Tag: thinking

A Free Food Dream Adventure

I was in a store with friends. This clean, mostly white, and well-lit place was like a fancy grocery store. No friends from real life were present but the people there were all known to me as friends. I knew that we were there for the second time. The first time, we’d made minor purchases. Liking the place, we returned to buy more.

So, we’re in line to pay, and we’re comparing how much our purchases will probably cost. Most of what we’re buying is food, especially cheese and bread, it seems like. The owner, a young and petite white woman with black curly hair and red lips, is behind a counter ringing up purchases.

I estimate to my friends that I’m buying several hundred dollars of food. Then it’s my turn and I step up to pay but the owner waves me off. She tells me that she knows who I am, that I’m a writer that she admires, and that she loves my books. I’m perplexed as I’ve only self-published a few books and had a few stories sold, so I tell her that I think she’s thinking of someone else. No, she insists, she knows me, knows who I am, and I will never need to pay for anything in her store. Her insistence stirs guilt in me; that’s not the way the system is supposed to work. I’m also flattered but doubtful. We talk more; she stays on point. I surrender and walk out without paying.

Dream end.

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Twozdaz Wandering Thoughts

The coffee shop is pretty damn full.

I’m in RoCo. It’s my new favorite coffee place, an old house converted to a business on the corner of 8th Avenue and East Main Street.

Every table is in use. Many regulars are in attendance. Like me, at a table, computer open. My eyes and ears are open even as I read, think, and type. Wonderful community and social energies swirl through the room like a strong, happy breeze. I love the noise and action, enjoy looking up at the faces, glancing at the fashion.

Most clients are, ahem, ‘my age’. They look like, ahem, boomers, like me. I’ll be seventy next year. I think I’m in the middle of the age spectrum here. Sure, there are so younger outliers. Teenagers who look like they’re wearing colorful fleece pajamas come in as pairs, order, take their stuff and leave. A few twenty-somethings, thirtyish, and fortyish folks are partaking of drink and food, chatting with others, reading, so forth. Hoka shoes are spotted on many, the shoes of my people. Columbia sportwear and Patagonia dominates. They’re the clothes of my tribe, but this is Oregon, where some of that stuff is produced, and where Columbia is headquartered, up north, west of Portland. Two children, about ten, are also present with an older woman. The children are on ice cream on this chilly, foggy, autumn day. The weather doesn’t daunt them from enjoying a cold but sweet treat.

The baristas take orders, prepare, and serve, all laughing and chatting as they do. Regulars come in and get greeted by name, including Sugar the dog, who waves their tail in happiness and await their standard treat.

Sunshine has burst through outside. Cold air storms me as the doors open and close. This is the United States, Oregon, Ashlandia, in 2025.

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Satyrdaz Wandering Thoughts

“My name is Brenda,” I said, with a touch of happy humor.

My current coffee haunt is RoCo. The local Food Co-Op owns RoCo. Members of the co-op, we get a dividend back from the co-op at the year’s end. And guess what? All you need to do is give the RoCo barista your name and number. That’s what I was doing.

“Is Brenda your wife, Michael?” Kat asked.

“Yes.” I released a small scoff. “The funny thing is, she doesn’t go by Brenda. She uses a name that she made up a long time ago, so it always makes us laugh when we reveal our account name.”

Kat grinned through the entire tale. “I like that.”

It’s the small things which give us spirit, innit?

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Fridaz Wandering Thoughts

Mom and sis are coping and adjusting, per usual. Mom is an interesting case. When she’s doing well, she’s happy on her own. When she’s doing poorly, she gets crabby and wants visitors. But her crabbiness repels people, so they stay away. Not a good dynamic.

So many things must be tended for Mom. The emptying and cleaning of her house, of course, and then putting it on the market. Those are expected, straightforward, but work. The matters causing the most headaches and frustrations are these modern matters. Changing phone plans because Mom’s phone was on Frank’s plan. Canceling her internet and cable. Those things were done online, through passwords and account numbers and usernames and things like that. Mom has it written down but it’s all been changed so many times because they changed systems or the passwords expired, or it didn’t work for God knows why, as Mom would say.

Then there are the prescription drugs. Sam’s Club is Mom’s pharmacy. Frank was her delivery system. Now sis is her delivery system, but sis doesn’t have the time to make regular runs like Frank did. These things can be delivered but the co-pay must be paid for. Does Mom have a credit card on file? Yes, she does, she says, no, you don’t, the pharmacy replies. Back and forth they go, driving sis insane.

It all makes me think. Mom is but twenty years older than me, and the way my health is trending…LOL. I think, I must be better prepared. Sure, passwords are written down and secured but they must be found by whoever is taking care of me at that point.

Maybe it’ll be AI or a bot assisting me by that point. A Medibot. Watching AI and bots in action at this stage, though, I’m not reassured. Maybe, maybe, they’ll have it worked out in twenty years.

Time will tell. Always does, doesn’t it?

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Thirstdaz Wandering Political Thoughts

Paul Krugman consistently writes about the Trumpcession vibes.

Trumpcession vibes are a feeling that things are worse than hard data shows us. My wife and I feel it. Not all of it has to do with Trump. We were forced to change home insurance companies last year because our previous company said they no longer wanted to insure homes in our region because of fires. So that price increased substantially. Electricity prices have gone up. Food prices are up. Coffee prices are up. Gasoline. Some of this is related to Trump’s trade policies and tariffs, and some prices are affected by weather and climate change. The world is complicated. We can make the case that Trump isn’t doing anything about climate change except mocking anyone worried about it, so in that way he’s causing prices increases.

Our household’s Trumpcession vibes arise because we don’t trust Trump to tell the truth. By extension, we don’t trust anyone in his regime to tell the truth, nor any of his supporters. Evidence has been presented that Trump Regime members and their supporters will lie heavily and frequently to make Trump look good. Couple that distrust in them with the soft data of what’s going on, and yes, we have Trumpcession vibes. For instance, how can SNAP benefits be cut without doing damage to the economy? Can’t. The SNAP cuts affect my state, Oregon, and my state government’s ability to help the homeless and needy. The state’s inability to help locally affects our local agencies and governments’ ability to help. From our point of view, it’s all a giant snowball rolling down a steep mountain, gaining speed and momentum, and coming fast. It’s going to be a big mess when that snowball finally slams into the world. That’s how we feel in our household.

It doesn’t help anything that Trump keeps lying about prices and tariffs. Trump insists against the evidence presented that everything is cheaper and getting better. And he lies to convince everyone that he’s telling the truth. But he has a deep history of lying and cheating. Like the boy who cried wolf, we just don’t believe Trump much any longer.

Trump’s Inflation Spin Backfires as Costs Spike Again

I ‘like’ how the story gives Trump the benefit of the doubt and calls Trump’s lies ‘inflation spin’. That’s part of the problem. The media and pundits often sugarcoat the crap that Trump does. Some of that sugarcoating is because Trump, the eternal child-bully, threatens anyone who criticizes him with lawsuits or other punishment, no matter how valid the criticism is.

In other news, Stephen Miller has been speaking out of his ass.

Truth be told, Miller is just mindlessly echoing what Trump mindlessly spews.

Trump calls Democrats who told US military to refuse illegal orders ‘traitors’ who could face death penalty

I’ll be damned. Trump does sometimes tell the truth:

And for those who are always throwing bothsiderisms at the wall to see if they’ll stick, a timely reminder has arrived that the two sides are not the same.

Finally, in response to this Trump rant, we respond…

QUIET, PIGGY!

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Wenzdaz Wandering Political Thoughts

Deep breath; release.

Trump’s lying has been documented and analyzed yet again.

Analysis: Trump keeps lying while accusing others of lying

President Donald Trump tells a lot of lies. Trump also regularly accuses others of lying.

And sometimes he does both at once – telling a lie about something while accusing someone else of lying about it. In other words, the president has been dishonest even about others’ honesty.

It’s a subset of his years-old “I know you are but what am I?” tactic of trying to turn common criticisms of him against his opponents. And he’s used it a bunch this fall.

In other news, water makes things feel wet.

Dale: Reflections on four weird years fact checking every word from Donald Trump

I thought Trump’s deception was bad then. It got much worse. In 2017, Trump averaged 2.9 false claims per day. By 2018, it was 8.3 false claims per day. What started as a side project I could handle in a few hours a week started requiring regular all-nighters. By the time I joined CNN in mid-2019, it required a second reporter, Tara Subramaniam.

Trump’s 2017 dishonesty tended to be impromptu ad-libbing. His 2018 dishonesty was much more scripted; he used serial lying as a deliberate strategy in the midterm elections. Then he used serial lying as a deliberate strategy in his 2019 Ukraine scandal. Then he used serial lying as a deliberate strategy in his response to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic – holding daily “briefings” so wildly dishonest that CNN needed me to go on TV right afterward to debunk the nonsense viewers had just heard.

~snip~

Yes, what’s weird these days is not that Trump lies.

Trump now jokes about his lying. What is weird is that some people still believe him. Or, more weirdly, that they are upset when it turns out that what he lied about something and it hurts them (see cattle ranchers, timber companies, soybean farmers, and families of immigrants, for example), yet they still support him because they think the Liar-in-Chief is better than anyone else out there, that this liar will somehow lead us out of the chaos that he’s created.

Some of Trump’s recent lying weirdness is all about the tariffs. Trump has been saying for a long time that American consumers won’t pay the tariffs that he imposed on imported goods for everything and anything.

Trump says foreign countries paid tariffs; American companies say otherwise

Now, though, Trump is reducing tariffs to lower prices. The question before us is, if we don’t pay the tariffs, how will this lower prices? Why will changing the tariffs matter, sports fans?

We know the answer: it’s because Trump is lying.

Trump scraps tariffs on beef, coffee and tropical fruit in a push to lower grocery store prices

Remember, Trump is reducing tariffs to lower prices at a time when, in his constant lying, Trump claims that prices are down and that stories about prices being high are lies the Democrats are telling. How the hell does that make any sense at all?

Fact check: Trump’s lying spree about inflation

“Every price is down,” he said Thursday. “Everything is way down,” he said at another Thursday event. “Prices are down under the Trump administration, and they’re down substantially,” he said Friday, adding, “Everybody knows that it’s far less expensive under Trump than it was under Sleepy Joe Biden. And the prices are way down.”

None of that is true.

~snip~

The evidence that Trump constantly, religiously, and consistently lies is fully and pervasively documented. Now Dozy Donny wants us to believe that the Epstein files are a Democratic hoax.

Where Is Democrats’ Transparency on Epstein?

As President Donald J. Trump said, “House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files, because we have nothing to hide, and it’s time to move on from this Democrat Hoax perpetrated by Radical Left Lunatics in order to deflect from the Great Success of the Republican Party.”

~snip~

Trump also wants us to think that with all the time that his AG has had the Epstein files, with all the time and access that the DOJ under him has held onto the files, that he will not make some attempt to redact or remove references to him, or to hide them. Why should I believe that? With his history, any document issued under Trump’s name is automatically suspect by anyone familiar with history, facts, or the truth.

Yet, with the evidence of all of Trump’s lying filling the net, Dizzy Donny expects us to accept on his word that the boats which he ordered the U.S. military to destroy are all narco terrorists and drug dealers.

Trump has accused boat crews of being narco-terrorists. The truth, AP found, is more nuanced

GÜIRIA, Venezuela (AP) — One was a fisherman struggling to eke out a living on $100 a month. Another was a career criminal. A third was a former military cadet. And a fourth was a down-on-his-luck bus driver.

The men had little in common beyond their Venezuelan seaside hometowns and the fact all four were among the more than 60 people killed since early September when the U.S. military began attacking boats that the Trump administration alleges were smuggling drugs. President Donald Trump and top U.S. officials have alleged the craft were being operated by narco-terrorists and cartel members bound with deadly drugs for American communities.

~snip~

Man oh man, when oh when oh when will the MAGAts catch on to this lying?

That’s the wrong question, isn’t it? The right question is when will they care enough to stop supporting Dozy Dizzy Donny and his regime of distraction? When will they accept that they’ve been conned? When will they realize and admit that Trump is destroying the United States, ripping off the treasury, and enriching himself?

Way it’s going, we might have colonies on Mars before any of that takes place.

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Wenzdaz Theme Music

Blue sky. I see blue sky and sunshine. It looks so different today, Wenzda, November 19, 2025, then it did on Twozda, November 18, 2025. It’s only 40 F out under that blue sky and sunshine. Fall’s full impact has arrived as we shift toward winter. Dead leaves are browning, curling up and resting everywhere, like sayin’, done. Gonna be up to 50 F, so wear shorts.

Today’s song is one by The Wallflowers called “The Difference”. The Neurons gifted it to me because I was walking through the house and thought, something looks different. Then I stopped and puzzled through WTH looks different. Nothing came to mind but as I walked off, The Neurons began “The Difference” in the morning mental music stream.

Off I go to another medical appointment, some ultrasound for this or that, or maybe the other. One of those NPO things. I’m hungry and thirsty and keep automatically reaching for things to put into my mouth, forcing me to chastise myself, don’t eat that! Don’t drink that. Put that down! Bad boy.

I’ve been thinking about the economic bubble we’re in. This is the AI bubble. Look how much investment is attached to it. It’d driving employment, production, and growth plans. Big thing about it that I can see is that companies like Amazon are salivating over the idea of hiring less people. The GOP, especially Trump, is drooling over this. I guess they’re thinking, let’s use AI to hire less people so we can build more things that less people can afford, thereby increasing the wealth gap yet more.

Of course, others think, we’ll use AI and its predictive and analytical processes to more precisely predict weather! Except the Trump Regime cratered many of the satellites used in weather forecasting. He’s gonna turn them over to Musk’s companies. It feels like a bad idea, like it goes against that proverb, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Seems like as robotic manufacturing and AI management grows, less people will be working and more people will need assistance for things like food, medicine, and housing. As the GOP doesn’t want to give those things, it feels like we’ll then have greater homelessness, more sickness, and higher levels of deprivation and starving. But given that the GOP is erecting the means for the wealthy to live isolated and insulated from the masses, most of them won’t know. They don’t care but not knowing will help them sleep easier, and don’t we all want the wealthy to rest easy? Isn’t that why we cut them deals on their taxes and give them freebies, hmmm?

Sorry, the inner cynic broke free of his moorings and tossed around on the cynical sea. On to other things. May peace and grace find you, if you can afford it. Way it seems to be going, only those who can afford it will know peace and grace. At least I have coffee. Thank dog Trump lowered the tariffs that he raised on it, right? Of course, that doesn’t offset all the other things driving up the costs of food and coffee, does it? But what do we know? I know; let’s build some AI so we can ask it what we need to do. Then we can ask AI what it thinks of tax cuts for the wealthy, tariffs on imported goods, using the military on your own citizens, separation of church and state, climate change, things like that. Man, it’s getting to look like a fugly future.

Wish I could sip some coffee and mutter to myself over this, grumble grumble. Have a better one. Cheers

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Satyrdaz Wandering Thoughts

The honeymoon is over.

Sis is angry with Mom. Mom is angry with her. They are, as they have done for decades, growling at one another. Accusations sometimes come out about what’s going on. Sis thinks Mom is being obstinate. Mom thinks sis is being mean.

Growing experiences from the new living arrangements are certainly expected. Both are intelligent and know this. As with so many things, there are components of making these adjustments. It’s one thing to intellectually know something, yet something else to intellectually understand and accept it, and still requires some emotional and physical facets to adjust to make it all work. It’ll take time. Patience and anger will rise and fall like waves beating on the shore. The adjustments will be found.

I hope.

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Thirstdaz Wandering Thoughts

We had to buy a birthday card for someone yesterday. I’d not bought a card for about two months. We tend to buy cards early so we have them on hand and buy a plethora of cards at once for birthdays coming up in the next several months. Anyway, in the time since I last shopped and now, our favorite local greeting cards purveyor, BiMart, had rearranged their greeting cards offering. Further they’d reduced them.

My wife said, “Where are all the other cards?” My wife is a greeting cards fan. When we go on vacation, she visits local stores for greeting cards. She walked around in shock, checking other aisles. “They’ve really cut back on the cards.”

I agreed. “Guess it’s a business decision.” I was mentally shrugging. This didn’t fit in as one of my pet peeves and I wasn’t overly bothered.

Then we started looking for a card for a female, celebrating her 70. She’s a friend…

“What have they done?” my wife said. “There are no friend cards.”

True, I saw. No friend cards. There was a small selection for LGBTQA+. Moms and sisters dominated. Grandmothers and aunts could be satisfied. Daughters. But friends? No. The greeting cards had become weirdly overspecialized, at least in this chain store.

“Guess we have to go to CVS,” my wife huffed. As we were walking out, though, she offered comments about it to an idle cashier, complaining about how much the cards had cut back and how overspecialized they’d become.

I’d walked on, waiting for her at the door. It just wasn’t one of my pet peeves.

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