Still in it.

That three pointed star hood ornament on a Mercedes-Benz actually has meaning apart from just being a company logo…

Back when the internal combustion engine was a new thing, Gottlieb Daimler invented the first high speed four stroke internal combustion engine. He sent a postcard of the city of Stuttgart with a star he had drawn on it to his wife, writing that someday that star would shine over the factory he would build, that would make their fortune.

Years later his son’s decided on the star to represent the company, and the three areas their father wanted to motorize: Land, Sea, and Air.

My star, and the car it rides on, has just over 220k miles on it now…

So…about that Hardware run I mentioned the other day…

I was away from the house over the weekend (more on that later) and I’ve a habit of turning off the water to the house if I’m away on a road trip, however short. What I’ve noticed over a long enough period with the house water turned off is one or both of the toilet tanks will drain empty.

The leakage can’t be much or I would notice it and replace the leaky flapper valve and all is good again. But the very very slow leakage I don’t notice until I return home, turn the water back on, and hear one or both toilets in the house start filling. Which usually means a trip to the hardware store for new flapper valves. You let them dry out after a period of use and they either shrink when they get dry again or harden and won’t seal anymore.

This is something I just need to bake into a long road trip: go buy some flapper valves before leaving, so I have one or more ready for when I get back home and turn the water back on.

Anyway…this time I saw water on the bathroom floor, apparently because one or more gaskets had also failed, not badly just enough to start dripping, and I ended up replacing everything from the turn off valve to the stuff in the tank.

Which was easy and simple because the parts for my old-ish standard toilets are available practically everywhere. I am no Luddite but before buying into the latest and greatest new thing my first question is how easy is it to get parts. Because everything breaks eventually. Most of what is in my house may seem surprisingly low tech or old tech for a guy like me because of this.

When I did the big backstage tour at Walt Disney World I was told the rides that required the most maintenance by far were the water rides. In this house it’s nearly always something water touches. The sinks, the toilets, last month it was the hot water heater. I’ve had to replace my roof three times to deal with leaks. The electrical and gas services have given me next to no trouble at all, though I’ve had to replace a bunch of appliances. It’s almost always something to do with water.

Hoisted From The Blog Archive…just because…

The wind never seems to stop here on the plains.  It is October in Wyoming, and the wind carries with it a chill now.  The first tentative breath of winter dances restlessly over rolling hills of sage.  The days have grown short, the nights cold.  And long.  Very long.  And quiet, save only for the sound of the wind.

Take a walk tonight across the rolling hills of Wyoming sage.  Leave the town lights twinkling in the distance behind you.  Walk toward the mountains in the darkness ahead.  There is only you here tonight.  You, and the wind, and the stars in the sky, so far away.  So very far away.  Around you are only rolling hills of grass and sage, fading into the night.  There are remnants of what looks like a small wooden fence here, that was torn down some time ago.

Listen to the wind.  Listen carefully.  There are ghosts here on the plains.  Hear them talk tonight among themselves…

No one knows why Matthew was determined to go to the Fireside that night, or why he left with Aaron and Russell. It was karaoke night, which would not ordinarily have interested him. There was some speculation that he was buying drugs from Aaron and Russell, but his friends find that implausible. A close friend thinks that depression may have weakened his judgment, and wonders if he had taken a heavy dose of Klonopin before he went to the bar. “When he was depressed,” she says, “he would just grab a handful.” Romaine Patterson remembers how in the coffee shop where she worked Matthew “would just talk to anyone-people no one else would talk to, like this weird old man…. He had no discrimination in his person.”
-Vanity Fair

Shortly after midnight on October 7, 1998, 20-year-old Shepard met McKinney and Henderson in a bar. McKinney and Henderson offered Shepard a ride in their car. Subsequently, Shepard was robbed, pistol whipped, tortured, tied to a fence in a remote, rural area, and left to die. McKinney and Henderson also found out his address and intended to rob his home. Still tied to the fence, Shepard was discovered eighteen hours later by a cyclist, who at first thought that Shepard was a scarecrow. At the time of discovery, Shepard was still alive, but in a coma.
-Wikipedia

Aaron Kreifels first met Matthew Shepard in a dream last Thursday night, the night after he discovered his fellow University of Wyoming student badly beaten, barely alive and tied up to a fence outside of Laramie.

Although Shepard was in Fort Collins by then, kept alive by an array of life-support machines in Poudre Valley Hospital’s intensive-care unit, Kreifels said the gay student, who was beaten beyond recognition, allegedly by two young Laramie roofers, perhaps because he was gay, came to visit his rescuer in a dream that night. Kreifels doesn’t remember much of the dream, but he said Wednesday that he awoke the next morning comforted by the vague sensation of having met the person he found in such bad shape two days before.

Although early reports indicated that two mountain bikers had discovered Shepard on the crude fence on an old, double-rutted road, Kreifels was alone that evening, struggling on his mountain bike through deep sand and for some reason ignoring a desire to turn back and find another, easier way back to town. Before he knew it, he had fallen. He was on the ground, his front wheel broken beyond repair. He was unhurt, but what he saw as he got up struck him cold.

“I got up and noticed something out of the corner of my eye,” he said from his room in a freshman dorm at the University of Wyoming on Wednesday. “At first I thought it was a scarecrow, so I didn’t think much of it. Then I went around and noticed it was a real person. I checked to see if he was conscious or not, and when I found out he wasn’t, I ran and got help as fast as I could.”

As the former high school crosscountry runner traversed the quarter- to half-mile of scrub prairie between him and the nearest house in the nearby Sherman Hills subdivision, his thoughts froze before quickly accelerating.

“It was distressing. I was panicked for a couple minutes, because I wanted to make sure I could do all I could do to help save him,” he said.
-The Denver Post

Officer Reggie Fluty: When I got there, the first – at first the only thing I could see was partially somebody’s feet and I got out of my vehicle and raced over – I seen what appeared to be a young man, thirteen, fourteen years old, because he was so tiny, laying on his back and he was tied to the bottom of the end of a pole.

I did the best I could.  The gentleman that was laying on the ground, Matthew Shepard, he was covered in dry blood all over his head.  There was dry blood underneath him and he was barely breathing…he was doing the best he could.

I was going to breath for him and I couldn’t get his mouth open – his mouth wouldn’t open for me.

He was covered in, like I said, partially dry blood and blood all over his head – the only place that he did not have any blood on him, on his face, was what appeared to be where he had been crying down his face.
-The Laramie Project

Shepard suffered a fracture from the back of his head to the front of his right ear. He had severe brain stem damage, which affected his body’s ability to regulate heart rate, body temperature and other vital signs. There were also about a dozen small lacerations around his head, face and neck. His injuries were deemed too severe for doctors to operate.
-Wikipedia

At the Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado, Matthew lay in bed down the hall from Aaron McKinney. Matthew was comatose; his brain stem which controls heartbeat, breathing, temperature, and other involuntary functions – was severely damaged. He also was suffering from hypothermia and had a red welt on his back, a red mark on his left arm, bruised knees, cuts on his head, neck, and face, and bruising in his groin.
-Vanity Fair

Dr. Cantway:  I was working the emergency room the night Matthew Shepard was brought in.  I don’t think, that any of us, ah, can remember seeing a patient in that condition for a long time – those of us who’ve worked in big city hospitals have seen this.  Ah, but it’s not something you expect here.

Ah, you expect it, you expect this kind of injuries to come from a car going down a hill at eighty miles an hour.  You expect to see gross injuries from something like that – this horrendous, terrible thing.  Ah, but you don’t expect to see that from someone doing this to another person.

The ambulance report said it was a beating so we knew.
-The Laramie Project

Exactly a week after his tragic discovery, Kreifels, 18, an architectural engineering major from Grand Island, Neb., said he tries not to think about the condition in which he found the classmate he had never seen before. Authorities say Shepard’s assailants repeatedly beat him with the butt of a .357 Magnum, fracturing his skull. Kreifels doesn’t talk about it.

“I don’t really want to go into details about that,” he said.
-The Denver Post

Aaron Kreifels:  I keep seeing that picture in my head when I found him…and it’s not pleasant whatsoever. I don’t want it to be there. I wanna like get it out. That’s the biggest part for me is seeing that picture in my head. And it’s kind of unbelievable to me, you know, that – I happened to be the person who found him – because the big question with me, like with my religion, is like, Why did God want ME to find him?
-The Laramie Project

My last day at Space Telescope this trip was last Wednesday. After that were days I didn’t usually work anyway. That’s because when I came back to work it was part-time; Tuesday and Wednesday full eight hours, then half a day Thursday working from home, to make a twenty hour work week.

Eventually, because I had a recurring Monday afternoon web meeting with our ITSD staff, I switched the half day Thursday for a half day Monday working from home. Then I’m off until the following Monday.

But Monday was a work from home day. So yesterday didn’t really feel like being retired, even though I didn’t need to do the web meeting, and could not anyway because I turned in my equipment last Wednesday. The short wave radio is sitting on my desk where the office laptop used to. Yesterday I’d been retired for five days but it didn’t really feel like it. For the past two years Tuesday was the first day of the week that I needed to be in the office and put in a full day.

And…it’s Tuesday…and I don’t need to be anywhere.

The awareness begins settling in; that strange feeling…like I’m a kid again and school’s out and I have the whole summer ahead of me.

“Oh that magic feeling nowhere to go…” Actually, I need to go to the hardware store…

I’m a gay man and I like to gawk at cute beautiful guys. No surprises there hopefully. So on the social media sites I frequent the “algorithm” (you keep using the word…I do not think it means what you think it means…) feeds me photos and videos that are mostly of cute beautiful guys. No surprises there either. They hit the mark almost as often as they miss, but I am probably excessively picky in that regard. I got fed one the other day of a guy who looked sincerely back at the viewer and said he is Very attracted to older guys who pay for dinner with their American Express Black Card.

1) Not my type.

2) First thing that came to my skeptical mind was “is this an ad for the American Express Black card?

Well it isn’t…I did a web search and that card is by invitation only for the excessively well to do. So that guy was probably just trolling for older men who haven’t maxed out their cards yet. But now I have to wonder how many of these cute beautiful guys I keep getting fed are about to start being AI generated ads.

Just remember fellow seniors, gay or straight, you are not the customer, you are the product.

To paraphrase Alfred Pennyworth…some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just don’t care whether or not the world burns.

They don’t necessarily want the world to burn, but they have their eyes on a prize and they will walk over everyone and everything to get their hands on it.

“When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.” – J. Robert Oppenheimer

They will walk over the ashes of the dead world to get what they want, maybe only later realizing what they have done.

“We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.” -J. Robert Oppenheimer

These are the worst. If it were money they were after they could be bought, reasoned or negotiated with. But they have their eyes on a prize and won’t be deterred. And for some of them, even after seeing the damage done, they’ll just get busy making excuses, forgiving themselves for the role they played in setting yet another fire to an already burning world. The physicist and the technically sweet problem. The techbro working on AI. The billionaire owner of a deep sea tourism company objecting to needlessly prioritizing passenger safety over commercial innovation.

The actor and the role of a lifetime.

It isn’t fame. It isn’t the money. It’s the role, the character, the part. If Leni Riefenstahl came back to life and announced work on a new movie about world war II, there are actors who would walk over everyone and everything for the once in a lifetime chance to work with the legendary director, and play the part of one of the famous generals of that war. Because that role is the one they were born to play. And Riefenstahl is a brilliant director. And just never you mind her regrettable political ideas, just never you mind Triumph Of The Will.

The actual fascists among actors wouldn’t even rate during the auditions. It would be the A list actors who get the roles. The ones with real talent and star power. As historian Henry Adams said about Robert E. Lee, It’s always the good men who do the most harm.

They would say to their critics that Riefenstahl’s movie is simply a story about the war, not promoting fascism. They would say Riefenstahl is tragically misunderstood.

And maybe later, when the money she makes from this new movie goes toward promoting fascism around the world, and synagogues start burning, and democracies began falling to the extreme right, when the hated others start dying, they might see what part they played in promoting Riefenstahl’s fascism by excusing it, by looking the other way, by complaining about “woke”.

Maybe some would express regret after it was too late for regret to matter. Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. But most of them will just start excusing themselves.

I’m looking at you, all of you, in the cast and crew of the new Harry Potter HBO series.

When more laws against transgendered people are passed thanks to Rowling’s billions, and even more of your transgender neighbors in this life are thrown out of their families, their homes, their jobs, isolated from their communities, afraid to be out in public, dying at the hands of thugs, or by their own hand, what will you tell their families and friends? What excuses will you make the rest of us listen to?

[Edited a tad…]

I just need to add this: On one of my backstage tours I learned that Walt Disney used to say “put the money where the guests can see it.” And…yeah…if you took one of those tours you saw right away the difference between the guest areas and the backstage work areas which were pretty functional. Here’s a shot of the Expedition Everest ride that really brings it home…

The part the guests don’t see doesn’t need to look like anything more than what it is…the building that houses the ride. Everywhere in this shot you see the mountain peeking around the sides of this structure is where it can be seen from the guest area. All the ride structures look like this away from where the guests can see them.

So…my point: this is what Chapec forgot in his single minded pursuit of bigger and bigger profit margins; Put the money where the guests can see it. The guests don’t see money that only makes the executive suite richer.

This came across my Facebook stream just now, in a post about an Orange County Register article about Disneyland Magic Key holders…

From the post: “The top-tier Disneyland annual pass cost $699 when Chapek became Disney parks boss in 2015 and $1,599 when he was fired as CEO in 2022 — a 128% increase. Today, the most expensive Disneyland Magic Key pass costs $1,899.”

Chapec ruined the parks even more than I’d realized at the time. I was commenting in the previous post about how massively the cost of the annual passes had risen, and how now it seems like they don’t even want anyone who isn’t wealthy going to the parks on a regular basis at all.

The New Yorker ran this last May about how your average Disney goers are going into debt rather than giving up their park time as the costs have exploded.

In 2023, Ashley, a freshman at Quinnipiac University, in Connecticut, had fifteen thousand dollars in her bank account. Excited by her newfound freedom as a college student, she decided to start going on solo trips. Walt Disney World, in Orlando, Florida—a place she had fallen in love with as a child, after visiting for the first time when she was four—seemed like an obvious choice. She went during her winter break. Then she returned, six times, in two years. “It’s just so magical,” she explained. “It keeps drawing me back.” Soon enough, her account balance had dwindled to just five dollars.

(you will probably need a subscription to read this) She ended up going to work for Disney and also having a thousand dollar credit card debt she needed her parents to help her pay off.

This is not sustainable. At some point attendance is going decline, but I think they’re baking that into the plan. If you have fewer guests but they’re wealthier you can still turn a tidy profit and your operating costs have gone down.

It’s a total betrayal of Walt Disney’s vision of what his parks should be, but his part of the company’s history just a small fragment of the total, and the people running it now see him as a marketing gimmick not a standard bearer.

I’m glad I got to visit for a few years before Chapek got his hands on it. In retrospect I started noticing the changes in tenor almost immediately; the big screen TV breaking the theming of the Belle Vue lounge, turning the Sid Cahuenga bungalow at the entrance to Hollywood Studios from a place to buy actual Hollywood memorabilia (where I got my autographed photo of Tommy Kirk in Old Yeller) into a photo-pass sales place because the profit margins on photo passes were higher, and finally, and most infuriatingly, turning The Writer’s Stop into a tap room because selling beer to adults made them more money than selling books to kids and adults.

I’m thinking now it wasn’t just having to wear a face shield in Biergarten during COVID that made a certain someone decide to retire early. He would have seen what Chapec was doing to the parks from the inside.

The only thing tying me to Disney parks now is the 100 DVC points I got regrettably talked into buying again after I’d sold all my other points because I was so disenchanted with what Bob Chapek had done to Walt Disney World. Part of the reason I bought back in was Chapek was shown the door and Bob Iger came back and I thought Chapek’s greedy disrespect for the parks and guests was over and that most of it would be undone.  But the nit picky greed has only got worse. Of course Disney was all about the money…as a certain someone once riddled me when I was considering going with a friend to a DVC presentation…

He: What does Mickey Mouse eat?

Me: Cheese I guess…?

He: What’s in your wallet.

The advice I got then was to break both my arms so I couldn’t be talked into signing anything. But eventually I did because I just loved Boardwalk and wanted to stay there every year. I got enough points in Boardwalk to do just that and the signing gifts I got were lovely.

When I signed back on some years later for the same number of points what I got as a signing gift looked like cheapshit WalMart stuff.

I think I knew then I’d made a mistake.

For a while I had annual passes at both Walt Disney World and Disneyland. But the very act of buying them by then resembled the insane Christmas mobs trying to buy Cabbage Patch Dolls or Tickle Me Elmo. I remember vividly buying back my WDW annual pass during the brief window of opportunity that opened, and hundreds of us logged in only to be placed into a queue where there was no guarantee that any of the Limited Available Passes would be left when we got to the front of the line…and a bunch of us were texting each other in some social media channel waiting with baited breath to see who got theirs, and encouraging the others to stay in line because who knows, you might get yours too… Well I got mine but I had to wonder…where’s the Disney magic in all this..?

I noticed to my alarm that Disney wasn’t warning you your pass was about to expire, like they used to, like sending you big postcards and emails and texts reminding you weeks beforehand to renew. I missed renewing my Disneyland pass and was distraught for a year before circumstances seemed to open up a chance at getting another one.  ABC/Disney had cancelled Jimmy Kimmel and everyone was in a rush to cancel their Disney+ subscriptions and the little devil on my left shoulder started whispering in my ear I bet they’re selling annual passes now…

The last straw was when it came time to renew that annual pass and I was told those passes where no longer being sold, but that I Might be able to get one of the other new ones that one was being replaced with. At full price of course since it was a new pass not a renewal. And only if there were any available.

And I had enough of it. Time was you wanted an annual pass, you just bought an annual pass. And then every year you got a notice to renew. Some years that notice came with a promise of extra months on the pass.

But then time was you didn’t need a reservation to enter the parks, just your pass or your ticket.

It just kept getting more and more astronomically costly to go, at the same time it kept getting more and more difficult to go. Everything that used to be part of the package you got simply by going was being nickeled and dimed to death. It seems now that “plus it” thing Walt Disney often spoke of isn’t about making the guest experience better, it’s about plussing the bill.

The other day I chanced across this blog post from Magical Dad Blog on Facebook, that really speaks to me too, even though I don’t have kids of my own like he does…

Disney’s former CEO proudly called things like the Magical Express, free FastPass, and complimentary MagicBands “revenue opportunities left on the table.”

Chapek’s memoir excerpts came out this week, and he defended, even bragged, about every price hike and perk cut, pointing to 18% profit growth as the proof. I’ve been thinking about his phrasing a lot the past few days.

I know what that “revenue” left on the table looked like from our side.

It looked like my kids watching Mickey cartoons on the Magical Express while my wife and I sat there realizing we hadn’t thought about logistics since we landed in Orlando.

It looked like MagicBands arriving in the mail three weeks before the trip and my boys carrying them around the house because they couldn’t wait to leave.

It looked like touching your wrist to a reader and hearing that unique Disney chime instead of the cash coming out of your wallet.

Sure, those things never showed up on a quarterly earnings call, but they’re the reason families chose Disney over every other vacation on earth.

To me, that’s not revenue left on the table, that’s the magic that Chapek so happily torched in the name of a bottom line.

Disney’s new CEO, Josh D’Amaro, started at Disneyland 28 years ago and worked his way up through the parks, including a stretch running resorts and transportation at Walt Disney World. He knows what that table used to look like because he helped set it.

Here’s hoping the table eventually gets set again, and a few more kids get to fall asleep on the bus back to the airport with a MagicBand still on their wrist.

…What I have is the Disney kid inside of me, who a certain someone awakened after a long sleep, and I walked into Walt Disney World and Epcot for the first time…and it all came back to me.

I am skeptical any of it changes due to new management. They’re all about the money now, not the magic. Which is not to say they weren’t about the money before, but at least they were also about the magic. The trick they pulled to make renewing your annual pass impossible so you had to buy a new one every time was the last straw for me. The annual passes saved the regular visitors money. They’re not interested in those visitors anymore…the people who came just to spend some time in Walt Disney’s World and believe in that great big beautiful tomorrow for a while. If you’re not there to spend lots and Lots of money they don’t want you.

It’s a small world after all… There’s a great big beautiful tomorrow shining at the end of every day…

I want that magic back. But I don’t think it’s ever coming back.

Today begins my last week before second retirement. My last day being this Wednesday, the end of the month of September.  I’ll have a bunch of stuff to take care of finance-wise, but mostly I’ll be getting ready to spend some time with my brother and that side of my family in California.

This one feels a little different and I can’t quite put my finger on why, other than I’ve been down this road before. It’ll be nice to have 100 percent of my time to myself, instead of having to keep to a clock, and I think this time I can manage that better. I’ve been “downsizing” Casa del Garrett for a few months now and I think I have the essential kruft removed. Come October 1 I’ll start bringing in the summer solar garden lights and getting the Halloween stuff ready. I’ll have a good idea then of how many storage containers I need to keep on hand and I’ll take the rest to recycling. Then I can repack the storage area under the basement steps and that should open up a lot of free space in the house.

The next big step is to sort though my big library and decide what to keep and what to donate. Then I go through all the shirts in my closet and do the same. At this age there is a bunch of stuff I just don’t need to keep and deciding which is what is likely to be an ongoing process for the next year or so.

No more Disney trips…at least not apart from using the DVC points I got regrettably talked back into buying. First chance I get I’m selling those. I let both annual passes expire…I’ll go into that more later…but I’m just not feeling the magic anymore. Disney Corp is just getting way too greedy now. Not that they weren’t about the money before (“What does Mickey Mouse eat?”  Yes…yes…I know…), but at least they used to be all about the magic too and now it seems like they don’t care about that anymore. Probably keep my subscription to Disney+ though…at least until I see how they treat Nico in this coming 3rd season of Percy Jackson. I saw a video post alleging that in this season they’re diverging from the book (again) to make Nico have more time and tell more of his story at Camp Half Blood while Percy is away fighting titans. Comments on that post were ecstatic about the possibility that they might show the first meeting between Nico and Will. That would be Excellent!

This weekend is another, probably last visit for a long, Long time to Greensburg and the Historical Society. They’re having a talk with a man (in his 90s now) who signed the memory book of my maternal grandfather’s funeral service and I want to ask him how well he remembers him. My maternal grandfather played a major role in the life I have now, and getting the job I did at Space Telescope, and yet I never got to know him since he died almost a decade before I was born.

Here’s the birthday cake I bought for myself, on the kitchen table at Casa del Garrett. Vanilla cake with vanilla butter icing! In retrospect I should have asked for a shot of insulin to go with it…

I really appreciate them coming out with those number candles!

In the background is the Glenn Close Cruella de Vil doll I inherited from mom’s collection. I found it while going through mom’s things deciding what to give to Greensburg Historical Society. I’m keeping it. I’m still trying to decide where to place her which is why she’s on the dining room table, but I’m tempted to let her oversee the bookcase in my den between where I keep some Disney World memorabilia and the shrine to my three strikes.

The crab is an Alebrije I bought in Epcot Mexico a few years ago. I’d never seen an Alebrije crab and I live in Maryland near the bay, so…

This came across my Facebook stream today. It’s from Bob Dylan about being age 80, and it gave me a few things about my own age 73 to ponder…

Some of this applies to me at 73, some not. There Is a certain freedom in being old…the closer you get to the grave (I’ve told my brother I want to have my ashes scattered on a hillside near Oceano with a view of the ocean) you can see more clearly what matters and what does not. People have come and gone from your life and some of those you grieve and some you wish had gone sooner: You see better what matters in a person. But the fact is I was always hard to program. Not sure where that came from in my heritage, maybe more from dad’s side than moms, but it was always there. In retrospect I think it was the curiosity. I was a kid that couldn’t stay away from science and technology. Books were my friends from an early age, and reading will grow you inside. But if I am truthful, I bore easily. Being confined in a religion or ideology of any kind feels suffocating. My mind wants to explore. It’s one reason I’ve always had trouble with focus. But this has kept me from being trapped by pretty illusions for very long. On the other hand, I am an artist; I weave my own illusions. That is very much a two edged sword. Picasso said art is a lie that makes us see the truth. But us gay kids know it can also be a refuge from a world that hates us.

The fire Dylan mentions is still there in me, but the body isn’t telling me been there done that, but do you really think you can finish it at this stage. A Coming Out Story is finished but really not. Not in the way I wanted. I just ended it because I thought I was running out of time. I am seriously hoping that second retirement motivates me to flesh it out like I always wanted. I take some comfort in what Jacob Bronowski taught me; that no work is ever finished; you just take it as far as you can and then stop. What the artist leaves behind isn’t finished pieces so much as mile markers. This is where I am now…this is what I see. I will leave a bunch of those.

I know Very Unpleasantly what Dylan means by having that understanding of what you could have changed when it would have mattered. Things I did still haunt me. Even worse, things I didn’t do. Things I never said when I should have, (Hi Tico!) I have to live with all that now because it’s all water under the bridge…or Yesterday’s Snow, as the Germans say.

As for not being surprised by anything anymore, I hope I never reach the point where I am never surprised by anything. Even the unpleasant surprises keep you engaged.

Time. That business about time standing still and we’re the ones that move. I object. As Prior Walter said in Angels In America, “The world only spins forward.” Everything moves.

I had my exit interview earlier today at Space Telescope, although my last day isn’t until the 30th. Looks like everything will happen smoothly. I got a lot of happy praise from the HR lady, who said I was a significant contributor to the work of the Institute and I should keep in touch. Which I will. I’ve been promised a place at all the coworker happy hours to come.

I’m looking forward to being retired again. The joke I’m hearing now is maybe second time’s the charm. And yeah…maybe this time I’ll handle it better. Now that I can see it was Parkinson’s that was causing my previous fatigue and brain fog I think I can, with the help of the meds, manage it better. I still have a Lot of art projects I want to get back on, including adding all the episodes I originally wanted to put into A Coming Out Story.

I need to stick around to vote this November, but I’ve bought my train tickets to California for soon after.

Me at 73…Still A Longhair…

So I’ve initiated a “staff departure” and my last day of part-time work at Space Telescope will be at the end of this month. Then it’s back to the retired life again. When I came back I set myself a goal of working it at least until the Roman Space Telescope launched. And now it has. So my goal is met. And I think this time, it is time.

That first time I really didn’t want to belly flop into being retired but part-time work wasn’t available at the Institute then. So when my project lead came to me after a couple years and asked if I was interested in coming back part-time I jumped at the chance. Now I think it really is time to move on. I’ll always be a part of it, my den walls are full of artifacts from my 26 years working for a NASA contractor, but it will be good to have the time to explore my art more. I want to give my cameras and my drafting table more love now.

I’m going to miss having that extra amount of income, and it’s probably going to be scary watching my 401k slowly shrink, but so it goes. It’ll be a comfortable, if not fabulous retired life. I have a house of my own. My car is paid for. My health insurance is good. My neighborhood is walkable.

…is going to be a walk through hell. This from a Facebook page I follow…

I was planning on taking a road trip to Oceano right after retiring, then I remembered we have an election coming, and I will walk through fire if I have to so I can cast my vote. I’ve been getting the Maryland mail in ballot ever since COVID but I don’t need to mail it back as there is a convenient drop box not far from the house. But given how badly Trump and the republicans want to screw up the mid terms (if we even have them) I will stand in line at my polling place if need be to cast a vote.

Which means no California trip until after the election, and maybe even not then depending on the mood of the middle part of the county I’d have to drive across with my Maryland plates afterward. We shall see.

But, 1) use the drop box or 2) if Trump’s USPS won’t send Maryland it’s paper ballots, I’ll vote in person. Early if I can, if it’s still allowed, or on election day if that’s what has to be.

Everyone needs to plan ahead for this one. Consider every possible way they can screw it up and how you will work around it.