The Beatles 2525: I Want To Hold Your Robot Hand
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Tags: And Then It's Gone, Lonelyache, Schrodinger's Bag O' Laughs
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February 26th, 2021 The Beatles 2525: I Want To Hold Your Robot Hand
Zeno’s Race To The Vaccine Bunch of friends tried to help me get a vaccine appointment today. I got leads on almost half a dozen possible locations/companies/mass vaccination sites. I love my friends! Were any available where I was pointed to? Not a single one. It seems by the time knowledge gets to me, however it does, they’re already booked solid. But I really do appreciate the thought. I’ve had some almost excessively good luck in my life. But there are these recurring situations where I am always falling through the cracks. My love life for example. Mental health not being so great, but not so bad as to warrant any support. Not artsy enough to be taken seriously as an artist, and not nerdy enough to be taken seriously as a computer professional. I tend to bore people and I get talked over a lot. I feel most of the time like I’m some sort of misplaced inventory. Like I’m really not supposed to be here. This seems to be another one of those things.
February 25th, 2021 In Seven Words Describe How Your Life Is A Complete Not Worth Living Failure… Joseph Gordon-Levitt occasionally posts these little challenges on Facebook for his readers. Every now and then one of them hits me pretty hard… He was beautiful, but it was 1971. Kinda hard to realize that even back when you were a teenager falling in love for the first time it was already over and done. Strike one…strike two…strike three…strike one redux… You’re just not getting the message are you kid…your kind isn’t allowed to love…
Life In A Plague Reality Show… I’m out for my evening walk as I’m desperately trying to stay active in some limited fashion while trying to avoid the plague, and and I’m thinking that either this plague or social isolation is going to get me, one or the other, and suddenly I realize Firesign Theater only played the last half of that show Beat The Reaper…the part where one lucky contestant has to guess what fatal disease they have, and Beeeet The Reaper! But the first half is a dozen lucky contestants get to run through a spray mist of some deadly disease and race to get the vaccine. 12 lucky contestants, but only 6 doses of vaccine! But it’s okay dear friends, because the odds of actually contracting this weeks’ disease is only 50-50. Last week it was Ebola and almost all our lucky contestants managed to Beat The Reaper. Let’s have a big round of applause for this week’s lucky contestants! (music plays) Who knows what this week’s racers will have to face. Maybe they’ll make it to the shots in time! They’ll only find out when they get to the vaccine station and try to grab a seat before the others do. Maybe the rest won’t even catch the disease! (Clock music plays…) Oh I’m sorry…you didn’t Beat The Reaper. But aren’t they a swell bunch of contestants. (music plays) Let’s let them see the consolation prize, brought to us here on Beat The Reaper by our favorite sponsor, Ralph Spoilsport coffins…the World’s Largest New Used and Used New coffins here in the city of (deep breath) emphysema. Let’s just look at the extras on this fabulous coffin…star studded mud guards, chrome fender dents, wire wheel spoke coffin dollies, two-way sneeze through air vents, sponge coated edible coffin handles, fully factory equipped satin cushions from our fully factory equipped satin cushioned factory. Yes dear friends it’s a beautiful coffin with doors to match! Birtch’s Blacklist says this coffin was Stolen, but for you dear friends complete price: only two-thousand-ninety-five hundred dollars in easy monthly payments of twenty dollars a week twice a week and never on Sunday! (music plays…audience applause) Why isn’t this a reality show we can watch now? It’ll be a ratings hit! Oh wait…
February 11th, 2021 Bridge Freezes Before Roadway I’m watching Weather Channel reporting on that awful chain reaction pileup in Texas, and noting that it happened on a long overpass. Some years ago, driving back home from a visit to California family, I ducked as far south as I could because the forecasts were for snow and ice almost as far south as the Mexican border. No kidding, there was snow along I-8 just west of San Diego and I saw people pulling their cars off to the shoulder and kids getting out to scoop up handfuls of snow like they’d never seen it before. Probably they hadn’t. One night I stopped well before the sun went down in Odessa Texas. I stopped early because I was aware the temperatures would drop below freezing after sundown, and I didn’t want to be on the roads then. Even so, I noted in the motel parking lot, little puddles of ice trying, and failing, to melt. I asked the desk clerk about the weather and she told me they’d had an ice storm and only recently got their power back on. Next morning I packed the car and continued driving east on I-20. And I am not exaggerating here: every bridge and overpass I went by, even if it was just over a small dry run, had an accident on it, or just past it. Fortunately none of them looked fatal. But there were tractor-trailers on their sides, there were banged up cars and pickups. I saw what looked like a brand new and expensive pickup that was all torn up on on the driver’s side where it had bounced off the bridge railings. And I could tell that the locals don’t really grok how snow and ice change driving conditions, because it did that to them so rarely. Climate change is giving them a new reality on the roadways, and the high local interstate speed limits (85 in most places west of Dallas), combined with a less than intuitive understanding of how bridges and overpasses freeze up before the rest of the pavement does, was a perfect storm of accidents waiting to happen. They have no infrastructure down there for dealing with snow and ice, because that’s costly to maintain and why would you when it gets like that so rarely. But times are changing. This horrific chain reaction pileup happened on a long overpass and I’m sitting here watching the reporting and I just know what happened. The locals, too many of them I reckon, just don’t get, from lived experience how even if the roads are good the bridges probably might not be, and you have to pay attention to falling temperatures, even, or especially, when there hasn’t been very much rain beforehand. The slightest little bit of wet on the bridge and the temperature goes down and Newtonian forces will do their thing when you transition to the pavement on that bridge. You probably won’t even see the danger. Thin enough ice and it’ll look dry and it isn’t.
January 27th, 2021 Stressing My Way To Retirement Some days you get so wrapped up in your job, and so stressed out over it (I haz Deadline!) that you wonder if you’re even going to make it to retirement. It’s okay. Mine is not the sort of job I’d regret not making it to retirement working. It’s just some days…some days…I get so damn frazzled…and then a pit in my stomach that probably won’t go away for the rest of the night…
January 26th, 2021 Ah Yes…Plan ‘B’… Looking though the blog archives, I came across this post from before we had our nuclear war. That box had become quite full in four years. I just kept running across stuff and thinking oh, he’d like this. Mostly Hubble and JWST stuff. I couldn’t bring myself to just throw it all away, so I took your name off the box and now it’s just a random box in my closet full of this and that with seemingly no common denominator. I’ve no idea what to do with it. Most likely because I don’t like thinking about it. Do you still believe in do-overs? I know someone down there who deserves one way more than either one of us.
January 21st, 2021 Maybe I’m Finally Understanding This
It’s odd because his tweet is about Trump, but this business about the constant low level stress of wondering when they’re going to wander into the room and blow everything up instantly reminded me of actually living that, and perhaps it’s knocked some sense into me that’s been long overdue. Something like fifty years overdue as a matter of fact. My entire childhood and a good part of my adolescence, and most of mom’s life I suspect, were spent in an abusive relationship with her mother (who I have often referred to here as my Bitter Baptist Grandmother) and I never really looked at it that way until just now. It’s always been just…yeah that was her…she was like that. Now I’m thinking that lots of people see their abuser that way…not as an abuser specifically, but as just being like that. Someone who is always cranky and bad tempered. Someone who just seems to always be miserable, and wants everyone else to be miserable to. Someone you are always tip-toeing around, trying not to set them off, trying not to attract their attention. Because…that’s just how they are. Not abusers, just difficult people. And you avoid their gaze because you know what you’ll see in those eyes. People who are always making you tense up. People who make you feel small whenever they’re around. Yeah. Abusers. I’m sixty-seven years old and she still haunts my bad dreams.
January 13th, 2021 You Have No Poetry In Your Soul Is The Problem A friend linked me to this today…
People who know how to code are not all that difficult to find, though it is a specialized skill set. People who can do it well, as it turns out, are. And the problem for managers is you almost have to be as good at it as they are to know which from which when you’re hiring. But then these people would probably not have hired mostly on the basis of IT skills, but political affinity. Call the above an example of Sturgeon’s Law. But also, if the last four years have taught us anything, it’s the kind of logical, clear headed thinking that makes a good coder is not a skill set very many right wingers have. My personal experience working on code others have left behind tells me it’s not a matter of education…some of the most brick brained idiotic code I’ve ever seen came from people with their BS in Computer Science. It’s how well you can think logically and above all, clearly. There’s a limit to how well schools can teach that. It’s in a way, an art. And to paraphrase Marx (Groucho) right wing art is to art, as military music is to music.
January 11th, 2021 Unity…Did You Say… This from Steve Schmidt, co founder of The Lincoln Project, was I think, posted somewhere, maybe as a Twitter thread but I’m not sure at the moment, before the mob assault on the Capitol and well after the election, when you could hear howls from the kook pews about how could Biden have won so many votes when we saw practically no Biden signs on lawns or bumper stickers. Wasn’t it obvious why? Yeah…they knew damn well why they weren’t seeing much of that in their neighborhoods. All that ranting and raving and chest thumping was meant to silence anyone who might even be thinking of voting for Biden. But once people got into the voting booth, they made their silent voices heard. Anyway…this was posted the other day on the Facebook page of the Lawrence County (Indiana) Democratic Party. I couldn’t have said it better…
January 8th, 2021 Our Bodies Don’t Always Fit The Standard Models Almost four years ago, I posted the following to my Facebook page after I read it on someone else’s page. I was trying to be helpful to the women in my life, and any lady who might see it.
Now I want to add something to all this for any gay males, and family and friends of gay males reading this. I can’t speak to the effect what I’m about to discuss has on lesbians or transgender folk because I am not one of these. But I am a gay male and I’m here to tell you that the above was how it was with my own heart attack in October of 2019. Mostly. I didn’t have the back spasms and jaw symptoms that lady did, but the sensation of having a very severe bout of heartburn was my experience too. Almost four years after I posted this to my Facebook page, I had my own heart attack. In retrospect I should have kept this in mind, that it might, just might, hit me more like it does women then men. After all, I was, and still am, convinced that my sexual orientation is a matter of my physiology…that is, it’s how I’m made…at least brain wise. Perhaps, I sometimes wondered, there is more to it than just what’s going on in my brain. But when it finally came down I initially ignored the symptoms which could have led to disaster. What happened was for a moment the heartburn sensation became so severe…like it was a horse standing on my chest…it scared me and I called 911, still thinking there was a problem in my esophagus. I like my cigars and worried that this was the first sign of throat cancer. When the doctor in the emergency room told me I was having a heart attack it actually surprised me. Pay attention to this my fellow gay males! My sense of my sexual orientation being wired into me physically, not as a psychological effect (distant father domineering mother blah, blah, blah…every bar stool blowhard bigot theory of homosexuality…blah, blah, blah…), has always been there. But as I’ve grown older I’ve had to wonder if there is more to it than just the grey matter. There is much better research going on now then there was when I was younger about gender differences in how disease presents and progresses, and in patient responses to treatments and medications. This is good for women. But gay males might need to pay more attention to this effect too, regardless of how cis gender we see ourselves to be, and how comfortable we are inside our male bodies. Our physiology may be just slightly different enough from heterosexual males that it makes a difference in our healthcare.
January 4th, 2021 Ahhh…First Morning Back To Work After The Holidays… That morning cup of coffee really wakes a person up. Especially when the first mouthful tells you that you forgot to put the sugar in. I like my coffee like I like my men. Sweet.
January 2nd, 2021 Say Something! A Coming Out Story – Episode 31 “Say Something” is now live… …in which our hero gets a helpful nudge from his libido. Read it Here.
January 1st, 2021 Oh The Difference A Decade Makes… On January one, twenty-eleven I was into my second decade at Space Telescope and amazed to be starting work on James Webb. Barack Obama was president of the United States and it seemed like that long darkness that was the Bush years was over and the nation had been restored to sanity. I was several years into ownership of my first Mercedes-Benz…a cute little white ‘C’ 300. By the end of 2011 I’d trade it in for my dream come true car…a Mercedes-Benz diesel sedan. I was a decade into home ownership…a cute little Baltimore rowhouse, a dream I never thought would ever come true. It was within walking distance of where I worked, grocery stores, shopping, restaurants and bars…everything I needed for my day to day life. I had reconnected with my high school crush after decades of searching for him, and he started flirting with me again just like he did back in high school and I was walking on air again just like I did back in high school. But it was even more terrifying than it was back then because he was deeply closeted and married and I really didn’t want to get in the middle of that. Later that summer of 2011 some sort of personal crisis happened, he dropped out of sight for three months, and when he reappeared he sat me down and we had the strangest miserable conversation I’ve ever had with anyone, and that includes the time someone on mom’s side of the family assured me less than an hour after we’d laid her body to rest in its grave that I couldn’t be family unless I was the same degree of Christian they were. So it’s a decade later… I’ve lived through my first heart attack and an atrial fibrillation that sent my heart rate to over 210 beats per minute. EMT told me she’d never seen a heart rate as fast as mine just then in her entire career. The Mercedes diesel sedan is paid for. My little Baltimore rowhouse is still mine, but only halfway paid for. It’s value has increased with the building of many matchstick “luxury” townhouses (they stop calling them rowhouses after the first hundred grand…) nearby. I have a lot of work planned for it this coming year, including new storm doors, a pull down ladder to the roof hatch, and repairs to the front porch tiles. There’s at least two more planks in the backyard deck I’ll be needing to replace. I might have the old carpet taken up and see what condition the wood floor is in…neighbors have had theirs refinished and they look very nice. Also on the wish list is new counter tops and kitchen cabinet doors. And a parking pad. With a charging station. Maybe. My high school crush and I are not speaking to each other and I’m wondering if fate didn’t actually deal me the lesser of two miseries because I discovered that we’re not very compatible. My sense of humor grates on him, which is probably a cultural difference more than I’m fine with my sexual orientation and he isn’t. But it was his attempts to constrict me into something a little less exuberant after I’d spent decades freeing myself from inhibitions and self doubt beaten into me by schoolyard bullies that really grated on me. I began to feel like I was being suffocated. There’s accepting yourself, your whole self, and there’s accepting that some people will hate you for being that person, even down to the things you can’t help being. By the time we’d reconnected I’d accepted both those things so thoroughly that I think in retrospect it unnerved him. I had to be reined in and I am constitutionally unable to be that. Oh…and my fellow countrymen elected a racist grifting con man to the White House, and now having lost reelection because he was such a crappy president, is now trying along with the republican party to end The United States of America so he can remain in office in perpetuity. Who would have thought that the party of god fearing patriotism would burn it all down they moment they thought they had a good chance at it. I’m still working at Space Telescope, in and out of the Mission Operations Center, and now I have a bit of the upcoming Roman Space Telescope, named for Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer, who paved the way for space telescopes focused on the broader universe. My regrets are, as usual, focused almost entirely on matters of the heart. But I think I’m somewhere now that I can see a bit more clearly, that all the what if’s I’ve tormented myself with all these years don’t matter a whit. Nothing I could have done would have changed anything. Let me share a bit of geezer wisdom with you, acquired by yours truly at great personal cost. It’s not how well two people get along that matters, it’s how well they don’t get along. Never mind how perfectly in sync they are politically and intellectually. It matters not that their laughter delights, that their smiles linger. How complementary their personalities are while they’re both in a good mood is of slight importance. When skies are blue everything is easy. It’s how things go when the skies darken and you can hear thunder in the distance. That is where you can see their future. How deep the threads of fondness and desire weave is but a passing moment. To paraphrase a certain someone, happiness is like farting…it stinks for a little while and then it’s gone. It’s the bad moods that matter. How do two people deal with anger. Is the reflex to go to their separate corners and sulk for a while and then have fierce makeup sex, or is it to hoist the Jolly Roger and start lobbing cannonballs? It’s a new decade and I’d tell myself it’s all for the best and I probably don’t know how good I have it really, except I don’t know if I’ll still have a country when it ends. Or how much longer I have to live. That first heart attack really focuses you on that question. The upside is, as I wrote previously, you stop giving a fuck about a lot of things you probably never should have in the first place.
December 31st, 2020 Happy Same Old New Year! Tom Tomorrow (aka Dan Perkins) is a cartoonist I’ve followed avidly since I first saw his cartoons in the local alternative weeklies (many of which have gone belly up in the print news devastation). I love his strip This Modern World, and when I needed a new host for my own personal website I did an nslookup to see who his was, thinking that if they were cool with his cartoons they’d be cool with mine and my blog. He suffered a divorce a few years ago and he’s occasionally bled about it on twitter. Apparently it was sudden and unexpected. This thread he posted today this New Year’s Eve speaks to me so much…
That is so much me in many ways. And yet, my situation could not be more different. I reckon that speaks to the universal human condition. I didn’t suffer a divorce, but that’s because I never had the lover. The breakups in my life did not happen after years and years of peace and joy and happiness. So they would not have been as wounding. I suppose. Instead the wound was a never ending cloudy drizzly sky I somehow became accustomed to. A constant ache from a place within that should not have been so empty for so long. There was nothing in my romantic life to loose. But I lost everything. And now I’m 67, and given my own set of recent events, health-wise, I’m not sure I have a lot of life left. Loosing both parents changes you. Old age changes you. The first heart attack, or whatever that first serious brush with death due to an aging body is, changes you. In some ways for the better. You kinda stop giving a flying fuck about things you probably never should have anyway. The regrets you’ve carried with you all this time get shuffled and re-arranged, and maybe some of them weren’t all that worth carrying around anyway. Baggage is dropped. But then fresh baggage is picked up along the way. It always is. It’s odd in a way for me the elder man to be watching how the younger ones deal with their life’s knife wounds in a way that teaches me how to live with mine…at least a tad. I wasn’t expecting to live the life I have now, but…it’s definitely been interesting. And sometimes, really good! Yeah…I can relate. And especially to a previous tweet he put out there about how nobody wants to hear about getting kneecapped by love…probably because they’ve all been kneecapped too at some point and nobody knows how to deal with it. Yeah…I can relate. Absolutely. Somewhat. And here’s the thing…all those times in my life when I’ve been asked/challenged/preached to, in the context of a discussion relating to my sexual orientation, if I had it to do over would I still want to be a homosexual…in the expectation that of course I would choose to be a heterosexual…all those times I may have stared back at them like they were from another planet…what’s going through my mind just then is You’re heterosexual and you’ve lived your entire life in that world and you’re trying to tell me that the grass is greener on Your side of the fence?? What have you been smoking all this time? I’m sorry for what happened to you Mr. Perkins. I’m sorry for what happens to all of us. Somehow we manage. What I learned in 2020 is romantic alienation did not prepare me at all for imposed alienation. This is worse. In a world full of broken hearts at least we had each other…
…and our favorite local bar. Here’s to the new year. May the day come quickly when we can at last all be brokenhearted together once more.
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