I have transitioned back into retirement, and I should be feeling great about it. A couple days ago I was. I’d made plans to visit the ancestral Garrett homelands in California, and hang out with my brother in Oceano. I’d bought train tickets from Baltimore to Los Angeles because I didn’t want to be driving cross country during snow and ice season, and also across red America after election day. I figured I’d decide how to get up the coast to Oceano when I got to LA, since the train schedules going north don’t always sync well with the Southwest Chief. Then I realized I had time left on my Disneyland annual pass and I could take a MetroLink to Anaheim and spend a few days in California Adventure and then take the Surfliner north to the Grover Beach station, which is walking distance to my brother’s house in Oceano.

So I was in a great frame of mind. Then. Later that afternoon I took an ad-hoc hike along the NCR rail trail north of Baltimore and it was a sunny pleasant sky blue day. Got a nice BLT at a local shop next to the trailhead. I was feeling wonderful. There was however, a problem I was waiting to get resolved the next business day. I have been in a state of despair ever since. I’m typing this now after waking up from a bad nightmare.

When I got what I thought was going to be my final paycheck plus all the vacation time I’d accrued, it was massively less than I’d thought. So I asked HR to look into it, and naturally it’s my fault, or so they say. And the tax man’s. This is going to make things difficult for me for the rest of this year, and it’s too late to cancel my train tickets and Disney hotel reservations without taking another big hit.

And while it’s true I have enough in my 401k to retire comfortably, the problem for me at this point is the current managers of my 401k have much more stringent rules for making sure you are not and never have been married that the other one I was previously on did not. Which is (hahaha) why the Institute dropped them and pushed us all onto the current one. So the buffer I thought I had to tide me through the paper are you or are you not or have you ever been married chase isn’t there and I’m going to be struggle to make ends meet until this new 401k manager decides I’ve satisfied requirements. And they have fucked me over dragging their feet on other matters before.

Saving grace of all this might be that at 73 I am subject to the Required Minimum DIstribution now and this current 401k manager has already informed me that I have a chunk out of my 401k I now I have to withdraw. Hopefully this means they will get serious about letting me do that.

Here’s the thing many of my friends and practically all my classmates don’t really get about me. I was raised by a single divorced mother and didn’t get a chance to finish college because the money ran out and what great granddad Garrett had put aside for me and my brother got disappeared somehow. I knocked around this and that low paying job for half my working life. And even when I started making a good living as a software developer it was contract work at first with zero benefits.

Mom didn’t have any tangible property when she died, let alone a house in Montgomery county that could be sold for a big profit, and I just don’t have the foundational wealth most of the rest of my classmates and co-workers have. It’s not like they’re rich by any means, just comfortably middle class. I on the other hand, am literally a kid from the other side of the railroad tracks.

If it wasn’t for the benefits I had at STScI I wouldn’t have anything but social security to retire on at all. The 401k and b have enough in them to let me have a comfortable, if not fabulous retirement, but I can’t tolerate sudden complexities very well at all. Like having to go through a paper chase just to prove I’ve never been married before I can access my retirement funds.

Most working people in this land of the free and home of the brave can’t tolerate surprises either. We have lived hand to mouth for most of our lives, if not all of it. I’m also excessively lucky I can still keep my employee health plan, even accounting for how that and Medicate part B increases are likely to eat all of the coming SS COLA increase and then some. You’ve no idea the panic that sets in whenever I hear republicans talking about cutting social security.

I’m just anxious and sick to my stomach right now. I just want to stay in bed for the rest of the week. Maybe the rest of my life.

Despair. Nightmares. So on and so forth…

I was out and about a couple nights ago, just wandering around my little corner of Baltimore, and chatting with a friend in DC via cellphone. The kid who grew up with telephones wired into the wall, and local long distance charges through the roof, is loving how all that changed in the 21st century. I carry my phone with me in my pocket and it is also my music library, weather radar, encyclopedia, and all around handheld computer. I was feeling great since my short afternoon hike on the NCR rail trail north of Baltimore. Despair was to come the next day but just then I didn’t know that. It was a lovely blue sky day and the evening was cool and but not so cold yet that I couldn’t be out and about in a flannel shirt and no jacket.

I decided to stop for a drink at one of my favorite restaurants, I won’t say which because of what I saw going down and what I did about it.

This particular restaurant served a specialty drink that they smoked in front of the customer before serving it. I discovered this delightful thing about smoking a drink at the upscale Basque restaurant across I-83 from me. They call it a Blue Velvet and it is decadently good. But that restaurant had a fire and it’s been closed since last January, although they say they’re opening back up this December. So when this other place started serving a smoked old fashion I tried it out and it was excellent. If pricey.

So I go inside and sit at the bar. A new bartender is there…a young woman I’d never seen before. She asked me what I wanted and I asked if she could make me that smoked old fashion and she said yes.

So I’m chilling out at the bar while she’s making it. Eventually one of the regular bartenders comes back and starts working the little glass washer at the end of the bar. He sees me and asks me if I want my usual food and I say no, just a drink tonight. I don’t really know this bartender, but he seems to know me. There are other regulars behind the bar I see often, but this is late Sunday night and so I suppose these are the off hours staff. He’s tall, thin and bearded and he seems okay. But his interactions with the young woman really put me off.

She starts walking over to me with my drink and the guy grabs her by the arm as she passes by him and says something to her. It wasn’t a rough grab but it was a grab, and the first thing I’m thinking is no, you don’t touch your staff like that. He says something to her and she nods and walks over to me and puts my drink down.

The process at this restaurant involves putting a smoker over the glass. They apparently get them from one of their suppliers and it has that company’s name on it. It’s a wooden thing that fits over the glass and has that company’s logo carved onto it. On the top of the smoker is a small bowl the bartender fills with some wood like hickory, mesquite, or red oak. Once the bowl is filled a torch lighter is used to burn the wood, and smoke drifts down from the bowl and covers the top of the drink. At the Basque restaurant the bartender would bring a small bottle prefilled with smoke and pour the smoke from the bottle over your drink while you watched. It’s all very theatrical in a way but that’s part of the enjoyment.

So this new young bartender starts trying to smoke my drink using their smoke top device, but it isn’t getting the smoke down onto the drink. I’ve seen this happen before and suggest to her that the smoker is clogged. She agrees. But then the other bartender comes over and sees the problem with the smoker and basically takes over the process from the young woman. He brings over a new smoker, fills it’s bowl with wood chips and starts torching it himself, saying in front of her and me that he needs to show her how it’s done so she doesn’t screw it up. And I’m thinking no, this is not how you train your staff. This is how you make them want to quit.

I can appreciate there are customers who will get all ornery when they’re being served by inexperienced staff, but that’s on them. I’m fine with being part of the process of teaching someone their job, especially when I can see they really want to learn. And this young woman was, before the other guy came along, pleasant, cheerful and wanting to make my time there good. It wasn’t her fault that the damn smoker she picked up was clogged. The other thing is you give staff the tools they need to do the job, and don’t be putting it on them when the tools fail them. Get them better tools.

So now there is discord behind the bar. The young woman is upset and she goes off to work the tables in the seating area; a task I think she was mostly there for and only did behind the bar while the other bartender was away or on his break. Periodically she comes back to the bar to take the drink orders from the tables, and goes into the kitchen to bring out their food. But a definite chill is in the air and I am completely sympathetic with the young woman.

I hear another staff member, also young woman, just casually say to the guy “She’s pretty angry at you.” He seemed to shrug it off. I saw him talk to her semi privately a couple of times but what was said or what it was about I had no idea. Whatever it was it didn’t clear the air.

I am loath to insert myself into other people’s drama, but there are limits. I kept an eye on the movements of the young woman until I saw an opportunity to catch her eye away from the others, and motioned her over to a spot where we could talk without being seen.

I told her 1) I saw him grab your arm. That was way out of line. 2) you do not criticise staff in front of the customers, that is completely unprofessional. 3) the crapped up smoker was not your fault.

She thanked me but the look on her face was thanks enough. I went back to finish my drink. At some point someone, or some someones (there were other young women working there) must have said something to the guy because he came over and apologised to me for putting all that in front of me.

Okay…I’m a gay male and the dynamics of straight male/female interaction is a foreign land to me. Fine. But I think I get workplace dynamics pretty well. You keep your hands off your co-workers. Train your staff with a measure of patience and humility: you had to be trained once yourself. Keep your criticisms private. Keep it away from the customers. Whatever it is.

I first heard of this child’s skull and the explosive argument about the human emergence from reading Robert Ardrey’s book African Genesis. It was a pivotal time in my life when I was hungry for spiritual guidance, having basically walked away, mostly, from the Baptist religion of my youth.

I would remain an agnostic for decades until finally becoming an atheist in my middle fifties. I dipped into this and that 60s/70s spiritual fad, read about Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan, sorted through the detritus of various gurus and spiritual cults, glanced at the pamphlets I was handed while photographing protest marches in DC. None of it moved me much. I was a science geek from an early age, took a class in logic and semantics in college, and could not seriously abide plain nonsense no matter how enchanting it seemed to me as a work of art.

So I wandered through my early 1970s, dazed and confused…

I discovered Ardrey’s book at age twenty while working at Industrial Photo in Silver Spring, in a corner of the basement where it had been tossed by some prior worker among random open boxes of inventory. I picked it up and read…(I understand the sexism of the text I am about to quote…sorry…but it’s how he wrote it in 1961)

Not in innocence, and not in Asia, was [mankind] born. The home of our [fathers] was that of the African highland reaching north from the Cape to the Lakes of the Nile. Here we came about – slowly, ever so slowly – on a sky-swept savannah glowing with menace.

In neither bankruptcy nor bastardy did we face out long beginnings. [Man’s] line is legitimate. Our ancestry is firmly rooted in the animal world, and to its subtle, antique ways our hearts are yet pledged. Children of all animal kind, we inherited many a social nicety as well as the predator’s way. But most significant of all our gifts, as things turned out, was the legacy bequeathed us by those killer apes, our immediate forebears. Even in the first long days of our beginnings we held in our had the weapon, an instrument somewhat older than ourselves.

[Man] is a fraction of the animal world. Our history is an afterthought, no more, tacked to an infinite calendar. We are not so unique as we should like to believe. And if [man] in time of need seeks deeper knowledge concerning himself, then he must explore those animal horizons from which we made our quick little march.”

He was writing this during peak cold war about when I was doing my duck and cover drills in the elementary school I attended. So I have a hunch about what “time of need” he’s talking about there.

The book instantly grabbed me for these nuggets of pure gold on the first page: not born in original sin, but born of this earth, and we can know ourselves after all, but to do that we have to look to our past, to our evolutionary heritage. He makes it even plainer later in the book when he says we are not fallen angels but risen apes; a metaphor I have always held close.

His books have been rightly criticized for the over emphasis on the killer ape hypothesis. I’m told the opening sequence of Kubrick’s 2001 was heavily influenced by African Genesis. A different and more complete picture has emerged since the book was published. I bring it up here only to say that Ardrey made me familiar with the long and acrimonious argument Dart’s discovery began, as related in the above video. But science Does self correct, if the evidence is there. Eventually even his most ardent critics came to admit they were wrong, and Dart was right. And it was walking upright, on two legs, that grew the large brain, not the other way around, freeing the arms and hands to do…things.

And I think Ardrey’s point still stands, if not quite as dramatically as he put forward. Given our ancient ancestors’ lack of physical stature, our canines ridiculously small by comparison, having no claws or talons or poisonous venom, how long should we have lasted on those African plains, had we not been born with a weapon in our hands? This same videographer has another one about the one simple thing we could do that gave us an advantage over the other animals we were competing with for food: we could throw things, hit and inflict damage at a distance from our physical selves. Our bodies, our shoulders specifically, are adapted to it.

Rocks and stones first probably, then spears, and from there to arrows…bullets…nukes.

Ardrey addresses this in his book too. The weapon that gave us a survival advantage, now threatens it, if we don’t learn to manage as he put it, those deeper understandings of ourselves, and those animal horizons from which we have made our quick little march.

This video came across my Facebook feed just now and I’m glad I found a copy on YouTube I could share with you on my blog here. I can see myself in it so clearly I’m stunned.

This is me, mostly. And it might seem strange to think of me as having grown up in an unstable environment, because the usual image of that is a horribly brutal family situation and mine wasn’t that. I never experienced childhood homelessness. I was never physically abused. I never went to bed hungry or out the door in dirty clothes. By all rights I have to say I had it pretty good. But family life on mom’s side was still dicey at times and this video really gets how I learned to cope with it.

Thing is when you grow up in certain situations they don’t seem unusual to you because that’s your normal environment. It’s only as you get older and have more contact with the world around you that you begin to see how odd it might seem to others. But even then it’s still normal to you.

Mom’s love was the one constant I had growing up. Everyone else in her side of the family (I never had any contact with dad’s side until I was in my middle teens) was a minefield of is it good today or angry, and that was mostly about the central family drama that I was in the middle of and which I won’t go into now. The only one I never had to be careful around on the maternal side besides mom was my maternal uncle who lived in California who was always cheerful and fun. But he was clear across the country from me. I grew up with a bitter always angry and hostile maternal grandmother and that was the big minefield I learned to navigate growing up. Mostly by going to my room and closing the door, or going out for a walk. To this day long walks are how I work off nervous energy.

Don’t even get me started on the teachers I had all through grade school until I entered Woodward. Being the only son of a divorced mom they all pegged me as a problem child the moment I entered their classrooms and treated me that way (Montgomery County let me see the notes those teachers wrote in my school record, but wouldn’t let me make copies alas). Then there were the bullies my being a skinny girlish art kid attracted. Woodward was paradise compared to everything that came before, but even then it wasn’t until my senior year there that I finally began to feel secure enough to open up and make real friends.

So I see myself in this video very clearly. I can think of at least one other friend here who probably can too. I see you. Survivor’s Intelligence.

Of all the symptoms of Parkinson’s, the one I dislike the very most is fatigue. Tremors at this stage I’m in are trivial. I get the occasional stiffness, mostly in my thighs, but it’s not bad. I get the dizzy spells randomly. The brain fog comes and goes. But fatigue, when it hits, slams me down. It sucks the minutes of my life I still have left away and I just want to stay in bed and I get nothing done.

I have to be careful though, and not attribute everything that happens to me to Parkinson’s. The fact is I am 73 now and so some of this, maybe even most of it, is simply just my getting old. Also, my heart. I was told when I had the heart attack in 0ctober 2019 (tomorrow is the anniversary), that I have a leaky heart valve. I’m three years away from the time my cardiologist and the surgeon that did my angioplasty say are when I’ll probably need it replaced.

They say it can be done nowadays without opening up my chest. Lovely. Another scary procedure to be done inside my beating heart.

I have a book I purchased to write everything my family would need to know upon my demise. It’s titled “Sorry, It’s Your Problem Now.” I should probably get to work on it…

Got some good woodworking done today, something I’ve been looking forward to doing once I was on retirement time. Happy to note that Parkinson’s wasn’t bothering me at all and I can still work the table saw and other power tools pretty easily for a 73 year old. Even moving and lifting to its feet the Ryobi table saw wasn’t a problem.

As you can see I’m doing all this outside. I keep the table saw in an outside tool shed because it’s much too heavy for me to take up and down stairs, and there is really no place inside for me to be doing any woodworking. This means I have to do any woodworking during the part of the year it’s warm enough and not raining.

I had two things I wanted to at least get cut so I could stain and seal them later, and what you see in this photo is, or will be when I’m through with it, a lid for the storage bench at the front of my basement art room I needed to make after I got the new hot water tank; which required adding a bunch of new pipe and regulators to a space I was using to store art supplies. The lid will keep all that new plumbing in its own space and I can store my supplies on top of it.

I needed to buy nothing. The wood was from my stack of spare pieces from other projects. The power tools I’d bought long ago. The minor skill set I have for this work I got long ago while working for a couple of guys who had their own custom speaker shop, plus while working in a custom plastic shop. That odd skill set I have now was a benefit of the way I ricocheted around different jobs and workplaces when I was a young man, before I settled in to PCs and software development. I am no carpenter, but I can do most of the Harry Homeowner stuff around the house that needs doing and maybe a bit more.

Via Josh Helfgott on Facebook…

Researchers just found the graves of more than 1,000 children who died LOCKED UP in America’s youth prisons, scattered across 29 states, most in plots nobody bothered to mark.

Georgetown University researchers have traced children’s graves to 40 reform schools and youth prisons, from Salem, Oregon, to Augusta, Maine. The kids died between the early 1800s and the 1950s. Most were poor and disproportionately Black. Many had committed no serious crime and were locked up for being “incorrigible.” Death records mostly blame tuberculosis or flu. The project’s leader, Marc Schindler, says those records deserve skepticism, and his team’s report lists “violence and neglect” among the causes.

The biggest site is in the woods across the street from Maryland’s Cheltenham Youth Detention Center, which opened in 1870 as the House of Reformation and Instruction for Colored Children. More than 230 Black boys are buried there. Children as young as 5 were sent there, some just for being poor, homeless or orphaned. A state report says white guards beat them with a brass-studded belt. In the 1920s the boys were leased out to nearby farms, and the institution kept most or all of their pay.

State officials knew that cemetery existed for decades and did nothing. Schindler rediscovered it in 2024, while he was a top Maryland juvenile justice official. More than 200 of the graves are gray cinder blocks with no names or dates.

Don’t be lulled into thinking the abuse documented in this article is something out of the past. It’s still happening, only moved into privately owned and under the radar camps for so-called troubled youth; usually just teenagers being teenagers with parents who were probably brutalized themselves. Every now and then that youth gulag archipelago peeks out into the open, as when a couple years ago a kid whose parents sent him via an “escort” service to one in the backwoods of North Carolina was put into what the other kids there called “the burrito”: wrapped tightly and locked into an alarmed sleeping bag on his first night there. He had a panic attack that night, allegedly checked on, then later found dead, naked from the waist down, underwear next to his body, and bruises on his arms. Radio silence after a couple news articles about him and another kid who died trying to escape. These outfits often have powerful protectors in their state legislatures.

Faulkner said the past is not dead it is not even past. How humanity treats its young is its judgement on itself and whether it deserves a future. It’s the two sides of the human coin. We raise decent, noble souls as often as we grow sickeningly cruel sociopaths and indifferent zeros. Yes Sam, there is good in this world; but is it enough?

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.