I want to chew a bit on what happened to me yesterday before I write about it. But I never felt more alone at a thanksgiving table than I did yesterday. Not my host’s fault though. He worked hard to put out a great thanksgiving table. He’d have sat there and talked my ears off but he was too busy. The others…well…they talked past me, they talked around me, they talked over me. Whenever I opened my mouth to contribute to the conversation someone would immediately start talking over me, and then yank the conversation to a different topic. Fact was I didn’t really know any of them, and they apparently knew each other but not me, although I’d seen some of them at previous gatherings. So that put me on the outside looking in from the start. I tried, but could not break through.

The worst moment came when one of the guests asked to take a group picture of all of us at the table, and the guy sitting next to me quite deliberately put his head in front of mine so my face wouldn’t be in the picture. I had to ask for a second take. What I should have done was get up and leave. But I didn’t want to offend my host, who I’ve known since the BBS days. It was no accident, he knew I was sitting there, he kept crowding my space at the table and I kept having to move away. This is something all us weird outcast kids get to experience over and over. But this was a Thanksgiving table for gay guys who didn’t otherwise have family to be with on that day. I expected some sense of…you know…Family.  

I have never felt more alone at a Thanksgiving table.

Later I saw this post from Father Nathan Monk, who I follow on Facebook…

Some of you had a rough day because you were alone. Others choose to be around family that isn’t supportive because that’s easier than the alternative. There are those of you who had to sit at tables with those who hurt you. Then again, this might be your first holiday alone because you finally stood up for yourself. Maybe you are a seasoned veteran of the Black Sheep Society. Perhaps you’ve long ago found a chosen family and never looked back. You might be the person who has to show up because you are the only one who protects your vulnerable sibling who can’t bring themselves to walk away yet. Whatever your situation is as we step into the holiday season, whether you are alone or surrounded by people who despise you, just know that I love you just the way you are.

No one can replace a family with a status or undo all the pain with a few words; I won’t pretend to have that power. I just hope, that if you’ve snuck behind the tool shed to catch some of Willie Nelson’s breath with your cool cousin, or are hiding in the bathroom for just a moment, that as you look down at your phone after being told, “We said no politics!” because you were responding to the thing your uncle said about abortion but it’s only politics when you take the opposing view so he’s not in trouble for bringing it up, but you are for responding, that when the screen glares brightly as you check out of the hell you are in for just a moment, you look down to these words and know I’m thinking about you, I see you, and I love you.

If you fall into one of those cracks know that you’re not alone. But remember that cultivating chosen family requires digging below the labels that get put on all of us at one time or another. I might be gay for example, but that won’t mean we have anything in common with each other apart from a political battle, and you might even disagree with that.

I would have loved to have had Thanksgiving with my little crew of high school classmates. We have gathered semi regularly, those of us who still live in the area, and it is always a good time. We knew each other from when we were teenagers. Those are good friends to have and keep. I would have loved to have had Thanksgiving with my brother in California, and that part of my family tree out there. I’ll be there for the Christmas and New Year holidays though, so there’s that. A casual post Thanksgiving happy hour with some of my co-workers at Space Telescope would have been lovely. Maybe some other year. Assuming I have a few of those still left to me.

I made myself a nice turkey dinner yesterday, to somehow make up for the miserable one I had on Thanksgiving. Yes, I ate by myself. But it was delicious. I made myself a drink and settled into some fond memories before going to bed. I reckon this is what solitary old men do. Then again, I often did this when I was a young man too.

“Acquainted with the Night”
by Robert Frost

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

This is why my art photography is so dire.

This came across my Facebook stream just now, via Heather Cox Richardson’s Book Club page…

And yet…and yet…I have met, online and off, many religious people, Christian and otherwise, who also believe these things. I am an Atheist, but it’s not because I have a grudge against religion. It’s just that belief in an all powerful creator of the universe and all living things God just stopped making sense to me. It may be different for you and I am fine with that. Maybe someday I’ll find myself strolling along Newton’s beach and pick up one of those prettier seashells he spoke of and find God inside of it and think oh…there you were. But I don’t think so. I’ve been like this, entranced by the world as I see it, as science and curiosity has revealed it to me, as long as I can remember. It is an awesomely beautiful universe we live in.

But there are times, like as I’m reading the script on this…what is it, a bench, a monument of some sort…that I wonder if you can be a Christian even if you don’t believe in God. I think you can. I think the carpenter’s son would tell us that it’s better to build a hospital than a church. If you have to pick one or the other, build the hospital. I think the carpenter’s son would say it’s better to work for the good than just to pray for it and wait for God to do something about it. I think carpenter’s son would tell us to be the good the world needs, feed the poor, care for the infirm, treat the stranger with kindness, because they are your neighbor. Make peace, be peace. I don’t need to believe in an almighty god to know these are good things, necessary things, if we are to have civilization, if humanity is to have its tomorrows. 

But I know there are those who think tomorrow is much less important than eternity. I think this is why they’re willing to let children, who are our tomorrow, starve to death, die of completely preventable diseases, become war’s collateral damage. It was god’s will. But no, it was indifference. It was the belief that belief alone is all you need to be a good person. Belief excuses indifference, forgives bigotry. But no, it does not.

You hear a lot since the election about being willing to disagree and still be family. But details matter. What are we disagreeing about? Is it about God, or about deeds? There are those that say good deeds won’t get you into heaven. But belief does not make anything happen all by itself. Belief can just be an excuse for not doing what you didn’t want to do in the first place. If you want to help make the American dream of liberty and justice for all real, do the work of civilization, and make all our tomorrows happen, I will walk with you. I will be your neighbor. We can be family. We can disagree about god.

This came across my Blue Sky feed this morning…

This idea that raising the standard of living drives the birth rate down is something Bill Gates has been saying and when I first read him arguing it I was surprised at how much sense it made. Some ideas just get into your head at a young age, and then you realize later in life it was just about rich and powerful men pushing you in a particular direction. Let’s not be trying to raise the standard of living for the poor because we need them to keep the middle class scared.

I’m pretty sure that’s Steven Pinker of the Blank Slate being talked about in that quote. The Blank Slate was my first exposure to him. In it he argued against a model of human consciousness that denies that our evolutionary heritage has any influence on our behavior. I was already thinking that model was wrong after reading Robert Ardrey’s book African Genesis which argued that if we sought a deeper understanding of ourselves in times of need then we should to explore those animal horizons “from which we have made our quick little march.” This was during the Cold War, so you can appreciate what those times of need were.

And on that basis I picked up Pinker’s first book expecting to read some elaboration of what Ardrey said. But he lost me when he began approvingly quoting Thomas Sowell, who called homosexuality a deathstyle (hello Dick Hafer) and incongruously argued that allowing gay men to marry would help the spread of AIDS. Yes, let’s not be encouraging gay men to get married and settle down. Sowell, who fancies himself as a recovered Marxist, also liked to bellyache about how American Marxists haven’t actually read Marx…oh yes they do, ad infinitum, and their arguing with each other about what Marxism is, let alone with what Marx’s critics say he is, reminds me of arguments over the Bible I had to listen to. How many Hegels can stand on the head of a dialectic…

So I wasn’t terribly surprised that Pinker spent some time on Epstein’s island, only to get his self important ass self booted off after telling his host he was wrong about something. But even a stopped clock is right twice a day (or once if it’s a military clock). If you want to slow down the birthrate, improve everyone’s standard of living.

And…yeah…Trump and Epstein seem to have had lots in common. Fragile egos of a feather sexually prey on teenagers together. Why were you even there Steven Pinker??

The more you know…

It all started with a little Commodore C64 I bought so I could pick up shortwave radio teletype signals. That eventually lead to my building my own IBM PC compatible from parts, and teaching myself how to use and program it.

And that led me to this place you see in this image I found in today’s Facebook Memory…

…when, 26 years ago, while working an unpleasant contract for an insurance company in Reisterstown, I got a call from a recruiting agent at the agency I was contracting with, asking me if I’d be interested in a side gig at the place where the Hubble Space Telescope was operated.

Well he didn’t have to ask twice. And not just because I’d been wanting out of the contract with that insurance agency ever since I saw what I’d been brought in to work on, as opposed to what I was told I’d be working on. I’ve been a little space cadet ever since I watched the first Mercury astronauts going up on TV. I called the number he gave me and arranged an interview with the person leading development of the new Grants Management system they were about to start work on. At the time it was going to be based around Microsoft Visual Basic and Microsoft Word and my skill set by then was all about the various dialects of Microsoft Basic and how they’d evolved ever since that first Commodore with its PET Basic interpreter. So the job requirements hit the bullseye of my skill set. The interview went pretty well.

Later that insurance company project manager snuck up to the door of a conference room I’d entered to have a private conversation with my agency recruiter. He got mad when he overheard me complaining to the recruiter about being mislead and that the source code I was being asked to maintain was a crazy rats nest of GOTOs and GOSUBs and global variables and no attempt at all of scoping and he fired me on the spot. In part I think because he was actually quite fond of that programmer, who had recently converted to a very conservative Mennonite faith and had resigned to go live in one of their communes. But also he probably didn’t like his deceptiveness being called out. So I got fired. I was delighted. Now I could pursue the job at Space Telescope as a full time gig.

I was brought me on board to the GATOR project 26 years ago today. I worked it as a contractor for a bit over a year, then they brought me on board as AURA staff (after negotiating my release from the contracting agency I was working for). I’d only been expecting the contract to last a few months, as they usually did. My agency recruiter asked me if I was okay with leaving the contractor world, and I told him if it was anything else but a space project I wouldn’t bother with it. But…Space! My first day as AURA staff was January 1, 2000. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.

In February 2022 I retired, after having worked slightly more than two decades, first on Grants Management and then for James Webb, which included running tests in the Mission Operations Center. There are three posters somewhere in the STScI office spaces with my signature on them, that went into space on various Hubble servicing missions. My den wall is festooned with service awards I earned while working at STScI, including four large service awards for 5, 10, 15 and 20 years service, and a poster with two mission patches that flew, and a piece of heat shield foil from Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 after the camera was brought back to Earth. I had a lot to be proud of looking back after retirement. And it all started with that little Commodore C64. Wish I still had it, but I gave it away.

A few months ago I was asked if I was interested in coming back part time. They didn’t have to ask twice.

You should say Hi sometime.

(It works equally well in both English and German)

Bridges burned can always be rebuilt.

I really need to keep in mind that I’m part-time and only getting a part-time salary, and so I really need to not let myself get drawn into things during my off time that aren’t urgent.

I’ve hit my 40 for this pay period but I still needed to complete some back to work on boarding stuff before midnight tonight, so I went ahead with that. Then because I was already logged in I started fiddling with some code I need to get working again so the reporting overnights can start running again. All of that is a code base I created back when I was full time and hadn’t yet retired.

So I start looking at things in the code with an idea that I’d just get a better idea of what I needed to do next week. Next thing I know I’m immersed in that report code, and I had to force quit myself. Because today all of the time I spend working on it would have to be non-comp time if I kept at it…which I really wanted to do because I can’t stand a software problem I haven’t figured out yet.

But no. I’m not hourly, I’m salaried and that means no overtime. I’m fine with that, and if I have to work non-comp for urgent things I will. I did that back in the day and especially while I was working on JWST. But sometimes I just did it whether it was urgent or not because I could not stop myself until I get it figured out.

See…that’s going to bother me…

I knew when something was going to nag at me all night long if I didn’t figure it out. A shrink would probably have a field day with me I suppose. But it did get me good performance reviews.

I have to pace myself now. This isn’t urgent Get to it next week…

Firstly…

I am not nearly at his level of accomplishments, but this is how I feel, and especially now that I’m getting myself back to doing my political cartoons. And I’m even more focused now on this blog, and the idea of blogs as an alternative to the commercial social media that helped deliver us to this moment. Blue Sky exempted ( @brucegarrett.bsky.social ). Lots of people are decamping Twitter for Blue Sky now, because its user controls allow you to keep the trolls out of your feed, keep them from reposting you to their followers, keep them from seeing anything you post. Unlike Musk’s Twitter which has removed all of that entirely because…Musk. Which brings me to…

I finally deactivated my Twitter account on the eighth. I’d been holding onto it after Musk took over because I’d been an early Early user and had an account name that was actually my name and not my name plus a string of numbers. Maybe that sounds like a strange reason but I like my name. I’ve never been comfortable using a handle, although for a brief time I went by “Coyote”, which was actually a reference to a character in the book of the same name by Peter Gadol, not the Coyote of native myth and legend or the Warner Brother’s one. It didn’t last long but if I ever went back to using a handle it would be Coyote Gato.

Digging in my heels and insisting on going by my own name wherever I happen to be online might also have something to do with how often my bitter maternal grandmother used the fact of my having my dad’s family name against me. Yes, my name is Bruce Garrett. What of it.

Anyway, Twitter became too much Musk (musky…pungent…). I think I knew I was going to drop Twitter back when the hurricane hit inland and all the disinformation came pouring out like an overflowing sewer, where once there was useful and immediate emergency information. The damage Musk had done to the service became sickeningly clear.

So that deed is done but however much I despise Musk and his kind I still felt it as a loss. I was there at the beginning. (I was there when USENET was a thing…) But it was over some time ago.

I didn’t bother getting a zip archive of my time there. I have my own website here and that’s personal history enough.

As I said…I’m getting back into doing my political cartoons. Here’s a work in progress from a few days ago…

This is about one of the few bright spots in the election day aftermath. Larry Hogan, former governor of Maryland, was running for the senate in a state where a democrat seemed certain to win. Our Maryland republicans are batshit crazy, but Hogan stood out for being somewhat moderate-ish and was much respected for standing up to Trump during the worst years of COVID and getting our state the tools we needed to cope. He had the good will of lots of democrats and moderates here and he eventually term limited out of the governor’s house. So standing up to Trump you’d have thought our republicans would not have anything to do with him, but they wanted to turn the Senate badly (and alas they did, but not with him), and that snake McConnell got him to run and Trump even endorsed him.

Of course during his campaign he kept all that on the down low. He made a big deal of his alleged support for abortion rights and how he would stand up to Trump like he did during COVID. But it was all a sham. At a private GOP fundraiser he made a big deal out of getting Trump’s endorsement. But the fear was all that goodwill he got from Marylanders during COVID would get him elected.

Thankfully our voters saw through it. We didn’t give our votes to Trump either, although I am well aware of the subset of my neighbors who most likely did. All you had to do was drive anywhere outside the urban zones to see the Trump/Vance signs. As I said, one bright spot post election.

Lastly (for now…), this from my Blue Sky feed…

Can I get any more stark mad liberal democrat American? I dunno, but I intend to make it fun.

Well that was a short stint at being alcohol and tobacco free…

As democracy is perfected, the office of the president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
-H. L. Mencken

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
-H. L. Mencken.

Last night’s nightmare was vivid, intense, and very unwelcome. Not that any nightmares are welcome, but this one which clearly sprang from all my stress and fear over the coming election was one I could have done without. I won’t retell it, partly because some of its details are almost comical in their surreality. I’ll write it all down in a private dream diary I keep later today. But the essence of it was I was among 14 others being rounded up to be taken to a place where I was pretty sure we were all going to die. I tried to slip the line but was put back into it by an idiot who was also in the line and thought he was being helpful. I escaped once, was recaptured, escaped again, almost recaptured, then finding my way to a safe hideout, only to realize that one of the others there, by a slight slip of the tongue, was a betrayer.

When I awakened from that last moment, it reminded me of a meme I’ve been seeing lately on commercial social media. The one about being disappointed to realize that you had friends you would not want to know where Anne Frank was hiding…

I considered reposting that except I don’t have any friends or family (on my dad’s side) that I would feel that way about. We would all keep Anne hidden, of that I am certain. But there’s another side to that coin.

Turn it around. Put yourself in Anne and her family’s place. If You had to hide, let’s say because the hate mongers have been painting a target on You for decades, and now suddenly they have free reign to do with you and everyone like you as they please, who out of all the people you know would you worry about turning you in?

Well…again…nobody among my friends or family (paternal side) would do that to me I am certain. And yes, there are a couple on the maternal side who I’m pretty sure would resist…which would make them just as much a target as me. But there are those others who have occasionally walked into and out of my life that I’m pretty sure would.

But even more disturbing than that are the ones I’m not sure about. I can see their faces as I type this and I honestly don’t know what they would do. It’s a very creepy feeling.

Ever have that feeling?

I’m part time at the Institute now, theoretically three days a week up to 40 hours per pay period, which is every two weeks. That actually works out to just five days per pay period. So my weekends are Very long by comparison. Today is the end of my first pay period, but I have been off since last Wednesday at 1 because I hit my limit that soon. So I’m off work until next Tuesday, apart from an hour web tag-up on Monday. I put the final touches on my front yard Halloween display Thursday, and fed the goblins Thursday night. But starting Thursday was also the beginning of a few days I could slow walk myself out of bed, and then take my morning coffee walk around the neighborhood.

I can feel myself starting to stress once again about work and I promised myself I would not let that happen. But I reckon it’s just me. Understand that my workplace is an exceptionally good environment, I just stress over every little thing. I can keep telling myself that whatever happens I can always go back to being retired with enough retirement income I can live comfortably, but it doesn’t work. I seem to be constitutionally incapable of just letting whatever will be…be. Que Sera, Sera…but not right this moment. I’m going to be a mess on election day.

My thoughts this morning as I took my walk weren’t helping.

Nowadays, they call it The Lavender Scare. That McCarthy time in the 1950s when the witch hunts for communists and homosexuals in government and private industry contractors was, shall we say, energetic. The newspapers of the day referred to gays and lesbians obliquely as “security risks” because you don’t actually use Those Words in family newspapers.

Now comes Trump and MAGA and Project 2025 and all the fascist energy to tear down our democracy and rebuild it in their image, and it’s going to make the McCarthy years and all the witch hunts and black lists look positively liberal.

And here I am thinks I as I’m having my morning coffee walk, an open and proud gay man, working for a government contractor.

I remember when I was living in a friend’s basement, dialing around looking for whatever likely work I found in the want ads. At that moment in time I had enough programming skill I could plausibly apply for computer work so long as a degree wasn’t required…which wasn’t often. But one day I saw one and called the number in the ad. A man on the other end asked me about my skill set…what programming languages had I worked in, and did I have any database experience. When he seemed satisfied enough to schedule me for an interview, he asked if I could pass a background check for a security clearance. And I told him honestly, because I have always dug in my heels at moments like this, that my police record was spotless, but that I am an out gay man, so not vulnerable to blackmail but if it’s going to be a problem anyway then no. He assured me that it Would be a problem, and hung up.

Is it going to be a problem again in my lifetime? I hope not. But don’t be telling me it can’t happen here. In my lifetime it Was happening to people like me. It did happen here. Yes it can happen again. You bet it can happen again. A lot of decent god fearing oh so sinless and righteous people who vote are praying for it to happen again.

It isn’t just me. I have a few young gay friends on Facebook that I worry about. I saw the before Stonewall time…

(The above panels are from A Coming Out Story)

I feel grateful sometimes that I lived to see a better world for us emerging. Now it’s this. And unlike me my young friends have their whole lives in front of them.

Is it going to be this again for them?

Those readers (there must be a few of you) who read my previous post about the dark time probably won’t find what I’m about to say as strange as others. I’ve touched on that dark time in other posts…this one from just a year ago for example…when I said that I could see it happening again. I wrote that post during my second year of retirement when, as I said, I could feel myself entering a downward spiral of inactivity. In that post of several days ago I wrote that I’d accepted part-time work at Space Telescope and I was pretty sure it would bring me out of it, like it had that first period of darkness. What I wasn’t prepared for was how much more alive I began to feel. 

Well…at least mentally. Physically I’m still a 71 year old man who never worked out as much as he should have. But even that is abating just a bit more every day. I walked in to the office the first couple days I was back, though the walk back home was more fatiguing than the walk there. The new Mac Pro laptop they gave me is heavier than I expected, almost as heavy as the older Macbook Pro I have that was top of the line in its day, but no longer runs the most current versions of MacOS. This new Macbook Pro is Very Nice and I considered buying one until I saw how much they cost.

So I got a new and up to date Mac laptop, with the Institute’s VPN software and all the other accoutrements necessary to work from home. As I am part time I don’t get my own office, though I think I would if I was expected to be at the office most of the time. I think this is not the case now. The work I will be doing is almost exactly like the work I did before I retired, which means some of the machines I will need to be working on at kept off the internet tubes for security reasons. So when I need access to those machines I will have to be present in the office. 

This first week was for reorientation, getting my access card established, and getting back into the work. So I was there every day, although one of those days I broke early, went back home, and picked up where I left off back in my den with the office laptop connected to the household network. That was mostly to make sure it all worked remotely too. And as I said, I suspect I will be doing most of my work from home. That’s because the Institute is very tight on office space. So tight us part-timers don’t get our own offices.

What they have for us, and for remote workers who need to come in from time to time, is a hoteling system. A bunch of offices are dedicated hoteling rooms with desks that have laptop connections and monitors available by way of a reservation system. If you know you’re coming in one day, or even on the spur of the moment, you go to the hoteling reservation system, see what’s available, and reserve a desk. That’ll work out fine for me, except I tend to want to bring in snacks, K-Cups and ice tea, which I don’t want to keep backpacking in every day. Be nice if I could just leave a bunch of stuff there.

At my old office on the ground floor (which, due to the steep grade around the building is actually two floors below street level) I had a mini fridge, a microwave and a coffee maker. Above my desk I had a lovely poster picture of Maligne Lake and Spirit Island, which I used to joke was my window (it was an interior room). That’s up on my bedroom wall now. I had a bunch of office supplies and computer cables, adaptors and other things I needed every now and then. Plus a bookcase with all my computer manuals, software and documentation. I have no place for any of that now. No official place.

My project manager says I can leave my computer books and stuff in the test lab which is off limits to everyone except those of us in the testing and integration branch. That’s okay…sort of…but meetings and tests are often conducted in there that I can’t be disturbing. And I still need a place for my snacks, coffee and ice tea.

Well it turns out that after I retired, they made the room my desk was in a hoteling room, and I can reserve my old desk to work at for the days I’m in the office. So I’m going to keep doing that, leave my snacks, K-Cups and office supplies in its desk drawers, and see what happens. I could see bringing in a small cooler for my ice tea every day, and maybe a sandwich, but then I’ll have to drive it and the walk into the office is very refreshing.

My branch had a small pre-Halloween party during lunch in one of the conference rooms and I got to socialize a bit more with all the new faces, and a bunch of the ones I remembered from before I retired. All week I kept crossing paths with people I worked with in the before I retired time, and it was more uplifting than I’d expected.

All week I walked down hallways I’d walked a bazillion times in the before time, and not much at all had changed, other than people I’d known were in different offices now. But that was always a thing at the Institute. The main building is small, and they have always been tight on office space, and it was not unusual at all to find your co-workers, computer labs, and conference rooms even had been moved around. I was something of an outlier in that I managed to keep one office for (I think) about 15 years. Which was how it ended up being almost a home away from home.

The employee cafeteria is the same, but the menu is Much better. The shared Keurig machine around the corner from my old office is still there…I checked to make sure while I was scoping out what had happened to my old office. I made some coffee with it and a K-Cup I’d brought with me just in case.

The work is the same, but not in any kind of boring same old same old way. I built and administered several computer testing facilities, wrote software to measure progress on various projects and generate reports for Goddard and NASA. Now the Institute is moving on to new projects and I will be a part of all that, again, working on new things for new space projects. So it’s what I’ve always done for them, but it’s the next steps forward in space telescope explorations. I would not have come back out of retirement for anything else but this.

I’ve put it like this often and every time I do it stuns me to see what it is that I am a part of: We harvest light from near the dawn of time and give it to the world to study and learn from.

So I’m back in the saddle again. And I feel like I’ve been reborn.

I feel…young again. Somewhat. And well of course I’m not actually. I’m a 71 year old man and I really feel my age sometimes lately. Especially that first day I had to be in the office at 9am. For two and and three-quarters years I could just slow walk myself out of bed because I had no schedule to keep. It was wonderful. It was liberating. And then it wasn’t. That first day back was a bit difficult. Getting up on time was difficult. Walking into the office with a heavy backpack was difficult. The walk back home was hard. Some of that is probably that spiral downward and inward I was getting stuck back on. 71 is a hard time to try and regain some physical stamina, but I can feel my body awakening a tad, as my mind is reawakening. I’m seeing the world around me with fresh eyes. Wide awake eyes.

It’s like I’ve been reborn. Those are the only words I can find to describe it. But I am not the same person I was in the before time.

Last day of my first week I set myself a goal to have a new system my project manager wants established online and available for the others to test. Almost right away I ran into a difficulty I needed our IT staff to work with me on. And there was some back and forth and I got stuck and it did not get done. There will be more back and forth next week. But that is nothing new. Our IT people are the best, but even with the best people there will always be things that need to be worked through, and especially when you are breaking new ground with what you are doing. And we are always breaking new ground.

Time was I would have stressed massively over not getting it done. What’s different now is I’m an old man, which doesn’t mean old and tired but someone with more life experience than he had when he was younger. It means I’ve walked down these roads many times and I know the territory. What’s different now is I have felt death tapping me on the shoulder a bit more insistantly than before. It gives you some perspective.

It isn’t that I don’t care anymore; I care deeply that the things I am tasked with get done and get done Right. But I am not going to stress out over it like I would have in the before time. I’ll keep my project leads and my users in the loop and we will work through it and we will get it done together.

Some lessons take a lifetime to learn. I was an only child. Teamwork has been mine. Also, that family doesn’t have to feel suffocating. But that’s another story for another time.

There is no growing up, there is only growing. And…every now and then…being reborn.

…except those who want to be fooled.

This is…amazing…

I don’t think he’s ever made his own bed, let alone his own breakfast, lunch or dinner a day in his life, let alone worked a deep fryer in a fast food joint. My first real W-4 job was at a Burger Chef. I worked the night shift and that included closing up and an hour of cleaning the food prep after closing. Show me the staged photos of him cleaning the prep area after closing…go ahead…this man could not have handled the work involved back when he was a teenager himself, let alone now.

He’s had everything handed to him his entire life and that’s why he gets pissed off whenever he doesn’t get his way.