[NOTE: Another one in the drafts folder I didn’t publish for some reason. Probably because the whole thing back then was making me so heartsick I didn’t want to bother.]

In my free time I’m reading a New Yorker profile of the new talk radio star, Dan Bongino, and there’s a passage quoting him as saying to his radio audience that

The day after Bongino riffed on the Arizona audit, he told podcast listeners that liberals are happy when conservative vaccine skeptics get sick. “These people want you dead” he said, and offered a call to action.

But “happy” isn’t the word for it. More like the hard cold satisfaction you get when a guilty verdict is announced. Justice was served.

Maybe that’s too cold for some and I appreciate that. I would have said the same at the beginning of this plague. It’s always confusion and fright at first when catastrophe strikes. But not now. The facts are in and have been for quite a while. We have the means to save lives we didn’t have back in 1918. But now people are demanding their neighbors not avail themselves of vaccines that can save their lives as a test of tribal loyalty, and that is a level of human depravity I never thought I’d ever witness.

MAGA antivaxxers are actively spreading lies about the vaccines and the science behind them. We see the stories over and over again of people reporting pressure not to get vaccinated from republican family and friends. It’s become politics. Now even Trump can’t convince them to protect themselves. And the hospitals are filling up with unvaccinated patients and that’s making it difficult for hospitals to take care of other people.

We could be mostly out of this by now if not for them. I’m out of sympathy and I’m out of fucks to give. If that’s happiness then why doesn’t it feel like that? I hate every part of this.

It’s times like this I can see my bitter Baptist grandmother in me. The one constant thing I hear said about her on that side of the family is she was a hard woman. As if that excused that stoney cold heart of hers. I can be that sometimes and no I don’t like being that and no I’m not happy. But as the saying goes, you made your bed now lay in it. Maybe that one person you might have convinced not to get protection if this hadn’t happened to you will live now.

[NOTE: For some reason I never published this one and it sat in my drafts folder until now. I might have put it up on my Facebook page, but given the formatting here I don’t think so. Anyway…it’s worth putting out here. I am actually pretty good at this stuff…but I’m a year retired now and I want to move on…]

I’m going through a bunch of old documentation in preparation for retiring in a couple months. My project manager quite reasonably wants me to basically do a brain dump and put it all out where they can access it after I’m gone. It’s bringing back a lot of very happy memories. And also not quite so happy ones. I created a bunch of custom software for them that I am still intensely proud of, that just got trashcanned, in some instances even before I could release it for general use.

That happens in this trade. One of my contract jobs before coming to Space Telescope had me working on an interactive tutorial for Microsoft Office products, that had already been superseded by newer versions. When I came onboard I wondered how long the contract was going to last, given that we were working on a product for teaching users how to use a version of Office that was already obsolete. And sure enough, about a week later the project was cancelled. I felt really bad for the employees of the business that had been working on it for months before I was brought in. All that work…all that time out of their lives…just out the window.

I’ve had several moments of that working at Space Telescope. It happens and I was told not to worry. Some way more experienced developers than I had it happen to them multiple times. The environment changes out from under the work you’re doing and you have to throw a bunch of stuff away and start over. At least in this business you can often reuse some of the old code. But nonetheless, it still makes you doubt yourself. I wasn’t good enough…

As it happens, Facebook this morning showed me the following memory…a post I put up while going through my old DayTimer pages (I used to use DayTimer’s 24 hour pages as a work diary) about something that happened to me from back before I came to the Institute. Out of everything that ever happened to me while plying this trade, this one jobsite holds for me both the best of my times, and the absolute worst. I have never hated working for a company, and its managers, more than I hated everything about working there. Yet it proved to me just how good I am at doing this. I solved a problem that none of them could figure out, and I did it with only paper print outs of the code.

I should have posted this here too, instead of only on Facebook. But I’ll do it now. Because I need to remember this going forward. I am actually pretty good at this stuff…

Condensing the last of my Daytimer pages…I’m glancing over the entries for what was one of the worst contracts I had…the two weeks I spent at a big insurance company not far from where I live. The story I got was they’d just undergone some massive layoffs and the environment there was bitter, resentful and hostile toward contractors. After a week of enduring loud, angry shouting matches among the managers there I was telling my agency to get me the hell out of there.

In the two weeks I was there they never got my network account properly set up. For a few days after clearing it with the manager there, I brought my personal laptop in to get some work done, but then one of their lobby guards tried to confiscate it and I pitched a fit that got one of the directors called down and I was allowed to take my laptop home and from that time on I did my work with paper printouts of the code I was supposed to be debugging. I am proud to this day that I was able to pin down several reasons why their software was blowing up using just those paper printouts.

Here’s some of my Daytimer notes from the battlefield…

– Resolved GPF problem on external program module. Share must be running or program will GPF when initialized.

– When recommended that install be changed + test for presence of share be coded into the program, suggestion by **** that I just wanted to spend their money on useless trivia.

– Hostile toward suggestion that GPF condition be trapped for and handled gracefully. “We could be dealing with millions of little problems like this” was what I was told. (Better I guess to let the program blow up and make the user restart it than put error trapping where your lazy programmers couldn’t be bothered..)

– I can run the system but not in debug mode and I can’t access files I need do my work. When asked about this I was told it was my problem and if I can’t fix it myself then why are they paying me to be here. So I dig a little deeper and find out my network account is USER not DEVELOPER which explains why I don’t have privs on those files. When pointed this out I got an angry stare and was told they would look into it when they have time.

– Told my workstation is user configured and not to be reconfigured because it is against LAN policy to reconfigure user workstations, and I just have to do the best I can. Still using ****’s (this was another developer from the same agency I was working for, who’d been there longer) from workstation as I can’t log in on mine. Cannot log in to developer area on any workstation though, not just mine.

One afternoon during this time I met a neighbor of mine at the apartment complex I lived in then, who worked for a different agency as we were both getting mail from our mailboxes. I asked him what he was working on and he asked the same of me and when I told him first words out of his mouth were, “Ohhh… Rough Place.” Apparently everyone already knew it was a notoriously bad place to be a contractor but me.

And from the comments I replied to, was this from me…  

Yeah. Some of my favorite programming code horror stories come from this place. I was called in to find out why their reporting system kept blue screening their workstations. It was written by some staff programmers who allegedly had their BS in CompSci but the code I saw was so full of problems I don’t think a half-wit would have made that it made me wonder. They weren’t fixing it themselves because they were leaving the company for allegedly better paying jobs elsewhere. At least that was their story. I suspect they were just getting the hell out of Dodge before it dawned on anybody how incompetent they were.

I tracked down the blue screen of death problem to the fact that these idiots used a bunch of global variables (named…I Am Not Kidding, GlobalDummyInteger1, GlobalDummyInteger2, GlobalDummyInteger3…and so on…) and were storing handles to windows in them at the same time they were using them to store things like the result of a button press or a for-next loop counter. But to fix it would have required a lot of rewriting of the code base and they were already saying to my face that I just wanted them to trap for errors whenever they tried to access a share to spend their money.

I have no idea what eventually became of that system but it just needed a complete rewrite to be stable and I suspect they eventually contracted out of house for a new one but who knows…they may still be telling their users to just reboot their machines whenever they blue screen.

This came in the mail just now, to add to my collection of banned or censored children’s books. I buy them to support the authors, but also to see for myself what the gutter is yapping about now. In this case I discovered this book via the author’s blog post about her very painfully having to decline an offer from Scholastic to include the book in their catalogue because of a Scholastic editor’s request/demand to remove references to racism in it. You can read her blog post here. This is very sad, mostly because of how unsurprising it is these days. One of my favorite days after the beginning of the school year was when we got the Scholastic catalog. I still have a bunch of those books I got as a schoolboy. All the precious moments I had reading them…I expected better of Scholastic.

(And speaking of blogs…since you’re reading mine now right? Do you use a blog reader like Feedly yet? You should. There’s a whole world of information and fun out there that commercial social media would rather you didn’t bother with. I’ve added Maggie Tokuda-Hall’s blog to my Feedly list.)

This book is the first in my collection that isn’t LGBT themed. It’s a simple, lovely children’s picture book, about two people who find each other in the midst of a horrible event in this country’s history. I searched the pages carefully for the mentions of racism that the Scholastic editor was objecting to and they’re only in the author’s note, which is clearly written for parents as a guide to understanding the book’s themes. The objection was clearly, sickeningly, meant to appease school board MAGA racists. But what, really, was the objection?  Teaching about racism? You might think so if you haven’t been in this culture war as long as this gay guy has been, and seen what he has seen.

The central theme of the book is the power of love told in a simple, beautiful, childlike way.

Jacob Bronowski wrote that art does not set out to preach, but to shine a light in which the outlines of right and wrong can be seen with frightful clarity. You can shine that light even in a children’s picture book. Perhaps even best in the spare elegant simplicity of a children’s picture book. The racist injustice visited on the main characters in the book is always in the background of the story, it is a critical part of the story, but it is not the primary focus of the story. It is a love story. Love of family. Falling in love with someone. That moment when you realize it. It is a love story.

And that is exactly the problem. Never doubt it. Shakespeare wrote that love is an ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken, and bears it out even to the edge of doom. Lao Tzu wrote that being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage. The author’s note regarding the racism that built the camps was for adults, the lesson about the power of love was for the children.

That was the unforgivable sin, something the hated Other must never know. Especially when they are young.

Because love is an ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken. Because love bears it out even to the edge of doom.

Because love can give you strength, and courage. Courage enough to move mountains. And the one thing you never want the scapegoat to know, is they can move mountains. Especially when they are young.

I got a reminder about the memorial for cartoonist Howard Cruse happening later this month and went ahead and made preparations to go. The first time I heard of this happening I was pretty sure I would be in California by now, but the scheduling of the colonoscopy made me put that off and I realized I could do it after all. It’s not so close to my Disney World/Gay Days trip that I couldn’t get there and back in time, and Massachusetts is a state I’ve never visited. Also the drive takes me up the Hudson River Valley in New York and that’s one I’ve always wanted to do because my favorite American landscape artists (of the Hudson River School) lived and worked there. Maybe I’ll take a slight detour and visit Frederic Church’s house. His paintings are amazing.

I’m retired now, and I can go wherever I want, whenever I want (providing the retirement money is there). And Howard gave me lots of encouragement with my cartoons, and A Coming Out Story. There’s a little nod to him at the end of “Intermission 2” that I pinged him about after I put it up…

…and he replied with thanks and more encouragement to continue on with it. A few days later he was gone. I had no idea he was in the hospital.

I have some of his original artwork, including page one of his magnum opus, Stuck Rubber Baby, about growing up gay in the deep south during “Kennedy Time”. I even commissioned a drawing from him around the time of National Coming Out Day. It is a magnificent piece about the moment a teenage boy comes out to his parents. Howard’s lines are as fluid and meticulously perfect as anything Al Hirschfeld did. He even put a couple easter eggs in it that speak to my interests and work at Space Telescope.

I miss him lots, so do his many fans and fellow cartoonists. So I should be there. His original memorial got put off because of COVID, so this is actually happening years after the fact.

All these lovely ladies suddenly trying to friend me on Facebook…

Here’s something to think about next time you read a news article about DeSantis feuding with Disney, and trying to take its Reedy Creek Improvement District away. You hear a lot from the republican side about how everything would be so much better for all Americans if only the free market could be released from the chains of Big Government. Government is not the solution, government is the problem. The more government intrudes on the marketplace, the worse it makes everything. If only businesses were allowed to managed their own affairs without government interference, the invisible hand of the marketplace would reward the most efficient, the best able to meet customer needs, and everyone would prosper. Actually, Reedy Creek is a good example of how that might actually work.

You notice it right away the moment you drive into the parks. Everything is immaculately maintained. The roads are all in good condition. The lawns are perfectly manicured. There is no litter, trash is picked up and there are handy trash cans everywhere that are seldom full, let alone overflowing. The power grid is stable, as are the water and sewage services. I did a backstage tour once and the guides told us about how trash and sewage were managed and they were visibly proud of the fact that not a single piece of trash or drop of raw sewage ever left the park despite the yearly torrent of visitors. Everything was reused or recycled. Reclaimed water was used in the park wide sprinkler system. Solids were sterilized and remanufactured into fertilizer the company packaged and sold. Recyclables were sorted, packaged, and handed off to local recycling companies (every room in a Disney hotel has separate trash cans for recycling). The rest was burned in clean incinerators to power the electric grid.

The rhetoric coming from DeSantis about Disney not paying its fair share of taxes due to its special district is tactical bullshit. Disney doesn’t pay taxes to the state of Florida to maintain its infrastructure, it pays for its own roads, its own water, sewer and electrical grid, it’s own fire department and EMTs, its own security forces, all of it, via Reedy Creek. The state of Florida pays for none of it, and it gets all the sales tax from that hundreds of thousands of yearly visitors, which amounts to billions in yearly income for the state of Florida. Reedy Creek is a way for Disney to essentially tax itself for all its infrastructure, which it is continually making improvements to. 

Improvements like this…

That’s a solar farm they built a few years ago, nearby to Epcot. Disney does all this through Reedy Creek, which, prior to DeSantis trying to fuck with it, would manage improvements and bill (tax) Disney Corp for the costs. This is Disney basically taxing itself for the infrastructure maintenance, which it could then do with a mostly free hand. That is, without the state of Florida always butting in. And it was Walt Disney’s original plans for Epcot that prompted him ask for, and get from the state of Florida, that special improvement district.

Originally it was supposed to be E.P.C.O.T.: the Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow…

This article from How Stuff Works describes it in a nutshell:

Among the remarkable components of Disney’s EPCOT would be a community of 20,000 residents living in neighborhoods that would double as a showcase of industrial and civic ingenuity — a running experiment in planning, building design, management and governance. There would be a 1,000-acre office park for developing new technologies, and when, say, an innovation in refrigerator design would be developed, every household in EPCOT would be the first to receive and test the product before it was released for the rest of the world.

An airport would enable anyone to fly directly to Disney World, while a “vacation land” would provide resort accommodations for visitors. A central arrival complex included a 30-story hotel and convention center, with the downtown featuring a weather-protected zone of themed shops.

EPCOT’s more modest wage-earners would be able to live nearby in a ring of high-rise apartment buildings. And there would be a park belt and recreational zone surrounding this downtown area, separating the low-density, cul-de-sac neighborhoods beyond that would house the majority of residents. There would be no unemployment, and it was not to be a retirement community.

“I don’t believe there is a challenge anywhere in the world that’s more important to people everywhere than finding solutions to the problems of our cities,” Disney said.

The promotional film Walt Disney made to sell his visionary living experiment in emerging technologies is there at the link above. Go read the whole thing, it places Disney’s experiment in the context of other planned communities then springing up all over the country, but also explains how Disney’s vision was completely different from the others. His E.P.C.O.T. was to be a living thing, always changing to test and prove new technologies for city and suburban living before they were deployed into the wild. The people living in it would be buying into becoming part of a living experiment and proving ground. They wouldn’t own their own property because it would be changing constantly. You might go to work one morning, and come back home to find your kitchen had been completely updated with the latest appliances and technologies. This was not to be a static vision of urban utopia. Walt Disney was an always moving forward kinda guy. E.P.C.O.T. would be a statement against such utopias. There is no utopia there is only progress gained through experiment and test.

And for that, he needed complete control over the maintenance of its infrastructure. That is what Reedy Creek was initially for. Then cigarettes killed him and it passed to his brother Roy to do what he could with what was left of Walt’s vision. He got Magic Kingdom finished and then he passed away. After that, E.P.C.O.T. became Epcot…another theme park, but at least one dedicated to Walt Disney’s vision. One half of Epcot is that perpetual world’s fair that was to be a centerpiece of E.P.C.O.T.. The other, Future World, is theme park rides, and exhibits, most until recently centered around Walt Disney’s vision of what emerging technologies could do to benefit our lives.

Eventually all the land Disney bought there in Florida, much of it Florida swamp, became Walt Disney World. But Reedy Creek remained Disney’s special improvement district. And if it’s not a living experiment in new technologies, it is if you look at it through the lens of American politics, an experiment in letting business manage its own land resources. A pretty successful one actually.

Usually taking the regulations off big business results in a race to the bottom. Everything goes to hell in the pursuit of stock market value. But in this one stunning case, it actually works. Spectacularly. You could argue that this is a special case because Walt Disney World is a tourist destination and of course they want everything working and looking nice or else the tourists won’t come. But that was always what the invisible hand of the marketplace was supposed to do; reward good product, penalize bad product. How often can we really say it’s worked that way?

Here’s what I think: it depends on the character of the people in charge. And really that’s how it goes with every one of us. Do you take pride in your work, your neighborhood, your country, or do you just want the money and to hell with the customer, let alone the neighborhood, let alone the country. Yes, yes, Disney Corp has its dark side too…but just imagine what it would look like if Trump was running it. Or DeSantis. Or any republican you can think of babbling all the time about Freedom and Free Markets and Deregulation.

Why is that? Where’s the disconnect there? Look back up at the top of this blog post, at that sign in the window. There’s the disconnect. There’s the deception. Free Markets and Capitalism are euphemisms, delicate little fig leaves over the prerogative of their hate, like State’s Rights and War Of Yankee Aggression are for old time and modern Confederates alike. Their Peculiar Institution. It’s not about freeing business from onerous government meddling. Onerous government meddling is just dandy with them so long as it’s punishment for treating all their customers equally. They like free markets to the degree that’s about freeing business to discriminate against minorities, keep them out of neighborhoods, deny them jobs and opportunities to grow and prosper.

To the degree that business can and does do that, they’re all for deregulation. The instant companies start acting “woke” it’s another story. Then come the new laws and regulations telling businesses what they can and cannot do, and especially that they cannot do business with the hated Other without even more government regulation. All that free market capitalism rhetoric ever amounted to was a thin veneer over bitter, venomous resentment that everyone they hate was getting their place in the American dream too. Can’t be having that!

And if you think that’s overly dramatic, reflect for a moment how DeSantis and the republicans exploded when Disney merely voiced…voiced mind you…objections to DeSantis’ Don’t Say Gay law, and then immediately began doing their best to destroy not only the biggest generator of tax revenue in the state, it’s biggest single employer, it’s biggest draw of tourism, but also one very good example of how letting business mind its own business could actually work. Why would they do that if they really believed in free enterprise? Because they don’t.

Sticking it to the hated Other doesn’t just matter more then economic freedom, it’s the only thing animating them. Don’t believe it? Look at what is happening in Florida. Then take a step back and look at, really look at, the economic damage they’re busy trying to inflict on American to get their way in the culture war. This country is about to default on paying its bills because republicans are using the debt ceiling as a weapon in their political and culture wars. It will cause wholesale economic chaos when the rest of the world realizes that the United States cannot be trusted to pay its bills. And with our default, comes many other defaults, all countries and businesses depending on the United States to pay its bills, so they can in turn pay theirs. Dominos will fall, taking down the entire world economy with it. And the republicans? They think they can just blame it all on democrats, and through that harvest votes for the next election. They Just Don’t Care About The Economy. They don’t care about free markets What do they care about? It’s in the picture at the top of this post. That’s what they care about.

Looking at all this, can you still tell yourself that republicans are the party of big business? What sort of businessman doesn’t pay their bills? 

Well…okay…he’s a crook not a businessman. But he freed the republicans from that loathsome pretense of believing in deregulation. And in a sense, they’re all crooks. They benefit from our labor, our productivity, our creativity and our imagination, and in return they spit in our faces. Free enterprise? Free markets? It was never about any of that. What you’re seeing isn’t hypocrisy. It’s the mask dropping. 

…being that it’s the last of April. Drizzly, chilly, miserable. Must be springtime in Maryland. A perfect day for staying inside and catching up on my filing. I have this really bad habit of just dumping mail that isn’t urgent into a box and leaving it there, sometimes for months. It can really pile up because I keep resisting the calls to just “go paperless”.

I practically already have. I have a list of bills I just routinely pay online and that is when I check over the transactions and make sure everything is okay. I have credit monitoring that alerts me instantly if someone tries to open an account in my name. My banks and cards tell me about every transaction made in real time. So the paper bills tend to get put off for filing later. Occasionally I get nagged to just switch to “paperless” billing (we used to call it email back in the day…) but I am old and like my paper bills for some reason I can’t even now explain. Maybe it’s that filing things makes me feel like I’m adulting.

The Social Security and medical statements I look at immediately, and also the retirement account statements. But then they also go into the box for filing later. So do all the other odds and ends including the junk, because I can’t always just toss the junk mail away. Some of it needs shredding.

Which is why my shredder gets a lot of work when I get around to sorting and filing everything in the box. This is when I notice how persistent some junk mailers are. No my house is not for sale, I don’t care how many times you ask. No I am not switching energy providers. No I am not buying a car warranty. No I do not want your Medicare supplemental coverage. No I am not going to your retirement planning seminar and I don’t care how free the food is. It’s impressive how many of these same exact mailers come, one after the other, over and over and over. What…did you think I missed the first one?

I come home from my favorite hamburger joint and I find this waiting for me in the news stream…

Authorities search for suspect who fatally shot 5 people in Texas home

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — A man went next door with a rifle and began shooting his neighbors, killing an 8-year-old and four others inside a house near Houston, after the family asked him to stop firing rounds in his yard because they were trying to sleep, authorities said Saturday.

San Jacinto County Sheriff Greg Capers said authorities were still searching for 38-year-old Francisco Oropeza following the shooting…

Meanwhile Greg Abbott, governor of Texas, says he hopes to be able to sign into law soon, a bill to defy any new (or existing?) federal firearms regulations. He says it will make Texas a 2nd Amendment sanctuary.

I’ve heard it said that the 2nd amendment is an experiment that’s failed. I would respectfully submit that the experiment that’s failed is the mad rush to undo just about any and all existing firearms regulations out of a fanatical idolatry of weapons and war making. If Heinlein really meant what he said, that an armed society is a peaceful society, I think we can now say with certainty that he got that one wrong. Maybe he was imagining a world where everyone, including dangerous criminals and madmen, respond to prevailing conditions, to rewards and punishments, rationally and logically. What we’re seeing now more resembles the unleashing of the ID monster in Forbidden Planet.

There need to be rules, regulations, guardrails, just as you would need for any other potentially lethal thing, be it an automobile or toxic chemicals, heavy machinery or medicines. Firearms may be unique in that being deadly is their purpose…they’re weapons, that is what they have to be. But it does not make them all that unique. We deal with dangerous things all the time. And with dangerous people, be they predators or people you just don’t want behind the wheel of a car, let alone holding a gun. We used to have rules and regulations regarding firearms. Maybe some of them needed a little tweaking, but this experiment in deregulation has been a disaster. An armed society is a terrorised society.

It’s taken me a while to be able to post this one. Last April 16 I checked the cat bed a next door neighbor put out for the Calico and she was there napping. A few hours later I looked again and she was gone. I reckon it was time after all. I’d been hoping she would let it happen either in my house or on my porch so I could give her a decent memorial. But she decided to return to the streets from where she came to me.

I never gave her a human name, though I’m certain she had a name among cats. It would have been scent based probably. I called her Little Dear, or Madam. I would say to her what ‘cha want sweetie…what ‘cha doin puddin. You want inside? You want some food? How about some better water in that dish? But I never gave her a name out of respect for her independence. She was a street cat. A feral. I always respected that. But my neighbor Jason named her Elenore so both times I had to have her trapped and taken to a vet, that was her name. But to me she was mostly Little Dear.

She started coming around to my bird feeders I’m pretty sure, back in 2005. By then some city animal control someone had already trapped her, taken her to a vet to be spade and given an initial round of shots, then tipped one ear as a signal that she’d already been trapped and would not produce more feral cats. But the city likes having them around as long as they’ve been fixed because they keep the rodent population down. You are not supposed to trap or bother the ear tipped cats.

One day a hurricane came up the bay, and while the wind was howling and the rain pouring buckets I stepped out onto my porch and saw her huddled in my basement window well. I figured I was going to find a dead little kitty next day but she was gone. I had a twinge of sympathy…she was a beautiful little thing…so I got a distinctive looking yellow Fiestaware bowl and put some tuna in it and put it on the window well. I knew I was making a commitment then…I really wasn’t interested in having another pet, but I went ahead with it. A few hours later the tuna was gone but I didn’t see her. Next day I saw her stalking my bird feeders and went back inside and got the same yellow bowl, put some more tuna into it, and walked out where she could see me. Feral cats are very skittish but the moment she saw the bowl she seemed to recognise it. I held it up for her to look at, then put it down on my porch and walked back inside. A few moments later the tuna and the cat were gone.

Later that day I got out my car care kit and began washing my car, which was parked on the street in front of my house. While I worked I noticed the calico walking toward me and I just stood still. She sat down in what I call perfume ad cat pose and gave me a heavy stare for about a couple minutes. She was sizing me up, taking me in, fixing me somewhere in mental storage. Then she just casually walked off. But I figured that somehow, some way, she made me hers in that moment. They say dogs have owners and cats have staff. That day I became staff to a street cat. It lasted 18 more years.

The photo above was taken in November 2010, and while I’m pretty sure the first time I fed her was five years before that I can’t just now find those first few photos I took of her. Ten years ago when I took that she was still keeping her distance but would come to my porch for food and water. She was still hunting the birds around me feeders though, and that step was a favorite spot. She was an amazing hunter and I was always moving the feeders around to keep them safe from her hiding places. Problem was birds are messy eaters and the ones perched on the feeders would scatter seed all over the ground and then the ground feeders would come and those were the ones the cat got regularly.

It wasn’t until about six years later I could get in a few pets, but only with my feet with cotton socks on. This I figured, was because feet can’t grab and she remembered being trapped and taken to the vet where she got her ear tipped. Cats don’t forget things like that. Then a couple years after that I was able to coax her into the house but only briefly. Then it became a thing and it was around that time I was able to pet her with my hands. I put up a couple YouTubes to prove it because it’s very rare anyone gets to touch, let alone pet a feral cat.

But after she started trusting me eventually giving pets became mandatory.

The front of the sofa you see there was the spot. If I didn’t walk right over to the sofa after I let her in, like if I went to the kitchen to make my morning coffee, she’d come into the kitchen and meow…Loudly…and I would have to go sit on the sofa and give pets until she’d had enough. Then it was either she’d nap on the cat bed I’d provided or want to go back outside.

We developed a signal. If she was just watching through the storm door then it stayed shut. But when she put her nose into the bottom left corner of the storm door then it was time for me to open it. Right up to the very end that was the signal and I always complied whether I thought it was a good idea or not. There were times when it was pouring buckets out there and she still wanted out. Yes Ma-‘am…whatever you say…and I’d open the door. I never forgot she was a street cat and I’m certain that was why she trusted me.

She kept her distance from everyone except Bob from Topeka who would occasionally come over and house sit for me while I was away, and Heather and Jason my next door neighbors, and them only provisionally. I seem to have been the only one allowed to give extensive petting. Under the chin, around the face, pretty much everywhere except the belly. I learned her body language and could see the look that said okay I’ve had enough take your hands off me now. Occasionally I would get a swat, but never with claws out. She had her boundaries.

She was getting very old for a cat, let alone a feral cat. I did my best, but now, maybe it’s natural, I wonder if I wasn’t stupid after all. Heather helped trap her so I could take her to the vet for a urinary tract infection. She was having difficulty urinating and then she started bleeding. They gave her antibiotics and for a while it was looking good. She never stopped letting me pet her and I could get her purring, and that little trilling sound she would make now and then. But she never really got well. And I think partly it was the trauma of being captured inside my house. I really wish I hadn’t had to do that but I was afraid the infection would kill her. Now I wonder if it wasn’t something the vet did that shot her aging health to bits. My neighbor and I had to call around to even find a vet that would treat a feral, and while the nurses at the place I took her all fussed over her I’m not so sure the doctor really cared about her like they would have had she been my pet.

She was a feral cat, not mine, just a pretty little wild thing I made friends with. Had she been my cat she’d have been used to being put into the carrier and taken periodically to the vet. But she was feral. When I got her back from the vet she hid down in my basement, but eventually came back upstairs. I let her come and go despite how wobbly she got because outside seemed to perk her up. Or maybe it was knowing she still had her freedom. Every time I let her out she seemed to get a little better. But also freedom to come and go was the bargain. I always kept my side of the bargain.

As she got weaker, thinner and more wobbly I still figured letting her outside would be okay because she wasn’t going further then my or my neighbor’s porches. And freedom to come and go was the bargain, the bases of the trust she’d given me. I considered trapping her again and taking her back to the vet, but I’d become convinced that vet, whatever they did, only made things worse. I didn’t know what to do except wait and hope she got better. But 18 years old is a long time for any cat.

Then abruptly she was gone and she wasn’t in any shape to be going far. So I searched. I searched all her places nearby, and up and down the street. Nobody had seen her for days.

I found out though that lots of folks up and down my street were also feeding her. They loved her. Beauty has its benefits. She was a beautiful little calico. Everyone said so.

Now she’s gone. And I’m just going through my days on autopilot. I wake up in the morning and for an instant I want to open the front door to see if she wants inside. I step outside to check the weather and I glance around to see if she’s coming. She would always come running when she saw me at the door, even if it was just to dart inside for a few nibbles an some water and then go back out. Today it’s cold and rainy outside and the feeling keeps tapping me on the shoulder that I need to go look and see if she wants inside. She would let me dry her off with a terry cloth towel if her fur was wet. She gave me an amazing amount of trust.

From the city streets she came to me, and to the city streets she returned. A piece of my heart went with her.

My little dear…

…part the upteeth.

A few days ago I tried syncing my local website copy with the copy on my web host server and the sync failed. Digging into it I discover that the people who made my favorite sync software found a way to deactivate all the older versions that don’t require rent (they like to call it a “subscription”), which I refuse to pay and kept using the older version because it kept working. Hahahahaha…silly me. So I looked around for alternatives and I found what I thought was a good one in FreeFileSync, which is open source and runs on all my platforms.

But I almost instantly ran into a problem syncing my art room Mac files with the NAS copies. (NAS stands for Network Attached Storage. Mine is a box with two drives in it that pretends to be a single drive on my network. The two drives are mirrored so if one fails the other should still have good copies and I can just replace the failed drive.) Nothing I expected would sync because the software was reporting the files on the NAS were timestamped five hours in the future ahead of those on the Mac. I checked the NAS settings and it was applying the correct GMT offset, so I thought it might be a flaw in the software, and not having time to track it down, I manually copied the files that I knew had changed.

Under the hood all modern operating systems sync to Greenwich Mean Time and apply an offset depending on where you actually are. This allows people to move files across time zones and still retain the actual time the file was created or modified. That can be important if you are tossing time critical files across time zones.

So I figured I had a GMT offset problem with FreeFileSync and put it aside until I had time to debug the problem, and maybe file a bug report.

Then the other day I tried backing up the NAS. I have two USB backup drives that I’ve formatted to ext4 because that’s what the NAS uses. I use rsync and I have a preformatted rsync command that does the trick for me. Right away I noticed it was trying to copy everything off the NAS so I stopped it and took a look and finally saw that all the timestamps on the NAS were off by 5 hours ahead. So again I dug into the NAS settings and looked and yes, the NAS was applying the right offset. But then I noticed it’s value for GMT was off. By five hours ahead.

So I checked the setting for the time server and I discover that the time server it had been using was no longer available.  I’ve no idea why, but the main problem was the NAS didn’t throw an error message when it lost its time server, it just simply failed silently and continued. Probably the last time I shut it down when I went on vacation, when I turned it back on and it came back up it looked for its time server, couldn’t communicate with it, and just happily fell back to assuming everything on it was timestamped local time.

It caused me a lot of problems getting timestamps out of sync moving them between the NAS and the art room Mac as I worked.

G*damn silent fail…

So I set the NAS to talk to a different time server that it could still reach and everything is good again. So now at least I know that there isn’t anything wrong with FreeFileSync.

Also, that I will be debugging computer software systems for the rest of my life, retired or not…

It’s just…amazing…to twitter watch the massive dogpile (of which I was a part) on the Disney website to buy annual passes…some of which are Very Expensive…sprinkled with all the go woke go broke tweets from pudding boy’s fans. Disney sure didn’t go broke today.

And here’s the thing: you buy a pass that means you are going to Disney World at some point. Wherein you will Spend Money. All those new annual passes are ringing the cash registers. Well…or whatever passes for cash registers these days.

I wrote this back in July 2018 as I was renewing my annual pass…

I was having a conversation with a fellow guest at Walt Disney World a few years ago. He was a middle aged man there with his wife and kids and we were sitting at the Tune-In Lounge bar. I must have mentioned something about ticket prices, and how I keep renewing my annual pass simply because the cost of Disney without one is even more hugely expensive. He told me a joke that keeps coming to mind.

“They always talk about magic here,” he said. “You want to know how the magic works? It’s like this. You walk into the park with a hundred dollars in your pocket and maybe you walk back out with five. The magic is they make you want to do it again the next day.”

Universal is running some ads promoting their theme park with the slogan, “It’s more than magic, it’s real.” I’m guessing it’s a sideways slam at their biggest competitor down there, but it has a sad truth to it. Let me say I’ve been to Universal and for a while given my issues with Disney’s handling of tickets and that god awful park reservation system, I was tempted to buy one of their annual passes. Universal is a very good, very entertaining theme park (and it has a Margaritaville!). But the Disney parks still have enough of Walt Disney’s DNA in them that this new slogan of Universal’s kinda works against them by reminding visitors where the magic is. 

That said, be sure to bring money. You will need it. I just saw this morning hundreds if not thousands of people telling Disney to shut up and take their money.

Back to being an Annual Pass member. Since I sold my DVC points I’d have lost all the perks I used to enjoy without the pass…which I stupidly allowed to expire when they switched to the “Magic Key” thing. The perks being free parking everywhere and discounts on everything including in park hotels. Since I usually drive down the free parking thing is especially valuable to me. So on days when I can’t afford to stay in park I can still get parking.

I never want to wait in a ticket queue like the one I just did ever again! Maybe I’ll tell that story some other day.

The park reservation system is still a hangup, but annual pass holders can make a reservation at any park and then (provided you have park hopper) go to a different one after 2PM. Trick is you Have to go to the one you made a reservation for no later than 11am. But it’s close enough to how it all used to work for me that I can handle it.

Plus I get both water parks and they don’t need reservations.

I’m on retirement income so I probably can’t afford staying in a Disney resort more than once a year. At least not in the nice middle tier resorts like my favorite, Port Orleans Riverside. But there are plenty of nice third party hotels on “hotel row” inside the park that have excellent rates, and with the annual pass parking perk I’m still good. And with the passholder discount their economy resorts might actually look better price wise than hotel row. It’s what I used to do before I became DVC.

DVC was nice for a while, but I’m glad to have it off my back. It just didn’t make enough sense for my income level. And I’m not doing badly at all. And it limited my flexibility in going which was something I was looking forward to in retirement. You just can’t make DVC reservations on a whim. 

Wherever I stay, I am Not spending one thin dime outside of Disney World if I can help it! But I might make an exception to go see classmate Reverend Billy if he’s playing nearby. And a classmate I know who’s living further south, and who must be going nuts with all the bellicose religiosity going on down there.

Definitely doing Disneyland, finally, sometime during my next California trip. There are good hotels in walking distance to the park that aren’t pricey, and a three day park hopper ticket isn’t all that expensive.

Wish they could just expand Disneyland into another Disney World out there, but not being able to expand there is why Walt Disney gobbled up so much of Florida.

…and so are hundreds of us. It’s a small world after all!

I saw a few moments ago on Twitter another gay activist (self described) writing that nobody should spend any money at Disney World or in Florida, and that corporate gay allies actually harm progress. I made my case against that claptrap, at least regards Disney, in this blogpost. Pay attention to the last 2 paragraphs. The joy of acceptance and inclusion in those two teenage girls when they saw those Mickey pins Is Progress. As much progress as any of us managed to make for all our activism back in the day. The kids are the future of this country, that great big beautiful tomorrow shining at the end of every day, and at that moment those two saw themselves in it. 

They saw themselves accepted and included in the Disney family. And it doesn’t get more all American wholesome than that.

That is how progress is made. That is what Disney is doing for us. That is what DeSantis and the republicans want desperately to put a stop to. That is why they passed Don’t Say Gay.

I can see not spending money elsewhere in Florida, but I will continue to support Disney. The republicans blew a fuse when Disney objected to Don’t Say Gay and after that it was a torrent of hate mongering, directed at Disney, but mostly directed at us. Every filthy lie you ever heard about gay people suddenly came rushing out like a reservoir of bile that had been bottled up just waiting for an excuse to roar out and flood the democratic conversation. Yes, they hate us. Yes, we know. But as I said previously, they can turn Florida into a ghetto of hate but there is a world outside its borders, and it’s a small world after all. And there really is a great big beautiful tomorrow shining at the end of every day. And we will not be shamed into silence anymore. And neither will our families, our friends, and the companies run by men and women who think progress on human rights isn’t just good for business, but good for the country, good for civilization.

I was regretting I might miss Gay Days again because I thought I really should go and document the goings on especially this year into the DeSantis/republican war on Disney and all things LGBT. Especially Disney since the homophobic rhetoric is that familiar Anita Bryant Save Our Children claptrap and never mind that Walt Disney wanted his parks to be for all ages. I’ve been documenting our struggle with my cameras since I was drafted into it when I came out to myself back in 1971. I felt I should be there in Disney World this year to document whatever the kooks were up to while we were enjoying the parks. But I had plans to spend the summer out in California with my brother, which would have put me on the other side of the country. Then some helpful complications arose.

I am 69, going on 70. I had my last colonoscopy 11 years ago, which gave me a clean bill of health, but now I’m due for another. My GP recommended I use the new Cologuard test but it isn’t perfect. If you pass you still would need one every three years. If you fail maybe you have cancer maybe you don’t but now you need the full up colonoscopy. I failed mine. So I had to schedule one. But nobody could get me scheduled any time before July it seemed. And there was another complication: I am a heart patient. I needed my cardiologist to sign off on my stopping the blood thinners he has me on for the two or three days leading up to the procedure. 

So I had to delay my California trip. eventually I got everything scheduled between my cardiologist and the gastroenterologist, and lo and behold I have a window of opportunity between the two to go back to Disney for Gay Days after all.

I just made reservations to go during Gay Days. I’m staying inside the park again this trip. I have my tickets and park reservations. It’s all set. First thing is I am going to enjoy the parks, enjoy Gay Days (I haven’t been in years and years) and document a lot of happy LGBT folk enjoying the parks and generally having fun. So people can see we are as human as anyone else. Because some people need reminding of that fact. But also, second thing is I am going to keep an eye out for any protests and craziness and document that too with my cameras.

When I get back home I’ll put my photos up here in the gallery. 

Ever take a sudden instant disliking to someone? You take one look at them and you feel your hackles rise and revulsion hits you in waves? Some total stranger whose only crime was crossing paths with you while minding their own business and suddenly an involuntary reflex of absolute hate hits you? Spain Rodriguez’ character Trashman had a random alert factor that would break into his thoughts with warnings about impending danger. I sometimes wonder if we all have something like that going on just below the level of conscious thought. Some background brain process that is adding it all up while we go about our day and suddenly makes us feel nervous about someone nearby, or imparts an instant dislike that makes us keep our distance. They say animals can tell almost instantly whether a particular human can be trusted or not, and I can easily see how evolution would have given that to us.

This one was crowding me at the bar at Texas Roadhouse the other day…which I can normally shrug off since restaurants these days like to put more seats at a bar than reasonably allow customers some personal space. But there were other places this guy could have sat and had space all to himself and instead he sits right next to me and starts taking up the counter space between me and him instead of the space on the side of him that was empty. And what made it worse was it didn’t seem to me just then to be deliberate. He wasn’t ignoring me, he knew I was there, he even asked me if the chair was taken and I told him politely that it wasn’t. And from that moment on he was simply oblivious. Or so it looked. And I wanted him to please go away.

Something about him just completely creeped me out. The instant he sat sat down next to me I just…loathed him. And then I thought…why? He isn’t doing anything to me. But my hackles were up and to concentrate on what was happening inside of me just then was difficult. His interactions with the bartender only made it worse. He wasn’t rude to her. Something about his voice, something about how he used language, how he strung words together, just completely irritated me. Blunt but not rude. Simple but not stupid. Not an empty head, but a head full of nothing. I tried to analyze it but I couldn’t see why just loathed this guy every second I had to sit next to him, I just did. I asked for my check quickly with my plate only half eaten, just to get some distance.

Maybe it was the delicate smell of some gruesome cleaning solvent, like something you’d expect to smell in an autopsy room. Maybe it was that frozen blank expression. It was a face out of a police sketch. A deer in the headlights but just staring back unsurprised. The face a blank wall might have if walls had faces. Maybe it was the toneless voice. Not toneless in a Jack Webb Sergeant Friday way, just empty. But with a certain undertone that speaks of a kind of runt locker room dive bar internet basement troll masculinity that creeps me out. But it wasn’t an aggressive tone, what I heard was an oddly passive kind of toxic masculinity. Every time he spoke something inside me cringed with loathing. And…a weird kind of unfocused alarm. I could not for the life of me pinpoint why he was making me feel the way I did, but I just badly wanted either him or me to be somewhere else.

He wore a quilted overcoat that should have been way too warm for outside then, let alone inside, that he never took off. I’d have taken him for a street guy but everything about him was clean and neat and tidy. And yet not just drab but ostentatiously bland. Extreme ordinariness. I thought maybe he was wearing his work clothes but it just looked like he picked out whatever looked colorless and ordinary off the rack. He struck the sort of figure that sucks all the color and life out of wherever he was. In his clothing, but especially in his empty unfocused yet not at all stupid face.

He had some sort of iPhone but I couldn’t tell its version, other than the case it was in seemed to be one of those they sell that give iPhones a look of a faux military hardened device. Reflexively I turned off my Bluetooth in case he had an app for hacking into smartphones. His eyes fixed on whatever he needed to pay attention to at that moment, and then looked at nothing in particular. He seemed completely aware and yet totally disengaged with the world around him. 

You took one look at him and you just knew his living space had nothing on its walls but paint. No books. No music. No interests. Just the daily routine of life for no other reason than it’s what adults do. Neither joy nor despair. The eternal gray overcast of the uncurious mind.

Every time I moved slightly away from him (I was seated at one end of the bar) he extended his counter space into where I’d left it. But it didn’t strike me just then as deliberate. Just an off handed use of the space where I was and wasn’t now. I wanted to put some space between us and he just kept maintaining the same distance simply I was certain just because it was there now. 

On the drive home I kept chewing on it and finally realized what he reminded me of. This is one of the shorts from The Fantastic Animation Festival that I first saw back in the 70s. The video quality is very Very poor, slightly and annoyingly out of focus, but there isn’t another copy of this out there I can find. It’s called “Oiseau de nuit” which translates into “Nightbird”, and it’s by director Bernard Palacios. It is hauntingly grim. The artwork is pitch perfect for the story it’s telling, 

Warning: this is a Very Dark, Very Grim short.

I think I just sat next to this guy. Maybe there was something up about his needing to sit next to me out of every other seat at the bar, and keep ever so slightly invading my space at that bar. Maybe my subconscious added him up and gave the alert for a reason.

A few days ago I noticed the calico was having trouble urinating. She would make repeated trips to the litter box I’ve provided and make an attempt but I could tell nothing was coming out. Afterward she would lick her genital area as if there was some irritation going on there. Then I noticed bleeding. So it was time for a trip to the vet, and since she’s a street cat who only comes into my house when it’s cold or she just wants a safe place to hang out for a while, that meant trapping her.

I had to do that once before when she had a wound of some sort on the side of her face that became badly infected, but that was done with the help of animal rescue folks who knew what they were doing, and kept me out of it. Even so, when she finally came back from the vet and they released her into my front yard she instantly darted off and I didn’t see her again for several nerve wracking days. This time it would have to be me, or so I thought. But my new next door neighbor does animal rescue and fostering and she got madam calico into a carrier for me. But then it was where do I take her? She’s feral. No shots since way back when the city caught her and tipped her ear as a notice to animal control that she’d been fixed and leave her alone.

One animal hospital in Cockeysville that was recommended refused to take her, which surprised the rescue people. But one in Towson did. Getting her there meant listening to her cry the entire time and I felt horrible. But it needed doing. Something like that could eventually kill her if it isn’t treated.

They all loved her at the animal hospital. And let it be said she’s a beautiful cat. Everyone remarks on it. One nurse in particular came into the holding room with us with oohs and ahhs…and how much she loved taking care of elderly cats. I had told them he was at least 17, if not 18 years old by now. I have digital photos of her when she first started hunting around my bird feeders from back in 2005. Back then she wouldn’t let me come near. It took me about 16 years to gain enough trust with her that she lets me pet her now, and comes inside when it gets cold, rather than use the shelter I made for her. So when the nurse referred to her as being a geriatric patient, I was a bit stunned to hear that word, but it made sense. I’d noticed her becoming more frail this year. But she was still very active up to then.

I got her back home and all was reasonably well. If the cat was having trouble urinating here at home base she had absolutely none on the doctor’s table, which was good because they were able to get a sample to send to the lab. They examined her as best they could and saw nothing that needed urgent attention. I’m assuming the bleeding I saw that morning was due to her constantly cleaning her genital area. There was none present at the examination and there has been none since. Her vitals were normal for a cat her age. They gave her an injection of antibiotics which is good for a couple weeks and told me to keep an eye on her. They discharged her (us) without need of any further medication. Though they would like a follow up visit in a couple weeks. I don’t know if either one of us is up for that, but one thing at a time.

She went down into my basement and stayed there overnight. I went out for a drink. Self medicating. It didn’t help. She was so listless and wobbly after I got her back that all night long my stomach was in knots worrying about her. I stressed about it so much I began to worry about my heart. I felt my right arm going numb and wondered if it was time to call 911. But it was just the awkward position I’d tossed and turned myself into.

Next morning she came back upstairs. She was drinking plenty of water and now she was urinating without any apparent problem. The outgo was matching the intake. But her aim wasn’t hitting the litter box. She’d put her front paws into the box but left her butt hanging out and my carpet was getting hit. I figured her genital area was still sore and she didn’t want to sit right down on the litter. My neighbor told me that wasn’t uncommon. So I got out the pet stain remover and the carpet shampooer and the Kirby and cleaned up after her. Then I cut a mat out of one of the contractor grade trash bags I have in stock (I use them for yard work) that extends a foot and a half around the litter box. That’s doing the trick.

She stayed inside all that day. Next morning she was still a bit wobbly but she wanted out. She’s a feral. I have a set of bargains I made with her and it’s all about maintaining trust. She has complete freedom to come and go, whether I think it’s wise or not. She’s not my pet, she’s a wild animal I made friends with. So I let her out. I hoped some fresh air, sunshine and at least a little activity would start perking her up. Thankfully she didn’t go far. I kept fresh water and food out there for her. She didn’t touch her food but drank lots of water. She came back in for the night as it started getting dark and I was glad she did because Maryland had a cold snap and the temperature was in the low 30s when I got up the next day.

When it got warmer, she went out again, then came back in again for the night. She’s downstairs now in the cat bed I’ve provided and I expect she’ll want to be let out again when it warms up later today. I’ve been trying to get her appetite functional again with various wet cat foods, some with gravy, but it seems the off the shelf tuna has the best chance. At least she’s been expressing interest. Still isn’t eating though. I’m thinking that’s the antibiotics they gave her. I’ve had a round or two of those myself and I know how they knock you down and kill your appetite. As long as she’s still consuming lots of water I’ll leave her be.

But it’s still stressing me out. I’m going to try to get some more work around the house done, and work on finishing off episode #36 of A Coming Out Story, and just try to chill as best I can. I don’t mind being childless. I never have. But in retrospect I don’t think I could have handled having kids very well. On the other hand you can talk to human children, educate them, teach them to look both ways when crossing the street, ask them where it hurts, call them back home for supper. You have to intuit Everything with a pet and there is just no teaching them to look both ways. And that reputation cats have of not coming when they’re called. It’s True. They’ll just listen to it and not move and you don’t know where they are and you wonder if they’ve suddenly taken a turn for the worse.