Cologuard said Fvck You Bitch

that title may sound like another bad cancer result but no, this was just a weird dream.  i got a cryptic letter that said something like this feces was from four years before sample date, and was expressing my confusion outdoors when a neighbor explained a probable reason.

he’d had a cause to do a fecal test with mail-in results and it included radioactive isotope dating, which had a range of accuracy no better than a few years, so the letter was saying a range of possible dates for the shit.

meanwhile, side plot.  we had lost this cool unit in the cul-de-sac, and nobody had moved in yet.  i lamented to dooky neighbor that the place was nice and i missed it.

for some reason i still had access, like maybe the realtor had just left it unlocked or was having an open house in the middle of the night, and i went in, shutting the door behind me.  from outside, i started getting strange abuse, people yelling at the house.  something about hating our brush?

i was surprised by someone trying to come in the back door and scared them off, then went back to the front door.  somebody was there and i bullied him into explaining.

they were with something of a shadow HOA and were bothering me about the faults they had with the way we kept the unit.  there was a handbrush embedded in the front door, like an odd bit of hurricane aftermath.  i saw the lady across the cul-de-sac with her homies.

i yelled we can’t get it out, it’s not even our door anymore, fuck you bitch!  the last three syllables i said aloud, waking myself up.  my husband is trying to sleep sitting up and had a coughing fit.

i gave him a cough drop and told him to keep it outside his teeth to minimize choking hazard, which seems to have worked.

now i’m trying to go to sleep again.  gnite.

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Thanks for Giving Us the Plague

We’re all sick.  My mother-in-law brought home some wacky virus or other, which naturally is hitting my husband the worst, because they always do.  As I compose it’s only 5:49 in the evening (black night this time of year at this latitude) and after eating some thanksgiving themed gruel, he’s gone back to sleep again.  At least there’s no wheezing.  They say rest is supposed to be good for sickness, right?

MiL cooked the gruel tho, and I said thanks to her for that.  Wish she’d ever wear a mask.

I’ve been thinking about how much of a social outlier you have to be to wear a mask these days.  Practically nobody does it.  That makes it a conformity thing, I think.  There is no way the vast majority of the population in a blue state feels easy-breezy-indestructible about disease and/or nihilistic enough to not care who suffers or dies for unnecessary transmissions.  Some of these people would do it, if they weren’t afraid of looking like a freak.

So when you see somebody wearing a mask properly, understand that person is either a cowardy custard whose germophobia exceeds their social fear, or they are a person so fucken cool they genuinely don’t give a fuck what other people think about them – mostly the latter.  Props either way, because vulnerable people like my husband don’t deserve this shit.  I wish his mom wasn’t a slave to conformity.

After a few hours of interruption, back to finish the article up.  He woke to eat two bites of pumpkin pie and went back to sleep.  Snoring again.  At least that’s breathing.

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Nostromowrimo

when i say my writing group is doing an unaffiliated writing month, i mean to say only my husband and i are, because the world is lousy with sluggy-ass slugheads.  i like to have consideration but it gets my goat a lil.  i can do some on this hand on that hand -ness…

on one hand, if i can try to write a novel in a month, why can’t the rest of those bums?  i’m workin’ full time in the ugh factory.

on the other hand, i may be creativities georg the outlier who should not have been counted.

on the other other hand, my husband is too, and surely there wouldn’t be two creativities georgs.

on the other other other hand, these people have all succeeded at novel months in the past.  what are the odds they’d all be so enfeebled now?

on the other other other other hand

my own husband is a good example of a person becoming progressively more disabled, which seems to be a recurring theme among like every art person i know, like wtf, is art like a slow-burning cancer.

on the other other other other other hand, my husband is one of the people who is noveling this month, already hit 50k words and is now just aiming for completion of the story with no specified word count goal.

on the other other other other other other hand, i can believe there is a sort of pandemic of distraction, demoralization, or something, that is oppressing the masses, making us less capable than we used to be.

on the other other other other other other other hand, what is it, truly?  it’s real hard for me to imagine there’s a decent excuse for how slugheaded the world has become.  you don’t think i’d rather be vegging out, watching tv shows, sleeping every chance i get?  if i did that, life would pass me by.

anyway, this is detracting from time i can be writing so i’m leaving now.  point is, i know i’m better than most at this, but i shouldn’t be.  come correct, ye sluggardly masses.  you princes of new york.

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A Mission from Me

Your mission, should you choose to accept it…

Unbelievably, nobody seems to have isolated the audio from that nature documentary where Michael Dorn said “Now he’s decided it’s time for a little monkey lovin’.”  At least find me a time signature on a yewchoob video, please, I’m beggin’ ya.

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EDIT – i begged for the impossible.  spurred by morales in comments, i googled it from both the quote and the dorn side.  no trace.  feels like i had a hallucination.  humans never do that, only bad dirty robits…

depressed, but you know

im depressed, but u kno, neurotypically, so strictly in proportion to how actually fucking depressing my life is at the moment, and ready for those dark clouds to blow away in a puff of air, should said circumstance stop fucking sucking so god damn much for a minute.  on the downside, doubt i get much done this month of the writing i want to do.  but on the plus side for you, i’m more likely to produce a few posts.  see y’all around…

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Fingertips

My breathing is impaired, shallow.  I can assume there’s some amount of fluid in my lungs causing this, or maybe constriction in the bronchioles, I dunno, but my breathing is a bit impaired.  Last night, my fingertips weren’t as pink as they usually are.  Not the purple / blue of cyanosis, but I don’t love it.  They say go to the hospital, but there’s already like three thousand of debt on my health care credit card.  Last time the interest popped on it, it added $992 to the balance.  I cain’t even with that shit.

Besides, what is the hospital going to tell me?  Last time I was tested for similar shit they came back with nothing.  They ruled out covid, they found nothing on chest x-rays.  Guess I’ll wait til the fingertips go blue before I hitch a ride to the ER again.  They’re still not as pink as I’d prefer.

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The Tapout

life too hard for daily blogging.  did not manage a year of it.  sure was an interesting ride, at least for me.  the thing that made the most practical difference in my life was making myself listen to new tracks by The Dead Milkmen.  that changed the rotation on the radio station in my head some.

i’m too tired to do this tho.  it’s over!  see u whenever i get to it.  zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

zzzz.

zz.

When it’s Over

I’ve been pretty blithe in my attempts to make people feel less doomy, and PZ did call me out on it, in a sense, during the August podcast.  The main thing I try to tell people is that for most of us life will go on – the terror fascism inspires may not play out as dramatically in most of our own lives as we are anticipating.  If you look at people from Ghana to Papua New Guinea, there are a lot of travails but people still live life, every day.  This perspective becomes especially important as shitler puts us in the fast lane to economic ruin.  We’ll suffer sometimes, but we will live our lives, at least as well as all the people who have been living under tyranny and economic depredation all around the world.  However, sometimes, for some of us, doom is gonna happen.  What then?

I’m put in mind of this by all the comments on a recent post.  A lot of people have family members near the end of the line, or have that in their own headlights.  I was reminded of my mortality a few years ago during my first nbd-styled cancer situation.  As a philosophical materialist, I know what comes after this: a big nothin’, which I want to put off as long as possible.  And my neurotypical sauce keeps me feeling like most likely, that will happen.  There’s a chance I’ll die randomly at any given moment of any given day, but it’s a small chance, and if it doesn’t happen, I’ll most likely be fine – even accomplish a few useful things before I go.  I just know, on a rational level, not even a minute of it is guaranteed, which is low-key depressing.

This is not to say I’m abandoning my anti-doomerism policy or even the earnest beliefs behind it, that for most of us life will remain tolerable for most of the path, that we gain nothing by living in terror and despair.  As I mention in the policy tho, I am occasionally going to point to dark truths, and this is one of them.  It’s something I need to address, because it points to what some might call a good reason to abandon the policy.

Sometimes you have to talk about your despair.  Arguably, sometimes you have to wallow in the ableism inspired by a world run by cruelty that defies all reason, by living among buffalo that are stampeding for the cliff.  First point true, second one maybe.  Neither of those are reasons for me to allow it here.  After all, Pharyngula is right next door and has no such limits.  If you need it, there it is.  And if you need to get away from it, here I am.

But what should I say to people for whom doom is extremely nigh?  I don’t know if I’m the guy to say anything to them.  My “dark realist” perspective makes me rather terrible at helping friends and loved ones through depression.  Sometimes at my job I have to talk to people who are dying, or have recently had loved ones die – sometimes their children.  I gotta keep it professional.  This isn’t a professional setting and I don’t have that excuse here.

Not everybody can be everything to everybody, and my pollyanna ways are a thin coat over a rather bleak point of view.  Best not to interrogate it.  Even so, I’m not lying when I say most of us are gonna be alright.  We’ll have pain and suffering, we’ll have ok moments, we’ll have life, the same as anyone has ever had.

There are many places in the world where that is less true.  Very sorry to those people, but we can’t all be thinking about that all the time, or life is over for us.  I expect that some people dying in pointless wars will die thinking, I’d love every last motherfucker living a life of ease to experience what I’m experiencing.  If I have to die, everyone should die.  I’ll forgive them for feeling that.  I’m a cranky bitch and I’d probably feel the same if I had to live through such times.

But I also expect there are people in Ukraine, Palestine, etc, who would not begrudge any of us trying to live life in peace and feel as ok as possible – as long as we do what we can to help steer our respective societies away from war and ruin.  Who are we beholden to, the angriest in suffering or the more kind?  What should we do?  Live in anguish and die in terrorist action against our tyrants and warmongers?  Or do what we can, within the limits that allow us to know the fleeting happiness we are allowed on this bitch of an earth?

When something scary or sad is going on, there are a million motherfuckers lining up to tell you that you are not scared or sad enough.  Let this blog be one place that calls bullshit on that.  Do what you can to make life better for others, as much as you can, but know your limits, and allow yourself to be as happy as is possible – in a world that is doing its best to make you miserable.

It’s Gloria Gaynor time.  I will survive.  You will too.  Until you can’t, and I’m sorry to hear if that’s happening for you.  I hope you can find solace and peace along your way out the door, as I hope I do when it’s time for me to go.  That’s all I can reasonably say or do for you.  Good luck to all, and a good life as well.

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Ya Talk Too Much

When I was a kid in the ’80s, the children in the halls and on school buses would chant song lyrics, especially raps.  Janet Jackson, Beastie Boys, LL Cool J, and Run DMC all had their time, sometimes with alternative lyrics, like the “batman smells” versions.  This song was especially popular.

The place I heard it the most was in the mouths of other babes four decades ago, and I’m only seeing the video for the first time now.  I love the use of white people in this video.  It’s like these guys are the sensible cool mans in a world of weird posers and art freaks.  They gots my number.

In more ways than one.  In the latest FtB Poddish Sortacast, I spoke way too much.  I had proposed the topic so it was kinda my time to rampage, but still, rude.  Nonetheless, I thought I did a great job elucidating my perception of the world and the shituation we’re in.  This is not a good video to watch if you’re one of the people my doomerism policy is designed to protect, so don’t watch it if you’re one of them.  Anybody else, have at it.

Am I foolin myself, or did I come off like a big ol’ smartypants?  I lost the bead a few times, but when I was on, I was on.

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Me and Sadako McGee

I’m so close to the bottom of the well (get it get it) on my daily posting it’s fuckin’ wild.  I get the feelin’ the way PZ and Mano work is by reading their news and social media, and commenting on anything that seems worthy of comment.  I don’t follow news or social media on purpose.  FtB is the condensed version run thru the filter of people who share my principles.  Good enough.  Could I just do posts reacting to what they’re posting?  Blogly shadow puppetry?  Nay.  I don’t even feel like making a two sentence comment under most of their articles, no offense intended.

As much writing a chapter a day of novels was a frenzied dash, at least it gave me something to work with.  On the other hand, I seriously doubt I have the sauce to write fiction every day.  I imagine what I would write and immediately it all seems so high effort.  Even cheeky nonsense involves craft, way more than you might expect.

What would Groucho Marx do?  If I recall he was a well known epistler.  That’s like blogging but involves ponies and shotguns, I’ve heard.

Recently I’ve been watching The Dead Milkmen‘s vloggish thing on yewchoob, called Big Questions with the Dead Milkmen, and getting a mental picture of their lives.  Those guys had a hit almost everyone over forty has heard, in “Punk Rock Girl,” but they never stopped needing day jobs for at least part of the year.  The lead singer is at an age where some emeffs are retired and he still has an office job of some kind.  Royalties for the artists ≠ living high on the hogg 4 lyfe.  What hope do the rest of us non-fame-adjacent slobs have, of escape from tha Grind?  We all know PZ should be retired by now for health reasons, but can’t due to financial concerns.  Work sucks.  Everything fucking sucks.

Chill, me.  Chill.

That’s a bit off topic, but maybe it is a better topic for discussion.  Being a “creator.”  I’ve long wanted to put it all together as an artist, to assemble the palace of my perfected works, to accomplish whatever bare minimum level of public self-expression that would feel like “enough” when it’s bucket kicking time.  But to what extent is the public element necessary?  Should I be building an aluminum foil throne room in a storage unit or composing ten-thousand page novels about sentient tornadoes that will be found in shoeboxes after I’m floating out the crematorium pipe?

The world is glutted with motherfuckers.  There are a million bajillion artists clamoring for attention, a great howl reaching up into the unfathomable cold.  To be one more vainglorious mausoleum builder, this feels just pitiful.  Uncool, and you know I want to be cool.

But still, it gets me, thinking about how I have to toil most of my life at things I don’t want to do, while my imagination burns with things I’d prefer to be working on.  And the certainty that if society wasn’t a giant pyramid scheme to keep business nazis in boats, if I literally had to plow fields, I would have vastly more free time to pursue my craft?  That’s a ten thousand degree knife thru my braincase.

Chill me.  Chill.

Anyway, if the daily posting train comes sputtering to a stop very soon, do not be surprised, nor concerned.  I’m as well as anyone can be, given the current circumstances of the world.  Thanks for reading this foolery as long as you have, and even if I return to erratic and much less frequent posting, I will most likely be here until FtB itself is pushing up daisies.

See you around!

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