MonsterHearts 2025 – Day Three

Don’t Miss Posts.  This MonsterHearts, I’m also having one regular post a day, if you should prefer that kind of thing.  Just look at the posts before or after this one.

MonsterHearts is a 14 day event (named after a pervy RPG) wherein my writing group votes on a monster each day to include in a story concept.  As we march toward Valentine’s Day, the theme is supernatural romance.  For this first few, I’ve tried to just use “edit” mode in MidJourney to iron out irregularities, even trying to make a legible title in the AI program.  While it’s cool you can now hammer the hands and text into shape, there are a lot of disadvantages to doing that, as opposed to just photoshopping what you need to fix, or placing your title just so.  Probably won’t keep up the effort for long… The snowy owl on this one ended up with those lil feather “horns” that you see on other owl species, not so much in snowy owls…  whatever.

MONSTER HEARTS DAY THREE:  HYBRID

TITLE:  EMBRACE OF THE OWL BOY

CHARACTERS:  Jenny Fred: a Koyukon / Irish teen, Lemmy Reyes: a Filipino / Anglo / Koyukon teen and Owl’d Boy.

PREMISE:  Jenny is the coolest girl in school but she’s fallen for bad boy Lemmy.  Lemmy is not at all smart, and decides to steal the most expensive thing in town, to pay for their elopement, somewhere far away.  But the artifact is cursed, and he turns into a giant humanoid snowy owl -type thing.

THE HOOK:  Why must I be a teenager in love?  You know how these things go, when the genre was in its heyday.  An actor that will someday be more famous, like Michael Landon or Steve McQueen or Charles Bronson, he plays a teen that gets mutated into a monster.  The less famous girl who will one day become a tabloid footnote barbiturate OD, she is imperiled, and screams.  The authorities shoot boy as he runs away.  His body transforms back into a human shape, while she says something like, who are the real monsters?

SleepyTime BooBoo Bears

I’m a Commie SJW Cultural Marxist DEIA Wokester Gender Cultist Such and Such Whatever Whatever.  Did I miss something?  Anyway, since at least 2015, I’ve been hot to see nazis spit teeth, you know, generally being a big old meany to innocent little baby fascists.  Like, what’s my problem?  It’s time to let them have a few decades of absolute unchecked power, just to be fair.

That’s what Amewica thought back in November.  And who am I to argue?  I’m as subject to the Unquestionable Authority of The Golden One as anybody here.

To wit, it’s become clear to me that the wokefulness of my ideological cohort is vewwy scawey to all the baby boo boo boy adorable little nazi clowns.  They need sleep so very badly.  And I say yes.  Have your beddy-bye time, baby bears.

There are only two genders who must behave in prescribed ways.  I forget what they’re called, but the one with dresses needs to drink an herbal tea.  And the one with hugh hefner smoking jackets needs to drink a nightcap.  And when your tumbly tummies are all warm from nummies, lay your weary heads down to sleep.

I won’t stop you anymore (pursuant to executive memorandum 777pointSunkMyFlompyDongus, subsection 69, paragraph EatMyEntireAsshole).  I’ll see you in the glorious morning of our new United States.

Nightynight!

MonsterHearts 2025 – Day Two

Don’t Miss Posts.  This MonsterHearts, I’m also having one regular post a day, if you should prefer that kind of thing.  Just look at the posts before or after this one.

MonsterHearts is a 14 day event (named after a pervy RPG) wherein my writing group votes on a monster each day to include in a story concept.  As we march toward Valentine’s Day, the theme is supernatural romance.  For this first few, I’ve tried to just use “edit” mode in MidJourney to iron out irregularities, even trying to make a legible title in the AI program.  While it’s cool you can now hammer the hands and text into shape, there are a lot of disadvantages to doing that, as opposed to just photoshopping what you need to fix, or placing your title just so.  Probably won’t keep up the effort for long.

MONSTER HEARTS DAY TWO:  SHADOWY

TITLE:  A SHADOW OF LOVE

CHARACTERS:  Carla Butler: the Debutante, Lavonne Tipton: a The Shadow

PREMISE:  Some rich white dude found himself with the power to see what evil lurks in the hearts of mans, and sought to overcome the urgings of his own dark shadow by questing for justice.  He learned the skill to cloud men’s minds, and became something of a monster.  A monster for goodness, outside of society, fighting crime, forever misunderstood.

What he didn’t know was that being a The Shadow is kinda like vampirism.  He created a new category of creature – in himself – and ultimately passed the curse to one of his underworld associates.  Lavonne found herself seeing evil lurks and doing the mind clouding.  She came to feel that her life as a lady hustler was a disguise, an illusion, and that her true self was blasting on thugs with paired .45s.

While working the Case of the Sacred Scorpions, Lavonne encountered a lady of economic privilege, socially isolated due to being biracial in a place and time where that could be socially isolating.  Carla became fascinated, but her father was like, don’t even think about it, girl.

THE HOOK:  Too late, dad.  Carla was going to bag that Shadow, if she had to become a criminal to get her attention.  Forbidden hijinks ensue.

The Bestening

Planning on writing the best story in the world this march, for the audience of one husband.  Call this post “thinking out loud,” as I’ve been known to do on stories in the past.  I don’t know how many times I’ve done that in a blog post and had nothing come of it.  Let this one be different.

The majority of the stories he loves the most are in contemporary settings.  The grounding of recognizable reality makes the deviations from such easier to get with, makes magic feel more magical I suppose.  Gotta go contemporary.  Urban, suburban, rural?  It’s tempting when going contemporary to set it far enough back that cellphones were less universal, but I should really get with the times on this.  No narrative crutches.  People should have cellphones that don’t conveniently lose signal when bad guy is closing in.

Puts me in mind of what I was sayin’ about the soap opera bits in Twin Peaks.  I said the show within the show says something about the show, but it also invites you to become aware of yourself as watching a show.  It could make the proceedings feel false, but alternately, it could be the rope ladder that lets killer Bob climb out of your TV, become more real.  A cellphone in a story could create a bridge between maximal fakery and the mind of a reader.  Get got.

The Satoshi Kon movies and series in the big list tend to involve modern technology and media, as a springboard for shenanigans.  Gotta be careful to not go too creepypasta.  In general, that dude’s output was too gonzo for where I’m aiming to be, but there are some subtle vibes hiding in it.  The use of the real world as a foundation for surreal happenings, with a lot of depiction of the aspects of reality that don’t typically show up in our narratives – awkward insterstitial spaces and moments.

I remember how a critic who was disappointed by the lack of an overtly sensible narrative in Inland Empire said it was a “wagon train into Lynchistan” – something that can be a rewarding trip, but less powerful than your Mulholland Drives or Blue Velvets.  How did its surrealism compare with that of Eraserhead?  I dunno, been a minute since I’ve seen both.  Pretty sure I need to start it out feeling less precisely like a dream than either IE or EH.

I think about how in the things we like the most, there may be things we don’t like.  I asked my man what he liked least about Mulholland Drive and he said the scenes with side characters that had dubious relevance to the story.  Similar quibble on some other Lynch stuff, especially for the sillier stuff in Twin Peaks season 2, which may have been the influence of co-creator Mark Frost.

Just the same, I can’t help but remember how having different characters with their own lives does give you a lot more room to explore variations on your theme, and generally get more material out of your story.  Paranoia Agent, Uzumaki, and yeah, Twin Peaks, all made good use of large casts.

On the other other hand, this story is for my audience of one and the word has been handed down from god’s lips.  I may refrain.

On the other other other hand, maybe I can try to come up with a bunch of concepts for side characters and subplots that I don’t spend my word count on, just use to inform scenes that are only half-understood, and add to the surreal atmosphere.

A suburban environment, a lil PNW Gothique.  Everybody has their own personal demons, not everybody bothers to put on a brave face about it.  Black mold.  Al ColumbiaThompson’s Teeth.  Some kind of mystery shit is happening, and characters are compelled to walk that path.

This stuff almost always has miserable endings.  Hearts get broke.  Makes sense, but ehhhh  I dunno.  I don’t know.  I do not know.

At the end of Pulse, which is basically a ghostpocalypse, it seems like one character is getting away on a boat.  Surely the ghostpocalypse will catch you, but you have your moment.  Likewise Hellstar Remina – doomed survivors have a bleak moment of peace.  Wan joy.  Maybe that’ll be a fair compromise.

The other night I was realizing that I will always fundamentally be a baby, because I only ever think of baby scenarios.  Superheroes, action, SFF.  Genre fiction.  When David Lynch wrote a story, he was thinking about adult concerns – the kind of feelings you can’t cure by punching Green Goblin.  Even if I include an element of supernatural horror, which I surely will, it can’t be the point.  It’s gotta just be a vehicle for the big surreal expression, whatever that is.

Whose feelings am I expressing?  This may be something I can’t puzzle out in public.  It might be too personal.  And is it my person, or my audience’s?  I write something that reflects what I am aware of in his own feelings and struggles, and he sees something that agrees with him, is personally  moved… or finds it too painful to hang with.  I write to express some way I feel, he probably won’t relate or connect, because at the end of the day we are fundamentally different.  He is goth, I am a dork what falls in love with goths.

There’s a whole other branch of things I haven’t considered.  Almost all of these influential stories are personal or small in scope, but some do get apocalyptically colossal.  Or at least have a more grandiose scope, like Panorama Island.  Maybe I should go big.

Comments from my last article that I’m taking onboard, at least, having some version of in the background of the brain:  If powers appear, they could plausibly not be supernatural in nature.  Vast remote gothic mansion with series of vignettes or short scenarios.  Jazzlet won’t read this one.

The surreal thesis.  The big surreal expression.  What feeling am I trying to convey?  Should be something sad or huge, something we can’t escape…  Ya know, I think I’ve got it.  Again, personal.  Now, what kind of nonsense scenario would really pull that theme out and make it land like some Wile E. Coyote trap lands on Wile E. Coyote?  I continue avec mes pensamientos ahora im privat.

MonsterHearts 2025 – Day One

Don’t Miss Posts.  This MonsterHearts, I’m also having one regular post a day, if you should prefer that kind of thing.  Just look at the posts before or after this one.

MonsterHearts is a 14 day event (named after a pervy RPG) wherein my writing group votes on a monster each day to include in a story concept.  As we march toward Valentine’s Day, the theme is supernatural romance.  For this first one, I tried to just use “edit” mode in MidJourney to iron out irregularities, even trying to make a legible title in the AI program.  While it’s cool you can now hammer the hands and text into shape, there are a lot of disadvantages to doing that, as opposed to just photoshopping what you need to fix, or placing your title just so.  Probably won’t keep up the effort.

MONSTER HEARTS DAY ONE:  NAUTICAL

TITLE:  LAY HIM IN WATER LILIES

CHARACTERS:  Brother Crispian: the Exorcist, Childeric: the Faun

PREMISE:  A mysterious young dude is tempting all the men of the village into gay dalliances and then being entirely too forthright about the fact when asked.  There are hints he is a supernatural creature, up to no good.  Whatever the case, gotta put the inquisitional spurs to his pale hide.

THE HOOK:  The only way to cleanse the world of Childeric’s sin is to plant a knife in his body – representing each man he has made filthy, thus taking the sin back from them – and for him to be drowned in the river, beneath the water lilies.  So sayeth Father Auribrande.  But you really wanna put a knife in that, Brother Crispian?  Really?

Specific Actions for Blue States

This is an open letter to the governors and state legislatures of California, Washington, New York, Minnesota, and anywhere that still has responsible human beings at the helm.  This blog itself is a wasteland of poorly considered guff, obscenity, and self-indulgent daydreams, so I’d rather this letter not be shared with links to the source.  Just copy-paste it at your politicians, if you agree with my thinking, and by all means, if you have better ideas, improve and rewrite it.  For my part, I’m sending it to Washington State’s Governor Bob Ferguson.

***

The federal government of the United States is being destroyed.  We will fight to preserve what we need, to get a fair return on what we pay into it through taxes, but the thugs have a death grip on every lever of power, and we must respond to their destructive radicalism with constructive radicalism.  We have to build something to replace everything they destroy.  And the best time to do that is right the hell now, because the destruction will happen very quickly.  Like global warming, it is already too late to truly get ahead of it.

This is not going to be easy at all.  I understand that it seems like I’m asking for the impossible.  Right now so much is under threat in so many ways, and we are all operating at a loss from responding to massive natural disasters, year after year after year.  But we cannot expect the status quo to suffice, even in blue states.  Perhaps especially in blue states.

I’m not talking about replacing capitalism, as much as I’d love to be.  I know there is not a body in power with any interest in seeing that happen, and that’s fine.  Properly regulated capitalism is still recklessly cruel and ultimately burning the world to ash, but it’s a system under which we can enjoy some liberty, can lead reasonable lives.  You ran for office in this country knowing what this country is, and I’m not asking you to fundamentally change that.

This the United States of America.  At our christening, we took this name to show that we are a collection of individual nations – willing to be united, but never willing to give up our self-determination.  My proposal is to assert control of that self-determination – to make it our own – so that when the feds say “public schools don’t exist, we’ll only fund hitler youth programs,” we can say “no thanks, we’ve got our own way.”

These aren’t meant to be done in sequence, hence bullets without numbers.  They have to happen all at once, as much as possible, because the “storm” they promised is coming down now.

• Come Together

The blue states need to be forming political alliances, making deals with each other for mutual aid and protection. As I recall, during the pandemic response, the governors did meet. Now it’s even more important to do this.

• Shore up Taxes

None of this will be possible without tax revenue.  All of our states have powerful lobbyists constantly campaigning to keep the wealthy from having to pay a fair share of the cost of having a civilization.  You may have to make some risky moves, you may have to examine every inch of every way money changes in the state to look for new angles, you may have to fuck up the avenues by which the wealthy put their gold bricks on the scale against you.  But you cannot afford to lose a cent.

This could be a significant part of why Democrats have lost so much nationally.  They profit handsomely from business as usual, from legalized bribery in the form of lobbyist money, from gerrymandering that makes their jobs safe at the expense of fair representation for all.  Obama and Biden could have seen the writing on the wall and used their executive power to limit the power of the executive, but they couldn’t bring themselves to lose a drop of their privilege.  You may have to reach within yourself to find principles that have been very hard for the best of us to find, when national power is on the line.  Please do.  Lives are depending on it.

We’re taught in middle school that budget decisions have to be approved by Congress, but the current president has shown that these norms are so much paper.  Expect every drop of federal funding to be leverage for intimidation and coercion, to abuse you and your constituency.  Get ready to lose it all.

• Replace Federal Funding

This could border on impossible, or it could be way easier than I’m imagining.  After all, most of the revenue of this country comes from our states.  But replacing federal funding of state programs will absolutely be necessary, for our continued safety and prosperity.  It is very unjust that our tax money continues to flow to a federal government that cares so little about us, that only trickles back as it sees fit – especially when that is jeopardized by the whims of a tyrant.  However, short of civil war, what can we do about it?

Work around the problem.  Come up with investment schemes, carefully negotiate with the wolves of business.  Maybe some functions of the state can be handled by the private sector.  That has been generally bad for utilities and extremely bad for telecommunications, but if you have no other recourse, privatization could prop up tax shortfalls.  Only use this one with the strictest of regulation, OK?

Right now US Treasury bonds are underpinning the global economy.  The tyrant could end that tomorrow because he didn’t get a nap and felt cranky.  What if California State bonds were so hot that international investors could just ditch the fed and buy into Cali?  How does your value stack up against the BRIC nations?  What about the combined value of the blue states?

• Plan Radical Restructure

Plan this, but with the knowledge it is aspirational – unlikely to be passed into law in one grand sweep.  This is what the radical right wing administration is attempting at the federal level, and attempting it with a grand sweep.  They want to destroy every institution on which the country has come to depend, and replace them with exploitative mock versions that funnel money into the pockets of wealthy administration cronies.  That’s a radical restructure.  We don’t have that kind of power, but maybe we could benefit from some careful measure of that kind of radicalism.

Our states’ institutions evolved over time from the growth of our respective economies, and from the progress of history.  This process is not elegant, not efficient, and there may be costly redundancies in our laws, policies, and bureaucracies.  The right wing solution being attempted at a national level is to wipe away the complexity of established systems and replace them with something new, simple, and rigged to feed the rich.

To help with the goals of shoring up taxes and replacing federal funding, targeting these inefficiencies may be a useful goal.  We don’t have to leave people in a lurch like they have.  The right way to do this is to study how our civil structures operate – what they do, how, and why – and see if we can engineer more elegant ways to achieve the same ends.  Then implement those fundamental changes in a way that exercises care to prevent lapses in essential services.

If the current president cared one jot about his own constituency, actually believed that his right wing agenda was a principled and good thing, he would have taken that thoughtful and slow approach to making these changes.  It didn’t have to be implemented like a blitzkrieg.  That’s just a way of showing off that they don’t have to care what anybody thinks of them anymore.  It’s a way of showing off that at a national level, democracy is over.

• Plan for State Border Problems

While red states demolish their social services, health care, infrastructure, human rights, and worker protections, our states will become the release valve for anyone trying to escape the badlands.  This is already true in many ways, but can get so much worse.  At least for the moment, interstate travel is free access, but as the reddest states try to lock their women in Gilead, border checkpoints may become a thing.  And if that doesn’t happen?  Then that’s a lot of red state refugees you may need to accommodate.

This can be a good thing, if it’s done right – like international immigration.  Try not to be as exploitive as our country has been in that regard.  Instead of “what can these desperate people do for us?” ask “what can we do for each other?”  Indeed, to the extent the fascists allow any international immigration to happen, the same kind of solutions can be applied to both issues.

Job programs and genuinely affordable housing are my preferred solution.  And if there aren’t enough jobs?  Figure out how to make more jobs.  It’s been done before, during the New Deal.  And if that’s too radical for you, this may be a good place to make deals with private businesses, to have them fulfill some of these roles, for profit.  Any unskilled position in healthcare, construction, agriculture, customer service – these are places where the most desperate people can be employed.  The kind of jobs we have a bottomless need to fill.

It’s important that any immigrants that are allowed to stay in our states should be allowed to do so in a legally sanctioned way.  Our country has allowed illegal immigration to prop up entire sectors of the economy, because that labor force was cheap enough to encourage us to turn a blind eye.  But that’s just human trafficking – moving unprotected bodies and subjecting them to abuses we’d never allow to happen to those we fully regard as human.  We have to be able to figure out a better way to do this.  I know the red state solution is going to be prison labor.  But that’s just slavery.  Let’s do better, for everyone.

And if it can’t be like that – if there’s a need to privilege residents of a state over immigrants from another – then there should be a refugee program to allow a more expedient path to residency, for those under the most threat where they come from.

• Rethink Healthcare

Our nation’s health care structure is a rolling disaster, created explicitly to make the rich richer, off the desperation and sorrow of the poor.  To an extent you cannot escape this.  Medicare is federal, and Medicaid is federally funded.

I think it’s instructive to look at the history of Medicare’s “parts.”  Part A was free for people insured through taxed wages and covered hospitalization.  Part B became necessary as healthcare expanded to lean more on specialists and outpatient care, and there was not enough money (was there?) to make the expansion happen without charging for it.  That’s $185 a month out of old folks’ Social Security checks, and not well-liked.

A and B didn’t cover everything, so gap coverage came along to pick up the rest, plus another letter for prescription drugs.  These are parts C and D, and these were a massive gimme to the rich.  The fed subsidizes these programs, forking over barrels of taxpayer dollars to private businesses.  In return, those businesses provide spotty service, while terrorizing and badgering the vulnerable with deceptive advertising and outright lies, denying care, and getting people killed.

This situation happened in stages.  Some causes were unavoidable – healthcare was bound to  become more sophisticated and expensive over time – and some were a result of avoidable government corruption.  At this point in history, we have enough perspective to come up with new ideas that aren’t hobbled by piecemeal development.

This is another Radical Restructure.  Your state could probably afford to lose its entire Medicaid program easily, if it had a well-designed and efficient replacement that covers many more people.  Maybe that could be handled as an expansion of the bureaucracy of Medicaid, but an expansion that relies on state funding over federal.  Because most importantly, as the federal government abdicates all responsibility for the well-being of its citizens, we are obliged – by the human decency they lack – to make sure everyone is adequately cared for.

• State Social Security

The federal program of Social Security will likely limp on in some debased form, barely helping anybody with anything, while its coffers are pillaged to pay for nuking Samoa, or some other absurd nonsensical atrocity.  I think it’s time to help seniors (and other vulnerable populations) within our states in big ways.  This can either be done with a new retirement program – a “State Social Security” – or by massively reducing the expenses members of these populations face, with expansions of Section 8, EBT, utility programs, etc.

Advantages of State Social Security:  This can be tied to investment schemes that generate revenue, and because people are already paying for and receiving Social Security from the federal government, this doesn’t need huge payouts – just enough to make up the shortfall, to keep old folks from having to eat dog food and ration medication.  Disadvantage:  Corporations will exploit any public benefit to raise their prices, busting you back to square one, with nothing but useless bureaucracy to show for it.

Advantages of Reducing Cost of Living:  Takes away that last disadvantage.  Need-based programs cost money.  More people using them means more people needed to administer them.  And as a strictly humanitarian thing, they cannot generate profit.  These programs are always targeted by aggressive lobbying – by rich vultures that will never be satisfied until the poor are beaten and bleeding in chains, calling it austerity.

The best way is probably some combination of the two, but one thing that is needed regardless of the approach is…

• Genuinely Affordable Housing

OK, you can’t very well have half your state on Section 8, and you can’t limit the asinine price of real estate without damaging the financial sector, right?  But there is absolutely a middle path here.  Poor people – the renting class – generate so god-damn much money.  The rich have come to feel entitled to have an ever-escalating amount of that money, with no thought to how much blood is in these stones.

If you could just get a corporation to be willing to accept a smaller profit margin, in exchange for providing massively more units for rent at reasonable rates, you could house many more people.  People who could afford to participate in your economy as consumers, as workers.  All you need is the political will to make these deals with a strong hand – without capitulating to lobbyists who tell you that “one or two sliding scale micro-studios in a block of two thousand $8000 units should be enough to house all your baristas.”  Those lobbyists are liars that do not deserve your tax breaks.  Don’t sell your people out; don’t let yourself look like a cheap bum.

• Disaster Preparedness

Climate change has caught us completely flatfooted.  What happens when we are still recovering from the last disaster every time that a new one strikes?  We are gradually worn down to nothing.  What happens with no help from FEMA?  Don’t let that be you.  I don’t know how much your state spends on research into new ways to deal with natural disasters – new solutions – but it needs to be a lot.

I know, we are so many grains of sand before the mighty gale.  But we caused this with innovation.  Surely there are ways we can deal with it that haven’t been fully considered or even developed yet.  And again, there’s a venal motivation for you as well.  What if California figured out how to manage wildfires, to prevent them from ever damaging property?  To prevent them from turning the sky into blood and hellfire multiple times a year?

What do you suppose that might do for the value of real estate there?  To the decision-making of businesses considering your state for a new campus?  If the new methods involve a process of labor or technology that can be employed and exported, how would you like to corner that market, in a world that is increasingly on fire?

This isn’t just about fire.  New solutions for flooding, earthquakes, winds, freezing, for temps that melt plastic and soften aluminum.  We’re in for a world of excitement.

• Global Warming is Not Going to Stop

I reiterate.  Look at what all of the world’s reputable scientists have said.  Look at what our federal government and businesses are doing in response to the crisis.  You know those maps of what the world will look like with no polar ice caps?  Familiarize yourself with them.  Count on that becoming a reality before this streak of fascism has even run its course.

None of you are in as bad of shape as Florida, but we are all going to take big hits – in addition to the disasters mentioned above.  NYC is going to have to move ashore, eventually.  Paint all your rooftops white.  Start wearing silver foil when you walk your dog.  SPF ain’t gonna hack it.  Air conditioning must be regarded as a human right, same for water.  Incorporate this kind of awareness into every law and policy you draft, for the next ten thousand years that it may take for the world to recover.

• Beware the Wolves

Unregulated capitalism devours itself.  It destroys competition, consolidates power, devolves into dictatorship and tyranny.  I’ve mentioned that, for lack of revenue, you may involve corporations in the essential functions of your state.  But this must be regulated powerfully, unfailingly.  That’s even without the consideration of a federal government that might consider dropping tactical warheads on San Francisco.  Watch your backs.

***

That’s all I got for the moment.  The nuke thing was hyperbole, I hope.  Don’t look at me like that.

This took way too much brain to compose.  Hopefully I don’t get spammed for donations by the DNC for the rest of my natural life.

Look forward to my usual foolery later today.

Life List: Osprey

GO ‘HAWKS!  WOOO!  I kid, I kid.  I don’t give a fucking fuck about amurrican roids ‘n’ brain damage -styled football.  But the Seahawks have been around in the periphery of my consciousness many a year.  Seahawk is another word for osprey, so just to squeeze more wordcount out of these birds, I’m gonna talk about hucking the ol’ pigskin.

Colors:  Green and blue are the team colors.  Those colors don’t go great together, in my humble opinion.  Too “Captain Planet.”

Local Billionairism:  One of Bill Gates’ old buddies Paul Allen owned the ‘Hawks while he was alive, and I indirectly worked for his ass during a few of those years.  I don’t much care, but it puts me in mind of the bitter fact I have, in past jobs, been close enough to some famous billionaires that I could have just reached out and… I kid, I kid.  Unless..?  No, no, of course not… … …

The Kingdome:  Sports arena sponsored by local TV station King 5, started losing bits of roof, got replaced expensively.  Subject of much one note local humor.  Speaking of local humor, I have some affection for the old TV show Almost Live!, which, last I checked, was airing in reruns after SNL on NBC.  That last checkin was a long-ass time ago.  As was the moment in history when Bill Nye was on that show.  For whatever that’s worth to whoever.  Enjoy some Pat Cashman.

Good times.  Anyway,

Parking Garages:  You can tell a lot about sportball fandom by how badly they fuck up the parking garages nearest the playing fields.  I never noticed any especial damage for the women’s soccer or the hockey teams, but baseball, men’s soccer, and football would definitely leave their mark.  People get messy.  Baseball fans are just tipsy enough to accidentally drop their wallets or other little bits and bobs.  Soccer fans leave half-eaten boxes of oranges, clothing items, and other oddities.  Football fans invariably knock the garage’s gatearms off their posts.  One time a rich drunk fucko that came to get his eighty thousand dollar SUV -after the garage had closed for the night- crashed it through two concrete bollards and a metal roll-down fence, in order to get home.

That’s my menial job’s eye view of amurrican football.

How about some birds?  One time in a gas station parking lot in Federal Way, I heard some bizarre bird calls from the treetops, and busted out the birdy app.  It was ospreys, having the biggest conversation I’ve ever heard from them.

Accipitriform birds of prey -hawks, eagles, old world vultures, ospreys- usually nest on broad platforms at the tops of tall trees.  On a cellphone tower near the Walmart I used to work in, I once saw some ospreys hanging out.  Trying to nest?  What was interesting to me about this sighting is that one of the birds had a whole-ass cardboard box in its talons, and was flying it up the tower.  Was there anything in the box?  Tasty fish?  A gwyneth paltrow headAn Alice in ChainsA British one-hit wonder?  Or was it nesting material?  I just think it looked cool.

Ospreys are sooo easy to see here, around the Puget Sound.  Go close to water.  Look at treetops, or out in the shallows.  Watch them grab fish.  A sunny day is best because the fish are often shiny and silver, which makes the birds easier to spot at a distance.  Once saw one when I was walking across the Ballard Bridge, resting briefly on a street sign there.

Ospreys are one of those birds with worldwide distribution, so you might know about ’em no matter where you are.  They are white and brown, leaning toward the white.  Heads are white with a dark brown mask.  They are famous for reversing one of their toes to get a better grip on a fish.

I had a birthday a few years ago where I went to the beach.  Briefly I waded out to get a better look at a heron, and an osprey flew by at the same time.  Fun.  But the water was piss warm and full of slimy kelp and humans.  Ugh.

The US military has a tilt-rotor aircraft called the Osprey, courtesy of Boeing.  It looks cool, looks like a good design to do vertical or short takeoff & landing.  But it’s been problematic enough to call into question whether any aircraft built on that idea can ever be fully safe, over the years taking dozens of soldiers to their graves.  On the other hand, maybe it’s just motherfucken Boeing.

Bird doesn’t have that problem.  Nature wins again.

A Civil Restructuring

As Abe Oceanoxia mentioned, we’re in an era of endless recovery, where the damage wrought by natural disasters will always outpace our ability to repair it.  The slithering shitstain in chief is doing a blitz of horrible moves to make life worse for everyone.  Everything has everybody on back heel all the time, which parallels the recovery from natural disasters.  Before you can even get a handle on one fucked-up insult to human dignity, you are broadsided with another three.

But at some point, we are going to have to crawl out from under the fecal deluge, and make some moves.  You and I can only do so much, and we should of course do that much, but the people most responsible for fighting back?  That’s on the decent people in government.  What can they do?

It is distinctly possible this is the end of democracy in america for the next few decades.  Certainly it feels like the Civil Rights Movement was just busted back to the 1960s.  I used to say there was no way a politician on either side of the aisle would want to be the one holding the bag when Social Security runs out of money, but that sentiment belongs to a time when norms existed.  We’re in an era of uncharted fuckery, under the fascist deathclown administration.  Will they let the SSA fail?  They might.

This brings me back to those decent people in government, particularly in states where they have enough power and resources to make real moves for their people.  The governments of places like California, Washington, and New York, they need to start uncoupling themselves from the federal government.

What does it matter to your state if Social Security fails, if you have a state retirement system that covers your citizens?  What does it matter if Medicare fails, if you have a better state healthcare system?  Those things are not so trivial and not so easy, but I contend that they are possible.

Those would be the actions of true states – independent political entities.  Easy to forget that the very name of the USA is an artifact of a time when every state wanted to be its own country, with only a nominal federal government.  Well, the federal government is about to get nuked from within, so it’s time to start treating the situation with that kind of seriousness.

How hilarious would it be if the NYPD had its budget actually fucking constrained for the first time ever, to pay for important shit the people actually need?  It would be soooooooooo fucking easy to spot the excesses.  They could keep their massive salaries and benes and number of cops in the city, sure, and still save millions by, oh, say, not having offices in foreign countries?  Not having military vehicles?  I’d love to see it.

I had another article about this before, more or less, but that one didn’t get this specific.  I’m calling on the governments of blue states to make those baller moves.  Protect human rights.  Get teams of civil rights lawyers figuring out any way possible to keep civil rights decisions from escaping to higher courts staffed by fascist shitlords.  Get sociolgists forming comprehensive analyses of the ways people live in your states, where society is failing them, and develop more efficient and effective ways to palliate human suffering – thus making your states even more attractive to people fleeing from the United States of Jesusland.

Get civil engineers thinking of ways to take care of natural disaster preparedness without a lick of federal support.  Make concrete plans that will make your states physically safer and better places to invest in, for business and real estate etc.  Laugh at places like Florida letting themselves get blasted to pieces year after year, just to stick it to the transes and DEI wokesters.  What if Cali could figure out a way to make fire season less dangerous?  What an achievement that would be!

Yeah, there are a lot of items on here that seem wildly pie-in-the-sky, even sci-fi, but this is the future, guys.  Right now it’s a burning trashfire of a cyberpunk dystopia.  The failure of the central government might actually be just the opportunity you need to set this thing off – to really change the world where you are in ways that inspire all of humanity.

Do you have the political will?  You’ve never shown that spine before, but these are wild-ass times.  Show us what you can do, please.

Hey, why am I not making a hunnerd grand a year in a DC thinktank.  George Soros!  Hear me!  (in the voice of that guy that recorded himself kidnapping his kids and asked Qanon to save him)  Give me tha power.  Y’all know I’m good for it.

Life List: Chestnut-Backed Chickadee

Chickadees are American tits, like the stuff I got in my shirt, hey-O!  heyoheyoheyoHey-O!  Haha.  Got ’em.

But seriously, they’re iconic birds of North America, hugely successful and widespread, to the point I have to wonder, like I do with dark-eyed juncos, if they are out of balance with their natural condition, as a result of human restructuring of the world.

That’s mostly black-capped chickadees, but of course, there are other close relatives of those birds.  Of them, the only one I’m ever likely to see is the chestnut-backed chickadee, because they are found in similar environments to the black-capped – namely, in trees and bushes around humans.

They have to be niche partitioning somehow, to have such a close relative in the same range.  What are CBCs doing differently?  Well, for one thing, they are not completing their sentences.  They are mumblecore chickadees with vocal fry, or whatever you call it.  BCCs are well known for their chickadee call, which in practice is more like “Tsickida-BEE BEE BEE.”  I could be wrong about this because it’s hard to get a clear enough view of the bird making the call, but it seems to me CBCs say Tsickida but never BEE.  Kinda like, halfway between the indistinct squeaking of bushtits and the bolder chickadee style.

Also, they are less bold in color.  I didn’t know there were multiple types of chickadees when I first saw them, and the chestnut back stood out less to me than the charcoal color of the dark areas on their head.  It’s like somebody took a black-capped and turned down the contrast, then painted a cedar red strip on their back.  I initially assumed I was seeing a mutant black-capped, with low-key leucism.

Anyway, I think they look cuter than black-capped chickadees, but cuteness is not the main thing I like about chickadees.  It’s the sassy noises, and for that, black-capped chickadees win – enough to get a post of their own someday.

Life List: Pine Siskin

A few weeks ago, my husband called my attention to a flock of birds flying around wildly, outside our window.  He said they must be the same birds that weirded him out when, upon waking, he thought he was seeing bats outside.  Now these birds were not flying at all similar to bats, but they were shading in that direction much more than bushtits or starlings – the other birds I see larger flocks of at times.

There was just an erratic, manic quality – no cooperation, just dashing around.  Starlings are like fighter jets, Bushtits are bouncy little paper airplanes, and they both like moving in the same direction as the squadron.  Not so much with these guys – pine siskins.  How else can I characterize them?

I don’t have much to say.  They’re streaky LBBs with a wee bit of yellow in the beige.  My husband thinks they look green.  Word is they sometimes flock with goldfinches, but I haven’t seen it.  They’re not unusual in the region but it is unusual for me to see a big flock so close. Kinda fun.

This post was boring so I’ll do another one today.