Writing
Use protection. Kids are great and I love mine, but unplanned pregnancies change your life.
Wear sunscreen. Kurt Vonnegut was smart AF and he said that so I am going with it.
Stay close to your family. If you've made it this far without too much trauma, that's awesome. Family is the best mutual aid society ever developed.
Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇- ⌘+Q - Runs an Apple Script that prompts “Are you sure you want to close this app”
- shift+shift - opens/closes notification center
- control+control - reveals desktop
- option+option - reveals all Windows
- esc+esc - activate screen saver/lock screen
- fn+e - Raycast emoji picker
- fn+v - Raycast clipboard manager
- four-finger click on MTP - activate screen saver/lock screen
- one finger click on bottom center of MTP - Google search
- three finger tap on MTP - simulate alt+tab
AMA - What advice would you give someone graduating from high school?
The question is from Brandon - What advice would you give someone graduating from high school?
This question is a cross between what it says and what I'd like a chance to do if I were 18 all over again. It would be cool to have nearly 60 years of accumulated knowledge crammed into an 18-year old head. Let's go.
Yep, go to college
All the people out there making noise about how college isn't for everyone and that becoming a plumber or joining the army are good solid alternatives, you know the ones I'm talking about, those people are anti-education conservatives who went to college themselves and who plan on sending their children. They are trying to cover for the inability or unwillingness to make education affordable to the masses like the social democracies in Europe do—the countries that aren't sending half their tax revenues to defense contractors. People who go to college make more money, have longer life expectancies, and are happier than the people who don't go.
DO NOT JOIN THE MILITARY!!!
I am a vet and I do not hate the military, but it is not a job program, nor is it safe if you happen to be female. One out of three people who enlist do not finish their service with an honorable discharge. The usual pattern for that segment of enlistees is a general discharge for some sort of misconduct, health issues, weight issues, or incompatibility with military life. For those who don't complete their enlistment, all of the wonderful benefits described by their recruiters are no longer attainable, including the educational benefits.
Exercise and Eat Right Starting Now
Don't wait until you get out of shape to start exercising. Make going for a walk or run and going to the gym a habit starting right now. Just get used to the idea that you need 30 minutes to an hour each day to take care of your body. I'm not telling you that you can't eat pizza. I'm saying don't eat a whole pizza. Also, if you never worry about your alcohol consumption, then you are doing it right. If you do worry about it, that's a very good sign that drinking is not right for you. Weed probably isn't a better alternative. You need to get used to getting high on life.
Start Practicing Gratitude
Every day for the rest of your life, take a minute and write down three things you are grateful for. Your list doesn't have to be deep and philosophical. Did you find a good parking space today? Write that down! Did someone treat you nicely today? Write it down! Make it a habit to be continually on the lookout for things to be grateful for. It will do more for your outlook on life than anything else I can think of.
Vote Democrat
The Republican Party is a front for the top 1% of Americans on the wealth scale. They've discovered things that fire up white people and made that what they pretend to represent, but what they are really about is maintaining a system in this country where the richest people get richer and the rest of us fight over the scraps. I'm not saying that the Democrats are perfect because they are not, but they do not preach white supremacy, the subjugation of women, and the perpetuation of the war machine above all other government functions like the Republicans do.
Avoid Debt as Much as Possible
Go to a state-supported school, preferably one that has reduced tuition. Start a habit of saving money from your very first paycheck. When you want something, start saving for it instead of borrowing money. There is a huge difference between what you need and what you want. Internalize that fact and let it guide your spending habits. You may want a fancy car, but what you need is reliable transportation. You may want a big screen TV in your dorm room, but all you need is the laptop you use for school.
Miscellaneous Advice
A Trip That Changed Me from Ask Me Anything
My Internet friend, R. Scott Jones, asked - What's one place you've traveled to (or perhaps an entire trip) that changed you? Tell us how you changed because of it, and why you think it inspired that change.
I've lived for all but a very short period of my adult life in the same southern military town where I went to high school. Most of my vacations have been to the beaches or mountains of the same state I live in. My military service took me to places like Texas and California, but never out of the United States. Then, over a period of three years during the beginning stages of the US war in Iraq, I became a traveling fool. My activism against that war took me to college campuses and demonstrations all over the US and Europe.
The way that happened was a matter of luck, politics, and maybe a tad bit of exploitation. I learned a lot about group dynamics, organizing, and the far left as it exists in the United States. I was a member of a tiny little community group in Fayetteville, NC, protesting the death penalty and other social justice issues. Then 9/11 happened, and George Bush and Co. decided to attack Iraq because 19 Saudi Arabians attacked the US. My son was in basic training in the Navy on 9/11 and was on the way to report to the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower after completing Navy Nuclear Training when the first bombs fell on Baghdad. He was home on leave and went to a demonstration against the war and held a sign that said "No Blood for Oil." He was interviewed by an AP reporter. When he reported to the ship, he was brought up on charges and convicted. It was bullshit because even members of the military have free speech when they are off duty, out of uniform, and not purporting to represent the government. Thousands of GIs did it during the Vietnam War.
I was pissed about the way he was treated and told the story at a small gathering of activists I attended. In attendance was an instructor from the University of NC-Greensboro who was a member of the International Socialist Organization (ISO). He led the student group there and had ties with the national headquarters in Chicago. He approached me and asked if I would mind coming to his school to speak, and I agreed. I didn't know that I was being auditioned. When I spoke at the school, members of the national cadre were there, and they liked what I had to say and how I said it. Before I knew it, speaking invitations started pouring in. I was eager to represent Military Families Speak Out, a national organization I was trying to organize for, so I went to every place I was invited.
They asked me if I wanted to go to Paris to speak at the World Socialism Conference on an anti-war panel, and I agreed. I didn't even have a passport and had to hustle to get one. I was there for nine days. My roommate was a man named Shuja Graham, a former Black Panther given the death penalty for the death of a correctional officer in a prison riot, later exonerated, as he was not actually involved in the murder. I'm a former prison guard myself, but Shuja and I got along just fine. I met leftists from all over the world and started to see some of the nitpicking differences for which that strain of politics is known.
I didn't do much classic tourism, other than visiting Notre Dame and the Seine one afternoon. I spent much time talking politics and drinking. I went to a demonstration organized by the French League of Communist Revolutionaries and bought a Palestinian scarf from the Italian Communist Party, whom I later learned were Stalinists. My hosts, the ISO, were Trots, disciples of Leon Trotsky, an early Communist thought leader assassinated on Stalin's orders. Most of my far-left-leaning political friends back home belonged to an organization associated with Maoism.
When I returned home, I continued to speak out and travel, eventually going to Italy and Great Britain on ISO-sponsored trips. As the anti-war movement grew, some activists got lots of press, like Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq who gained fame for camping out in a ditch outside of Bush's Texas ranch. Another became known for appearing in Michael Moore's movie, Fahrenheit 911. GI resistors started getting attention and invitations to speak. People organizing against the war competed to see which well-known person they could get to come to their demos. Factions developed. It was distasteful. The ISO cadre, whom I had come to look upon as my friends, suddenly wanted to dictate to me where I could and could not speak, depending on the politics of the organizers. I was outraged because I was on one team, Team Stop the War. That was my goal. I wasn't trying to grow anyone's membership or advance some nuanced understanding of far-left politics. I just wanted for kids like my son to quit being sent to die in Iraq.
Although I remained very much against US policy, I made the abrupt decision to quit traveling and speaking after making one last trip to Atlanta for an event that had nothing to do with any political group. Thereafter, I attended meetings of the same hometown organization I started with and went to our tiny demos happily. My adventures on the national and international stage were enlightening, and I got to meet a lot of military families and hopefully discourage a few young people from joining up. My adventures with the ISO, of which I must stress, I was never a member, were enlightening, if for nothing else, to see a small slice of American culture that most people never experience.
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Can Any Here Be Objective?
I am one link in a chain of military service stretching over four generations. I didn't go to war, as the period between 1983 and 1989 lacked one to send me to. They only needed a few guys for the invasions of Grenada and Panama, and I wasn't one of them. I've lived in military towns for most of my life. I'm also a committed progressive, somewhat to the left of almost everybody you probably know. I've learned over the years that no one on either side of the political spectrum has an objective view of the people who actually serve in the military. People on the right insist that they are all heroes fighting for our freedom, even the truck mechanics who spent four years in the motor pool at Ft. Hood and got out. People on the left vacillate between calling them victims of the war machine and mercenaries, depending on which ones they are talking about.
Practically the only folks who have an objective view of who soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines are, are those men and women themselves. Here's what one of my friends, a former special operations soldier (Green Beret) said about himself and his fellows on why or why not military service makes you more American than other people.
They volunteered to be there, they get compensated for their time just like any other person that works any other salaried job, they have employment benefits rarely seen outside silicon valley and wall street, they travel the world, have the opportunity to pursue degrees at no cost, and the majority of their day is spent just sitting around waiting to go home. Once they leave service, if they have long-term effects from service they will be compensated for those for the rest of their life tax free, have access to healthcare for reduced cost, reduced cost life insurance, access to programs and services that allow them to build business, buy homes, and send their children to school with no money out of pocket, and will be able to tell outlandish stories with little ability to be fact checked even in our social media obsessed culture. BUT, they are more American because they do something that you feel guilty for not doing yourself. Like the garbage collectors, the police, firefighters, teachers, janitors, landscapers, painters, carpenters, roofers, plumbers, teachers, nurses, etc…
Military Life | The Point Magazine
What is something that civilians don't realize about the military and its members? - Quora
Public, Veterans Agree: Most Americans Don’t Understand Military Life | Pew Research Center
Defense Finance and Accounting Service > MilitaryMembers > payentitlements > Pay Tables
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I'm An Expert on Relationships, LOL
The November Ask Me Anything blogging challenge is going well. Today's question is once again from @annie@social.lol on Mastodon. She wants to know, "What's an important lesson you've learned about relationships?" As a happily married guy, albeit in marriage number four, I feel fully qualified to share my expertise on this one. Anyway, relationships also include friends, work, and more.
High School Sweethearts
I got married the first time to my high school sweetheart. I was 18, she was 17. We already had a baby and had another one pretty quickly to boot. Today, all four of us are doing OK. Getting an early start on children made me a young grandparent able to do plenty of stuff with my huge collection (13) of descendants. Although the marriage didn't last long (three years), it did not ruin my life in any appreciable way.
Don't Marry Someone You Meet in Rehab
I don't really need to explain this one, do I? Also, ten-year age gaps create certain realities, many of them not positive. 1/10 Would not recommend!
Even Good Relationships Can Wither
I think it's fine, healthy even, to have interests and hobbies different than those of your partner, but interests and hobbies need to take second place in a marriage. The most important thing in a marriage is the other person in it. Taking them for granted or assuming that all the hard work is in the past is unwise. That's all I have to say about that.
Good Relationships Have Requirements
It is quite possible to be true to yourself and also put your partner's needs at the top of your list. My relationship with Wonder Woman works because I have respect for her needs. I know what things are important to her, and I accept that without argument. She does the same for me. She kind of had to train me, and I had to allow myself to be trained. I don't think either one of us has extravagant demands. We have evolved into a couple that spends most of our time together. Most of what we do, we do together. I don't go running with her, but I do go to most of her races. When we are at home, we spend most of the time in the same room, often within an arm's reach of each other. We always kiss goodbye, including before work, at lunch, and before sleeping.
Work is Hit or Miss
In the job I retired from, I made several friends that outlasted my employment. A couple of them have lasted more than 20 years. We've done things socially, been to each other's houses. I've watched them get married and have kids just as they've watched my family grow. I believe in being friendly with the people I work with and finding out about their lives. I had the same boss for many, many years, and the guy was so disinterested in everyone who worked for him. He didn't know anything personal about his employees, and I just marveled at his indifference. Most work relationships don't evolve into friendships, but I think it's important to humanize my co-workers and not see them as cogs in a machine.
Organizations
I'm an outspoken and energetic person. When I'm in a group of people with a common purpose and something needs to be done, I don't mind voicing my opinion about the direction we take, nor do I mind stepping up to do the work. I don't know how to be any other way. The upside to this is lots of people appreciate you. The downside is a lot of people resent you. I don't like being resented, but what I like even less is a group of people staring at each other, waiting for someone else to make the first move.
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My Favorite Better Touch Tool Actions
Better Touch Tool, an app from Folivora.ai is one of my favorite automation apps. Here are a few of the shortcuts I use with it.
Please Make It Easier!
In the continuation of the Ask Me Anything series, today I am tackling a question from Annie, first answered by Keenan, Estebanxto and Kerri Ann - if you could instantly change one internal pattern/thing about yourself, what would it be?
This is an easy one. I would turn myself into a natural people person on the spot. I'd love to live in a world where relationships were easy for me. I can come across as personable and friendly, and there is a large part of me that truly is that way, but it takes so much effort. I make the effort because I enjoy the rewards and reactions I get from being that person, but my god, it takes so much energy and concentration. Left to my own devices and true nature, I'd silently do my own thing, content to be left alone most of the time.
For a long time in my life, I acted very taciturn, rarely showing much emotion other than irritation. I was pretty gruff. It was all to keep people at a distance because I was so clueless about how to deal with them. I grew up moving once or twice a year, and my first 14 years on planet earth were spent always being the new kid. I didn't know what it felt like to be settled or to have long-term relationships. As an immature new kid, I felt like I always had something to prove, and if it backfired, my natural inclination was to angrily withdraw.
In early adulthood, I dealt with substance abuse and mental health issues, both of which I sought treatment for, and after a myriad of struggles, finally got on top of. When I finally entered long-term sobriety, I realized that I absolutely needed people in order to be healthy, and that's when I decided to drop the gruff, grouchy, grumpy nature that I had always used. I was 43 years old. At work, I adopted the attitude that I would have were I self-employed instead of a civil servant. I really concentrated on being friendly and approachable and started thinking about how other people felt. I was at that job for 20 years, and I'm still friends with people from there. All of them will tell you that I had a mid-career personality change.
In my personal life, I decided to start sharing the things I loved, which at the time were 12-Step meetings and riding my bike. I'd spent the last decade heavily involved in activism, always struggling against the things that made me mad at the world. Bush's wars, Conservative attempts to punish LGBT people, criminal justice inequality and more were things I organized against, but it had taken its toll on me. I stepped away from that and directed my energy into being the guy who was just grateful to be sober another day. When I realized I had a talent for endurance cycling, I became an evangelist about it to people who were interested, constantly talking people into attempting challenging bike rides of greater and greater distances. I met Wonder Woman at one of those rides.
I finally learned how to make small talk. I adopted the role of a nurturer and started trying to make people comfortable, whether it was on a bike ride or at work when I went to help teachers and administrators with various computer problems. It was about this time that my grandchildren started entering the world, and I found that to soften me up a bit as well. I remember explicitly training myself to smile more.
Today my problem is maintaining that friendly persona. It takes a lot of energy and sometimes I run out. "What's the matter Lou? Why are you so quiet?" is something I hear with regularity. There's nothing actually wrong. I just need some time to recharge my batteries and be still. By design, our home is a quiet place. It's relaxing. I have become an extrovert with introverted tendencies.
When I look at people I know who seem to be always on their game, friendly and helpful by nature, I marvel at how they do it. I wonder if it even takes any effort on their part. I have a coworker who can talk to anyone and keep a calm demeanor throughout it all. He rarely complains and is always there to help when asked. Someone recently said that the two of us were alike, and I took it as a great compliment. Maybe I'm getting better at maintaining a friendly outside when my inside isn't feeling it. I hope so. It sure took long enough!
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Kicking Off Ask Me Anything for the November Challenges
Question: Why do you have the politics you have today?
In real life, outside of my family and a couple of close friends, I rarely talk politics unless someone says something real backwards around me, in which case I speak up. I consider any endorsement of what passes for Republican policy to be backwards, so I'm not going to let anyone subject me to it. I don't go around preaching to anyone and all I want is the same treatment.
That's the root of my politics right there. It's the golden rule. I want to live in a society where people treat other people the way they want to be treated. Republicans want a two tiered system where there is a definite advantage given to white, native born people. They want to explain away the disparity in educational achievement and the rates of incarceration by acting like minorities are stupid criminals instead of using our joint national resources to bring about a better system. If I were poor (again) I'd want to be treated with compassion, not scorn.
Conservatives want a government that puts more money in their pocket and screw everybody who isn't like them. I want a government that provides for the common good. don't believe in a government that foster's an elite class who get to skip paying taxes on their yachts and jets. I think that the effective tax rate for people who live off accumulated generational wealth should be at least as much as the people who clean their houses.
In order to have the kind of country I want, the insane amount of money that gets funneled to defense corporations has to be drastically reduced. Our government has a vested interest in keeping people scared of terrorists, the Chinese, the Russians, Mexican drug lords. None of the money spent towards combatting that lengthens lives the way it would if it were spent on cancer research and improved medical care for everyone.
I want to live in a country with educated people because I believe education to be important. I worked in schools for decades and I know how dedicated teachers are. Republicans have fostered a narrative that schools are failing and it isn't true. They use any excuse to avoid spending money on education, preferring to give tax cuts to those who already have the most money. They want to give money to private schools that allow non-certified teachers to tell children that men and dinosaurs walked the earth together.
I believe in science. Only a fool would look at the rapidly changing climate and think the best thing to do is drill more oil wells, but that is the policy Republicans want. I want to drink clean water and breath clean air and I don't want to be told how spending the money for those basic life giving necessities sin't good for the balance sheet of some billionaire.
So there you have it. Those are my reasons. I don't think the Democratic party has the solution to all those problems, but they are a hell of a lot closer than the alternative. The two party system is terrible. There is too much money in politics. I hope we incrementally change the system to something that better serves more people, especially those that need it most.
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I've Been Accused of Hoarding
When Wonder Woman decides she doesn't need something anymore it gets tossed into recycling, or it gets donated. When I decide I don't need something right now, I place it aside because you never know, I might need it later. Therein lies a slight problem. She looks at my stuff with a rapacious gleam in my eye, and from time to time I get a wee bit offended and protective of my stack of eight different sizes of jeans.
One place I can hoard to my heart's content is on my computer. I have stacks of external hard drives full of, well, stuff - movies, music, 25-year-old website archives, multiple backups of photos. I also have accounts in iCloud, Google Drive, One Drive, Box and Dropbox with files on all of them. I have files I created in Microsoft Works, a program that was discontinued 15 years ago.
When it comes to music, of course I have a subscription to one of those all-you-can-eat services, where I can listen to almost everything but the ripped CDs I bought at coffee houses and bars in the far distant past, but I worked hard to download all that music from Napster and I just don't want to let go of it.
I've carried a smartphone around in my pocket since shortly after the iPhone was released. At work, I have always snapped pictures of bar code stickers we used to identify computers, the admin panel on printers, lights on switches and routers and all kinds of serial numbers. I have a career's worth of those photos that I only occasionally cull.
The 2009 iMac I used as a Plex server to watch movies hasn't been plugged in for four years, yet it and all the movies I ripped back in the days when Netflix sent you DVDs in the mail are still located in our family room. When I hear one of my friends talking about their movie streaming setups, I have to stifle the urge to bring them a hard drive to fill up for me. We subscribe to EVERY channel and don't have time to watch what we are already paying for, and here I am thinking of ways to get more.
I went through a collection of articles I'd saved today "to read later". It went back several years, and you could see my learning and interests patterns through different periods. I had dozens of saved YouTube videos on deadlifting and squatting from my power lifting days. There were tons of articles on stupid shit Trump did from 2105-2020 when I was building up my encyclopedic knowledge of his many faults. I had to trash a bunch of NYT and WaPo articles because I'm mad at them and canceled my subscriptions. I had automatically saved the entire blogging content of two of my favorite writers, Matt Birchler and Jarrod Blundy over the course of 2024 and had to eliminate all but the reference material from those prodigious writers.
Of course, I have every tech guy's obligatory box of various cables and connectors. You just never know when you might need a 30-pin iPod cable or s-video adapter. FireWire might even stage a comeback. Stranger things have happened. I think there's even a Windows 7 laptop, sans power cord, around here somewhere that hasn't been booted up in 12 years. We have an extra iPad that I keep trying to think of a use for, and I am still holding on to my last Apple Watch, thinking I might make it my nighttime sleep recorder. I've been thinking about that for quite a while.
Anyway, when Wonder Woman reads this, it may be my last blog post, so if y'all don't hear from me, you'll know she beat me to death for not getting rid of some of my very valuable personal possessions!
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3 Productivity Tips and Apps
Here are three cool things I've learned about recently.
1. Create a cumulative clipboard with Popclip
Popclip is an app that does all sorts of things with text you select, from sending it to different apps, to formatting it, looking it up on Google, adding it to your calendar. One trick I learned it can do is to create a list from things you copy to your clipboard, so that you can copy 10 different things and then paste them all at once.
2. Access Menu Bar Commands from Anywhere with Better Touch Tool
Better Touch Toolis an app that lets you create an infinite amount of shortcuts and automations with your keyboard, mouse and trackpad. One of the things I set it up to do is add the menu bar commands to where ever my cursor is located when I type the ⌘ twice. I don't have to remember any shortcuts other than that one to use all the available commands in any program
3. Use Raycast to Auto-Quit Apps
Raycast is a free keyboard driven app launcher similar to Spotlight, except it has superpowers and can replace all kinds of other programs on your computer, like your clipboard manager, your emoji picker and your window manager. One cool feature you can use on a case by case basis is to have it quit programs you aren't using automatically. Macs do a good job with memory management, but after a while your interface gets cluttered if you leave everything open. Just set Raycast to certain quit apps if they go 10 minutes without being used.
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Nothing Lasts Forever
One of the central tenets of Buddhism is that everything is decaying. Eventually, everything falls apart. One just has to buy a home to see the truth in this. Trust me. Today, lots of people were disappointed that a well-liked Internet service, Omnivore, which allowed you to save articles to read later, subscribe to newsletters without using your personal email, and have some articles automatically archived, was turning off its servers on November 15. Some folks had just transitioned to using Omnivore, only to find that their efforts were now wasted. It was my favorite way to read a couple of my favorite writers, so I had to scramble to come up with an alternative.
People have seen it happen time and again. Huge, popular websites and companies have just disappeared or changed so completely that they are no longer the same: MySpace, Digg, StumbleUpon, Epinions, the list is endless. We are used to it now. That's why I say people were disappointed rather than shocked.
If you look at stats, the average length of time that people stay in a job continues to decrease. In 2024, it's a reality that in order to grow your wages, you often have to move from one employer to another. Pensions are very rare these days. Most of us have self-funded retirement; some are lucky to have an employer contribution, but our accounts are portable, unlike in the past. Even jobs that were once looked at as lifetime opportunities aren't the same anymore. I am a retired state employee, and one of the benefits I earned is lifetime health insurance. Too bad for new hires, though. The Republican state legislature took that away from future retirees, including teachers.
I have seen landmark restaurants close their doors forever. It makes me really sad to think that my beloved Zorbas, the diner at the end of my street where I have eaten for 30 years, will be gone one day. I don't think that one set of my grandchildren has ever spent the night with us without going there for pancakes on a weekend morning. Things can be so central to our lives, and then one day they are just gone.
Some great films from the early days of the movie industry weren't preserved, and the works of people like Rudolph Valentino, Clara Bow, and many others from the silent era will never be seen again. The military records of hundreds of thousands of World War Two veterans were burned in a fire at a VA records warehouse in the '60s, and the information on them is not retrievable. People think that the advent of computers means that data will last forever, but that's not true. CDs, floppy disks, and hard drives all have life spans, and if the data, whether it be pictures or music or books, isn't continually moved from one medium to another, one day it will be gone.
I am of an age where my much-loved grandparents are long gone. Nobody likes to dwell on death, but we know that as we age, the frequency at which we confront it accelerates. Our relatives, our peers, our heroes, and idols begin to leave. I still find it hard to believe that I live in a world without people like Muhammed Ali and Hank Aaron, but I do.
So, as trite as it may be, I'm using this reflection to encourage you (and myself) to savor what we have right now. Call your mom. Eat at your favorite restaurant. Read your favorite magazine. Watch your favorite TV show. Enjoy it all. One day it will all be gone.
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A Meditation on Nice People
A long time ago, a friend of mine told me that in life, you find what you look for. I believe that to be true most of the time. I'm always on the lookout for nice people. Thinking about them is a tool I use in my personal gratitude practice, a daily exercise where I record three things I'm grateful for. I have been doing it for years. There's never been a time in my life when I couldn't find some folks with kindness in their heart. Even during the years when I worked as a prison guard, there were inmates who did kind things in a non-manipulative way. I used to drink coffee continually on that job. You could buy a packet of Taster's Choice in the canteen for a dime in those days. An old con who cleaned the area around my desk gave me some sage advice one day. "Mr Plummer," he said, "Don't ever put that coffee cup down and turn your back on it. These boys will spit in it if you do." It's been almost 40 years since he told me that and I still remember him for saving me from that indignity.
During the years I worked as an IT tech in the school system, I would always be showered with gifts at Christmas. Teachers would bring me baked goods, iTunes gift cards, coupon books, CDs and more. With all that teaching involves, remembering the guy who comes around once in a while to look at your laptop takes some real effort. When I took a mid-career break to get married and go hiking for six months, many of those teachers send care packages to my wife and I with edible treats, socks, bug spray and other things from our wish list.
People with demanding, public facing jobs who maintain their cool and make others feel welcome have a special gift. The wait staff at my favorite diner, even when they are slammed, still acknowledge their regulars. They are still nice and patient with kids. They take a minute to crack jokes and to make fun of me for always ordering the same thing.
So many of the tools I've learned to love on my computer are apps that some developer has made and given away for free. Everything I know about creating a blog is a result of freely distributed guides and tutorials. The number of letters I've gotten from complete strangers on the Internet to thank me for something or to encourage me or to praise me is just astounding. People will go out of their way just to make someone else feel good and I think that is awesome. Yes, I have also experienced some meanness online but it's overshadowed by kindness.
I think often about some of the giants I have know who dedicated their lives to the social justice movement. I know men and women who worked in the deep south during the Civil Rights era at great danger to themselves. I know organizers who survived the 1979 Greensboro Massacre who are still committed to the cause of helping poor people. I know union workers who've left home to travel to other areas to help organize workers so that they might enjoy the same benefits. I know soldiers who, sickened by war, laid down their rifles to speak out to try and stop the senseless killing that our government asked them to do in the nebulous name of freedom.
Look for kind people today. Better yet, be kind. Get your name added to someone's gratitude list.
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I have updated my /now page - What I’m reading and watching, plus links to this week’s blog posts, the week’s best purchase, and the links I added to my personal bookmarks.
Inevitable Things
I'm turning 60 in a few months and though I wouldn't say it's messing with my head in any kind of negative way, it has prompted me to think about aging and mortality more than I have in the past. It's so weird to be getting ready to start my seventh decade on earth while simultaneously being able to recall events from the past as if they happened yesterday. In some ways, it is almost inconceivable that high school happened 40+ years ago. I had dinner with my brother (58) and sister (56) the other night along with my mother (77) and we were recalling events from growing up as if they just happened last week.
I've been going gray for years. Not only that, but I wear a full beard and it is 100% white. Wonder Woman told me today that one of our grandkids said to her recently, "Nana you might be old, but at least you're not as old as Papa." For the record, we are less than two years apart. Still, there has been more than one occasion when we've eaten together, and they've extended a senior discount to me (I'm not old enough) and not to her. Sometimes I feel like I'm in a Sci-fi novel, married to an immortal who doesn't age. She was furious when Kamala Harris first named Tim Walz as her running mate because she thought he was just another old white man. Once she found out that Kamala and Tim are are the same age that he is cool AF, she calmed down.
I charged full steam ahead through my 40s and early 50s, hiking the Appalachian Trail and completing 83 century rides on my bicycle. I thought I'd be going like that for decades until arthritis brought me to a screeching halt and I had to have both knees replaced. Plenty of people go on to have very active lives after that surgery, so there is still hope that I'll get some of that mojo back. My mom walked across England and hiked the Camino de Santiago in Spain in her 70s.
Our oldest grandchildren have graduated from high school now. It won't be long before we are great-grandparents. It's funny because all of my siblings, none of whom got married or had kids early like me, all have children the same ages as my grandchildren. I grumbled for years that I didn't like kids, but it was all a facade. I worked in primary and elementary schools for two decades, and being a grandparent has been one of the best experiences of my life.
I'm trying to be OK with the fact that I don't feel like my time on earth is unlimited like I have for most of my life. Not being a religious person, there are no thoughts of an afterlife. Every time I do something unhealthy, I immediately have the thought that I'm robbing myself of time. I wish I could say that I am them immediately motivated to then eat some spinach and power walk around the block, but so far that has not been the effect.
I have got to say that I enjoy having been around enough to be retired from my career job. It's cool going to work these days because I want to, not because I have to. I could stop at any time. That's pretty empowering. It makes the crappy days that inevitably happen at work more bearable. I'm not even the oldest person in my office. Our database manager is three years my senior, and she takes no shit from anyone. She's my role model.
I can accept my eyes getting weaker and my gait getting slower. As far as I can tell, my mind isn't slipping yet. Both my parents are still alive, so family history indicates that I probably have quite a few years left. I hope so. There is so much more to write about.
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Being Wonder Woman's Husband
At 8:00 AM Saturday morning, Wonder Woman and about 70 others will begin running a 2.2-mile course over and over for 24 straight hours. Whoever covers the most distance in that time period will be declared the winner. Those completing 50k, 50 miles, 100k, 75 miles, and 100 miles will receive special awards. Some races are entrepreneurial money-making events for the organizers. Ironman, the titular sponsor of triathlons, is a for-profit company. The race Wonder Woman is in is a fundraiser. The money raised goes to an organization in the greater Williamsburg, VA area called The Arc. This is a wonderful inclusive organization offering programs to adults with developmental and intellectual disabilities.
The name of the race is The Greensprings 24. The start/finish line and crew area (I'm crew) is at Jamestown High School. If you want to follow her, you can do it here. Her race number is 204, and her actual name is Carol Plummer.
I'll be set up in a pop-up off to the side with her supplies. I'll be in charge of filling bottles with both water and a liquid nutrition product called Tailwind. She has prepared packets of sports nutrition products that she will pick up every five laps or so. I have a small backpacking stove to heat up some real food for her to wolf down later in the day and through the night. It consists of things like plain white potatoes and soup. I'll be making coffee for us both.
Today has been kind of ritualistic. We live about four hours away, so we had to travel and check into a hotel. She's stayed off her feet for the most part, although I did have to talk her out of going out and doing tourist things today. She has a more restless nature than I do! It's important that she stays extra hydrated today and that she eats some extra carbs. Her favorite pre-ultramarathon meal is pho, the Vietnamese rice noodle soup made with a salty and savory beef broth. She got into bed at 5:30 to read and hopefully doze off early. We will sleep as late as we can tomorrow before driving the 15 minutes to the racecourse in time to get the crew area set up.
My duties will be pretty minimal. I'm mostly there as a cheerleader and motivator. If she gets blisters, I'll play medic, and as she gets progressively more tired, I'll help her with socks and shoe changes. I'll probably get yelled at a time or two. Ultramarathon runners are known for being grouchy crybabies sometimes because it's a terribly stressful sport. I'm experienced enough to let the abuse roll off. If blowing up at me makes her feel better, she's welcome to call me names any time. I admire her not just for competing in these events but also for all the training and disciplined training, eating, and sleeping she does on top of working an important job full-time, being a wife, a mom, and a grandmother. I don't call her Wonder Woman for nothing!
When the race is over, we will have to pack the car and drive back to the hotel. We've arranged a late checkout so we can both get some sleep before driving home and going back to work on Monday.
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Generation X Isn't Mad, It's Tired
The dividing line between Generation X and Boomers is New Years Day, 1965, fifty-two days before I was born. Over the next 15 years my cohort, smaller than the one that preceded it and the one that followed it (Millenials), began to reap the meager rewards our parents bequeathed us, single-parent families, careers as latch-key kids, run away inflation and coming of age with Reagan in the White House making it easy on rich folks and kicking off the decline of the middle class by breaking unions and kicking income inequality into high gear.
The oldest Gen X-ers are only five years from retirement. Everything seems to have changed for us. We bought records we traded in for tapes that we traded in for CDs before we downloaded MP3s that we stopped listening to when we had to start paying a subscription fee to listen to music. After graduating from high school, I supported a wife and a baby by cooking at a Shoney's and serving in the National Guard one weekend a month. By the time my youngest reached maturity, two adults working full time at entry level jobs could barely make ends meet.
We experienced a few cool things, like getting to watch MTV when they played music video. We've had some great music. We got to transition out of a world that worried about nuclear holocausts. Unfortunately we got to see AIDS put in an end to the free love we thought we were going to get. I've lost count of the financial crises we've endured.
Generation X | Origin, Years, Characteristics, & Facts | Britannica
Gen X is next up for retirement. Are they in denial?
Gen X Research | Environics Research
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Living Lowbrow in a Highbrow World
Back in the days when people still bought encyclopedias, my parents were confronted by an especially good salesman who sold them not only a full set of the Book of Knowledge but also a collection of classic literature. When I was in elementary school, I tackled many of those books because I thought they sounded interesting. I mean, Gulliver's Travels was about little people, and Pilgrim's Progress was about (I thought) American pioneers. I plowed through the books with as much understanding as I could muster at that age, and can today truly state that I've read them. The problem is that it's been years since I felt any urge to approach that kind of book. When I see people reading The Scarlet Letter or Dante, I'm in awe. I would feel like I was back in high school senior English if I picked up one of those books. I'm even inherently suspicious when an enthusiastic reviewer claims that a novel in one of the genres I like these days—English detective novels, science fiction, military fiction—rises to the level of literature.
I'm generally OK with my lack of formal education. I managed to learn enough on my own to support myself through retirement. I can talk to anybody and don't suffer from low self-esteem (quite the opposite if you ask Wonder Woman). I just regret not being exposed to classes like music appreciation and art appreciation. I enjoy some classical music. I've listened to Vivaldi enough that I can generally recognize his compositions, but I don't have any background in theory. Opera is a mystery, and I've only got a rudimentary knowledge of the development of jazz, although I do have a good collection of Miles Davis and John Coltrane.
When it comes to art, well, I've been to one exhibition—Norman Rockwell. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but I know that hardly qualifies me as a connoisseur. I can name famous artists and tell a Rothko from a Jackson Pollock, but I still feel under-qualified. My son takes trips to Boston and New York just to visit art museums. Considerable space in his tiny Austin bungalow is given over to his collection of art books, and the walls are covered in originals he's purchased at galleries. My walls are covered in pictures of my grandkids and Wonder Woman's photography, which is admittedly pretty arty.
I rarely like any film that wins the Best Picture award from the Academy. In fact, I am still mad at myself for sitting through The English Patient all those years ago. It's not that I'm a fan of superhero movies—not that there is anything wrong with them—I just seem to lack the gene that lets people discern symbolism in films. I'm very much an on-the-surface kind of guy. My most common reaction to reviews of arty movies is WTF?
At this point in my life, I'm not likely to summon the energy to improve on any of this. I've learned to live with my shortcomings in appreciating things the way the more cultured folks do. I feel proud of myself for reading the occasional book of poetry (full disclosure: my son buys them for me) and for reading The New Yorker, Harper's, and The Atlantic. That will have to do, I suppose.
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The Best Pharmacist in the World
For one reason or another, I've taken some kind of medication on a daily basis for almost forty years. I am an expert at swallowing pills. I'd hate to estimate how many I've taken over the years. Despite the attempts by my insurance company to strong-arm me into using a mail-order pharmacy, I stubbornly cling to a locally owned one that I lucked into by being hard to get along with.
I used to use various big box pharmacies. One thing I quickly learned by doing that was that the people there do not care about you. You might occasionally run into someone with a heart for people, but by and large, the pharmacists and techs there don't form relationships, and they stop seeing their customers as human beings after a while. That's been my experience. They will tell you to come back tomorrow in a minute. They will tell you that counting your own meds after they short you is your responsibility. Furthermore, they won't make the extra effort to deal with frustrating insurance companies. I pretty much would rather die a thousand deaths than deal with one.
Luckily, a local pharmacist with good business sense saw an opportunity to draw business away from them by starting his own pharmacy in a good location. He hired nice, competent people, and most of the time, you could go in there with a prescription in hand and walk out within 15 minutes with your medicine. It was glorious. Unfortunately, he had two giant TVs right behind the cash register tuned in at all times to Fox News. I was in there when they were covering a story about poor people trapped in a flood after a hurricane. The owner of the pharmacy was ranting that it was all their own fault for not leaving. I disgustedly asked him if he thought maybe they should have just driven their Maserati out of town or something.
I went home, went to the pharmacy's Facebook page, and left a scathing review, where I said they had good service but bad politics, and they weren't getting any more of my money as a result. I resigned myself to living in Big Box Hell. Some period after that, I got a message through Facebook from a name I didn't recognize. The writer, first name LeRoy, told me that he'd been a partner in the pharmacy but that he was leaving to go out on his own. He let me know that there would be no giant TVs playing Fox News in his new business and asked me to give him a chance, so I did.
These days, when I go to a doctor's visit for med refills, LeRoy has them filled before I can get out of the parking lot. If I have a question or an issue about one of my prescriptions, I can message him via Facebook or text him to get an answer or a refill. He's fought every insurance battle that's faced me for a decade. When big pharma jacked up the price of one of my meds by 400%, LeRoy figured out how to get me a better price. If I'm late picking up a refill, he doesn't put my meds back on the shelf and yell at me on my next visit; he just holds on to them for me, secure in the knowledge that I will get there eventually.
We are social media friends, and both of us are big baseball fans. I've followed his son's career from club ball through our local high school and summer ball. He now plays for the university where I work, which has one of the nation's best NCAA D3 baseball programs and a legendary coach. LeRoy's wife is a nurse practitioner with her own clinic, and she's treated me for everything from multi-day hiccups to a sliced finger.
In a day and age where so many businesses seem as though they exist only to extract money from you, LeRoy and his pharmacy are a total exception. He gives unfailingly polite service and always makes me feel welcome and cared for. He inquires about my wife, asks about my job, and tells me about his last baseball trip. Everyone should be so lucky.
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Should You Eat at Chick-fil-A?
LGBT Activist # 1
If a restaurant was taking the money they make and giving it to organizations trying to dissolve your marriage and take your kids away from you, you wouldn't give a shit if they"have really good lemonade."You wouldn't eat there. - FAITH NAFF
LGBT Activist # 2
"If gay rights advocates permanently withhold our business from Chick-fil-A, we'll send the message that stepping away from hateful causes was a mistake, and companies will be less likely to listen to our demands in the future."Nate Morris (CAS '27)
I don't eat at Chick-fil-A. I like chicken sandwiches OK, but I prefer the ones from Bojangles. Hell, I eat the ones they sell in gas stations. Every Chick-fil-A I come across is always super crowded. They have a reputation for dealing well with crowds, but you have to go be part of a crowd to find out if that's true. No thanks.
The biggest reason I don't eat there though is their reputation for being homophobic. Someone in my area had a Chik-fil-A Support Day a couple of years ago and lots of ostentatious Christians that I know made a big deal out of going their and posting it on social media just in case they hadn't done enough in their lives to be shitty to LGBT people.
In doing some basic research for this post, I found that the hate-chicken people quit giving money to homophobic organizations a few years ago. The owner doesn't even use his personal fortune that way any more. Most people think the motivation behind that is to stave off boycotts and bad press and they are probably right. Right-wing organizations accused Chik-fil-A of caving the the Gay Agenda, if you can believe that.
I know some principled leftists who patronize them now, partially because out of all the fast food chains, they offer more for people with celiacs. Since I don't personally have celiacs, I'll keep on eating at Bojangles though.
VIEWPOINT: Stop Asking Us to Boycott Chick-fil-A – The Hoya
Chick-fil-A and LGBT people - Wikipedia
Chick-fil-A “woke” controversy: Why conservatives are calling for boycotts | Vox
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The Culinary Misadventures of the Long Distance Hiker
The year Wonder Woman and I hiked the Appalachian Trail, we were away from home for 156 days, from early May to mid-October. At the beginning of our journey, I weighed around 230 pounds. By the end, I had dropped to 180 pounds and was wearing medium-sized clothes for the first time since high school. For most long-distance hikers, the two overriding feelings are ravenous hunger and fatigue. The trail involves over 400,000 feet of climbing, stretching from Maine to Georgia and covering just shy of 2,200 miles. It’s almost impossible for hikers to carry enough food to sustain their weight, though some manage better than others for physiological reasons I can’t quite grasp.
In preparation for our hike, we spent a lot of time packing boxes of food for my daughter and son-in-law to mail to us at various hostels, outfitters, and general delivery post offices along the way. We bought cases of oatmeal, Pop-Tarts, energy bars, corn chips, and other pre-made food. We also dehydrated large quantities of sweet potatoes, black beans, and several London broils to make beef jerky. Since Wonder Woman has celiac disease and can’t eat wheat, we were concerned about finding adequate food for her along the trail. In hindsight, we shouldn’t have worried—or prepared so much food. We ended up giving away large portions of it when it became monotonous. To our surprise, finding gluten-free food wasn’t as challenging as we had anticipated.
A guy my size, carrying a 25-pound backpack and climbing mountains all day in hot weather, can burn upwards of 5,000 calories a day if he hikes long enough. We typically woke up around 5:00 AM to eat and pack our gear. My breakfast usually consisted of two large honeybuns thickly covered with peanut butter or Nutella. Occasionally, I’d indulge in a bagel. I drank instant coffee boiled over the beer can alcohol stove I packed. While hiking, I’d consume a Snickers bar or a couple of Nature Valley granola bars every hour. I also ate quite a few Clif bars, but I found they tasted progressively worse the more I had.
For lunch and dinner, I often wrapped my meals in a big flour tortilla. My fillings included tuna, cheese from a block I carried, dried beef or Slim Jims, hot sauce, and maybe some crumbled Fritos. I always had a second tortilla with peanut butter. For dessert, I enjoyed candy, usually Whoppers or dark chocolate. I also devoured countless bags of pork rinds—they weigh almost nothing and pack a whopping 900 calories per bag. Sometimes I’d eat a couple of family packs of instant mashed potatoes or instant rice or pasta dishes from Lipton. I’m proud to say that, unlike most of my fellow hikers, I didn’t eat any ramen noodles. I like them just fine, but they simply didn’t appeal to me at the time. After returning home, I discovered that I had royally messed up my electrolyte balance by not getting enough sodium, so maybe some ramen would have been a good idea after all.
Hiker hunger is truly on display at restaurants in the towns along the trail. Every few days, hikers need to find a place to buy supplies, wash their clothes, and grab a shower. However, they don’t do any of that until they’ve filled their bellies at whatever establishment they can find. There were times when I’d order a meal, quickly finish it, and then order a second meal before feeling even slightly full. Alongside the food, I’d drink entire pitchers of Coke, or, when we were in the South, sweet iced tea. We were always on the lookout for any AYCE (all you can eat) places, although I was asked to leave a Chinese buffet in Pittsfield, MA, after my sixth plate. In New Jersey, there’s a stretch of trail that allows you to hit quite a few delis in a short span, and I certainly took advantage of that. In New England, I savored a delicacy we don’t have in North Carolina: gigantic full-belly clams. Of course, in Maine, I enjoyed fresh lobster during a memorable meal in Millinocket, the town near the northern terminus of Mount Katahdin.
Most of the weight I lost came back within a year. To this day, I haven’t had another Snickers bar, and I went a decade without eating a honeybun. I’m not a Nutella fan anymore, although I still enjoy a fair amount of peanut butter. Whenever we travel to trail towns during hiking season, I always nudge Wonder Woman if I see a hiker come in, so we can watch them order the prodigious amount of food they typically get. It brings back such fond memories.
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