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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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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In North Carolina, where I live, early voted started this week. On the first day, we set a record for voter turnout. Even in the western portions of the state where a recent hurricane destroyed roads and where many people still don't have power, the number of people who turned out exceeded the numbers from four years ago when conditions were not impeded. Wonder Woman and I always try to vote early, partly to get it out of the way and partly out of excitement.

This year we went to a recreation center located about three miles from our house. My kids went to dances there when they were in school, and I have taken my grandchildren there many times to play on the playground. Today I went to defend democracy from the fascists trying to take over my country. Donald Trump recently called people like me "radical left lunatics" and said we are "the enemy within."

We were met by campaign volunteers from various candidates, who are allowed to approach voters as long as they stay 50 feet or more from the front doors. I gratefully accepted a voter guide from a guy who had a list of all the Democratic candidates and offered polite "no, thank yous" to everyone else who wanted to hand me literature. I usually try to research all the obscure races ahead of time, but I was glad to have the guide nonetheless. We used to be able to do straight party voting here, but the Republicans eliminated it because they thought it would help them.

Most of the people in line were younger and there were lots of POC. One dumb ass showed up in full Trump rally regalia and people were staring daggers at him. I wanted to catch his eye and mouth "I'm canceling your vote" but he kept staring at the floor, too embarrassed, I hope to feel like he could hold his head up amongst his perceived enemies. In my mind, whenever I am in line to vote, the happy people are always Democrats and the sour pusses are Republicans. Unfortunately, 60% of white men are probably going to vote for Trump, citing many different reasons but the primary one, I am convinced is to perpetuate white supremacy. Yeah, screw that. Not this white guy.

We had one extremely stupid constitutional amendment to vote on, one that would make excluding everyone under the age of 18 who isn't a US citizen from voting. If you thought there was already a law in place that did that, you would be right, but you underestimate the idiocy of the Republican Party who wants to plant the idea in their pitiful voter's heads that the Democrats are getting ready to allow children and illegal immigrants to cancel Bubba's vote. These people are pitiful.

I will be glad when the election is settled. I expect there to be all kinds of controversy and dirty tricks from the other side. Another insurrection is certainly a possibility. They are losers but they don't lose gracefully.

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I'm not going to pretend that I don't make assumptions about people from time to time because, as much as I try not to, I fall into the trap occasionally. I'm glad that, for the most part, plenty of other people and I seem to be less inclined to do it these days. We are learning not to assume that when someone is married, it's necessarily to someone of the opposite sex. We aren't as surprised when we find out that our friend's new love interest is from a different race. I love meeting someone who is into technology as much as I am who doesn't play video games, so I don't feel like such an outsider.

At the university where I work, the Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities & Sciences, who is a Professor of Religion & Philosophy, is covered in tattoos. The university chief of staff, a diminutive ex-banker, swears like a sailor. The football coach, who looks for all the world like a defensive tackle, turns out to have been a record-setting quarterback in college. The best network engineer I ever worked with talks with an accent that would fit right in "The Dukes of Hazzard" or "Hee-Haw."

People from other regions of the country (or the world) can easily have stereotypes of those of us from the South here in the US. That stereotype is that we are conservative, a little (or a lot) racist, old-fashioned, and uneducated. I always feel that I need to establish my progressive bona fides quickly, especially if someone knows I'm also a veteran or that I worked in manufacturing. I have to do that for my fellow Southerners too, just to keep the ones who actually are conservative racists from trying to include me in their conversations. I am not the type to ever hide a single facet of my personality or beliefs from anyone. I want people to know exactly who and what they are dealing with.

It seems to be a driving force within conservatism to work towards putting people back into stereotypical roles. Organizations that have used DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) are routinely attacked by Republicans, who paint the whole idea as a disturbance to the natural order of the world. They want women and people of color to stay in their traditional places. They make no secret of their disdain for same-sex marriage. When they try to practice inclusion, they use unqualified bootlickers like Herschel Walker or Mark Robinson or someone with the flawed party loyalty of Nikki Haley.

Learning how to escape thinking in stereotypes can be a lifelong process. Some people seem to naturally escape those kinds of attitudes, while others, like me, have had to be deprogrammed throughout our lives. I'm sure I have a long way to go, but I'm happy with how far I have come. Being open-minded is the goal.

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I made the weekly update to my /now page - Joan Westernberg, Bad Monkey, cheap but good earbuds, lots of blog posts, some links I added to my personal collection