A certain type of person cares very much about their constitutional right to own a gun so that they can defend themselves and their family from any perceived threat. They obviously believe in the need for a violent solution to a potential problem and are willing to take on all the added danger that owning a gun brings to their lives. Hey, after all, who wouldn't do whatever it takes for their family, right? Usually, that very same person is also adamantly against providing any type of accommodation to immigrants from countries where street violence is endemic, making the U.S. the only feasible sanctuary. It might cost them an extra fifty cents a day on their federal income taxes after all. Not only that, the more brown people there are in the country, the greater the chance that they might have kids, earn the right to vote, or speak Spanish in the presence of "real" Americans.

The same person who feels good because they adopt a kid from the Angel Tree at work every Christmas or because their church has a soup kitchen once a week has no problem supporting a political philosophy that would curtail food programs for the poor and eliminate Meals on Wheels for the elderly. They have a tremendous sense of entitlement for everything they feel they have earned and no sympathy for people who aren't in the same circumstances. Lots of people in the military lean conservative (not all though!). If you make a tour of barracks day rooms, you're likely to find lots of TVs turned to Fox News. Despite that, you will not find a more duplicitous, malingering, dishonest, getting free stuff from the government group of people than a service member at their discharge physical. There are people who specialize in helping them come up with every conceivable reason to get VA money for the rest of their lives for dubious medical reasons.

On the flip side, there are those who put themselves on the line for people whose circumstances they'll never share. Every straight high school kid who joins their school's Gay/Straight Alliance voluntarily risks bullying by homophobes. If you look at the roles of civil rights martyrs, you'll see the names of people like Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman who lost their lives helping people register to vote. Plenty of white people who enjoy all the privileges that their skin color gives them are adamantly opposed to white supremacy in all its insidious guises. Fannie Lou Hamer famously said, "Nobody is free until everybody is free," and lots of people take that to heart and make it their creed.

I'm not sure what makes a person lack compassion and empathy. Whatever it is, it's unattractive and malignant. When you don't care that poverty, hunger, and untreated diseases exist as long as you've got yours, well, you have lots of company. It seems that the price of gas and eggs is more important to a whole lot of people than anything that might help the less fortunate. And, that's just it. It's more often fortune that dictates one's circumstances than it is blood, sweat, and tears. It's fortune that picks your birthplace and your skin color. It's fortune that lets your job continue to provide for you when others lose theirs. It's fortune that your neighbor's house burned down and not yours. It's fortune that you don't have a crippling illness.

I don't like associating with people who lack compassion. I don't understand their selfishness. I don't want to see them gloat and blame poverty on the poor, blame illnesses on the sick, and claim that any attempt to address the patriarchy, racism, or homophobia is "identity politics." My people are the people who care. My people are the people who make a difference. My people are the ones who make whatever claim America has to greatness a reality.

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Ask me anything - Do you consider blogging to be an art form?

One thing I absolutely despise is elitism is any form, followed closely by gatekeeping. Sure, people have varying degrees of talent, but I prefer an open society that encourages folks to try their hand at things. It is much better than one that acts like the plebes should stay on the sidelines while the real pros do their thing. That's why I don't find it the least bit pretentious when anyone describes themselves as an artist, regardless of the form they choose. I smile when I see anyone present a drawing or a poem or a landscape photo to the world. It's an attempt to bring something conjured in one's creative spirit to life, shared with the hope that it will spark a feeling in others.

When I look at the effort it takes to write regularly, I know that it takes a muse of some sort. It takes real effort to come up with an idea, flesh it out, polish it and present it. I give bonus points when someone's post contains a hint of vulnerability, a confession that not everything in life is easy. "Hey world! I have a wart! Want to see it?" Laugh if you want to, that's a thing an artist would say. Let's face it, it's hard to come up with something original in a world filled with people who can say whatever they want, whenever they want. Just the act of trying conveys a certain sense of bravery.

Emily Dickinson never saw one of her poems published, yet she continued to write breathtaking poetry for the entirety of her life. Stieg Larsson wrote the entirety of the Millennium Trilogy (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) and died before it was published and became an international bestseller. There are many other examples like them. Artists write because they have something to say, something they have to get out. It's not about being recognized or lauded as much as it is about creating because doing so is a representation of our own humanity. When Og, the cave man, was drawing on the walls of his home all those years ago, he had no concept of received admiration. HE just had something inside himself that he wanted to get out.

Most of us have bloggers we admire. I told Keenan last week that I wasn't jealous. I just wished I could write the way they write. They responded kindly, saying, "I like the way that you write like you." What an affirmation. To me it means I've practiced my own art form enough to have developed my own style, something recognizable. That's the thing about almost any skill. When you practice, you get better. Malcolm Gladwell famously wrote about the 10,000-hour rule, where he proposed that The Beatles, Bill Gates and other successful people reached the heights they did because of how much they practiced, how much experience they had. That's why I write every day without fail. This is my art form and I want to get better at it.

That's why I don't give any credence to the criticism of blogging challenges. Writing every day isn't a gimmick. It isn't forced, necessarily. It is learned behavior and discipline. Writing is just taking what your thinking and putting the words down on record. If you think every day, and you do, then you can write every day. No one said making art was supposed to be easy. Picasso probably had days when he asked himself, "What the hell am I going to draw today?"

To all my fellow artists, do your thing! Do it often. Do it for yourself, and to hell with the rest of the world. Internal validation is the best validation.

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I don't actually have a cold, but if I'd titled this post "A Sick Man" then everyone would have thought it was about Trump and avoided it because we are all so tired of him and the attention he gets. To further obfuscate things, I don't believe I am actually sick either, just feeling the after affects of a couple of vaccinations. This has happened to me as punishment for telling Wonder Woman that I've never felt bad after getting a shot, possibly insinuating that people who do are experiencing a psychosomatic reaction. She said her arm was a little stiff at the injection site, prompting me to wave mine around, windmill fashion to show that I was just fine.

I generally escape the variety of communicable diseases that seem to plague some folks. Thirt years of working in the close confines of first a prison and then public schools seems to have given me the immune system of a plague doctor. While others complain of reoccurring sinus infections, bronchitis or other upper respiratory illnesses, I just get the sniffles once in a while or a mildly stopped up nose, both of which are adequately handled by OTC medications.

When I do come down with something, I usually have company. Wonder Woman and I have lived through two bouts with Covid, a horrible flu and joint food poisoning from a sketchy Mexican restaurant. We lie in bed together so that our kids won't have to wonder around the house to find our bodies if we end up dying. The bad case of flu happened when one of our daughters was visiting at Christmas. Her family drove all the way hear from central Florida and barely got to see us since we rarely ventured out of our bed room as we did not want to infect them.

I am not one of those men the Internet likes to mock when I don't feel well. I am not prone to moaning or any sort of drama. What I want more than anything is to be left alone. Headaches and bodily aches and pains tend to make me a little cross and ill natured. I usually don't feel up to any sort of prolonged conversation. I want nothing more than to be left alone so I can sleep. Sleep is the great cure all. The more I am unconscious, the less awareness I have of my plight and the better I like it.

Being sick on a weekend is the worst. You don't even get an unexpected break from work since you are already off. Thankfully, my white collar job offers PTO so if there is a need to stay home, my pay won't get docked. I remember the jobs I had early in my life when no work meant no pay and often those types of jobs also wanted a doctor's note, forcing you to actually pay to take a sick day. Isn't American great?

If I were one of those science denying Republicans, or RFK, Jr., I would be fine since that type no longer believes in the proven efficacy of vaccinations for some reason. That's fine. The fewer of those people in the world, the better off we all are. I know that wasn't a nice thing to sy, but you'll have to excuse me. I don't feel well.

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Today's question comes from hiro It has been answered by gabz, Tyler and Helen.

What is the best musical experience of your life?

Rather than describe a concert to you—and I have seen some wonderful acts—I'd rather talk about a quest I went on. This is a story about a particular time on the Internet when ethics were a little more cloudy than they are today, or at least that's my story and I'll be sticking to it. Somewhere around the turn of the century, two things collided in my world. I became one of the first people in my city to get broadband internet by virtue of having signed up on the waiting list years ahead of time when it was first opened up. The other circumstance was the heyday of Napster, a program that let you share your music collection for the rights to access the collections of other people, which you could then download at will.

Napster debuted in June of 1999, and by July of 2001, it was shut down by court order. This was a time before purchasing and downloading music online was widely available. The iPod and the iTunes store were still several years away. The way most people obtained music was by driving their car to the store and purchasing CDs. If you wanted to listen to music on your computer, you either slipped the CD into the drive or you went through a process known as ripping, where each song was converted into a format known as MP3. Hard drives were much smaller at the time, so you really had to keep an eye on disk space. I used a Windows computer I'd built myself in a giant tower that was almost three feet tall. It had room for three hard drives and a CD drive, all of which I used.

Rolling Stone Magazine, then and now, was fond of creating lists of songs and albums for music fans to argue about. I found an article online with their version of the top 500 albums of all time. I copied the entire list into an Excel spreadsheet and added two columns: HAVE and NEED. I went through the list and checked off the albums I already owned. As a classic rock fan, most of the highly regarded albums by The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and the like were ones I already owned. I didn't have any hip-hop, and my soul and blues albums were pretty sparse. It was definitely a white boy's music collection.

Each night after supper, I would sit down at my computer and search first for entire albums and, in some cases, for individual songs to piece other albums together. I relied on a website that still exists to this day, Allmusic.com, to find the track lists for the albums since the Rolling Stone article I used didn't have that information. I would listen to the tracks to make sure I wasn't getting a live version if I was trying to build a studio album and vice versa. Some songs were shared at a low quality, forcing me to download second and third copies to find ones that matched what I already had.

I was in my mid-30s while I was doing this, probably at the north end of the Napster-using demographic. The typical user was a college student with a computer connected to their school's broadband connection. Most people at home were just starting to give up their screeching dial-up for cable modems and DSL lines at the time. Because Napster skewed towards younger people, finding older albums—particularly ones that were out of print—was difficult. Two I remember searching for over a months-long period were Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music by Ray Charles, released in 1962, and Phil Spector, Back to Mono (1958 - 1969). The latter album, in fact, was the last one I needed to complete the entire 500 album collection. I remember the night I finally completed it.

As a result of searching for and curating the editions of so many songs, I was exposed for the first time to classic 90s hip-hop in the form of Dr. Dre's The Chronic and N.W.A.'s Straight Outta Compton. I got my first Frank Sinatra album, In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning. Hank Williams, Willie Nelson, and Johnny Cash all had albums on the list, and so I found out that I enjoyed their brand of country music. I found blues artists like Little Walter and Bobby Bland.

For a moment in time, I had a veritable music museum available to me. I could discuss and play just about anything a critic could name as being influential to the modern music scene. Over twenty years have passed now. When Apple released their top 100 albums of all time last year, I was deeply, deeply offended when I realized I didn't have them all. In fact, I didn't have anything by Frank Ocean or Kendrick Lamar, two of the artists with top 10 albums. Not only that, I couldn't even name any of their songs. That's on me. After Napster was shut down, I once again started purchasing music, both CDs and through downloads. My musical taste shifted from classic rock to alt-country, which is what I like to listen to today. For a period of time, though, I was on top of the musical world.

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I 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.