degringolade

You know, I think that I violated one of my own words of wisdom some seven years ago and didn't read the manual for posting on Dreamwidth. I just thought that I knew it all. Well, the posts that I put up trying to figure out how to do things would not have been necessary should I have actually read up on a (then) new system. So y'all don't have to put up with my fumbling around after this.

I unplugged the TV this morning. I don't think that it will be plugged in again until October 25th. I hope to have the self-discipline to keep it that way until the scheduled date. Luckily, the game yesterday was a perfect example of why I am scaling back. Too much "pageantry", too many commercials, and the collection of self-absorbed divas on the Chiefs reinforces the correctness of this stance. It was a pretty good game from a technical point. Would have been more enjoyable without the commercial input or the unfortunate insights into the marriage of sports and entertainment.

The weather is good enough today to get out for a nice walk. I am pondering a haircut, but I don't want to rush into things.

Impressionism / Emile Claus/ Zonnegloed

Last day of this week. Still have to buy one present but Christmas is in the bag.

Since L. passed, the family needs to decide what Christmas is about. This is a transition year, with almost no prep or thought. It has always been too much about the tree and the presents and santa. But now it is kinda sterile of anything except the vestiges of a failed tradition.

Still, one can’t build anything in the nineteen days we had to think about it. I suppose this will take a couple of years to figure out.

Southern Song Dynasty (1127–1279) / Ma Yuan/ Water Album - The Yellow River Breaches its Course

I have been thinking about the myopia that relying on the internet for one’s source of information allows/encourages. I have been trying to find an alternate source(s), even tried a couple of the weekly news magazines and they seem to have the same problems that cruising the internet has: They present the news with a partisan bias that ensures that the reader is indoctrinated to the political views of the magazine. Much is left out, nuance is ignored. Villains are generated and heroes exalted. It is a bit of a bore.

I am coming to the conclusion that, in a society where hyper-capitalists are the end-stage, and personal wealth the touchstone of a life well-lived, I suppose that this can only be expected. The journal’s themselves are an odd attachment to the big boys, usually staffed by well-educated graduates of a specific flavor favored by the oligarch who ponied up the money.

Overall it appears to me much cheaper to head out to the original sites. But I think that I I will spend some time and come up with a decent list of site that, taken together, might give me a decent snapshot of what is actually going on in the world.

But I am thinking that anything that I take seriously has to be linked to an original source. I will read other folks' opinions, but I won’t use them as a basis for a decision.

Realism / Arkhip Kuindzhi/ Sunset in the winter. A coast of the sea

Last day of this installment of the diminishment of paid time off. Travelled up to M&M’s and hung out for a day and brought a sausage fest (thank you Sheridan Fruit Company) and generally relaxed. Only driving seemed to cause any stress.

Spent a bunch of time figuring out how to hide from the future. No consensus was available despite the available intoxicants and sufficient time to come up with a solid plan. Unfortunately, it appears that the future is coming and has a sufficiently wide path that getting out of the way doesn’t appear to be one of the available options. Sigh.

I won’t go into the simple fact that I am constantly amazed (and truthfully quite pleased) that things aren’t already in the toilet. I am hoping that I will be proven wrong by all of the pollyannas and bourgeois bumpkins who are constantly reminding me that I have not been proven false yet.

But I am more and more coming to the opinion that while I hope to be proven wrong, I may be proven right in the not too distant future.

So now I am going to spend the rest of the week pondering. As fearful as I am of quoting the Archdruid Emeritus, I think that at the end of the day his aphorism of “Collapse Now, Avoid the Rush”. Might really be the only way to look at the problem. I guess that it beats the other witticism about lying back and enjoying it when confronted with the inevitable.

Surrealism / M.C. Escher/ Sundial ( XXIV Emblemata: rejected plate)

Another day away from work. Taking today off, taking Tuesday off. Relaxing and doing stuff. Gotta burn up sick leave and annual leave. After all, fourteen months and change.

So today is pondering the assumptions going into our current society/predicament. Depending on just how I approach this, this could go just about anywhere. I am blaming Michael and Keith for this. They both have been routinely blowing up trains of thought that were on the way to running off the cliff anyway. I suppose they were doing their due diligence, but nothing is quite so annoying as spending effort developing a line of reasoning and then having someone show you that one of the supports can’t quite bear the load. Sigh.

I have been trying to start Octavia Butler’s “The Parable of the Sower” and have been failing. I just can’t really get into a well written dystopian novel right now. I think that the phrase “all truths are half truths” came out of that book, but I can’t seem to find the phrase to feel confident about quoting it. Might be just a dream of mine.

But that is the way that things seem to me right now. I am trying to get my mind wrapped around what is happening and when I start digging down, I get information telling me that the previous thing that I used to begin developing the ideas or thoughts didn’t quite get me enough information. So then I have to backtrack and start again. Sometime I feel as though I am at the gnomon of a world-sized sundial and am trying to keep up with the movement of the shadow across a culture-sized dial plate.

Sometimes it is just exhausting. Maybe gonna take some time away from the thinking and rot my brain in an attempt for a reboot.

Current Mood: 井
Current Location: Kitchen Table

Not too much happening of note. Second day charging experiment a failure. Will repeat tomorrow. Should have been today, but bed was tough to get out of..

Getting closer to something happening. I am hoping for the best, but I really can't see too many scenarios where things will improve drastically soon. Most scenarios seem to lean toward the "this isn't going to end well" direction. But all the things that look to effect me are not really in good shape. Me and my shadow (Shadow here symbolizing the generational beliefs of us boomers) are failing and trying to cobble something together last minute is usually a recipe for failure.

Who knows how the whole deal will shake out. I am planning out how to do with a lot less. That's really all that I have right now. Luckily even I, an overfed, long-haired leaping gnome (ha, figure out that reference) am way above the truly needed and into the sybaritic. So I have a whole bunch of less I can explore pretty effortlessly.

Current Location: happy lamp and coffee
Current Music: Buffalo Springfield: On the way Home

Realism / Vasily Polenov/ The ill woman

I really feel that I am pretty well suited to the current crisis.

I mean really, look at me. Raised in Utah by a bunch of Italian rubes stuck in the middle of Mormons. Everything I was raised for came into play in my mind lately. Economy in the shitter? Well, I am used to being poor, so the poor Italian cheapskate can come to the fore. I think Polenta and Gnocchi and Paella Italiana and fagioli are poor food. Couple this with the Mormon prepper mentality and you have cornmeal, beans and other such goodies available at any given time, with redundancy in spades.

You see, I am thinking that you had better start brushing up on your cooking chops.

Look, I think you are going to be at home for a bit. So start doing the things that will help you when the show restarts. You're gonna be poorer, best figure out how to cook cheap at home, because going out is going to be curtailed. Good food, made by hand, served at home, is a pretty good way to keep occupied and happy. Don't even think of going low fat and healthy. Make shit that makes you happy. For me, that involves pork fat.

Yeah, yeah, you might put on a couple of pounds. But hell, if this thing goes south, you will be offered more than ample chances to going on a pretty strict diet.

I would also recommend getting baked, binge-watching Marie Kondo, and home improvement efforts for the duration

Current Location: happy lamp and coffee
Current Music: Monkees: The Last Train to Clarksville

Impressionism / Pierre-Auguste Renoir/ Dance at Moulin de la Galette

Short and sweet today. Going to head in a finish digging out from under the wreckage. I have no idea if the plan will work or what the course of this thing will be. Right now I am just going to concentrate on my piece. I realize that the work I will be doing might not be useful if things head south, but at that point, who cares.

So it is off to the early max and the early tram. They have been empty thus far so social distancing is a great idea and easily done.

Just as a side note, I am thinking that if we really want to flatten the curve, we are taking a lot of half measures. I ran numbers on hospital capacity and more importantly ICU capacity in the US and the numbers aren't good.

Off to work. Take care.

Current Location: Happy Lamp and Coffee
Current Music: Not feeling it

No post yesterday. Can't really say why, just didn't feel it. Did a spot of OT, came home and lounged. Pretty much a nothing day. No particular shame. Today is a fall Sunday. Laundry is in the dryer, I have the bread start going. Maybe some football watching, maybe a spot of cleaning.

Screed:

Spoke with C. the other day, and unless I was mistaken, I think that in the course of the conversation I was referred to as as an "Ethnonationalist". Wow. Now, I have a clear written record of seriously limiting immigration, I can't for the life of me figure out where the aforementioned label came about. Especially in light of my mongrel heritage. I think that I have been repeatedly referred to over the years as "not quite white".

My desire for limitation is not in any way about the people wanting in. Truth be told, I don't blame them a damn bit. They are trying to escape from what we are desperately trying to keep away. The more people of any flavor that we let in is another brick in the wall that seals us into our fate. I hope that people will forgive me for not wanting to hurry that process for my descendants. In a sense, the phrase from Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" comes to mind here.

That the makeup of the US is currently overwhelmingly white is not the issue here. Within the "white" race there are as many divisions as there without. Nope, I am in no way supporting the "white" ethnicity, as such a thing doesn't truly exist. What I am hoping for is a new synthesis of culture for the folks who are already here. I don't really care how they got here at this point, such a thing would be futile (not that futility is an unknown thing in this neck of the clear cut). But the change in worldview and the cultural accommodation and integration into a new cultural norm cannot be done by fiat, it's sole currency is time.

When you add the not-all-that-distant decline of the oil economy and the increasingly urgent coming of environmental decay, we might be looking at trashing the current industrial baronies and over-financialized economic model in favor of something considerably less. The current population is going to have to share a pie that is considerably smaller than what is currently available, and us Americans have never been noted for our willingness to change or our open embrace of frugality.

So, truthfully I tend not to see myself as an ethnonationalist. I will freely accept a designation of economic/environationalist though. Even worse, the nation that I envision myself a part of is Cascadia as defined by the Columbia River Drainage.

Current Location: Laundry and Tea

Sorry Mike, no update today. Mind is a wandering and when I cast the exact same hexagram (Hexagram 48 (The Well) with a moving line at the bottom) I have to sit up and pay notice.

One does not drink the mud of the well.

No animals come to an old well.

Then good old Jeff sent me a link to a video "Don't Let the Old Man In". Lots of folks like me need to watch it.

Some folks see this as a call to return to childhood, to become an adolescent again, to breathe again the irresponsibility and the solipsism of youth.

Fuck that: I am going to arrest things at being forty or so. Back when you really hit your stride. Back when you hit your power. Gonna work for a couple of years yet. Student loans, surreptitious supplements to the memory care facility to make Mom's life more comfortable, a pile of stock options from defunct companies, and 2008 all conspire against not working.

So I think that I will keep the old man out by walking out the door of the house every day before he gets there and locking the door behind me. I will remain among the living.

Current Mood: 井
Current Location: Kitchen Table

Paul Woner: Still Life with Napkins and Gift Box

I worked on Mike's stuff this weekend, but to tell you the truth, I was slow and fitful in my ethic and production. Gotta keep going, gotta keep going. This weekend I felt like an old man. I think that I am coming out of it now. Still feel old, but it isn't up at the front any more.

Gotta keep making repairs.

Current Mood: calm
Current Location: Kitchen Table
Current Music: Shawn Colvin: Sunny Came Home