Mmmm, Candy Hearts 19

February 14, 2025

“XOXO”

Tic-tac-toe?

“CUTIE”

Aw thanks… oh, wait, you were talking about yourself, little candy heart? Awkward.

Another Valentine’s Day is upon us. The romantically involved make sure to be especially involved today, in order to maintain said involvement. And why not? Doesn’t hurt to do nice things for each other.

What does hurt are the, well, not-nice things.

Sometimes relationships (romantic and otherwise) turn bad, or maybe they were bad from the start. It might not have been obvious at first, or perhaps obvious to everyone except the one involved in it, but it became clear before long… this person you’re with is treating you like shit and you don’t deserve it.

So you get out. And you look back and wonder… how on earth did you not see it? How could you have been so clueless? Of course this person was terrible. There were so many red flags, and you missed them all.

Maybe you have others in your life who saw those red flags and tried to warn you. Maybe if you had listened to them earlier you’d have saved yourself so much grief, so much hurt, so much lost time. Maybe they are thinking this. While they might seem sympathetic to you now, they are secretly (or openly) wondering “if you’d just listened to me, you idiot…”. And you feel more and more ashamed.

How could you have let this happen? How didn’t you see it? Are you just not that bright?

I’ve got three words for you.

Fuck. That. Shit.

Interesting how the abusive partner is out of the picture at this point but the shame and anguish remain.

It may be tricky to advise people on how to spot relationship toxicity in such a way that doesn’t imply “and if you stay despite this, you’re a dumbass”. We want to believe we have more control than we do, that we can avoid pitfalls if we just make all the right moves and not make mistakes, if we know the signs and act accordingly.

But that is not real life. While for sure there are things one can watch out for and avoid, all in all there is no immunity to this. These things happen. Being in love can make those red flags invisible.

In fact, if anyone is in fact getting on their high horse like “I told you they were bad news but you didn’t leave!”, this too is abusive behavior. They’re more interested in elevating themself than being supportive.

They deserve to get whacked a few times with a tire iron, right there alongside the abusive partner and anyone who decides to frame all this as some sort of life learning experience.

You know who would never shame you for not leaving a bad relationship sooner?

That’s right…

“LOVE U”

What is it about the letter U that I should love?

“HUG ME”

Will do. With my teeth.

Arguments and Failed Attempts to Fly

January 24, 2025

Two years ago today, my dad died.

The days that followed I was reeling with anger and approximately 37 other indescribable feelings and traits, such that I voluntarily went back to work after only two days of bereavement leave mostly just for something else to pay attention to, shocking my coworkers with my unexpectedly early return and with occasional remarks like “yeah, I’d have taken care of that sooner but my stupid dad had to go and die”, leading to me getting self-conscious that I wasn’t “performing grief” correctly.

In the time since, as events personal and global unfolded, there was getting used to that he wasn’t around anymore to offer whatever probably-terrible take he had about things. I might think to remark to him about something, perhaps to gripe about the Nationals (in fact, my very last text message to him was bemoaning that Trea Turner went to the Phillies), and then remember. That time is over. Other than standing over his grave and saying “so anyway Juan Soto went to the Yankees because of course he did”.

Among all that, one thought has kept coming back to me. I’ve thought back, over all the years of my life, all the things he’d ever said he wanted to do someday. Much of it he gave up on long ago. Others he would still have liked but circumstances caused him to give up much hope of it.

But now. None of it would ever happen. He reached his end.

Along with the huge loss itself, that a major piece of life is suddenly just… not there anymore, comes that even greater awareness of mortality.

So much he had wanted to do, and so little of it ever happened. Of what I knew about anyway.

How much can any of us hope to accomplish all we hope to someday, regardless of circumstances or feasibility?

The common saying is that one must “live life to the fullest”. Which is of course a bullshit sentiment. And the ghosts agree.

My dad did not “live life to the fullest” or “cherish every moment” or “make every day count”, whatever the hell any of that even means. He had goals over the years, and some of them he achieved, many he did not. What was he doing instead? Nothing special. Just… life. Daily routine, just like everyone else. But it’s one often filled with guilt and shame, because it’s just routine, nothing special. We create impossible standards for a Life Well Lived, which is a surefire way to make sure no one feels they’ve amounted to anything.

Even so, we like to feel like there’s some purpose to our lives, that our brief time in this universe made some sort of difference. Beyond what’s already necessarily the case anyway, like all of our interactions with others throughout that life, all the biological and chemical processes our bodies contained and performed.

We feel like there has to be more. We go about our lives and run into trouble and obstacles. Our relationships sour. Our dreams go unfulfilled or, if they are fulfilled, aren’t as great as we thought. There must be something better. There must be a reason. Because if not, why bother with anything? If whatever hard won joy or success is so fleeting or ultimately overrated?

Kind of makes you want to just stay in bed all day eating cookies.

Maybe the surest way to waste one’s life is to worry about wasting it.

I don’t want to say “it’s the little things that matter” or anything to that effect, since that’s ridiculous, too. As is any nonsense about being “happy”. Maybe it’s just a matter of claiming the good stuff when and where you can, since life, for all its precious brevity, will make even that a challenge.

My dad did often list a handful of things he was always proud of, including:

1. He was able to quit smoking.

2. He correctly guessed that it was Maggie who shot Mr. Burns.

I guess it’s something.

No More 2024

December 31, 2024

Another year. Another whole mess of things happening, and here I am on the last day of it trying to remember enough of it for a decent recap. Here goes…

January: The Map

– New year in a new age
– International potluck
– Another big ceasefire rally
– Snow day
– This better not be Covid again…
– Negative. Just a regular cold/flu.

February: Lucky Plate

– The Chiefs again.
– (Ash) Valentine’s Day
– I’ll make a bunch and see what’s good
– Maybe I’ll actually do the Gummi Ship stuff this time.
– Ahhh! Extra day!

March: The Banality of Evil

– AwesomeCon!
– Oh, fuck, the Key Bridge collapsed?!
– Easter at Brookside as usual

April: 15:15:14

– How am I doing this?
– Is this plan going to work? I have no idea
– Shit. It’s going to be cloudy. Probably. Change destination? I don’t know!
– Screw it, let’s just get on the road and see what happens…
– Okay. We’re here…
– Holy shit, the clouds are clearing!
– WHOA

May: Frankie

– Crackdowns on pro-Palestine protests on campuses, inb4 another Kent State…
– Star Wars game in the rain
– Whatever I do it’s never enough.
– Don’t rush off to the picnic and leave me to do all this shit!

June: Twelve Day Turnaround

– Tornado warning. Whatever.
– Wait. It’s an actual tornado?! Wow.
– I’ve got to get this renewed before the deadline.
– That was fast.
– Oof, Biden, are you… uh, you okay, man?

July: Sunday Afternoon

– Blueberry pie for the 4th.
– Oh, shit, someone made an attempt on the Orange Thing.
– Someone not named Mike Pence is next to him now, wonder why that is…
– What’s Biden saying?
– Hooooooooooooooooly shit!
– The Paris Olympic cauldron is a hot air balloon. Your argument is invalid.

August: Offsides

– Tim Walz for VP
– USWNT Soccer Gold!
– Team USA basketball Gold, after biting off all nails.
– Also, Snoop Dogg.
– DNC a lot more cheerful than it might have been.
– States roll call!

September: Talk About Extreme

– Ghosts.
– RIP James Earl Jones
– Harris mops floor with Orange Thing in debate.
– She does it with one hand, too. The other is on her chin.
– No, NO! Not in my neighborhood!
– RIP Maggie Smith

October: Fragilissimo

– Holy shit, the Commanders are actually… good?!
– This has been going for a goddamn year now and no end in sight.
– Expensive car work is expensive
– Did you just straight up kill the Post endorsement because Bezos didn’t want to piss off the Orange Thing?

November: The Price of Eggs

– Good opportunity to check the place out
– Alright, it’s time to do this…
– And…
– Oh.
– No.
– Not again…
– What the fuck now?!
– Fuck this.
– Pop up shop
– Welcome to Not Twitter
– Apple pie
– A couple more opportunities. Can’t move forward yet, though.

December: Olivia

– I’ve got to make some cookies.
– So much to finish.
– Much needed reprieve.
– Is it happening this year or what?
– I guess so.
– Christmas gingerbread cake came out yummy. If needed more ginger.
– Roast beast
– Hidden surprise present
– RIP Jimmy Carter
– Moana 2

Yikes. What the hell was that?

(That could refer to either this whatever-it-was of a year or just my attempt at a write up. Or both. It’s both.)

Sometimes I wonder if things really are getting worse or we’re just conditioned to believe that. Perhaps the latter, given I began this year with an optimistic entry about us all living together on a big sphere. I guess we get fed a lot of stories every which way, and such is why we ended up, among other things, with this election result. Maybe it’s a silly question. Things just are. We control such a tiny bit.

Whatever the case, 2025 awaits. Like a cliff from which we are all about to plummet. Into the abyss. Into the future…

Where Are You Getting Your Information?

December 28, 2024

See there? Floating facedown in the swimming pool?

Yup. That’s my country.

You’re probably wondering how we got to this point.

So am I.

Let’s back up a bit.

In early 2020, I started writing a post that never got finished or published about the Democratic primary going on at the time. There were many decent candidates with ambitious and popular ideas. But we were lowkey shamed for supporting any of that, that in order to oust the Orange Thing we had to play it safe and go boring and steady, and that was Joe Biden and not Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.

It seemed to me a losing strategy, so typical of the party. After all, the Orange Thing had an excited base that got him elected. So did Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton did not have one as much, and that plus a lot of baggage she has led to her upset loss in 2016. And Joe Biden? Not very interesting or exciting at all. Plus, with Covid showing up by this point, couldn’t host big rallies anyway.

So because he was so deemed “electable”, Biden got the nomination, so that was the choice.

Lo and behold, after lots of counting the following November, Biden narrowly won Pennsylvania the Saturday after Election Day and was declared the winner, freeing us from the Orange Thing at long last, prompting dancing in the streets in cities around the nation. He was boring as can be, but it was an unusual time and situation where that was the winning trait against the shitshow that was his tangerine-hued opponent.

Perhaps then 2016 was just a mistake, a miscalculation, an anomaly. The Orange Thing was so actively repulsive there was no way he could win, and Clinton seemed so clearly more qualified, that she was a lock. Then, well, you know…

When he was out after the 2020 election, as we know, the Orange Thing denied the loss, declared fraud, and sent his rabid followers to attack the Capitol, leading to his second impeachment just a little over a year after the first. This failed, so he wasn’t blocked from running for president again.

Which he did. He sailed through the primaries, well on his way to pulling a Grover Cleveland given Biden’s abysmal approval ratings, with little opposition from Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley who promptly turned around and kissed his ass and thanked him for his disparaging nicknames for them.

Biden was seeming, well, old, but still doing his job. Then the June debate happened, and he was seeming really old. Nancy Pelosi, who’s even older but in Congress so it doesn’t matter, ran some behind the scenes maneuvering urging him out of reelection. And in July, the switch happened, and now the candidate was the younger, sharper, popular Kamala Harris. A campaign that felt irredeemably dead on its feet sprang to life, as hope came through that we had a capable, exciting candidate, to move past the Biden shortcomings and bring us something new. The Orange Thing didn’t stand a chance.

She walloped him in the debate. The convention was vibrant. Her campaign tore through the battleground states, making her case, knocking on doors, running shit tons of ads about how she’ll improve the economy and take on greed. She was likable. Her rallies packed arenas. She appeared on SNL.

Unlike Clinton’s and Biden’s runs, she hit all the right notes. A candidate the voters were enthusiastic about, who could energize the base and swing voters alike. She was a break from the mold, from the old guard. A breath of fresh air.

The Orange Thing, meanwhile, was rambling incoherently about pet-eating Haitians and Arnold Palmer’s penis at his poorly-attended rallies, with his get-out-the-vote efforts amounting to Elon Musk’s legally-questionable scheme of offering large sums of money to people who claim to support (his own interpretations of) the first and second amendments. And he is, after all, only three years younger than the too-old-to-be-president Joe Biden.

The polls inexplicably showed them tied, with her having a slight but statistically insignificant lead. And one renowned-for-accuracy one even had her winning Iowa? Incredible!

So it seems all the pieces are more or less together for this one to go well…

And then it didn’t. At all.
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