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.
Continue reading “Where Are You Getting Your Information?”

Joe the President

July 21, 2024

What’s this? A little Sunday afternoon tweet from the White House occupant. Let’s see…

My Fellow Americans,

Over the past three and a half years, we have made great progress as a Nation.

Yeah, it is nice the virus is mostly under control and we don’t have to wear masks as much anymore. That’s what you’re talking about, right?

Today, America has the strongest economy in the world.

Contrary to very popular belief, per basically every poll.

We’ve made historic investments in rebuilding our Nation, in lowering prescription drug costs for seniors, and in expanding affordable health care to a record number of Americans.

Is this message just to lay out admin accomplishments to get votes? Hopefully people will see that not drowning in medical debt is more important than the spurious concerns about “illegal” immigrants the other side won’t shut up about.

We’ve provided critically needed care to a million veterans exposed to toxic substances.

Sit your asses down, Marjorie and Lauren.

Passed the first gun safety law in 30 years.

Not sure whether to be more shocked at it being 30 years or that one passed at all.

Appointed the first African American woman to the Supreme Court.

She gets to join Elena and Sonia in concurring dissents that amount to glaring incredulously at the other six.

And passed the most significant climate legislation in the history of the world.

If we want the world to have even more history, better keep it coming.

America has never been better positioned to lead than we are today.

“I think there’s still room for improvement.” -Gaza

I know none of this could have been done without you, the American people. Together, we overcame a once in a century pandemic and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. We’ve protected and preserved Democracy.

And a depressingly large chunk of these American people intend to vote for a guy promising to undo all this in a few months.

And we’ve revitalized and strengthened our alliances around the world.

“Hello?” -Gaza

It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President.

Sure?

And while it has been my intention to seek reelection,

Ummm….

I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.

Hoooooooly shit!

I will speak to the Nation later this week in more detail about my decision.

A disturbing degree of ageism and ableism from all corners? I know.

For now, let me express my deepest gratitude to all those who have worked so hard to see me reelected.

Namely the flimsy attempts to hypnotize us all into forgetting about that debate.

I want to thank Vice President Kamala Harris for being an extraordinary partner in all this work.

“All yours now, coconut tree lady.”

And let me express my heartfelt appreciation to the American people for the faith and trust you have placed in me.

American people: *exchange glances*

I believe today what I always have: that there is nothing America can’t do – when we do it together.

“Except maybe you can’t quit giving them bombs?” -Gaza

We just have to remember we are the United States of America.

That’s what our Dustin Hoffman-voiced substitute teacher wrote for us!

Well. Here goes…

These Truths the Self-Evident

July 4, 2024

On this night, our country sparkles.

On this day, 248 years ago…

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Typical. Can’t just quit and be done with it. Got to write out a whole long thing first.

We hold these truths to be self-evident

“We hold these truths to be self-evident…” -Bart Simpson, tapping his head

that all men are created equal

#NotAllMen

that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights

Even the “creator” who kicked them out of a garden and drowned them in a flood? Or… a different one? Do the modern day so-called “originalists” know that?

that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

“This is totally a thing we believe in.” -the slaveowners who wrote and signed this thing

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men

Well, there’s your problem right there.

deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,

Were you saying something? I was just thinking about that debate the other night and about how our “consent” amounts to choosing between them this November.

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

PSA: Your favorite orange racist loudmouth fairly losing his reelection bid does not amount to “destructive of these ends”. Quite the contrary, in fact.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

The devil you know…

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

You go girl!

Continue reading “These Truths the Self-Evident”

Eclipse 2024

April 8, 2024

1:00am: Let’s get on the road.

Can the Pennsylvania Turnpike make up its mind whether the speed limit is 55 or 70? It changes like every mile.

4:00am: Fine, get yourself a snack. Top off gas, too.

Hmmm, there’s the exit to the road I was going to take originally. But had to change plans yesterday. Looking too cloudy there. New destination has a better chance, if still not a great one.

Crossing into Ohio.

And it’s raining.

That’s okay. It was supposed to rain this early anyway. We’ve got a lot of hours to go.

Heading north now. Past Youngstown… and officially in the path!

7:00am: Light out, still raining on and off, nearing destination.

Hmmm, clear traffic the whole way. Pleasant surprise. There was every indication traffic would be a nightmare. Maybe we’re just way early.

8:30am: Here’s a nice park by Lake Erie. Some other people in town checking it out as well. Hard to see the water from the fog from the rain, which seems to be clearing up.

9:30am: Better get some food now while we can. This little restaurant is filling up quickly with others in town for this.

After food, driving around town. Lots of neat houses right along lakeshore. There’s another cool park by the lake, with people filing in to enjoy the view. And the one later.

11:30am: Here’s the park by the lake we were in earlier. There’s more people and the bathrooms are open now. Plus my passengers want to make a stop anyway. Found a spot in the boat ramp lot.

What a lovely view of the lake, the sound of the waves lapping against the rocks. A bit of area to walk around. Watching the people show up and set themselves up here. Lots of snacks and a bathroom nearby.

Yup, I think this is our spot.

But what will we see? There’s so many clouds up there still.

Except… what’s that to the west southwest? Is that… clear skies?!

The clouds are moving from that direction. The big ones are passing, leaving fewer of them and just some high up wispy ones…

Holy shitburgers, I think we’re actually going to see it!!!

The clouds cleared more, allowing some more sunshine and warming the air a bit.

2:02pm: At last, it starts.

Can see some high up wispy clouds moving across the sun through the glasses, but they don’t block anything.

And on the lower right corner, the moon has begun to bite off a chunk.

Steadily, all around us, the light dimmed.

The sky turned a deeper blue.

The sun was a crescent. Then a fingernail. Then a sliver.

About as far as it would have gone had we stayed home (if no clouds this time).

3:10pm: Minutes away. Sky is darkening faster. Nearby lampposts and outside lights on a building by the water have clicked on.

3:15pm: Seconds away. Counting down. The last rays of sunlight disappearing as if a crack in the sky is being zipped closed…

WHOA

That’s not my picture. That’s NASA’s view of it from Cleveland, just a little west of where we were. But that’s about what appeared up there in the sky the moment the last ray of sunshine vanished.

This one is my picture.

My phone camera couldn’t focus on it too well, so it shows a whitish glob where in person at that spot was NASA’s above image.

In my picture, you can see the lit lamppost, as well as, oddly enough, that the sky on the horizon kind of looks like a sunrise or sunset. But… that’s not right. The sun isn’t over there. It’s up there behind the moon! Most of the sky was a deep dark blue, the part under the shadow, which in person was much darker than it appears here. On the horizon was where there was still sunshine. So it was like a sunrise or sunset… only upside down!

When totality began, people around us cheered. Some honked their car horns. Some howled for some reason. Sounded like someone shot off some fireworks nearby.

Up there, the white sunlight radiated out from behind the black moon, the very edges of it shimmering, as if the sun was itching to come back out and blind us all. Solar activity that is usually hidden to us, perhaps.

It went on for many glorious soul-touching minutes, until the bottom right corner got brighter. Glasses back on now! And the sunshine was back.

An industrial ship docked nearby in the lake blew its horn.

People around us packed up to leave and departed. We hung around to let the crowd clear. I stayed by the lake and watched the reverse partial eclipse pass. The air had chilled back down.

4:30pm: And that’s that.

Time to head all the way back home!

Our spot by the lake didn’t get the best reception, so we drove away somewhere else so I could see the traffic situation better on Google Maps.

Hmm, yeah, every road we could take back was backed up, though we’d be driving a while before we got to a backup. My fellow travelers were itching to get back on the road, so to shut them up, we started on southward, even though I thought it might have been a good idea to get some food first.

Sure enough, we hit a traffic backup. I went a slightly different way back this time to avoid some of the toll road as well as to go a way that looked clearer. That was fine for a while until we hit another very slow road. The exits off that road to areas with restaurants were also backed up, and those restaurants surely packed.

Eventually, we were back on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which was moving a little quicker. Rest stops were completely packed with people. It got dark, and my lack of sleep was finally taking its toll, so I let the other person drive who had gotten some rest earlier.

Almost home and back into Maryland, without any food since every place was too full or already closing for the night, and more backups. This time construction and lane closures on I-70. Got past one slow area and into another one before long. Even once back on 270 we hit a few!

Home at last at 3am. Concluding a totally wild day trip to a midwestern state on a Great Lake, eight days shy of eight years since the last one. And perhaps longer than that until the next solar eclipse in this country, or whichever next one I’ll be able to see, whatever the world will be like then.

Easter: The Final Battle

March 31, 2024

How does the story go?

He was crucified, died, and a couple days later he rose again, showed off his badass crucifixion scars to his doubting disciples, and rose on up to heaven to, per Nicene Creed, be “seated at the right hand of the father”.

Thus we celebrate with bunnies and eggs.

Something is missing. Something feels incomplete. Is that all there is to it?

Definitely not. And I’ll tell you what it is…

After his slow horrific death, Jesus first went down to hell, where all dead souls since the beginning of time were trapped. An epic battle with Satan ensued, from which Jesus emerged victorious, believing he’d at last fulfilled his destiny and destroyed evil. So he invited all the souls to ascend with him to heaven. He stopped by earth again on the way to see his friends real quick and celebrate his victory, instructing them to go forth and spread the word of what has happened. And then he ascended to heaven for good.

This much we know. But what happens next?

Jesus arrives in heaven with all the souls he just freed. God sees this and says “Very good, my son. Now come be seated beside me.”

But suddenly Jesus pauses, and any feeling of triumph he had was washed away. And he asks himself what might have been a dangerous question. What exactly was all this for? Why did everything, his becoming human and suffering through crucifixion and everything else, have to happen in the first place?

The realizations came upon him all at once. Before him was so-called Almighty God, his heavenly father, creator of all, omnipotent. As he, Jesus, had just battled Satan, the embodiment of evil who was condemning all souls to eternal suffering until this point. Why was God allowing Satan to keep those souls trapped in hell at all? If he really wanted them freed before this, he could have done so. How did his excruciating crucifixion in itself absolve any sins, when God could have just decided to forgive anything he wanted at any time?

Jesus at long last sees the truth about the being before him. It was all entertainment for God. It was all manipulation for his own amusement. Perhaps his executioners were the ones who killed him on the cross. Perhaps it was Satan who was tormenting the dead souls. But it was God who orchestrated the whole thing. And he’d been his loyal pawn through it all.

So, against everything he’d been and believed up until this point, Jesus said no to God. And then the true final battle ensued.

Just as Cronus overthrew Uranus, and then Zeus overthrew Cronus, it was time for Jesus to overthrow God.

And he did. And he became God.

Although he lacked his father’s omnipotence, he became a sympathetic God who had already spent 33 years as a human and understood what it was like in a way his father never cared to. He was also uninterested in being worshiped and glorified. All he expected of people was to be good to one another and live their best lives. He wanted all people to be free from oppression, whether human or divine.

And it is this freedom we celebrate today with bunnies and eggs. Freedom from an oppressive manipulative deity, from religious restriction and sacrifice.

But it was before all this concluded that Jesus told his disciples to go forth and spread the word. He was unable to update them, and so incomplete information spread around about him and what he wanted. He had to watch with dismay as, rather than being good to one another and living their best lives, people hurt and oppressed and killed one another supposedly in his name. Churches sprang up exploiting his name and his crucifixion just to amass power for themselves. The cross on which he was brutally murdered had become a symbol to these people, believing this suffering was for them, when, as Jesus himself had to come to terms with, there was absolutely no point or value in the crucifixion, that in itself it was just another senseless execution in a world that commits far too many of them. And his so-called followers were looking and acting a lot more like his executioners than his disciples.

That’s why we never hear about the final battle. Not only did it happen after his ascent, but churches aren’t exactly going to be telling people that their very existence is against what Jesus wanted. It’s in their interest to say Jesus remains God’s dutiful subordinate for eternity, that only those who believe in him in some very specific way are saved while all others are doomed. That’s how they amass power and wealth.

That’s why, as we celebrate today with bunnies and eggs and botanical gardens, this holiest day of the Christian calendar might well be a simultaneous rejection of Christianity. Where we celebrate the absolution of sins not because of the unjust torture and murder of a demigod a couple millennia ago but because his later victory removed the very concept of sin. Or, hell, just because the whole idea of sin is ridiculous anyway.

That’s how I’ve celebrated Easter for the past fifteen years or so now. At first, I figured I was just being ironic. I have marzipan or similarly flavored treats for Easter because of a scene in the His Dark Materials trilogy, where Mary Malone tells a story of how she gave up religion after taking a bite of marzipan and prompting a flood of memories and the realization there was no point or benefit to anyone in her living under pious restrictions and denying herself a rich and full life. That and Rush’s “Freewill” has become a sort of Easter anthem for me. Some people have been puzzled that, despite pulling away from Christianity, I still celebrate Easter at all. And, yes, I do celebrate Easter, but its meaning for me has changed.

It more recently it occurred to me that, though I don’t have any desire to return to Christianity (whatever that would entail), even from a Christian perspective this reinvented Easter still works, if one wanted to stick to what Jesus would actually want, in acknowledging his triumph over a sadistic god, in setting us and even himself free. But, of course, he wouldn’t want that. Christian or not, the idea is the same.

Be good to each other. Live your best life. Eat some Cadbury eggs.

Happy Easter!