Category: Politics

Guilt

I follow a lot of musicians on various social media platforms.  I follow a lot of performers.  I follow a lot of politicians too.  They all have something in common right now.

They all want my money.

Politicians are looking for money because it’s an election year.  Performers are looking for money because COVID-19 has put them out of work.  None of them are asking for handouts, but they are all asking.  Please buy some merch.  Please by my music on bandcamp.  Please buy a ticket to my stageit show.  Please pledge on patreon.

I have the same answer to all of these requests.  I would if I could, but I can’t.  We’re still working but the economy is collapsing.  I can’t afford to give money to any cause right now.  We could all be out of work tomorrow.  How can I give you money today when my family might need food tomorrow.  Come on, I can’t help you guys.  I want to, I swear I do and I absolutely would if the situation were different.  It’s not though, so don’t be surprised when I get tired of feeling the guilt and start lashing out.

The world is shit right now for all of us.  I can’t help you without putting my family at risk.  Just lay off, please.

The Stir Crazy Files – Episode 7

It’s been a week and a half, can I get used to this already?  Come on, this is stupid.

My normal-life telecommuting day is Thursday.  New episodes of Star Trek Picard come out on Thursdays.

A few minutes ago I was shaving… why?  I don’t know.  As I was shaving I thought to my idiot self, I’m working from home today so there is a new Star Trek Picard to watch before work.  Sweet!

Wrong.

It’s Wednesday.  It’s my eighth consecutive telecommuting day.  Why the hell can’t I stop thinking every single effing day is Thursday?  Brain, would you get on this please?  I’m tired of being disappointed over no new Picard every single solitary day!  Enough already!

And what the hell am I gonna do when Picard is over?  I should have three more weeks of The Walking Dead followed by the premier of the new spin off.  Wrong.  It’s two more weeks and then nothing.  The season finale of The Walking Dead isn’t finished and it won’t be until after this all clears up.  It has been delayed indefinitely.  The new series is also still in post production so they are pushing that off indefinitely too.  Same with (at least some) of the CW DC Comics shows.  The final episodes are being delayed until it’s all over.  Bloody hell!

That’s all right though, our schmuck of a president say’s all of the restrictions will be lifted by Easter.  He said it would be so great to see all of the churches full.  When I heard that I realized what his goal was.  He doesn’t want to be remembered as a nazi.  He wants to be remembered as a great nazi.  Therefore he is going to arrange for the death of millions of Americans.  He’s going to go down in history as the first great mass murderer of the 21st century.  Why should hitler have all the fun, right?

Our president is evil.  He’s going out of his way to demonstrate it each and every day.

Okay, so this goofy post about feeling stir crazy got a little heavy right there.  It’s okay.  It needed to be said.

Don’t Read the News

If you enjoy freaking out and panicking over the state of the world related to COVID-19 then by all means go ahead and read the news.  I often start my lunch break by perusing Google News.  I look through the headlines of the topics I follow and if something catches my interest I’ll open it up in a new tab and save it for later.  Once I’ve gone through the front page I pop on over to those other tabs and start-a-readin’.

In our present global situation though, a quiet little lunchtime activity like that is enough to either make me want to punch everyone on Earth square in the face, or curl up in a ball and cry as the world around me collapses into anarchy.  Yeah, both alternatives sound like so much fun.

In one article I read a few minutes ago, the Governor of New York said that things are falling apart much faster than anticipated.  He said the Federal Government (I don’t recall which agency) has a stockpile of about 20,000 respirators.  New York estimates they need 30,000.  The Feds (I think he said FEMA) agreed to send 400.  Four Hundred.

Who was it, the Lt Governor of Texas, I think, who yesterday said that grandparents are willing to die in order to save the US economy.  Really.  I am not kidding you.  Some numb nuts actually said that.  The nerve… the gall… the stupidity.  I said it in a post yesterday and I’ll say it again.  These fascists clearly care more about giving money to billionaires than they do about the lives of the people who put them in their offices.  Their constituents are worth less to them then their bank balance.  If that isn’t evil, then what is?

A few weeks ago I got into a minor online argument with a maga cult member who swore that electing a socialist like Joe Biden… as if Joe Biden had a socialist bone in his body… would burn down the entire country.  As of this moment, there is a bill being hammered out in the US Legislature that is by all accounts near completion that will see the US government send checks of $2400 to married couples, with an additional $500 per child.  Funny… I don’t hear those maga cult members I was arguing with complaining about socialism now.  Now that the high priest of fascism, the cheeto himself has come out in favor of this plan.  Is socialism no longer the devil that you swore it was?  How does that work?  Is it not socialism if a republican does it?  Hypocrites.

Okay, I’m done with the news today.  I’m going to put my headphones back on and listen to podcasts about Sunday’s episode of The Walking Dead.  After that, maybe some prog rock.  Probably no blues today… my heart can’t really take that right now.

Wash your damn hands.

 

Their Money or Your Life

Trump and his collaborators are talking about ending the stay at home coronavirus response so that people will go back to work and the economy will recover.

If you thought for a second that your life was more important to them than their donors’ money then you are as big a moron as they think you are.

Music and Money

I’ve mentioned that at the start of March I decided to curb my post-RPM Challenge blues by doing another RPM Challenge.  I’m still working on it though it is very easy to be distracted by other things right now.  I’ve got two songs done, six more partially done, and I still need two more.

This morning there was a post on the RPM Challenge Facebook group (I didn’t check the actual RPM Challenge website, it might be there too) suggesting we all take advantage of being stuck at home indefinitely and do another RPM Challenge in April.  Good idea!  I mean, I was already planning on it, but I don’t have to do it alone.  Why not?  Why not use our stay-at-home time to do something creative?  I’m all for it… but I would have been without a global pandemic to lock me in the house so I guess I’m not the target audience there.

Turning to politics, remember when Andrew Yang was running for president and proposed giving everyone in the USA a $1,000 stipend every month?  I thought it was a good idea.  A creative way to help those in need as well as to stimulate the economy.  I also loved the implied, “you think Sanders is a socialist?  Wait till you get a load of this” vibe.

Yesterday Mittens Romney threw out a similar proposal.  Today Joe Kennedy did as well, though he provided some actual details with his idea.  Now it sounds like the fucking white house is jumping on the wagon.  They may be considering a plan similar to Yang’s.

First off, let me get it out of the way… if the dickless president really wants to make being anti-socialist a platform in his campaign, then giving away money isn’t a good way to do it.  I expect that anyone who ever said a negative word about socialism should refuse that money, right?  Just like they refuse public schools and public fire departments, and trash pick up, and police, and snow plows, and highways, and all of those other socialist things.

Second, can we just make Andrew Yang president now?  Like, let’s all vote today and just give him the job.  The proposal he made that everyone laughed at could very well be law within days.  Good work, Mr Yang.  Smart leadership is what we need and it is literally the furthest thing away from what we have.

So as for the social distancing, today is my second day working from home.  Yesterday felt like a normal telecommute day.  All day long I had this idea in the back of my mind that I would be back in the office tomorrow, same as any other telecommuting day.  It really wasn’t until I got up this morning and didn’t drive to work (I drove to the super market instead) that it really started sinking in.  Things are different.

There is a little sense of stir craziness, sure, but mostly what I am feeling today is the sense that this is going to be really hard to do.  Some how removing the commute and the office from the work day equation is going to make things more difficult?  I don’t get it, but that feels like where this is heading.  I wish I could explain it, but I can’t.

There is so much wrong with the world right now, and I’m not even talking about that textbook nazi prick in the white house.  There is so much out of wack that I can’t figure out what to focus my worries on.  I’m trying to only worry about things I can control like stocking the pantry and working from home and making sure everyone has what they need to do their work/school work without driving each other to drink (wink).  I don’t want to worry about all the other shit.  I don’t want to worry about the projections or the infection rates, or the mortality rates, or the stock market, or layoffs or closings, or the fact that I am weeks overdue for a haircut and now can’t get one (anyone want to lend me their flowbee?).

Positivity used to be the hardest thing in the world for me before I met Jen.  It’s still not easy, but it is closer to my normal mindset.  I am trying real hard to stay positive through all of this.  I may need to bash my guitar around in order to pull it off, but I owe it to everyone to do my best to keep the ship upright.  (I typo’d ship as shit and somehow that sounds better to me, hehe)

So keep your shit together, planet Earth.  I have faith in you.  You can do it.  Now let’s all celebrate St Patrick’s Day in our self imposed isolation by listening to some Irish music.  No, not U2.  No, not Makem and Clancy…

Rory Gallagher (I wanted the Irish Tour album but those pukes at Spotify don’t have it)

Screw Up

The president is supposed to address the nation and declare a state of emergency.  He should have done that at least a week ago.  Instead he was trying to stop cruise ships from docking in US ports because he didn’t want the number of infected people to go up.  That’s the kind of cunt he is.

He gave a speech the other night where he detailed some new policies.  The White House immediately followed that speech with corrections to the policies he had announced just minutes before.  The ban on air travel to Europe wasn’t across the board like he said it was.  It doesn’t effect citizens and permanent residents.  Insurance companies did not agree to waive copays for treatment as he said, only for testing.  Little things like that.

If he gives another speech what will he get wrong this time?  It’s fun to speculate.  It’s also fucking terrifying to speculate.  This man is so insanely stupid that he can’t even read a speech off of a teleprompter.  Worse, he can’t hire staff who will fact check his speeches before he gives them in front of the entire globe.

Fuck that guy.  I mean really, just fuck that guy.

We’re still waiting on word for how my step son’s school system is going to respond to this global pandemic.  They sent out a statement today saying they were looking into it.  You know, they were doing things that the rest of the region did a week ago.  Way to stay ahead of the curve there.

Why do we have to be surrounded by such stupidity in a time of crisis?

It’s been a quiet day at work today.  I hope it continues.  We were told that we have to clean off our desks so that the operations staff can spend the next couple of weeks disinfecting the shit out of the office.  I really don’t have that much stuff to hide, but I also don’t have many places to hide it.  We were told we could take our desktop computers home with us to ease the telecommuting pains.  I normally remote connect to my desktop from home, but it will be nice to not have to do that.  I still have to figure out how to setup the VPN, and I will need to…

Shit.

I connect to the network at work via an Ethernet connection.  I just spent some time with the Google to figure out how to tell if my PC can connect to a wifi network…

It can’t.

Shit.

Looks like I’ll be visiting Best Buy for a USB wifi thingie.  Crap.

Telecommuting five days a week might sound like fun on paper, but I am pretty sure that by Tuesday I’m going to be sick of it.  Every minor hiccup in the system is going to be magnified a million times based on the fact that I can’t over hear other people talking about it.

I had something else I was going to write about but I got distracted by the wifi thing and now I forget.

In closing: Wash your hands.

Damn It

 

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: In the general election I will gleefully, blissfully cast my vote for Joe Biden.  I just… I just wish I didn’t have to.  Given the choice between Biden and Bernie there is no choice for me.  Bernie all the way.

This primary season has just been so… annoying.

No School for Me

I tried signing up for a wordpress.com Blogging University course last night.  Nothing happened.  I tried again today using Chrome because maybe it had something to do with click functions in Vivaldi.  Nope.  Same nothing as before.

I was going to have veggie burgers for lunch today but I bought a different brand this week and they need to defrost.  I don’t have time for that.  Crud.  I bought a package of veggie (imitation) chicken nuggets too.  Maybe I’ll have some of those.  Maybe I’ll just make a chicken sandwich and pass on the veggie meal of the week for now.

Senator Warren dropped out of the Democratic Presidential primary today.  If you didn’t see that coming then you weren’t paying attention.  The thing I didn’t see coming was her not running the table.  I really thought she would be the one.  Now I’m looking at Senator Sanders and thinking Senator Warren would be a really good running mate.  Probably not though.  Ideologically they are too similar.  I don’t know.  Maybe if Biden tagged her as his VP it would be a better mix?  I don’t want to have to vote for Biden.  I absolutely will, but I don’t want to.  I really don’t want to vote for Sanders either.  I will, but I don’t want to.  Warren was my choice from day one.  Hell, I wanted Warren to run in 2016.  Oh well.  I guess she has to go back to kicking fascist ass in what’s left of the US Senate.

A new episode of Star Trek Picard came out today.  I watched it before work.  I was hoping the Troi-Riker family would have had an easier go of things, but it was nice to see them.  Have I mentioned this show is fantastic?  I am pretty sure I have.

Apparently there was a suicide at Disney World yesterday.  Some one allegedly jumped from an undisclosed location at the Contemporary resort.  I’m glad this didn’t happen when we were there, though there was an incident during our stay.  We had gone out for something one evening and when we returned there were insanely well armed cops stopping everyone at the entrance to the Yacht Club driveway.  Our Lyft driver was stopped and asked if she had received any threats that day.  No, she hadn’t.  It turned out that the Yacht Club/Beach Club area was on lock down while we were out.  As we were going into the lobby I asked a staff member if anything was up.  He had no clue, or at least he told me he had no clue.

We found out the details the next day and it was all nothing.  There was a report of a suspicious, armed individual wandering around the Beach Club parking lot and everything was locked down as a result.  It turned out that the suspicious, armed individual was neither suspicious nor armed and it was all an overreaction.  I wonder what he was doing to scare whomever reported him.  According to the news it was nothing at all.

Fortunately our stay at the Yacht club was undisturbed, apart from having our Lyft stopped, of course.
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Projects

March kinda sucks.

I go through this every year.  I finish my February music projects and then feel this gaping hole in the universe during March.  From reading blogs and forum posts on rpmchallenge.com I’m clearly not alone in feeling this way.

So what to do?

A few months ago I was working on a way to add the rest of my old myspace blog to this site.  I started up on that again last night.  WordPress.com is able to back date posts but it’s a royal pain in the ass to go back to 2007 and 2008.  Instead, I created a Blogger account and I’ve been posting back dated entries there.  Once I have them all I’ll export them to an .xml file and import them here.  That should work fine.  The myspace blog covered pretty much all of 2006 through November 2008.  I had pulled all of 2006 into my previous wordpress.com site so those are all here already.  As of last night the Blogger page has almost all of 2007.  I think I have about 75 more posts to go.

I’m still going with my Flickr photo-a-day project.  It suddenly feels difficult though.  It was easy last month.  There was always music happening so I could take pics of that, and Disney made things even easier.  Now?  What the hell do I take pictures of now?  Where’s the cat when I need her?

Back in January Jen and I did a tutorial for a javascript extension (I think that’s the right way to describe it… a scripting language built on top of javascript).  It was fun and interesting but my javascript knowledge is ancient and more or less nil at this point.  I thought I might have gotten more out of it if I did a javascript tutorial first.  I would like to try something like that in the coming weeks.  I would like to be a better all around programmer than I am right now.  My company’s development tools and programming languages are proprietary, so even if I’m firing on all cylinders at work it doesn’t really extend to the rest of the world.

Years ago I found a set of wordpress.com tutorials called Blogging University.  There are various beginner and intermediate level courses to help you get the most out of your wordpress.com experience.  There were classes for customization, writing, photography, and interacting with other blogs.  I might give some of those a try again, just for schnitzengiggles.  If I remember correctly they were mostly prompts.  Things like, today you should write a better About page, or today you should take a picture of water.  Stuff like that.  The photo stuff would be fine to redo, as I just said I’m always looking for ideas for photo-a-day.  The basic blogging stuff is probably too simple for this page, but there is always the lizardfishmusic.com page.  I could make some changes there.  I don’t think I’ve made any changes to the layout there since I first created it.  Maybe a face lift would be fun?

Exercising should be an obvious target for new projects.  I had a really bad night Weight Watchers wise last night and I’m feeling a little crummy about myself today.  I got home from work and just started shoveling food into my face and I really didn’t stop until I fell asleep.  I need to be better than that.  The gym might help in that regard, or at least minimize the damage of any future bad days.  Right now I am having a problem with one of my feet (again).  My right foot feels a little swollen and it hurts to walk.  It’s not the same thing I had a month or so ago, and it’s not nearly as bad, but it is slowing me down right now.  Once that eases up I need to get back to the gym, and I need to get into a regular routine.

There is always more music to record, and more songs to learn for Lizardfish, and more practicing in general to do.  Just because February is over doesn’t mean I can stop playing.  I was doing pretty well with finding time to practice back in January.  I need to keep up with it.  I’m tired of feeling like the weak link in the band.  I’m also thinking of trying something new gear wise.  I want to try to run a two amp rig in the band, but most of the amps I have now are way too powerful and if I paired them up I’d be unable to not drown out the rest of the band during rehearsals.  I keep looking at my 15 watt Fender Bassbreaker as the solution.  If I could pair that with another lowish watt amp that could work.  I am thinking about going to Guitar Center to inquire about trading my Fender Stratocaster in for a Vox AC15.  I think that might be the key to making it all work.  A Fender Princeton reissue could do it, but it’s only a 10 inch speaker and I’d prefer to stick to 12 inch speakers if I can.  I just like them better.  We’ll see.

Should I start looking into using in-ear monitors?  One of the guys in the band uses them.  One of the hosts of the Gig Gab podcast swears by them.  So much so that he’s always inspiring the other host to try them, even though he has a hard time with them.  I don’t really want to spend money on it, but we’re getting to the point where we’re going to be mic’ing the room during rehearsals and I always wear ear plugs anyway.  Is it time?  I’m trying to decide.  I’m definitely on the fence.  We’ll see.

I was hoping that by this point in 2020 I would be able to do something to help out with the Warren for President campaign.  I guess that isn’t going to happen.  At least it seems highly unlikely now.  I can get behind Bernie Sanders, but the idea of a candidate in his late 70’s who has already suffered a heart attack during this campaign is a little depressing.  Platform wise I can 100% get on board.  Human wise… ugh.  As for Joe Biden.  He’s a great guy and I love him to pieces, but he’s literally my last choice of all of the candidates we’ve had.  Dead last.  Yet another guy in his late 70’s but this time one who just feels like a frat boy who got lucky.  He just seems a little too dumb ass for the oval office, and we already have a total dumb ass in the office now.  If he ends up with the nomination he’ll get 100% of my support… I was just hoping the rest of the country would jump on the Warren bandwagon, that’s all.  Yet another reason to feel let down by my fellow Americans.

There are a crap ton of TV shows that I want to watch.  February has resulted in me falling way behind on all of the CW super hero shows that I like to watch.  I’m like two months behind on The Flash, Supergirl, and Batwoman.  I’ve been trying to get caught up on Star Trek Discovery.  Season two is really good, I just haven’t had time to power through.  The last season of Star Wars The Clone Wars is either about to come out or has just recently come out.  I wanted to binge the whole series before I watched the new season but… Jar Jar… he kinda killed my interest in that.  I want to finish season two of You even though it’s definitely meh.  I want to watch Lock and Key and The Expanse and I still want to get back into Breaking Bad and Preacher.  I’ve started both of them, but just haven’t been able to keep going.  I’m not sure why, the are both good.  I’m caught up on The Walking Dead, and the second spin off is just a month or so away.  One show that I did not fall behind on in February is Star Trek Picard.  It is so good.  Just, so very good.  I wish it was going to be a 25 episode season instead of 10 (I think it’s just going to be 10).  I don’t want it to end… ever.

I’m sure there are other projects I can come up with that are just there for fun and a sense of creative accomplishment.  If we get lucky and Spring actually gets here there are always day trips up to the mountains that I can drag my beloved Mrs to.  There are so many waterfalls, and so many scenic views up there.  They are all just sitting there, waiting for me and Jen and my camera to come and visit.

There’s also always Disney World.  Or Disneyland.  Or Euro-Disney, if that’s even still a thing.  I’d say Tokyo Disney too but I have a co-worker who was supposed to go there next week and he told me it’s closed due to some global pandemic* thing.  Maybe you’ve heard of it?

On an unrelated note, I am trying a new browser again.  The same podcast that inspired me to try Brave has inspired me to try Vivaldi.  This post is the first thing I’ve done with it.  Isn’t that exciting?  I’m just glad that the Last Pass plug in for Chrome works in Vivaldi too.  That makes life a tiny bit easier.

 

*Go wash your hands.  Seriously.