Now dropped in to the middle of this is a realization that I had given up on a lot. A slow rotting surrender. I had become complacent and everyone around me has suffered for it. This realization is not a bad thing. I was able to root out the rot and over the course of a few days regain some of my passion. While this is a good thing it also means that I have to deal with the reasons I let the rot take over.

When you add both, or rather all, of that together life gets kind of strange. So I have been on a roller coaster of emotion and trying to slow it all down. I think I have a handle on things now.  I have done all the stuff I dreaded doing: filed for unemployment, applied for food stamps, updated LinkedIn, sent out some resumes, and so on.

I also decided to use the Oxford comma when I make lists. In the grand scheme of things that’s not that big of a deal but I wanted to mention it.

And though all of this my wonderful wife has been my anchor, my shelter. I couldn’t have made it through any of this without her. Thanks baby. I love you.

Slowing down is never easy and usually by the time I am slowing down I need something like the damn TV to shut my brain off just so I can go to sleep. I think that getting back on my ADD meds will really help this. The meds haven’t been necessary for work, although it’s getting to that point again, but I do think they will help me with my other goals such as simplifying my life, which is still a work in progress. I am actually following through to completion these days without much of an effort. But the brain still works in overtime.

So as I try to take time for the things I want to do I also have to make sure to have time for the things I must do. This balance is something I have never been good at no matter what. I seem to do one or the other but have decided that it’s time to fix that little issue. This really isn’t a promise to post more here but rather that when I do it will be more of what it is. More thought put in to the writing, more logic applied, less ranting (not that a good rant isn’t cathartic or necessary once in a while) and in general hopefully easier to follow.

Have fun storming the castle…

So I had a little exchange with someone I have known for quite the long time and it didn’t go well. The guy is really quite out there and I have always known that but his, for lack of a better word, tolerance for opinions that differ from his has apparently found its limits. Mind you I wasn’t espousing anything crazy. In fact it was quite the opposite. I was mocking a website dedicated to chemtrails, the NWO, and air elementals (Sylphs). Yes you read that right: air elementals. Apparently I made the mistake of using the words “tin-foil hat” and that set old boy off. I tried to be cordial and non-confrontational but it was to no avail. I was unfriended (oh the horror) and told to “Fuck off”. Now I am not writing this post to bitch about the other person involved mostly because I am glad to rid of him and I’ll get to that in a minute. I am really writing this post because I am done with trying to reason with unreasonable people. No hard feelings but if you are a 9/11 truther, believe that the government is using commercial jets to spray the population with chemicals to help the NWO do population control, think that Zionists either control the world already or are trying to, that David Icke shouldn’t be locked up for his own good, believe that the federal reserve is part of a NWO plot, or hell believe that there’s a NWO to begin with and whole slew of other whacked out conspiracy theories then please don’t bring them up around me. I don’t want to lose any good friends over this but if you have allowed yourself to be deluded by the espousers of any of the above or anything resembling any one of them then you need clinical help. At some point I may expand this list to include folks who claim the Catholic church is the Whore of Babylon and other crazy religious beliefs but I think keeping it to politics is enough for now.

Yes I am being mildly offensive with saying that some people need clinical help but sometimes the truth is harsh. Plain and simple. I try to be a skeptic but I also try to be a logical and critical thinker. If you consider the odds of any given conspiracy theory being kept anything near secret then you really must suspend disbelief in order to believe in pretty much any of them. They fall so far out of the range of rational thought that it is just outrageous. Hell there are plenty of conspiracy theories that line up with my world view to a large degree but after you get past the first level they just become unreasonable and impossible to believe.

I have seen some folks I thought were intelligent people begin espousing some these theories recently and it has just made me sad. Now I am not asking you to change your beliefs. I respect your right to believe any insane thing you want to believe. But please don’t bring it up around me or try to prove any of these whacked out theories to me. After my little exchange on FB with the previously referenced old friend I have decided that my life will be much simpler if I just walk away at the first mention of any key buzzwords, for the record that includes Alex Jones and usually Michael Savage, and not bother trying to convince the folks drinking the kool-aid. I want to say I am sorry if this offends any of my friends but all I am asking you to do is keep the crazy to yourself.

So watch this and enjoy the rest of your day:

Maybe I should come up with an actual list of buzzwords and publish it here to help out other people…

Let me be clear that this is not about the race of the idiots being violent. This has nothing to do with skin color. We saw ever race acting like morons on Black Friday for the same reasons and over less expensive items. People are morons regardless of the color of their skin. Acting like animals over consumer products is just idiotic. On Black Friday a man died in a store and people stepped over him and kept going. He didn’t get killed, he just died, and no-one stopped to help.

The manufactures and the stores selling the items are not responsible, in the least, for the actions of the morons who hurt people in order to further keep up with the Joneses. It is the sick society in which we live that allows this to happen and then blames everyone but the people perpetrating the violence. Until we begin to teach personal responsibility again this will only get worse.

I know my words aren’t that deep on this subject. I know I am not citing a lot of sources but this is fucking common sense folks. If you hit someone in the face in order to get a pair of sneakers, or a Barbie doll or anything else you are a thug and nothing more.

I have been thinking a lot about my post concerning nostalgia and I think I may have been wrong. I was on the right track but think I may have come to the wrong conclusions along the way. I can’t put it in to words just yet but there’s an idea or two floating around my few remaining synapses. I’ll get around to sorting it out soon enough.

I have a ton of stuff on my plate at the moment including my top albums list for 9b, which I need to get done before Christmas, so there’s not likely to be a lot around here until the holidays are over. I have a dozen things I want to spew words through the keyboard about but in reality things are just a bit hectic. I really should make the time to get this stuff down because it would make things in my head less confusing but if I could ever sleep I wouldn’t have the time. In the meantime you could always read my wife’s blog: /usr/bin/mom.

Before I fade in to the ether for quite possibly the rest of the year here are a couple of friends on mine sharing some Christmas music:

That’s it for tonight and if I don’t drop back by here before all is said and done then I hope you all have a merry Christmas and dammed happy new year. I know I will.

I have been known to be a little sentimental at times. I wrote a backend for a flash mp3 player that looks like a cassette tape (something that some of my children have never even seen used) for Pete’s sake. But I got to thinking the other night, while watching Midnight In Paris, about the “Good ol’ days”. As an aside the move was decent and the wife really liked it but I wouldn’t have watched it if I had noticed it was a Woody Allen film because that’s not my usual speed. This really wasn’t my speed but Luke Wilson made it tolerable. This movie is about a dude who wants to live in Paris (God knows why) and his wife who doesn’t. Well old boy discovers that at midnight he can escape to the Paris he really wants, which is the ’20s, and hang out with the likes of Picasso and Hemingway. Long story short: he eventually figures out that the present is where he belongs and yadda yadda yadda. Happy ending and all that rot. But it got me thinking and I realized that as much as I miss the seeming simplicity of the past that I don’t want to go back there at all. For the purposes of this exercise I mean my own past and not some romanticized version of another time altogether.

I enjoy slipping in to the past in the recesses of my own mind. Remembering nights fueled by desperation, caffeine and nicotine making mix tapes at Vic’s apartment. Desperately searching for that right mix of music that would convey exactly what I wanted to tell some girl. The poetry I wrote (if I am honest it was probably horrible but I don’t have any of it left to actually know) and the impossible sleep schedule we kept. Looking back through the right lenses makes this look like a romantic time in which I let my creative side show through and pretty much did whatever passion drove me to do but that’s only part of the picture. During that time frame I couldn’t hold a job, lived on friend’s couches, ate whatever friends and family had laying around and rarely even had my own smokes. It was for all intents and purposes a pretty miserable existence compared to what I have now. At least if I am being honest with myself.

I know that I am not the romantic figure I tried to make myself out to be back then. I mean I tried and all but in the end I was the same dork that I am today. Back then I didn’t even know who or what I was and if you asked me what I be like while I was looking down the barrel at forty I would have likely told you “dead” and been done with it. I didn’t have a future in my head back then but the one that I ended up with pretty much rocks. I know all of that stuff that I went through and the stuff I put myself through made me what I am today but in the interest of being honest I wouldn’t do it all again. Sure some of I would but not all of it by any means. I like to say I have no regrets and for the most part that’s true and the regrets I do have are resolved regrets if you know what I mean. Having no regrets is not the same as being willing to do it all again.

I don’t have any real special message to wrap this one up with. I don’t have a cute little bow and pretty paper with an uplifting message. I just have this: Overall I like my life and while I need to make some changes I wouldn’t want anything but what I have. Take that for what it is.

On top of all of that I played with ROMs for my phone, read a dozen comic books, finished two and a half novels (around 500 pages each) and worked on a personal project in python involving RSS, NNTP, and a specific type of media collection. I did all that from work and still accomplished everything I was supposed to and more. The problem with this is that my mind was scattered beyond belief. Every night when I got home I was brain dead and couldn’t think. I just wanted to watch TV and let my brain run out of my ears. Boredom makes my brain shut off and not in a good way. On the surface I appear to be functioning normally but inside I am screaming for something to challenge me. This is not like wanting to do nothing in a weekend. That’s my choice. That’s different. Forced boredom is something that makes me completely insane.

Now that’s over. Capped off by a good weekend the week of boredom is behind me. At least one would think. The rest of the year is likely to be a repeat of the same. It is vacation time and it will be a ghost town at work. So if I seem a little insane this holiday season it is not for the normal reasons. I am actually looking forward to the holiday season this year. At least the outside of work part.