Fear of heights

I don’t know exactly when I developed a fear of heights. As a kid, I loved looking down from heights … from an airplane window, from balconies, sometimes from precarious places. Mount Pleasant is a small town in a relatively flat area, so the body memory of that probably got a bit rusty. Anyway, these days, I’m terrified of heights. Not even so much the falling and sudden stopping part, just looking down.

When I started a health journey two years ago, I made a daily priority goal of hitting 10,000 steps. It doesn’t make any difference how busy I am at work or how lousy the weather, I get those steps in*. It’s helped with memory and attention span and general health. So, I’ll keep doing it as long as my legs keep working.

There are two places on campus I like to incorporate because both involve fourth floors that have exposed views of the ground floor: the library and the science building. When I can, I get to the top and pause to look down to the ground.

It’s helped. My palms have stopped sweating and my heart has stopped racing. The vertigo has nearly gone away, too.

*—There’ve been a couple of holiday-related exceptions.

Stank your Ax foot

The woman from the gym* is now working at a university in Florida. I took a couples selfie with her. She manipulated it so that it looked much sillier than her real face. I snapped what I thought was the perfect couples selfie that I realized that my head was a shaggy mess**.

I’d just returned from Cedar Point with my daughter***. It was a dayyd-dayghter thing and I made the trip happen as between us to celebrate her feminity. My co-parent partner thought it was a great idea, even though I wound up getting chased down the road by men with pitchforks and hoes and carrying my son****.

But the thing that will haunt me is the guy who said, “Stank your ax foot” to me.

*—I don’t know anything about the real woman from the gym other than she used to look at me all the time and stand where I might talk to her. I am all business at the gym and don’t play games in general — she also let other men circulate around her and maybe liked to collect male followers — so I let the opportunity pass.

**—I skipped shaving my head on Thursday because I took the day off work. My head and especially the back of my neck feels like a shaggy mess.

***—IRL, I don’t have a daughter.

****—The one-year anniversary of my co-parent partner’s death is Tuesday. I am coincidentally going to dinner with my son and his family to celebrate my first son’s birthday.

*****—From a dream the previous night. The circumstances of this comment are lost to waking memory. I asked my Gemini AI assistant about its meaning and it assured me that it is very important.

Larry, the worst assistant

I work in the Microsoft ecosystem of applications … Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams, etc… This morning, I thought it might be helpful if I looked at programming an AI assistant who could help me manage mundane tasks that I struggle with like keeping my calendar and setting OOO messages and whatnot.

It turns out that Copilot is embedded into Teams and can build AI assistants. So, I built one named Larry and configured Larry to be able to manage my Outlook calendar and set OOO messages, extract information from training sign-up sheets in Forms, and send messages and meeting invitations to a Teams group I manage.

Once configured, I asked Larry to reschedule a meeting from tomorrow morning to next Thursday and set an OOO message because I’m taking the next couple of days off. Larry said sure thing. I could feel his virtual smile.

A minute or so later, I noticed that neither was an OOO message set nor was the meeting rescheduled, so I asked Larry if he was going to do both things. No, Larry said, he could not do the work I asked him to do.

Separately, I asked my personal Copilot account why Larry didn’t do the work he said he’d do. Copilot said I probably needed to tweak Larry’s permissions.

I asked Larry how I could access his permissions. Larry abruptly ended the conversation. When I asked him why, he apologized. A couple of seconds later, I noticed that Larry had disappeared. I asked the Copilot AI embedded in Teams where Larry had gotten to and Copilot said it had no idea.

Larry was just gone.

Grogu for the 2 year old

My first grandson turns 2 today. I asked my son what to get him. He said it didn’t make much difference, since he’d destroy it.

I found a Grogu plushie at Target for $14. It ticked all of the boxes: No choke hazard, not easily destroyed, cheap enough that it won’t be missed if he does.

He was actually born the day of his baby shower. I woke up to a message from my son telling me he and his now-fiance wouldn’t make it, which instantly made me wonder why I’d have to commit murder that day. Then he told me her water broke and I went from enraged to overwhelmed with emotion in 4.3 nanoseconds.

The shower went on. I stood there, barely able to keep a conversation going. There was an open bar, but I forewent because I didn’t want to show up for the delivery smelling like a distillery. Actually, I ordered a gin and tonic right at the end of the shower only to have him call and tell us that his now-fiance was in full delivery.

Carter was born 15 minutes later.

I am led to believe that 15 minutes is fast for labor.

The month of fluff

It was a Friday. My son and I had plans to go to a fish fry (this was the year that I told him the real lesson about Lent is learning how to use other people’s religious beliefs to your benefit). A white cat started hanging around on my front porch. It tried to follow us as we walked to the Catholic church for delicious fish, but we lost it.

When it showed back up that evening, I took photos and posted them to social media asking who was missing a pet. It was clearly a homed animal, comfortable and wanting affection from people.

No one claimed him, but I learned that he was a neighborhood stray. He spent lots of time on the next street over where there was a colony of ferals. He just added me to his network of chumps who gave him food. I didn’t want to adopt him because we had another cat, a tortoise shell with a territorial streak in her.

A couple of weeks went by and I didn’t see the stray. Then, on a cold, rainy night he showed back up. He was clearly sick, had fleas and ear mites, and — after letting him in for a warm, dry place out of the weather — had poop full of worms.

The original plan was to take him to the shelter to get him the care he needed, but some folks on social media stepped forward and offered to help pay the vet bills. They had one string attached. I needed to adopt him.

Donations wound up being more than the bills to get him fixed up and fixed.

I brought him home after he got fixed and planned to keep him inside overnight so he didn’t tear out his stitches. But he bolted and I figured we’d at least given him a fighting chance.

He came back that night and hasn’t left since. In fact, he was kidnapped by two people who thought he was a people-friendly stray, got out of their houses and came back to my place.

Every March, I celebrate the month of Fluff.

Dodging The Affirm screwjob

My car spent a chunk of December in the shop, for brakes and body work. It took most of my savings. Then the tires couldn’t keep air, so I replaced them.

I signed up with Affirm last year to finance a second freezer and replacement Google Pixel watch (a tirade on the fitness blog) and weighed their offer to finance new tires. Their offer was pretty okay. My plan was to pay it off early, anyway.

They pulled a bait-and-switch.

This morning, I paid it off The lender wound up making much, much less money than if they’d given me the rate they offered.

A few folks I know use Affirm, so I thought the service would be on the up-and-up. Apparently not.

Dorothy Parker

I first heard about Dorothy Parker a few years ago through the lens of her newspaper writing. Sharp and combative and full of vaguely subversive themes, I believe was the general description.

It would have made sense to start with her newspaper columns. The column as a literary work has suffered deep decline as the newspaper industry has died. Where once you could find illumination and subversive with, today you find writers trying to position themselves to look smart for the elite class.

Instead, I got a copy of her short stories with some sketches. The comparisons to Ring Lardner and Hemingway make sense.

The first couple of short stories are about the angst and drifting discontent in middle class, suburban American life. By the time I was growing up in the 80s, it was a well-worn topic. It was in literature with novels like Babbitt, but also in music. Years before Green Day gave us American Idiot, there was Rush’s Subdivisions. Probably others that were less memorable.

I’ve been working my way through American Prometheus, the long, thick biography of Robert Oppenheimer. But I’ve also got another Terry Pratchett Discworld book on deck I’d like to read some time this century. So, set aside the biography for short stories, and if I feel the need I can tuck in Discworld.

Fasnacht

Glory be! It’s Fasnacht Day in Fallout 76. Fasnacht Day is a few minutes of utter chaos followed by the awarding of masks. I haven’t gotten any rare masks this year from the events. Mostly, I’ve poached them from vendors from player camps. I got a Fasnacht bigfoot mask and a jackalope mask. I am currently wearing the jackalope mask because why not.

I started this year’s Fasnacht event wearing my Old Man Winter mask because the event is about shooing away winter, which I hate with a white hot contempt. It’s less the snow and more the face-hurting cold and the 10 minutes extra it takes to get ready to go out in it. Give me a day where I don’t need to methodically dress myself to run basic errands and I’m happy.

The best part about Fasnacht, like the best part of the regular events, is that it diverts the bitching of regular players from the latest upgrade. Instead of bitching about the latest upgrade on Reddit, they just bitch about rare mask drops or other rewards.

We’re at the point in Fashnacht where it feels like everyone is tired of it and just phoning it in. No one really wants to do it, anymore, and the event is sped up by the game to honor that. But, no one really wants to say, “Christ, enough already.”During the last Fasnacht, I fast moved in to town and stood in the middle of the street. Then, I went to use the bathroom while another player attempted to assault me while other people asked him why. He was apparently angry that I was just standing there. People who play video games are weird.

Fasnacht is one of the few times of year when you need to pay attention to Helvetia (not the font, about which there is a documentary) in Fallout 76. Usually it’s just a cheap source of salt and teapots.

Ope … been 40 minutes. Almost time for more chaos.

Facebook … deactivated

You can tell how worthless Facebook is by the difficulty Meta has made to get out of it. I deactivated my account this morning because my feed has morphed into an endless sludge of bile and stupidity. Then, I tried to log into the browser tab for Messenger, and it logged me back into Facebook and reactivated my account.

I hate it so much.

The journey to freeing myself of that swamp really started back when I was a local newspaper reporter right as the worst of the pandemic was passing. Everyone was angry. Then someone I knew launched a dumb recall campaign against school board members.

What followed were four of the stupidest months I’ve ever endured, with people digging through my account and gossiping. I set my account to public to prevent that. Humanity’s stupidest instincts were plenty to overcome that.

Facebook provided easy access to an audience. If you’re a creative — I write, I also dabble in photography, I like sharing about typewriters … who knew — that makes it a difficult place to leave. You can create and share. You won’t get paid, but you’ll have the audience. If you aren’t interested in monetizing your creativity, that’s a strong incentive to put up with humanity’s worst.

Four years later, Meta has transformed Facebook from a place where you can share with strangers and keep up with folks to an endless slog of posts encouraging strangers to fight. It’s like a nightmare version of a town in the Old West, where every building is a saloon full of drunken cowboys who start slugging it out at the slightest provocation.

My original plan was to delete my account. Yesterday, I learned that deleting my account would make Messenger unusable. The unfortunate thing is I’ve used Messenger as my primary communications platform for a decade. So, once I move all of my conversations to something else, I can finish the job.

Discworld

I’m working my way through Terry Pratchett’s Discworld along parallel lines … one of the City Watch series followed by one on sequential.order. I’ve been told that his storytelling really ramps up in the forth book, but I want to watch it grow.

I’ve been seeding them in between non-Discworld books. The goal was to increase my reading using Pratchett as incentive.

Finished my third City Watch book last night over a burger and beer at The Bird. Feet of Clay was a fine, fine book. The last two non-Discworld books I read were disappointments, so it was also a relief to read something excellent.

I’ve been told to skip past the first few Discworld books because that’s when they start shining with Pratchett’s social criticism. Feet of Clay is full of excellent commentary on free will, the nature of existence, power structures and how societies arrange themselves.

At one point, one of the bartenders asked me about it, recognizing Pratchett from his co-authorship of Good Omens with Neil Gaiman. Figuring out a new home for my Sis world books will be a chore. If this dude takes up the challenge, maybe I can pawn off my Discworld.books on him.

George Washington was a dick

I was in the stately home fixing a display of fake plants and looking for my cat. My neighbor was a refined older woman, a genuine patrician. Her gray hair was parted in the center and ended in curls. She wore a black pant suit with large white buttons and a string of pearls. She stood erect and less walked and more glided across the plush white carpet. Yet she was friendly enough to me as she moved between rooms.

She announced the arrival of her husband. Holy shit, I thought to myself, it’s George Washington. I’m about to meet George Washington.

The two front doors opened in unison and Washington strode through them. It was almost as if he opened them with a wave of his hand.

His gray hair was pulled back into a tight knot. He wore no wig. He also wore a modern navy blue suit with a golden chain from one pocket on his vest to a pocketwatch in the other. He nose was thin and sharp, as were his limbs. He had a stern feel to him, like hardened steel just after being plunged into ice cold water.

Our eyes met as he walked through the room. His were full of contempt. I could almost hear his thoughts. “Are you trying to f**k Martha? Good luck, you little sh*t,” his eyes said.

I gathered my stuff. I was down with the fake plants and the cat had returned. With an eyebrow arched, he escorted me to the door and stood in the doorframe as I walked out. The cat scampered ahead of me and fell into an open-air sunken kennel. I could hear it meowing.

“How do I get my cat,” I asked him. With his eyebrow still arched, he wordlessly shut the door.

February is an ass

We should be on the downside of winter by the time February rolls around. It snowed for the first time a few months before and January brought ice and bitter cold. The days have been getting longer for a months and a half, so naturally it feels like it ought to be getting warmer.

Yet, February always seems to be colder and snowier and icier. The forecast calls for cold and wind and snow into the foreseeable future. I woke up this morning to three inches of bullshit on my car.

Not only does this mean time wasted shoveling off my car to run weekly errands, but it also means long minutes spent getting dressed for the cold. We’ve already been doing that for months. We should be slowly unwinding that, slowly peeling off the layers and relax into days with highs in the 40s.

Instead what we’ll get is another bullshit year that gives us two weeks of spring in between this weather and where we sweat sitting still.

February is an ass.

Trapped

Hi, I’m trapped and have to use the toilet. Lunch time is also rapidly approaching. I would also like to stretch my legs.

The tree

I met the governor at the end of a two track. Our destination was an abandoned cabin in an area flooded to knee depth.

Well, the cabin was the human landmark. We were really looking for a tree. It was a special tree, but it was difficult to pin down why.

We found the tree after a short hike. I marked it's location for her with a stick. Soon, other people would show up. Her staff, police, scientists.

The tree was barely the size of a shrub, sticking above the wat only about a foot. It was shaded by other, full-grown trees but you could sense its qualities. You could feel them.

Those qualities flowed through the area, affecting plants and animals. A large fish poked around near the tree’s roots, oblivious to me standing next to it. I poked it. It swam away as if in a trance. I could see deer gathering, watching, on a small hill just outside the flooded area.

“There’s a black bear over there that won’t move,” one of the other people called to us as they arrived.

I knelt down beside the tree, my knee resting on muddy ground. The air was full of dust particles slowly floating around and up.

The others set up equipment. We were going to stay a few days and needed to set up cameras and audio equipment to observe the area, and places to sleep. I rolled out my sleeping bag under the collapsed roof of the cabin’s bedroom.

Everyone else left. The governor and her staff had official duties, the guides to get food. That left me and a small child. I boiled water from the flooded area and when cooled, bathed the child.

I became aware of what can only be described as a low hum accompanied by the sense that something was aware of my presence. The dust danced to the tune of the hum and continued its slow drift up.

The hum got slightly higher; the sense of presence increased. The child and I looked at each other.

The Mt. baldy snack bar

I watched Commando yesterday. Rewatched, actually. It’s a thing of beauty. Lots of Arnold Schwarzenegger Easter eggs, bad one liners, the 80s worship of big muscles and Dan Hedeya in a role that will touch you. The plot is implausible. The action is as funny as the dialogue. It also has David Patrick Kelly, and a vastly underappreciated Rae Dawn Chong.

Matrix’s relationship with his daughter is also set-up in super cheesy fashion. They fish and pet deer (these days, potentially exposing your children to chronic wasting disease ought to be a criminal offense), and get ice cream cones. Where? I thiefed the name of the place for this website to honor the totality of Commando.

Pigeon, Missouri

The propane salesman had bright, red gums and wire Tim glasses. We’d walked into an open door to find him cooking breakfast.

He knew the short, curly-haired man I was with. That made one of us.

They talked about the health problems of Mr. Gums and Glasses. From the stacked boxes of insulin injectors, I took it that he had diabetes.

There was a third man sitting on a stool. He didn’t say a word. There also weren’t any propane cannisters. There also wasn’t a parking lot. No sign. And the doorway we walked in was in the middle of a non-descript brick wall behind a couple of corn silos. We’d walked a winding, worm path through the post-industrial waste of Pigeon to get here.

The curly-haired man gave me started giving me directions as if I was from a neighboring town. He asked if I knew a landmark. He got a look on his face like he thought I was maybe from Mars when I told him I couldn’t even begin to describe where I was. That shocked me. I thought I oozed that I wasn't from around there from every pore.

The only thing I was certain of, as I woke up, was that I was just in the company of two of the fullest people I’d ever met and that we were all in Pigeon, Missouri.

So, so full

Who the Hell eats the refried beans and rice at a Mexican restaurant? I do, that’s who. Ate them tonight while pigging out on carnitas at one of our local Mexican restaurants. There were chips and salsas, tortillas stuffed with fatty crisped pork, and the beans and rice. There was a small, white pool of melted queso in the beans that absolutely called to me until I scooped it up and stuffed it into my mouth. It was creamy and salty and warm.

Letters from a Nut

When I was a much younger man, I heard about a book about letters a mysterious man wrote to various people. One was to a physicist asking why if he could lift more than he and a chair weighed why he couldn’t just fly around the room. I sometimes thought about that book.

I finally read it. Sometimes thinking about a book is a much better experience than reading it. Some yucks there were, but it was not — as advertised — the kind of book that would make me laugh so hard blood would squirt from my eyes.

Prank correspondence wasn’t perfected until a decade later by David Thorne.