5/30/2023 Parent Trap
I was in town the other day, volunteering at a food pantry, mopping the floor, when I overheard two of the other volunteers swapping stories about their kids. One story started off with the 11 year old kid asking for a banana, and I didn't hear most of the story, other than the kid telling the mom, "You need to calm down," and the mom, in relaying the story saying, "I'm always saying that to her: 'You need to calm down.'" So I have no idea what that was about, but I'd bet that, aside from just mimicking the mom, the kid had solid grounds for saying what she said.
The other volunteer's story about their kid involved his 15 year old daughter getting a henna tattoo (a type of temporary tattoo that is applied to the skin as a paste, and wherever the paste touches the skin, the skin becomes temporarily stained), texting him a picture of it, and then not replying for an hour when he asked if it was permanent. I could tell pretty much right away that the daughter knew exactly what she was doing, hates her dad, and wanted to jab him, so she purposely got the henna tattoo, knowing he wouldn't appreciate her not "discussing" it with him first, and left him hanging for an hour so that he'd sweat over it. If the children have ire toward the parents, here in the early 21st century, I'm going to go ahead and conclude that it's not without good reason, and the plot certainly thickened when I chimed in. I usually tend to stay out of these things and let the chimpanzees have their way with each other, but I guess I couldn't help myself this time. The conversation became pretty thick and steered toward the bible somehow. Apparently some people believe that the line about not changing your temple refers specifically to not getting tattoos. I shared my views about how I believe the bible was written by people in power so they could make all these laws to benefit themselves and people would have to follow them because "God said so." In relaying this story to Adam later, he offered that it wasn't about power, rather they were just liars. The bible was written by liars. I said this, in essence, to the other volunteers when one of them stated that the bible was transcribed by people to whom god was speaking. I replied that they only said god was speaking to them, but they were lying. They made it all up so that everyone else would have to do whatever they said. People also use their interpretations of the bible--rather the interpretations that are handed down to them by other liars--still to force others to bend to their will. So the example here, "Don't change your temple." Your temple could be anything. For people who don't want their kids getting tattoos, your temple is now suddenly your body. When pressed about what's wrong with getting a tattoo, other than their belief that the bible says it's wrong to get tattoos, which it doesn't, the answer then changed to, "Well there are legal ramifications for her." Her being the 15 year old girl as it is illegal to get a tattoo under a certain age without parental consent, and the age varies from state to state. He believes that in this state, it is age 16. I didn't get around to saying this, but saying that there are legal ramifications for her implies that he plans on turning her in if she gets a tattoo without his consent before she's 16. There are only legal ramifications if someone turns her in and presses charges. Not to mention the legal ramifications for the tattoo artist. No tattoo artist is going to risk their job for that. He then went on about the legal ramifications for himself because of how a parent is legally responsible for anything their child does until they are 18. Later on, I was revisiting the conversation in my mind, and it occurred to me that this is the exact argument my mother gave when she said she didn't want me to smoke marijuana. As a youngster, I remember being involved in a conversation about marijuana where she said flatly that it's illegal, she tried it a couple times, it burned like hell in her lungs, and she just didn't care for it. And supposedly, it being illegal and her dislike for it were supposed to be reason enough for me to not smoke it. I got news: I don't care for mushrooms on my pizza, but I don't try to convince other people that it's wrong to have mushrooms on their pizza because I don't like them, that's for goddamn sure. I'll even go a step further. The social factor. In many circles, smoking marijuana, or having tattoos, or both, whichever example you want to take, is considered taboo. Doing so or associating with others who do so would lower your social standing within that group. If there's one thing I know about people, one of their greatest fears is to be ostracized from their social group. Circling back to the parents: yes, I acknowledge that most people believe in and abide by laws that put the parents under pressure to keep their children from breaking the law due to the threat of their own imprisonment. However, I don't think it's the imprisonment that really scares them. It's the loss of their social status as a result of their imprisonment that scares them. They'll swear up and down that their sole concern is for the child's well-being: "I don't want her to get something permanent applied to her skin that she'll regret in 20 years." Trust me. At 15, as a child of normal mental development (I've met her a couple times), she's aware of the permanence of tattoos. In reality, it's not at all about the child's well-being. It's about the parent's social status, but no parent is ever going to admit this. Why, when it comes to Law, I have nothing to say, for laws were never meant to be understood, and it is foolish to make the attempt. 5/30/2023 bleeding out
All the time you spend tryin' to get back what's been took from you, there's more goin' out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it. 5/30/2023 breakin'da rools
Let me ask you something. If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule? 5/22/2023 Shots Fired
They came by shooting today. Being that we have generally been occupying remote areas of forest, hearing gunshots is not uncommon. Typically, best practice is to avoid areas that are clearly shooting ranges. Signs of a shooting range will be various appliances and/or furniture with bullet holes in them. Broken glass is also a good indicator that you might want to steer clear of that area, or at least not setup right there. These are general rules of thumb that we have followed.
We've been here for about a week now, and everyday, I've heard shots to the north. My figuring is there's an area over there that locals have claimed as their own personal shooting range. This is not uncommon and doesn't bother me in the slightest, and I know to avoid the area, at least for camping. Today, however, for the first time, I heard shots from the east-southeast where I recently saw a couple cars setup for camping. The main road in and out of the area is in that direction, so I find it unlikely that anyone would choose that area to go shooting, given the likelihood of hitting someone. Immediately after the shots from the east-southeast, they began coming from the east and sounded very nearby. Then I started hearing ricocheting bullets flying directly over the tent. I stood up and walked cautiously around to see if I could see someone with the intention that if they saw a human walking around in the area, maybe they would move to a different location. I did not see anyone, but the whizzing bullets continued for about 30-40 minutes. I heard a few smacking through the trees overhead before hearing them land about 50-60 feet behind me. Today they were fairly high overhead, but it did occur to me that if you were trying to murder someone and make it look like an accident, a ricocheting bullet in the woods would convince quite a few people unless, of course, the target was on to you and was very publicly vocal about it which would make it increasingly difficult to perform your task. In this case, the best you can do is intimidate and try to scare them into uprooting their lives. Nevertheless, I stopped what I was doing and looked up how to treat gunshot wounds. Not long after they stopped shooting at us, a very large, earth-shaking booming began to the north. Those shots were deep blasts that sounded like explosions. They occurred in two's. There would be a shot, a pause, another shot, then maybe a few minutes of pause before beginning the whole process again. The blasts continued for another 20-30 minutes. At this time, it occurred to me that if you wanted to murder someone and make it look like an accident, but you knew they were on to you which made it increasingly difficult to perform your task, you might want to intimidate them, to scare them, to make yourself appear and sound bigger, stronger, and more capable than you are. 5/17/2023 singin' in the rain
Remember how I talked about the government doing some cloud-seeding when Adam went to pick up our new battery banks?
I thought I would provide some photographic evidence of the peculiarity this time. We've been talking about ordering a new solar panel for some time now. I suppose they just weren't sure when we'd order it, so they decided to modify the forecast so they could seed clouds at their whim without looking suspicious. I certainly find it strange that so far, May is proving to be pretty rainy. Don't believe me and my 5 years' experience living outdoors in this area? Just look at the weather data.
Today, it didn't just sprinkle a little then move on. As I write this, it is currently 15:39, and it has been raining steadily since about 11:45. Adam left to pick up our new solar panel well before then. The hail was steady for about an hour and reached about 1/2" (1 cm) across.
The package was delivered at 15:23. What's odd about this is that it was delivered to a business...one of those pack & ship places that charge you a flat rate per package to use their street address. Business deliveries, both from my understanding and our past experience using this service, generally arrive in the morning, by 11:15. Even the delivery carrier estimated that the package would be delivered between 11:00 and 15:00. At 15:01, with it not being delivered, that estimate disappeared from the tracking page. Update: The rain paused for about an hour around 15:49 and has picked up to a sprinkle now around 16:50. Update: 18:07, and it's still sprinkling.
Now that we have our package, of course, it wouldn't surprise me either way if they kept it up and called it an unusually rainy May or if they stopped the act and let nature take the reins.
5/13/2023 Adam Bomb
After reading over my last post about trashazon, I realized that it would be a pity to share that story and not include the email that Adam blasted through their little rinky-dink pile of bricks one evening. I guess I didn't bring it up in the original post because I had other points on my mind that I wanted to make. This way, though, that one email gets its own solo.
Before I get into that, I want to make it perfectly clear that the use of the word "bomb" in this post's title and that of the other one is purely, and always will be, metaphorical. I just don't want anyone getting any false ideas about my intentions here. Subject: On the Subject of Thievery in the Modern Capitalist Society from the Standpoint of a Species to which the Delusion that One can Benefit From Such is Entirely Foreign I'm having a little trouble understanding why we are being treated like criminals when it seems so very clear to me who the crook is here. I find it unlikely that any sane person would listen to this story and conclude that we knowledgeably donated $75 to Amazon. Now you can quote Amazon policy and legal bullshit all day long, but at the end of the day you have our money and we don't have the promised merchandise.
Though Adam came up with it completely, it was my idea to have such a lengthy subject line. I think long titles are funny. After sending it, he said, with some exhilaration, "It was almost worth 75 bucks just to be able to say that!" "Totally!!" I agreed.
Adam also recently reminded me that after having sent this email, the "customer service" agent I spoke with on the phone, who I said in my last post seemed like "a nice enough guy," when we were making chit chat, he asked if I watched football and said that his favorite team was the Pittsburgh Steelers. So yeah, either way you spell it, they stole our money, and they wanted us to know it, too. 4/17/2023 mindfff-bread
I once conceived, staged, and performed in a concert dance-art piece in which I sat in a chair and ate my dinner, which consisted of nothing more than a chunk of bread, whilst other dancers in the same show danced around me having been instructed to take their improvisational movement inspiration from little scraps of paper, randomly torn, by me, from a notebook I had been writing in for some time. Mind you, I was instructing them as I was tearing the paper scraps out of the book, and they had only volunteered when I asked them maybe 3 or 5 minutes prior. The instructions were basically: "take your movement inspiration from whatever you see on this scrap of paper, and feel free to vocalize in any way you see fit by stage-whispering to me as you dance around me. Meanwhile, I'm going to sit on a chair in the middle eating this bread." The whole thing was very last-minute, impromptu.
The overarching show was the last show a certain choreographer was presenting in Columbus, OH before he moved to New York City, and I was performing in it. This dinner incident was in a little showcase immediately preceding the performance on one of the nights that the show ran. The artistic director (who was also the show's choreographer) had invited us to present work in this little showcase. Ever the opportunist and full of wacky ideas that just might work, I went, "okay." with a casual shrug in my head. And so it was that I came to be eating bread that I had baked, probably that day or the night before, onstage in Columbus, OH one evening. The thing about the bread in this art-piece is that it was simply a point of pragmatism: it was only ever about satiating my hunger. I didn't have any ideas or anything "in the works" when the original offer to present something in the little showcase was made, but like i said, I was an opportunist, and generally speaking, I thrive and feel my most competent when I am forced to improvise, especially if my improvised idea works out to my liking. Still speaking generally, I'm sure that's how it is with everybody and that I'm not unique in this. When it came showtime, I guess the whole idea developed around and because of the bread. Otherwise, the piece may have, and in all likelihood would have, been different were Adam and I not starving. We were about 20 pounds each less muscular and bone-dense as we are now, now that we eat pretty much every day, sometimes too much. I had been dancing after college, and those were the days of the $0.53/hour gig that dragged on well past very nearly every last millimeter of my epidermis had been exposed in public, on a stage, in a bar, with or without great security, hair and all. I remember one morning during those days when I barfed from having drunk a certain quantity of whiskey the night before. I've never had whiskey (nor bourbon, if you please) since. That's beside the point. |
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