In which I admit it, I’m feeling despair.

Multiple airlines, who want bail-outs because of the pandemic, have announced they won’t be requiring staff to vaccinate. This makes me glad I chose not to fly out to DC in October to visit my friend Stephen.

No, it makes me angry. Fuck those fucking dipshits. I haven’t had a vacation in two years. I could fucking cry, really, but there you are. We were going to go to his cabin and eat and drink and chill and it was going to be restorative and fun and lovely, but nah. I’m going to take a week off and DO NOTHING, IN MY GODDAMNED HOUSE, IN THE SAME GODDAMNED BUILDING I’VE BEEN IN FOREVER. I need a vacation, I really do, but Jesus.

Spread of Covid in Oregon is heartbreakingly, unnecessarily high. The governor is expected to announce a new mask mandate tomorrow.

Everybody who works at Fox is vaccinated, no matter what incendiary, evil bullshit they say on the air. It’s publicly documented. You can see fucking photos of many of them getting their shots after a second’s online search. But they say the most horrific shit to their viewers, literal lies or weasely “I’m just asking questions” bullshit that a lot of people frankly aren’t intelligent enough to see through.

One in four hospitalized with Covid in Arizona, which has already started school, is under twenty years of age. Yes, KIDS GET IT. Whoever told you kids don’t get Covid fucking LIED TO YOU.

DeSantis is literally killing his constituents, live, in real time, and… nobody’s doing anything about it? But he also wants 600 ventilators and a bunch of ICU nurses, because everything’s fine and Covid isn’t really a thing? HOW IS THIS FUCKING HAPPENING. HOW. HOW THE FUCK IS IT HAPPENING.

Several states have no hospital beds left because they’re all full of unvaccinated Covid patients. People ask why they don’t just “put up tents” like they did last year, but “hospital bed” doesn’t mean the literal, actual bed: it means equipment and, more importantly, qualified staff.

The staff that aren’t already dead due to lack of PPE are quitting in droves, because they’ve been in the trenches for over a year and they’re demoralized and exhausted. It’s too much to be intubating unvaccinated people who insist they DON’T HAVE COVID, BECAUSE THEY DON’T BELIEVE COVID IS DANGEROUS, or, perhaps worse, people who beg for the vaccine now that they are personally sick enough to “believe” in it, even though it’s far too late.

Every local and regional news tweet about Covid or Covid policy has hysterical, ignorant, enraged, racist replies underneath it. “Fake news!” they scream. Or “this is because of illegal immigrants!” Or “Covid isn’t dangerous, this is all lies!” I recently read an anecdote by a nurse describing a nurse educator who honestly believes that leaving milk in the hall outside the doors of the Covid ill will attract and trap the virus.

Fucking IMAGINE an adult, with a job in healthcare, no less (!!!) fucking thinking that’s how anything works! Civilization is FUCKED!

Don’t even get me started on the ‘zombies’ bullshit. Anti-vaxxers are fucking wrong and should, under no circumstances, be entertained or allowed in debates or considered in any way whatsoever, full stop.

There’s a doctor that has been tweeting Covid dead for the past year and a half. Just little blurbs, but each one IS A DEAD HUMAN BEING. Now he’s got threads of dead children, dead pregnant women, and dead Covid deniers who recanted on their literal deathbeds and begged people to get vaccinated. I never watch those videos.

A million fucking people are dead, hundreds of thousands are hospitalized, and WORST OF ALL: surviving Covid is often worse than dying of it. This disease does permanent damage to organs. This disease causes fucking brain damage.

But a full third of the population refuses to know any of this, because they’ve been fed some incredibly insane bullshit by Fox or whatever they’re poisoning their minds with. I don’t know why right wing media wants its viewers to be poor, get sick and die, but it clearly does. It lies, literally outright lies, and I can’t figure out why it’s not being stopped. These outlets are tearing society apart, fomenting hatred, deliberately and with malice misinforming the population on everything from a deadly motherfucking disease to immigration, and nobody in authority is even acknowledging it.

For the past month, I have been the only person wearing a mask where I work. (For reasons I can’t explain even to myself, I’ve only been wearing it in the shop front, with customers, and not in the kitchen with co-workers, but shit, my co-workers are just as likely to turn me into a carrier as customers. None of them are distancing or masking, and I’m not even sure they’re all vaccinated.

I worry about this not just because I don’t want to accidentally infect somebody’s unmasked child while handing it some cheese or ice cream, but because there’s evidence you can get long Covid even if you’re vaccinated and asymptomatic. I emphatically do not want that.)

Based on the maps, Umatilla county is lousy with Covid. The mask mandate NEVER should have been lifted. These fucking people drive massive trucks they don’t need, carry guns they don’t need, and have a collective IQ of nine. They’re full of hatred, selfishness, distrust, and racism. I mean, most of them are fine, one-on-one, for a short conversation, but they don’t even know how much they don’t know about reality.

The bar across the street from the cheese shop has been fully open for awhile now. I know this because the new bartender comes in all the time for lunch. He doesn’t wear a mask.

The world is on fire. Russia, Lebanon, Greece, the United States. All burning. Here, we’re on our, what, fourth? fifth? heatwave of the year. Drought everywhere, flooding everywhere else. Shit is VERY, VERY BAD, but everybody’s just trying to get back to their normal rate of obscene consumption of resources. Just look at fucking truck ads, for fuck’s sake.

We’re having a crisis of compassion. We’re having a climate crisis. We’re having a crisis of civic duty. We’re having a crisis of venality and greed. We’re having about twenty crises at once. I’m sitting here in my air conditioning, feeling like a bloated tick on the skin of the world because I honestly can’t figure out what to do to help. I try very hard not to be the problem, but how does one become part of the solution? I can see clearly what’s needed, but I’m none of the things that one needs to be to do any of what’s necessary: stop the filibuster. Kill the police and fund non-military responses. Cut the military by 75%. End the industrial prison complex. Mandate national Covid responses. Universal healthcare. Make healthcare non-profit. End all monopolies and monopsonies. Tax corporations. Tax the rich. House the homeless. Decriminalize drugs. Build high speed rail. Stop pipelines. Enforce anti-pollution policies. Fund the IRS. Fund the FDA and get all those snake oil ads off the air and out of print. Prosecute everybody associated with the insurrection. Prosecute Trump’s entire thing. Make it illegal for anybody in any public office to accept anything whatsoever from anybody because OH MY FUCKING GOD THE SHIT THESE ASSHOLES VOTE FOR. Spank Wall Street into a snotty, cowering mess.

Just for a start.

I don’t know how anybody can look at any of this, let alone all of this, and think it has nothing to do with them. OF COURSE IT DOES. If you get sick or injured in the next, say, year, you might not be able to get a hospital bed in time to save your life. Because either the beds will be filled with terminally ill Covid-deniers, or there just won’t be any qualified fucking staff, because society is so fucking broken that they’ll all be PTSD-ridden and homeless, or they’ll have been fucking deported for being “foreign.”

Maybe where you live isn’t much affected by climate change, yet, but somewhere nearby is, and the people who will be shortly driven from there will be in your fucking neighborhood, and you’ll have to deal with it then. And your ONLY CHOICES will be to either fucking help, like a decent human being, or hate them because you’re a goddamned ignorant, selfish coward who lacks the intellectual capacity to understand that it WILL be you next. One way or another.

We’re all in this together, and while it’s been, for a long time, possible to ignore it, let me tell you: the bill is coming due, motherfuckers. You have to love, and you have to care, and you have to do better, because we’re entering several extinction-level scenarios simultaneously. Disease, climate catastrophe, and worst of all, unchecked, unmitigated Mammon-worship.

There has got to be a way to stop so much of society from being totally fucking evil, doesn’t there? Imagine extracting wealth from healthcare and somehow sleeping at night! How the FUCK is that even possible? How is it a thing that there’s an entire insurance apparatus that just dictates life-or-death outcomes in ACTUAL HUMAN BEINGS for profit? It’s absurd, and yet there it is. How the FUCK is it that we send brainwashed, indoctrinated, armed soldiers to handle things like mental health crises or stolen cars in our cities and towns? How the FUCK is it that Congress just orders billions and trillions of dollars worth of war machinery that even the armed forces publicly admit they don’t want, just to line the pockets of the military industrial complex, and we all know about it and NOTHING IS DONE TO STOP IT? How the fuck is it that our society supports brutally razing homeless camps instead of, you know, giving them somewhere to fucking LIVE? We’re at the point where many of us actively hate people less fortunate than ourselves, and we don’t even question WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH US?!

If you ever find yourself hating, the very first thing you should do is ask yourself why, because the two worst things are hate and greed, and WE ALL KNOW IT.

A thousand times this.

 

In which I’m making soup!

I’ve just put some vegetables, herbs de Provence, and broth into the Instantpot. Will add cream when it’s done and blend it.

Baked a stunning loaf of bread last night; gonna make a brie sandwich with it and that’ll be dinner!

Pluto has a channel that just plays endless back-to-back episodes of The Love Boat and I’m super into it these past few days. What a weird-ass show! It’s so incredibly horny.

I cut my hair yesterday. The only cut I ever do: pull it all carefully to the nape, whack it off. Instant asymmetrical bob! I don’t really like how thin, straight, dry, and awful my hair is these days, but what can you do. I also don’t like being old and fat, either. Oh, well.

Work is insane lately. They’re making cheese probably four or five times a week, there’s ice cream now, foot traffic is really picking up, and we’re hosting Poutine, Eh? (a Tri-cities Restaurant) in pop-up format every Saturday. I used to order from the distributor every two months, now it’s twice as often and we’re always perpetually nearly out of crackers. I spend a lot of time making custom snack packs for local tasting rooms.

I’m the only person still wearing a mask at work; I’m doing it because the global consensus appears to be that it’s the best approach, even if local mandates say otherwise. As of today, I only know personally of two people who have caught Covid-19 (an uncle of his, and a co-worker of mine) but with everybody going back to normal and variants, well I want to do the right thing.

The kitchen window sill is full of herbs and a jade tree cutting Embo gave me. None of the several tomato plants out front have set any fruit. I guess next year I’ll just put flowers in the raised beds since it’s a rental and I don’t care enough to replace all the soil. (Did tell the owners we’d buy it if it were ever for sale, but I doubt they want to sell since this is their designated house-to-retire-into.)

Today’s the first day the high temp was under 95 in weeks. It’s been unbelievably hot and dry. It’s supposed to get down to 55 tonight so I’m going to turn off the A/C for only the third time in as many weeks (once for service, and a few nights ago to air out the stuffiness) and open the house up.

Time to go eat some soup!

 

in which i rage a little

you have no idea how much time and intention i put into overcoming that shitty “everyone is stupid” attitude smart people often fall prey to and which turns them into assholes, only to end up in this timeline where a third of the population is demonstrably, irrefutably stupid

i mean i used to say that people may look stupid from the outside, but if you understand their actual specific circumstances, most people’s behavior and decisions are actually rational in context

but here we are!

…adults railing against wearing masks and getting vaccines during A DEADLY GLOBAL PANDEMIC, because some bullshit about their “rights” being infringed

…people voting on the single platform of provincial, ignorant fucking racism (see: trump and brexit) and nostalgia for the fake era of 50’s american prosperity

…we just had a record-breakingly insane heat dome and shit’s on fire (as of the time of writing, cle elum has an evac order) AND we’re in a drought. plus most if not all of both WA and OR have official moratoriums on fireworks, but motherfuckers are out there BLOWING OFF FIREWORKS aka this neighborhood sounds like fucking afghanistan in 2010 because LET’S RAIN DOWN SHIT THAT’S EITHER ON FIRE OR JUST MERELY VERY GODDAMNED HOT on dry grasses

…if you watch broadcast TV, which you don’t if you’re under 45, because why the fuck would you, and you lack sufficient critical thinking skills, you probably think that a lot of those snake oil products you see advertised are actually legit because they’re on TV and you don’t know that whatever regulatory bodies that should be protecting you from such garbage lack the funding to do so

…the preponderance of our citizenry really feel that they not only can but should drive everywhere, all the time, because they lack the ability to imagine any other way, like, people will straight up fucking drive a tenth of a mile and back rather than walk or cycle simply because society is so incredibly, horribly, wastefully car-centric and while i have sympathy for thinking this (there are so many mechanisms in place to cause people to think this way) i also require people to FUCKING DO BETTER

 

in which there’s a complaint

being old sucks because everything hurts all the goddamned time for no reason and i get uglier day by day

but at least there’s rampant government and corporate corruption, grift, a global pandemic, and the climate to make me feel worse!

racists, anti-vaxxers, MAGAts (i cannot imagine finding the former guy intelligent, capable, and a good leader; the man’s a venal, ignorant, racist fucking moron and i have rocks in my yard smarter than his rabid followers), BUT WAIT! a billionaire class that could feed and shelter everyone AND give us all healthcare but just chooses not to because they hold us, their own species, the very one that made them obscenely wealthy, in contempt because they honestly believe their disgusting greed means they’re better than everyone else

 

In which there’s a post.

Got home from work and ordered a pizza. Quattro formaggi. Ate half of it and it was delicious. Now watching a movie on Amazon Prime.

Uh, let’s see. I bought rye flour and am going to bake my first ever loaf of rye bread soon. The house needs cleaned AGAIN. It’s been hot as hell but I’m either at work in A/C or at home in A/C or it’s night (love living out here again where it never fails to cool down at night).

It’s been picking up in the cheese shop; today was national cheese day so a station did a package on the creamery that ran this morning. Three different couples came in because they’d seen it, so I did the first-time spiel quite a lot today. Every time I point to the picture of the cows and say “…these are my co-workers, this was taken during an important meeting, I think it was about clover or something” it gets a laugh, which is fun. And everybody likes to look at the display window. Who doesn’t like to look at a ton of cheese.

The yeti is good, nothing out of the ordinary. Currently sporting my favorite look, which is long hair and a fairly new beard. Cute as hell. Oh, and my mom recently gave him a new quilt so he’s smug about that. Man loves a snuggly blanket.

Standing for hours straight at work has me thinking I now need to buy expensive compression socks; the cheap ones aren’t cutting it anymore. They never fit right, and the compression, I gather, isn’t properly graduated or whatever. Basically, my calves ache in a stupid way I don’t like after work, plus weird zingy nerve feelings, so I’ma buy fucking thirty dollar socks.

Aging is bullshit. I kid you not. Stuff that always worked without thought now doesn’t work AND hurts. Buh. Fucked up my back and shoulder last week sleeping, and had to be really careful at work not to twang it into total immobility lifting a wheel of cheese.

Read three or four books since the last time I posted, which is the most I’ve read in a very long while. Still have a dozen books on my Kindle to get through, but a start has been made.

Tomatoes are in, last year’s parsley is alive and bolted. I now have a couple of jade plant cuttings from Embo. The avocado is back outside and bursting into new growth.

This post reads exactly like an email from one of my aunts.

 

In which fuck it, I’ve opened an account at Chase after all.

I’ve been using an excellent online bank called Simple for years. They paid killer interest, the app worked flawlessly, and it’s just been really pleasant, especially considering how infuriating banking has been for me most of my adult life (primarily due to poverty, but how insanely frustrating and expensive banking is for poor people is an entirely different rant).

Like everything nice these days, the Simple product is being killed because its parent company was bought out. It was doing really well, so I assume the decision to close is just more typical corporate raider bullshit, I don’t know, and I don’t care enough about finance assholes to go find out; what I do know is that an excellent, high value service is closing because some dipshits think CEO bonuses are more important than providing an excellent product, and now I have to move my money.

Naturally, I decided to open an account at the little bank down the block from work. That’ll be nice, right? Regional bank, easy access to a branch, should be a no brainer!

It took, and I am not kidding, THREE in-person visits, three phone calls, and FIVE FUCKING DAYS to open a checking account.

The process wasn’t unpleasant, it was just ridiculously complex and took forever. I imagine they pride themselves on their homey, small town appeal, but it’s 2021. Just open the goddamned account. Do not call me and leave messages. Do not make me come over there more than once. Just take my fucking money. It’s a checking account, not an organ transplant.

And after all that, they misspelled both my name and address on the counter checks and the account itself. I had to message them through the website (which, surprise, uses security technology from the 00’s and failed to change the temporary username I was given) to get the typos fixed, and even THAT took three days.

It took something like six business days for my initial deposit to clear, which is nonsense in today’s banking world.

THEN it took just as long for my first direct deposit to show up, and it was from my employer’s account, which is AT THEIR OWN BANK. It was AN INTERNAL TRANSFER, yet it took so long I had to send a message inquiring about it before it actually showed up. (There is no fucking way an internal transfer like that should take more than three days. None. They must be doing all this shit by hand. Like, with punch cards or some shit.)

Today I decided to transfer the remaining balance out of my Simple account (it’s closing for good on the 8th, “transitioning” to another bank with ridiculous fees) so I looked up my balance, wrote myself a check, and used the new bank’s app to deposit it.

Deposit rejected. Limit exceeded. The check was for WELL under five grand, so my new-account deposit limit must be in the range of hundreds of dollars? What the fuck?

Jesus Christ. I give up.

Logged into my Amazon-branded credit card account, which is a Chase account, and opened a checking account there. It took fewer than five minutes. No fees, similar interest rate, and my Simple account was already linked (it’s what I used to pay my card each month) so I’ve already initiated a transfer.

I’ll switch direct deposit from the local bank to the Chase account this week, and then probably just ignore the local account for a few months until I’ve got the stamina for the five phone calls and three in-person visits it will UNDOUBTEDLY REQUIRE to close a checking account I will by then have only used twice: once to open it and once to close it.

I’d much rather use the friendly, small, local bank, of course, but there are reasonable expectations a customer can have, ESPECIALLY in the finance sector. IN-HOUSE direct deposits should take three days at the absolute outside limit, and making me come sit in your drive-through on my bike for twenty minutes, twice, so you can explain checking accounts to me and hand me a printed packet I could much more easily read online? Forget it. No.

So now I’m banking with the big assholes, but at least I didn’t have to WAIT FIVE DAYS to open a GODDAMNED CHECKING ACCOUNT. The only benefit of the small local bank is that IF there’s a problem you should, ideally, be able to go in and speak to a person and get it resolved, but we all know that’s not how it works any more. There’d be an apologetic “I’m sorry, but” and all you’d have accomplished is wasting more time, because rules are rules!

 

In which fake news must be regulated.

In yesterday’s paper, there’s a Dilbert strip in which Dilbert says he “hates people” so much he doesn’t wash his hands, and hopes he’s an asymptomatic carrier of a deadly disease.

The strip’s artist is a man called Scott Adams who has, I regret even being aware of, publicly fallen down the Fox News/Breitbart/Q rabbit hole. I have no idea who or how he was a decade ago, nor do I care, but today he’s a rabidly pro-Trump, hateful, ignorant white nationalist more famous for saying awful shit online than drawing a comic.

It’s my opinion that all these media companies should be strictly regulated. Fox isn’t a news channel, it’s an opinion channel. It does not adhere to ethical reporting standards and has, as far as can be observed, never intended to.

Watching Fox News as one’s primary source of news turns a citizen into a fearful, angry idiot. It means that they “know” and “believe” a shocking volume of things that simply are not true or didn’t actually happen in reality. This makes these citizens, in my opinion, ineligible to vote.

If you “believe” that viruses aren’t real and that it’s fine that over 560,000 Americans are dead of a preventable disease, you’re not a competent adult.

If you “know” that the horrific number of mass shootings are a reasonable price to pay for… for… for, well, anything, you’re not competent. You’re a fucking sociopath. The second amendment does not mean that idiots can run around with weapons, killing and maiming others at will. Thinking that that’s what it does mean makes you… well, an idiot.

Read this Twitter account, Well Regulated Militia. It’s just an endless scroll of stories of people shooting themselves and others with guns they never should have had in the first place. I mean, we’re a population that can’t be trusted with lawn darts, and yet guns are fine?

These entertainment editorial platforms need to be regulated. They must be required by law to label themselves as entertainment and not news. They are deliberately misleading people and fracturing society. Because of them, people hate the Fourth Estate, because they lack the ability to tell the difference between reportage and editorial. It’s a massive fucking crisis and must be addressed.

I realize the IRS doesn’t go after rich tax evaders because it can’t afford to. I realize that the FDA doesn’t police ads for supplements as it should, for the same reason. (Print, TV, and online ads for unregulated garbage making insane health claims are utterly rampant. It infuriates me, because it’s just making the population dumber.) Trump’s administration gutted a massive amount of oversight in industry. The country’s organs of regulation are all but useless (rich people gonna loot and pillage, after all) but we have got to get them all properly staffed and budgeted ASAP.

We have the money. There are absolute fucktons of money, we’re just siphoning it off into the offshore accounts of the upper eschelons because we lack, apparently, the will to make this rapacious theft stop.

Vote in every local election (these are the ones that really matter). Subscribe to your local paper. DO NOT WATCH FOX, unless it’s just your mostly-harmless local affiliate’s local coverage. Be angry that there are homeless people in your community, not because you’re disgusted by them but because, in a rich country, the only reason anybody’s fucking homeless is because your asshole Puritan ancestors decided that poverty was a moral failing and not ultimately an indictment against society’s empathetic failings. Laugh at the war on drugs. Be offended by warlike language used by the police. Know that cops ARE NOT SOLDIERS and vote down any police funding requests for tanks and other weapons of war.

Shit is pretty awful these days, because a third of the country thinks guns and extra-judicial murders-by-cop are acceptable and that wearing a mask is, bafflingly, a violation of their rights. It’s going to get much worse.

Oh, also: kill Citizens United. Enforce anti-trust laws. Break up ALL the monopolies. And tax professional sports; I can’t fucking believe pro football is tax exempt, that’s a fucking racket. Also tax every penny every church has that isn’t spent directly on domestic charity. Megachurches should be illegal, or at least heavily regulated. And representatives at all levels of government should be heavily fined for refusing to show up in order to deny quorums. End the filibuster. Uh, what else? Drastically change police mandates and fund the ever-loving shit out of replacement entities to handle domestics, drugs issues, homelessness, etc. You don’t send a fucking armed soldier to get some unhoused out from under a goddamned bridge. Oh, and fuck car culture. Every single community in the country should require businesses to remodel existing structures whenever possible before building new, brutalist, sprawling, shitty buildings out on the highway that can only be reached by firing up a car or truck. Outlaw the modern SUV truck; those things are monstrous and ugly and they have such high windows and broad hoods that drivers can’t see anything closer than 23 feet away, which is why they keep killing pedestrians and cyclists.

I’m sure there’s more, but I’m going to go ride my bike now.

 

In which I need.

I need to quit being so old and fat.

Because it’s constantly uncomfortable. Jeez. The joints, the ankles, the ugh. However, problem is, I dislike diet and exercise a great deal and also time appears, in this plane, to be linear, so apparently I’m fucked.

Such a pain. A pain in the ass.

 

In which WHERE THE FUCK DID I PUT THE CILANTRO SEEDS?!?!?

Planted some seeds today. Should have done so the 1st, but whatever.

Hopefully they’ll germinate well. Had to re-order cilantro because I can’t find the seeds I got a couple months ago. Also ordered a compost bin thing for the yard and some compost starter, because I have absolutely HAD IT with throwing kitchen waste into the trash!

 

In which there is an anniversary.

Two fucking decades ago, on the 9th of March, I registered this domain name.

I was working as an engineering assistant at a small ISP in rural Iowa and since part of my job was second and third-tier technical support, I was encouraged to learn HTML. So I did.

Goblinbox has been online ever since, with fewer than a few days of downtime (caused by moves and DNS delays as I changed jobs and hosts over the years).

GOBLINBOX IS TWENTY FUCKING YEARS OLD, which puts me into my fifties.

Jesus.