Walkabout Thoughts #98

 Thoughts in Streams of Consciousness, Rough & Ready, and Lightly Edited from an Award-Winning Filmmaker/Author you’ve never heard of while walking off Reality and hopefully the last half-life vestiges of Long Covid while listening to podcasts.

Walking Day is Thursday, July 25, 2024. 

Today is July 28, 2024 and happy birthday to my older sister!

Weather for the day… nice day, starting out, 63° little wind, overcast, broken blue sky 66° upon returning back at home.

Podcast is WTF? With Marc Maron with Episode 1559 - Clare O'Kane

Mark just watched Maxine and Long Legs (he didn't like as much), both "devil shit" movies.

Out for my first walk in weeks because of how the heat has been. I switched over to strength training and got up to 70 situps adding five every day for a month starting with 25. I’ve done that multiple times throughout the years to get back in shape and it works really well. I noticed my stomach was leaning outward a bit, and when you see that you start doing situps. When you notice your weight goes over a certain poundage, lose some weight.

Feels good to be out for a walk, nice weather 63°. Intermittent clouds overcast to the east. 66° when I got home.

Anyway, Marc's podcast today is a good one because in the beginning he pretty much describes my political leanings.

All this bullshit from Trump all these years, trying to force us into a binary tribal mode and hating “the other “. OK, let’s not hate other American citizens or other citizens of humanity. Yeah, rat bastard.

Speaking of which, the TOC for the Handbook of the AntiChrist, from yesterday.I had this idea that Trump fits the definition of the Christian AntiChrist. I asked ChatGPT to make me an accurate table of contents for a handbook the AntiCrhist might use, tweaked it very little and there it is. Remarkably accurate to Trump's progress. Then Trump said that nonsense at a rally this weekend about how he's not Christian but vote for him and he'll end voting. What? WHAT? True, he said that! Unbelievable, truly...

We could learn something from our French friends:

France
"Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité"
America
"Out of Many, ONE"
Devolution...
US Christian Nationalism
"In God We Trust"
MAGA
"Freedom! Trump! Autocracy!"

But like Marc is saying, I’ve never been a "Biden guy", I think he did a great job, bizarre what MaGA claims about him, literally delusional. I’ve been an independent voter most my life. Historically, I looked at who’s running and I voted for the best person. Until the GOP elected Trump at which point I couldn't vote for a Republican anymore until we get this cleaned up. Purge the GOP or outlaw them.

I thought Marc had a very good rational objective way of looking at things in this podcast, his prefunction talk before he talks to a comedian. I never keep it straight. Comic or comedian?

As for, running for POTUS I've thought we’re decades past needing to have a female president. I thought Hillary earned her place and then got screwed. I think she had personality problems with some voters, sure. 

I know my kids didn’t like her but a lot of what they didn’t like was disinformation and just trying to make her look bad and some of her just not looking that good to a younger generation. But I think she’s a skilled bureaucrat and needed to be a more skilled politician. Some people are hard workers, are very knowledgeable but not great at connecting to the masses. We've lost some good politicians due to that. 

I fully believe Kamal can do the job. Whenever as a Senator, she was going to be on a committee investigating and interviewing people I would watch C-SPAN just to watch her excellent investigative and prosecutorial skills at work which I believe she’ll bring now against convicted felon Donald Trump

Oh yeah, she’s capable. The Right's going to slander and libel and denigrate her, say she "slept her way to the top", how misogynistic and how typical. She did things in her career and therefore is open to criticism as opposed to Republicans who try to do nothing so there’s nothing to criticize. That's just embarrassing.

She was a skilled Prosecutor, California Attorney General, Senator and fuck all you haters. Part of America’s conservative and now Republican disease has been a lack of equality for women in power. Women are more than half of 50% of Americans. It should be by law, that at least half of any authority group are women.Where possible.

Half of the Supreme Court should be women. the head Justice should be a woman. Half of Congress by law should be female. I know that’s problematic because of how things work but we need to get there somehow.

As a man, CIS-gendered heterosexual I believe part of America’s problem has been a lack of women’s voices being heard. As we are seeing now, as white people diminish in power (deal with it, this isn't White America, it's America), where Latinos will be the majority (2045), we have a  lack of minority voices. Which is getting better.

All this concern by bigoted white people that they’re losing power & authority? Grow up, get over yourself.

This is where I’ll have to put a meme of what I posted yesterday about how I feel and how I felt in the workplace dealing with women in minorities.

Granted, I’m not a grievance her ego type. It sickens me all this crap about DEI just denigrating women and minorities

I’ve been saying that "MaGA" doesn’t deserve/get a capital "a" for "America" in their acronym because they’ve shown so much disrespect to our country, to the US Constitution, and to our citizens.

But "MAGA" ("Minorities Aren't Going Away") is right about one thing in what that acronym stands for. 

Marc and his guest are talking about shaved heads because she has a problem dealing with hair so she just cut it off. He’s talking about the one time he got his head shaved and how weird it was. 

I only had my head shaved once, in basic training in the Air Force. I had cut my hair before I went in so it wouldn’t look too long when I got down there But I quickly realized it was still long for those grizzled old barbers who seemed to be pissed off at cutting hair.

Some of the recruits, after I was done (and I was fine, it hurt a couple of times when they were quickly cutting my hair so real because they’re trying to get a lot of guys done), but I saw at least four or five guys come out who had had pretty long shoulder length hair, and they were bleeding from the scalp in a few places.

For me, that said it was not just the barber's speed but involved some kind of emotion. This was in Texas. Where they still thought long hair equaled female. I mention this because that night when we went to bed in our bunks, 12 bunks in a row, next row 12 bunks in a row, in a U-shaped dorm where on the other arm of the "U", the same thing with rows of 12 bunks or so adding up to 50.

When my head hit the pillow, the pillow was cold on my scalp. I’d never felt that before. It was kind of cool, kind of weird. Finally, I fell asleep. I woke up in the middle of the night and could feel my hair was shaved. My hand, without thinking, went up to my head. I was rubbing my scalp and feeling it and thinking.

I rolled over and was able to see down the line of bunks in the glow of the emergency exit light. I could see other guys hands up down the line, rubbing their scalps just like I was. There’s something surreal about it. I went back to sleep and  was the last any of us thought about it.

Talking to my oldest son on the phone last night I realized he was born in 1988 and my birth father died in '89 about 10 months after he was born. I hadn’t seen him since I was 16. I hadn’t seen my younger half-brother, by our dad and his next wife, in a while. Since he was 11. So it was cool that we reconnected. 

I found out three things that day. We think exactly alike. It was like we grew up together and he has nine brothers and sisters from his mom‘s two previous marriages who he said he never really fit in with. They harassed the shit out of him being the new kid by the new dad. I wish I’d realized that as I would’ve been more of a big brother to him, but I was so hurt over my dad not giving a shit about me, I disappeared. The last time I saw him, I took him to a movie. A day he said he never forgot.

I went over one more time to see my dad and he and my stepmom met me at the door as they were leaving to go for a bicycle ride. I had called to tell him I was coming over to visit him. He said, "Oh, hi, the kids are inside. We’re going for a ride," and they just left. It was last time I saw him until I saw him in his coffin at the funeral service. 

Like I said, I got to reconnect with my younger brother that day and we became very good friends. His siblings were always very happy to see me. I also discovered that everything I did in my life, apparently, my dad shared it with his family, probably hearing about it through his parents because my mom would talk to my grandparents. I found my younger brother was a genius artist and just all around genius. It’s funny because when my son was around 10 or 11, I took him over to meet him, so they’ve known each other from then on, and they think very similar too.

I saw my VA doctor last week and then got a notification to see my Medicare doctor so I’m seeing her tomorrow. I’ve had this issue for months with my right hand, ring finger, and the doctor diagnosed it as "trigger finger", which thankfully isn’t my "trigger" finger. It’s really annoying. Getting old for me seems to be going through a compendium of things that can go wrong. But then in the end both doctors said I was one of their healthiest patients. Good to know.

I'd expected I would retire and write and enjoy my life. Go hiking and do lots of crazy things and travel a lot… Covid in 2020 put a real damper on a lot of that, but then some of this was going to be happening anyway, inevitably. So... "good times". I think about all those times when I was younger and people warned me "you’re gonna regret that when you get older" and I said "fuck it I’ll deal with it when I’m old." 

Well, here we are. Thanks, dumbass.

It’s like raising my kids. I had to do things financially to give them a good life that I knew I would find problematic later, nowadays, and I am…

I was watching some show the other day and this guy. or role/character. I can’t remember was it a drama or nonfiction? He said "when you choose a life partner or get married, that’s a really important other person in your life and you have to give it a lot of thought and choose carefully." Uh huh...

Yeah, I didn’t know about that advice. I did, but not to the extent he was implying.

What's below is from the podcast a few days after my last walk, when I was shopping for groceries. Yeah, I know, but..

They're talking about when they both lived in Boston (Marc and his guest), but didn’t know each other living in the same area. There was lots of heroin around. Which reminded me of a time in Seattle in the 80s when I couldn’t find any weed, but there was so much heroin around, you didn’t even have to ask for it. I’ve never done heroin. I'd never been offered heroin so often or so much.

Interesting, they're referring to a street called "Houston". When I got to Dublin, I was looking for the Houston train terminal and I asked someone how to get to Huston, saying it the way we say it in America. The only way I ever heard Houston pronounced. As Houston, as in Texas. Somebody from Ireland corrected my pronunciation: "Howston". What? Wow, OK.

I got to the terminal.

Perfect walking weather today. Supposed to get to 75 today 90 by Saturday. National weather alert went out for from the fifth to I think the ninth regarding heat around here.

On that note, I’ll bid you adieu…

And I’ll leave you with that. And it’s noon and time for lunch.

Cheers! Sláinte!