Long-time readers may have noticed that although I do a lot of holiday columns, and used to do even more, I’ve never done one for St. Patrick’s Day. The reason is simple: I dislike it almost as much as I dislike Valentine’s Day. But while my reasons for disliking the latter are mostly rational, my reasons for disliking the former are almost entirely irrational, and go back to childhood. I don’t think it will come as a surprise to anyone reading this that I was a willful, rebellious child who hated being told “you must” with the same intensity I hated being told “you can’t”. Now, that doesn’t mean I was purely contrarian; however, even then I reserved the right to decide for myself whether I would comply with some adult diktat, starting with demanding to know why I was supposed to do something or refrain from doing something. Being told, “because x authority says so,” or handed some tautological non-justification, would generally provoke either immediate non-compliance or a pretense of compliance as long as the parent/teacher/cop was looking, followed by refusal as soon as they left the room. To this day, the surest way to lose my cooperation is to accompany the demand with a phrase like “you must”, “you are required to”, “it’s the law”, etc, though obviously I am a lot better at avoiding negative consequences for my hardheadedness than I was as a schoolgirl. So, as some of you may have guessed, my aversion to St. Patrick’s Day started with the annual declaration that I must wear green on the occasion; I was told to do it, not asked or encouraged. The reasons I was provided, when they existed at all, were pure blarney (I was skeptical about that snake story even before I stopped believing in Santa Claus), and given that my school uniform contained no green, the obligatory color display generally took the form of a stupid little felt shamrock pinned to my blouse. On top of all that, I had an odd aversion to green clothing in the first place; Maman thought it was because my other grandmother had made several rompers for me out of an old green sofa cover, so after a while I was thoroughly sick of the color. Or perhaps it was due to association with the vegetables whose mere smell nauseated me. In any case, I eventually outgrew my aversion to the color, but not to the holiday; as I grew into young adulthood I even rationalized my dislike by tying it to my disdain for binge-drinking and my reflexive rejection of any attempt to include me in some group membership against my will (back when people were declaring “We’re all New Yorkers now”, my response was usually “I’m not.”) So anyhow, now you know. I no longer have issues with wearing green, but I still find beer (of any color) revolting and am wont to roll my eyes at fake brogues and dopey leprechaun cartoons. And while I was perfectly willing to kiss the Blarney stone, I can’t say the same for drunken Irishmen. 
Posts Tagged ‘psychology’
Off the Green
Posted in Biography, tagged Catholicism, holidays, Ireland, psychology on March 17, 2022| 6 Comments »
Blake’s 6
Posted in Miscellaneous, tagged domestic violence, ethics, imaginative fiction, psychology, Reviews on March 10, 2022| 3 Comments »
This is the conclusion of my series on the classic BBC sci-fi series Blake’s 7, which ran from 1978-81. The first part appeared the last week of January, and four other installments on the series’ characters and writing followed in successive weeks.
Blake’s 7 was controversial from the very first episode, which featured an unusually-realistic depiction of how totalitarian states deal with dissent; self-appointed Moral Climate Monitor Mary Whitehouse practically had a cow over it. And the creators didn’t stop there; for four seasons the show’s creators took risks and violated expectations in a way few broadcast TV shows ever dared. Major characters were depicted in harsh daylight or even killed off, and that included the titular character at the end of season 2; the last episode of season 3, originally planned to be the last, left the remaining crew stranded on a remote planet when their beloved ship, the Liberator, was destroyed. And when a BBC executive decided to order one more season, the creators seem to have viewed the surprise renewal as permission to color even further outside of the lines, depicting the heroes’ flaws much more clearly and ending the final episode with a bloodbath. But two episodes earlier than that, “Orbit” had already thrown caution to the winds to produce one of the most realistic and adult episodes of series television ever aired by broadcast. It was written by Robert Holmes, who is my all-time favorite Doctor Who writer thanks to his gift for characterization. The basic plot was borrowed from “The Cold Equations“, one of the greatest sci-fi short stories of all time; Holmes, however, does not merely adapt the already-powerful tale, but instead uses it as a vehicle for portraying not one but two abusive relationships.
The story concerns a renegade scientist named Egrorian, who proposes a deal in which he will give his new super-weapon to Avon and Company in exchange for their supercomputer Orac. The eccentric, narcissistic, treacherous Egrorian has a very elderly assistant named Pinder; the way Egrorian psychologically dominates and physically abuses him is already uncomfortable before we discover the truth: Pinder is only 28, and was prematurely aged due to radiation in an experiment where he was used as a gunea pig. He was a child prodigy who has been in hiding with Egrorian for ten years, and the homoerotic overtones of their interaction, combined with the abuse and Pinder’s being a teenager at the beginning of their relationship, paint a very dark and nasty picture indeed; I suspect the only way it got past the censors was simply that they were too puritanical to grasp what was going on. But even that pales in comparison with what happens later: Egrorian has sabotaged the shuttle on which Avon and Vila will return to their ship by hiding a microscopic quantity of super-dense neutronium on board, making the ship too heavy to achieve orbit with the available fuel. And when they run out of other things to dump, Avon goes looking for Vila,
whose body mass is just over the critical amount they must shed. Now, Avon does figure out the problem and jettisons the neutronium instead; however, that does not change the fact that until he does, he is stalking around the ship with a gun, fully intending to murder his crewmate, who only escapes a grisly fate by hiding. It would be difficult to count the number of unofficial rules of 20th-century broadcast TV drama this story broke; even in a series which had regularly broken rules for four seasons, it was nothing short of shocking.
Those under 40, whose televisual landcape has always included antiheroes, flawed or even criminal protagonists, and morally and factually ambiguous situations, can scarcely grasp how absolutely new, amazing, and even scandalous Blake’s 7 was, and its last season, in which the full humanity of the characters (with all that entails) was laid bare, was like nothing ever before seen on television. And in its willingness to blow up audience expectations and transgress sharply-drawn boundaries of its time, like nothing since either.
Links #609
Posted in Current Events, Links, Miscellaneous, Music, Obituary, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged animals, comics, cops, Florida, hotels, Illinois, politicians, prisons, psychology, Rome, teachers, United Kingdom, video on March 6, 2022| 1 Comment »
I didn’t know anything about building careers. Somehow I still have a career. – Sally Kellerman
If you don’t know the name, enjoy this video of the first percussion-driven #1 hit in Billboard history. The links above it were provided by Jason Kuznicki; Yasmin Nair; Clarissa; Mike Siegel & Jesse Walker; and Cop Crisis (x2), in that order.
- Politics is cruelty.
- Be like these birds.
- Sic transit gloria mundi.
- R.I.P. Sally Kellerman and Sandy Nelson.
- Cops keep demonstrating exactly what they are. Believe them.
- It’s amazing how often people die mysteriously when cops are nearby.
From the Archives
- They usually try to pretend “public health” rhetoric isn’t crypto-moralism.
- Threats of life-destroying consequences often cause people to surrender.
- Deranged prohibitionist vows to violate court order so he can kill people.
- “If it were as easy to get a sex slave as a pizza, all cops should be fired.”
- US anti-whore jihad is so out of control it’s attacking foreign websites.
- Wild fantasies about normal events seem most common in the South.
- Hey nurses, how does it feel to be infantilized by misogynistic racists?
- “The terms of carnal encounters should not be up to the government.”
- Sex workers need to bury all prohibitionists of every kind in lawsuits.
- Another entry in the “sex trafficking” scare story invasion of Twitter.
- While India allows deranged prohibitionists to dictate health policy…
- Too bad the settlement won’t come out of their personal assets.
- What cops & politicians really mean by “going after the pimps”.
- Just in case you think being a “legal” sex worker protects you.
- Too bad nobody listened when I wanted this banned in 2012.
- Anti-sex laws are deeply rooted in racism all over the world.
- A modern descendant of the walled districts of feudal times.
- Cops, whales, confusion, Southern Gothic and much more.
- Another toiletful of assorted sociopathy from Deliverfund.
- Please take a moment sometime to tell me how it went.
- Virginia excels in inventing truly awful anti-whore laws.
- No doubt the children were contaminated by sex rays!
- Your “leaders” know what’s best, so shut up and obey.
- Cops lie, constantly. They are almost never not lying.
- A catalogue of my essays for Sex Worker Rights Day.
- “Sponsored content” means an ad, not journalism.
- Cops, stupidity, Florida, kittens, and much more.
- Police departments hide pictures of rapist cops.
- All vice squads are breeding grounds for rape.
- Cops think everyone is as stupid as they are.
- Sex workers need your help more than ever.
- Endangered beetles and the Fermi Paradox.
- Words mean things, and so do spellings.
- Cops, crows, straights, and much more.
- How stupid do these pigs think we are?
- The premiere of The War on Whores.
- Another case of white van hysteria.
- They’re not even trying any more.
- A very interesting development.
- A visit to Orlando, Florida.
- Rapist cops of the week.
- Chick days!
In the News (#1213)
Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Tyranny, tagged Bad Girls, Broken Record, California, cell phones, cops, hysteria, I Spy, law, Michigan, Micromanagement, New Zealand, Ohio, Oklahoma, Permanent Record, politicians, porn, Property of the State, psychology, scams, shame, surveillance, teachers, The Implosion Begins, video on February 19, 2022| 2 Comments »
By and large, the [state’s] reaction is, “Who cares? A child is dead. Let’s put her in prison for the rest of her life.” – Karla Fischer
I don’t usually think ages are an important detail, but this is an exception:
…two Thai sex workers…Nualpan Coxon, 67, and Pornthip Phonkoed, 63, both of Auckland, have been on trial…[for defrauding] and…blackmail[ing three elderly men]…between August 2015 and February 2018…prosecutor Rebecca Mann…described the pair’s behaviour as “psychological coercion”…but…defence counsel Russell Boot told the jury…”They were not deceived in any way…It wasn’t until their wives and daughters found out … that it became an issue”…
Any information you give to cops can and will be used against you:
The San Francisco police crime lab has been entering sexual assault victims’ DNA profiles in[to] a database used to identify suspects in crimes…District Attorney Chesa Boudin…said his office was made aware of the practice last week, after a woman’s DNA collected years ago as part of a rape exam was used to link her to a recent property crime. If DNA from a rape kit was used without consent for purposes other than investigating the underlying rape case, it may be a violation of constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures as well as California’s Victims’ Bill of Rights, Boudin said. Such a practice could also create another deterrent to sexual assault victims coming forward…Boudin said his office was investigating the scope of the practice…the database potentially includes thousands of victims’ DNA profiles, with entries over “many, many years”…
For comparison: roughly 60% of prostitution charges in the US result from the charged sex worker becoming the victim of some crime.
The state wants vengeance for the loss of future tax revenue:
[On] New Year’s Eve…2019, Rebecca Hogue, then a 28-year-old cocktail waitress, arrived home in Norman, Oklahoma, around 4 a.m. and went to check on her 2-year-old son…Ryder…her boyfriend, Christopher Trent…had put him…in his crib, where he appeared to be sleeping…when she woke up again a few hours later, Trent was gone. And her toddler, still in the crib, was…dead…Days later, [police] found [Trent] hanging from a tree in the Wichita Mountain Wildlife Refuge, where he’d killed himself…he’d [apparently] beaten the boy while Hogue was away at work…[because] they found the words “Rebecca is Innocent” carved into a tree…But in the ultimate act of victim-blaming against a grieving mother, the state of Oklahoma…convicted [her] of first-degree murder, even though she never laid a hand on the boy…Hogue was convicted under Oklahoma’s “failure to protect” law, which requires parents to [magically] shield their kid from physical harm if [a jury decides] they…[“]should[“] have been [clairvoyantly] aware…that another adult [wa]s abusing the child…
…In a city council video that reads like sketch comedy…[Hudson, Ohio] mayor [Craig Shubert]] warns that if you open up the lake to ice fishing, ice shantytowns will follow, and then commercial sex…”If you open this up to ice fishing, while on the surface it sounds good, then what happens next year—does someone come back and say I want an ice shanty?…And if you then allow ice fishing with shanties, then that leads to another problem: prostitution. Just data points to consider,” he added. (Apparently, Shubert doesn’t understand what “data points” means)…
At least Shubert had the sense to realize he had become a laughingstock, and resigned the following week.
The government thinks you shouldn’t be allowed any privacy whatsoever:
…the U.S. Postal Service…is violating the privacy and civil liberties of the American people by using sophisticated tools to break into hundreds of citizens’ cellphones and collect their social media posts…the U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) admitted in its 2020 annual report that it not only employed top-of-the-line technology hundreds of times to hack into mobile phones but also planned to expand its use of…Cellebrite…and GrayKey…to break into phones, unscramble otherwise unreadable encrypted data, and copy it for [pigs] to [root] through. This technology is dangerous and prone to abuse…
Everyone who spread “sex trafficking” hysteria contributed to this atrocity:
…Troy Burke…admitted to killing his wife, Jessica…by shooting her three times in the head in their [Michigan] home…a judge allowed Burke to enter a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, after psychiatric evaluations by both the state and independent experts concluded that he was not fit to stand trial…Burke believed his tablet device was sending him signals from QAnon members who told him that his wife was working for the CIA…the messages directed him to kill his wife to save the world from child sex trafficking…it’s unclear if the messages Burke was speaking about were real or imaginary, but…QAnon…was built on…false claim[s about]…child sex-trafficking [spread for the past two decades by politicians, cops, the news media (including Vice), sex work prohibitionists, and amoral profiteers]…
Coverage of these incidents is growing more sympathetic:
Cami Strella…tried to tune out distress about being outed until a classmate who discovered her online identity broached a conversation about sex and Strella’s online content. That encounter signified to Strella that her time as a student in occupational therapy with a neurological rehabilitation track was nearing a close…she…sought the advice of a trusted academic adviser who told her it would be best if she left the program…[so] she followed that advice and submitted her intent to unenroll from the only graduate program to which she had been accepted…Lutheran-affiliated Lenoir-Rhyne University has no policy against digital sex work, [and] a university spokesperson…said the school encourages Strella to communicate her concerns to university leadership…
“Communicate her concerns”? What sanctimonious bullshit. Note also that despite the generally-sympathetic tone, writer Lateshia Beachum still felt compelled to include dysphemisms such as “earning a living in society’s underbelly” and sophomoric tee-hee attempts at wit such as “pull themselves up by their garter belts to attain financial stability”.
Brand “X”
Posted in Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged left-right myth, politicians, psychology on February 7, 2022| Leave a Comment »
Silly modern hair-splitting of barely-different sects of authoritarians might as well be based upon what brand of laundry detergent they use for all the difference in their observable behavior. The two main differences between US authoritarian brands are 1) who they want running the show; and 2) which individual rights and liberties they deem threatening to the state; the only personal freedoms any sect of authoritarians embrace are those deemed incidental, unimportant, or unthreatening to the state or collective. Different groups of authoritarians create different pseudointellectual excuses for “why” they want to control individuals, and their varying hangups and issues cause them to fixate on different groups of individuals. But all authoritarians want collectivized control of individuals because their fragile minds feel out of control of a world of billions of individuals being individual. There is no intellectual process involved, merely primitive emotional ones; all excuses for authoritarianism, no matter how academic and impressive the wording they use to justify those fixations to the cognitively-lazy, are nothing more than the moans of frightened cave-children cowering in the dark at night-noises outside. Actual civilized adults are comfortable with individuals being individual, without any sick need to target them with violent attempts at control.
Blake’s 2
Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, Tyranny, tagged acting, imaginative fiction, psychology, Reviews, United Kingdom on February 3, 2022| 2 Comments »
Continuing my thoughts on the classic BBC sci-fi series Blake’s 7, which ran from 1978-81. The first part was published a week ago today.
One of the things I found most notable about the series was its treatment of women. In the 1970s, there was a lot of talk about what was then still called “women’s lib”, and futuristic societies were generally depicted as more sexually egalitarian. But while even Star Trek wasn’t ready to depict women in the highest positions of authority (such as starship command or supervillain status), and action chicks were generally superhuman in some way (eg, Wonder Woman or the Bionic Woman), Blake’s 7 casually depicted female characters kicking butt, working as ship captains or judges, and even holding high military posts. While US shows of the period felt they had to shout and gesticulate about how emancipated their female characters were (Star Trek: The Next Generation is one prime example), Blake’s 7 just presented it as the way things were, with little if any explicit comment on the subject. And while most US & UK shows still have a tendency to de-sex powerful female characters, Supreme Commander (later President) Servelan was both very powerful and very feminine, showing off a different fashionable outfit in every episode while implementing plans so evil and shockingly-indifferent to human life they would’ve impressed The Master or Darth Vader. We’re told Servalan comes from a very powerful and connected family, and the implication seems to be that her sexuality played a major role in her ascension to the purple; Jacqueline Pearce portrayed her perfectly as a totally spoiled, amoral, narcissistic psychopath who has always gotten her way and intends to keep it that way. I really enjoy watching the character; it’s rare that a TV show dares to depict a character so utterly and unrepentantly vile, greedy, treacherous, degenerate, and morally grotesque without making them into a complete caricature. One episode in particular really displayed her in full; in the third-season episode Children of Auron she uses persuasion and threat to convince those in charge of a cloning facility on a distant and long-independent colony world to produce a batch of clones using her genetic blueprint, so that she will have an army of her own children. After she is tricked into destroying the entire brood, she weeps for her lost children, because Servalan is so narcissistic she could only truly love herself, and clones are as close to that as she can get. Thereafter, she only ever wears black, apparently in mourning.
Other female characters in the show tend to also be well-rounded, though there were a few episodes in the second season where the male writers seemed unsure of what to do with the two female crew members and so mostly left them babysitting the ship, a development which caused Sally Knyvette (Jenna) to leave the series at the end of that season. The telepathic Cally stayed on for another season, but like Next Generation‘s Deana Troi most writers seemed to see her more as a plot device than a person. Jenna’s replacement, the teenaged mistress-of-all-arms Dayna, is the best of the non-original characters, but Cally’s replacement Soolin never develops much beyond her description, “female gunslinger”.
Meanwhile, in the real world, two episodes (one each in seasons C and D) were written by Tanith Lee, a clever and creative writer who draws heavily on fairy-tale imagery and motifs and rarely disappoints; her second episode, “Sand”, is one of the best in the entire series and provides even more character development for Servalan, who admits to have actually loved another human once, at 18, before “power became my lover”.
Look for much more about the series’ characters, characterization and writing next week.
In the News (#1208)
Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Tyranny, tagged activism, Alabama, California, censorship, cops, Counterfeit Comfort, drugs, fantasy, Georgia, holidays, hysteria, law, lawyers, psychology, robots, sex offender registry, Social Distancing, Thailand, The End of the Beginning, The Pygmalion Fallacy, Unsafe for Human Consumption, video, West Virginia, You Were Warned on January 29, 2022| Leave a Comment »
Interactions with artificial agents is not the same as interacting with humans. – Yochanan Bigman
The smartphone app Replika lets users create chatbots…that can carry on almost-coherent text conversations…Replika has also picked up a significant following on Reddit, where members post interactions with chatbots created on the app. A [sad] trend has emerged there: users who create [algorithms they pretend are] partners, act [toward them in a way that could be termed] abusive…[if the algorithms were alive], and post the toxic interactions online…The results can be upsetting [to those with a very loose grasp of reality who should maybe get off the internet once in a while]…Replika chatbots can’t actually experience suffering — they might seem empathetic at times, but in the end they’re nothing more than data and clever algorithms…nothing you do can actually “harm” them…Yale University research fellow Yochanan Bigman [said] “Chatbots don’t really have motives and intentions and are not autonomous or sentient. While they might give people the impression that they are human, it’s important to keep in mind that they are not”…
The “trigger warning” claiming that typing words into an algorithm constitutes “violence” is just {chef’s kiss}.
A California appeals court sided with Salesforce…and dismissed a lawsuit by [ambulance-chasers representing] 50 [professional “survivors”] claiming that the cloud-based software company was liable for their alleged sex trafficking because it had provided services to the now-defunct classifieds site Backpage.com. The ruling dismissed the plaintiffs’ appeal on the basis of Section 230…[just as the lower] Court [had]…
We may be seeing the beginning of the end of these medieval practices:
From McClendon v. Long, decided…by the Eleventh Circuit, in an opinion by Judge Frank Hull, joined by Chief Judge William Pryor and Britt Grant: In October 2018, two deputies from the Butts County Sheriff’s Office placed signs in the front yards of the residences of all 57 registered sex offenders within the County, warning “STOP” and “NO TRICK-OR-TREAT AT THIS ADDRESS.” Before Halloween 2019, three registered sex offenders living in Butts County sued, seeking to enjoin the Sheriff from placing the signs again…[W]e conclude that the Sheriff’s warning signs are compelled government speech, and their placement violates a homeowner’s First Amendment rights. Thus, we vacate the district court’s judgment in favor of the Sheriff and remand for further proceedings consistent with this opinion…
[Last summer], sex workers and others in Thailand’s nightlife industry lined high heels up in front of the parliament building in Bangkok. Each pair…had a note calling for the government to compensate redlight district workers who are out of work due to the pandemic. Six months later, with bars and nightclubs still ordered to remain closed, sex workers…have not been financially supported like others in the nightlife industry…many of the workers, who call themselves the “High Heel Defenders” have been mailing boxes with pairs of heels to the government each day to “remind them of their responsibility for the people impacted by their policies.” But the packages have been sent back…
The Clueless Leading the Hysterical (#1185)
Cops will keep this up as long as people let them pretend that adults never like sweet flavors:
[Mobile] police [squealed and grunted at credulous reporters after they stole]…86 pounds of…marijuana…and a large number of [edibles. Head pig] Paul Prine [oinked a lot of idiotic nonsense about how no adult in the universe eats marshmallow treats made with breakfast cereal]…“Everything is packaged to attract children,” he [oinked stupidly. Cops are obsessed with the idea that people want to give expensive cannabis edibles to penniless brats for free, but a few reporters have grown tired of parroting the silly fantasy]…
Hey, female cops; how’s that collaboration with the police state working out?
[Typical and representative Wisconsin cop] Rick Gramza has been ordered to pay a [very small] fine [but] will spend no time in jail after…[repeatedly] sexually assaulting a department employee [for] several [years]…Gramza[‘s victim was afraid she’d lose her job, but sometime after he was promoted to Boss Pig she]…filed [charges against him] in November 2020…Gramza…[used the typical cop “she wanted it” defense, but also]…resigned from the department [the following] March…
Unsafe for Human Consumption (#1204)
Politicians are always happy to indulge cops’ violent fantasies:
West Virginia [politicians] advanced a bill that would make “exposing” [cops] to illicit fentanyl punishable by up to five years in prison…It’s unclear how someone might be shown to “intentionally” possess illicit fentanyl, which is often present as an adulterant in supplies of other drugs without purchasers’ awareness or consent…Mike Pushkin…the sole committee member to vote against the bill, [said]…“In a lot of cases, people think they’re buying one substance and they wind up getting fentanyl. So how can you prove they intentionally were in possession of fentanyl?” Neither is it clear how the bill would determine “exposure” to fentanyl. “Does it mean they’re in the same room?” Pushkin asked…overdose from passive fentanyl exposure is a myth. The substance does not readily absorb through the skin, nor do its molecules linger in the air. But the false claim that simply touching or being in the vicinity of airborne fentanyl can cause overdose is one frequently circulated by [cops]…
Sentimental Journey
Posted in Biography, Diary, Philosophy, tagged Louisiana, New Orleans, nostalgia, psychology on January 20, 2022| 1 Comment »
After Hereticon ended a week ago today, I flew into New Orleans to visit old friends; since my first visit was scheduled for Friday, I decided to go down to the flea market in the French Quarter to see my friend Solomon, an Ethiopian man whom I’ve been buying Indian dresses from since I was a stripper in the late ’90s. Due to delays in picking up my rental car I arrived fairly late, after most of the vendors had already packed up and gone for the day; however, since Solomon was a friendly and popular guy who’s been a fixture in the market for over 20 years, I asked one of the few who was left about him. And when I was told he had died just a few weeks ago, I was unprepared for how very sad I felt. It’s not like he and I were drinking buddies; I never even knew his last name. But he always had kind words and compliments for me, and never failed to recognize me; everyone in the market liked him, and for my part I never even considered buying my dresses from anyone else. And when I heard the sad news, I couldn’t help crying; it was as though a part of New Orleans itself had died. Perhaps that’s part of why I was so sentimental for the rest of the visit; it did my heart good to hear the local accents, to see the displays of king cakes at the doughnut shop where I bought my breakfast, and even just to drive the streets I once knew so well. I even took some time to go to a branch of the grocery store chain where Grace and I used to shop, and bought some things that just aren’t available in Washington; of course I had to send them home by priority mail so the TSA couldn’t steal them by belching out the magic word “liquid”. Later that afternoon, my friend Olivia contributed to the nostalgic mood; when it was time for dinner she said, “I made gumbo; I hope that’s OK.” Nothing could’ve been better! Because even though I do love my little farm and all my Seattle friends, and have absolutely no regrets about choosing to relocate, one long root of the tree of my life will always be inextricably embedded in the swampy soil of south Louisiana.
Diary #603
Posted in Diary, tagged drugs, New Orleans, psychology on January 18, 2022| Leave a Comment »
What an exhausting week! After Hereticon ended Thursday morning, I flew to New Orleans to visit some old friends I haven’t seen in a long time, including the cousin who recently got back in touch with me. And while I had a lovely time, the pace definitely took its toll. I knew the rapid weather shifts from Seattle to Miami to New Orleans (with a cold front moving in Saturday) and back to Seattle would play hob with my sinuses, and they did; it started as a post-nasal drip which turned into a cough on Friday, then practically as soon as I got back to Seattle turned into heavy congestion. It didn’t help that I had decided to do the week without cannabis; in retrospect, that was a bad idea because I didn’t sleep nearly as well as usual (even with the help of other drugs), so by Friday I was pretty tired from days of poor sleep. The flight into New Orleans was on a regional jet, which are far more conducive to giving me vertigo attacks than larger aircraft, and such attacks (while I recover from them more quickly than I used to thanks to my meds) tend to sap my reserves. By Saturday afternoon I was so debilitated by the one-two punch of lack of sleep and wonky sinuses that I strongly considered asking my cousin if I could stay an extra day, because I was genuinely unsure if it would be safe to drive back into town feeling as I did. But fortunately, she’s a very early-to-bed-early-to-rise type, so I took a five-hour nap and by 2 AM I felt good enough to get the rental safely back to the airport, board the plane, and promptly fall asleep by lying across three seats. I don’t actually remember takeoff; the next thing I knew, the pilot was telling the flight attendants to prepare for landing. The layover in Dallas was mercifully short, and though I didn’t sleep as well on the flight to Seattle it was mostly uneventful. Once back at my apartment some breakfast and tea allowed me to rally enough for the drive home, and though it was far more tiring than usual, I made it back to Sunset at last. This was typed about 9 PM Sunday night, so I hope you’ll forgive its brevity; I hear my edibles calling.
Back in the South
Posted in Diary, tagged Florida, New Orleans, psychology on January 14, 2022| Leave a Comment »
Longtime readers may remember that despite appearances, I’m really quite the homebody. Given my druthers, I’d rather not go very far from home very often, and when I do travel I’d rather return as quickly as possible. That preference has only become stronger as I’ve aged (which I suppose isn’t all that unusual), and since I moved to Sunset full-time I’ve become even less inclined to wander than I was in my Oklahoma days, plus Grace’s health problems mean she shouldn’t be alone for long either. Furthermore, there’s the fact that since hygiene theater Pelion was piled atop security theater Ossa, flying has become even more stressful and odious than it already was, so I now suffer low-level anxiety for weeks before having to travel by air. Fortunately, I was able to find conveniently-scheduled flights; I left Seattle Sunday night and arrived in Miami Monday morning, then flew to New Orleans yesterday to visit dear friends there for the first time since the summer of ’16. Sunday morning very early I’ll be flying back to Seattle, which given my legendary hatred of doing anything before noon should give you an idea just how much I want to get home. Next week I’ll need to be back in Seattle again, but after that I hope to leave Sunset as little as possible for the entire month of February; let’s hope I needn’t travel again before spring, at the earliest.
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