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Because

4/25/2020

Group I'm on for gun store folks shows a pic of a customer. Young chap, jeans and a hoodie. And he's wearing either a bondage lower face mask or is using the chastity locking panty from a pleather corset set as one. And the poster asks, "just... Why?"
My take?
If the out and proud sub boy can follow mistress' instructions, he can probably follow the four safety rules better than some fudds I've seen.
I mean shit, I'm in the south. Proud boys have exponentially more potential to be a pain in my ass than subby boys.
Hell, subby boys know how to follow rules and know their actions have consequences. Probably would be one of the more pleasant customers I'd have all day.

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Trying not to go hatchet & peaches

4/17/2020

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I've been doing my best not to get all hatchet & peaches here lately.
There's plenty of people willing to press your fear and anger buttons for the clicks, I don't need to join them. Although it is a time to do so. While a lot of people got stimulated this week, a lot of people also started getting answers from the guiding forces in their lives. Namely, creditors.
Personally, mine have been fairly cool and understanding these days. Some of my friends, not so much. Particular annoyances being the three month furlough on mortgages, due in lump sum at the end of 90 days. Not exactly helpful for people who've been forcibly prevented from gaining income. Nor nearly as helpful as say, extending said mortgage by a number of months equal to those deferred?
(Not that the shitty attitudes against landlords are helping any. That bullshit's giving me my In-laws flashbacks. Not to mention it's the flavor of dickery that makes it that much harder on the next tenant to come in after you.)
That said, it's been about a month since the closings started kicking in for me. I'm fortunate enough to have had a relatively bloodless month and minimal damage. I'm also smart enough to know that's not a state of affairs that will last forever, and that a very ugly calculus problem is being worked on multiple levels.
And while I'm there, fuck absolutely everyone who's boiled that down to "how many grandmas are you willing to kill to save the economy?"
We have enough people doing the math of "5% chance some cranky old person I've ever met dies vs 100% chance my kids don't eat. Fuck you and fuck your granny."
Now, a month after we put the economy on pause, it's, "place your bets how many we save now vs how many we starve later?"
Our food supply is holding out. For now. With a lot of waste and damage, but it's holding out. But if we don't get our trade routes moving and/or start reopening restaurants fast, we're looking at no-shit famine inside a year. That fucks us and everyone using us as a breadbasket (global pandemic, remember?)
That and, I've never been happier for the 10th amendment. Because opening back up is not and never could be a one-size-fits-all. What works in a city with 25Kpeople/sq mi is fucking asinine to apply to a rural county with less than 25 people/sq mi.
(Not as if I ever heard an argument against the electoral college that didn't boil down to, "the ignorant peasants aren't kowtowing to me!!!! Waaah!!!!" But this gives me another solid reason to keep it.)
You mileage will vary. Some leaders will do what works for their areas. Some won't. Some will do what works for their areas and get sneered at by peanut galleries from other areas. There will be triumphs you never hear about, fuckups you'll hear about forever, and screaming into the void from both ends. Welcome to politics.
On top of that, I haven't double-checked this guy's math (post in the first comment), but it looks like 1% of the country were first-time gun owners in March of this year. With no time to train or practice.
Look, at the end of the day, we all want to go on with our lives. Maybe what you used to think of as normal. Maybe hoping for something better. We'll get there eventually.
But there's no road map. There's some arguing experts and a huge arena full of people screaming for every fighter on the card.
There's also no math problem simple enough for me to see. At that point, the calculus becomes a craps table.
I do know I Don't want a big igloo this summer.
Nor do I want a spike in the suicide rate.
(And one thing Moms Demand Submission and I agree on is that having a gun in the house vastly increases your chances of finishing yourself off.)
And I damn sure don't want a fucking famine come winter.
It's easy to think about some coldhearted bastard with a ledger book and a stock ticker, adding up all the old and broken people they need to kill in order to end the next quarter in the black.
That kind of asshole is easy to hate.
But when they're trying to feed your kids and you're trying to keep your loved one breathing? That's some trapped by Jigsaw on a national level there. But there ain't even a Jigsaw in the center of it. Just a world of people doing what they can going out as far as they eye can see and then some.
Take care of yourselves out there.

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The Ivory Tower

4/17/2020

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I left active duty in the summer of 2009, right in the wake of the Recession. I already had a degree and the G.I. bill was just sitting there, so I went back to my alma mater for a 2nd Bachelor's in film, and whatever else I could study in the meanwhile.
I remember the summer of 2010 I was taking an advanced film class on documentaries, and something about the instructor didn't sound right. So I ran a background check on her.
Turns out, her background in film was minimal at best. Her Master's was in creative writing, and she had a single credit on Imdb for producing a documentary short I'd never heard of.
I was less than thrilled. It wasn't my money being wasted per se, but I benefit I'd earned by spending the first years of my marriage on the far side of the world where things occasionally exploded was somewhat degraded by the fact that I was taking a 4000 level class being taught by an incompetent.
And there wasn't a whole lot I could do about it. Drop/Add had passed by the time I figured it out. And most likely complaining to the department would just get her contract not renewed. Most likely she was the only MA left in the department that summer. Any response I did make would just knock over her rice bowl and do nothing to the shysters that had put us both in awkward places.
Hell, she had a Master's in creative writing and found a job in the midst of the recession. I was more impressed than angry. In other circumstances I would have bought her a drink.
So I left her alone, did my assignments and kept my mouth shut unless she spouted something really egregiously asinine. And we made it through the summer term.
Academia hasn't gotten any better.
In 2015, I predicted that Academia would crash and burn entirely in the fall semester of 2021. Short version, two reasons. One, that's the first incoming freshmen year for the children of millenials. Two, the results of the 2020 census will see how the income advantage of a bachelor's degree over other options have fallen.
And now there's... everything.
Distance learning, the bane of bursars eager to take freshmen money by showing off fancy campuses, is becoming the gold standard. It's making waves in K-12 now that legions of more parents are finding out that six hours in school teaches lessons that can be gone through in two.
But the real kicker is in higher ed. Forty percent of incoming freshmen don't graduate. One in four don't last freshmen year. But that tuition and those fees are no deposit, no return. Something pointed out very unceremoniously to an entire generation kicked out at spring break and told not to come back.
It pains me to think it. I got a lot of friends in the ivory tower. And the thought of my life's work crumbling out from under my feet is horrifying. And it only gets more horrifying the older you are.
Here's hoping you lot all land on your feet.

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Rice Bowl care

4/7/2020

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First and foremost, everyone you meet makes sure to fill their rice bowl.
The rice bowl adjusts to the person trying to fill it. A rice bowl could be anything from a 401K to a crack pipe, but filling it is still the base drive of the person in question. You can go all Maslow on me and just call them basic needs, but the case remains.
I've seen this happen everywhere, but it took watching a medium-sized city in the middle of a war for it to really hit home for me personally. A couple hundred hardcore assholes trying to kill anyone who wasn't up with their flavor of hardcore running around in a city of several hundred thousand people just trying to fill their rice bowls. Housewives, oil ministry paper pushers, cops, taxi drivers, college kids, you name it, every last one of them trying to just do their jobs, feed their families, and get by, even with gunfire and explosions every hour on the hour.
That basic zone falls somewhere between "fill the rice bowl today" and "be confident that you will continue to fill the rice bowl for the known future."
There's nothing inherently wrong with that being your baseline. Especially if you're living in first world America without any major issues. Yeah, student debt, shitty job prospects and the like might be irritants, but they don't prevent the rice bowl from being filled, nor do they seriously impede future fillings. They just inspire people to wistfully dream of a better life or post snotty memes about how it's really some other asshole's fault.
But things that actually disturb the rice bowl?
Now that's what really pisses people off.
Moving beyond filling the rice bowl, now that's a tricky part. Because the rice bowl has an annoying habit that I call Comfortable Enough.
(Yes, there are outside forces that may fill a rice bowl and beyond for you. They're rare enough that I'm not going to bring them up.)
Comfortable Enough tells you that working for better options ain't worth it.
Comfortable Enough tells you that taking a step up is more hassle than it's worth.
Comfortable Enough tells you about what you risk losing in an attempt to do more than fill the rice bowl.
In order to move beyond Comfortable Enough, one has to take risks, endure discomfort above and beyond what they're already enduring, and more importantly, risk a state where the rice bowl don't get filled.
It's an aspect of the fact that practices that let you thrive in a certain environment are not practices that let you escape that selfsame environment.
The problem with Comfortable Enough is that when an outside force disrupts either the bowl or the rice, there's little or nothing to mitigate the effects. Personal crises like losing a job, being sick, being in an accident, all of these affect the rice bowl and put us in a tight spot if filling it has been the baseline.
For all intents and purposes, the entire free fucking world has had their rice bowls disturbed. All the rice bowls.
Remember when I said a rice bowl could be anything from a 401K to a crack pipe?
I meant it when I said all the fucking rice bowls.
The biggest effect that's had is that it's narrowed everyone's focus. We're all worried about our own rice bowls and the rice bowls of our loved ones now. So that's an emotional spike.
We're all worried. We're all angry. So that's another spike.
We have time on our hands to one degree or another, so that lets the emotional spikes grow.
Everyone with something to gain from your belief? Their rice bowls are in danger too. So now their vested interest in making you scared and pissing you off has just risen sharply, if not exponentially. Politicians, media makers, Google, Facebook, any entity that has ever made money or publicity from you is now twice as hungry for it.
What was a dull roar goes up to a scream. Whatever you believed before, chances are you're all the more of a diehard now. You got a disturbed rice bowl, a cocktail of fear/anger responses, and time on your hands. It's a perfect fucking storm.
Bits and pieces are different, the huge panic buying of guns being a classic example. Principles get abandoned quick when people realize it's their own family's asses on the line.
But on the whole? Dull roar into a scream.
I'm still seeing people screaming into the void that America was ranked 37 for healthcare in the world and that said care is a human right. Meanwhile, I'm the asshole in the corner going, "Italy was ranked #2 in that same study, how'd that fucking turn out for them? And no, it's neither right nor privilege, it's a commodity. And when it runs low, whoever's stuck with the bill is not on the top of the priority list."
I saw an ordinarily smart and sane person look at the Kennedy Center accepting $25M in bailout funds the day before sacking their musicians, and their stance was that the government didn't give them enough to do what they had to.
>.>
<.<
I haven't used the phrase, "are you smoking crack?" in 20 years. But here we fucking are.
And of course, any mention of how our nationwide response may be overzealous results in dusting off the old ACA arguments. "You want Grandma to die!"
They haven't even met your grandma, sunshine. But it's still spring planting, and all your virtue signaling isn't going to mean dick if we social distance ourselves into a fucking famine because you're convinced you save another granny with every screech.
And even if you were right, it still comes back to the rice bowl. I'm paraphrasing from elsewhere, but 90%-100% chance of losing the rice, the bowl, and any other shot at future rice because you're not working and holed up at the home you have for the moment vs a 5% mortality rating among people they've never seen? That would make even the kindest farmer Bill go, "fuck your granny and fuck you, my kids WILL eat tomorrow."
Kindly farmer Bill came from a culture that invented the triple-S for a fucking reason.
Disturbed rice bowl. Anger/fear response. Time on your hands. A perfect storm of hiding in a hole and emerging to scream about what someone else should and shouldn't do.
And if the above paragraphs aren't a hint, it's definitely affecting me too. Trust me, I'd much rather be writing about my wizard handyman and his wacky band of acquaintances instead of brain dumping about rice bowls. Happy Tuesday.
A lot of us are holding our rice bowls together with duct tape and prayers today. Some of us are going to need new rice bowls when it's all over. Personally, I'm doing my best to see that there's rice to come, and that I can avoid Comfortable Enough long enough to secure the bowl from what comes next.
Take care of yourselves out there.

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Because

Trying not to go hatchet & peaches

The Ivory Tower

Rice Bowl care

Jay Peterson

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Because

Trying not to go hatchet & peaches

The Ivory Tower

Rice Bowl care

﻿Jay Peterson﻿

Archives

Categories

Certa Bonum Certamen

Jay Peterson