58

Please enjoy another in the Sunday Seven series.

Today marks another tour around the sun for me, the start of my 59th.¹ I suppose every day marks another year, or really, every second does. Time’s like that, just marching forward in pretty much linear fashion, unless you get yourself into someplace with a radically different gravitational well. Hopefully you saw Interstellar² and know what I mean. Today feels about like all the other birthdays have recently: it’s cold, I’m a nursing a new injury or two, and my sense of dread about our impending doom is a little sharper than last year’s. Nothing new about any of that. For the most part, my people are OK and we’ll get through the short term issues. I wish I were as confident about the long term.

Since I dove into it last week, I’ll share an update on the neurological situation. I saw a neurosurgeon (actually, his PA) this week, and for the first time on this journey, I felt heard. Thus far, the response of the medical profession has been a version of “Well, you can still walk and you’re not soiling yourself, so, you know, suck it up, old person.” Maybe this guy just actually understands the nature of medicine is to heal, or maybe the fact that my opening statement was that I am a musician and my hands don’t fucking work so this is a big goddamn deal. As I learned when taking care of dad last year, and should have applied to my own situation sooner, if you’re not firm with the medical-industrial complex, you will be run over by it. Regardless, Christopher is the first professional who offered something like hope that this (or a worsening version of this) isn’t my fate for the rest of my days. He ordered some more scans, and I will meet with the surgeon himself in a couple of weeks to chart a course of action. I don’t love the idea of neck surgery, minimally invasive or otherwise, but I love the idea of dropping dishes every day a whole lot less. Fingers crossed, to the extent that I still can.

I’m gonna be shutting down my Instagram soon. I’ll miss it, and as it was when I quit Facebook, it’ll mean there are some people I’ll likely never interact with again. But I just can’t abide what Zuckerberg intends do with his platforms. I know that if I were to boycott every company that had a right-wing supplicant in charge, I’d be living naked in a tree, assuming I could find a tree that wasn’t on fascist controlled land. But when you have someone being that explicit about exactly how and why he wants to steer the ship across the river Styx, it’s time to go. For me, that is. No judgement to those who will stay. Same story for TikTok, which I never really used, but it seems clear that when it comes back, it will have done so on bended knee, and probably end up getting in line with the regime, too. All while still exporting our personal data to a hostile foreign power! So you can find me here, or on BlueSky.

I should expand on that last point a little. What is “here,” exactly? This blog is something I set up using open source software, and which I’m running on an Amazon Web Services (AWS) server, which I really need to do something about (see above re: supplicants). The bar for a hosting provider like them to shut down content they don’t like on their platforms isn’t clearly defined, and while I don’t expect Bezos will start taking down tiny websites that are critical of himself or the regime, it raises a larger point. A lot of people out there espousing a resurgence of the old days of DIY hosting of personal blogs are overlooking two important things: one, you’re still on someone else’s hardware and network; and two, the more you want to minimize those impacts, the more technical skill you need. This path is not a solution for everyone. If there’s a way to really crack that nut, where any normie could realistically set something like this up and not be under the thumb of a distant billionaire with sensitive feelings and a small dick, that’s a truly world changing idea. Get hopping.

I don’t listen to podcasts. I don’t have the kind of aural attention span or internal processing required. Never really did; lectures never worked that well for me, and to the extent that I listen to talk radio or the like, it’s as background sound, white noise, not the thing I focus on. I know a lot of people love them, though, and that’s fine for them. But I have to take a moment to LOL at what seems to me to be an increasing prevalence of oversized, large diaphragm condenser³ mics in podcasts that publish via video. They’re all using preposterously huge mics that obscure nearly the entire face of the speaker. It seems the vibe needs to be LOOK, I AM A VERY SERIOUS PODCASTER AND HAVE INVESTED IN THIS MASSIVE MICROPHONE AS PART OF MY BONA FIDES, when in point of fact the built-in mic on your laptop or phone would provide 99.5% of the fidelity of that giant, Chinese, titanium and steel piece of junk that’s eating your face. Or, if you really want to impress me, then get out there and buy yourself an original U67.⁴

On weekend mornings in the winter, such as right now, I hear the reports of the shotguns. pok, pok, pok. Just over a mile from here as the crow flies, the country club repurposes their driving range for trap shooting when the golf season ends. I confess that my first winter here, it sounded more to me like workers throwing heavy stuff into dumpsters at that distance. There’s a lot of industry near there, so it’s not a completely insane idea (except for the weekend part). Something about a mile of winter air adds that metallic reverb to the initial impulse. You can see the shooters when you drive up Thatcher at the point where they open the gate that’s normally for course maintenance vehicles. They have fire pits and a warming hut. Looks pleasant enough, though I’ll never know that place or those people. Practically, I wonder how they deal with removing the shot from the grass at the end of shooting season, since there will be mowers going over that field in a few months, and spraying those steel pellets around seems like it’d be bad for the groundskeepers. Magnets, maybe? There it goes again, just now. pok, pok, pok.

It’s not just my birthday today, of course. It’s the last day of the old order, and that seems worth marking somehow. I understand: the project was flawed literally from day one. Horrible crimes against humanity were carved into the foundation, and new ones committed in the violent march westward. I’m glad to say I never really bought the exceptionalist narrative they jam down our throats from age five. But I did always think it was a place of at least aspirational decency, trying to move the ball down the field. We did make some progress in fits and starts. In the last century, we spent unimaginable blood in helping to save the world from the kind of darkness it had never seen. Well. The darkness is here now. We chose to bring it upon ourselves, if you disregard the lawyering, rule stretching, absurd electoral constructs, and bad faith arguments against fixing any of that. So here we sit, and nobody’s coming to help. I’m coming to accept that I won’t live to see this nightmare end, though obviously I hope the kids will. They didn’t choose this, they don’t deserve this, and I hope they can find the spirit to repair, and then improve upon, this failed experiment that showed so much promise.