The first of the last of the Sixties

Yesterday was the first day of my 69th trip around the sun.

 
At almost threescore years and ten birthdays are, well, kind of a mixed blessing - at best.

Making it to another year is fine. It beats the living Hell out of the alternative. But it's a reminder that my remaining time on Earth is fleeting, and that I now have some kind of serious malfunction inside my head that is killing me, and will, eventually, dispose of me in a really fucking nasty way; Parkinsonsism (or whatever you want to call it) is a damn hard way to go.

And yesterday was, even as sexagenarian birthdays go, just pretty sad.

Woke up late - one irritating Parkinson's effect is messing with sleep, and I had a bad night - so slept through my usual Sunday kendo. I didn't have any particular other thing I could think of that I wanted to do, so, despite it being a sunny day, I didn't do much of anything. I'm plowing through a good book ("Cold Iron", by Miles Cameron; fun swashbuckling swords-and-sorcery novel), so I spent a fair amount of that time reading, which was fine but, y'know, lonely.

I splurged on a damn fine dinner - grass-fed rib-eye and new asparagus in garlic butter, with a malty Oktoberfest - but ate it alone. I thought about going out for a high-end restaurant meal but that seemed even sadder than cooking and eating a meal by myself.

 
In the dark of late evening I couldn't help but look at where I stand.

In my life to date I've tried to be a good citizen, a good soldier, a good scientist, a good husband, a good father, and a good friend.

To my credit I think I was, indeed, a very good soldier and a damn fine professional geologist. I was as good a citizen as I could be, though I now regret not being more trouble for the Republican sonsofbitches that led my nation, and especially my Army brothers, into wars we couldn't, and didn't win (while in the process wrecking a damn sight of Southwest Asia as well as our own supposedly-sacred national honor).

I've tried to be a good friend. And I've tried, and am trying, to be a good father.

Sadly, to my shame, in one of the great trials of adult life I have failed. 

Failed to be, in the end, a good husband. A caring partner, a gentle and caressing lover, a fierce advocate, and loving friend. Twice now a good woman has looked hard at me and found me utterly wanting.

That's...indescribably painful.

My marriage of more than twenty years is over. Done, dust and ashes, and I can't help but feel like what was and should have been one of the great works of my life was a failure of crushing weight. That the grief of, and the grieving for, that loss will be with me, mark me, until the Parkinson's finally does it's work and relieves me of the remorse.

The thing is that tomorrow is...a day. Ending in "y". So I've got work to do, words to write, children to worry about and encourage, hobbies to putter with, Republicans to kill (okay, well, no...but that should be on the menu; these fucksticks are more worthless than plague rats and twice as big a nuisance), every little thing that makes daily living so busy.  

 I'm old. And alone. That's not a complaint; that's just the reality.

 
But I'm not dead. Not yet.

And while I'm not, well, tomorrow I'll do what I've tried to do for the past sixty-nine years and a day; shrug my ruck on, settle the weight across my shoulders, look up from under my helmet brim, and move out towards whatever the objective of that day might be. Embrace the suck. Deal with it.

That doesn't sound like a cheerful sort of way to greet each day, does it?

Fuck, no. I'm a sergeant; expecting the shit rain to fall is what we do, because we're the ones who have to figure out a way to work those troubles out. Cheerful ain't what I do.

But, goddamn it, I've tried to do the best I could.

And for now?

 
That'll have to do. 

Back in the saddle again

The "Bridge Pedal" is an August thing here in Portland.

It's...very Portland.

The idea is that for most of a summer Sunday a whole bunch of the downtown streets are closed to vehicular traffic - including most of Portland's Willamette River bridges - and are turned over to non-motorized (okay, well, non-large-motorized, since there are always some e-bikes and scooters in the peleton...) travelers to explore.

It's a real fucking nuisance if you're trying to drive around it, and I recall that when it began back in the 1990s the usual suspects pissed and moaned loudly about it. But since an overwhelming number of non-assholes enjoyed and still enjoy it, the whiners have learned to deal with it, so the first Sunday in August the bicycle (and scooter and unicycle and whatever...) wheels roll over the bridges.

Oh, and you can walk part of the route, too.

When we first met this was something that my ex and I did together and enjoyed. We were both just recreational cyclists - although Mojo did dream of a bit more glory and actually rode a century, a two-day endurance ride of one hundred miles, although finding the reality less rewarding than the dream - but for this? That was just fine. 

After my hips and knees started to fail, though, I got off the bicycle some time in the late-Oughts and even sold my old Kona "Lava Dome" by the time I started getting parts replaced in the Teens.

So I thought I was long past my bridge-riding days when my domestic world fell apart.

Since then, though...

First, I felt the urge to ride again. Remembered the joy I felt getting in the wind, pushing myself to speeds my legs no longer carry me with my feet on the ground. I missed my ex-riding-buddy, but I realized that I missed the riding itself. A lot.

And while I couldn't do anything about the one, I could the other. So... 

I picked up a second-hand bike at our local repair-and-refurbish collective.

I started riding again, beginning with our North Portland "Sunday Parkways" a week or so ago. 

And enjoyed that so much I decided to sign up to ride this year's bridges.

Top deck of the Marquam Bridge. Always a traffic jam...even with bike traffic.

The day cooperated; sunny but cool and breezy. I chose to put the bike on my car-rack and unload just above the descent from North Portland into Albina and from there downtown...

(which was a very good decision - I would have regretted adding in the extra two-dozen miles or so from there home to St. Johns after the full bridge ride.)

...and by the time I came off the Broadway Bridge I could take off my windbreaker, so the weather was perfect for riding. The startline on Naito Parkway was full, and my experience was that if you faffed around you'd get stuck in traffic, so I sidled as close to the start and...off we went, up the west ramp of the Morrison Bridge. 

This year's route was curious.

In the Olden Times the way this thing worked was that you could just ride a "downtown" loop that took in the central Portland bridges, or, if you were ambitious, a longer course that included the two "outlying" bridges, the Sellwood to the south and my St. Johns Bridge to the north.

The Sellwood is just a mile or so from downtown, but the St. Johns is a slog; probably eight or nine miles along the St. Helens Road - dead flat and through the grimmest parts of Northwest Portland's industrial wastelands, then back through my neighborhood and down through Overlook and Albina.

That seems to have been a deal-killer, so this year we rode this:

Across the Morrison and then down the pretty bike-path "Springwater Corridor" (an old interurban rail line) to the Sellwood. Back up through John's Landing to the Hawthorne Bridge, back across to the east bank to loop back across the Ross Island to the Hawthorne again!

From there over the first of the two "big bridges"; I-5 northbound's Marquam, which looped around the I-405 freeway - going north on the usually-southbound lanes - to the last crossing to the eastside, the Fremont Bridge.

Once back into Northeast Portland the route swung down along the Interstate Avenue right-of-way I'd ridden that morning to get to the start line...only instead of the Broadway it crossed back into downtown on the Steel Bridge and we were done. 

Fremont Bridge (looking west)

The taiko drum corps had their own iaidoka. Who knew?

Mind you, some things had changed since my cycling prime.

 

Back in the day I was a climbing beast. I was always a poor descender; frightened of crashing at speed, riding the brakes in a nervous sweat all the way down anything more than the gentlest of hills.

 

But going up? I was a fucking monster, "dancing on the pedals" and powering up the most awful grades. I vividly recall an afternoon in the Eola Hills with Mojo and two friends. It had been a nice easy ride until we started up the western side of the hills themselves. 

 

The slope got steeper, and steeper, and the others got slower and slower...until I told them I'd meet them at the top. And just rode away from them like they were sitting still.

 

They caught up with me at a little winery near the western crest where I'd been waiting nearly half an hour; watered, rested, and - as soon as the three staggered to a halt - ready to go on again.

 

I was lucky to escape with my life...but, anyway. I was a hell of a hill climber once.

 

This year? 

 

Not even close. The slightest incline had me spinning away in granny gear, passed by ancient gaffers and erratic small children. My days as the Marco Pantani of North Portland are clearly long gone.

 

Oh, well. 

 

I rode slowly back to Overlook Park where I'd left the car. Put the bike back on the backrack and then treated myself to coffee and a pastry. 

 

Fuck, I'd earned it.

 

Did the ride, and my enjoyment of it, make the world a better place?

 

Ohhellno. Don't even get me started on Fatso's idiotic vaccine order from today. We're still in the New Gilded Age with all that implies.

 

But it helped me feel a bit lighter. Like I'd accomplished some small something happy and good and just for my own.

 

And that was enough. 

Catching Up 1: I, me, mine

It's been so long since I've really posted anything here that I thought I'd begin with a quick "okay, since this is a personal blog I should probably add some personal information." 

Okay, no. I'm just a fucking egotist, so it's all about meeeeee!!!.

Kidding aside, well. Here's the basics.

I'm just a couple or three months away from my 69th birthday so, yeah, fuck, I'm old.

Throw in the whole "multiple joint replacements and Parkinson's" things and I'm not exactly heading into old age physically robust. That kinda sucks, given that I've tried to do all the "right things"; exercised, watched my diet, kept active and intellectually curious and engaged.

It seems pretty ungrateful for me to have taken at-least-decent care of my mind and body for them to decide now that I'm old to turn on me. C'mon, guys! All this time and finally you just give me the I'm-gonna-stop-making-dopamine finger?

Ingrates.

The other ugly reality is that I'm about two years into the post-second-marriage phase of my life, and that sucks on multiple levels.

On the obvious, social one, it's lonely. I've gone from being part of a family; wife, kids, a cat, loving and living together in a cute little house I had spent twenty years loving and working to make cuter and better.

So that whole two decades now feels like a lost sunk cost. All those years and work and love and caring...vanished as though they had never been.

 
On the physical level, well, I'm alone in a small apartment.

That turns back to the social-suck, because for twenty years my best friend, my companion at home and abroad, the person I liked and cared for the most, who shared our adventures together and apart was Mojo. She was my "working week and my Sunday rest".

And now she's gone. Not just physically, but emotionally; she's made it clear that she doesn't want anything to do with me. Not even the slightest, most casual contact. That hurts, a lot. I'd hoped we could at least remain friends, but Mojo has made it clear that she will not tolerate that.

Ouch. 

And the hard truth is that no other friends, as dear as they may be, can replace a best-friend spouse. For one thing, they have their own lives to live. I'm a third wheel, at best, emotionally, and distant physically; it's not like I or they can just stroll around corner or up the road to say hello and pass the time.

I do try; try and get out, try and go to places to meet with friends, or people I share something with.

I've even tried one of those on-line matching things, and met some good people there.

But, still, the bottom line is, well, what I've just detailed. 

 
What remains?

Well, the essence of my heart and mind. Me, who I am, for better or worse.

Retired now for almost four years I'm finding a lot of pleasure in having the time to myself, to exercise, or travel (locally, for the most part - I have time but not money), or just read or screen (and thank you, the shade of Ted Turner, for the TCM old-movie channel!).

I've been keeping my hand in the soils game until this last year. It's been good to use the skills I spent much of my life honing, and the income didn't hurt, either.

The last engineer I know who still called me in for that contract work is sliding into a different track in the geotechnical business and one that doesn't really require a field guy, though, so it looks increasingly likely that this will be the first real year of "retirement", the last soils work I will ever put my name to.

That's fine. I had a good run, did some good work, and I'm ready to hang 'em up. 

My children are almost man-and-woman-grown, and are a lot of fun for it. The big dude who is the Former Peep is in his third year at university here in Portland, studying geology, of all things. Missy is downstate, planning to be some form of botanist or agronomist. I try and see them as often as their time permits...which isn't the same as living with them.

That's probably the hardest part of post-divorce parenting, not being physically close, missing those little daily collisions, the small change of domestic life. Instead I've become the cliche' "divorced dad", seeing his kids every so often, unaware of and uninformed by the day-to-day happenings that make up their lives.

Still, they're good people and I love them to pieces. 

I still enjoy a lot of the activities I did in the Before Times.

Writing? Sure; not here much, though I'm thinking I want to change that, but quite a bit over at my soccer site. 

Soccer; indeed, it's been an intriguing year for pro footy here in Portland. The Timbers, having struggled through several difficult seasons, finally canned the manager that proved incapable of solving the troubles therein and are using the current World Cup hiatus to hire a replacement. The Thorns are playing surprisingly well, having also shed their gaffer at the end of the previous season.

Reading and thinking about the world around us has become a huge time- and energy-suck, given how appallingly ridiculous and idiotic (and dangerous) the current MAGA Regime has become. I agree with those whose loathing of Trump comes as much for the degree to which his freakishly bloated public presence doesn't permit me and anyone else who bothers to pay attention to public life to ignore his ignorance, stupidity, venality, and cupidity.

One reason I've blogged so little here is that grotesque presence, looming over us all like the giant stone head in the movie Zardoz, makes it damn near impossible to write about anything without having the orange (well, sort of; his face makeup seems to be more like that brownish shoe polish color "cordovan" recently) sonofabitch constantly poking his fucking nose into the story. Corpse at every funeral, by God...

I'm still hanging in at kendo, despite getting older and slower every week. I still enjoy it, and hope to postpone the day that I become too old and slow to represent my dojo honorably. I've picked up a related "sword" art, iaido, which is pure fun; a sort of "internal chanbara movie" thing, cosplaying samurai. Plus it's a way of trying to master myself; it's all about perfecting a series of forms. You're not fighting an opponent outside yourself but, rather, mastering your mind and body, a kind of meditation in motion. 

One thing retirement has gifted me is time to resume an old pastime, birdwatching, and I've been getting out as much as possible to scope the local patches. I'm not yet thinking of doing the sort of "big trip" sorts of adventures I did after my first divorce., but perhaps in a bit...

 
So I guess the final sum is that, while there's a lot about the last couple of years on me that I'd undo if I could, I'm still here. Still trying to live as full a life as I can. Still hoping that I can make of that something worth others remembering me fondly when I'm gone.

While all around me...

...well, that's for the next part of this.

 
(Next: Where are we going, and why are we in this handbasket?) 

A Gentle Reminder...

...that crowning a clown doesn't make them noble.

It just makes the throne the driver's seat in the clown car.

To make this a perfectly shitty year, I saw the neurologist last Tuesday.

It's Parkinson's.

So I'm on borrowed time. My great hope is to borrow enough time to outlive this shitheel in order to sneak into Mar-a-Lago and piss on his grave. 

I have no words, no profanities strong enough for my supposed-fellow-Americans, both those who voted for the bozo, and those who just didn't show up to vote against it.

We're gonna get it good and hard.

Today is a reminder that the "arc of history" is bullshit. "History", if it means anything, is an endless, remorseless grind of fighting people like these MAGAts, fighting their idiotic simpleminded "solutions" to complex problems, fighting their childish insistence that there was a former time of "greatness" that can be recalled if enough of the "wrong" people are exterminated. 

This past year We, the People just couldn't be arsed to do that, so here we are.

I've seldom been more ashamed of being an American than I am today.

Mouthful of spit

Since late winter I've been dealing with muscle tremor.

First my left leg - occasionally, then steadily - now my left hand.

I saw a neurologist in midsummer. He did some physical "tests" - write this, hold this, walk there - and concluded that the shaking was likely "essential tremor", a relatively benign symptom of brain function desuetude that accompanies aging.

But he wanted to see me again this winter to rule out Parkinson's Disease.

Well, the shaking has grown slowly worse. Not shocking or scarily so...

...until last weekend. When I realized that I was salivating. Constantly.

The fancy name for this is "sialorrhea", and it's just plain old drooling. It's to the point where I have to carry around a spit cup like some goober sucking on a bag of worm dirt (that's "snuff" for you non-Eighties-GIs).

Point is...the drooling is strongly - as in reeeeeally strongly - associated with Parkinson's, or other severe neurological issues like ALS.

So.

It's VERY likely I have Parkinson's.

I'm going to call the neurologist Monday to try and get seen ASAP. While Parkinson's has no cure there are treatments that can help quality of life. 

It's going to kill me.

But I won't go easy. I'll fight as long as my life is worth fighting for.

But I thought I'd just say this here and now, so you few remaining readers would know where I'm coming from. It's...not a good place.

Frontiers 1914: Intermission

Still working on the "Frontiers 1914" piece(s), so that's ongoing. The issue right now is that the next section needs to be about the French war plans. We've looked at Germany and the evolution of what became the "Schlieffen Plan". The bookend for that needs to be France and the evolution of "Plan XVII".

That's...being kind of a pain in the ass.

There's a shit-ton of scholarship (popular and otherwise) about the seventeenth of the French war plans.

The lead-up to it, though?

Not so much.

We'll get there when I finally post it, but the tl:dr is that from about 1870 to about 1911 the French planning was centered around 1) the fortress belt of the "Sere de Rivieres" system in NE France as a 2) defense-first-and-counterattack overall scheme.

But in the second decade of the 20th Century the French military hierarchy - led by the then Chief of the General Staff Joseph Joffre - changed this focus to a more aggressive offensive-first plan.

Supposedly this began with the revision of Plan XVI in September 1911, and came in force in full with the adoption of Plan XVII in the winter and spring of 1914.

There seems to be some major politico-military stuff associated with the changes that came before that, though, beginning with Plan XII in 1888 and especially involving Plan XV in 1904-06. I want details of this period, but all I can find on the Internet is pretty generic. I may have to run down some sort of dead-tree sources, and that takes time and more hand-work. I'm pushing it along.

(Update: Turns out there's a pretty important secondary source - the 1985 "War Plans of the Great Powers 1880-1914" - in the Portland State Library that is...wait for it...fucking closed because the fucking Gaza protests got out of hand and then the fucking Portland coppers swarmed in and completed the fucking destruction. So...not fucking good.)

The other "pushing-along" thing is divorce.

My soon-to-be-ex and I met with our financial planner. That went well, and she's working on the asset division the mediator recommended. We need to regroup with the mediator to move towards a settlement and, eventually, a final decree.

That's...saddening.

It's the final defeat for me, the admission of failure. The end of twenty-two years of marriage, and in that the loss of my lover, wife, and best friend. I grieve for that, and her. I wish I'd had the chance to repair the faults that resulted in the failure. I always will.

Meanwhile I'm hootched up in a mother-in-law apartment in the far edge of Northeast Portland. It's a very weird little mid-Century Ozzie-and-Harriet middle-class neighborhood in one of the most fucked-up parts of the sprawling blight that is East Portland. At some point I'll have to do a tour of this area. It's very much NOT "Portlandia". 

The surrounding area is poor and I'd say "rundown" but in all likelihood it wasn't ever very far up from where it is today. It probably went from farm fields to suburban slum to semi-urban slum. 

We probably don't have more skeevy homeless people than I did in North Portland. But here they feel more visible and frankly scarier; there seems to be more visibly-crazy and dangerous-looking gomers out here.

I'll have to post some photos from the truly bizarre NE 122nd Avenue Motorboat Graveyard, too. THAT's a real NE Portland oddity.

The hardest part of this move?

It's lonely.

I'm alone in a small apartment, with ex-best-friend, kids, even the fuckin' cat back in the Little House. I miss them all, even the cat waking me at oh-dark-thirty. I miss all the little interactions, the little kindnesses and gentleness of daily meetings and crossings. Waiting alongside the coffee brewing for a frowsy and sleep-soft woman to emerge from the bathroom. Passing snark from a busy daughter on her way, monosyllabic grunts from a son taking a gaming break.

It is what it is, I suppose.

I've signed up to volunteer at the local humane society to get my pet fix (lease says; no pets...). I've signed up for some sort of Post-60 political action organization ("Third Act"), though they don't seem to be doing much acting lately.

I’d do more political stuff if I wasn’t in Deep Blue Portland. We don’t really have a need to get out the Democratic vote; the Oregon GOP is so fucking looney – they were MAGAts before there were MAGAts – that they don’t have an electoral chance outside the yik-a-hoo parts of rural Oregon. And our four Electoral votes are likewise solid.

So I don’t feel like I can do much in the national races. I’ve got time but not money, and they can’t use my time.

I’m still pretty chapped that the race is as close as it is. Tubby is what we know he is, a gross, bloated, lying, psychopathic crook. He’s no better than he was eight years ago, and that he gets as much love from the wingnuts says more about them than him. But his new siderunner?

Jesus wept, could you have invented a more creepy, loathsome, spineless weirdo than Couchfucker Vance? What the hell does he offer that Tubby doesn’t? His weird breeding fetish that the press tries to sell as “caring for families”? The fuck..? He doesn’t give a shit about “families” any more than the rest of his Party of Personal Enrichment.

But I don’t expect the press to call him or any of them on that.

It's really worth pursuing how, as the current Harris campaign messaging points out, how deeply weird, creepy, and radical these "conservative" fucksticks are.

From their obsessive panty-sniffing of all kinds (from female reproduction to transgender bathroom business) to their bizarre fixation on "masculinity" to the intensity of their drive to shackle sex with breeding the wingnut politics of genitalia is, well...weird. Deeply, madly, truly strange.

I expect these fuckers to be politically and economically pro-Gilded-Age. They've always wanted to party like it's 1929.

But the culture war stuff?

It's borderline insane. And that it's not constantly derided as such is a massive failure on the part of the press (and any and everyone else who doesn't point it out). It should make everyone associated with it as popular as genital herpes.

I'm glad it's finally being at least marginally recognized and pointed to.

I guess I’m trying to be hopeful…but prepared to be disappointed. If the US public is willing to let these scum get away with their little Plutocracy Project 2025? Well…maybe I end up my post-divorce days in prison for rebellion.

I sure as hell hope not; I’m too creaky to make a good rebel.

Hope this finds you and yours busy and well enough. I had to laugh; on the way out of the grocery today the rent-a-cop asked me how it was going and without thinking I replied: “So far so good. But it’s early yet – lots of time for things to go wrong.”

That’s kind of my standard reply to that question and has been for years, which says a LOT about my outlook on life.

Maybe it’s an old sergeant thing.

I'll be back with more war plans in a bit.

Troubles

Some good - I'm working in Alaska this week, a place I've never been before (and probably won't be again) - and some...very much not so good.

It's not life-threatening or anything like that. I'm not dying, or, at least, no sooner than we're all headed for our appointment with the Reaper.

But things are happening that are very difficult and stressful, so it's hard to focus on anything else, hence the long silence here.

A lot of this "bad" trouble is still unresolved; though; that is, it's hanging there, ominous, but as yet not quite "as bad as it could be". 

It depends on someone's heart and mind, and those are still as yet unknown. When they become so, it will either be "troubling but hopeful" or "very, very life-alteringly awful".

When that happens, I'll be back here.

In the waning of the year

 ...the little group here at the 1922 House is still, well, being who we are.

There's still four, although this may be the last winter of that. The Girl is looking hard at four-year schools. She's been accepted at University of Minnesota at Minneapolis...

Father: Do you know anything about Minnesota?
Daughter: It's...ummm...in the Midwest!
F: Have you looked at the climate records for Minneapolis for, say, the past ten Februaries?
D:
F:
D: No?
F: Then I highly recommend you take a look. You might be surprised. Not saying that should change your mind if you really want to go. But you might want to know.

She's battering her usual bullrush way into her senior high school year, both in academics and in all her usual avocations; theater tech - she's the Sultan of the Soundboard - and ceramics and the Asian Student Group. She's a fighter.

This was last year, but it still works. That's her.

On the personal side she's who she's been; salty wiseass, meticulous, impatient, cynical. She seems too busy for relationships and so far as we can tell has no particular preference in that. We're pretty comfortable with who you want to pursue, so if the Girl is not conventional in her preferences I suspect she'd be upfront about it...so the lack of up-fronted-ness suggests that's not a thing, Yet.

The Young Man (I can't really call him "The Boy" anymore; he's an adult even while his sister retains a lot of "Girl") is, well, who he's been, too. He's taking classes at the local community college and is doing well there; GPA 3.7 when last seen.

For some odd reason he seems to be gravitating towards earth science/geology. Dunno how seriously to take that. I've told him he's a legacy at Portland State University for geology, if he is thinking of going that route. He seems unimpressed.

He's still gaming multiple hours in the day. He also still games his unique way, which involves lots of shouting and screaming, cursing, and (now and again) making literal monkey noises, which always makes me bust out laughing. Whatever happened to the stereotype of the dudebros gaming in silence broken only by occasional grunts?

(FWIW, when I showed her these last year my Bride winced at his. "A little too on-point..." was her comment.)

As for the Bride:

She's still "Miss Debra", beloved School Secretary at Astor Elementary.

A little sadder because her equally-if-not-more-beloved Work Wife Miss Chris retired at the end of the 21-22 school year. Still grouchy about how the District is being exceptionally shitty towards the clerical staff and paraprofessionals represented by her union.

Busily sewing, including her side-gig technical editing for the "Seamwork" line of patterns.

But slowing down, just like I am. She's eyeing retirement, which I simultaneously understand and dread, since what we'll do with both of us around this place all day I have no idea...

And me?

Older. Slower. A bit more creaky - surprising how little arthritic buildup it takes to make joints uncooperative! - and less speedy.

The contract work I was doing last spring and early summer finally ended and the outfit that hired me, after a couple of abortive offers, has faded out. My old employer still throws me a bone now and again, but that, too, appears to be waning.

My Guard retirement is a lifesaver; it's surprising how far $1,200 a month will go if you only spend it on things like gas and the occasional book. I'm thinking of cutting the Social Security wait short and applying at 66-and-a-half this spring - frankly because I think the fucking Republicans will run the table next fall and the plutocratic sonsofbitches will raise the qualification age to 70. It knocks the payday down significantly, but locks it in so keeps the greedy bastards' dickbeaters off it.

Otherwise I have lots of time to read. I've also been binge-watching stuff I've missed before, ranging from oddball anime to movies and serial shows. 

I'm still plugging away at kendo, despite being the slowest and clumsiest kendoka in the dojo. What's really frustrating is that the proper kamae, the basic fighting stance, demands an upright position; back straight, head up.

My back is...not straight (see "arthritis", above). I have to constantly think about my posture, which doesn't help when I'm trying to whack someone with a stick (or not get whacked...).

It's good training for me. But I spent years being as strong if not stronger and faster than my peers. It's very humbling to do the things your body did handily once only to find that that body is no longer as responsive.

Then there's the whole "kitchen and bathroom remodel" thing...but that's for another day.

Hope this brings us all up to date. Gotta go wrap some presents not; back in a bit.

H&I Mission

One of the now-long-forgotten Army things is the "harassment and interdiction" mission. This Texas A&M site sums up this artillery technique as it was used in Vietnam; "(unobserved fire which) engaged suspected targets with no more than a few rounds fired at random intervals throughout the night, and sometimes during the day."

My understanding is that a typical H&I target would have been a crossroads, or some similar linear intersection (bridge, paddy dikes, treelines), where the local S-2 thought that Charlie would be using to move around.

As the A&M site points out, while this sort of shooting could have been at least plausibly effective in a war where you had "enemy" roads, or crossroads, or bridges, doing this in a notional ally's house? NOT a very good idea. Your chance of blowing away some random villager was so high as to be nearly unavoidable compared to the likelihood of catching the NVA 309C Division in the middle of an admin move. 

Anyway, I don't have anything momentous to discuss. I'm threading my way through the Yarmouk references with the idea of getting something out before the end of September. What I really want to do is travel back in time and grab Abdallāh al-Azdī al-Baṣrī by the stacking swivel and choke him until he got a fucking editor! Dude! Seriously! I get that early Arabic writers were mostly in it for the poetry (that's the c.w. on a lot of early Islamic "historians" all the way up to Ottoman times, as I kept encountering writing up Constantinople 1453 and Vienna), but this is ridiculous.

In the meantime I didn't want to leave this joint untenanted, so...

First a quick personal note.

Had kind of a scare the other week. Sight went out temporarily in one eye. No more than three or four minutes, but the doc checked my blood pressure and things there were not good, so off to E.R. I went for the full meal; CT scan, EKG, blood work, all of it.

The end result was:
1) No idea about the vision, even after numerous pokes and peeks at the eye clinic. The term "ocular migrane" was tossed about but in truth nobody really knows.
2) I'm now on BP meds. So far, better, but not perfect. Need to drop weight, too. That'll be fun.

Other than that, the second creature to find itself in trouble was the big fig tree out by the back sideyard...

This thing was a cute little sapling when Mojo bought the house more than twenty years ago. Nobody here really likes figs, so it was just kind of an unminded but seasonally-messy nuisance for much of the ensuing couple of decades...until it got freaking huge. It shaded out the whole back yard, dropped fruit (which was now too high to pick) all through the autumn that drew crowds of aggressive yellowjackets, and we generally a nuisance.

So we lopped the bulk of the thing down:

But there we were stuck.

A handsaw worked well enough for the upper parts of the trunks. But the lower? Yike. That meant power.

Chainsaw power, to be precise.

So off to the local rental store and back with a nifty little electric saw that proceeded to take the bulk of the damn thing down to the ground...

...where I then applied the 21st Century version of the Roman Plow; a full bottle of Round-Up poured directly over the remains.

That will probably have to be repeated several more times this year - the sonofabitch is full of vitality and has already shrugged off a soaking with this poison.

But who's higher on the evolutionary scale, goddamnit. Two of us enter, one's gonna leave, and it ain't you, tree.

Let's see...what else should I send a round out at..?

Oh, yeah; this thing turned up in the World's Worst Newspaper the other day:

Tl:dr, the minor league ballclub that plays out on Portland's western 'burbs is being held up by the big leagues' ploy to extort more money out of the little communities where they play. The bigs are forcing their minor league slaves to force their local governments to pay for ballfields or lose their teams.

Some guy named Knudsen has a nice little takedown of this extortion racket. Keep in mind that, as he mentions, 1) the current minor league ballpark is only ten years old, that it 2) has the capacity for over 4,000 fans, and 3) typical crowds at these Hillsboro team games runs about half that, at best.

So Oram is all in on getting tax dollars for this gimmick.

Which is insane, given that supposedly we can't afford to get our hoboes into apartments or keep our junkies from scaring the normies, but which is also business as usual for the whole sports-owners-and-politicians-frolic-through-the-public-trough tradition.

I'm hoping that the gang over at Field of Schemes will have more on this disgrace before the City Fathers out in Hillsboro can start backing up the dump truck full of cash to the loading dock at Tonking Field.

And speaking of politicians and cash...

Oregon's governor has muscled into the homeless "crisis", shaking out a "task force" that's supposed to provide recommendations on how to rid the parks and streets frequented by the Good People of Portland of smelly poor people.

The whole business is secret, run as a private meeting because it's working under the local business alliance. Many of the usual non-profit and non-commercial suspects (i.e. organizations that work with or advocate for homeless people) are shut out.

My guess is that the business people will recommend the usual - more sweeps, more laws, more jails, more shelters - instead of the simple and practical solution: "tax rich people and businesses, fund jobs programs and cheap housing". That's how these characters usually roll; it's never worked before. That's never stopped them. I trust that the latest round of political circle-jerking will produce nothing practical.

I've seldom been disappointed.

And speaking of politicians living down to their expectations...

Dahlia Lithwick has a good piece at Slate (paywalled, I think, but if you don't go there often I think you can get it free...) that points out how fucked we are because Mittens is as "good" as it gets in the GQP and he's exactly the sniveling piece of pond scum you'd think if you remember his presidential run.

Bottom line? He wants a tongue bath for saying mean things about Tubby...while doing nothing substantial to interfere with all the shit Tubby and his cult are doing. Tax cuts for richies? Sure! Privatize? He's all in! Fuck the poor and the sick? Anytime! 

Oh, and speaking of shitheels...

Here's the thing about this.

First, Boebert is an asshole. Not because of who she is but because of what she does in Congress. This idiocy doesn't change that.

Second, though, is that this says something truly sad about her intelligence.

Because I love Broadway. I've been to two big touring musicals in the past several years; Wicked, back in 2021, and Hadestown this past year. Both wonderful, both memorable, both parts of my life I'll treasure.

Both expensive as a sonofabitch.

I took the Girl, and for both shows we had orchestra side-aisle seats, and for both the seats ran something like $150-$200 each. IIRC orchestra center seats ran $200-300 and up, first balcony and boxes even more - $400-500? Anyway...a LOT of money.

Point is, this isn't 1984, when I could drop into the TKTS booth in Times Square and nick a Sweeney Todd seat for thirty bucks. Musical theater is a big-money event, and tickets are hard to get.

To go to a big Broadway show to vape and grab ass? To be obnoxious to the point where you geet kicked out?

That's just fucking bone stupid. You might as well just set fire to a pile of twenties.

I mean...copping feels in a dark theater is a great tradition...for the matinee of Weekend at Bernie's.

I'm not blaming the woman for being an idiot.

I blame her voters for electing the dumb fuck.

And here we all are.

Jesus wept.

O shiri no itami

 Actually, no; the pain is in the leg, not in the ass.

This was this morning; left calf - technically it's the "gastrocnemius", the big muscle of the calf - wrapped up and laid over a cold pack, watching poor Everton take a Manchester United hiding.

To get here...well, this winter I went back to the beginner kendo class run through the Parks & Recreation district out in Beaverton by the westside kendo club, Obukan.

I played kendo at Obukan thirty years ago, back when I lived out there (married to a different woman, but that's a whoooooole 'nother story...). I never progressed beyond Rokkyu - the lowest rank - but enjoyed the hell out of it.

(I enjoyed the hell out of the marriage, too, mind, but that's really a whole 'nother story...)

Then I got divorced, moved away, started playing soccer, wrecked my hips, got them replaced and then my knees started to go, got them replaced (in the process somewhere changing women, which is a whole 'nother 'nother story), and then retired. 

With more time on my hands I started thinking about kendo again.

I fenced European style in college - just foil, and just for my own entertainment - and studied karate in the Shorin-ryu style after I got out of the active service, but something in kendo scratches me in all the right places more or less.

My only real question was whether I could return to being a good kendoka after thirty years and with legs full of replacement parts.

Well...so far so good, until last night, when I managed to strain something in my leg, probably pushing my dead ass forward, since the left left is the "pushing" leg in kendo. 

Ouch.

What was kind of odd is that when I played goalkeeper I was always banging myself up. Broken fingers, bruised shoulders, damaged knees...I was the king of pain, and all of the dings were just a thing. 

I'd put my knee braces on - I had two huge rubber-and-metal ones that pretty much took all the weight off the knee - and ice them down, wrap up the shoulder, get the fingers set, and go off to work.

It's been a decade since I've had a sports injury, and I'd forgotten how irking they are. And I'm ten years older, too, so instead of walking it off I've been sort of hobbling around and that as little as possible...

Anyway, just an idle sort of Saturday, and a kind of transition piece away from the politics. I'll be back later in the week with something more hopeful.

Oh, and the title? It's supposed to be "pain in the ass" in Japanese, tho after poking around a bit it sounds like there isn't an exact equivalent for the meaning of the term; the closes seems to be うざい ("Uzai"), which is a contraction of "urusei", "rude" or "noisy", and to bark "uzai" at someone is apparently a way of letting them know they're being a pain in your ass.

Or leg.

Which is what I need to limp off and ice down. No, thanks, I can see myself out. I'm good

RTFM

Speaking of the Army I Knew...

So I retired from the rascal about twenty years ago - back in '05, IIRC.

By that time I had twenty years in - twenty-three, to be exact. I wanted to make 1SG - I cared less about the top spot (I had no interest in nagging troops about their haircuts or boots and area beautification...) but I'd always wanted to be a First Shirt.

But.

I also had a new wife and a one-year-old and there were guerrilla wars going on in Southwest Asia and the wife - who is a treasure and a darling and has always been there for me in all other paths of life - had just suffered through the death of our firstborn.

She told me that she couldn't live through a year-and-a-half deployment.

So I pulled the pin.

Anyway, point is that at the time, and all through the time since then, I was fully employed, well-paid, and, frankly, over time lost track of the whole "retirement pay" thing.

Until I retired from my day job.

Then I got to thinking, y'know, it'd be a nice little tickler to have a couple of hundred bucks a month or so to buy a beer now and then or to pay the gas bill. So I yarded out my old Army orders file and looked for my "20-year-letter" etc. to see about asking Sammy for some jack.

And right there on the first page of the retirement packet it read in black-and-white;

"Current policy requires the retiree submits retirement application about 9 months but not less than 90 days prior to 60th date of birth..."

Which was...ummm...five years ago.

Duh!

So, important safety tip:

Read The. Fucking. Manual. 

I called the nice people at Ft. Knox, who said that, yes, I was a fucking idiot and that, yes, I could still apply.

That is all. Platoon sergeants, take charge.

Away from home...

 ...after the holidays; it's either one damn thing or the other around here.

The damn thing is dirt-nanny work I'm doing for a friend of mine. He needs the help, but it sucks ass like all dirt nanny work. So I figure I earned my week off.

The not-damned thing is that we got some snow yesterday; not enough to be a real nuisance but enough to be pretty, so I just enjoyed the winter wonderland and put out seed for the wild things who weren't enjoying it nearly as much.

I've been enjoying all the soccer (and, yes, I know; Qatar is a hissing, and FIFA exists to make the IOC look like a bunch of saintly contemplatives. I'm not pretending to be a good person about this...) but I'm going to miss the insane energy of the Japan fans. 

Apparently the soccer world will, too; they've won some sort of weird fame for policing up the stands after their games.

So will the otter. Ah, well; live and learn, Taiyo the Otter. Soccer. It's a cruel game.

Speaking of cruel, the Girl just laid down the law: no more singing "Hong Kong Phooey" because it's racist.

Yeah, well, no shit; it was a Seventies cartoon about a dog, voiced by a Black guy, pretending to be a Hong Kong kung-fu star. 

And let's not eeeeven go into "Rosemary", the horny switchboard/9-1-1 operator who spent the entire show constantly trying to hook up with the randos that called the cops.

The layers of "this is some fucked-up-racial-and-sexist shit" go about basement deep.

But it's Seventies phooey racist style! Sorry, kiddo...Yah!

Anyway. I'll get right back on this blogging thing later this week; I've got a break coming up.

Home for the Holidays

The contract work I was doing crashed last week, so I've had a genuinely "retired" sort of holiday all last week.

It's been nice.

I've continued to wake early because, well, I like waking early. I make a pot of coffee and hang out at the dinner table, reading the news or just reading, sipping the good brew and watching the day slowly begin.

This week the leaves finally began to fall.

That's not a good thing.

The neighbor's yard features a ginormous bigleaf maple. She gets most of the fallout, but we get enough to make the backyard a mess of sopping maple leaves. The Boy - who has no job outside his gaming - got roped into the collection of these damn things. Since he's nineteen and has never really had to work to standard his leaf-raking is...sketchy. So Drachma Kitty and I had to come out and pitch in.

We've done this twice now. The rains that came in last night look like they've finally knocked the last of the leaves down. So there's another day of this ahead of us.

That's not exactly a thrill to look forward to.

But the alternative is a yard full of bottomless mud.

Oh, there was one "work" sort of thing last week, but it was really just sad.

A project that I'd worked on before I retired went to fieldwork. The PM had wanted me to drill the thing, and without me to sit the rig he'd gotten a cherry staff person from one of the Puget Sound offices. He did get me to review her logs and they were...not great.

Should I come in and look at the soil samples? I asked. I might be able to work out some sort of actual stratigraphy; I know the site and the soils. Sure, he replied, so Tuesday morning early I went into my old lab and looked for them.

Nothing.

I asked around; turns out the staff person had never been in the Portland shop. Maybe the samples were in the Salem office? So off I went in one of the company trucks, down I-5 to the little rental office in downtown Salem where this PM holes up. Went in, looked around.

Nothing.

An hour after I got back to Portland the PM send me an e-mail. Oh, I just got this, he says. 

It was a forwarded copy of a message from the staff person saying that she had reviewed the samples and logs and wanted lab assignments. I guess she took the samples back to Tacoma, said the PM.

Yeah, the empty spaces in Portland and Salem kinda clued me in about an hour ago, I replied.

You bet your ass I charged that job every second of my wasted morning.

But that's a big reason I retired when I did. This guy is the chief engineer of the Portland office, and it's perfectly in his "management" style that he had no fucking idea where the samples of the drilling for this sensitive and potentially-hazardous investigation even were and wasted four hours of project time for something he should have never authorized.

Oh, well. His circus, his monkeys now.

Got up Thursday and watched the Macy's Parade. I didn't have the marching mariachi band on my bingo card, but they were pretty goddamn awesome.

And at least the CBS broadcast showed the actual parade. Fuck you, NBC, you worthless gits.

This year I did an actual turkey, as opposed to a breast-only. The Girl has finally developed a liking for the actual tasty parts of the critter (the dark meat...) so I got the smallest one of these monsters I could find and cooked it the way my mother taught me; sealing in the juices with a hot oven and then basting like a madman.

It turned out good as turkey can get.

That, in turn, meant the return of a long-dormant Lawes family tradition; the boiling of the carcass.

My mother, child of the Depression and the Big War that she was, refused to waste a scrap of food go to waste, would use the turkey carcass to make broth and from that some sort of soup, usually a turkey-vegetable-barley sort of thing.

My sister and I, children of the plump Sixties that we were, made merciless mockery of this housewifery. We called the broth and the resulting soup "turkey bone gruel", gruel being the word we thought best symbolized the penny-pinching poverty and misery that the gruel represented

Mind you, it was good soup. Kids, they're just little fuckers sometimes.

Speaking of which...

I went into the Boy's room last night to shut down the gaming and asked about his application to the Portland police cadet program. He replied that he was no longer pursuing that program, but intended to go to college.

......

I'll believe it when I see it. He needs to do the work to find out how much he needs to do, how much it'll cost, and where he needs to go. Will he? I have no fucking idea.

The afternoon of Thanksgiving Day was bright and calm, and I went out into the yard to enjoy the temporarily-leafless vistas.

I sat in the old rope swing, idle since my progeny got too old to swing in it, and just took in the sunny afternoon, quiet and at peace. But also at a place I'd never been before in that familiar backyard.

What lies ahead for me? For us?

I don't know. Perhaps the most fraught part of this whole "retirement" thing is that I don't know how it goes.

I've been a wage slave for thirty years, ever since I left the Army.

I don't know any other life.

But now I'm going to find out.