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Last Nice Day For A While
Looking at the forecast, today is the last “nice” day for a while. The rest of the week is high 80s. Blech!
Cabin Fever
Tucker: Why mobs are tearing down America’s monuments
People were stuck home with nothing to concentrate on but their own pet peeves from the middle of March due to the quarantine.
Fortunately, we all still had cable and/or the internet. We could feed our heads with all of the binge-worthy material we hadn’t had time to catch up on when we were still allowed to go to work or out to dinner or wherever we actually wanted to go.
Unfortunately, some of us decided to binge on petty hatreds and became outraged by things that never happened to us personally but have been perpetrated on people like us generally.
Some of us took the lifting of the tightest restrictions of the quarantine to be a good sign. We got out and took walks and tried to save faltering local businesses who were locked down and starved of revenue in the guise of public safety.
Some of us decided that a criminal outrage that had been perpetrated by a problem cop against a known loser who had apparently stayed out of trouble for some time was a reason to start a coast-to-coast ragefest.
Some of us decided that no tragedy should go to waste.
Some of us are conducting a skillful replay of Mao’s Cultural Revolution with an ugly, modern twist. While mobs of useful idiots rampage around spray painting, burning, assaulting people and attempting to erase history, their handlers and enablers are quietly funneling money back to their organizations so they can cause even more chaos.
Some of us have decided that the rage is justified and we should kiss the asses of those who are running around like spoiled children having a tantrum. All kinds of ridiculous acts of pandering have been performed. Washing feet. Wearing slave collars. Women shaving their hair in shame. It’s ridiculous and it’s not helping.
None of us have apparently decided that law and order is a thing anymore.
None of us have done a whole lot to arrest and convict people who are wantonly defacing and destroying both public and private property.
Some of us think that stuff can be replaced and therefore that’s not violence.
Nope.
If you have burned, broken or otherwise defaced something that does not belong to you, that’s violence. It’s criminal and it should be punished accordingly.
Some of us think that some of us who have been out there spray painting and burning stuff ought to be prosecuted, fined and sentenced to go back and clean up the damage that some of us have done.
Some of us would like the violence to end.
Some of us would like the racist threats against people who have never done a damned thing to some of us to stop.
Some of us are getting kind of pissed off.
When the noisy minority pushes hard enough, the silent majority stops being silent.
When that happens, things tend to get as ugly as they are regrettable.
We want the rule of law reestablished. We want police to be allowed to do their jobs. We want elected officials to honor their oaths of office. We want our country and way of life to be defended against enemies foreign and domestic.
We want the chaos to stop and we want the agents provocateur to be dragged into the light and held accountable.
Ow!
Most of last year was a struggle to put an end to my costochondritis. We did all kinds of things. Even two courses of steroid treatment and some kind of medicated ointment.
Nope.
It’s back with a vengeance and it doesn’t look like it’s going away.
Words
Words are but pictures of our thoughts. ~John Dryden
Words are about all I have anymore.
I can’t do physical work like I have the last couple of years.
I can’t do IT work like I did in the decades that preceded.
I can’t do much of anything anymore.
I can write.
I have been, but I hit a rough patch.
In an effort to do the right thing correctly, I tend to overcomplicate it.
This happens to writers fairly frequently.
Also, when your mind is muddled with pain, it’s kind of hard to concentrate. When it’s hard to concentrate, it’s correspondingly difficult to produce coherent thoughts. Lacking coherent thoughts, quality fiction is unlikely to occur.
It’s temporary.
People need to calm the fuck down and give it time.
It’s not like I can actually do anything else that’s of any use to anyone.
Employers like you to be able to breathe. That has the problem of being difficult for me sometimes.
Some employers like you to be able to bend and lift things. Basically not gonna happen any time soon.
This is what I can do right now and sometimes I can’t even do this. Being hassled about it doesn’t make it go any faster.
If anything, it slows things down and makes it damned near impossible.
If you’re not helping, then you’re not actually helping.
Thought I’d bang it out early since I have errands to run today.