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Monkey Day 2024
Strangely, today is Monkey Day. That’s somewhat amusing, but I generally associate monkeys with summertime.
🐵 The Circus 🎪
Just cause you got the monkey off your back doesn’t mean the circus has left town. ~George Carlin
I’m optimistic about 2025. I think important changes are coming, but all the bad actors are still in position to gum up the works.
The election resulted in an unquestionable mandate. Trump won, fair and square, in epic fashion.
County result maps show a majority red country with a few urban enclaves and some idiots clustered in New England and the Left Coast.
That’s a landslide. That’s a mandate. That’s why he was at the reopening of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris while 46 was napping in Angola.
He’s causing the world to settle down and look forward to better days, and he’s not even President (again) yet.
Even the deranged morons who hate him are settling down. No Antifa. No BLM. No cities burning. No pink hats. Everybody is taking a breath and waiting to see.
But that’s all it is.
You can only maintain a frothing hate for so long before you wear yourself out.
All the loudest agents provocateur are still saying heinous stuff, but most of them are just saying it instead of screaming it as they usually would.
You could conclude that they’ve been brought to heel. To a certain extent, perhaps they have.
I feel as if they’re waiting to get their second wind. They’re doing something out of character and just taking a break for the holidays.
Sure, some of them are whining about having to share the Thanksgiving Dinner table with crazy MAGA Uncles or whatever.
Fine, they can stay home and eat tofurkey with their TDS support group members. Whatever gets you through the day, y’all.
Should be interesting to see what pops off after they recover from their New Years’ Eve hangovers.
I’d encourage everyone to simply wait and see. Things will get better under policies that are the opposite of the current administration’s.
So, yeah, we got a monkey named Joe (although he’s more like a barnacle than a monkey) off our back at long last, but it sure doesn’t mean the circus has left town.
It’s going to take a lot of work to clean up DC and return to a limited form of government that’s actually answerable to its constituents.
There will be significant headwinds. Anybody who gets in the way deserves to be primaried and voted out on their next cycle.
If It Hasn’t Got A Tail, It’s Not A 🐒
VeggieTales: Monkey Silly Song
Yes, this post is supposed to be about monkeys. I don’t have much to say about monkeys. They’re cute and furry and they like to fling poo.
That’s all I’ve got on monkeys. They have an uncanny resemblance to humans. This makes them both attractive and abhorrent.
For me, they live in the “uncanny valley”. This is a term that was coined in relation to robotics. If you’ve ever seen an animatronics display such as Disney’s Hall of Presidents or the Country Bear Jamboree, you’ve probably experienced the cognitive dissonance that comes from seeing how the actions that make them seem realistic don’t quite add up. They wave their hands, tilt their heads, roll their eyes. Their lips move in sync with the words, but you know that you’re watching a puppet show. Your willing suspension of disbelief is kneecapped by how janky and weird the whole thing is.
Monkeys fall into that uncanny valley. Not because they’re fake things pretending to be real, but because they’re real creatures echoing human behavior. When you see a squirrel carry a nut up into a tree and sit on a branch to eat it, you’re thinking “that’s what squirrels do”. Monkeys do much the same thing.
They scurry around getting food to climb up a tree and eat, but then they do human-like things.
World’s Most Intelligent Monkey
You don’t see squirrels opening bottles of juice or handing change back. It’s uncanny how monkeys straddle that divide between human-like or childlike and basic animal.
Some find it as inherently disturbing as a well-crafted animatronic display. They’re cute and cuddly until they’re screeching and scratching at you. People are both attracted by the cuteness and repelled by the fact that this cute little childlike creature can cause serious harm if they flip out at you.
That’s the dichotomy of monkeys. They’re cute, but let’s just watch them on video for safety’s sake.
Running Off 🙈🙉🙊
The problem is to keep the monkey mind from running off into all kinds of thoughts. ~Lee Kuan Yew
How to train your monkey mind.
It’s the bane of productivity. You want to knuckle down and get something done, but your 🐵 mind is chattering away, distracting you.
I had a lot of success getting into flow state last weekend, but it took me entirely too long to silence my 🙊 mind long enough to get that focus.
That’s more than can be said for this week. I’ve got quite a few aggravating factors as far as work goes. There’s a whole mob of chattering monkeys keeping me from focusing on work.
Now that the week is over and I’ve accomplished damn near absolutely nothing, I’ve got the 🐒 of guilt on my back. Who needs all that? 🙊🐵🐵🐵🐵🐵🐵🐵🐵🐵🙈
That’s part of being human. We’re too easily distracted. We’re distracted by shiny objects or by the daily pursuit of basic human needs. Frankly, I need the holidays to be the holidays.
I’ve been on afterburners all year and it’s quite tiresome. This is the time of the year I most look forward to. Everything is supposed to slow down and get mellow and jolly.
It’s not like that this year. It’s super-intense and it’s absolutely crushing me. I need a little Christmas now, and I’m not really getting it.
I’m too busy to even enjoy the holidays. Kelly has been quietly transforming the house, and I genuinely appreciate it. She doesn’t think I do, but I appreciate it.
I come up from behind my monitor and it’s more jolly than the last time I did. Yet, nothing. I’m not feeling it. I appreciate it, but I’m not feeling the Christmas vibe that I’m craving.
I’m in too much of a spin to feel the holidays like I should. I’m churning away in a super-busy frame of mind that is more like ordinary time than the holiday season. Totally unacceptable.
Even so, what little time I have been able to get into the zone yielded some good stuff. Not sure if you’re following along with The Lights of Pine Hollow, but it’s coming along very nicely.
If I can do a better job of 🙊 silencing the monkeys 🐵🐵🐵 this weekend, I might be able to get the rest of the story done. That will be one less piece of busy-ness that would let me slow down and try to enjoy the holidays while they are still here. 🤞🏻🎄🦌🎅🏻⛄🎁🍪
Even though I’ve been listening to Christmas music, using egg nog as coffee creamer and wearing some of my holiday shirts, I still don’t really feel it. There’s one thing that really gets me in the mood, and it’s going in for an overdose.
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That’s it for this 🐒 day, so hang loose and go 🍌🍌🍌! See you on Wednesday for an even more ludicrous topic.