Today has been the technology day from, oh I don’t know where – Hell is too mundane. Perhaps it was the day from Betelgeuse, which is probably in the process of blowing up now as we speak (although we won’t see it for several hundred more years or so). But yeah, Betegeuse gets my vote for the most technologically obtuse and nonsensical day ever.
I was trying to fiddle with a WordPress site for an organization that has the poor judgment to include me as a volunteer, and every single thing I even THOUGHT about touching blew up. Everything. I think 99% of that was due to upgrades with no notification, like let’s just sneak this mess in here right quick, and if we don’t tell anybody it didn’t really happen. Besides, next week we can charge everybody more money for the stuff that doesn’t work and explain how much they need to thank us. Yup.
I was just about ready to get into the web host’s site to see if they had anything to do with it, but that place was hermetically sealed with a double-locked stainless steel chastity belt. Lord. There are so many points of failure in the average website effort that it’s like navigating the information superhighway when the road is made of swiss cheese.
In a few years, we’re all going to be aged people with microchips in our heads to keep us from destroying all the computers. We’ll be the last people who remember what it was like before. Before…this. When people talked to each other in full sentences and went about their work at a reasonable pace, not one that was inspired by Speedy Gonzales.
I am truly not sure where the hell we’re all trying to get to so fast, but if the guy across the breezeway from me runs up the effing stairs outside my bedroom wall one more time I am going to scream. No, the dog is going to scream and I am going to throw something against the wall. He’s not all that big a guy, but he walks like a herd of rhinos and runs up. I can hear (and feel) him coming from the first floor (we are on the third floor). I’m ready to block off the stairs and toss a rope over the railing, and tell him he can either take the rope or jump but no more stairs.
That volcano in Iceland is still cranking out massive quantities of lava. There are earthquakes there every day, several times a day. I don’t think very many people actually live in that part of Iceland, but still.
I am also still watching the eagles in Juneau AL getting close to fledging. Mama and Papa are still feeding it beak-to-beak, which is still really endearing. They mostly go out and bring home fish, and the young ‘in is just beginning to be able to feed themselves. Papa almost did a fly-by earlier today, came skidding into the nest and hurled down a fish, and then off he went. Eagle business, I guess.
Mama eagle is estimated to be about 22 years old, which is pretty good for an eagle in the wild. The park where these eagles nest doesn’t band the birds who have chosen their trees to nest and breed, so I suppose nobody really knows for sure. They do know for certain that she’s been coming to this nest every year since she built it in 2004, so that’s some indication of her age. In 2004 she was at least 5-6 years old because she already had the white feathers on her head, so…she’s an old pro. Such incredibly strong and beautiful creatures.
The bald eagle is our national bird, of course, but it always tickles me that Ben Franklin was overruled when he proposed to make the turkey the national bird. He said it was far more fitting and in line with our stated values. That would have been a hoot to have a turkey on the back of our currency, clutching…what? Maybe some cobs of corn, or a sweet potato.
Because I had my own distraction today, with the technology unpleasantness, I haven’t watched the news at all. Funny how quiet it seems. The television has been on in the background, but I haven’t locked on to it. I should have put on music, but I was nearly up to my armpits in frustration (and misspelling that word was entirely intentional).
The day before yesterday I got the guitar out and played for close to an hour. I need to do that way more often, especially because the callouses on your fingers have to build up again if you’ve not been playing for a while. That’s coming along…a little pain, a little pleasure, like everything else.
There is so much that I encounter that’s more or less polarized, and you have to take the good with the bad as they say. That’s just dandy, but who the hell raises their hand and says, “I want the unpleasant stuff. Yup, I’m the one who is standing here and saying bring. it. on.” Some people seem to get more than their fair share of hard times and pain and difficulty in life, but who is to say what’s a fair share? Somewhere in my spirit, I am thinking perhaps that sort of thing is unfinished business for a soul to learn from. It still kind of sucks, though.
I was on this Zoom thing last night, with a book club that I was invited to by a friend. It was mostly women and one lone man. The discussion centered around a book that Alicia Garza has out in the stores, The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart (there’s not an easy way to underline that, which is really distressing me, but whatever). It seems like a really good read, although it’s long. I had not read even one page of it but found what amounts to crip notes online.
As I listened to other folks offering their comments about the book, and what they found meaningful, the lone man present jumped in. He lurched out some seriously stinky shit about how he could never understand why when he goes to marches and demonstrations the people who are directly affected aren’t there. “They” should be the ones doing the marching and showing up for all the stuff he’s been involved in. “Those people” aren’t there, and he just doesn’t understand that.
After I let the dust settle on his “those people” comments, I decided I wanted to punch him. Hard. Those people??/ At least two other women gently challenged him on why “those people” might not be present, like…oh, um…maybe THEY ARE WORKING? Maybe they don’t have jobs where they can take a day off and still get paid, or maybe they aren’t retired and have a lot of time on their hands. That’s the facts, Jack. Ugh.
But, the gathering was fine, and some of the women were associated with the Pauli Murray Center in Raleigh. I know enough about Pauli Murray to fill a demitasse and would like to know more. From the little bit that I know, she was entirely running up his all her life, and against the grain. She was an activist when that might be a death sentence, and she was an out queer Black woman when that could get you dug up from the grave and killed again. She’s no longer living but has left a wealth of writings and philosophical essays that I want to read. Soon.
Right now, I’m pretty tired. I worked for quite a long time on that website problem, and that is the kind of activity that requires focus and concentration, which always wears me out far more than physical activity. After a while sparring with those kinds of problems, it becomes competitive, and I have to win. I have to find the cause and correct the error. But today, I could not, probably because there are multiple causes for why the problem has emerged in the first place. Truth be told, I was initially so engaged in fixing the problem because I wasn’t sure that I had not done something to cause it. But the damned website had been acting goofy since I first logged on, and once again, if I even THOUGHT about changing something or trying something, it freaked out even more.
This is why people are on the edge. Every day. Everything is out of our control, and sometimes you feel like you’re at the mercy of people who function way above your pay grade. Well, that and the virus…and the vaccine…and now the Delta variant…and most of us know there are still folks being killed and treated unfairly (an understatement, of course) at traffic stops. But the news isn’t tuned to that right now – they’re obsessed with the anti-vaxxer crowd and the investigation of the January 6th debacle. But they’re on top of it. Yup.
I think I will sleep well tonight…for some reason, I woke up at 4:45 this morning. And I can’t blame that on the dog. I was just all of a sudden awake, for no good reason. Went back to sleep for an hour or so, until the dog realized she had missed her window of opportunity to get outside earlier than usual. She was a little snarky because her boyfriend didn’t come out and give her love. Spoiled little cur.
For some reason, I thought today was Saturday. That was really bizarre. At the beginning of the pandemic lockdown, I was having trouble keeping the days in order but have been doing pretty well lately. Sometimes I wonder if there’s a dark overlord of time who speeds things up and slows them down just so we are constantly off balance. Who’s to say the fabric of space-time doesn’t get a wrinkle every once in a while, and gets ironed out after the fact.
Who’s to say how anything works these days? The more we know, the more we know that we don’t know, and that’s always the way of it. I do think we’ve gotten collectively a bit more arrogant in espousing what we know, but pride goeth before the fall, or so I’ve heard. We shall see, said the blind man as he picked up his hammer and saw..
The Sound Hole 