In which I complain about things.
Still from Rejected by Don Hertzfeldt, used without permission. Sorry. Since I don't study anthropology or religions besides the ones that bother me, I coined (or at least independently derived from standard vocabulary) the phrase "pathological anthropomorphism" to describe my relationship with ...
I haven't gone four straight days sober since, at best estimate, 2002. The only reason I have any estimate is because I remember a conversation with a classmate in my apartment after we'd watched The Ring and neither of us wanted to be alone for a couple of hours. At some point before we parted ways ...
Since retiring from software engineering, one of my pursuits is to read All The Things, and Pensées ended up near the top of my personal list of Things. After reading the introduction and discovering what Pensées actually is, I was burdened with an aspiration I had never before conceived: be so ...
There was a contentious theory in the 80s. It started in the 70s, but I wasn't there and can't speak to its contentiousness at that time. It was called the anthropic principle. It's attributed to something between cosmology and philosophy, but I suspect it was rubbed out between science fiction and ...
The future of any given ICE agent is going to be grim. All perspectives tend to agree about ICE's current purpose. Take the two most popular framings: From the viewpoint of those resisting, ICE is there to incite retaliation and create a pretext for deploying the military on US soil to quell social ...
I do not enjoy writing about technology. Aside from the shiny, birdlike emotion I get from opening a new Apple product every three years, I do not enjoy using much of modern technology. I view my phone with mistrust and resentment, even as I allow it to eat my time with distractions to recover from ...
Congratulations! You've made it to the collapse of the postwar order. The future is not going to be great. The United States might have made a mistake in building a military-backed economic empire before contending with its original sins. The president-elect is likely going to pardon the collected ...
Upon the most recent medical assurance that I had more than a few months to live, I was more relieved than I expected to be. Having no obvious death wish, I found myself struggling to describe why I was so unburdened and why I didn't notice what I was carrying around in the first place. Thus was born ...
Making a metal bull model almost killed me. It is a known element of ADHD fixation that the sufferer tends to Do The Next Thing without regard for the context, so it was a full minute before I realized the hand trying to force a screw two more millimeters through an unyielding socket was the same ...
While flying back into the states from a sorely needed yet thoroughly exhausting vacation, the final hurdle between air travel tortures and public transit was customs. Going through US customs as a US citizen always irks me. In European countries, going through customs as a US citizen is, for me, ...
Smile scared the piss out of me. In my middle age, with all its years of nothing inexplicable ever happening to me or anyone I know, I'm not easily scared by monsters. Alien and The Thing are both in my top ten favorite movies. My eyes go through multiple full rotations when my wife listens to "real" ...
There's a rule for watching Star Trek episodes: Pay attention to three-word noun phrases in the jargon. Reversed polarity? Shut up, Wesley. Main deflector dish? Plot point. Inverse tachyon pulse? Say hello to my little paradox. This is also how real jargon bubbles up to pseudo-relevance in sciencey ...
It was the briefest slice of light, a telltale shimmer, that revealed you. It glinted up your thread, running down from the ceiling to the lamp sitting incongruous in the middle of an unpacked living room. Did you stow away in that lamp, riding rough in the back of the moving van, those three long ...
Brooklyn tried to kill us before we left. I half-woke in an already disgusting apartment at two in morning from dreams of a waterfall to an actual waterfall in our bathroom. A main had broken on the third floor, so every other bathroom in the building was doing the same thing. We salvaged what we ...
I spent two days in my basement growing crops. I needed the crops, of course, to satisfy The Ark. The Ark would preserve a bit of humanity's culture for a future that may or may not exist. It also contains a weapon that it will give me once I finish feeding it crops and fish and wood and rubber ...
Everybody forgets. Nietzsche was super into it. I forget why. Forgetting a celebrity name is common enough that they acronymed "tip of the tongue" to TOT for studying it. I have TOT moments for everything and everyone, but occasionally, something more severe happens, and for no reason I can come ...
Tomorrow is Leah's immuniday. It's what we're calling the two-week mark after the second vaccine. It one of the new words in the small personal language we inevitably created after months of being each other's sole companion. The cat became "Beeb" soon after her recovery. All meals are "One food, ...
There were no steak knives. It's one of those things you don't notice until you notice. I glanced over at the dish rack. No steak knives there either. I searched my memory. No recent parties, obviously. No steak-knife donation drives. There was clearly a place for steak knives: Four little slots ...
This morning I felt something I couldn't identify. I was sitting in my yard in Brooklyn, wondering what to do about the ten-foot branch that fell on the walk during the hurricane. I drank my coffee and tried to decipher the feeling. Oh, yes. Peaceful. I have not felt this way in four years. I've ...
Forget the media. Forget fact checks. Forget facts. If, and I know this is a lot to ask, we can trust video footage of Trump speaking, let's make an argument based solely on the words Trump has spoken, and stood by, on camera. I'll even avoid the more famous clips, except for this one: Eleven ...
Cerebus is named Hobbes for a week, because everybody who read the newspaper in the 90s has an instinctive urge to name cats Hobbes. At the end of that week, I remember I'd always meant to name my next pet Cerebus, so Hobbes is shunted to middle name status. There are few fictional characters more ...