The “monster with the green eyes” is usually a euphemism for jealousy.
The big dog with green eyes is Chewy. No doubt about that truth.
Now that I’ve been locked up with him for eleven months, we’ve come to a bit of an understanding: he’s in charge.
I took two weeks off this past month to get some outside work done. It was the first time since the lockdown (which will never end in Minnesota) that he didn’t have me held hostage in the office/bedroom for at least 32 hours in a given week. It not only surprised him, but annoyed him. Wait until I retire, Doggo.
He made up for it by gluing himself to my left ankle. Some days he was just “there” with every step I made to declutter the house. Others he was on the floor at my feet, or on the couch next to me, while watching television. In both cases (of the couch) he was taking up space where humans usually sat, or rested their feet. We can be so inconvenient to our dogs sometimes.
He has, in that year (almost) mellowed a lot. Not that he doesn’t get the zoomies and leap about, but it’s not as often. He’s also largely given up destroying random items for amusement. I actually saw him playing with a stuffed toy last night. Who is this dog?
He’s Chewy. A dog that was almost put down in the pound, who was rescued by a fine group of people, and who wound up in our home. He was skinny, shy, and a bit nuts. Today he’s muscular, unaware of personal space (with his people), and just goofy.
I like this dog more than a little. I don’t even mind that he’s a bed hog. His favorite is to climb on the bed while I’m sleeping and flop down on my feet. He’s not exactly a toy size (38 pounds if hotels ask) and I am thus pinned down until he offers to move.
He is also an empath. I had a massive migraine today and retreated to bed – a rarity that has only happened about 5 times in my life. He hopped up on the bed and laid down next to me so that our heads were almost touching. Usually he’s way down the bed and keeping his own space. It never fails that if I roll over, he leaves within 10 seconds. Today he just snuggled in closer.
I needed that. I need that dog. Those green eyes mean the world to me.
The title might prompt you to think that I’m advocating increased hostility. Far from it. I’m merely asking that if you are to argue with others, especially on social media, that you do it in an actually persuasive way with valid (truthful) points.
How would one do this? Let’s start with not putting up graphics posts that say things like: “White looters ignored by American police.” The picture shows white people looting a store, carrying out televisions and clothing. Yeah. That’s a great example. Let’s explain.
The reason American police ignored them is because the looting took place in mexico several years ago. American Police weren’t within five-hundred miles. The country is not the United States.
But that doesn’t stop the “If they were black, there’d be dead bodies” kinds of arguments. That’s the same foolish argument that is trotted out any time a white person suspected of a heinous crime surrenders peacefully. I guess we’re supposed to assign a quota to police and enforce it. If a black person is shot by the police (and you should know the numbers before you go ballistic, so go do the research) an equivalent or larger number of white people should be shot to make the numbers balance.
I guess the argument is that if there is a tragic killing of an innocent black person (one not involved in felonious activity) we need to kill a white person trying to surrender to police. Then the question becomes how many Asian and Latino suspects need to be shot as well? Will we drill down to the point where 1 person of Lithuanian descent must die for every 4 black people? Or, perhaps, we should just execute without trial one Irish woman for every 24 Latino deaths? I’m going to have to get a better calculator.
The next bit of public discourse is that I’m going to immediately block anyone who posts a tweet, Facebook, Instagram, or other social media post that ends with SMH. (Sweet Merciful Heavens.) This is church-going Christian code for “I’d like to use an obscenity but people won’t let me be in the choir if I do.” Some of the most remarkably stupid and nasty things, almost always unfounded and poorly thought out, are posted with this as the end of the item.
Straw men are next on the list. They are effectively used to make you feel bad because you may not be doing enough in your heart when you read them. An example? Well, of course:
If you say, “All lives matter” does that include:
Syrian refugee lives?
The poorest of the poor in Brazil?
Haitian refugees?
The unjustly imprisoned?
Those who have nothing to eat?
The list usually has one or more items. It can also start with other items such as “Protect the unborn,” or “Diabetes is a tough gig,” etc., and then list all the other tragic things in the world.
Be honest. Doesn’t that make you feel a bit small and churlish if you think that everyone’s life matters? But what does it mean? If you sponsor orphans, feed the homeless, advocate quietly for justice reform, and shovel snow for the old and ill, are you still a rotten-racist thug who isn’t doing enough? That’s how straw-men arguments work: you take a statement and then turn all possible alternatives against the reader.
Let’s stop that one cold: you do what you can. Even Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos, with all their money, couldn’t address all the injustice and poverty in the world. How could you possibly be expected to handle every bad thing on the planet. More importantly, you are entitled to an opinion. Yes, freedom of speech still applies. Your thoughts are no less valid because someone who can paste clip art into Facebook doesn’t like your philosophy.
How about, instead of demeaning each other, and throwing sharp rocks – or calling out the police on someone because you disagree on Twitter – you rationally engage with factual arguments. I know most are incapable. They are spoon fed by the leftist media and never do their own research.
That’s a tragedy. They are often the most prolific posters. More importantly, they knowingly post first, so as to get the clicks. They also post inflammatory things from the past just to keep the flames going. I don’t really care if it’s the story of a veteran’s group being denied service at a hotel in 2016, or a kid being hit by a patrol car in 2017 – both are equally in the past and whatever remedy needed to be taken has likely been instituted. When you check, you’ll find out policies have changed, people retrained, others jailed. But that picture that makes your heart swell with outrage is still floating around, waiting to pop up and make others pound their fist.
And the same thing repeats over, and over. Seriously, if you don’t have a puppy picture, or a family reunion to post a picture of, maybe some of you shouldn’t be on the internet. You (and you know who you are) are the same vicious animals who spread rumors about the Murphy girl being a prostitute back in 1887. You know, those Catholics are all evil. She was seen with a black fellow – I am sure her parents know….
Yup. Things never change, just the technology and the hate you choose to inflict on your fellow man.
This blog might take a while to write, Chewy is next to me on the couch helping with keystrokes. He’s sincere, but clumsy with the paws. Such is life.
Current events. I’ve hesitated to dive in here because most people come unhinged when I mention my beliefs. Fine. Instead I’ll give you a “Joe update” and work in the world around us.
I have mentioned for years that among my many defects you can count my hearing. I’m not bitching, but the Navy was really hard on my ears. As it was for many of my fellow sailors. But Cryptologic Technicians really had it bad with what we did: headphones on almost all the time at sea. Now, other rates (jobs for civilians) had the same kind of hearing loss. All of it is tragic. But I can attest that almost all of my contemporaries are messed up in that way. Tinnitus and deafness are our lot.
The V.A. has finally recognized that our exposure to rooms full of printers, speakers, and high volume air handling units has created problems. They don’t even fight the claims anymore. But you do have to keep going back as your hearing declines to get your disability rating changed.
About a year ago I got my hearing checked right before we all went in the sewer of lockdown. I was officially as deaf as the honcho’s required before they added an additional percentage to my disability. It also meant new hearing aids.
With the lockdown, and the VA and everyone else being closed for months, I waited an extremely long time to get my new equipment. I finally got it in November – about 9 months after the exam.
The new hearing aids are amazing. Computer driven, I can control them from my phone. They are bluetooth enabled, and the sound quality is top-notch. In addition, they specifically fill in the frequencies where I have the most loss.
Sadly, I use my hearing aids at work to interface with my phone. The problem was that the boat-anchor I called my desktop didn’t work with the hearing aids. My boss is a prince of a fellow, and he and I worked together to make it happen. Let’s just say that for a technology company, our tech support on the issue was rotten. They fixated on hearing aid, versus bluetooth. Dear God, what a bunch of dips.
Any rate, we finally got past all the small minds in our way and I got a new computer just before Christmas. It works with my new gear.
I no longer have to struggle to hear what the caller is saying. In addition, I now wear the hearing aids every day. I hadn’t the heart to switch over from the old ones until I could wear the new ones all the time. Why? I’ll tell you.
It is jarring, disconcerting, upsetting, and troublesome to change what you hear. Right now you think you hear what’s around you. But I can promise you that you are missing a lot of things. The difference between what is in the world around you, and what you hear is huge.
This is true of your view of the current events in the world. Part of it is that you’re comfortable listening to the sounds inside your own head. Or the station on the radio that you prefer. Or the cable news channel that meets your approval. And, just like it is when you have hearing aids, you’re only hearing what’s programmed to pass the filter. You can hear other things, but you have to seek them out and turn up the volume.
You grow accustomed to a certain level of noise and sound patterns that please you. I didn’t realize the floors in my house squeak like they do. I also didn’t know that certain things I do each day are quite noisy. I never heard them until the new hearing aids.
I have to turn them down when I put them on. The world is just too loud after years of it going quiet decibel by decibel. That applies to most people’s knowledge of current events as well. You just turn away when it is jarring.
Me? I love the new sounds. I turn the volume down or I become a monster. Sensory overload from too many new inputs. But I don’t turn them off. I just avoid getting overstimulated. The first week I wore them full time, I was nuts. Truly on edge and didn’t realize it. But once I figured out why I was so jumpy and anxious, I learned to deal with it.
I miss hearing without the things. When I take them off at night, it’s like flicking a switch. The ceiling fan vanishes, the street noise is gone, Chewy thumping his tail is just something I see, not hear. It makes it easy to sleep.
Many of you have taken out your hearing aids and are going to sleep. You never hear what is going on around you politically. You only listen to what the programmers allow you to hear on your devices. That has to end.
I am a conservative patriot. Yet I listen to the opposition and actually hear what they are saying. It is frightening. Never in my life have I wished to silence even the most odious speech. I listen to communists, Nazis, pro-abortion, anti-abortion, Catholic, agnostic, you name it. I can converse intelligently on those topics.
But the last year the people I used to be able to talk to just try to shout me down when I discuss the world around us. They wish to make me quiet so that they don’t hear me. They never seem to consider hearing what I have to say and just writing me off as a nut. Nope, it’s time to shout your “enemy” down.
I don’t care what your position is, but I am asking you to do this: put on your new hearing aids and listen to what is being said all around you. I hope you find the floor is squeaky. I hope you find a new melody in another way of thinking.
Most of all, I hope you resist the urge to silence others. Or to vindictively deny them a job, or a bank account, or a voice on social media. None of those things is very American. Yet they are happening now.
If your response is that “you guys did it too” I’m disappointed. No, actually not. It was not a platform point for “my side” at any point in the last 224 years. I follow the constitution. I love that document. Swore to protect it. Will continue to do so. Also, and this is a good point to make right here, how long do you go on killing the children of your enemies for something that happened prior to their birth? Moving forward involves discussion. There is a sad lack of that in our country right now.
This week will be intense. And every time you hear someone call for silencing, punishing, locking out those they have taken power from, I hope you cringe. You see, that will be you next time the wheel turns.
The wheel always turns. I don’t hope to hurt you, or take your power to speak. I hope you join me in this.
Finally, if you go back over all the things I’ve written in the last decade, I suspect you’ll find this is a consistent viewpoint. I have never advocated putting opponents in jail for a bad point of view. I will continue to hope that is your outlook as well.
Freedom isn’t free. I wear hearing aids as part of my dues to that concept. I am okay with rotten hearing. But if you shut your ears voluntarily, my sacrifice is for naught.
I won’t be long. But for those of you cheering that conservatives are being banned from social media, and that Parler is being taken out of the application stores for Apple and Google, you should remember this:
When they silence the powerful, the average and low have no voice at all.
History is replete with examples where free speech is restricted by governments. It inevitably means people die under the thumb of the authoritarian powers that rise in that silence.
When tech monopolies have the power to control the public square, by dint of federal law exceptions carved out for them, they are truly an extension of the government.
If you value your rights, and I hope you do, you need to fight this every way you can. Because, whether you like it or not, acknowledge it or not, you are next.
I have no idea what that title meant, but it just popped up.
I am not deceased. I am very busy. Those two things are quite different.
Just a couple of things. First, The COVID Quarantine Cantina is doing well, but we’d love to be Number One in our category again. Today we’re at #3. Your buying a copy of the audio book can do that. Just click on it and make us all happy. Buying a Kindle version, or a couple of paper copies, would also be appreciated. It’s a darned fine collection of yarns.
Second, I’m putting my newest computer together over the last 28 hours. The previous resident on my desktop puked up a hairball and died forever. Before you take another step tonight, make sure you are backed up in the cloud. I am. I was able to recover one of the hard drives, but not the second – tantalizingly close, but not quite reachable. I’m sitting here writing and reading while it downloads files from the cloud. Life saver. I would have lost books, audio files, lots of stuff if not for backup.
The other thing about the computer (the new one) is that someone finally asked users what they like. This is a big, roomy case with extra power. Best of all, and I mean this with great admiration, it comes prewired for lots of extras. Like an amazing bundle of power supply wires already connected to the power supply routed to a spare part of the case for installing extra SATA devices. All I had to cough up was a single data cable. (I have about 10) and connect it to one of four spare ports on the mother board. It is not the usual horrible kind of connection, either, but it is a prefab hanger for 4 plugs that makes it almost impossible to crack the mother board while installing. It’s from Microcenter and it’s their homebrew PowerSpec line. Better price than the competition, much better case.
Last of all, I’m reading blogs of mine from 2013. Got there by a google search. I’m pleased to say that I’m amazingly consistent in my ability to annoy people and predict the future.
The next 2 years are going to suck.
That’s my prediction. But, the new computer is solid, the new books are coming right along, and lots more audio books on the way.
Be well, don’t fret too much. I’ll be back next week.
