That can cut two ways. Sometimes a perfectly executed, tight piece of work just doesn’t feel alive. Rundown any top sales chart and you’ll eventually hit “perfectly executed, but boring.” To prove this isn’t an old man opinion, I’ll dig all the way back to the 90s.

I’ve made an active effort to not talk too much shit on here, but I will give myself a personal waiver to discuss the number 16 song of 1995, “Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman?” by Bryan Adams.

The song is impeccably produced with a textbook arrangement that ebbs and flows in the right places, with everything cleanly played and vocals that are right on the money. It also fucking sucks. Sappy lyrics, guitars that say “excuse me, do you mind if I play here?” and a general aesthetic that feels like an upscale Spanish restaurant run by Mormons. Weak.

The easy counter example here would the the number 4 song of 1995, Seal’s “Kiss from a Rose”. In the macro view, they have a lot in common: both are about love and had single releases that were tie-ins for major feature films, the Adams song with Don Juan DeMarco and the Seal song with Batman Forever. But there’s no fun here, because of course the Seal song is better. In the video he sings in front of the Batsignal and the song has that little pause-to-keyboard break that rules. It’s no contest.

So we’re going to dig a little deeper today and find the second meaning of “Sometimes the best stuff kind of sucks.” Something that has enough going against it that it has no choice but to be glorious.

Have you heard the ending theme to Baywatch Nights?

Sung by star David Hasselhoff, it’s essentially a vanity project nesting doll. A soap star (Hasselhoff) hit it big on prime time 80s tv as the driver of a talking car (Knight Rider) and used that success to make a vanity album that eventually lead to him singing down the Berlin Wall. He was in another prime time NBC show that was cancelled after one season, but he got a deal made to bring the show back in syndication and in the process it became one of the biggest shows in the world (Baywatch). From that success, Hasselhoff set up a spin-off where he traded in his tiny red shorts for tight jeans and a cool Adidas jacket as he went from lifeguard to private eye (Baywatch Nights).

Hasselhoff’s Humphrey Bogart obsession and Baywatch Nights’ eventual shift into supernatural territory are beyond the scope of this piece, but think of the journey it took to get this beautiful piece of work, a journey you can somehow hear in every note. The breathless pre-chorus, the round at the end, it’s all so beautiful. And I do not mean for this to come off as ironic appreciation, I truly think it rules.

Now the song his Baywatch son sang about how he’s not going to have sex, that I appreciate ironically.

This is an extreme example, but stuff like the ending theme to Baywatch Nights is why I’m not really interested in the creative possibilities of AI. I believe it will have a place, serve a purpose and possibly make the grunt work easier, but the thing I truly love about art—and yes, I just called the end theme from Baywatch Nights “art”—is that it’s made by people. People with weird ideas and scores to settle and things they wish they were but probably aren’t. Honestly, at the rate it’s moving, AI can probably get you 90% of the way to a new Baywatch Nights theme, but it’s that last 10% that makes all the difference. We can only stomach so much algorithmic slop until we crave that batshit human touch.

Setting Off the Exercise Sensor

The potential for smart watches hasn’t quite been reached, probably because there’s more money in getting you to look at the screen of your phone. It’s great that I can see my blood sugar reading from my continuous glucose monitor at a glance, but it would be even greater if I could do it without having my phone in range. Hell, at this point I’d settle for being able to dismiss and silence the high glucose alert without having to unlock my phone.

But there is one feature of the smartwatch that truly brings me joy. Unfortunately, it’s a rare occurrence and as technology improves it may disappear altogether. I never feel more accomplished than when I poop so hard the watch asks me if I’m doing a workout.

Yes, I am, thank you for asking.

Things I Like

I think Venture Bros is the most beautiful show ever made.

It’s beautiful because there’s a sadness at the heart of it, the way there’s a sadness at the heart of life. Nothing seems to go right, but it always goes on. The characters are constantly dealing with the consequences of their actions and the actions of the people they love, even if it seems like the people they love don’t always love them back. It is a show about life that also happens to have a villain with invisible appendages named Phantom Limb.

The new Venture Bros movie, Radiant is the Blood of the Baboon Heart is a fitting end for the series, as it’s not quite what any of us wanted—a full final season—but Jackson Publick and southeastern Connecticut’s favorite son Doc Hammer took the cards they were dealt and came up with something beautiful. If you’ve never seen the series, start from the beginning and work your way up. If you have seen the series, watch it again anyway. That’s what I’m doing.

I don’t know if that broken bridge was the inciting event that delayed our flight 6 hours and made us board the plane no less than three times, but sometimes it’s nice to think of what could have been if the cards fell correctly.

Luckily, I had most of my stuff strapped to my back, so I had plenty of entertainment options, though I’d woken up a bit too early to be able to read with any hope of retention. So the delay mostly came down to playing video games in a place I don’t normally play video games and lightly eavesdropping on the conversations around me. Some college kids going home for a bit, a grandmother making a trip to see family, one very loud gentleman who wasn’t quite sure how weather worked…

Let’s talk about him for a bit.

Anyone who’s worked with the public at any point knows this guy. He’s 100% sure that you’re keeping something from him and are intentionally trying to antagonize him when in truth it’s easier to just give these people what they want so they go away. But his coping mechanism to deal with the reality of a delay was to have very stern faced conversations with the crew about how they shouldn’t lie to him. It seemed his brain was having issues connecting the sunny skies of Virginia to the potential tornados of New York and he was insistent on working this problem out in a verbal manner, so that everyone at the gate would remember “that fucking guy who wouldn’t shut up about the weather”.

Of course, we are in an era where the tools for amateur meteorology are one tap away, but he seemed content to work with the maps in his mind, thank you very much. I’m fascinated by this, because we rarely get to observe from a safe distance the problem of what happens when a mind has to face a truth that was previously hidden from it.

I think people misestimate what is in their control. I say “misestimate” because I don’t think they over or under estimate what they can control, they’re just not sure on all the details (and for the record, I include myself here). For example, on that flight, we all chose our airline and our arrivals and departures. Our choice of airline–Breeze, for the record–limited the destinations and days we could go, but for a reduced price, we gave up a little control. We could have paid more to take another airline at another time to another place, but we didn’t. We were in control of our decision to buy a ticket for this plane.

But we don’t get to decide when the captain feels it’s okay to fly and the weather is not a democratically decided event. If Johnny Yellsalot thinks he should risk the tornado warnings, that’s fine, but it’s not his decision. The concept of truth has proven to be very elastic over the last few years, but he seemed to genuinely think that he could debate the weather.

And that’s why we’re fucked.

How much has the weather impacted the average person? Maybe it cancelled a picnic or a baseball game or something. Has it stopped them from going outside because the air was unhealthy or it’s too hot to be alive? If not yet, it will soon.

I feel like so much of modern life is built on ignoring natural forces. I tapped a screen a few times, handed over a pile of money that was never actually in my hand, and somehow that gave me the ability to fly, with little to no knowledge of headwinds or tailwinds or wind in general. But that act of giving the money makes it feel like I know something because now I’ve seen a small piece of the story of those planes in the sky. But I don’t know shit and I can’t control the weather, no matter how miserable I am sitting in the slightly too hot Richmond airport with the WiFi that barely works while I’m trying to see a doppler radar signal 380 miles away as if the act of me looking at it will somehow push the storm out east.

But staring at that map is easier than staring into the gaping maw of the truth: it’s a hostile, uncertain world and our entire society is precariously balanced on the edge. However, sometimes, when the circumstances are right, we can fly.

You Can Stop Squeezing

Sorry if that got out of hand up there, it’s been a rough week.

As I said before, I didn’t necessarily want to be on vacation, and though I’ve learned over the years that it’s a mistake to have fun at a place you don’t want to be–someone will use that against you to make you go again–I had a little fun anyway. Wasn’t free though.

We went to Busch Gardens in Williamsburg, were I got the 7 day pass because I though my body could handle just a little park each day. Unfortunately, it was so hot and muggy that even standing in line for their not-as-good-as-their-sister-park rider accessibility program almost took me out. After standing in line for 10 minutes to get a wristband and a sheet of paper that would let me go to the front of the line and get instructions on what time to come back to the front of the line, we picked up 3 refillable drink cups and two slices of watermelon. The total on that was $78.

They’ve gone cashless at Busch Gardens, which I think they do to make the transactions feel frictionless, but it just makes it so there’s an app on my phone that will show me how hard they’ve been squeezing my grapes.

I thought I got them because I upgraded my pass so I didn’t have to pay for parking, but it turns out you can just blow through the toll both and no one even bats an eye. I might even feel bad about that if I didn’t pay $16 for a chef salad at some point. The food at their German themed Festhaus is very good, but at $124 for three people, it was the most expensive meal of our vacation. I probably would have made out had I purchased a dining pass instead, but every dollar you spend with an amusement corporation is essentially a bet on whether or not you’re about to get screwed. All told, three of us spent five to six hours in the park over two days, rode roughly 6 rides and paid just under $600 for the privilege. That $600 is park expenses only. My Realdeal Actual Value Estimate—the price I think I should have paid—would be roughly $300.

Things I Like

I’m on record as disliking the outdoors–particularly the beach–and being extremely price sensitive to things that are not computers, instruments, collectibles or trash food, but we rented jet skis for an hour and it ruled. I felt just like my hero, Mitch Buchannon of Baywatch, even down the Ray Ban Outdoorsman glasses I bought for the trip. I even got to come to the rescue of a busty blonde when her son accidentally dumped her off the back of the jet ski (full disclosure: she paid for my rental and also I’ve been with her for over a decade).

I’m probably not buying one anytime soon, but I would ride one again.

But I’m also not getting the maximum value out of this hotel room, because the Samsung tv is stuck on Motion Smoothing. “Vacation” to me means unlimited time to work on my little projects, watch movies and catch up on all the video games I bought and haven’t got around to yet. I brought a 5 terabyte hard drive full of lovingly ripped films which all look like absolute shit on this Samsung television. I tried to get it out of hospitality mode, but since I don’t have the actual remote for the tv, that was useless. I also tried to call the front desk to see if anyone could help me, but trying to explain the pains of motion smoothing to someone who doesn’t care about it feels similar to explaining that we could all lift this building 3 inches off the ground if we just concentrate on it. I think I would have gotten a better reception had I marched down there and taken a dump on the counter. At the very least, the would have known what it was.

Still, my handheld pc works though it is bittersweet to play it next to a 55 inch television and a pile of useless adapters. I’m not a man who easily admits defeat, but here I am, defeated.

At least I got to try Hardee’s for the first time.

A Brief Note on Accessibility

The Busch Gardens/Water Country USA Disability Accessibility Program has worked out quite well for me. I swear I wrote about this before, but a cursory search of the archives didn’t turn up anything and I’m on vacation, so I’m not looking any harder than that.

I was in their system from a previous time at the park, so I didn’t even need to break out the doctor’s notes or anything. At Water Country, the gave me a bunch of one time passes for certain rides so I didn’t have to wait in line, though the passes don’t really help with the truly awe-inspiring amount of stairs I had to climb to get to the rides. Still, I got to go on pretty much  everything in a reasonable amount of time. I may get maximum value out of that 7 day pass yet!

Things I Like

Every July 4th, I alternating between watching two films that take place on the date: Jaws and The Return of the Living Dead. This year was a Jaws year.

You don’t need me to tell you Jaws is good. It’s one of the best movies ever made. But to switch things up this year, we watched it projected. I bought an LG projector for $200 on eBay back in 2020 when it started to look more and more like my white ass would never see the inside of a movie theater again. As much as I love the look of a 4K OLED television, there’s a special kind of magic to the way that projected light hits the eye, even when it’s just projected on a bedroom wall.

I came very close to packing that projector and bringing it on vacation. That seemed overboard at the time, but now as I type this in the ambient glow of a Samsung television that mocks me with it’s motion interpolation, I know I must always follow my heart.

I’m still not entirely sure why she did this, but it was a tremendous day for me. It had been a couple of years since I invoked her “you don’t have to go on vacations after you turn 16” clause, which was probably heartbreaking for a woman that loved to drive really far to sleep outside. But while I can acknowledge the sadness now, I cannot feel remorse because I hate camping that much.

But she did not hold it against me. Or maybe she knew the fireworks would piss off her (now ex-) fiancee, which had become something of a pastime for us. Perhaps the bag would have stayed in New Hampshire it if she knew just how much it would piss him off.

Upon receiving the bounty, I called some friends up and told them to get ready for the show. It would take place in the standard venue: a patch of dirt in the middle of my mother’s backyard. Or so I thought.

Her ex felt that the trees were too close to the firing zone even though a.) they weren’t and b.) it had recently rained. Still, it was his house and he recently helped transport some illegal fireworks over state lines for me, so this was a rare time I was in no mood to argue. Following his instructions, I moved the show to the middle of the yard. Since the ground here wasn’t as flat as my usual area, I supported the small box shaped package with 4 bricks we had laying around. Then I lit it and ran.

The fuse hissed and then went silent. Moments later, the first shot went up, a brilliant purple ball that flew about 25 feet in the air before expiring like a small, beautiful supernova. The next shot was a beautiful red comet that flew directly at me. I dodged and it slapped into the side of the house. The next shot went into the neighbor’s yard.

It was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.

The force of the first shot had knocked the box free of the bricks and onto it’s side, where every successive shot spun the thing around so you never knew where the next round was going. There was nothing we could do but keep dodging until it was done. Well, I guess we could have ran into the house, but I was crying with laughter and not thinking straight.

When the thing finally burned itself out, my mom’s ex announced that the rest of the show was canceled because I “want to act like an adult but you’re not responsible enough”, even though at least 4 other people heard him give the instructions that got his camper lightly grazed by a small green ball of sparks. I’d probably be madder about that if getting yelled at by someone for following their instructions wasn’t a tremendous preparation for the world of work.

He instructed my mom to get rid of the fireworks, which meant she put them in the basement and told me where they were when she went on her next vacation, telling me to definitely not light them off while they were gone *wink*. I definitely did not throw the remnants of a fireworks show into the family fire pit and spend an hour trying to put out a fire that changed colors every time I sprayed it with water.

One of Two Times I Mowed a Lawn

I lived in apartments for most of my life, so I haven’t done a lot of lawn mowing in my day, which is good because I hate it and I’m bad at it.

But when my mom and that same ex took a trip to Florida and left me in charge of the house, the only instructions I received were “don’t leave a mess in the sink” and “mow the lawn”. I should not have to tell you that I waited until the literal last minute to do both of those things.

Mom’s ex’s son was big into lawnmower racing, so we had a bunch of lawnmowers laying around the yard in various states of disrepair. With about an hour to go before we had to pick up mom and her ex from the airport, my buddy and I decided to give lawnmower racing a go ourselves.

Apparently we didn’t do a good job, because I was banned from yard work after that, though I assure you all the grass was shorter than it was when we started. Her ex was so mad he couldn’t even yell at me directly. I felt bad that mom had to get a lecture about the proper latticework pattern we were supposed to cut the lawn in, but in our defense, we had wasted a bunch of time playing Animal Crossing for the GameCube and did not think–or care–that the blades on one of the mowers might be higher than the blades on the other mower.

Things I Like

July is the month of my absolute favorite holiday: the anniversary of the theatrical release of Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

It was not the first R-rated movie I ever saw–we had HBO when I was younger and I was a child raised by the tv–but it is the first R-rated movie I saw in theaters. I swear I saw it early as part of some sneak preview screening, but I can find no evidence of this anywhere on the internet. And I believe I only saw it 2 or 3 times in theaters, because unlike the 8 or so times I saw Batman, a parent or guardian had to actual stay in the theater with me, not just drop me off and then swing back in 2 hours. Still, every moment was seared into my tiny little brain the moment I saw it.

Even at a young age, I was a cranky little bastard, so my dad came up with the idea of my stepmother taking me to see it the first time, perhaps in hopes that I would stop suggesting that if she wanted tacos for dinner maybe she should take a trip to Mexico. It worked for a spell. My instinct for self preservation was high enough that I knew I had to play nice if I wanted further access to movies I was probably too young to see. Really backfired on me about a year later when we took a family trip to see Under Siege and we all spent an awkward few minutes looking at Erika Eleniak’s boobs as a family.

Still worth it to see that T2 spillway chase on the big screen.

The main signal delivery mechanisms for 8-bit and 16-bit consoles was the RF adapter. This turned video and audio information into a radio frequency modulated signal. It worked on pretty much any tv that could tune itself to channel 3 (or 4) and delivered a fuzzy, yet usable signal that replaced the evening news with Yo Noid! or whatever.

Most of these consoles did have better output options available, but those were for fancier TVs. The RF unit is what came standard until the onset of the 32-bit generation. The Sega Saturn and the Sony Playstation both came with Yellow/Red/White RCA cables, which were pretty common on newer tvs.

But most people did not run out and replace all their old tvs and if you didn’t have the right input, it wasn’t as easy to get a replacement cable as it is now. Now you hit a button, a series of human rights violations occur and BAM! a new cable is dropped on your doorstep. Back then you had to not only explain the difference between RF and RCA to an unwitting parent, you had to get them to drive you to the store and hope they had the thing in stock.

So my PS1 was a strictly RCA affair, which was fine when I had it at my house, but less so on weekends with my dad. Though the weekends should have been prime video game time for me, the only tv with RCA inputs was in the living room, where my stepmother would enjoy a steady stream of pirated pay-per-view movies. If there was a particularly boring film, she would sometimes take a little nap and I had to drop whatever I was doing to savor a few brief moments of Tekken 2. But the more likely situation was I would just stay up until three or four in the morning, waiting for everyone to go to sleep so I could finally switch the tv from an endless loop of Titanic to playing Mortal Kombat Trilogy until the sun came up.

And so, I became a night person.

Out of the thirteen or so jobs I’ve had, only three have been first shift and I hated every fucking minute of them. I probably still would have hated them if I started later in the afternoon, but the lack of sleep wasn’t helping. Once I had a third shift job that turned into a second shift job without warning, so I just keep coming in at my regular third shift time until someone finally stopped me six months later. My current job is actually supposed to be a 9 to 5, but after a week of that, I was like “I think I’m going to start coming in at noon”. Everyone just went with it.

My preference for the dark hours seemed to cause some amount of consternation amongst my family, who were apparently unaware that their disapproval only makes the juice sweeter. My father used to constantly try to reason me into getting up earlier. I specifically remember when I was having issues limping a grey Volvo 240 through the lenient Connecticut emissions process. In talking to him on the phone, his advice was “get a good night’s rest, get up early, make some calls, get some prices.” Turns out you can sleep until noon and accomplish the same thing, because all the morning people are already in bed by 3pm or something.

I do wonder what my life would be like if I were born a few years later, when video input options were less of an issue. There are 3 screens in my eye line right now and with little to no effort, I could be playing a game of Mortal Kombat on each one of them. Would I be the same person if a good portion of my teen years weren’t spent waiting for an adult to pass out in front of the living room tv? Maybe, maybe not. But have I also mentioned that I hate the sun?

The Headline When You Die

Do you ever wonder what the headline will be when you die? Most of the time, the answer is “there won’t be one”, but I don’t think it’s something you can control or predict.

I’ve done some questionable things in my day. One of my favorite pastimes used to be making giant KISS-like pyro flames using a small campfire, an old candle and a cup of water taped to a broomstick. I also once took a cheap, non-flying, glorified sparkler “firework” I bought from Wal-Mart and taped it to a model rocket engine I also bought from Wal-Mart and flew it in a state park. It was a glorious ascent and an impressively loud explosion upon landing.

(I dug out some video of one of the candle fires. I assure you that I always checked the Smokey The Bear fire safety sign before ignition)

My initial numbers on the home unit were almost frighteningly low, but soon I was getting the best lung function numbers I’d ever seen. Shockingly, impossibly high numbers. I actually wrote about it here. This machine evolved my technique from a normal breath to a kind of death metal growl to more of a haunted house whine. After all these years, I had finally bested my enemy, the PFT machine.

Turns out the machine had swindled me.

I could never replicate the numbers I was getting in a clinical setting. There are going to be discrepancies between a professional machine and a handheld one that links to an app that no one can really nail UI scaling on, but the gulf was too wide to write off as manufacturing discrepancies. The handheld machine sabotaged me by rewarding behaviors that the professional machine hates.

The handheld home version loves it when you take a deep breath, stop to collect your thoughts and then make a noise similar to the library ghost from Ghostbusters. The hospital machine and the people that run it are less enthused by this. After three years of piss poor numbers, I finally figured out the thing the hospital machine wants: big breath in and an immediate exhale, no pause. Which is probably how I used to do it before the home version got into my head, I don’t remember. You’re also not supposed to make an actual noise, as that gets your throat in the way of your breath, but I still think I can find a way to make it work, just to say I did. We’ll find out in three months!

The home machine “works” in that you have to understand it’s numbers are a lie but they can be compared to each other in order to tell if my lung function is going up or down. But right now I think it’s too dangerous for me to use because I treat it like setting a Donkey Kong score and I’ll do whatever it takes to make the number go up.

Machine vs Man 2: Now It’s Trying to Piss Me Off

What’s the maddest you’ve ever been at an inanimate object? I suppose I should start by asking if you’ve ever actually been mad at an inanimate object, but it’s so thoroughly ingrained in my dna that I can’t imagine anyone saying “no, an object has never made me mad” and I’m unwilling to reckon with the fact that anyone could say such a thing.

Analog technology always seemed to break in a way that felt “haunted” to me, like there was literally a ghost in the machine. This probably comes down to the age at which I was dealing with these things and my lack of basic mechanical knowledge at the time. We used to have a VCR who’s diet consisted mostly of my favorite video cassettes. Chewed them up by the goddamn truckload. But it never did it while I had it opened up. And for some reason taking a cotton swap and some alcohol to the top of the drum seemed to fix it for a bit, even though that has roughly as much effect as blowing into a Nintendo cartridge. Maybe the thing really was haunted and the ghost liked alcohol.

Digital technology feels like it breaks in a willful way, like it’s trying to test you. Again, I’m projecting here, but when a VCR ate a tape, you could see the tape crumble and kind of understand how this could happen. When a computer won’t run a program it’s run every day for it’s entire fucking life, it feels personal.

I bought a Steam Deck and love it, but not enough to keep me from buying a competing device last week so that they can battle for my affection with the loser being sentenced to a 7 day auction on eBay. The Asus ROG Ally is a tremendously powerful handheld PC that also holds the title for “Inanimate object that made me the most angry.”

As an early adopter, I expected some trials and the Steam Deck had some issues when it first came out too. But the Ally uses Windows 11 and sometimes it feels like a cruel joke. The whole selling point is that you can use it to play Microsoft Game Pass games, but I couldn’t even install them for a full day. It just kept telling me I needed to install Gaming Services, even though I’d done it 5 fucking times. I did some digging on the internet–tough since this was during the Reddit blackout–and ran some command line business. Nothing. Came real close to writing “Credit my account” on the back of my receipt, taping it to the Ally and whipping it through the Best Buy window at 3am.

Instead, I went to bed, which was probably smarter, but not as satisfying.

The next day, I came at it again, determined to figure out how to download at least one game before I brought this thing back. So I turned it on and…it worked. I didn’t have to do anything. Even the fingerprint scanner worked now, which I didn’t expect. There hadn’t been any updates or anything, it just worked. This was somehow more infuriating than if it was still broken, but not enough that I’ve returned it…yet.

Things I Like

I’d like to take a moment here to talk about Katatonia’s “Last Fair Deal Gone Down”, one of the greatest albums released in my lifetime. It came out in 2001 and even though it was the first Katatonia album I heard, I specifically bought it because there was a big uproar about how they changed their sound and I love it when bands change their sound. 22 years later, I am not joking when I say the songwriting team of guitarist Anders Nystrom and vocalist Jonas Renske are the Lennon/McCartney of my generation.

I have listened to this album hundreds if not thousands of times over the last few decades and I still find myself going “listen to that fucking chord! Who does that?!” multiple times. I celebrate the whole catalog but they were cooking with that special shit on this one. If you’ve never heard it, just check out “Teargas”

I work from home and I’m pretty busy at the beginning of the month, so I was running late on the dog’s 4pm walk. She was very excited when I got the leash out. Less so when it turned out her walk was from the door to the road then right back to the door.

I felt it before I smelt it. Not quite a tightness in my chest, but more of a tiredness, as if my lungs had found a way to do crunches without alerting the rest of my body. Like the world’s worst detective, I connected the haze on the horizon, the red sun and the smell of someone burning the world’s largest Wicker Man with the various “air gonna be bad!” headlines I’d seen over the last week and determined the air was indeed bad.

Turns out I was actually the world’s second worst detective.

The next day, an anonymized family member stopped by to print something and we bullshitted a bit as the Brother printer everyone has fired up. I was explaining that I felt bad because I couldn’t take Lila out for a walk and this person said “Oh really? It’s not that hot out.” I explained that “no, the air smells like burning”. This was news to them. They were incredulous that smoke from Canada would even make it this far and they didn’t notice anything on their walk, but resolved to sniff the air when they went back out.

As noted above, the fucking sun was red.

A younger me, probably would have made a big deal out of this, especially since this family member holds the world record for cigarettes smoked in front of me, but in my middle age, I’m content to write about it here. If anything, I’m envious, because it must be nice to be so thoroughly unaffected by what’s happening around you.

An Awe Inspiring Piece of Mail

I won’t say that my co-pays are out of control, but they’re getting there. I’m on the hook for $4k a year, which is above what the average US employee paid in 2022, but I’ve seen worse. However, I’d love to spend that money on literally anything other than drugs, so I applied for assistance through a charitable foundation.

I’m not going to name them here, because I still need them to send me some checks, but I’ve mentioned the deal before: I applied and qualified for a $15,000 grant, which would essentially make most of my financial issues disappear. Of course, I don’t just get a check for $15,000, I have to submit receipts from my prescriptions. And even then I don’t get the full $4,000, they’ll only reimburse medications from companies that have contributed to the fund, so at the end of the day, assuming everything gets approved, I’ll probably clear just over a grand. Still, I’ll take it!

I will, of course, get it slowly. I have paid medical bills very slowly in the past and let me tell you they don’t take kindly to that shit. Funny how their attitude changes when the payee becomes the payer.

So in a rare show of optimism, I was very excited when I received an envelope from this mysterious foundation last week. Thinking it was a check, I excitedly ripped it open. What I found inside was truly awe inspiring.

It was a solicitation for a donation.

This is a company that I got in contact with because medical costs were juicing my grapes a little too hard. In the course of that process, they got both my address AND my adjusted gross income. Taking a look at the sum total of this information and deciding “maybe it’s time this guy gives a little back” is truly awe inspiring, especially since it’s been about 40 days since I asked them to send me a $120 rebate for drugs that my insurance was billed $43,500 for. It’s very possible that we’re just going to keep sending each other “give me money” messages until the wildfire smoke finally takes me out, which they probably think is a tremendous business model, but I believe my death would drop the stock price of at least 3 of their contributing companies, so maybe their math is off on that one.

Speaking of Asking for Money

I’ve been reluctant to mention this for a few different reasons, but I have been chosen as one of CT’s Finest by the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. It’s “an event honoring Connecticut’s best and brightest outstanding professionals” which is very funny to me because an astounding portion of my work is done while I’m wearing a bootleg Tiamat “Clouds” shirt and the line between casual and business attire for me is “sleeves”. Also, I give myself 4:1 odds that I’ll need a GoFundMe at some point, so I don’t want to run the well dry before that.

In any case, I’m supposed to raise $2,000 for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, so I’m going to put a link here in case you feel like using it.

Things I Like

I bought the new In the Line of Duty boxset for “Yes, Madam!”—this is a Cynthia Rothrock household—but holy shit was Royal Warriors incredible. I’m fairly new to Hong Kong action, so it’s very surprising to me that filmmakers are more likely to “go there’ with story beats that most American films back away from. Main characters die and don’t pull a surprise resurrection like LL Cool J at the end of Halloween H20. They’re fucking dead and it affects the rest of the movie. In that spirit, the final act of Royal Warriors contains one of the very best revenge schemes I’ve ever seen. The villain is ice fucking cold for that one. Highly recommended.

I only mention this because after about a year of trolling eBay, I finally found a reasonably priced pair of Ray Ban Outdoorsman II Aviator glasses. That’s the model that David Hasselhoff wore for many an episode of Baywatch, so I’ve been hoping to get a pair to join my bootleg Terminator 2 sunglasses in the “glasses that look like the ones the guy wore on that thing I watch” collection.

I got the larger lensed version which is great because again, I have a head similar to lovable 90s video game caveman Bonk. So with the good news out of the way, it’s time to tell you that the temple arms don’t quite clear my ears, making the balance on my greasy nose very precarious.

These are a vintage pair of glasses that I’m roughly 75% sure aren’t bootleg, so I rolled the dice and ordered some official replacement arms at an obscene price to see if I can get these things to fit my damn head. I do not know if newly manufactured arms fit frames made under the previous corporate owner, but sometimes half the fun of buying stuff is trying to get it to work. I like a little adventure, even when it ends in a real Ship of Theseus situation happening on the bridge of my nose.

The Lies We Get to Believe

As I get older, I find it’s easier to believe one’s lies about oneself, because they can no longer be tested. The years go on and the letters “v”, “n”, and twin “e”s run rampant on all the “I could do” sentences floating in my mind, turning them into a graveyard of “I could’ve done”s. Even my most low level dreams and goals—say doing a two week tour as a live session player with a random legacy band—are being assaulted by v, n, e and e as we speak, as I slowly become too old to be an interesting choice should a member of Danger Danger take ill in the northeast United States. It’s okay, had I been paying attention when I was younger I could’ve started a guitar based YouTube channel where my thousands of followers would launch me straight from my bedroom to the Former Members section of the BulletBoys’ Wikipedia page, though my name probably still wouldn’t be in blue text.

Of course, the most interesting “what if?” Is to wonder what would happen if I didn’t have Cystic Fibrosis. Would the chip on my shoulder that has rocketed me straight into a midrange data administration job still exist? Would I still have one of every Swamp Thing figure ever made?

The closest thing I have to an answer to those two questions is a half-brother roughly 10.5 years younger than me. He has a lot more money, but a lot fewer Swamp Things.

Honestly, I’d rather have the Swamp Things.

Things I Like

Nothing says “summer” to me like Street Fighter. Many of my summer childhood memories involve me doing things—camping, going to the beach, being outside in general—that I was forced to do instead of playing Street Fighter II. Though to extend some credit to the well meaning adults in my life, camping probably made the many hours I spent playing Street Fighter even sweeter.

Street Fighter 6 came out last Friday and I’m the adult now, so I played a lot more of it this weekend than I probably should have. The thing is, none of my friends were ever really all that interested in fighting games, so I spent a lot of time playing against the CPU. Street Fighter 6 has a full fledged single player adventure mode that lets you build a truly terrifying custom avatar—a thing I love— and randomly uppercut passerby on the street—a thing I didn’t know I would love, but boy I sure do. The standard arcade mode is pretty good too, though it’s dangerous for me to play, because the idea that I might be good at kicking things someday is slowly worming around in my head and things like this make it seem like a great idea to take up martial arts at 40.

Though I suppose if I injure myself trying to kick through a board, I can pass the time by wandering around Metro City as an impossibly greasy and ill-proportioned divorced dad, uppercutting anyone who looks at me wrong. Truly an age of wonders.

I realize saying all this makes her sound frail and many a family member and acquaintance have inquired as to whether or not I’ve though about putting her down. I have assured them that I will put her down the second I’m sure she wouldn’t figure out of way to hook me up to the juice instead. Which is to say, Lila is a fucking tank. Not in size or stature–she’s roughly 16 pounds–but in sheer will.

We recently switched internet providers, which meant we had to have an installer come over to free us from the tyranny of Xfinity’s paltry upload speeds. Lila is very friendly, but enthusiastic, so my plan was to lock her in one of her favorite rooms upstairs with some food and water. She doesn’t get to go in that room very often, so I thought she’d enjoy it. She didn’t.

Lila recently received a lifetime stair ban, because I watched her slide/roll down a flight of stairs and slam into the front door. She immediately got up and was ready to go outside for a walk, but I’m not interested in rolling the dice like that. So, lifetime ban.

The enforcement of the lifetime stair ban is carried mostly by two small shipping boxes kept on the first stair. Taking away any purchase her paws could get on the first step keeps her grounded, even if she sometimes scratches at the step just to make sure.

Though she used to love sleeping in the upstairs room, it turns out she only likes it when she goes there herself, not when I bring her there. When I shut the door, she started to make noises that made it sound like she was working on a one dog show about a Dickensian orphanage, so I opened the door to let her wander between the room and the bathroom with the mat she likes to lay/chew on. And to enforce the stair ban, I moved the shipping boxes to the top landing.

This was a mistake.

I put the boxes on the landing and went downstairs, Lila’s eyes just about peering over the top of the boxes. Then I saw her backing up. I screamed “Dog, don’t you fucking do it!” but again, she’s a dog and that doesn’t mean shit to her. Or maybe she does understand me, because she followed the letter of the lifetime stair ban if not the spirit.

She backed up, took a slight running start and jumped, almost clearing the shipping boxes, clipping her rear paw a bit on the takeoff. Lila, a 16 year old 16 pound ball of failing kidneys and hypertension tried to jump the entire staircase. The box threw her trajectory off, but she still cleared 7 or 8 steps before I did a long reach and caught her just as she was about to bounce off the 4th step from the bottom. I made sure her leg was okay and I hugged her, though she was interested in neither act. She just wanted to go outside. And I just want to sleep without seeing the hilariously horrifying image of a tiny dog flying down the steps towards me.

Multicourse Meals are Ableist

You can tell I’m bad at the business of writing, because I should have lead with the controversial hot take headline, but instead I’ve buried it second and I’m already trying to walk it back before I even explained what I mean.

Back when I used to go into the office, I was pretty good at weaseling my way into all kinds of dinners, some of them pretty fancy. I’d say up until 2013-2015 I never had a legitimate plated multi-course meal. Unlike Applebee’s and other chain restaurants that just want to get your fucking ass out of the booth, fancy meals often have a decent amount of space between courses. This is probably great for people who like to digest and pace themselves, but I eat on a timer.

I take at least 6 pills to digest food and between 12-16 units of insulin to process the carbs. Which means when I take the medication, the clock is ticking. It’s easy to add more pills to the process, though it may or may not be healthy AND the pills are fucking expensive. But the insulin is a one time deal: I take what I’m going to use and then I have to eat before it hits. Even now that I’m a work-at-home goblin, dessert in an hour isn’t going to work for me. Dessert now or I don’t get shit. Sometimes I’ll have ice cream before a meal and the salad after because that’s the way it has to go if I want to enjoy any of Tom Carvel’s gift to this world.

Of course, if I just avoided carbs altogether, none of this would be a problem, but I work hard for the insulin and goddammit I’m going to use it.

Things I Like

With the news of Tina Turner’s death, I decided to re-watch Beyond Thunderdome. The Thunderdome portion is tremendous, though the beyond is less so. But the real surprise was the opening song, a piece I had somehow completely forgotten over the years even though Tina won a Grammy for it. “We Don’t Need Another Hero”, which plays over the end credits, may be the “Thunderdome” song, but I’ll be goddamned if the opening track “One of the Living” isn’t my favorite Tina Turner song. I’ve listened to it a couple hundred times in the last week.