Labor Day weekend was, on the whole, uneventful. The usual sort of thing I normally do on the weekend, except as I get Monday free, I got to stay up a little late on Sunday night playing D&D over Roll20 with my friends, and had a nice bike ride on Monday morning before settling in to do some laundry and watch movies.

Today I returned to work, logging in at my usual early hour, and finding few new messages in the inbox, but those that were there led to my being on for the entirety of my day cleaning up other people’s messes and misunderstandings. Yay.

So, after work I racked the bike and rode 24 miles with a bunch of hills, and, for the first time in a while, met some trail friends along the way willing to pose for photos:

I’ll take the nice wins where I can get ’em.

In any normal year, I’d already be in Atlanta, hauling gear up hotel stairways, dodging Deadpools in the habitrails, and guessing which cast member of Battlestar Galactica I’d end up next to at the urinals.

But, as we all know, this isn’t a normal year.

Although I’m fully vaccinated, even with the generally good procedures DragonCon is attempting to put in place (especially my beloved filk track); there’s no way I’m heading to a state that’s still under 50% vaccinated and hanging out with 100k of my closest friends inside a few square blocks. Personally, I’m just not down with the odds on that calculated risk, and neither is the band, who’s opted to skip this year (though S&K are doing a smaller duo gig elsewhere).

That said, I do have a lot of friends who are there (many of whom depend on this sort of thing for their livelihood) and I’m missing the pleasure of their company. It’s a crazy, exhausting weekend, especially if you’re constantly hustling to sell merch and put on half-a-dozen killer shows for the fans, but nonetheless, it’s kind of a rush, and when you do get to slow down and catch your breath, it’s a great pleasure to just sit down to crack wise, sing silly songs, and share a drink or three with friends.

I’m honestly not sure I’d have the energy to really be my best this year anyway. This week has been a definite slog, with way too much C-Suite exposure, too many broken test routes, and way too many hours logged (seriously, I had more than 35 in the books when I started on Friday morning) for me to give the event the level of effort required to do the job.

I did sneak out last night to play the Art Factory open mic and do a couple of geeky tunes to maybe fill the hole, but honestly, my set was middling and it didn’t do the trick, because frankly, I was just too tired after all the work stuff and keeping up on my cycling/workout regimen (which is just as much for my mental health as it is the physical).

Oh well. I’m going to take this Labor Day weekend easy. Maybe a couple of bike rides, sure, and there’s talk of a lunch date with the Eldest, but I’m mostly going to work on getting some rest and a little distraction from the reminders of what I’d normally be doing in the Before Times™.

So…tunes. Spotify’s still got me in a left-of-the-dial classic rock mode, though there’s some definite variety in there; #1 brought back some pleasant high school vibes, and #12, which I didn’t dig in it’s original context, has really started to grow on me as the performers invovled ended up maturing and the years rambled on. Also, there’s always a place for extraneous umlauts:

1. “Hole Hearted” – Extreme
2. “Synchronicity II” – The Police
3. Helter Skelter – Mötley Crüe
4. “Back to Paradise” – .38 Special
5. “Heavy Metal – Take A Ride” – Don Felder
6. “25 or 6 to 4” – Chicago
7. “The Voice” – The Moody Blues
8. “Fire” – Jimi Hendrix
9. “Rebel Yell” – Billy Idol
10. “School Days” – The Runaways
11. “My Favorite Headache” – Geddy Lee
12. “Hunger Strike” – Temple of the Dog
13. “Jet City Woman” – Queensrÿche

Just a couple of notes of celebration, or something…

Note The First: I did my third cycling fifty(-two)-miler of the summer on Sunday. Averaged over 14mph, knocked twenty minutes off of my best time, and did the whole business in under four hours. My ass kind of gave out after about 45 miles, but that’s a hazard of the hobby, y’know?

Note the Second: In the area of hobbies that subsidize themselves, I finally earned enough streaming royalties from my music on the services that I got an actual pay-out from my distributor. It wasn’t *a lot* of money, but if you know how streaming services work for artists, it’s significant nonetheless.

So Dunning-Kruger be damned; the next time I feel out of shape, or that people aren’t listening, I can point myself to this post, which I’m totally not bookmarking on the topline of my browser.

Um…yay me.

For the first week of year forty-eight, it could’ve been worse.

I got a *ton* of stuff done at work, and finally got the meeting with my boss lined up we’ve been trying to have for more than a week, where we hatched plans to redesign the broken processes of our agency from the ground up, if only they’ll let us do it – on paper we have the power, but in reality? Who knows.

For the moment though, cautious optimism is in effect.

I also put some solid saddle time in for the first week in a while; little over a hundred miles since Sunday, including a 31 mile run yesterday afternoon in 100°+ weather, which, while definitely good for me, hurts like hell everywhere this morning. I’m likely taking today off to recover (as much as I try to ignore it, my body is very good at reminding me I’m in my late 40s), but I’m considering a nice 40 or 50 miler on Sunday; we’ll see what the weather holds.

As alluded to earlier, I turned 47 on Monday. No huge celebration; nothing to see here. My spouse and children did kick in to set up a pretty neat birthday gift – a new smart watch (Samsung Galaxy Active2) to replace my cheap, beloved, and dead Tinwoo Eclipse (the best smart watch you can get for 45 bucks; just don’t clean the fish tank while wearing it!). So far I’m digging it; I’ve been able to shut down all the stuff I don’t want to hear from it, though it does give me slightly better workout data than the Tinwoo did; so I have more data to obsess over and artificial milestones to meet, which is good for both my body and for feeding my OCD.

Ah, my love-hate relationship with technology; I appreciate the information, but still kind of resent the intrusion as all this stuff becomes so integrated with the day-to-day.

As for this morning’s tunes? “Discover Weekly” this week is hitting the GenX buttons hard, digging into the 80s and 80s-adjacent for whatever reason. I’d not heard #4 before, and I like it, and it’s honestly never too early in the morning for #9:

1. “God Gave Rock ‘N’ Roll To You II” – KISS
2. “Talking In Your Sleep” – The Romantics
3. “Heartbreaker” – Pat Benetar
4. “Born to Run” – Frankie Goes to Hollywood
5. “Sledgehamer” – Peter Gabriel
6. “Sausalito Summernight” – Diesel
7. “Young Turks” – Rod Stewart
8. “Thunder Island” – Jay Ferguson
9. “Holy Diver” – Dio
10. “Incommunicado” – Marillion
11. “Run Like Hell” – Pink Floyd
12. “Sunless Saturday” – Fishbone

I got on my bike for the first time in a week yesterday; just a short hop of around eight miles, because I’ve not been feeling particularly great lately. It was also the first non-rainy day in most of a week.

If it wasn’t for the rain, which has been kicking up all kinds of different pollen and mold to tweak my allergies, I’d seriously be trying to decide if I didn’t feel good because I hadn’t biked, or didnt’ bike because I didn’t feel good. As it stands, I’ve only been entertaining the conundrum on an informal basis.

I’ve been making tons of great progress at work, which I guess is something. Successful data transmission tests, successfully getting the first of my FY22 requirements approved and in the queue for purchase, and pulled my boss’s ass out of the fire by chasing down some obscure answers he was on the hook for that he forgot about until the last minute.

But by the time I got that stuff done, I’d pretty much blown through my spoon inventory for the day, wrapping stuff up early after playing a few turns of Civ6 or reading the latest adventures of Murderbot. I did, however, manage to replace the dead garbage disposal on Sunday afternoon, so there’s one less broken thing. I’ll take the wins where I can.

Nothing big for me this weekend; just some usual life stuff. There’s a “house filk” a few hours down the road in SC this weekend with a bunch of friends, but the drive-to-music time ratio is a bit much for me right now. Folks have said they’ll play a few of my tunes in my absence so I’ll be there in spirit at least. Also, unless the world ends in the next couple of weeks, there’s another road trip soon in the offing.

Anyway, music outta the little black box. Skewing a bit older again this week, but different degrees of old, swinging from 70s AOR jams to forgotten wails from the waning days of hair metal in the early 90s A neat, mostly-forgotten gem at #2, and one of my favorite overblown classic rock sci-fi epics at #9. Incidentally, it might just be the time of the morning, but for some reason, I was really digging the clean electric guitar tone on #3, a song I haven’t thought about in several decades:

1. “Eyes of a Stranger” – The Payolas
2. “Rock ‘n’ Roll Lifestyle” – Cake
3. “Lawyers in Love” – Jackson Browne
4. “Little Suzi” – Tesla
5. “Jailbird” – Primal Scream
6. “Sign of the Gypsy Queen” – April Wine
7. “My Sharona” – The Knack
8. “But Anyway” – Blues Traveler
9. “Children of the Sun” – Billy Thorpe
10. “Dreaming” – Blondie
11. “Fight The Good Fight” – Triumph
12. “Everything About You” – Ugly Kid Joe

Excuse me while I dust off my history degree for a moment…

No one’s ever successfully done it. The British tried it three times between 1838 and 1919. The Soviets tried three times between 1929 and 1979. The United States’ attempt starting in 2001 that’s currently ending is going about as well.

The only winning move was not to play.

Joe Biden is the one taking the political hit for the relative failure of the US’s withdrawl from Afghanistan, with the Taliban moving in to unseat the government the nation helped establish and the chaos we’re seeing on the news these last few days, though *any* President who presided over a withdrawal (even if the last one and his ilk are are pretending he wasn’t on exactly the same track) would face a similar situation. The political philosophies of western civilization never took hold in that part of the world; thus, the traditional methods of the world’s modern Western colonial superpowers (and in this case, I’m including the Soviet Union in this category; Marx and The Communist Manifesto came out of Germany and was based on principles of Western thought) to “democratize” or “westernize” the region are doomed to fail; the Afghan people and their neighbors in Central Asia look at the world through an entirely different lens.

I will concede that I’m certainly not an expert on Central Asia and it’s people, though I’ve studied enough in the academic context to have a general understanding. Afghanistan’s culture isn’t organized around the concept of nations and democracy; the culture of the region operates on a much more personal level; it’s a tribally-organized society where connections based on kinship and associations in the local community matter more than statecraft. The succession of Western powers hoping to influence the region never understood that. The reason that, apart from media images of Bagram this weekend, the Taliban’s takeover has been largely bloodless has to do more with local agreements between communities with a tradition of meetings with tribal leaders on all sides finding common ground and making small-scale deals in order to get by in life in an environment that is sometimes less than hospitable. As described in the article above and in this interesting opinion piece, arrangements have existed since time immemorial that keep the peace between non-combatant and revolutionary elements at the local level. In fact, in many cases, Taliban/Mujahedeen have done more to assist local communities obtain resources and security than the government in Kabul – given these conditions, it’s less surprising that the Taliban takeover of the country has been swift and largely peaceful.

While the United States did not accomplish it’s mission of establishing a democratized Afghanistan, with any progress it made toward that goal being rapidly undone, I personally believe, as the Biden administration is publicly stating, that getting out is in the best interest of the country. In short, it’s a case of, to use the colloquialism, “throwing good money after bad.” History and experience show that the goal established by the Bush II administration back in 2001 was a flawed one (and was motivated in great measure by emotional thoughts of vengeance by a wounded nation). While it disappoints and angers American exceptionalists to admit mistakes or failure, no individual or nation is perfect, and it’s rational to recognize errors in judgement and take corrective measures, and if necessary, cut one’s losses.

That’s my interpretation of the Biden administration’s actions here; staying the course regarding the withdrawal and standing by the decision. The President’s remarks yesterday spoke to the history of the conflict, and cited the actions of those who came before him that contributed to the current situation, but is taking responsibility (“The buck stops with me”) for ending it, and owning the political fallout, because it’s the least bad decision to be made. Maybe this is his legacy in the end; who knows. This might be his signal that he’s not going to seek a second term. Whatever comes next, I don’t think it’s a mistake to commit to not not passing the conflict on to a fifth President.

There was no good way to get out of this one. But getting out was the right call. There’s little honor in kicking the can, but there might be in making an ugly, but rational decision to stop digging.

I can think of worse legacies.

The video above is not only objectively the best Katy Perry song, it’s also an adequate descriptor of the week. Outside, it’s regularly breaking 100° and inside, at my work desk at home, I’m wearing a sweatshirt, because my chair sits right on top of the air conditioning vent (which is the closest vent to the actual system outside and under the house and relatively remote from the thermostat/temp sensor), and thus it’s way colder than the 70° things are set at.

I’ve been subjecting myself to both, because I’ve been working harder this week than I have in a while, as the first cut of next FY’s budget got released, and I’m rushing to make sure I can get funding moved around in order to avoid dealing with unfunded requirement memos and the extra hassle they provide, before things lock down. This means I sit at my desk a lot, freezing. I’ve also put about 40 miles on the bike this week in the crazy heat outside, because after putting my work time, I need a change of scenery. Granted, I’ve been doing shorter rides this week (10-15 miles) because of the heat, but sometimes, especially on the unshaded parts of the VCT, it’s like riding through superheated foam due to the heat and humidity.

The heat continued from the weekend, where it was just as crazy hot for Sunday’s outdoor festival show, which kept attendance down a little bit, and kept those who were there hiding in the shade or under big umbrellas, so it was hard to connect with the audience. However, people said nice things to me after my set about my songs, I sold a couple of CDs, and the gig paid well overall.

Also, we got to hang out with friends we haven’t seen in a while, which was quite enjoyable. Both hanging around at the gig, and afterwards during a quiet dinner and drinnks at a local watering hole.

Looks like rain this weekend; we’ll see how it goes.

As far as tunes go, I seeded the algorithm with an appropriately descriptive tune, and ended up with a bunch of 70s and 80s pop-rock, and two instances of Ballroom Blitz. Huh:

1. “99 In The Shade” – Bon Jovi
2. “I Want You Back” – Hoodoo Gurus
3. “Ballroom Blitz” – Andy Scott’s Sweet
4. “Last Cigarette” – Dramarama
5. “How Soon Is Now? (live)” – Johnny Marr
6. “Ballroom Blitz” – Tia Carrere
7. “Working For The Weekend” – Loverboy
8. “Touch And Go” – Emerson, Lake and Powell
9. “Open Your Eyes” – Lords of the New Church
10. “Sanctify Yourself” – Simple Minds
11. “The Electric Version” – The New Pornographers
12. “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” – The Jeff Healey Band
13. “Wrap It Up” – The Fabulous Thunderbirds
14. “Spaceship Superstar” – Prism

Ups and downs this week, more than usual. Work was feast or famine, either waiting for things to happen, or being stuck on the phone for 5 straight hours during a Reply-All-Pocalypse. Emotions were a bit of a roller coaster: at different times, I was both my best and my worst self. I got the chance to deliver some good news to important people, but it also seems that something new breaks every damned day. I’ve seen some of the best, and some of the worst, of the rest of humanity (though honestly, it’s been mostly the worst…) Just a ton of swings of the pendulum, and it’s been, frankly, not entirely cool.

That said, it wasn’t all bad. I’m feeling relatively good about how the show this weekend is going to go, especially after a couple of successful open mic nights over the last week or so where I got to play a few sets in front of actual people, and they generally dug what I was layin’ down, in the slightly out-of-fashion parlance.

I’ve also gotten (as I type this) about sixty solid miles behind the tires of my bicycle over the last four or five days, and those rides have done a lot to help me shake at least some of the baggage as described in the first paragraph, and I’m hoping to get a bit more of that on the agenda this afternoon and tomorrow.

That’s really about that. Happens to the best of us. Best we can do is, as I say above, strap in and hang on.

Tunes this week are definitely a throwback…with a couple of exceptions, the whole thing could have come out of the ancient radio tuned to the local classic rock station stuck in the corner of the food trucks I spent my college summers working out of. That’s what I get for listening to a few “Best of Rock, 198x” playlists over the last week or two. Could be much worse; except for #3, which is the worst, a not-entirely-terrible song that, unfortunately, has become the bane of the existence of every working musician, even if their last name happens to be Van Zant. Oh well:

1. “Dirty Laundry” – Don Henley
2. “Crest Of A Wave” – Rory Gallagher
3. “Free Bird” – Lynyrd Skynyrd
4. “Stone Cold” – Rainbow
5. “Still of the Night” – Whitesnake
6. “Hair of the Dog” – Nazareth
7. “Thing of Beauty” – Hothouse Flowers
8. “Cleveland Rocks” – ThePresidentsOfTheUnitedStatesOfAmerica
9. “In A Gadda Da Vida” – Slayer
10. “Cover Me” – Bruce Springsteen
11. “Alone With You” – Sunnyboys
12. “True Faith” – New Order
13. “Kids Wanna Rock” – Bryan Adams

I’ve mentioned this event in this space before, but this time, I’m including….a poster!

This Sunday, I’ll be on the bill at the RavenCon Summer Concert, along with other acts including Mikey Mason, Dirty Metal Lefty, Doctor Shock and the Electrodes, and my former bandmates Dimensional Riffs. It’ll be a safe and (hopefully) beautiful summer afternoon of music and entertainment, and for once, it’s more or less a hometown gig!

I’m looking forward to it, as I get to see some friends I don’t see very often, and I’ll get another chance to play some of the new tunes I put out in March for actual people.

The things start up around noon, and my set will start around 1pm. I’m expecting a good time!