Well, it’s certainly been a week, technically short as it was.

As indicated previously, my lovely spouse and I spent Monday in the car driving east from Indiana; said drive was less pleasant than the drive west; in part, I suppose, do to the fact that we were returning to so-called “real life” after a weekend of relaxation. In any case, I spent the last couple of hours of things in a bit of pain; ankle, leg, and ass cramping up fiercely after ten hours in the driver’s seat, even with breaks to get up and stretch. After we got home in the afternoon, I spent a bit of time laid up and popping ibuprofen.

Knowing things about my body and brain, I took Tuesday off to ease back into things. I slept in a bit, and took advantage of a cool morning to get a bike ride in (welcome after a weekend away from the trail) and did a bunch of laundry and stuff around the house, before heading into the city for the evening, as I had won tickets from WNRN for the Dawes show at the National a few months back.

I was, as one might imagine, a bit apprehensive about doing this in the pandemic age, but honestly, it wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d imagined. The crowd was lighter than one usually gets in that particular venue (I expect that was by design), most everyone wore masks, and refreshingly, they made me show my vax card before they let me in the door. The band, who I wasn’t particularly familiar with (apart from the single NRN’s been playing lately), was rather excellent live, as was their opening act, songwriter Erin Rae.

Also, the sound guy had a puppy, which was awesome:

I returned to the daily grind on Wednesday, with work being work being work, a.k.a. largely productive and returning good results from a couple of bureaucratic experiments, but still kind of a slog. This seems to have held steady through the rest of the week, though after having to make a bit of an ugly emergency stop to avoid a distracted fellow cyclist on Wednesday afternoon, I strained some abdominal/oblique muscles, which has added a unique unpleasantness to life since then. It’s mostly down to a dull ache as of this morning, but I’m still planning on taking it easy one more day before trying to convince my nearly 50 year old body that it’s still in it’s early 20s.

Oh, and finally a bit of promo – on Saturday afternoon, I’m playing a set as part of the ongoing Pandemic-era virtual concert series The Festival of the Living Rooms run by a friend of mine in the filk community. I’ll be one of an international cast of characters performing 30 minute streaming musical sets throughout the weekend – as it stands now, I’m on around 4:30pm Mountain Time.

Really finally…tunes from the little black rectangle. This week, some classic AOR tunes, plus a variety of other stuff, including one of my favorite 80s tunes at #13 (Aimee Mann is awesome, even back then), and there at #9, the song that, more than any other, represents to that feeling of naive optimism we all had there for a while in the mid-90s when we were sure peace was breaking out all over the world and the economy was booming and the world seemed our oyster.

Oh well…it was nice while it lasted.

1. “In The City” – Eagles
2. “Where’d You Go” – The Mighty Mighty Bosstones
3. “I’m Alright” – Kenny Loggins
4. “Brave Captain” – fIREHOSE
5. “96 Tears” – The Stranglers
6. “Divine Thing” – Soup Dragons
7. “Infected” – Bad Religion
8. “Rockin’ at Midnight” – The Honeydrippers
9. “Right Here, Right Now” – Jesus Jones
10. “I Feel So Good” – Richard Thompson
11. “The Doctor” – The Doobie Brothers
12. “Honey White” – Morphine
13. “Voices Carry” – Til Tuesday

Just have to say, we really enjoyed our time away last weekend. Good food, good friends, some great music, and maybe a little too much beer, but it felt wonderful spending time with people in pleasant, welcoming spaces.

Muncie, Indiana, at least the downtown area where we spent most of our time, is a beautiful city that we had a good time exploring, with lots of historic buildings and independent businesses, be it excellent coffee and pastry at The Caffeinery, delicious gourmet pub fare at Twin Archer Brewpub or drinks and music at The Fickle Peach.

We even took a side trip up the road to Indianapolis and spent a few hours at The Indianapolis Zoo.

But mostly, it was about friends, stories, and making memories: Chris’s rapping, Sugar the hedgehog, the nightly bottle exchange, impromptu trivia, All Beers Considered, and brunch with sassy waitresses in the magical land of four dollar pints.

Sure, the drive was long (especially on the way home), the sky was sometimes too big, and not everything went entirely to plan, but those are the kinds of things that make life interesting.

I really needed that, is all I’m saying.

As I’ll be on the road heading west tomorrow when I’d normally weigh in with this weekly post, I’m tossing it out this morning, and not even delaying it’s posting, because…well, I don’t know why. I guess I never got the hang of…etc.

I’ve alluded to this particular adventure in vague terms over the last few weeks, in part, because I was never entirely sure it was really going to happen, but as it stands right now, in a little less than twenty-four hours, my lovely spouse and I will be heading to the greater Muncie, Indiana region to spend a long weekend with a handful of close friends, many of whom I haven’t seen in quite a while.

Why Muncie? A dear friend lives there, and has, a few times over the years, hosted small gatherings (previously affiliated with a certain, dear departed, podcast) to enjoy some of the city’s many interesting amenities, sing some karaoke, and share stories over drinks with interesting company.

Having made the appropriate risk calculations (everyone will be vaccinated, the organized events are small and/or outside, and we’ll be particular about masks and appropriate distancing), we feel it’s worth it to make the trip, to get away from home and spend time with friends in a situation where one of us isn’t competing or working.

Sure, I’m still a little apprehensive, because I always am, but as I said, the benefits are worth the controlled risks, and I know we’ll have a good time.

And, I think I really need this one. I’ve been mentally exhausted. Work’s been a lot of heavy lifting the last couple of weeks, even with the holiday, as we rush toward the end of the fiscal year thanks to some very poorly organized processes within the organization that my boss and I are really trying to flex some muscles and apply order to, because it really doesn’t have to be this way. Also, said disorganized processes are really getting in the way of me trying to get ahead of the game and start pushing my first FY22 requirements through the process, as nobody is available to provide documentation or concurrences on things because they’re rushing to get all the crap through in the last minute.

Seriously, I’ve put in more ten or eleven hour days in the last couple of weeks than I have in a long time. I deserve a bit of a break, especially since the weather’s been crap when I have managed to carve out some time this week, so I’ve only got like 45 miles over two decent bike rides and a rushed little hike to clear the head with physical activity.

So yeah, I’m taking a break, and I’m even being responsible about it, because that’s what adulting is all about.

Anyway, because this is the traditional end-of-week post, here’s the playlist that the algorithms provided. Some interesting stuff, mostly favored deep cuts from the first half of my life, which I’m totally fine with. #1 has always been a favorite, as it comes out of that interesting early 80s Philly/NJ rock scene (plus the video has people shooting laser beams out of guitar headstocks!), #9 is one of those cool proto-hair metal anthems I remember from the early days of MTV, #2 features an artist a friend was once on a university faculty with, and she tells me he’s kind of an asshole, and then there’s #6 (along with a piece of #12), whose artist I think we can all agree is definitely an asshole.

But yeah, the whole thing kinda rocks. Enjoy:

1. “Fantasy” – Aldo Nova
2. “She Blinded Me With Science” – Thomas Dolby
3. “Stuck In The Middle With You” – Stealerss Wheel
4. “Slow Ride” – Foghat
5. “Things Can Only Get Better” – Howard Jones
6. “Stranglehold” – Ted Nugent
7. “Rise (Bob Clearmountain Remix)” – Public Image Ltd.
8. “Epic” – Faith No More
9. “Summertime Girls” – Y&T
10. “Shot in the Dark” – Ozzy Osbourne
11. “I Wanna Be A Cowboy” – Boys Don’t Cry
12. “Coming of Age” – Damn Yankees
13. “Only A Memory” – The Smithereens

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.