Slipping out quietly after close of business Tuesday night, the Supreme Court released it’s ruling on the pending litigation regarding the federal workforce EO. It came out about how I expected; there’s been no argument that the head of the executive branch, as outlined in Article II of the Constitution, doesn’t have the power to enact changes to or develop policies regarding the non-partisan career federal workforce; however, it must follow the rules as established by existing law to do so.

This opinion largely affirms that, though I suspect few of us actually trust that the letter or spirit of the law will be followed in this case.

Morale’s been low since the initial order came down in February (if not since 12:01pm on January 20), and isn’t getting particularly better. Even though my particular department is statistically less likely to see the HUGE cuts (but we’re clearly in uncharted territory) others already are, the vibe in the office on Wednesday morning was a bit different. You could honestly tell who keeps up with the news and who doesn’t based on the set of a person’s shoulders at their desk. Rumors are swirling based on second-hand accounts from somebody who golfs with someone else or what folks in the front office aren’t saying, given that there’s been no real deviation from the “official” line so far.

That it’s not a happy place to be right now is putting it way too mildly.

What’s really not helping is some non-related office drama regarding a pet project that senior leadership is pushing for that I was asked to *advise* on and assist the requirement owner in prepping some documents, though that apparently got translated into “Chuck will do it,” even though I’ve been kind of boxed out of any discussion of the requirement and have had all my inquiries ignored.

So there’s one more bus hanging in among all the hammers already on the verge of dropping.

So, in the meantime, I’m saving receipts, being even more aggressively polite in emails than usual, and doing my best to manage my growing sense of existential dread.

So yeah, the last couple of days have been a rough year.

But, this week’s over now for me, as of Thursday night. Friday morning I’ll be heading down to Winston-Salem, NC to do ConGregate once again, which is one of my favorite cons every year, especially since I missed it last year thanks to Covid thrashing it’s way through the house. As always, I’ll be all over the place at this one, but here’s where I am on the schedule:

• Friday, 230pm – Hearn A (Marriott) – Mutant Mayhem – 25 Year of Fox’s X-Men
• Saturday, 1200pm – Hearn A (Marriott) – Chuck Parker in Concert
• Saturday 730pm – Winston (Marriott) – Home Recording: The Best Tools
• Sunday, 1130am – Bethabara (Marriott) – Cowabunga! 35th Anniversary of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie!
• Sunday, 100pm – Hearn A (Marriott) – Summer Camp Sing a Long

As always, I’ll be around otherwise, probably listening to and playing music elsewhere, or drinking somebody else’s beer, if I can manage it. If you’re in town, come on by!

And since this is the Friday post, here are tunes the algorithm spit out. Lots to look at here…local bands, animals with strange adjectives, and the first band I ever saw at a “real” concert. You can guess who is who:

1. “Get Some Go Again” – Rollins Band
2. “Get It On (Bang A Gong)” – The Power Station
3. “Maggie May” – Rod Stewart
4. “High Class in Borrowed Shoes” – Max Webster
5. “Meat Sandwich” – GWAR
6. “After The Rain” – Nelson
7. “Cruel Summer” – Bananarama
8. “Scratch and Bite” – Treat
9. “Love Games” – Coney Hatch
10. “Shaolin Monkeys” – Osaka Popstar
11. “Devil’s Answer” – Atomic Rooster
12. “Rock’n’Roll Party n the Streets” – Axe

At noon today, we’ll have crossed over into the second half of 2025. The first half has been…a lot. The last five months, especially, have felt like five years. There’s just been too damned much of it. Go look at any of the retrospectives today (such as the opening paragraphs of this daily newsletter) for a rundown of all the shit that’s flooded the zone.

I’m just…tired. Of the state of the world, of the way that state of the world is impacting my life, of the various other stressors, the loss of dear friends, and just how quickly everything keeps changing, and how it all continues piling on and needs to be dealt with.

To be fair, it’s not been all bad. I’ve gotten over 500 miles biked and hiked over the last couple of months, and am down a net ten pounds. I had a nice camping vacation last week. I’ve played some rather positive and well-received gigs (and had fun doing them), and booked a few more. People in my life have done things that they should be proud of (and I am very proud of them). I’ve read some decent books (I just started this one, which is great so far, and part of an excellent series). I’ve paid off a few debts, and saw and heard some pretty neat things; art, music, the natural world, and as the algorithm delivers, .

I just wish I could be a bit more happy about the latter paragraph and less concerned with the former, y’know?

As for what’s on the horizon? there are some cool things coming up. Next week’s gig. Seeing some friends and playing some games in Indiana at the end of the month. Dragoncon (yes, I booked it again this year, though as of today, I’m not on the website. Call this a piece of the “soft announcement”). I’ve got a couple of collaborative creative projects coming up that should be neat. I’ve got more plans to spend time out in nature, focus on my mental and physical health, and just *be*.

As for the other stuff, I’m just trying to accept that I can’t really do much to change those, and holding on to the idea got a plan to deal with those eventualities; and if I’m really and truly honest with myself, if the worst happens, I don’t know if I’m going to be completely heartbroken. I’ll avoid cliches about doors and windows (because they’re so trite), but new opportunities and a little less responsibility wouldn’t be entirely unwelcome, even if it means some pretty big lifestyle changes.

So that’s where I am, trying, and sometimes even succeeding, to focus on the positive and shake off the negative, because the next 182.5 days will probably be even weirder.

Thank you for listening to my self-care TED talk.

This weekend I was not my best. I couldn’t stick the landing on much of anything. Most productive thing I did was a Saturday morning Costco run. Mental health, as has been pretty damned obvious given what’s been written here for the last five months, is not great, and it kind of crossed some kind of line Friday afternoon.

Not entirely sure why. Could’ve been the weather, the Imperial Assload™ of crazy dropped by the courts the end of last week (go look it up if you’re not paying attention), the fact that the latest module of the online class I’m taking at work to knock out my “continuous learning” requirements by the end of the year involved Excel macros, which are universally blocked by my organization, or simply the fact that ongoing household projects are disrupting my routine enough to damage my calm.

Whatever. I didn’t get a lot done, apart from holing up in the basement TV room way more than is usual and watching the new generation of Jurassic World movies (I think we might go to the drive-in this coming weekend for the new one, if only to get out of the house), which are…okay? I’m not sure they quite know what they are anymore, but have their moments. We also watched a seriously dark and kind of depressing UK murder show, Deadwater Fell” which included some uniformly excellent performances, though was really effing dark and probably not amazing for the aforementioned mental health (that said, it’s only about a three hour commitment, and well put together). Of course, I’m now caught up on Murderbot (uniformly excellent), and am quite enjoying Ironheart primarily for it’s neat tech vs. magic angle.

So, I begrudgingly gave myself permission to decompress a bit, which all those self-care memes and mental health professionals remind me is important and necessary. Here’s to hoping that it builds up my spoon reserve for getting through the week, which includes not just one, but two departmental and director-level all-hands meetings, which I’m kind of dreading as it’s been a while since they’ve dropped a new Vought-Bomb on us.

Just going to hope for the best; I’ve already planned for the worst.

Even for a short week, where I was in the office for approximately 32 hours (less my approved time for fitness, which is one awesome benefit I actually still get to take advantage of), I’ve spent approximately twenty of those hours locked down on Microsoft Teams meetings, and the rest looking for an open rest room.

Yes, there are four two-seater rooms on my floor, and way too many people for them. It sucks.

The rest of the week is kind of a blur. I got out for one good bike ride, before it became a cycle of 110° heat and raucous thunderstorms. Most of the rest of my exercise this week has been circling the halls looking for a free toilet, and some sad laps of the mall. I did finally did get around to switching over to clip-in pedals rather than flats, but I’d rather not risk wet pavement until I’m a little more confident with them, because falling on my ass because I can’t get my foot on the ground properly would be, frankly, embarrassing.

The only other news to report, really, is that there’s a stray mother cat and her kitten regularly sneaking through our yard, and the lovely spouse is already putting food out in an attempt to catch them. It’s the right thing to do, even if it’s just to get the feral mom fixed and release her, though I wasn’t expecting to have the universe drop another cat or two on me so soon. We’ll see how that goes in the next little while.

Oh, and as the pinned post mentions, after two decades, chuckparker.com opened up, and I immediately snagged that domain and pointed at a simple promo page for my musical endeavors.

And that’s honestly it; I’m just tired.

As for tunes, this mix is honestly all over the place (and started wading into NSYNC and Britney after I stopped counting), though I expect I’ll be going down the rabbit hole on #5, because she’s kind of awesome, and the universe can always use another pretty girl playing the blues on a vintage Les Paul:

1. “She Drives Me Crazy” – Fine Young Cannibals
2. “Song of the South” – Alabama
3. “Bad Moon Rising” – Iron Horse
4. “Billie Jean” – Michael Jackson
5. “Two Wrongs” – Ally Venable
6. “What is Love – 7″ Mix” – Haddaway
7. “Don’t Start Now” – Dua Lipa
8. “Young Lust” – Pink Floyd
9. “Power” – Sons of Legion
10. “Better Off Alone” – Alice DJ
11. “Long Cool Woman (In a Black Dress) – 1999 Remix” – The Hollies
12. “Lord It Comes Down Hard” – 100 Watt Vipers
13. “Cissy Strut” – Rosie & The Revival

Last week was the Juneteenth holiday, and in spite of That Man™’s proclamation that all of us layabouts should get back to work, I took a long weekend, and my lovely spouse and I, along with the dog, took our what’s-becoming-annual camping trip to tick a few more State Parks off the list.

It was a refreshing break, with lots of time spent out in nature, hiking, climbing, enjoying beautiful scenery, having encounters with wildlife, and checking out some of the local color of the region we happened to be in.

Also, we climbed a mountain.

That was part of our trip to Grayson Highlands State Park out in the southwest, where we visited and climbed to the 5th highest elevation in Virginia, Little Pinnacle on Haw Orchard Mountain, at almost 5100 feet above sea level. From there you can *see* the highest place, Mount Rogers, which is in the national forest nearby just off the Appalachian Trail, which passes through the park for a couple of miles near its northwest boundary. I’d have loved to go that way (in part, because of the wild ponies, but we’ll save that for next time; while Tifa loved bounding up the rocks on the climb we did, the distance out there site would be a challenge.

It was gorgeous, of course:

We camped at Claytor Lake (which we first visited last year), and also visited Hungry Mother and New River Trail State Parks; the latter being one I’m going to hit again; it’s main feature is a 57 mile rails-to-trails space along the river, and I really want to do it as an overnight bike-packing expedition one of these year. We spent our time in and around the Foster Falls area, the site of an 18th century industrial village and rail stop, which scratched my history buff itch. I was hoping for more from Hungry Mother; it was quite nice, of course, but I’ve seen plenty of tourist-swamped CCC lake rec areas in my time, and this was certainly another one. The origin of the name is an interesting story, however.

The other highlight, honestly, was our Saturday visit to Moon Hollow Brewing, which is a wonderful women owned and operated brewery that also acts as a LGBTQ+ safe space in a conservative area that truly needs one. As we enjoyed our very good beverages in the outdoor biergarten, a red hat goober in a huge pickup truck threw the middle finger and lazily shouted vulgarities (I mean, he wasn’t even trying…) at the gathered patrons, which to me said we found exactly the right space to spend a relaxing afternoon.

So that was my long, forget-about-work-and-the-world-for-a-bit weekend. Now it’s back to the usual bullshit bluster, Shroedinger’s war in the Middle East, and anger-inducing memos from Cabinet Secretaries.

Joy.

Actually, this really is joy, watching my dainty flower of a dog avoid getting her feet wet in the New River (which is actually one of the world’s oldest rivers):

Another couple of weeks down, because I’ve been all kinds of busy, depressed, tired, sore, occasionally celebratory, and outside touching grass.

Work is work, of course. I’m kind of just tired of all of it all, going through the motions and doing the thing, but not feeling particularly motivated to give the powers that be any more than the minimum expected effort. I’ve been leaving the office for lunch every day, finding a space that’s simply not there to exist away from it all for half-an-hour. It’s not that I don’t appreciate my immediate team members and leadership, I really, honestly do, though everyone above the level of my agency CIO, from the HQ front office all the way up to the grifter sitting at the Resolute Desk, clearly not have the our best interests in mind, and that doesn’t exactly inspire loyalty.

I might be a bit bitter, though I have been enjoying the ugly breakup currently happening in real time, even under the deluge of partisan memos dropped every Friday along with the rest of the trash.

But that’s all I’m going to say about that, because you’ve heard it all already, and I’m honestly tired of talking and thinking about it more than absolutely necessary.

More positively, I’ve been putting some effort into advancing a few of my other projects, which have been much better for my mental and physical health. Over the Memorial Day weekend, I added four more state parks to my Trail Quest list over a long Sunday in NW Virginia, bringing my total up to 30 and crossing the next milestone. Only ten more to go, and I’ve got three more lined up for a camping trip later this month.

The Capital Trail Summer Challenge is up and rolling, and I’ve been logging the miles most days after work. So far this week I’ve got 67 miles down, and am comfortably in the top half of the rankings for the “ten times the trail” category on my way to 517 by the end of the summer.

Those last two have me down seven pounds or so over the last two weeks, which I’m also not complaining about.

Apart from that, I’ve gotten some time in with friends, which has helped as well, sharing some fun concert stories with folks over a beverage or two at the local watering hole the other day, and spending a few hours at the pitch catching a Richmond Ivy FC match mid-week, with tentative plans to hit the Kickers match coming up this weekend. It’s a nice time tailgating and shouting along with the Vine Guard/Red Army hooligans.

So yeah, simply stepping away from all this crap: it’s helping. I have to watch the headlines, of course, but I try to get a few stories in there about Fantastic Four: First Steps along with the corruption, slash-and-burn, and ALLCAPS ranting rolling down I-95.

So…tunes. I downloaded a randomly generated playlist in Spotify last week to listen to at work while working magic with PowerBI and Excel (because my building is a Faraday cage and data connections are weak sauce), and it’s hitting a right proper mid-1980s vibe, and I’m okay with that:

1. “Do You Love Me” – KISS
2. “Coming of Age” – Damn Yankees
3. “Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers” – ZZ Top
4. “Whatcha Do to My Body” – Lee Aaron
5. “War Pigs” – Faith No More
6. “What Do You Know About Love” – Lita Ford
7. “Wild Flower” – The Cult
8. “Rhythm Of Love” – Scorpions
9. “Love’s A Bitch” – Quiet Riot
10. “Every 1’s A Winner” – Gun
11. “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong” – Spin Doctors
12. “Seventeen” – Winter

Short week and pretty decent long weekend (that provided a welcome distraction from other things) aside, I’m hitting a bit of a wall.

I actually started the week with a relatively positive attitude. I was ready to hit this special project I’m working hard and wrap things up so I can get back to my real job of building cool things. It was not to be. The universe simply kept throwing up roadblocks. Non-responsiveness (or worse, passive-aggressive deflection from certain quarters) to reasonable requests for information have kept me from ticking off milestones on the project schedule, and the project schedule itself has been difficult to get to, given that the office network has been just as unresponsive as the stakeholders; when it takes ten minutes for a simple SharePoint list to load and five minutes to launch Word thanks to everything being cloud-based now, not a whole lot’s getting done.

Watching the back-end guys having big “Oh Shit” meetings at the conference room down the hall to try and figure out what’s going on (not that any of that stuff is really managed locally anymore anyway) was not encouraging. When you’re reduced to re-writing work statements in basic text editors for later pasting into more feature-laden applications, you know things are not going well.

Add all this to the general sense of existential dread in the public sector (even with the five bullets thing finally going away), morale is low, and the three or four emails from the HR wellness folks (who are, surprisingly, still doing their thing) that came in overnight stressing the importance of mental health and the positive impact exercise has on it just had us wondering what the next thing coming down the pike would be.

That’s just what it’s like around the workspace these days.

This week-long rain isn’t helping either, as it’s keeping me off the bike and the trail. To maintain some sort of physical activity regimen, I made like a good senior citizen after work the other day and did a few laps around the mall along the route home from the office, though that place was just a different kind of sad, with it’s many closed storefronts and others filled with barely-functioning no-name t-shirt shops, fronts for local MLM representatives, and the saddest, most bored-looking retail workers you could imagine serving absolutely no one, because the only other people in the building were the half-a-dozen others doing the same thing I was.

That experience sparked a long-filed-away memory, so I did a quick search and found out that deadmalls dot com is still hanging on (or at least they’re still paying their hosting fees) from the early days of the internet in its late nineties glory, which is inspirational in its own sort of way.

So, I guess I’m going to do my best to try and take some solace in that little bit of positivity and stick-to-it-ness and do try to live up to that example, and see if it helps.

It has been a rough and emotional week. Things happened. Even some good things, but I don’t feel like talking about them. Maybe later.

I don’t really want to talk about them, because I’m largely completely occupied by the fact that on Thursday, I had to say goodbye to my friend Phoenix. She was only with me for six or seven years of her very long life (I don’t know exactly how old, really), and it’s been hard watching her age catch up with her this year; especially the last week or so. But she’s been my constant companion for that time, always right there with me while working from home, enjoying the outflow from my work computer’s fan, or just sitting with me while I was reading.

Or, you know, just looking at me silently while I was cooking, waiting for me to make the right decision and give her some.

I’m gonna miss her a lot.

No music today, just this picture of her in better times:

Another week mostly down. Work was work, headlines were headlines, and the back hurt. Also, My lovely spouse celebrated crossed a major, hard-earned milestone (and I am very, very proud), and I learned that a dear friend from my past is no longer with us, which is seriously a bummer. I spent some time with a few friends, I mowed some grass, but mostly? it rained.

it was a mixed bag, or would have been, had my elderly cat not woken me up on Thursday morning at 4:30 am by peeing on my head (she really hates the CPAP machine). I guess that experience does kind of shove it into the negative column overall.

It was what it was. I kind of just, well, existed, and dealt with things. All we can do. I honestly don’t have that much to share that I haven’t already. It was honestly, well, enough.

Well, except for the playlist my streaming service spit out this week. It sounded, end-to-end, like the perfect soundtrack to a low-to-mid budget 80s action film, most of which would be completely appropriate for an end-of-second-act montage. I dug it so much, I ended up making it into it’s own playlist to totally hit that mark, because why the heck not?:

1. “Crazy Nights” – Loudness
2. “Road of the Gypsy” – Adrenalin
3. “Waiting For The Big One” – Femme Fatale
4. “God Blessed Video” – Alcatrazz
5. “Carry On My Wayward Son” -Yngwie J. Malmsteen
6. “Fight” – No Vacancy
7. “It’s A Long Way To The Top” – Jake E. Lee
8. “Rock You Tonight” – C.J. Snare
9. “I Wish I Had A Girl Who Walked Like That” – Henry Lee Summer
10. “Sunset Strip” – Roger Waters
11. “Iron Eagle (Never Say Die)” – King Kobra
12. “So You Ran” – Orion The Hunter
13. “Swords and Tequila” – Riot

This morning I woke up in a cold sweat, with my pulse racing and an existential feeling of dread and anxiety. The clock radio alarm, went it went off, was playing “Hot Blooded” from Foreigner, which, I guess, was oddly appropriate. Seems I was having an anxiety-induced panic attack, and wasn’t immediately aware of why.

As I stood in the shower attempting to calm down, I started remembering fragmented images of what I was dreaming about before the exquisitely produced voice of Lou Gramm yanked me from my slumber:

Apparently I had been booked to play a musical set at a familiar place, a church I used to attend, which, of course, looked nothing like that place in real life, but you know how dreams are. Also on the bill were a bunch of my favorite people in my life, from all over; work, the con scene, friends I look forward to sharing a pint with, others I haven’t seen or spoken to in decades. Most of them aren’t performers in any sense of the word, but they were all on stage doing their sets. Weird stuff; interpretive dance, guided meditation, poetry readings, acrobatics, dramatic one-person monologues, martial arts form demonstrations, and yes, some music, but none of the musicians (I know a *lot* of musicians) were not doing music, and the non-performer types tended toward esoteric musical styles. I think Eurasian throat singing and didgeridoos were represented; it’s kind of vague.

As for me, I was basically set to do an hour or so of my usual acoustic singer-songwriter thing. The problem was, I had no idea when I was on the bill to perform, or even if I was performing that day, and the schedules I was able to get hold of were all out of sync with the time; the dates were wrong, the times didn’t make sense; and seemed like they were for entirely different events. On top of that, I also didn’t seem to have any kind of instrument on hand, and ended up slipping out to grab my gear, while also having to run my youngest child (who for some reason was a preschooler here) to another event across town that we were already a quarter-hour late for that involved mattresses, and was convinced that if I left, I’d miss my set and let everyone down.

My spouse was present at the event, but I wasn’t able to communicate with her for some reason. A dear friend from my musical community was supposedly the organizer (since she’s *always* the organizer IRL), but likewise, I was unable to get a straight answer from her as to when I was supposed to do my thing, but she, and others were inordinately happy I’d agreed to perform, and kept saying how much they were looking forward to it.

Also, every time I left the venue (which seemed to happen regularly, in spite of my feeling of dread about doing so), I always ended up in a different bathroom where I, for no discernible reason, always took a shower (because these dreams always involve nudity for some reason), and was always interrupted by strangers who needed to chat about something, leaving me unable to find my socks.

And finally, I was consistently worried that my set list (which I could swear got left with the gear I was worried about acquiring) had too many Beatles songs in it (I don’t typically do Beatles or Beatles-adjacent material)…

Seriously, the only thing that was missing from this weird subconscious mental conjuring was me being late for a final exam in a class I’d not attended all semester, or perhaps some kind of Freudian maternal weirdness.

Now, I’ve been under a *lot* of stress and anxiety due to occupational uncertainty, the political realities of the day, money, aging, and pharmaceutical weirdness. I often feel anxious, depressed, and unable to give proper attention to other people’s needs. This particularly lucid dream caught a lot of those feelings, and incorporated some mundane details that have cropped up recently in life…and ramped them up in ridiculously surreal circumstances.

I’m not sure what it all means, other than my subconscious trying to process and work through some stuff, but it kind of feels like I was saving all this up to deal with at once, and through the looking glass, so to speak.

Anyway, thanks for your attention to this personal exercise (or maybe I mean “exorcise”) of self-reflection and personal demons.