Apparently I pushed myself very hard this weekend in terms of physical activity. I did almost 70 miles on the bike over 4 days this week/weekend. Felt really good while I was doing it. I woke up Sunday morning unable to move without wincing.

I am not 20 anymore; I’m in better baseline physical health at almost 46 than I was back then, but I simply don’t bounce back as fast, and I’d be lying if I didn’t resent it a little bit.

My lovely spouse (who deserves better than a wreck like me for any number of reasons) advises me of the need to rest/recover after exercise, and she’s right (and I do take at least one out of every 4 days off), but as I’ve said in this space before, my time traversing the trails is really the only time I truly get that’s really mine, which is important to me, especially in this time when my house is constantly full of all sorts of other people and pets for whom I am responsible to in various capacities. My mental health, which, frankly, is less solid right now, needs that time to stave off both the interpersonal frustration and the looming existential dread that’s part and parcel to living in 2020 America, which is, unfortunately, not a great place and time to be.

Sunday was not a good day; we’ll say that; details aren’t necessary.

I hate being as irritable as I am, and it’s really hard to let go of frustrations that should be fleeting, but by their nature hit me on a visceral personal level, when, frankly, I’m barely hanging on to that elusive “even keel” on the best of 2020 pandemic days.

That’s kind of what it feels like; that I’m barely hanging on to well-adjusted humanity, while the world around me devolves into chaos and incivility (just going out to the store for something and seeing the sheer volume of irresponsibility, selfishness, and lack of care for the collective general welfare is rage-inducing), especially in this society at this point in time, where from the top down, so few are appealing to better angels.

When I get so angry so quickly at what should be small things of relatively little significance (but nonetheless feel ridiculously significant in the moment), I feel like I’m no better than the rest of those unwashed (sorry, that word’s hitting on particular stress point) teeming masses out there in the community doing their level selfish best to exercise “Mah Freedums” at the expense of their responsibility to their fellow humans.

And that just makes me feel worse, because on some deep, base level, a part of me want to say “screw responsibility” and just do whatever the hell feels good, damn the consequences, and when I acknowledge that, I acknowledge that I’m, deep down, I’m pretty terrible myself, and that’s an idea I really am not comfortable with.

I hope you enjoyed this window into the inner life of the upper-middle class white male in the midst of mid-life crisis. Dammit.

So this week…up and down. Could’ve been worse, I guess.

Once I got past the monthly review board at work, things settled down nicely, except that the boss went on surprise paternity leave (kid was a few weeks early), and he didn’t read us into a bunch of things. Hoping he drops us some knowledge one of these days, though I’m not going to bother him. We’ll manage.

It’s been very hot this week, but it hasn’t stopped me from doing almost fifty miles on the trail; looks like Friday is rain, so I’ll have a day off, but I’ll probably still put 25 down this weekend, as is habit.

Otherwise, I’ve just been coasting along, work, bike, read, sleep, repeat. Thursday afternoon I did my usual shopping and stopping by Kroger’s bar for a beer. It was nice. They had Kentucky Christmas Morning on tap; weird in July, but okay…insert retail cliche here. Nothing else, really. It’s life in the age of Corona.

The world’s still hosed, what with 45 surprising absolutely no one by floating the idea of postponing the election; of course, as a former civics teacher, I can tell you that such a thing ain’t happening, but it sucks that he brings it up (in the same week as monumentally shitty, worst in modern history GDP numbers and with Doctor Demon Seed, no less), especially given that Thursday was John Lewis’s funeral. I caught a bit of President Obama’s eulogy on my way to the park after work; I got kind of choked up, remembering how we used to have a charismatic leader who had eloquence and mastery of the English language. Sigh.

Oh well; nothing in particular on tap for the weekend. We’ll get by.

So…tunes. Running off the personal hard drive collection this time, which means that Zappa makes an appearance for the first time in a while, some basic hipster stuff, and twice the Cranberries. Cool. Coolcoolcool.

1. “Cosmik Debris” – Frank Zappa
2. “King of Hollywood” – The Eagles
3. “Just My Imagination” – The Cranberries
4. “Just What I Needed” – The Cars
5. “Purple Haze” – Various Artists (Make a Difference Foundation)
6. “Iron Lances” – Valentine Wolfe
7. “When You’re Gone” – The Cranberries
8. “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” – She & Him
9. “Less Than Useful” – Ned’s Atomic Dustbin
10. “Reminder” – Mumford & Sons
11. “Want Some, Need Some” – Poison
12. “Swingin’ Party” – The Replacements

Odds are, if you’re reading this, you’re sitting in the United States, so what’s going on around us right now, whatever your political stripe, has become somewhat normalized to you, even as abnormal as it seems.

Thing is, there are a lot more people outside our borders than there inside them; it’s important, as a citizen of the world, to understand their perspectives on things as well.

The New York Times (don’t you dare say fake news; it’s unseemly) published this video recently, getting reaction to conditions on the ground here in the United States from citizens of other countries, from Senegal to Germany to New Zealand and everywhere in between. Just watch it; give yourself seven minutes or so to watch this video (and whatever ad they throw; it’s worth it), without distraction, and get a vision of how the rest of the world sees what we’re doing, or more accurately, not doing. You’ll also likely see some images you *haven’t* seen in U.S. Media, but rest assured, it’s on the level.

“American Exceptionalism” is certainly a thing. It’s just not necessarily what you thought it was.

That really about sums up my outlook at the moment.

I’d much rather be positive, of course, and I try to make that choice as often as I can, but so far this week, I’ve had a hard time summoning energy to be productive, and am honestly relying on inertia and sufficiently distant deadlines to keep the wheels turning.

It’s hot, humid, and full of allergens out there (though I keep biking because physical health, endorphins, and also because it’s one of the only ways I can get an hour entirely to myself without anyone else’s demands on me), and there’s just too much life-mass (does that make sense?) in here, between the people and the cats, and for at least eight hours a day, I’m tethered to the office via internet pipe that mostly works, except when the damned systems I need go down.

I can’t get comfortable anywhere, and it’s starting to wear on me, which means it’s wearing on them too, and thus, the cycle feeds itself.

Sure, physics says that a perpetual motion machine isn’t possible; maybe they should talk to the psychologists and just get it done.

I wish I had better news, or a better outlook. I’m trying; I truly am, but it’s really tough going.

I know that this is a historical, once-in-a-century fustercluck we have going on here in the world right now, especially since idiots in charge are bored and much of the rest can’t be bothered to care about the larger community because they’re selfish contrarians. When the world outside my window looks like this, it’s just hard to be optimistic.

Can’t really put it any other way. Not that there wasn’t some good (my tunes hit spotify, got some good biking done, etc), but largely, it was a hot, stressful slog that I struggled to push myself through. It is, however, Friday, and I’m going to keep plugging on the best I can, hoping that things stay as low-key as my work calendar currently indicates.

Not going to speculate on weekend activities; gonna keep it loose. There’s some stuff happening on my periphery, but as far as I can tell, I don’t have any direct responsibilities beyond the mundane, and that’s fine. I had entirely too much responsibility this week for my liking.

I can point to my friend DJ’s new record You’re Not Cleared For This, which dropped last night, and I contributed a couple of guitar tracks to and offered some mixing advice (such as my experience would allow) on. There’s some really cool stuff here. Go take a listen (I love “Star Fleet Program Manager”).

Anyway – tunes. I’d been listening to some atypical stuff the last couple of weeks, digging into some low-key instrumental electronic music for background, for example, and it’s showing in my “Discover Weekly” playlist. Lots of stuff that’s new to me, an old favorite or two to raise pleasant memories, and more than one’s daily allowance of bands with names canonically in ALL CAPS:

1. “Vagrants of Venice” – David Crosby
2. “Day Tripper” – YELLOW MAGIC ORCHESTRA
3. “The Conversation” – SACRED PAWS
4. “Stolen Car” – Beth Orton
5. “More Time” – Eileen Gogan and The Instructions
6. “If I Only Had A Brain” – MC 900 Ft Jesus
7. “Lost in the Supermarket” – The Clash
8. “What Presence?!” – Orange Juice
9. “Armageddon Days (Are Here Again)” – The The
10. “Tom Collins” – The Sloppy Boys
11. “Chewbacca” – Supernova Chile
12. “The Witch of the Westmorland” – Stan Rogers

warning: little bit o’ self-pity driven by anxiety here…

It’s Thursday, fill the appropriate HGTTG quote here, because damn, if it isn’t applicable. Not sure why, other than the fact that I’m going to be stuck on the phone for a meeting-before-the-meeting that’s scheduled for two hours, but has 19 things on the agenda to get reviewed, and my two items are dead last, but if it was only that, I’d not be in the doldrums where I’m finding myself.

Honestly, it’s probably just one of those days where one struggles to find motivation, and the balance of neurotransmitters is just *off* for whatever reason. I’ll muddle through, I always do, because responsible adult and goddamn professional, but it’s going to be a bit of a slog.

So be it; cest la vie, it is what it is, oh well.

Let’s do this thing.

So, folks, as of checking in this morning, my record, World’s Okayest… is now streaming on Spotify! I’d still love if you bought the thing, of course, but I’m happy for folks to just hear the stuff, to be honest (plus, I get like a fraction of a cent if you play one of my tracks, but it adds up).

You can, of course, just search for me, but if simplicity’s your bag, click here to get directly to my artist profile.

The fact that I’m now out there, as well as on pretty much any streaming service you care to use, makes me feel like a kind of professional and stuff – it’s cool.

As I indicated last week, I took myself a mental health day on Monday in order to try to cleanse some of the frustration, stress, and craziness of last week’s “rush to do all the acquisition things” theme. It mostly worked, and I got a bunch of stuff done, both for me, and around the house.

For example, I saw all kinds of “trail friends” on my bike ride Monday morning, including this guy, who looks quite dashing in his velvet:

The weekend itself wasn’t all bad, either. The lovely spouse and I had a nice anniversary date (in accordance with all public health mandates), grabbing burgers on the patio at Luther Burger, doing a little bit of fabric shopping and AR game playing, then stopping by Steam Bell for a drink on *their* patio before heading home. The schedule changed on the food trucks, so our original plans for gourmet mac & cheese didn’t happen, though if all holds, they’ll be out at Crazy Rooster this weekend, so we’ll get our fix then.

I also got to play music with some friends from all over the place Saturday night, as I sat in on a tech test for the Dragoncon Filk Track. A few of us tested the livestream/conference platform and did a few tunes for an hour or two. It was nice chatting with my friends and picking up the guitar again. I also got confirmation that I’ll have a short set (along with several others) for the virtual con, and we’re working up the details there, so….cool.

Back in the “office” this morning, however, the bureaucratic dysfunction started grinding on me immediately; I need to get on the bike again this afternoon…

If you’ve been paying attention to my posts the last couple of weeks (especially this week), you’ve probably gotten the impression that things are decidedly not good.

That perception’s not entirely wrong, of course – one merely needs to look out the window or to the television to see that: the White House is is blatantly denying basic science and trying to distract people with big trucks, and people are risking lives and crashing school board meetings in Utah because masks are inconvenient, but you know what? I’m going to try not to focus on that today, because there have been some Nice Things™ that have happened as well, at least on a personal level in the last week or so, and I want to look at those objectively, and not through the common lens of clinical depression and existential despair.

For example, my biking experience has been pretty great recently. I finished the Quarantine Challenge last Saturday, knocking out a 19 mile run in record time, and, oddly, passing more people than I was passed by. Now, while I wait for my certificate and t-shirt, I keep riding, having 40 miles on dirt under me since Monday, and I’m going to aim to blow past 60 by Sunday, just to see if I can, and likely will, because I’ve gotten past one of those physical plateaus you occasionally hit, and am seeing a real increase in strength and stamina in the last week or so. I’ll take it.

Even if I wasn’t able to host open mic this month (or any of the last five months), and honestly, have barely picked up a guitar recently, I’ve made some progress in my semi-pro music career, finally getting off my duff and working on arranging digital distribution for my work. As of this week, World’s Okayest… is starting to trickle out to the various digital sales and streaming platforms. Thus far, I can currently confirm sightings in the iTunes store, Google Music, and Amazon, with more popping up regularly. Once Spotify hits (I hear it takes a little longer there than other places), I’ll feel like I’ve “made it.”

Also cool, though it’s not a done deal quite yet, I was approached by the Dragoncon Filk Track to maybe do a solo set sometime during this year’s “virtual” convention. It helps that the folks what run things are friends, and that I’ve played the event the last however many years with the Humdingers, but it’s nice to be thought of, and especially nice to be reassured that I was firmly on the list before the con left the physical plane of existence.

One more music-related thing worth noting is the new (to me) toy I acquired. A while back, my friend Alyssa of Rhiannon’s Lark mentioned that she was looking to unload her venerable TC Helicon Harmony Singer vocal effects pedal after scoring an upgrade. Having seen one of these in action in the past (one of my open mic-ers has one, and it’s *awesome*), I kind of jumped at the chance, we coordinated, and as of Thursday afternoon, it’s in my hands. I’m looking forward to finding some time this weekend to experiment with it.

Finally, tomorrow is my Twenty-Second wedding anniversary. The lovely spouse and I have been through a lot in the last two decades and change, but we keep on going, and it’s still cool. Given the General State of Things™, we’re going to play it low-key; one of our favorite food trucks is going to be out at Steam Bell tomorrow afternoon, so we’re going to go have a delicious and pandemic-safe dinner and drinks to celebrate.

Anyway….it’s kind of reassuring to see that I can fill just as much space with talk of good things as I can with frustration with Life, the Universe, and Everything when I put my mind to it. Maybe stuff isn’t so bad after all. We can hope.

It is, however, Friday, and that means I play some tunes in the background and list them here for folks to discover and/or judge. This week looks relatively typical; indie rock and alt-country bookended by 80s alternative icons. Cool:

1. “Six Different Ways” – The Cure
2. “I Just Threw Out the Love Of My Dreams” – Weezer
3. “Ninety Bucks” – Craig Finn
4. “Gun” – Uncle Tupelo
5. “Union Jack” – Big Audio Dynamite
6. “Hard to Kill” – Bleached
7. “Car Song” – Elastica
8. “Dream All Day” – The Posies
9. “The Death Of Pop” – The Rub
10. “Teenage Wasteland” – Wussy
11. “Alone Again Or” – The Damned
12. “Wave of Mutilation” – Pixies

This week was the one during which I cracked. I struggled with all the stereotypical hallmarks of bureaucracy as seen through the filter of Gilliam’s Brazil this week, and it almost broke me.

While the fiscal year ends with September, the fact that the acquisition shop needs time to actually buy the things means that July is the crazy time for program managers in my particular organization. As I’ve said before, because I have training and experience in both program management and contracting, the bulk of setting up the acquisition packages for approval from the C-suite for my corner of the organization falls to me because I’m reasonably good at it, in theory. In practice, it’s me flailing at creating documents with only about 60% of the information I need from the key players, aiming for constantly shifting standards, and dealing with the various departmental gates to get the package (that honestly, nobody with authority is going to read anyway) to approved status, who are often ill-prepared in meetings, and can’t seem to be able to read.

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been aiming to have our branch’s last two packages for the fiscal year teed up for the end-of-the-month approval-palooza review board, the submission deadline being Thursday (today) at noon. I spun bullshit, catered to every stakeholder’s whims (often contradictory), and mostly suppressed my passive-aggressive responses when people showed up to meetings having not taken five minutes to brush up on the topic and insist on asking irrelevant questions while treating me with disdain and condescension, not unlike asking an honors AP English student if they knew their ABCs….

This, on top of my whole other job of making sure the data keeps flowing through the pipes and ends up in the right format at the end, and trying to wrangle funding to get that process in line after all kinds of discussions with lawyers and stuff to make sure what we wanted to do was on the up-and-up; And dealing with personally ramping myself back up on my prescription meds and serious allergies that had one side of my head completely jammed all week to the point that I couldn’t hear out of my left ear for about 24 hours….

So yeah, I was dealing with some stuff.

About 150 emails into my day on Wednesday, my boss called, and basically asked “Are You Okay?”, because one of the memos I wrote that came across his desk not only didn’t live up to my usual high standards, but upon reviewing it myself, it was basically incoherent; like the numbers weren’t actually numbers incoherent.

Thankfully, my boss and I have a pretty good relationship, and he notices stuff like this, and basically talked me down to the point where I wasn’t vibrating and babbling, and encouraged me to step away for a bit, because for a while, I forgot that no matter what anyone says, there’s nothing in this job that can’t stand to wait until tomorrow.

So, I put some stuff to bed, went to my fortuitously timed chiropractor appointment, where my guy with the magic hands cracked my spine like a zipper opening (and cleared some of the pressure in my ear), then took a drive into the city to have a pint at Castleburg and eat a soft pretzel with pub mustard for dinner, and talk to my staff friends there about what exactly it is we’re going to do about open mic as this whole world outside business keeps happening, and felt a little better afterward.

I did break one of my usual rules by logging back into work in the evening before bed to check to see if finance guy had any more ridiculous requests, which he did, but they were simple to address, and then I went to bed, confident that things were sorted enough to wait until morning.

Morning came, and I found that the app which shall not be named (but anagrams to “hate PriSon”) had wrecked my access to load things for the point of sharing…again, so a ticket got submitted that I expect won’t get fixed today, and I handed off my final packages to someone else to load, a full six hours before the deadline.

And honestly, unless something else stupid comes up, I should have smooth sailing through Friday, at which point I take a long weekend, spend my 22nd Wedding Anniversary on a date with my lovely spouse, and enjoy my application of annual leave on Monday for no other purpose than a mental health day.

Thank you for listening to my venting. Carry on.