Weekend wasn’t bad; bit of rain here and there, though we got out to Crazy Rooster on Sunday afternoon for an hour or so; it’s a nice place, will be an *awesome* hang-out and chill sort of place if ‘rona accommodations ever end, and the Late Day Shadow NE IPA is kinda divine.

It’s been a fairly typical sort of week so far, with additional sides of social distancing and the lovely spouse working on clearing out some closet space. I work, I bike, I watch the occasional thing on television, and I agonize about the cause of the weird algae bloom that’s clouding up my fish tank. I think I’ve been overdoing the Flourish excel plant supplement, so I’m pausing on that, cutting back the lights for a day or two, and changing some extra water. Fish don’t seem to mind, but I do.

In between meetings on Wednesday, I’ll likely skim the headlines, work through my outrage about them (really, it’s outrage fatigue at this point), and check the primary results; we did our votes absentee this time around, which was simple convenient. A quick check Tuesday after the polls closed had our incumbent Representative winning in a walk (seriously, 80%-20% or thereabouts), which didn’t surprise me. My expectation is that the primaries are going to lean left and anti-45. I’m really curious about the Kentucky primary for Senate, as there’s been some drama. I expect that’ll take a couple of days to settle out at least.

But yeah, beyond that point of interest, it’s same old, same old.

This post feels kind of like a contractual obligation thing; most of them these days do, because it kind of feels like much of the novelty has been wrung out of the world; one can only talk about the stress of dealing with this once-in-a-century situation we find ourselves in so much before it gets repetitive. At least I’ve kind of settled into the new normal, no longer fighting with crippling anxiety; it’s just the usual low-level buzz, though I’d be dishonest if I didn’t admit that I’m quicker to frustration and anger than I usually am.

But, writing about it helps a bit, and maybe someday far-flung historians will find this on a dusty server under the collapsed remains of a forgotten data center after the apocalypse, and it’ll help future generations understand 21st century middle aged ennui.

Just doing my part; that’s all.

Today’s headline refers to the fact that my eldest child today turns twenty-one.

All told, it’s not the best year to turn twenty-one if you’re of the mind to go out and visit interesting drinking establishments and such (especially when your dad knows so many brewery people). We’d talked for quite a while about the “Stumbling Tour of Scott’s Addition™”, though as things stand, the taprooms are barely starting to open, and usually only with limited outside seating, and it’s looking like rain for the weekend.

I feel bad for the kid, I really do.

Instead, we’re going to have an evening at home with family (and the kid’s paramour), requested take-out chinese food, and a variety of fine brews and spirits I’ve picked up along the way. Also, Dungeons and Dragons, also at the request of the kid. She deserves a happy birthday; she’s shaping up to be a fine upstanding citizen, and I am proud, even if I sometimes struggle to express it.

While out adventuring with my mask firmly in place (it’s required here in the Commonwealth, though I see too many people in non-compliance) Thursday, to get the usual cat food and a couple of grocery items (and said spirits), I took advantage of Phase 2 opening and had my first pint in an actual taproom in months, a frosty vessel of Valiant Knight IPA at Castleburg, chatting with beertender Leslie from a socially responsible distance, catching up on small things and enjoying being in the comapny of a friend for half an hour, before I grabbed some beer to go and headed home.

It was nice.

It was especially nice, because the office has been requiring lots of thought and evaluation and interpersonal issues, as well as briefing to senior executives to get acquisitions approved. Today looked entirely too much like I should maybe have a law degree, which wasn’t comfortable, and I think my boss and I are going to throw some things over the fence to the lawyers and folks with the checkbooks anyway. There might be some interesting developments on the horizon as well, but I know very little; certainly not enough to talk about. In any case, it was nice to chat with a friend over a beer in a familiar (if somewhat more thinly furnished) environment after dealing with all that and pushing myself through six miles on the bike in the neighborhood in half an hour; which is fast for me on my relatively large and hefty off-road vehicle.

The weekend ahead? I dunno. We’ll do some birthday things, some of the standard errand stuff, and I’m likely on Sunday to check out yet another newish brewery (Crazy Rooster), have a pint on the patio and meet a thus-far online only friend who runs a local craft beer social media group (and who’s also a hell of a guitar player), which might be nice. I also took Monday off because I have too much leave in the coffers (no traveling gigs at all, dammit), and I don’t want it to go to waste.

Also, happy Juneteenth, which is definitely a thing we should be celebrating.

Anyway, tunes. The playlist from Spotify is all over the place this week; little bit of Prog, little bit of folk, plus some classic rock, the welcome return of Zappa, and the always jarring appearance of a track featuring yours truly on bass. One day I’ll get used to that:

1. “Journeyman” – Jethro Tull
2. “Lappi (Lapland)” Pt I: “Erämaajärvi” – Nightwish
3. “Camarillo Brillo” – Frank Zappa & The Mothers
4. “I’m Going to Hogwarts” – Lauren Fairweather
5. “From The Beginning (Live)” – Keith Emerson, Greg Lake
6. “Chronophobia” – Bad Religion
7. “Rivendell” – Rush
8. “Niffler Swing” – The Blibbering Humdingers
9. “Making Friends” – Bishop Allen
10. “Sharp Dressed Man” – ZZ Top
11. “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” – Tom Lehrer
12. “Spirit and the Stone” – Jeff and Maya Bonhoff
13. “Let It Go (live)” – The Clarks
14. “The Last Song on the Album” – Devo Spice
15. “Angel Standing By” – Jewel

Early Monday morning, the rain started; a long, slow, soaking rain that looks poised to last most of the week. I’m not entirely sure I enjoy it.

Doing most of my biking on the dirt, coming home mud-covered (after getting the mud all over my car on the way home) isn’t ideal, and one thing I don’t have is particularly good rain gear for biking the road; I’d manage, though in my experience, mountain bike tires on wet pavement isn’t the most stable platform, and we all know how my balance is.

I’ll likely still try a little bit; it’s not going to be the 40+ miles I did last week, but it’ll be something. I’ve dropped 12 pounds off of my winter/quarantine 30ish since really picking the bike back up these last few weeks, and I don’t want to lose the momentum.

But I also don’t want to fall on my middle-aged ass and break something.

Sunday, after say, 9am, wasn’t particularly cool. It started well enough, with me knocking out a solid ten bike miles on the Virginia Capital Trail (I did the same Saturday morning). I came home to find my lovely spouse making good progress replacing the ratty old carpet in the upstairs hallway with wood-look vinyl flooring. She’s proud, I’m proud.

I just couldn’t make anything else take the rest of the day. I got frustrated out in the world when I popped out to buy cat food, laundry detergent, and struggled to find chain lube for the bike (because apparently silicone chain lube is the new toilet paper). People aren’t wearing masks (or wearing them improperly), aren’t being responsibly distant, and big box stores that *ideally* stock all the crap I need (so I can be responsible and limit my trips out) are inherently frustrating and evil places even in better days.

It doesn’t help that I looked at the latest ‘Rona statistics to find that while my state is , on the whole, doing pretty well, my particular county, while within spitting distance of a major city, is rather a hotbed of conservative idiocy and macho redneck posturing, leading to the behavior described in the previous paragraph, leading to my particular county being well into the top ten (and solidly at the top of the “second tier”) for number of cases in the state.

And it doesn’t have to be this way; it’s all because my fellow humans are making bad choices. Dammit.

Between this and work (this morning…you don’t want to know…) being extra difficult because of the General State of Things™ it’s really hard to be optimistic about the world, even if, from a certain narrow angle, that with nudges in the right places, we, particularly this country, could be on the verge of some amazing change for the better. It’s all about the walls everyone throws up for the most petty of reasons.

I kinda want to just get off the planet and hitch a ride someplace else. I have my towel and everything.

It’s depressing, and seriously hard to process sometimes. But I managed to fix my Instant Pot, so there’s that. I can cook beans again.

While in the scheme of things, this week wasn’t as overloaded with work stuff as some, by Wednesday afternoon, it felt like it should have been over days ago.

I honestly don’t even know why; maybe it’s the world on the precipice of…something; could be huge change, or complete destruction. Maybe it’s just the fact that I’m getting discouraged by what I’m seeing around me in the community (my little municipality is not, shall we say, tolerant or open-minded) regarding the current protests (folks in my ‘burg are not particuarly thrilled with the statues coming down in Richmond or NASCAR banning the Confederate battle flag from events); people not wearing their masks as ‘Rona cases spike nationwide (I saw an old woman, on oxygen, at the grocery store the other day without a mask!), or maybe it is work, where I can’t get a straight answer on so many different things that should be simple.

Or it could be the simple fact that on top of all this other crap, my beloved Instant Pot threw a fatal pressure sensor error Wednesday night and now it’s bricked. Even though information online tells me that this is a manufacturing defect that the company will quickly and courteously address by sending me a new one, the fact that it died as I was getting ready to make dinner was maybe an ounce too much on an already heavy burden of stress.

Good news? There’s been some. I’ve gotten a lot of riding in this week (even with a blown tire tube early on) including a this year’s personal best long one Wednesday afternoon, and a quick check of the scale tells me I’m down about seven pounds from last week (only about 25 more to go to be within spitting distance of what I call reasonable). Something at work that *usually* waits until the very last minute got taken care of months early, which is a relief (even if it creates a void to be filled with other people’s crap to solve rather than mine)…

So, I don’t know, scales maybe not quite balanced, but getting there.

No idea what’s on tap for the weekend, really, other than I’ve taken Friday off, because damn, I deserve it.

So, tunes. Solid indie mix, as I’ve come to expect. Perfectly adequate:

1. “Golden Shower of Hits” – Circle Jerks
2. “Ohio” – Cherry Glazerr
3. “Your Reply” – Frances Quinlan
4. “Dangerous Type” – Letters to Cleo
5. “Every Flower I See” – Young Guv
6. “Balloon Man” – Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians
7. “The Perpetual Optimist” – Luke Lalonde
8. “Citysong” – Luscious Jackson
9. “Darkness” – Pinegrove
10. “Search 4 Me” – Chris Farren
11. “Townie” – Mitski”
12. “This Sentence Will Save/Ruin Your Life” – Born Ruffians
13. “The Rest Will Follow” – …And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead

Music, my friends, has no boundaries; it speaks to all of us. A dope, kickin’ bass line doesn’t discriminate.

(shamelessly stolen from my friend Bob Bock)

This weekend was short, above all. Ugh.

Biked both days (and discovered baby bunnies again this year at the usual part of the trail), got some excellent produce at the farmer’s market (which supported a pretty good roasted chicken and some excellent asian stir fry), returned some library books (now that they let us do that, I was able to finally return the books I took out in February!), and did a bunch of laundry.

In addition to that more active stuff, I played a few hours of Witcher III after setting it down for a couple of weeks, and watched the delightfully batshit 1978 TV movie star vehicle for The Loudest Band In The World™, “KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park”. It’s long past time that I saw this (and it took some digging to find, since nobody’s sold a copy of it in years), and it’s just as bad (in a good way) as I’d expected, with crappy special effects, awful dubbed dialogue, amusement park robot fights scored to a 70s tv disco soundtrack, and (as you’d expect), lots of concert footage.

As the title for this post suggests, it kind of surprised me that Peter Criss was the film’s MVP, being arguably the best actor (even though his dialogue was apparently overdubbed by veteran voice actor Michael Bell) , the best at handling the fight choreography, and having the most lines, which consisted primarily of badly-conceived cat puns. Also, the stripped down, acoustic version of “Beth” alongside the swimming pool (which, for whatever reason, appeared to be the band’s base of operations) is quite possibly better than the original.

All in all, a nice distraction from the world collapsing around us, but now, it’s back to the grind.

This week, as weeks go, at least personally, in this age of pandemic, protest, fascist photo ops heat wave, and bears, hasn’t been the worst of the lot. I’ve gotten some actual work done (without working too hard about it), read some books (including the wonderful The Last Emperox by John Scalzi, in the welcome form of an actual physical paper hardback library book!), and put more trail miles on the bike than I have in months; sure, it’s only about 15 miles this week so far (while I’ve been hiking regularly, the bike is something different, and my lack of conditioning and extra 25 pounds I put on over the winter and quarantine need to be overcome), but it’s a foundation for more. Mental health has been pretty okay, in spite of the current General State of Things™.

And yeah, the world’s going to shit, and I’m dealing with that, helping where I can while maintaining my own sanity as best I can. One thing that’s brought me some joy these last few weeks is this ongoing feature at Jalopnik, for which on of their writers has documented the process of buying the world’s cheapest new car off the internet and having it shipped from China to North Carolina, and doing a bunch of pieces about what the car and the process are like. The joy and fun these folks are having is infectious, and the car is just so damned cute.

Nothing huge on the agenda for the weekend, but you knew that already. We’re still in pandemic conditions (though idiots out there won’t wear their masks!), and even though most of Virginia is hitting “phase 2” today, I’m still leery of big groups, honestly.

Oh yeah – today (Friday) is another one of Bandcamp’s “waive the service fees to artists” days, so it’s a great time to buy some indie music and see that the artist gets a little extra. There are a lot of great options over there on the right in the “playlist” box, or, y’know, you could look at my record:

As it’s been through this whole pandemic business, the record is “free or name your price,”, and I’ll be donating half of Friday’s proceeds to the National Bail Fund over at ActBlue, in case you needed any additional motivation.

Finally, tunes. Very XX this week, and pretty modern indie (even the classic stuff up front and mixed doesn’t sound out of place), and all told, not a bad listen:

1. “Hero Takes a Fall” – Bangles
2. “Coming Up Close” – ‘Til Tuesday
3. “I Get Cut Lala Lala
4. “Masterpiece” – Big Thief
5. “Give It Up” – Angel Olsen
6. “Living Room” – Tegan and Sara
7. “What Do All The People Know?” – The Monroes
8. “Iceblink Luck” – Cocteau Twins
9. “You’re The Reflection of the Moon on the Water” – Grant Hart
10. “He War” – Cat Power
11. “When you Were Mine” – Cyndi Lauper
12. “Moon Over Marin” – Dead Kennedys
13. “88 Lines about 44 Women” – The Nails

There are protests happening in the streets just a few miles from where I currently sit. For good reason. There is also violence happening there, and across this country, which is heartbreaking, wrong, and largely unprovoked against those protesting. The President is out there fomenting further hate, fear, and violence; not acting like the leader we need, or a leader at all. It’s shameful, and I’m ashamed. We should be better at this, and the things that happened to George Floyd and so many other black men and women should not happen, and certainly should not be egged on by those in positions of leadership.

We can, and should do better.

It should go without saying (but it’s not going to) that I support the cause of racial justice and the #BlackLivesMatter movement. I’m saying it. Black Lives Matter. No qualifications.

Something I think it a lot of people of my particular hue struggle with, however, is being an ally to the cause in a way that is effective, productive, and not problematic. I worry that coming from me, a cis-het white man of a certain age, statements of support for the movement will appear not genuine or condescending. I worry about this because I am (at least on some levels) aware of my privilege, privilege that I primarily just lucked into by accident of birth. By definition, I can never *truly* understand the challenges that people who are not me contend with, and as a result, I sometimes balk at outward expression on the topic, for fear of doing more harm than good, because this is not about me.

Of course, that last paragraph is all about me, or my difficulty of finding a way to talk about it without making it all about me, which, by the use of the word “my” at all, defeats the whole purpose.

Damn.

I want to be an public ally to my fellow humans of color, just like I’m figuring out how to be a public ally to my LGBTQ+ fellow humans. I think most of us do. It’s hard, but I’m working on it, and want to do so in a way that doesn’t detract from the message.

All I can say is I support you and the message. I’m here.

Woke up really damned early this morning; sleep wouldn’t take. So I logged onto the work VPN around 4am; my work day will be over by noon, which I guess is a silver lining on the situation.

Not like there’s going to be much to work on in any case; I spent yesterday afternoon lining up all kinds of things to get passed around to various departments and senior leadership teams, and I’m finding that I must have missed the memo on taking Thursday and Friday this week off, which is what damned near everyone did, so there’s nobody about to sign anything or complain that even though I followed the TPS report template perfectly, something needs to be changed.

That’s the way this shakes out, I guess.

Little else to report, unsurprisingly. Might cook something interesting this weekend; I honestly don’t know. Maybe check out Space Force on Netflix, because what else is there to do? As the title of this post suggests, I did kind of wake up with a taste for a good ham sandwich; it’s likely I’ll make that happen.

In any case, tunes. Mostly new indie and some old alternative, which is a fine soundtrack, really; maybe it’ll inspire. Then there’s that track at #1, which hits the nostalgia buttons of listening to Dr. Demento on the Walkman under the covers on Sunday nights…I’ll take it.

1. “Elvis is Everywhere” – Mojo Nixon & Skid Roper
2. “Demon in Profile” – Har Mar Superstar
3. “Camel Walk” – Southern Culture on the Skids
4. “Heads Gonna Roll” – Jenny Lewis
5. “Stranger Than Fiction” – Bad Religion
6. “Disaster (Is What We’re After)” – Death Valley Girls
7. “Born With A Tail” – Supersuckers
8. “Miles Iz Ded” – The Afghan Wigs
9. “Murder (Or a Heart Attack)” – Old ’97s
10. “lucy” – Soccer Mommy
11. “History Lesson Part 2” – Minutemen
12. “Get Lost” – Queen of Jeans