Massive Cardiac Suckage

 

More news on the cardiac front for me. For those unlucky enough to stumble upon this post for the first time back on August 1^st 2018 my heart suddenly went into ventricular tachycardia launching me into a cardiac adventure that didn't end until December of that same year. Unfortunately, I didn't come away free and clean. Turns out I possess a genetic defect that prevents my heart cells from producing, or correctly producing, a protein vital for proper function.

Four cardiac ablations, two different types of pacemakers, and a whole spectrum of different medicines later I have fought this condition to a standstill. That is until February of 2020 when I started being plagued with atrial fibrillation, or A-Fib for short.

Now A-Fib isn't as dangerous as tachycardia, and as one of my doctors likes to tell me people actually “live” with it to the degree it's effecting me. But A-Fib sucks high balls, especially since I live in a place that is hot and humid for a larger portion of the year as compared to being cool and pleasant. Besides sucking the energy to do any activity from my body, A-Fib would also send it into full-fledged flop sweats. So much that a few people actually stopped me in the hallways or my work and ask if I was okay.

Well, back in April I had a simple procedure called a cardioversion where my Columbia-based doctor shocked my defective heart out of A-Fib. It worked, at the time, and I felt great and went about my business. That is until the middle of July went my goddamned heart casually went back into A-Fib. Being deep into the summer at the time, at first I just thought the heat and humidity were taking its toll. That is until the first of August when the dipshit asshole- and I truly mean that- scheduler for my cardiologist in Columbia called to tell me that the doctor really wanted to see me “as soon as possible” but that his first available appointment wasn't until the end of that month.

“Huh...wait, what?” I said only thinking that my appointment with that specific doctor wasn't supposed to happen until the middle of October. The scheduler, being a dipshit asshole quickly cut the call leaving me wondering what the hell was going on. So I called back the next day with the intention of getting an appointment with the cardiologist's physician assistant or nurse practitioner, someone who I'm on better terms with than the Columbia cardiologist.

No, the scheduler went full prissy asshole acting like my request was done just to shit in his morning cornflakes. Still feeling like shit and wanting some answers before the end of August I make another phone call to the Advanced Heart Failure Clinic, a separate practice in the same location, and still got nowhere.

So instead I called the cardiologist down in Charleston and got an appointment just a week later. The Charleston cardiologist didn't waste time and promptly ordered another cardioversion that day upon seeing me. It was quite the surprise actually since I expected him to just kick the can down the road.

I was A-Fib free until September 8^th went my heart again casually went back into it. Now I'm looking at a cardiac ablation, my fifth, scheduled for November 3^rd here in Columbia. I'd rather have it with the Charleston cardiologist but it's easier on my family to have it here and from all my best information ablations of A-Fib are for more simple than the ones for ventricular tachycardia.

So if anyone out there was wondering what happened to me I simply didn't have the energy to try and dazzle you with my brilliance, or more accurately baffle you with my bullshit.

I'm still going to work during the week and performing the absolutely minimum in outside chores. That latter part isn't affected by the A-Fib, I just don't give much of a rip about the yard work.

As for the November 3^rd ablation, hopefully the Columbia-based cardiologist will nail down the bad spots in my heart the first time. He screwed up on the first ablation back in August 2018 and his three others didn't relieve me of the tachycardia. It took the Charleston cardiologist to nail down the life threatening spot on my heart.

Unfortunately, my genetic condition means my heart will continue to be a dick for the rest of my life. Meaning I will continue to live under the threat of things like A-Fib and tachycardia as well as Cardiomyopathy. At least I have health insurance and access to several top notch doctors down in Charleston.

Yes, a heart transplant is a possibility but I don't want to think about that until I absolutely must.

You Can't Fix this Level of Stupid

 

We are so doomed!!!!

 

 

 

 In all the annals of stupid that I have been exposed it was this week that I saw something so strange that it defied all my expectations. I stumbled upon the meme to your left accidentally as I was wasting time at home watching the grass and weeds in my yard grow. See the fun part is seeing my neighbors drive by and give me dirty looks for not having a seamless carpet of deep green in my front yard.

After discovering this meme, I was enthralled at the interlocking levels of stunning stupidity and brazen incomprehension that one person can possibly endure and still be able to remember to breathe. I say that because Jesse here is legitimately saying that he could do the following:

1. That he could force his way into an international airport with just a good old American AR-15 while carrying his sick son.

2. That they could then force their way onto a fully fueled plane with a pilot.

3. That this pilot would then fly across the Atlantic Ocean and land in Italy.

4. Then Jesse would fight his way off the plane, with his son and then to a hospital.

Those were just the most basic steps since anyone who has read something more that the infantile propagandize drivel of your average conspiracy-plagued Fox News host knows you can't readily hijack a plane like you might a car driving down a deserted street. Now I'm sure in Jesse's armchair commando mind he's probably recruited a number of like-minded individuals all armed themselves to carry off his plan. Hell with a big enough circle lunatic friends he may even have a pilot friend or two.

Still though, Jesse's statement was so bleeding stupid I have heard five-year old kids who still believe in Santa say things more rational. After my initial discover I looked Jesse up on Twitter. It's almost like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingram made the nasty and the child they created was exponentially more crazy than them both.

Enough of the stupid, lets now explore the incomprehension. Jesse here is proposing that he would marshal all his God-given American manhood and using his AR-15 force his way to Italy so his child could be saved by socialized medicine. Yes, good folks whether Jesse know it or not Italy, along with all other Western nations, has some form of evil, communistic, socialized medicine. While the United States is still mired to privatized medical system where insurance companies decided whether or not your family will go bankrupt due to a sick family member. Remember Sarah Palin and the evil of rationed health care she talked about during her bizarre time as the Republican vice president nominee?

Rationed health care has existed for as long as insurance companies and many times they have allowed darling grandmothers to die because of some cost/benefit analysis.

So this begs the question, instead of attempting an improbable hijacking wouldn't it be better to just work together and bring some form of socialized medicine here to this country? 

 Unrelated to Jesse, here's some more stupid. This good American is praying to Donald Trump to save him from the police. This country is doomed, get out if you can!

 

Section Eight Housing and the Incredible Absence of Integrity

 

Shock and near panic rippled through my section of Lexington County recently with the news of a Section Eight housing project being built in an area surrounded by upper middle class subdivisions. I learned of the news from the “Nextdoor” social media app, something akin to Facebook but emphasizing local neighborhoods. Two or three years ago my subdivision's Home Owners Association started pushing for all the residents to join so we could communicate faster. Prior to last Tuesday when the Section Eight panic began I strictly limited my participation to receiving email alerts in case something other than asinine bullshit was ever shared.

What I mean by asinine bullshit involved countless garage sale notices, inspirational writings of a religious nature, along with the expected hyper-patriotic posts involving shrill civilians all wanting everyone else to know how much they truly loved America. Don't get me wrong, I'm not criticizing for the most part. You would be a fool to expect a duck not to quack and a cat not to go meow. It's what they do and comfy, fat American civilians who live in McMansions love their miniature English estates and get teary-eyed about a country the vast majority have never lifted a hand to serve in any capacity.

I was already at work Tuesday morning when I started checking my email and saw the fearful subject lines of the disaster that was going to befall on the perfect subdivisions near the purposed housing project. Crime, property devaluation, unruly elements that would make it unsafe for families to walk the streets at night were all common comments by the people up in arms that their area would be saddled with poor folks trying to find a decent place to live.

I'll give a few of the scared locals a little, backhanded credit. Some did couch their complaints in semi-reasonable areas such as the schools are already overcrowded and that local traffic is a damn nightmare. But the area schools have been overcrowded for literally decades with some already pushed beyond capacity the same years that start operation. The summer my daughter's middle school opened for the first time the tar on the roof wasn't even dry and the school district was already buying portable classroom trailers because they had too many students.

Describing the local traffic congestion would have me devolving into fits or rage best left untouched. Just understand it's bad and every addition of a new fast food joint, strip mall, or convenience store/gas station makes everything exponentially worse. Throw in an ambulance trying to save someone's life or a fire truck in route to an emergency and the already slow traffic can come to a confusing, messy stop.

But I'll be sickeningly honest, the majority of people against the section eight housing wrote their comments in such as way that it was painfully clear that they had particular worries about the future residents living in the housing project. I'm sure they had poor redneck white folks at least partially in mind as their fingers danced in fear over the their keyboards. But it was obvious that there was some racial and ethnic fears being stoked by those opposing the project.

Just to make things that more ridiculous, a few even began bringing up conspiracy theories involving the usual suspects on the left. One person wrote about how this was an attempt to change the voting population of the county. That person's point being that the area is so deeply politically red that some nefarious group or individual was trying to throw political blue into the area mix. Another spoke openly of another conspiracy that someone was purposely trying to damage the property values.

Just understand, the sharing of possible conspiracies got deep as the comments began to pile up in number. Not that it surprised me, for a couple of years I had a certain local lawn irrigation company help me with my troublesome sprinkler system, that is until the owner in a offhanded manner back in 2008 said he knew for a fact that Barrack Obama was a Muslim. I may live among the crazy, but I don't have to do business with them.

What actually depressed me though, was the total lack of empathy the vast majority of people writing comments had for anyone they perceived as outside their suburban socioeconomic level. From their point of view, everyone who would be living in the section eight housing would be a drag on the upper middle class area. Now about four or five brave individuals challenged the majority in the comments essentially saying, “poor folks have to live somewhere too.”

That's when the accusations of being a liberal/”libtard”, Marxist, socialists troublemaker began flying. This might make a few people reading this angry but you can't throw a rock in my area without it coming close to numerous upscale churches that in my opinion act more like country clubs and whose parking lots overflow with luxury cars. I scanned pretty hard but failed to find any individual oppose the majority and agree with the section eight housing project on the grounds of the teachings of Jesus Christ. You know, the love thy neighbor angle that was drilled into my head during Sunday School.

The few individuals standing up for the poor were strictly social justice warriors on the secular end of the political spectrum.

The only conclusion I can take away from this disgusting situation is that we have degenerated into tribalism. America and Americans don't really exist in this day and age of paranoia and extreme gaps between the rich and poor. We've long since successfully balkanized the country between the elite rich and those living in abject poverty. But the fractures have spread to the middle class with those living in comfort already turning on those who can't purchase their way into McMansions.

Hey, I don't agree with it but I can understand billionaires or multimillionaires acting like old English aristocrats consisting of dukes, earls, and barons. But it seems clear to me even a lot of middle class folks have an irrational animosity towards poor people.

Affordable low-income housing is difficult to find in the best of times. And while there would be issues with the construction of section eight housing what are poor folks supposed to do? Conveniently retreat deep enough into the shadows of society till they can't be seen by the easily disturbed middle class?

I didn't want to bring myself into this rant but I didn't spend twenty-one years in the army and National Guard to be a part of some bullshit experiment in social Darwinism. I'm no saint, but I have enough of a conscious that I can't ignore those less unfortunate than me. I just there was an easy way for me to flee this chicken shit county. 

 

 Here's an edited screen shot of one small segment of the comments

Plundering Around in my Subconscious

 

Probably best to start this rambling mess of words with a friendly disclaimer.

Just like one of the characters in the movie Inception stated, dreams, at least for me, have no real beginning. The way I remember my dreams is like waking up in the middle of a movie that has been going on for some significant period. I know something in the form of a plot is going on but I have no idea what caused the “characters” to behave the way they do.

Secondly, I absolutely do not believe dreams are supernatural in origin. That means I do not believe dreams are windows to alternate universes nor glimpses of the past or future. And I absolutely do not believe metaphysical beings contact us through dreams.

Dreams are just the unconscious human mind sorting through the bits and pieces of conscious reality and stringing them together. If someone has a dream about their Aunt Sally winning the lotto and that actually happens at some point in the future that was pure chance. For me, deja vu could well just be random pieces of memory that dropped into a dream with that individual experiencing it accidentally repeating those actions in a similar location.

I do believe dreams are elements of a person's psyche and can be related to their fears, hopes, and how they view themselves. Which in my case could mean I'm losing what little piece of my mind that works

With all that out of the way, I had a wild dream recently that I want to relate because it was so weird.

It began with me among an unknown group that I couldn't see nor really hear. All I knew was that they were pissed at me for some reason. I have no idea why they were upset but I understood, at least I think I do, that it involved me personally.

Typical dream stuff that didn't have any real basis in how others see me. Over the next several days, I began to theorize it was just my subconscious playing with my deepest fears. Nothing too awful weird, and given the times we live with economic uncertainty a normal component of life, probably typical.

It was the final segment of the dream that was really different. Don't ask me how I knew the following but I after left behind the unknown group I “bumped” into God.

Now get this, in the dream God was a short, fat white guy. Sort of like Danny Devito, Buddha, and the Boss Hog character from the Dukes of Hazard television show back in the early 1980s. And yes, he was smiling and giving off this feeling of love and warmth that was quite weird for a dream.

Now the really weird part begins, God was wearing a mustard gold Starfleet Command uniform from the original series complete with the flying delta symbol on the upper left of the blouse. My one distinct memory of the dream was being utterly surprised to see God wearing such a costume.

The dream ended right there, or at least that's all I remember. All things considered it was pretty cool and left me with a good feeling for most of that day. Now clearly understand this, I DID NOT have a personal one-on-one encounter with the Almighty. Technically, it's still best to classify me as an agnostic, although I freely say humans don't know as much about the universe nor reality as they think they do. It just takes real, verifiable evidence to prove things exist that would be classified as metaphysical.

Like one character in Star Trek: The Motion Picture stated near the end of the film: “We all create God in our image.” I guess my subconscious wanted to relieve the collected societal pressures in my head and constructed a God I could relate to in the best possible way. What's weird was that my subconscious put God in an Original Series uniform. I relate far more with Star Trek: The Next Generation and I could easily see Sir Patrick Stewart playing God in a movie.

But I can deal with a Danny Devito, Buddha, Boss Hog combination making up a friendly God. Yeah, all that stuff in my head is a mess. Speaking hypothetically, it would be beyond cool if God was a Trekkie.

Random Brain Droppings

 

Late Saturday and early Sunday are the best times for me to write. That is until we have a bit of an emergency here at the house like we did last Sunday morning. Long story short, neither my wife nor I had heard from our daughter up in Clemson since last Thursday. Being out of contact with our daughter for a couple of days is no big deal, she's busy studying or doing other college stuff. But by Sunday morning with no answer from our texts and our calls being sent straight to voice mail we were getting worried, if not scared.

No worries, my wife and I found out while we were on the way up to Clemson that our daughter had lost her cell phone that Thursday. We learned this after the on-call person at the dorm went to her room and knocked on the door two different times. After knocking at the door for the second time our daughter finally woke up to explain the situation with her phone and that her friends only talk to their parents like “once every week or so.”

Since we were already speeding up to Clemson, my wife, the custodian and master of the family cell phones, did what needed to be done to get her a replacement. So the really great story I started writing Saturday afternoon died a slow death of forgotten ideas and plot points. So instead here's some random brain droppings to make up for it.

Random Dropping One

Several days ago I caught a McDonalds commercial on the radio as I was driving home. This commercial was geared towards African-Americans the way McDonalds often does with hip hop music in the background and voice actors with noticeable accents so you understand they don't come from some upper middle class white neighborhood.

The narrator of the commercial went on to say in a happy and jovial voice something about how when you're driving from your second job to your side hustle you need something quick and good to eat. That you need to be in and out quick so you can have a few minutes to relax.

First of all having a second job means you have a first job that takes up a good part of your day. I know LOTS of people that have second jobs because their first job doesn't pay enough to make ends meet. These honest and hardworking folks don't work that second job because it's fun or they need something to take up all their free time. For one of the two-job working people I know a vacation to her is having an entire Saturday and Sunday at home being left alone.

Rich and well off folks really need to develop some sort of empathy because at some point the overworked and underpaid masses are going to lose their patience and come after them.

Random Dropping Two

Directly related to first dropping, I've heard numerous employers bitching on the business channels that they can't get anyone to apply for the jobs they offer. That many of these jobless folks would rather just sit at home and draw unemployment.

Finally a few people are replying to these asshole captains of industry that they need to pay enough where a person would make more working for them than sitting home on unemployment.

Random Dropping Three

Jim Caviezel is a superbly talented actor who has been in numerous hit movies and successful television series. He is also a conservative Christian who has been vocal about how his beliefs don't mix with the majority of people in Hollywood.

I can respect his views and actually understand to a certain point. I'm an extreme liberal bordering on Sanders/AOC progressive living in a heavily red state. I have to daily keep my mouth shut and do my best to live among people who I consider borderline fascists. It sucks hind tit but, as far as I am concerned, there is no point to whine about it.

What I'm saying is that I never cared what political or religious views Caviezel held. He's a great actor and I would readily watch anything he might appear. That is until now, to put it bluntly the dude has lost all his marbles.

Caviezel recently appeared at a conspiracy convention and told folks that he not only believes crazy shit about vaccines and the Covid Pandemic, but goes even further out into crazy land. He believes babies are being kidnapped and tortured to death so the “Elites” can harvest some sort of compound from their innocent blood.

Final Brain Dropping

For a long time I've wanted to write something meaningful about George Floyd and all the other victims of police violence but I find myself unable. There is no outrage I could write that better, more articulate people haven't already put to a page. There is no other way to say it but that African-Americans are being hunted in this country, both by racist civilians and especially by cops who can somehow peacefully apprehend gun-totting white folks but shoot black people on sight.

Back in 2015 a piece of South Carolina shit by the name of Dylann Roof walked into the Emanuel African Methodist Church in Charleston and killed nine people in cold blood. A virulent racist, he wanted to start a race war here in the United States. I'll be damned but there seems to be a lot of people like him doing their to make such a war happen.

Side note, after being arrested shit bird Dylann Roof whined about being hungry and the cops taking him back to South Carolina pulled into a Burger King and bought him a Whopper. Motherfucker kills nine people and gets feed. George Floyd just passed a fake twenty-dollar bill and got a knee on his neck for over nine minutes.

Irritating Forays Into My Subconscious

Giving myself a little credit here but my imagination is one of my few developed talents. So much that my creativity even extends to the dreams my subconscious weaves at night. The source of this creativity during both my waking and sleeping hours can almost certainly be traced back to all the science fiction novels I've read and the physiological and thriller movies I watched over the years. Many have left such a huge physiological impact that for years my nightmares hosted a bizarre array of terrible characters.

For example many of my dreams have hosted a collection of murderous xenomorphs from the Alien film series. In my dreams I usually find myself trying to allude the creatures whose only purpose is to find hosts for the parasitical “face-hugger” so more of them can be reproduced.

Joining in for the fun were the Borg from Star Trek, a polyglot of many alien species forcibly assimilated into a militaristic hive mind. During these dreams I find myself recoiling at how they violate the mind and body of captured individuals during the assimilation process.

One of the more curious participates in my nightmares were the Draka, a creation of the author S.M. Sterling, someone described as the H.P. Lovecraft of political science. See, in the world of these Draka the Americans loyal to the British Crown fled to South Africa instead of Canada at the end of the Revolution. This change in history led to the creation of a “super Nazis” society dedicated to the literal enslavement of every human on the planet. Spoiler here, but at the end of the Draka trilogy they end up in control of Earth and the entire solar system.

Those are just my dreams where familiar characters take part in playing with my anxieties. They're a disturbing bunch but I take some small amount of relief in having some truly evil phantoms running around my head. Where things take an abrupt turn to the surreal is when my brain begins to piece together random elements into something that leaves me wondering where the dream ends and reality begins.

Way back in the early 1980s when I was living on the coast, I had a particularly disturbing dream that left me confused for days. It all began during a late night summer thunderstorm with me “waking up” during the worst phase of the lightning and thunder. Somehow the lightning and thunder turned into someone desperately knocking on the front door. It was the kind of pounding knock of someone that in movies was fearing for their very life.

Since I lived in the middle of a fairly dense neighborhood, the idea of someone actually at the door in the middle of a thunderstorm didn't make any sense. In reality, I believed I turned over in my bed and went back to sleep. When I did truly wake up, possibly hours later but before sunrise, I went to the door to look outside. I saw nothing and went back to bed. The weirdness came when I later stepped outside to get the newspaper.

There was a woman's shoe on the front porch. I have no idea where it came from and while I'm mostly sure the late night knocking on the door was a dream, I've got to admit it took days for me to shake off the feeling I might have missed something real.

Over the intervening years I've had what I hope are the usual, normal amount of those strange dreams. But relatively recently I've had another that tends to replay itself with no apparent rhyme or reason.

The actual events in the dream are consistently fuzzy but they all revolve around the main point that I have forgotten an important piece of vital information. Sometimes during this dream I feel I might be on the verge of remembering that lost piece of information, but it metaphorically slips away again. I then wake up and have the irritating feeling that my subconscious was actually trying to send me a message. By the middle of the day I've shaken off that strange feeling but it really bothers me that the dream will return at some point.

Well, that dream did return last week and it has evolved a new level of complexity. I was once again trying to remember something I had forgotten but this time I attached a name of a person to this missing knowledge. Just to make the situation more puzzling, the name now associated with the dream is unknown to me. Yes, my assumption is that my subconscious has reached into the cosmic grab bag and pulled out a name from nothing. That explanation is reasonable and highly probable but it still doesn't feel right.

I've gotten to the point now that I'm starting to miss the xenomorphs and the Borg, but not the Draka, those bastards are really bad.

Maybe It's Aliens, If We're Lucky?

You know we live in interesting times when legitimate reports involving UFO's hit the mainstream media and they aren't the top stories in the evening news. But that is the case with both a New York Times report and the one Huffpost uploaded on their webpage.

On the surface both reports sound like the usual highly dubious and easily dismissible stories espoused by countless nutcases and con men for decades. The trouble though is that this time we have official statements from both the U.S. Navy and the Pentagon that yes, there have been sightings of strange aerial phenomenon displaying capabilities outside the abilities of current technologies.

More to the point, a few years back the Pentagon once stated that its covert program to study unexplained aerial phenomenon had been disbanded. Now real news outlets have discovered that this program was just renamed and moved to the Office of Naval Intelligence. Not exactly something an organization would do if there wasn't a reason to keep information hidden.

Those reason appear to be that these unknown craft have the ability to perform extreme maneuvers that defy known physics. One such unidentified vehicle was observed dropping from 60,000 feet to 50 feet in a matter of seconds. You don't need a degree in physics nor human anatomy to understand such maneuvers would destroy any known craft and turn any human pilot to chunky salsa.

Despite the possible crazed hoopla about aliens and first contact scenarios the more chilling possibility revolves around either Russia or China secretly developing technology that puts out best, most advanced planes on par with WW2 aircraft. Why Russia or China as possible boogeymen? Because they are the only countries with the money and/or technological clout to make such a breakthrough.

For the most part I despise Russia, but they do produce some seriously world class engineers and theoretical physicists. Their one drawback is money, it's one thing to produce fancy blueprints and maybe a prototype. It is another to have the money and industrial capabilities to turn such dreams into reality. China on the other hand does have the money, engineers, and the industrial might to possibly produce such revolutionary aircraft. What both countries do share is a grudge against the United States and an overwhelming desire to be the global top dog and remake the world pecking order.

Another possibility worth mentioning is that this release of information about UFO's is just a disinformation campaign by the United States Government. That our country has actually made a massive breakthrough in aviation technology and that we are just acting stupid to throw off our adversaries. Such possible advanced aircraft have to be tested and with surveillance what it is these days someone is bound to catch sight of these vehicles. At least that is my best case scenario when it comes to this situation.

Touching back on aliens, no I do not believe these UFO's are extraterrestrial in origin. The idea that an advanced alien race would travel hundreds, if not thousands of lightyears just to play aerial chicken with the primitive natives is just a bad science fiction movie idea. I've got admit though, given how supremely nightmarishly fucked up 2020 has been, we probably can't discount Little Green Men entirely.

See:

Explosive UFO Report In NYT Mentions ‘Off-World Vehicles Not Made On This Earth’

When You Vote For Stupid, You Get Stupid

Okay, I fully realize that I live in bizarro, right-wing land where the rules of common sense and rationality have not only left the building but boarded a plane under an assumed name and fled the country. Case in point is one of my coworkers, an admitted extreme homophobe, he nonetheless swoons over Trump to the point homoerotic elements of his admiration more than occasionally creep into his lengthy praise sessions.

Exaggeration? No, not when he gets that awe inspired look on his face and consistently describes the Orange Buffoon as a “man's man who has done it all in life.” His adulation of OB gets increasingly weirder, given his homophobic views, that I often come close to laughing at the guy. Something I cannot do because open ridicule would probably cost me my job.

But the one common point this individual shares with other Trump supporters is the delusion that OB is a firm, commanding leader who doesn't apologize about America and its actions to the rest of the world. More to the point Trump supporters, of all types, seem to believe he doesn't take any shit from anyone and is a superb Commander-in-Chief looking after the nation's interest. However the reality of OB's true nature has once again become exposed to anyone with a microgram of rationality and objectivity.

Case in point is that the New York Times is reporting that American intelligence has become aware that the GRU, Russian military intelligence, has offered bounties on every American and NATO soldier killed in Afghanistan. The New York Times, further reported that the Orange Buffoon and his staff, including the Vice President, were briefed on this development in late March.

Now of course, Orange Buffoon supporters don't believe a thing coming from the New York Times. And I admit, the Old Grey Lady is screwed the pooch many times, but when it comes to who I believe in this surreal nightmare we've been living in since November 2016, I'm going with the journalists.

What once again reinforces the view that Trump is just a toady for the murderous thug, Vlad Putin is the confusing reaction from the White House staff. Latest blonde bimbo press secretary, Kayleigh McEnay say that neither OB or Pence have been briefed on this situation. While the Times goes on to say the White House held expanded briefings on the intelligence assessment and that possible responses include a sternly worded compliant to Moscow. Oh Hell, my bunny slippers just ran for cover.

While this is going on the Orange Buffoon is sending 200 American ventilators to help Russia with their Covid-19 outbreaks. Russian coronavirus cases neared 300,000 Wednesday, which is surprising because just a few weeks prior their news media was saying they had the situation firmly under control. In fact, before Russia finally admitted they were having trouble with Covid, several doctors mysterious fell out of hospital windows. The key point here is that each of these doctors attempted to inform the Russian public about the outbreak before the Putin government was ready.

So help me here, the Russia government is paying Afghan insurgents to kill American and allied troops. At the same time the Orange Buffoon is constantly talking crap about anyone in this country who dares to suggest we do not have the coronavirus under control.

You would think a strong, commanding leader would tell the Russians to, at a minimum, kiss our asses. Trump has said worse to our longtime democratic allies who have stood by us over the decades. Yes, you can correctly surmise that I am not a fan of Russia in any shape or form.

More to the point, Trump's infatuation with Putin is quite similar to my coworkers misguided affection towards him. Which given how Trump hasn't said a word about the bounties placed on the heads of American troops shows how his supporters don't have any clue about what it means to be patriotic. I am just so fraking tired dealing with idiots.

Russian intelligence officers Offered Cash Rewards To Taliban Fighters To Kill Us/UK Troops In Afghanistan.

US Sends 200 Ventilators to Russia As Crisis Deepens, Hopes For a 'Better Relationship'.

The Latest WTF Moment

Just when you think the Orange Buffoon can't top his latest stupid statement or action, he goes and pulls another monumental zinger out of his ass. Of course I'm referring to the press conference back on April 23^rd when he suggested injecting and/or ingesting disinfectant as a way to treat the coronavirus. Just to add icing to the huge stupid cake he was offering, Buffoon then suggests it might be possible to use ultraviolet light internally to also clean the human body of the pathogen.

I'm sadly use to the fact that most people here in the US don't have a microgram of scientific understanding on any subject that is relevant to our lives, but this one left me unable to speak. Had I not been watching the press conference I would have instantly thought the later stories reporting the Buffoon's words were satire. I mean young toddlers generally understand that to drink any sort of disinfectant will make them sick or even dead.

Here we have the individual occupying the Oval Office not understanding the effects on the human body of drinking something like bleach. We've entered realms of dark comedy that, to me, suggest all sorts of insane scenarios could still happen long before 2021 Inauguration Day, the earliest we could expect some relief from the surreal reality we find ourselves trapped.

From the horrible November 2016 night when the Orange Buffoon stumbled into an electoral college victory, I knew we were highly screwed. I also knew that OB would burn the country down in some fashion. Never once did I even entertain the possibility that he might try to poison us.

Please excuse me that even now after the Buffoon has attempted to play his misguided suggestion off as “sarcasm” that I sincerely wish that he might demonstrate his novel treatment. Does that make me a bad person? Because if it does, I can surely live with it on my conscious.

Onward and upward people, the only way we'll get through this shit is to laugh and enjoy a long weekend nap.

This Week Sucked

Just not feeling it this week. My personal health condition is unchanged, at least for right now. Taking my medicines and hope to have my next cardiac ablation scheduled later this week.  Which is a two-edged sword since I have to go off the meds for five days to clean out my system so they can find the problem heart cells and zap the little bastards with electricity. Of course, going off the meds means I might have another incident before I have the procedure.

On an entirely different note, the nation had to live through a conservative republican terrorist sending pipe bombs through the mail this week. Nothing signifies the utter corruption of American politics when all manner of Trump-supporting MAGAts openly believing those crimes were some Democratic-inspired hoax. And just to add another insult to an already injured country, another conservative wacko decided to shoot up a synagogue in Pennsylvania.

What comes close to leaving me in despair is that the Orange Bastard is still out there trying his best to burn the country down. 

   

 

More Cardiac Adventures- An Unexpected Hospital Stay

Just a quick update. Had a cardiac ablation on October 11th to solve issues with things like heart flutter and ventricular tachycardia. Cardiac ablation is a relatively simple outpatient procedure but I took a four day weekend to recover because my groin area was quite sore. You really don't want me to explain that detail, just take my word that it's unpleasant.

After a relaxing weekend, on the afternoon of October 15th had a setback. I was suddenly hit with another bout of ventricular tachycardia which sent me to the emergency room and a hospital stay that lasted until this passed Thursday.

Didn't post anything about this hospital stay because I was both depressed and more than slightly pissed. Depressed because the assurances I was given about the problem being "solved" weren't worth the toilet paper stuck to Trump's shoes as he boarded Air Force One the other day. And pissed because I didn't do my own research into VT and the cardiac ablation procedure. Found out people can have up to four procedures and still end up taking the medicine that controls crazy heart rhythms.

Feeling "better" as compared to the events on October 11th. But I'm still getting use to the new blood pressure meds and the fact I don't really have much of an appetite lately. The appetite thing could be a blessing since I need to lose weight anyway.

Once again, huge shout out to my wife, son and daughter who did their best to take care of me. And a massive thank you to my coworkers who visits made me feel much better. 

Christmas Trials and Tribulations

To say I am a bit of pariah in the area I live is a given. I don't attend any of the local mega-churches that act as religious country clubs where the majority of inhabitants go to be part of the accepted social set. I most definitely do not drive an oversized trunk which is a male status symbol in these parts on par with what guns you own as well as the required circular NRA sticker on the back window. While there are a few exceptions, my politics alone keeps me at arms length with otherwise nice people who view Obama as a tyrant and anyone not white and Anglo-Saxon as an invasive species. I will offer up a backhanded complement and say the centuries old suspicions about Catholics appears to be dead.

All that being said, it is this time of the year that one of my serious deficiencies shows itself to all the others who spend days, if not weeks, setting up Christmas decorations on the outside of their wondrous Mcmansions. I have never really seen the point of elaborate outside decorations. Of course, this is just a holiday extension of my distaste of yard work but it is also an expression of my dislike of light pollution and how it literally drowns out the stars in the sky. In an effort to not seem a total secular humanist douchbag, I do not harbor any contempt for those who do decorate the outside of their homes. As of this writing it is still a free country, although what happens after January 20 will be anyone's guess after that.

Where my family usually falls in line with everyone else is on decorating the inside of our house. My wife has three separate themed Christmas decorations boxes that contains items for the tree, the living room, kitchen, and even the bathroom. Frankly, I find the bathroom stuff ridiculous but it all makes her happy and while I'll never be confused with a rocket scientist, I have learned that it is best just to go along during this time of the year.

This year is a bit different though since we are in the middle of several major home renovation projects. With storage boxes literally overflowing and taking up a great deal of space all over the house there was simply no room to pull out the Christmas decorations this year. While this fact didn't sit well with my wife, this holiday sacrifice will be repaid with her eventually having new carpet throughout the house, along with new marble kitchen counters and revamped cabinets. On a side note, you cannot underestimate my happiness in the fact that the bathroom remodeling was largely completed a couple of weeks ago.

Now understand, to our far more holiday-minded acquaintances we haven't advertised the fact that we're essentially skipping Christmas this year. Our lack of outdoor participation has been mentioned in the past, which my wife diplomatically explained away as having more to do with the front of our house being a different design from most of the others in our neighborhood. We don't have a large front porch which is what most everyone else uses as the basis of their decorative garland, colorful lights, and tinsel ideas. I'm sure to our closer associates she has whispered that it's her damn husband's fault because he is a total scrooge.

From what my daughter has told me recently she has inadvertently revealed our non-participation in Christmas this year. It seems that during one of her classes just this last Monday the topic of Christmas decoration came up among her friends. The parents of all her close friends are Christmas decorating fanatics and the way my daughter explained it when she told them we didn't even have a tree up everyone was quite shocked. Making matters worse, given my known anti-social and leftist leanings beliefs, I am sure the assumption others will take is that I have gone total anti-Christmas if not militant atheist. Needless to say, given the area I have become a bit paranoid as of late. Another side note, no, I am not an atheist, my beliefs have me firmly in the agnostic camp. In fact, I pray quite frequently on the off chance God does exist and that one more person broadcasting on the supernatural hotline might cause him to reengage with his erstwhile hairless primate creations.  

Returning to the main point sitting out Christmas, I have this vague worry that as I try to sleep during the day after coming from work that a Yule tide lynch mob might invade my house with them super gluing glittering tinsel and cheap wooden crosses all over my body instead of the ancient ritual of tarring and feathering. So, if I am not heard from again that will probably be the reason. That being said, I wish everyone Happy Holidays while I consider the possibility of  avoiding the coming lynch mod by joining the secular guerrilla underground which is fighting the endless War on Christmas.

Election Aftermath

As anyone who has read my ridiculous rants and crappy fiction for any length of time should know, last Tuesday night was a full-fledged shit sandwich party for my family and me. Trump’s unexpected electoral victory over Hillary Clinton will go down as one of the most insane upsets in American history. For three days after the election, I was literally emotionally and mentally numb, hell I’m still coming to grips with this situation.

I honestly wish I could say something nice about Trump and the people that see him as some savior. Unfortunately, I can’t and I refuse to make nice given the crap such people rained down on President Obama from the day he won the 2008 presidential election. Pushing political ill will and outright hate aside for a moment, if Trump pursues his campaign promises I frankly see him creating a far bigger mess than the one George W. Bush left behind for the black guy to clean up. You simply will not bring back old-fashioned 1950’s manufacturing jobs when some chump in China or Mexico makes pennies on the dollar compared to an American worker. If these jobs did come back companies would have to pay workers enough to do more than just survive. They would mean Joe Sixpack having money left over at the end of the month to buy that new washing machine or television while being able to save a little for his kid’s college education. The cost of such wages would have to be passed down to the American consumer, which would mean a nice rise in inflation. To bust this bubble even further for those who don't remember the 1970's, American consumers hate inflation and tend to stop buying all those neat new adult toys which keep the economy afloat.   

Then there is Trump’s promise to renegotiate trade deals and hit foreign goods with tariffs. Start pulling on those threads and the millions of jobs here in the United States that send their products overseas will definitely be in grave danger as other countries throw tariffs on our stuff. We’re talking trade wars with the global economy going into a tailspin with an economic depression the best of all possible outcomes.

But hey, Hillary lost and the Republicans have control of both houses of Congress, so the ball is firmly in their court. Given Trump’s mental and emotional instability and the Republican’s desire to make the United States into the image of Ayn Rand, a cynical part of me wants to see hell rain down on those silly souls who think Donald will lead them back to the proverbial Promised Land. All us sorry-ass liberals can do is sit back and watch the train wreck as it unfolds. But who knows, the bastard got elected, by the Electoral College, not by the majority of the American public, so who the hell knows how this will all unfold. I’m just going to start rereading Grapes of Wrath to refresh my memory of outright despair and struggle. I have a sneaking suspicion such conditions might return sometime between now and 2020. 

On a lighter note, I am still in a state of semi-bondage as the great home renovation projects continue. I swear, my wife is taking on some uncomfortably similar characteristics to those little, megalomaniacal dudes that run North Korea.  

What I Did Last Weekend

 No, I'm not bragging...



If a period of time, in this case the 365 days making up a normal terrestrial year, could have sinister motives, I swear 2016 could be Hannibal Lecter or even one of the supernaturally indestructible movie slashers such as Jason Voorhees or Freddy Krueger. From the moment David Bowie died and the 2016 American presidential campaign started, I distinctly remember a few people on the internet saying this year was going to be a full-fledged crapfest. And in all honesty, given what we have been through calling 2016 a crapfest is a gross understatement. Just the trauma of having such people as Ted Cruz appear on the news almost daily during the primaries and then top it off with Trump winning the Republican nomination is more than any sane person should have to deal with in a single year.

Somehow, we’ve made it to the end of October and quite frankly, I’m not expecting things to get much better in the short-term. Multiply that last statement fifty to one-hundred times and extend this nightmare until 2020, if America goes and elects that bizarre combination of Jerry Lewis and Benito Mussolini president of the United States.

On a personal level, my lovely spouse, whose codename remains Dragonwife, has spent most of this year doing her best to take what little free time I can normally call my own. For the last several years she has wanted to do major renovations on the money hole…I mean the house we live. These changes would include ripping out the carpet in all the rooms and replace them with hardwood floors, changing out the kitchen countertops, and installing at least a closet in the room over the garage so it could be classified as a fourth bedroom. I say at least on that last item because for a while Dragonwife wanted to add a half-bathroom to that room as well.

A couple of interviews with renovation contractors later and she has finally realized that while such a project is possible, the cost would be so great it would make more sense just to sell the house and move into another that would already have such facilities. I didn’t hear the amount the contractors said it would take to add a half-bathroom but it was enough to utterly kill that idea. You’d have to know my wife but she does not easily abandon any project, especially something she has talked about for years. However, after speaking with those guys, she placed a big “X” through the notes she had for the half-bath and hasn’t mentioned it since. There are most certainly other items she wants to change and replace while all this is going on but I’d would get bogged down listing them.

Getting down to the nitty-gritty here but whenever my wife conjures up fantastic plans involving home projects she eventually starts nickel and diming everything down to my level. She does this mostly to save money and redirect funds to other things that I simply cannot do alone or lack the proper equipment to accomplish. Cases in point are the several Leyland cypress trees that fell over in our backyard due to the recent hurricane. I do own a small electric-powered chain saw, which is solely designed to cut small limbs and not forty and fifty foot trees whose trunks are at least a foot in diameter. This says nothing about having the truck and/or trailer big enough to carry away the wood after cutting everything down. Dragonwife eventually realized that it was simply better to stick with hiring someone to remove the trees since they would also have the equipment and personnel to pull up the stumps as well.

Now throw in the water heater that for some unknown cosmic reason decided to start leaking, a lot, several days after the cypress trees tipped over and several home renovation projects that were going to be outsourced have found their way on my honey-do list. This weekend I tackled the first of these new honey-do items with a Dragonwife high priority star beside it. Little side note here, for those who don’t know I work third-shift so my weekend starts after I leave work Friday morning and ends around 10:30pm Sunday night.

Painting the vanity in the small bathroom at first didn’t look like a major job. Sure, I was going to have to sand the wood so I could apply the couple of coats of primer needed so it could be painted but I didn’t think the job would take that long. The first thing I didn’t take into consideration was the freaking mess that I would make from sanding the heavily varnished wood. All together the cabinet was done, inside and out, in about two hours. It took me three damn hours to clean up the mess inside the bathroom and in the hallway. At one point, I began wishing the bathroom floor had a drain that would have allowed me to use the detachable shower head to wash off the dust coating the toilet, bathtub, walls, and floor.

Applying the primer came next and while that was easy, the bathroom in question is quite small so I had to contort into some improbable and uncomfortable positions to cover everything inside and outside of the cabinet. Once that was done I had to get cleaned up because it was getting close to the time to pick up my daughter from school and I absolutely refuse to sit in my car waiting for her while feeling that dust on my skin. Needless to say, Dragonwife and me had a talk when she came home Friday evening wondering why the small bathroom wasn’t done yet.

Saturday morning began bright and early with me painting the cabinet. After three coats of paint, it finally began looking decent. One of the contractors told my wife from the get-go during the interview process that there was simply no way to hide the grain pattern in the wood so when she said the cabinet looked good I agreed and called it a win before she could change her mind. Now that left the two cabinet doors and the two small drawers to sand and paint.

Sanding those four items was one of the most time consuming chores I have attempted in recent memory. I’ll be honest and say I have no talent when it comes to this home improvement stuff and as far as woodworking is concerned, I haven’t done anything like that since high school. But it took me hours to properly sand away the layers of varnish on those items. I have no idea if I was doing something wrong of that the cabinet doors and drawers were prepared differently than the vanity.

Understand I have some sense, I did the sanding on the doors and drawers outside on my deck and there was a point about halfway through that I wished I decided to take on the fallen cypress trees instead with my pitiful under-powered electric chainsaw. Somewhere around 4:00pm Saturday I reached a point that I had gotten enough primer and paint on those hateful things to quit for the day.
 All that is left is the back of the cabinet doors and I hope some kind deity might not throw any unexpected issues in front of me when I finally tackle that last segment this coming Friday. Why am I waiting for this coming Friday to finish such a ridiculously small job? Because the next item on my high priority honey-do list is the larger cabinet above the washer and dryer in the laundry closet.

Supposedly, the timeline my wife has for completion of all these projects, both the ones I have been enslaved to do as well as those using contractors, is the middle of December. At this point all I can do is hope that at some point the evil grip 2016 has on me and everyone else will be broken allowing us all to have a happier and much saner 2017. Quite frankly, a large part of that hope hinges on what happens on Election Day. No matter what, the one thing I am sure of is that I will be coughing up wood and varnish dust well into next year.

The situation isn't that bad

I'm still here-sort of-and should be fully functional by October

Time, or the lack of it, totally sucks. The main reason I decided to take a break was because, quite frankly, whenever I tried to sit down at the kitchen table to write several members of my family would invariably rush in and begin some complex project. The usual suspect being my wife who with the assistance of her god-awful expensive blender, made enough noise to wake the dead. The curious counterpoint to making enough noise to trigger a zombie apocalypse is that her blender makes actual human thought impossible when it is used. 
Another issue was a total breakdown in what could be called my creative instinct. I simply couldn't think of a damn thing to write that was even halfway original or interesting. Not that any of my stuff has ever been that inspired to begin with, but even crappy middle age dudes like me would one day like to reach the status of hack writer.

This morning though I reached a bit of a breaking point. I was cutting the backyard feeling disgusted that I was wasting my life in a never ending battle with mother fraking grass. Don't get me wrong, I've never like cutting grass but it's damn near the end of September and I'll probably have to do this shit again one more time before the weather gets cold enough to make my lawn go dormant for the winter.

Somewhere in the back of my head I have this fantasy of buying a fifty-five gallon drum of the most toxic weed killer and spraying it all over my lawn. After that I would burn the now dead grass residue and dance around in the flames laughing like a madman. Some might worry what the neighbors would think if I actually got around to doing those things but they are already working under the assumption that I'm crazy and for better or worse I'm actually okay with them having that opinion of me. They're just a bunch of Trump-loving, semi-suicidal morons deluded enough to think that narcissistic bastard won't frak the country to advance his own interests. My wife on the other hand is another matter, she demands I act civilized and decent in front of the sorry a-holes I am forced to live around. So, that leaves me little else but to take up my writing again and essentially live in the bizarre world that exists between my ears.

I'll leave you with this for now:


      

Thoughts on Childhood's End

One of the laziest tropes in science fiction is the sudden and unexpected arrival of gigantic alien spaceships above the cities of Earth. The most notable example of this sub-genre is the 1990's movie Independence Day where such ships are part of a grand invasion scheme to strip our planet bare of resources. Other than an extreme form of xenophobia that views all other intelligent life as a danger, Independence Day never really explains why these aliens with super engineering skills just don't go around harvesting asteroids, rich in vital strategic metals and frozen water, which are literally floating around in space free for the taking.

A simple cost benefit analysis would show how that instead of attacking and then moving into new planet-side territory, they could easily gobble up what asteroids they need and then head back out into deep space. And if these pesky aliens still felt the need to kill off humanity, all they would have to do is toss a half-dozen ten kilometer asteroids towards Earth and it would be totally game over for us hairless primates. Pretty much all that would be left after such a bombardment would be cockroaches, a few ants, and assorted slime molds and bacteria. Remember, it took just a single ten kilometer asteroid or comet to send the dinosaurs off into eternity.

Honorable mention for this story line has to go to the 1980's television series entitled “V”, where seemingly human looking aliens arrive and proclaim they come in peace and friendship only to once again be after some terrestrial resource, this time it's Earth's water. Never mind that water is abundant all over our solar system, with most of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn being really big snowballs. And I'm not even going to mention the Oort Cloud way out past Pluto which could contain trillions of icy comets, with more than enough water for dozens of thirsty evil alien armadas. Whatever the case, along the way during the “V” series we discover that these aliens are just wearing a human-looking disguise and are in fact quite reptilian in actual appearance.

Unless someone can correct me, the best story involving the sudden arrival of several dozen alien starships above human cities comes from the Arthur C. Clarke book entitled Childhood's End. It would be an awkward but accurate pun to say Clarke's novel leaves both Independence Day and “V” lightyears behind in simple story telling. Which is not hard since this is Arthur C. Clarke I'm talking about, the man was a true visionary. My one problem with him though is that he didn't really look favorably on what he considered science fantasy, (Star Trek, Star Wars) his stories had to have at least some basis in our current understanding of physics and the universe.

Childhood's End was published in 1953 and I read the book probably in the early 1980's. In fact I believe it was quite close to the time Carl Sagan's Cosmos aired on Public Television, and yes, the two did a number on my small brain that I have never really recovered from since.

In the book dozens of alien starships arrive and take up positions above terrestrial cities. But instead of looking to cause death and destruction one of the aliens, named Karellen proclaims to the world they have arrived to prevent humanity from committing suicide and are here to guide us to a more stable, peaceful, and sustainable future. Naturally, humans are suspicious but over the course of a few decades these aliens, called the Overlords, pretty much end human suffering. All during this time, the Overlords don't physically reveal themselves to us humans but hide behind barriers saying that until our species has matured, we would find their form extremely disturbing. Instead they work through one person, the Secretary General of the United Nations, who eventually smuggles a device aboard the alien craft that should allow him to see Karellen's true form. The Secretary General succeeds in his attempt but decides not to tell anyone else what Karellen looks like.

With the aid of the Overlords, humans enter a Golden age but there is a price. First off the Overlords put a stop to human space exploration with the only exception in the book being a manned base on the moon for astronomical research. Secondly, with all the humans on Earth fat and happy not only have all our cultures have become stagnant but technological research has almost stopped completely. I have to chalk that one up to the idea that with the Overlords several thousand years technologically ahead of us there isn't much sense in devoting time to engineering a better coffee maker or television. But things aren't all bad, with everyone getting a decent education no one freaks out when the Overlords finally reveal themselves to the public fifty years after their arrival. Turns out the Overlords look exactly like Christian-themed demons or Satan himself. They are bipedal creatures with cloven hooves for feet along with leathery wings on their backs, long barbed tail, and horns coming out of their heads.

While the Overlords were truthful in that they came to save humankind for our destructive ways, they didn't tell us the entire story. Turns out they are a sort of cosmic midwife for something referred to as the Overmind. See, in the novel we learn that nearly all intelligent species in the universe have to eventually evolve to a higher plane of existence and be adsorbed by the Overmind. An entity that seems to be the Grand Poo-bah of the cosmos. There is simply no choice in the matter, and for humans the first signs of this ascendancy comes from young children who develop telepathic, telekinetic, and a type of collective consciousness that totally freaks out their uncool H. sapien parents. Matters are only made worse when Karellen reveals to the world that because of this change normal humans won't be able to have anymore children. No, the Overlords are not responsible for that side effect, it is either the Overmind being a total dick and preventing conception or just something systemic to the whole process because the kids are on the verge of jumping dimensional planes.

As you can imagine, human civilization falls apart after this with everyone blaming the Overlords for this development. Throw in a human, Jan Rodricks, who stowed away aboard an outbound Overlord starship before the kids got seriously weird and you have the setting for the final act of the novel. By the time Jan comes back from his sightseeing adventure on the Overlord's homeworld normal humans are extinct. The kids are still around but you can't really say their human because they are in the final stages of joining the Overmind.

The Overlord's are cool with Jan permanently staying with them but he declines and offers to go planet-side to record the final moments of the kids linking up with the grand cosmic entity. Jan made this offer mainly because the Overlords occupy an evolutionary dead end and will never be able to make the jump to higher existence like us humans. But they would very much appreciate any information he might be able to discern from the event. But before he departs for Earth's surface, Jan makes an assumption and asks the Overlords about the traumatic encounter they must have had with humanity in the distant past for our species to base our idea of evil on their form. Jan learns from Karellen that the human fear of their form is not based on a past event but a racial premonition that echoed back down through time to the very beginnings of our species.

With Jan planet-side, he radios ups reports of a vast burning column going up into space, which is probably the kids. Afterwards the Earth itself begins to dissolve into transparency, including Jan whose last report mentions a final sense of fulfillment.

Yes, in Childhood's End the author does appear to break his rule about staying as close to real science as possible. Not only that, a reader would have to be pretty low on IQ points not to see the Christian imaginary inherent to the story. It goes beyond the Overlords looking like Satan, and by no fault of their own playing a part in the downfall of Man, and extends to the Overmind standing in for God and the evolved children linking up with it sounds a lot like the Rapture.

Given that I came from a moderately religious family who were regularly exposed to preachers that based their careers on End Times prophecy Childhood's End was an eye opener. Up until that general moment after finishing the book, the ultimate fate of the world and human destiny had been spelled out to me in such exacting details during certain church sermons that in hindsight it almost seems that those preachers were in on the planning of Jesus coming back to Earth. To not only have the creatures standing in for Satan and his fallen angels seem sympathetic along with the Overmind being seemingly less than a benevolent entity was a lot to handle.

As the years have gone by, both the book and the recent miniseries, which is what spurred this post, offer up some intriguing questions about the nature of the universe. For me the first mystery is the nature of the Overmind, I came away both times believing it was neither benevolent nor malevolent, just an inherent function of the universe trying to achieve some sense of itself. All I can say is that if Clarke ever decided to write a prequel to explain the Overmind's “birth” I surely would have bought the book the second I knew of its existence. Secondly, it would have been just as interesting to know the origins of the Overlords and how it was determined they could never evolve to join the Overmind. The Overlords existence also brings up the possibility that there are other species like them in different parts of the universe that occupy similar evolutionary dead ends.

Additionally, I have huge questions as to the nature of the utopia that the Overlords helped us develop here in Earth. Both the book and miniseries strongly suggest that removing all immediate concerns like poverty, hunger, political oppression, and outright fear would not create a culturally dynamic society. That the chief human response to such a condition might be for people to fall into a lowest common denominator situation where everyone just lays around and watches stuff like lowbrow reality shows. Think I might be overstating the case a little? Well, just look here at the good old United States where intelligent and thought-provoking PBS specials only rarely draw any significant attention while such moronic stuff like Duck Dynasty, Real Housewives, and numerous other "reality based" shows are cultural mainstays of popular attention. In short, here in the United States there are numerous ways for a person to develop and enhance themselves both mentally and physically but for Western industrialized societies we are, quite frankly, lazy, fat and embarrassingly ignorant fuckers.

Someone once said that surest way for humans to drive themselves mad and go extinct would be to impose some sort of utopia on us where I every need and desire was met. Unfortunately, I believe that might be the case, which is quite depressing to me since I would prefer to believe we humans might one day mature enough to rid ourselves of the scourges that have held us back since we became self aware.   

       

I suppose Childhood's End can be summed up as a book, and miniseries, that deals with Homo sapiens' place in the greater scheme of the universe and here on Earth. Are we the creation of some supreme entity or just a random accident of evolution? Ignoring the two possibilities of our origin for a moment I think the greater question we face in real life is what is our ultimate destiny. It actually scares me sometimes when I deal with people who just can't see past their own noses and have the imagination of your average rock. All too often our response to seeing our society and world change under our feet is to pull back in fear. You get enough people to do that and all sorts of human-made hell can easily be unleashed.

While the absolute last thing in this real life universe we have to worry about is gigantic alien spaceships turning up above Earth's cities we do have problems staring our species in the face that many just refuse to acknowledge. How and when we ultimately face the issues that threaten the lives of our children will signify our growth as a species, or truly show that we are indeed just a random accident that nature or a very silent and absent God will eventually wipe out of existence. 

Maybe its just me, but redundant comes to mind.

There is much in this world that I admit is over my head. How Bush got reelected in 2004, how that expert in the Constitution and geography Sara Palin still has people that want her to run in 2012, and perhaps strangest of all how Joe Lieberman can get on television and say he is still popular with Democrats after repeatedly stabbing President-elect Obama in the back. But as I was waiting in the theater parking lot for my son, Darth Spoilboy, to break his lip lock on his girlfriend ending their date the NPR game show "Wait...wait don't tell me!" was playing on the radio and they mentioned the item in the above video. I really didn't believe what they were describing so when I got home and after forcing Spoilboy into a cold shower I looked up the video.

Now I understand the concept of a treadmill and how it has certain advantages because I have always preferred running on them than running outside. Running outside in bad weather can really suck and I have an understanding that running on a treadmill is actually easier on the knees but combining a treadmill with running outside just doesn't make any sense to me. After seeing this video somewhere I imagine PT Barnum is laughing his ass off.