Cleaning House for the Holiday

Recently, someone I know from way back in high-school days calls me up and tells me I ought to go to the Rockville (MD) Hometown Holidays.

I have long since decided that I want to be extremely scant, as a rule, in any information I give out to him, or anyone for that matter, over the phone when I can't see who all else is in the room listening to the speakerphone. And as a rule I usually try to be polite when I demur invitations to grace this or that affair with my presence. However, I think I might have been a little rude at first and increasingly moreso as the call progressed. My final words were pretty much "you've got a lot of nerve to even ask me and I say not just No but FUCK NO". Not quite so forcefully said, but that's pretty much it.

I'm pretty much boycotting Rockville and have been doing so for some years. This mostly stems from the fact that the Rockville Police Department was hamstrung, along with all other Maryland police forces, by the fact that there were very few crimes for which officers who weren't also witnesses could move forward with investigation or arrest unless the victim went to a Commissioner of Police and swore out a complaint. I used to be pretty well abused anytime I went across Rock Creek into Rockville and on those occasions where it hurt me enough to actually complain to the cops, they basically told me to fuck off and get lost. Then again, for years and years -- about 15 or so -- I got the exact same treatment from the County cops, who could have saved me a lot of time by just telling me "we're not empowered to enforce the law without a warrant from the Commissioner". Yet such is the difference in professionalism between the two departments that at least the County officers politely listened and did nothing, while the Rockville police radiated hostility and then did nothing. And when my complaints are received with hostility by the police force of some jurisdiction, that's a jurisdiction in which I shall spend as little time as possible, and certainly no money I can spend in places more welcoming.

Then there was that little double-incident on March 17th where I dared to try to buy groceries in Rockville -- and got bird-dogged by two different cops that the City claims don't work for them. That was just icing on the cake, so to speak, and the cherry on top of the icing was when I tried to work through their chain of command and as near as I can tell, was made the subject of a multiple-agency SWAT operation that was aborted only seconds before a forced entry on the basis that I was a probably psychotic terrorist with known militia wackjob tendencies. Well, that's Rockville for you. Comport yourself with dignity and the locals will untie your shoelaces and stab you in the back of the neck, and the cops will organize try to arrest or kill you if you dare to complain.

But I digress.

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The close of Probate draws near. Much of the interior contents of the house have been removed to consignment for liquidation, and the rest of it will be going soon.

However, whatever remains here remains under my responsibility, and although it is covered by a combination of the homeowner's insurance redounding to the Estate and renter's insurance I got to double-cover my own properties, I still don't want to have to deal with the paperwork or the shopping that would be required if the place gets burglarized.

Before too long, there won't be much in the house that's not far too big to carry off, and most of everything else will be insured and generic and easily replaced. Even then, I will be trying to clear out the place. While there's no great need to repair or replace anything in the interior, it's time to tear out some wallpaper and paint the interior, that sort of thing. The less furniture I have here, the less things I need to cover with tarps. The ultimate goal is to clear out the place to the point where everything I have can be easily and quickly squeezed into a rather small shipping container.

But do I once again digress?

---

As I told my homeboy on the phone, he's got to be nuts if he thinks I'm going to go hang out in Rockville at some pretentious little bash the city puts on every year to pat itself on the back and let the politicians think they're doing something useful. No, I do not like crowds, you know, I told him, and as time goes on I like them less and less.

But you used to go down to DC to this and that event, he says, and that's a fact and I agree, with the explanation: that was because I was going some place to do something, or to see someone. I didn't tell him this but it should go without saying: Generally speaking, the District doesn't weird me out just because it's the District. If it wasn't a half-hour drive with no free parking anywhere, I'd spend most of my time there, because unlike Rockville, it's actually important, and actually interesting things happen there.

The District doesn't weird me out, and quite a lot of people who are actually from there (or close enough to be considered locals) know me well enough to point me out as someone you respect enough to hang out with and occasionally invite to parties. There are people down there I've been boozing it up with since the mid-1980s and we might not be close friends but we are known quantities not at odds with each other. Many of the spies and vampires might mutter "son of a bitch" when they see me, but even they will shut down anyone trying to diss me as a God Damn Tourist, by telling them "he lives here".

And in my heart, I do. Such a shame I can't make it down there anymore. There are few things more spectacular than watching the sun rise over the Capital Building, and watching them run up the flags. You can really feel the love. That's something I've never felt in Rockville, or any of the surrounding areas.

There's something special about that building, you know. From the National Archives (correspondence between the Commissioners to Thomas Jefferson regarding construction of the Capitol and White House)

On December 24, 1792, Thomas Hardman, overseer, and 24 laborers working under him were paid for 64 days service for assisting the surveyors [...] a December 1794, payroll lists 26 laborers working under Hardman. Only thirteen were slaves [...]

There's other stuff floating around, something to do with being in charge of counting salmon colored bricks.

I probably should have found or made a way to move back downtown, but it was not to be.

---

Noted in passing:

• Today was "snake day" along the Rock Creek Park Trail. Just off of the trail, a good sized King Snake, clearly on the hunt. Also, a tiny little thing, splotched with shades of brown, lying right there in the middle of the trail. I'm pretty sure it was a baby copperhead. With a stick, I prodded him until he crawled off into the weeds, where he won't get run over by cyclists.
• Though "Dust Wars" activity is down somewhat, it's still ongoing. Over the holiday, it was pretty much every other car that was blowing visible clouds of nasty dust out of their windows, making signs at nose height, and then hanging their arms out of the car windows like they just proved they were a man or somesuch simian crap. Yet another reason to not hang out in crowd. Or for that matter, go shopping. Clearly these people don't want me to come out of my house and spend money at local businesses. I think that I agree: so long as they are on the streets, I don't spend one cent here which I don't actually need to spend.

Frankly, I think the cops need to do the obvious thing, which is to put a lot of plainclothes officers in quite a few unmarked cars and cruise up and down various secondary arterials. East-bound Bobby can call West-bound Larry and say "I see 12 cars down Larry, and the hispanic asshole in the crappy blue Camry five cars ahead of you just dusted me"... and about 20 cars behind East-bound Bobby, East-bound Arturo comes across the double-yellow line into a crappy blue Camry and totals both cars. While Arturo and the perpetrator are duking it out, West-bound Larry comes up and snags the evidence, which will probably be in a 10cc screw-top vial rolling around on the floorboards. It will be interesting to know the composition of this stuff. Is it just plain old-fashioned Goofer Dust or is it something more... Taliban? You know, something liberated from the Libyan weapons stores and foisted off on superstitious boneheads here with the explanation "it gonna fix that white devil you don't like".

Anyway. I am on a consumer strike until this shit stops, and remember, "justice left unseen is justice left undone". Further, I think it's very important that these terrorists win, so as I am cleaning house for the holiday, I'm packing to move away.

It Takes A Village to Raise A Village Idiot, Part 1

First, an apology for my over-the-top postings over the last few weeks. I always get seriously outraged when we have Dust Wars.

These always occur to some some degree towards the close of the school year, at least in the last five or so years. Yet in most years "they" don't go so madly buzzing about filling the air with nastiness. This year, for me at least, it started when I put signs in my yard about upcoming meeting of the Aspen Hill Civic Association, Inc. And interestingly enough, the night of their semi-annual General Membership meeting, the moment I took the signs down and took them back to their owner, the harassment stopped. Totally. On that instant. I'd call that pretty damn well an obvious case of cause and effect.

I can only associate this with the whole sad affair being a political gang action to dissuade me from attending. However, anyone who thinks that I'm a big enough risk to their political ambitions so as to warrant sending around a couple dozen or so minions to play chemical warfare, well, I'm pretty sure that you got noticed for what you are and how you operate. And I'm perfectly able to communicate my opinions without showing up at public meetings where I am in any case already quite uncomfortable. If anyone was hoping to keep me from showing up and voicing a well-reasoned argument in support of something, anything, to replace the dead space of the former BAE Building in the Aspen Hill Central Business District, I certainly didn't show up... but people you dare not harass did show up and there will be motion in the direction we want. And if it was to keep me from speaking out against relaxing the rules for Accessory Apartments, let's just say that it's a lot more people than just me who will force the issue to be resolved in our favor at the Planning Board and County Council. That is all. Chemical warfare from foreign gangsters notwithstanding. You might be able to keep me pinned down inside, but you can't do it to everyone. If you even try, on the one hand you'll be dealing with the Department of Homeland Security and on the other hand you'll be dealing with open revolution from people who have had about enough of the American Hating Foreign Racists and Assholes Who Instigate Them.

---

That's all of the over-the-top that you're getting from me today.

---

Well, here's a little video experiment in Irony and Altitude.

I should mention that this was filmed with one of the first of the New Generation of remote-controlled model helicopters. This is a smallish one -- the bare bones unit is about the size of a shoebox -- and there will soon be much less-expensive models which have even greater capabilities. This one is marketed to the semi-skilled technophile, the sort of person who is adept with their iPod(tm) or Android(tm). The Next Generation which should start hitting the markets within 18 months are far more capable:

Note that FAA is relaxing rules on drone operations on US soil amid significant privacy concerns.

I should mention, in passing, that my own unit is, of course, Made In China, although the developers and the originators of the software are a French company, Parrot.

---

Of course, privacy is an evolving concern in the modern day. For example, despite repeated attempts to build a laptop-based controller using the vendor's software-development kit ("SDK"), I was never able to get that to work, and had to buy an iPod Touch(tm), a tiny little device that comes equipped with a 3-axis gyro and accelerometer sensor set along with everything else. The app for that works great.

Yet having paid for this device with a debit card, to get much use out of it at all, I had to provide almost as much information as I'd have to supply to apply for a passport, everything except for the Social Security number. I predict that this handy gadget will spend most of its time at home plugged into a charger and turned off, unless I'm bored enough to play Angry Birds or actually pay attention to Twitter... or if I'm using it for a drone controller. Frankly I have privacy concerns, mostly to do with the eventuality that if I carried it everywhere and had the location reporter activated, it would not likely be long before it started sending me alerts to super hot deals every time I walked into any store.

Yet most people seem to accept a total loss of privacy as being a price of progress.

One question that might seem reasonable is this: given that the Supreme Court has long since ruled that searches may be considered reasonable of conducted from the air, which might not be reasonable if conducted on the ground, should people be worried about the proliferation of such devices as my little hobby toy?

You see, if I was a police officer, and you were smoking marijuana in your back yard where I could not see you, and the wind was blowing in such a way that I could not smell you, if I were to enter into your back yard and arrest you, almost any court would invalidate the arrest. There was (and could be) no reasonable suspicion not stemming from actual trespassing without a warrant.

If, however, I was a police officer flying in a plane, and looked down and saw someone smoking marijuana in their back yard, I could certainly transmit that reasonable suspicion to an officer on the ground and he could maneuver until he could smell it, and there's reasonable suspicion and you're busted. That one, or a variant or three on that theme, has been to the Supreme Court and they allowed it.

Airplanes are expensive and fuel is also costly. Helicopters used to fill the air, and now you hardly ever hear them chopping by, now that fuel costs eight times as much as it did in 1980. Yet my little hobby toy is electrical, very lightweight, and not large at all. It can ascend to and hover at about three times the altitude seen in the video, above, and if I were a police officer, I could see a heck of a lot of backyards. The drone types now allowed by the FAA, and affordable mostly to organizations of a minimum size comparable to your average fire department or police department, have far greater capabilities in terms of time aloft, reliable control link distances, and potentially for onboard equipment such as signals intercept or multiple cameras with high-quality optics and telephoto lenses.

---

Yet let's not just look at the ramifications of ubiquitous law enforcement in the form of a hovering camera drone at every 4-way stop sign, despite the fact that this would be a tax bonanza far beyond even the avaricious dreams of people who put speed cameras on every other block.

Let's look at the ramifications of a time perhaps 30 years from now, when all of the hot young techie gals have aged into suspicious matrons who really want to know whose kids are doing what over there at the park.

More to come! (We promise that we personally will, like German broadcast television, never retain or broadcast any images whatsoever of attractive females.)

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Nazi Punks Fuck Off, Or, Waving Goodbye With A Smile

But before they lay down,
the men of the city,
even the men of Sodom,
compassed the house round,
both young and old,
all the people from every quarter; [...]

---

As of next August, I will have lived here for 50 years.

Where's "here"?

"Here" is Aspen Hill, Montgomery County Maryland, in the Greater Washington DC Metropolitan Area of the United States. It goes without saying that this is on the homeworld Earth, but I thought I'd mention it anyway.

This place once had a great many things to recommend it. First, in the beginning, in the 1960s, Montgomery County had some of the most excellent schools in the nation, and given that so many of the parental generation at the time were some of the best and brightest people alive, working in the service of their nation as employees of the Federal government or its many technical contracting firms, the greatest asset of the community was the people, both the parent generation and their children.

When we moved here, the neighborhood was far from complete. We lived at one extreme end of a subdivision where houses were still being built or had just been completed. A very few trees remained from before the subdivision and development, but mostly this was a lot of former farmer's fields which still had the occasional fence posts in this or that yard, still studded with scraps of barbed wire. In my back yard is a beech tree, a mature specimen which I could once encircle with both of my childish hands. Now it's far too large to reach embrace with both arms. Face it. I'm a tree hugger. I was a tree hugger then, and I'm a tree hugger now, even when the trees are too big to hug, and even when they are -- much like myself -- well entered into the ending phases of their lives.

When I was a kid, I liked the people just fine, most of them, anyway. Now, having lived here almost 50 years, I barely speak to any of them. I don't go out from my yard other than because I must, to shop for essentials or to get some exercise. When I take a walk, I don't take it on the streets of my neighborhood because quite frankly they are unsafe. It's not because of the sort of crime that you find in police statistics, however. So what is it that keeps me effectively a prisoner without conviction, or even visible jailers?

Second Witch
   By the pricking of my Thumbs,
   Something wicked this way comes.
   Open, Locks,
   Whoever knocks.

[Enter Macbeth.]

Macbeth
   How now, you secret, black, and midnight Hags?
   What is't you do?

All 
        A deed without a name.

---

My mother's dead, and seeing her through her declining years was the main reason I've stayed when, quite frankly, far too many the locals have gone so far out of their way to be unbearable pricks that if it weren't for Mom I'd have preferred to be homeless anyplace else rather than have a home here.

There's a really great movie called Europa, Europa, in which a Jewish teenager escapes the Holocaust -- just barely -- by pretending to be an Aryan and joining the Hitler Youth.

There are some scenes in there that really resonate with me. No, not the part about him spending hours a day trying to stretch his foreskin so that he will look uncircumcised and could fearlessly shower with his Nazi "friends". There's a part where he's almost ready to confess to his girlfriend, and she starts talking about how horrid are the Jews and how she longs for the day when they're all dead, and says something to the effect of how she hopes that they save a few for her to kill. Through this fine (if chilling) performance by the young and lovely Julie Delpy, one sees a fine depiction of one of the more frightening and yet deeply human emotions: a bloodthirsty race hatred. Yes, as she speaks in sweet tones of longing and passion about murder of every last Jew in the world, you can see every last tooth in her head as the protagonist finally realizes that she's not smiling at him with affection, she's smiling like she can't wait to lock her teeth into someone's spurting neck. And that if at that moment he had confessed, he probably would have been that someone.

I see that smile all too often hereabouts. Quite frequently it's on the face of someone who has just uttered the word "bloodsucker". Frankly I'm less worried about any supposed bloodsuckers and more worried about the people smiling their bloodthirsty smiles of racist rapture and talking about "kill them all". Because, thinking back to "Europa, Europa", the only reason that Delpy's character wasn't out there actually participating in "kill them all" was the fact that in the story, she was slightly too young a teenager.

Here in the occasional modern eruption of bloodthirsty race hatred that washes across Aspen Hill and the greater region, no teenager is considered too young.

---

Once they'd seen what the Christian Germans were capable of becoming and doing, those Jews that survived almost universally left that part of Europe. I cannot imagine anyone going through that three times and still remaining. Not even if it had the best schools on the continent and lots of ethnic restaurants.

---

I'm not sure, to tell the truth, how anyone could call schools "the best" when they don't take really extreme measures to cover the history and the horror of mass perversion of mob psychology, and aggressively teach all students how important it is to have their own solid moral and ethical standards which intentionally shy away from mob action, or even mob affiliation. Regardless of academic standards and top flight instructional process, I couldn't call a school system "best" which seems to promote a state of alert readiness to organize and aggressively develop mobs and their chain-of-command or communications systems.

And to judge from recent observations, "why of course we have a smartphone App for that!" Whether it's developed, released and controlled by the schools or a consortium of local religious institutions, I couldn't say, but I think that unless the local, state, and federal governments want to be in the position of looking as if they don't just condone but actively support this, they need to be able to say. Publicly, and with authority. As in "there will be immense fines and significant prison time".

During the recent irruption of mass psychosis, I see two girls walking home from school with another much smaller girl. Watching the body language and listening as best I could from across the street, the older teens were informing the younger one of what was going on and how she could be expected to participate... and they were smiling that bloodthirsty nazi smile. Other bizarre stuff was happening, such as a police officer setting up a checkpoint at my intersection, etc. A little while later, the officer left, and back up the street came the two teens, looking glum as if someone had just stolen their cookie jar, reading texts off of their cellphones, with their little girl charge in tow. And as they passed, the little girl kept looking at me, and looking at them, and all of it back and forth, and all with the same smile we see on Julie Delpy's face in "Europa, Europa"... and she's asking "can we do it now? Can we?" Out of the mouths of babes you shall hear truth.

And that's why I'm clearing out the house to ready it for sale. I do not want to live someplace where the teenagers are instructed by their cellphones to teach first-graders to look forward to satisfying their nazi bloodthirst...

And that's just one tip of an iceberg in an Arctic ocean full of them.

---

Ringleader, Ringleader, Henchman, Stooge

It's astonishing how many people hear that there's a riot in progress and decide that they're going to run right out and join in.

But that's Montgomery County, Maryland, for you.

I have no idea what sets these people off, other than that they think they smell blood in the water and they do their best imitation of sharks in a feeding frenzy.

It's really difficult to even try to imagine how any collection of people could be more contemptible. Yet there's a saying that comes right out of Scripture that for the sake of 10 good men, a city or nation or world could be preserved. The willful sinners will of course get their own reward in their own way and in their own time, this is something on which almost all religions and ethical systems agree.

Yet I cannot wait until the next time I see them running around in the streets waving their hands and wailing about how bad things are, when I know them so very well and can realistically say that they didn't get a tenth of what they deserve.

I think I'll go crash some stock markets now.

Perhaps A Little Explanation Is Long Overdue

It may have come to the attention of certain powers that be that upon occasion, I will be out working in my yard, smoking a cigarette, trying to relax, whatever... and someone will go driving by and I immediately give them the finger and look pretty goddamn furious.

Here's the explanation. I am in fact furious. But first some background...

There are various chemicals out there which are listed as "generally regarded as safe", or "GRAS" in terms of the Food and Drug Administration and industries which answer to that Federal agency.

"GRAS" products have in the past included such things as peanuts, peanut butter and other peanut-derived products, white glue, and gelatin. White glue and gelatine are no longer on the GRAS list, or are listed in a sidebar to the GRAS list, because of the threat of prionic diseases, to wit, "Mad Cow" disease. Both white glue and gelatin are made of parts of cattle generally not considered fit for human consumption, with the gelatin being much more finely treated to render it suitable for eating.

Please note that in recent years, so many people have developed allergies to peanuts and related products that now it's required to post a sign that peanuts are in use, and to prominently label products which contain peanuts as such. Why? Because someone MIGHT DIE if they aren't warned.

Now imagine that some asshole -- and I mean a genuine fucking asshole of the sort that ought to be kicked up and down the street by any and all decent persons -- finds out that someone is allergic to peanuts, and makes a powder out of crushed dried peanuts. They then follow a person who is allergic to peanuts, and throw peanut powder on them. You know, just enough to make the allergic person really really sick, you know. Further, they find other assholes of their own type and caliber, and enlist them to their team. The poor bastard with the allergies to peanuts may have no idea, at first, what it going on. They go out of their way to be sure they aren't missing some signs warning them of peanut products in use, they double-wash all of their apparel to be sure there isn't some sort of contamination, and eventually they notice that usually when the symptoms of "mild to medium reaction" to peanuts start, it's right after they've passed a certain asshole, or his friends... and further, at the moment that symptoms begin, these certain assholes make a very specific gesture that nobody else makes. They hold their hands in a very specific way, and then point that gesture at their nose.

Our allergy victim quickly learns to recognize that when they see that gesture, they are about to get sick, or are just starting to get sick from the peanut dust to which they were just intentionally exposed. Pavlovian conditioning, operant conditioning, whatever you want to call it, starts setting in.

And I guarantee you, pretty darn soon, every time they see that gesture being made, they're going to give the finger to whoever is doing it. Long after the peanut dust stops flying, the sight of that gesture is going to remind the allergy victim of the perhaps hundreds of times they felt their throat close up and started choking, felt the hives forming, or even fell out on the ground and had to be rushed to the hospital.

This is pure fucking TERRORISM on the part of the assholes -- smirking fuckwads who think they're just so funny and clever -- and there is no other way for a moral or ethical person to see this. Terrorism. That's all.

Now, this has happened to me and it occasionally still happens to me. Peanuts isn't my particular allergen and I won't divulge what is my particular allergen, but let me point out something.

Body language quite frequently translates easily into words. Giving someone the finger basically means "fuck off and die". To our peanut-allergy victim, that particular gesture given by a terrorizing gang of utter fuckwads means "I just poisoned you, and you can't do anything about it". Damned right the victim can't do anything about it, because they're experiencing anaphylactic shock. Chasing after the bastards will probably only get them a greater exposure, and quite possibly death.

Maryland being Maryland, there appears to be no law against this, and Marylanders being Marylanders, assholes just fucking abound: and in fact local culture seems to far prefer assholes to civility. Maybe it's not really that bad, and maybe it only takes about one in ten people being a complete shithead to make an entire State look like it's overrun with shit-for-brains fucktards who ought to be jailed for decades instead of left at large to terrorize any victims they can hunt up.

These fuckheads and their "antics" terrorized me out of college and I'd rather be a volunteer for a dental school during a novacaine shortage rather than set foot in College Park. I wound up getting hired by the Federal government shortly after I dropped out, and the same smirking fuckheads (or at least their fellow fuckwads with that same subcultural trick and gesture) followed me into work and drove me out of my Federal job, although it took three miserable years before I finally abandoned hopes of that career track. I fled across the country three times and wherever I wound up, it wasn't long before the terrorism began again, although to the credit of the police of Austin Texas they put a quick stop to that, because although Texas has no shortage of assholes, they are serious about enforcing their laws. Unlike certain other States, which don't seem to have any law against it and wouldn't enforce it if they did. In Maryland, harassment is in fact a crime but good luck getting this one prosecuted without a cop catching someone right in the act of flinging "GRAS" powder around. Most people won't even notice it. People sensitive to that chemical or set of chemicals live in absolute fear, PTSD, and increasing madness, thinking moreso every day that it's not just terrorists, it's terrorists with a personal vendetta.

Of course, these smirking fuckwads are having a hilariously fun time unstoppably harassing their special victims into madness and potentially worse things. And when I see them, I'm furious, and I do in fact give them the finger. And if you're a cop and you see me giving the finger to some smirking fuckwad flinging shit out the window of their car, making that special gesture with their hand held "just so" up to their face, keep in mind that it may not bother you, but somewhere in your rear-view mirror is someone who is allergic to some chemical that doesn't bother you, but which is killing that person with the allergies. You just witnessed participation in gangster terrorism and didn't do shit about it, presumably because you did not know. Well, now you know.

When I am out there looking furious and giving someone the finger, that's the same finger I'd give to Osama Bin Laden or any other TERRORIST.

Taxing My Wits in Mid-April 2012

Greetings to all, happy Tax Day to all and sundry.

Noted in passing, as I didn't have much income last year, I didn't pay a lot in Federal taxes. I barely made it to the level where I was required to file, but I did make it to that level, and I did file.

Electronic filing was new to me, and frankly it's a lot easier and faster than filling out hardcopy forms and mailing them. Yet the site I chose was one which will do the State and local taxes at the same time it does the Federal taxes, and I elected that option. Imagine my amazement when it turned out that the combined Maryland and Montgomery taxes amounted to almost double my Federal taxes.

This shit has gotten just way the fuck out of hand.

---

Moving right along, reasonable people will understand that I've been a bit depressed recently, and you can't much blame me for that. Even before my parents finally passed from this life, I had a laundry list of "reasons to be uncheerful".

I suppose I should share some of the more obvious ones:

• When I returned to the area in 1996 or so, the District of Columbia was on the verge of economic collapse, and if you're not depressed by the impending fiscal and cultural implosion of your own nation's capital, you're definitely no sort of patriot. Yet there was something I could do, and I did it. At a slightly different website, I developed what was probably one of the very first "blogs", not that I called it that. This project -- a sidebar to me teaching myself the ins-and-outs of UNIX-like operating systems and applications -- may be seen at the archive of Washington DC -- Not A Pretty Site (nor sight). Yet it was a bitter struggle for me to even pretend to anything other than blatant angst of the heart-on-your-sleeve variety. Mostly I was hanging out -- online and in real life -- with folks in the Gothic movement, since for one thing they cared about the arts and the intellectual pursuits as much as I did, and for another thing, if I was seriously depressed and for good reasons, they mostly felt about the same way.

• Even as the DCFRA "Control Board" created by Congress to take over the affairs of the District government went ahead and started fixing things, even as Tony Williams from Accounting got drafted to run for Mayor, the nation was being invaded. It was a generally peaceful invasion of at least a million persons per year, most of whom filled hard-to-fill jobs in agriculture, at least when they first arrived. Those jobs were hard to fill for a reason, and as soon as any other position could be found, these people would move on, only to be replaced by the people coming right behind them, who would also move on. And to where did they move on? Construction, light industrial work, fast food jobs, and they came to dominate the entry-level job markets and eventually they excluded almost everyone else from access to entry level positions and when people started organizing against them -- most were not here legally by any measure or definition -- it turns out that these millions upon millions of illegal aliens were far more organized than the locals. The locals offered no significant opposition in any real way, and were outnumbered on the one hand by the well-organized millions and on the other side were oppressed by political figures and their appointees, all of whom had deep-pockets campaign-contributors seeking exploitable cheap labor. 15 years later, in 2012, the sort of entry-level and labor positions which once were the recourse of returning Veterans and the salvation of many homeless, these positions are available only to the gangster-organized labor rackets' faithful tithe payers. You've gotta have some money to make some money, and good luck even then if you do not speak Spanish.

• After getting myself to a level of competence amounting to "professional", I was working in the IT field as a network administration tech, not too far below the rank of "network engineer". In a pinch I could do most of that job, too, and was getting paid to do it. Then in mid-2000 came the "dot bomb" and half of the industry was sent packing to flood the ranks of the unemployed. The usual stand-by work ("yes, I am working at FastFood Inc right now but before, I was an engineer") was not available, having been flooded by well-organized illegal aliens. Alternatives in technical fields weren't available either; due to a so-called "shortage of skilled labor" the H-1B Visa was deeply abused. While tens of thousands of citizens with engineering degrees and experience went on unemployment because they couldn't even get a job flipping burgers, 60,000 foreigners were imported to completely fill every last technical job available in the country... at wages far less than the local engineers would have had to be paid even in this downturn.

• September 11, 2001 came and went and with it went a lot of national innocence. Far from being at peace in a peace-loving world after the collapse of the Soviet Empire, we lived in a world where it seemed that everyone almost everywhere hated the USA and its few remaining allies, hated them enough to organize suicide missions striking terror into our cities and killing thousands outright. The nation went to war, and more than a decade later, we're still in fucking Afghanistan. Meanwhile, back in the States, my own specialties in IT were increasingly "offshored". Management and other corporate types had realized that if they could import foreign workers to work on the cheap, how much less expensive would it be to move the work to the foreign workers. I tried everything, cutting my rates, working as a 1099 contractor rather than seeing W-4 work, not any bites and not much of a nibble. Most of the nibbles consisted of people who intended to use H-1B but had to advertise before deciding, and a lot of these told me as much. Brief stints on the periphery of the military or intelligence community contractors didn't go well as their mindset and outlook is pretty alien to me. Hey, I just like to tend servers and deploy applications and generate content, not destroy people's countries or sneak around other people's countries making sure it never comes to that.

• The economy comes back from the double-whammy of the Dot Bomb and then Nine-Eleven, and just as it seems I might get hired back to a full time job, a rise in fuel prices caused a decline in housing value and that revealed a half-decade of Wall Street's total irresponsibility and playing strange games with Other People's Money. This caused an implosion in the world financial markets, and follow-on waves of economic near-collapse and delayed collapse continue to wash through the global markets and economies. Further, the cost of fuel is up at the same levels as triggered the last meltdown.

• Last, but not least, even if there was work -- and work in my field -- available to me in the last 3 or so years, I couldn't take it because I was the live-in elder-care person at my mom's house. And now that I no longer need to be in that role, for reasons which should be obvious to actual human beings, damned if I feel like doing much at all. Even if I somehow could stop feeling so terrible over the loss of not one, but both, parents within 6 months of each other, intellectually I should be able to look at the last decade and see how it was: every time I dared to hope for a better immediate future, unforeseen and frequently bizarre events entirely outside of my ken or control came and slammed the world (or my industry) so hard that hope would have been symptomatic of a total disconnect with reality.

In summary, then, why yes I am just not too goddamn happy.

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Well, life does go on. At least, it goes on if you bother to eat and drink and breathe and wear clothing and have housing suitable to the weather. Yet rolling through mere existence isn't enough.

Various things have provided some solace and distraction. Some things have had to be avoided.

Retail therapy has had some value, but to be honest most of that is simply me catching up with required maintenance or upgrade expenses, but now with a little more cash in hand than I'd been saving from my stipend, all of the maintenance or upgrade is pretty much done, and spending any more money than necessary would be effectively frivolous. At this point in my life, I don't do frivolous well; too far out of practice.

Some home-improvement efforts were long overdue and I am "getting around to it". Long overdue, better lighting in the upstairs hallway, and a contractor has been secured who does good work and handles all of the permitting paperwork. Also long overdue, I'm going to wait until the weather is just perfect and then pressure-wash the house and repaint it. I need to get a permit to rebuild the porch and I guess I'll do that, too.

Yet it seems that finding and doing busy-work isn't going to be enough to lift me out of depression, or so it seems. I'm told that the passage of time will do wonders, but what I think I really need is a mission.

I also need to go outside and do some yard work, and this has been enough background and update. If I figure out a mission, something to do that will get me out of my funk and my rut, I'll be sure to let you know. Maybe even here...

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April Fooling Writer's Block; and, Fragment Generation

(2012 April 2, very minor edit for clarity. Stet.)

Yesterday I was a listening-only participant in a "webinar", or "web seminar". This gave me a chance to listen to some speechifying by some well-respected published SF writers, among them Nancy Kress. Given her track record of writing, publication, and sales, when Nancy Kress speaks, I listen and take notes. I won't go into too much detail, but she covered the concept of creating tension within stories, at every level from the sentence, through the section, through the entire work. I suppose I can try to start applying her advice as best I can, wherever possible.

Meanwhile, back to the current collection of fragments-of-story...

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(fragment 120401-1, copyright 2012 TJ Hardman Jr and no doubt this is total fiction.)

"Never trust a cop that doesn't call for backup."

"Wheels, there's got to be some reason you make these remarks just totally out of the blue!"

"Wheels" Barrow rolled his eyes a little bit, sipped coffee, rolled his eyes a bit more as he lifted his ball cap and scratched behind his ear, then said, "Well, seriously. I know a man who got in serious trouble because he didn't know that rule."

"How so?"

"Lemme tell you a story. Has to do with our current case, tangentially, so it's not entirely out of the blue. Okay, this guy thinks he's being harassed by not one, but two police officers and he can't figure out why. So, he tries to work his way up the ladder of the chain of command, and all he's getting is a lot of folks telling him that nothing happened, nobody knows anything, the person who would know isn't here, they'll be back next week, etc etc etc. Our man is getting a trifle annoyed, presses a little too hard, next thing he knows he gets a voicemail telling him to call so-and-so, so-and-so has a secretary who tells our man to hang around the phone and wait for a call from the person he wants to contact, etc etc. So, the call comes, the superior our man wanted to reach is getting the idea that our man is a wackjob, or worse yet he's a terrorist trying to push people's buttons to see what happens, determine procedure or lack thereof, whatever. So he's got the whole damn SWAT team parked a block over, snipers are dressing up as bushes and infiltrating neighboring properties, the whole nine yards."

Wheels paused for effect. His partner's phone chirped and she expertly unclipped the back and pulled the battery. Wheels favored her with something like a mild grin. "Do go on," she said. The grin got bigger and Wheels continued:

"Meanwhile, our guy barely has any idea that the number three man in a city police department has got the whole squad and all of their cousins loaded for bear and camping in his back yard. He's trying to figure out what happened, did he maybe look like someone wanted for questioning, is he the near-twin of the neighborhood child molester, did one of his business rivals try to pull a fast one by dropping the dime on him the day before bidding opens... maybe his ex-wife or old girlfriend is having conniptions and sicced the cops on him, in not one incident, but in two places in two hours on opposite ends of town. He's not a happy camper. The officer on the other end of the phone is running a stock script to push at all of the standard buttons that are all well-known to set off wackjobs, and he's dropping just enough clues to make any spy or other information seeker jump up and down in ecstasy. Depending on how our man answers, the officer can figure out whether to give the Go Code or just write this off as some sort of unplanned exercise in protocol.

"Meanwhile, our man is getting more and more annoyed because as near as he can tell, the officer on the other end of the line is trying to baffle him with even more bullshit than he's gotten from the rest of the department over the last week of fruitless efforts to connect. He thinks the officer is either doing that, or maybe he's a bozo who's just not listening. The officer thinks that this is the weirdest wackjob he's ever talked to and it's just getting weirder. Our man doesn't care about insider information about special -- and fictional -- programs in counterterrorism, he doesn't care about space aliens or Republicans trying to take over the government and make our kids drink fluoridated water, none of that crap. This is freaking out our officer on the other end of the line.

"Eventually he figures out that the guy on the other end of the line is sincere... but that's even worse, because the officers he described don't match the description of any of the staff of the officer talking to our guy. He asks our guy for more detail, uniform color and type, etc. The guy describes the uniform of that officer's department, and furthermore describes a car in the colors and logo of the city department, and the officer asks our guy what were the unit numbers stenciled on the vehicle. Our guy can't tell him, says he didn't even think to look. The officer stands down the strike force, and tells our guy, look, the officers you describe, well, I don't have any such officers in our department.

"Our guy tells the officer that he can't figure it out, in any case he's told the officer everything he knows, it's for the officer to figure out which of his officers are coming out of the woodwork for no apparent reason, maybe someone's giving them bad tips or something. The conversation ends with nobody being satisfied and with our guy having potentially gotten taken down for pretty much nothing, and/or our officer being left as the fall guy when a civilian gets taken down for trying to lodge a complaint against officers in his force. You see? Could have gone very badly indeed and it's probably luck that it turned out even this well."

"Well, fuck me then," muttered Jen. Wheels grinned widely, as this was his favorite thing about his sometime partner. Got a problem to solve? Stakes are high? Jen would mutter something generally obscene and dive right in. He checked his watch.

"Um!" Jen actually bounced up and down. Wheels's watch showed eight seconds had elapsed. "Got an idea?"

"Never trust a cop that doesn't call for backup, you said earlier. I asked you why and you tell me this story. Okay, what kind of cop doesn't call for backup, and then is declared by the shift commander for that time and day to not answer the description of any officer on the force?"

"Yeah," Wheels said, "Tell me what kind of cop that is."

Jen bounced again, beaming like a little kid with a new toy. "He's not a cop at all," she said.

"Buy the woman a donut, I says to myself," said Wheels. "Look, here's the description of Out of Control Officer Number Two," and he recited, and paused for effect. "Sound familiar?"

"Um..."

"Remember Client Fifteen?"

"Oh!" Concentration washed across her expression and she said, "It's the guy from the grocery store. And the liquor store. And the library. Right?"

"There's a lot of that going around eh?" Wheels smirked. "Or at least there's that one guy going around to a lot of places... and dressing up like staff, and harassing Client Fifteen... and at least half of the other clients. If it's not the same guy, it's two or more different people that all have very similar descriptions... and it would appear, they also have a collection of uniforms that they wear during their activities. Though you have to admit, it takes bravery -- or maybe desperation -- to dress up as a fake cop."

"No shit." Jen grew somber as she pondered the ramifications. "This comes pretty close to 'will stop at nothing' in terms of boldness." Her expression grew brighter for a moment. "What about the other officer? Is he fake too? And what about the city squad car?"

"I have an idea on that. Out of Control Officer Number One is the one with the squad car. And the man in my story is actually pretty observant, if a trifle nearsighted. Even if he couldn't make out the whole number in the unit stencil, he'd have gotten something... but he didn't. Out of Control Officer Number One is also someone not answering the description of anyone working that day on that shift, and those actual officers who answer something like that description all have great alibi. So where do you get a car that looks exactly like a city squad car? Without, you know, stealing one from the car yard?"

"Beats me with a rubber hose," Jen remarked. "I got nothing."

"I have an idea, and when I finish this coffee and you finish your donut, we are going to drive on over and see what people look like somewhere, see if they match descriptions of any of our cops that don't call backup, and sometimes dress up as grocery store employees or liquor store employees, or dress up in suits and wave bogus County ID at people..."

Jen bit a huge bite off of her donut. Jelly squished out and she caught it with a napkin before it could add another stain to her Frumpy Housewife disguise. She gulped and asked "So where exactly is this place?"

"A question with a question," Wheels told her, "and you missed a spot." He reached out and dabbed with a napkin at her chin. She held still for him for a second, and then said, "C'mon, the suspense is killing me..."

"We're just going to head on over and hurry up and wait, you know," he teased. She gave him her best "spill the beans, dammit" look and he leaned back and finished the last of his tepid coffee, then spoke.

"Where do you find at least a few squad cars outside of the car yard, all with perfect markings, but maybe no stencils? You know, where does the department take its cars to be painted after body work?"

Jen sat up bolt upright for about a half-second and then began scrambling out of the diner seat. "The body shop. I've been by there. Half a dozen cars are there, every damn day."

Wheels stood and dropped a twenty on the table and waved to the waitress. To Jen he said, "And what do you want to bet that one of their staffers is real good buddies with someone in the uniform supply or laundry business?"

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