Trump is Stupid, and Putin Loves him for it.

Like you, I am watching the destruction of our nation happen in real time. Trump could simply put stupid people in charge of our government, but he has to go one further and put stupid people uniquely antagonistic toward their mission in charge of our government.

RFK Jr is a spineless idiot whose only contribution to humanity is the death of 83 people. Actually, that’s just one campaign, it’s pretty clear he has killed many more.

And that’s only the start. We have a QAnon queen in charge of Intelligence. Even the name of the department should disqualify her! She is a puppet of Russia and if I were an intelligence asset in that country I’d be grabbing my go-bag about now. Boebert is so goddam stupid it makes my head hurt.

Oh, and hey, let’s put a sexual predator (and Trump sexual predation enabler) in charge of the department of justice! Why the fuck not? You know this guy will put the law first.

Donald Trump is a stupid man. Really fucking stupid. He honestly doesn’t understand how important his job is. Sure he knows that it makes him a really big deal, but he has no idea at all that there is responsibility that goes with that.

Meanwhile, over in Mother Russia, Vladimir Putin is laughing his ass off. Ukraine is now his. His right to poison dissidents will not be questioned. And all he had to give up were a few flattering words to a little toadstool.

1

It’s Been Quite a Year

A little over a year ago I started chemotherapy. I haven’t talked about it much around here, but not because nothing happened. I just wasn’t ready yet.

Before the chemo even began, I resigned myself to losing my hair and decided to shave my head rather than leave it lying around all over the place as I shed. I left the beard for the moment. It wasn’t a bad look!

The only problem was that some of the worst people in these Unites States have coopted this look. Here I am the morning of the first chemo treatment, in the bathroom at the cancer center, rocking a special shirt with tearaway sleeves:

Not long after I took that selfie I sat in a comfortable chair, while the Official Sweetie of Muddled Ramblings and Half-Baked Ideas wrapped my extremities in ice packs. This is me, while we waited for the pharmacist to dole out the drugs:

When the medicine arrived, the tech had to put on special single-use hazardous materials gear before touching it. That stuff is dangerous! God forbid it should get on anything before being injected directly into my blood.

I had already been admonished not to share a bathroom with anyone for a few days, for the same reason. I’m sure the city water treatment plants are well-prepared for stuff like this coming down the pipes. (That was sarcasm.)

The precursor drugs all tucked neatly into my bloodstream, the main event began. The tech hung the bag with the cancer-killer goo, pushed some buttons on the transfusion machine, and made sure we knew where the call button was. We were left alone, to watch the drip.

Only it wasn’t very long I started to feel a little tightness in my chest. “I feel tight in the chest,” I said, “Can you…?” was as far as I got before Official Sweetie was pushing the call button. I felt my head taken by a wave of heat. We were right by the nurse station, and they glanced up and suddenly there was a lot of activity around me.

I was red. Alas fair reader, there is no photographic record of my redness; it was not the time for snapping pics. I have since been compared to the classic Kitchenaid red. If you don’t spend time around quality appliances, that is a very deep red.

I was very quickly surrounded by people. The drip was stopped, and the administration of antihistamines began. I’m a little vague on the details of this period. I did not see the tool box set up behind me with a variety of tools for resuscitating critically ill people, but Official Sweetie did.

While a nurse engaged in conversation with me, which was both pleasant and obviously to measure my mental state, more vitals were taken, my heart was listened to and my lungs were evaluated, and eventually the medical professionals around me decided it was ok to start the drip again, but really slowly. My chair would not be ready for the next patient for a while.

The drip had not been going very long when I reacted again, though not as strongly. MY vote was to try again another day with a different medicine, but my vote was worth exactly zero. One way or another, they were going to get that goo inside me.

Each attempt to put the drug in a person is called a “challenge.” Out of curiosity I asked how many times they would try to give me the meds before they gave up. The answer was technically four, but it sounded like the last challenge would go on a week if it had to.

More intravenous Benadryl, a slower drip yet, and on the third try I didn’t react. Eventually they increased the flow to merely slow, and three hours later than planned we were done.

The chemo medicine takes a while to make you truly miserable, so I drove us home. The megadose of Benadryl did not make me even slightly drowsy. I seem to have a special relationship with that drug. In fact, I’m convinced that I’m a little bit allergic to it, but I won’t bother you with my analysis here.

Home. We got there, and I felt all right, but Official Sweetie and I both knew rough times were coming. But those rough times are different for everyone, which makes preparation more difficult.

Maybe sometime soon I will talk about that. It’s been a year, after all.

2

Talking to myself, please disregard

While pounding away at NaNoWriMo, I meant to type “double or nothing” but instead wrote “double of nothing”.

Note to self: that phrase can do some heavy lifting.

1

November 1, 2024

Each year I participate in a challenge called NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. The challenge is simple; write a “novel” of 50,000 words in the thirty days of November. I perhaps have the longes “win” streak in the world, but no one else seems to be counting.

Many years I have posted my first burst of output here. So here we go. It is very different than anything I’ve written before for any purpose, so it will be an interesting experiment. I am shooting a bit toward the narrative voice of John Nichols in The Milagro Beanfield War, but that is in direct tension with the assertion I have made in the intro to keep this as close to non-fiction as possible. Also, that narrative voice is amazing but very difficult, and I may be simply unable to accomplish it.

Not really off to a great start on that account; this lacks any real flow. But there’s time!

Days of Pizza

There were three places one could get pizza in that town.

Los Alamos, New Mexico is a small town, high in the Jemez mountains, isolated from the rest of the world by twisting roads often in need of repair.

The roads have been upgraded since the time of this story; at one time the Lab needed a massive transformer and it was cheaper to rebuild the road, widening it, straightening some of its curves, even rebuilding a bridge across the Rio Grande in Española, than it was to construct a new transformer up on “the hill”.

Later, the road would get upgraded further, and an entire new highway built around Santa Fe, to accommodate the containers of nuclear waste being transported for safe storage far away.

The horseshoe curve is gone, and the pavement is better-maintained now. The guard rail has been beefed up after someone went over the edge mentally and then physically, surrendering to gravity and flying, for a moment, before landing in twisted metal at the base of the cliff.

Or was that one crazy or just a bad driver? Memory is fickle after forty years; time has a way of blurring one driving-off-a-cliff incident with another. The time a kid named (let’s say) Axel duct-taped his girlfriend up real good and drove them both off a different cliff nearby was definitely around that same year. In that case, happily, the cable stretched between posts along the top of the cliff was sufficient to slow the car enough that it did not go all the way to the bottom.

There was also a plane crash, roughly where the first over-the-cliff car incident had happened. A Cessna taking off in the thin air and something went wrong.

But in those times, it was down that road, across the Rio Grande, and on for several more miles before there was another place to buy a pizza. The 16,000 citizens of that scientific outpost in the wilderness really had just the three choices when it came to pizza.

First there was Pizza Hut. Tucked in a strip mall, dark inside, the pizza conveyor belt produced the same product as every other Pizza Hut, except since this was New Mexico they also offered green chile. To their credit they used Bueno brand chile, an improvement over the no. 10 cans of diced chiles used at the other two places. In every other way, the Pizza Hut lacked only the distinctive roof line to be exactly like the original in Topeka, Kansas.

Big Cheese Pizza was where the kids hung out. The quality of the pizza was questionable but good enough, and the joint was consistently filled with bored and twitchy high schoolers goosed on free soda refills and spiraling hormones, performing elaborate mating rituals around the formica-topped tables.

The Sysco truck that brought supplies to Big Cheese only had to move a hundred yards before stopping again to deliver the supplies to Tony’s Pizza. The Sysco salesman once said sotto voce that Tony’s consistently bought higher-grade ingredients than Big Cheese, particularly the cheese.

It was a small restaurant, with fourteen tables. In the middle of the room were four large picnic tables, made of hardwood and deeply lacquered. Around the perimeter were smaller tables, some for two, others for four. It had an open kitchen; patrons could watch as the cooks threw the pizza dough into the air, spinning it to stretch it before laying the dough on a well-floured paddle (the word “peele” had not reached that part of our nation yet). There were two ovens, one over the other, with stone surfaces, set to 500 degrees. A large spatula was wedged in the gap between the ovens for easy access to manipulate pizzas — or to burn your initials into your arm, if that’s the kind of thing you were into.

But we’ll get to Ake later.

The place was owned by a woman everyone just called Boss, and her husband Billy. Billy’s philosophy of life was that if you were going to be an alcoholic, it was much better to be a beer alcoholic; that way at least you would get more calories and some semblance of nutrition. Liquid bread, basically. He was slow and walked like his knees were bad and he sucked the smoke from cigarette after cigarette through the gap left by two missing front teeth. His laugh was rough but always ready, his gap-toothed smile a permanent fixture.

He wasn’t trusted in the kitchen, not around all those sharp objects, but he was excellent in the front of the house, greeting people, bringing drinks from the little station in the corner, telling terrible jokes, and generally just being Billy.

Boss was a slender woman, gray-haired with reading glasses hanging from a chain around her neck, her expression severe until you knew her well enough to read the kindness there. She was married to Billy, after all.

She was a hard worker, a heavy smoker, sensible about business. She would sit with the Sysco rep and reel off everything needed for the next week, straight from her head, and the restaurant never ran out of supplies.

This story doesn’t really involve Boss; simple competence is not terribly interesting. But if she had a weakness, it was in her hiring. This story is about her super-bike riding son in law, a big, crude heavy-smoking guy named Rock, his buddy Drew who also smoked heavily but preferred his motorcycles classic — his baby was a Triumph.

There was Ake, maybe 18 years old, who smoked a lot and wore black leather, heavy boots, and lots of metal, and drove a VW bus with a pop-up camper. DEATHBUS, Ake had meticulously scribed in bold black across the front part of the roof.

There are others who came and went — Crazy Bob, John Boy, Frank (who is surely dead by now), and others. You will meet them in good time. But right now the two other names you need to know are Jake and Joe, both college graduates with degrees that only qualified them for more college. Neither had any intention of doing anything like that. Neither of them smoked, either.

I should say, to close out this intro, that while your humble author was not present for all the events recounted here, they are reported with as much fidelity to the descriptions of those who were present as possible. While specific conversations are sometimes inventions, the events surrounding them are not. The Löwenbräu bottle really did fly through the air to land fifteen feet from where Frank stood, wobbly-kneed, staring blankly ahead. Twice.

Perhaps there will be enough in these pages to explain New Year’s Eve, 1986. But probably not.

2

A Beautiful Sentence About Ugly People

At Defector.com, today David Roth wrote this, about the people who share the stage with Orange Julius Cesar at rallies:

These were shitty roast comics and disgraced ex-Mayors and disgraced ex-wrestlers and disgraced TV psychiatrists and radio hosts, disgraced scions of similarly disgraced American political families and Trump’s weedy sniffling adult sons and Tucker Carlson and the various free-riding kooks and replacement-level elected masochists and aspiring genocidaires aiming to sneak into power by hiding their hideous chittering forms behind Trump’s luxurious width.

His prose is beautiful, his message crucial.

A Memory of a Funny Man

Back when I was studying Physics at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (they have since simplified the name), I took more than one class led by Albert Petschek. The school’s physics program was well-respected back then, in part because more than one McCarthy refugee found their way to the faculty.

Albert, it seemed to me, spent most of his time in his barren little office with the lights turned off, just thinking. Then he would publish a paper. That is obviously an oversimplification, but there is no denying that Albert was a really smart guy.

Early on I noticed that during his lectures, he would pause sometimes, maybe after describing the math of heat flux, and scan the class while holding an inscrutable face.

Then one time, perhaps in my junior year, he paused and I laughed. I was the only one, and Albert beamed at me. I had got his joke. This whole time the dude had been doing stand-up, but you needed to understand thermodynamics or quantum electrodynamics to get the joke.

Later I heard him say, “My brother is the smart one, but I am the witty one.” He said it with a smile, like that itself was a joke.

5

Changing Habits

Recently I have fallen into a disturbing pattern: work harder than I should, get fried, and play computer games for a couple of days to recover. Fall behind at work, and repeat.

In this cycle you will not find “exercise”, “write”, or “be otherwise creative”. It’s a bad cycle.

Meanwhile, if it weren’t for a massive back spasm I had a year ago and the ensuing tests, I’d be in a very bad place now, mortality-wise.

I’m alive; the barbarians will return to the gate someday, but right now they are deep in the woods. But they will be back, and in the meantime I can’t be spending my life staring at a computer screen clicking on beautiful graphics to the benefit of no one.

I’ve been on the bike a few times since chemo; 15 miles is (usually) not too bad. And hey, that’s how far I have to ride to get to work! If I can’t consistently carve out time to ride, I can repurpose time I already spend commuting. (I still don’t go into the office very often, but that is going to have to change.)

I’m not ready to do TWO fifteen-mile trips on the same day, but that’s what the bus is for.

But still there’s that burnout lost time to Civilization VI and Stellaris and Nethack. playing those games is really just wallowing in the burnout. All those games are decision-intensive, just without real consequences. I decided last week that when I felt the urge to fire up one of those distractions, I would Do Something Different.

Like play guitar. I bought a nice Gibson 40 years ago, and I’ve never gotten good at playing it. I have no illusions that This Time Will be Different, but doing finger drills or playing random blues licks seems like a much better use of time than deciding whether to build a battleship or a temple in Memphis.

Also (I profess) doing something creative, and different, will allow me to recover my analytical mind more quickly as well. Let that part of me rest while I do the spider drill or play along with any pop song based on 12-bar blues. Physical skills, creative challenges.

The guitar sits now within easy reach of my workstation. I spent a few bucks on a little headphone amp, but no more investment will be forthcoming until I prove I will be sticking with the plan.

Look at that beauty! I am so excited right now. Today I started what I hope will be a long-term relationship with a Local Guitar Shop (and the small dog that protects it). I love the shop already, with its focus on community.

It’s easy to be enthusiastic out of the gate. The only time I ever got even remotely competent playing this things was when I lived in a beautiful house with terrible people (I should probably tell that story here someday). I would close the door to my room and play. Playing was shelter then, a way to turn my mind to a better place. While I don’t need shelter in the same way anymore, The ability to turn to something completely different is (almost) always a good thing.

I’m working to break free of habits that have their roots in laziness and, honestly, depression. Finding a new challenge that is not like the old challenge. Looking up at the observatory at the top of Mt. Hamilton and saying, “I’ll get there.” Playing shitty chords that never seem to include the A string. That is a better life.

3

The End of Wings Week

Those readers who are not familiar with Defector will not have the context for this image, but don’t worry, I’ll be back to regular Ramblings shortly.

By the way, Defector is great. It’s the answer to my lament back in the day: Deadspin, I hardly Knew Ye.

Carry on!

1

Donald, it is not incredible.

Someone tried to shoot Donald Trump today.

“It is incredible that such an act can take place in our Country,” he wrote.

It is not incredible. He and his pals have worked very hard to make sure that assassins are well-equipped in this nation.

You made this world, buddy, and the only reason you are still here is because the shooter missed.

1

The Actual Spelling is FU

Here’s a frat house near Kansas University:

I failed, with my wee phone camera on a day where sweat was my main wardrobe accent, to capture just how much this place screams MONEY. This is the place rich assholes send their asshole kids to learn to be better assholes.

In this frat, the residents will have a chef to cook their meals, maids to clean up after them, and will learn nothing of independent life.

But we know that Harvard does not produce the best lawyers, it produces lawyers that know other Harvard lawyers. This is the system. The building you live in during your college years matters more than the education you get.

2

Fresh Air

I’m taking a long train trip right now, and there are stops designated as “fresh air stops”. In this context, “fresh air” means there will be time for people to get off the train to smoke.

1

iSassin

The Official Sweetie and I have been thoroughly enjoying a thriller on Netflix. It features high-end assassins doing high-end assassin stuff for high-end assassin payoffs. These killers live well, if not necessarily happily.

One of the sponsors for this show is an online housekeeping service that offers to clean your house for less. “I fired my housekeeper!” one customer gleefully says.

Uh, good for you, I guess. Some giant company is putting a lot of advertising muscle into driving down what housekeepers earn, and then taking a slice of what is left and keeping it for themselves. The business model is based on the premise “there will always be enough desperate people to work for shitty wages and make us rich.”

This is also known in Silicon Valley as “disrupting a market.”

So while watching these two things juxtaposed, I started to think: what would happen if Silicon Valley decided to disrupt the murder market?

There is a story I will likely never write taking shape in my head, and I’m on a train right now, and almost by magic my literary muscles are suddenly flexing after months of quiet. The story’s basic shape is that a suave international assassin suddenly finds himself competing for work against bargain-basement thugs who are considered disposable by their clients.

Then instead of limos his clients start sending Ubers with drunk and shitty drivers, and instead of fancy hotels they put him in AirBnB’s with all sort of privacy intrusions.

At the end of act one, Javier decides he needs to kill iSassin.

Here is how such a story might begin (if the dialog is a little too conveniently twisted to include the phrase ‘disrupt the murder market’, well, that would be something I fixed if I actually wrote this, but I’m not going to):

iSassin

For Javier, there were five kinds of kills, each to accomplish a specific purpose. If the client simply wanted someone to not be around only longer, a “natural” death was called for. Or perhaps a tragic death, a terrible accident, would earn the client sympathy they might find useful. Of course, simple murder — a gunshot, swift and clean, or a cut throat — might fit the budget of the client. Occasionally Javier was asked to make things messy, to make an example of the victim.

Javier’s favorite type of kill, however, was the shocking, humiliating destruction of a person, a death that would be talked about with hushed whispers and the occasional laugh. Javier wasn’t just killing a person, he was killing what they stood for.

Today he was in a particularly good mood. The Senator would be found, apparently dead of a heart attack, wearing nothing but lipstick, a codpiece with spikes on the inside, and a massive rubber dildo standing tall and proud from his rectum. The senator’s associates in government and in the clergy would try to suppress the news, but of course they would fail.

He sipped his Islay single-malt and smiled as he looked out over the cityscape from his apartment high above the grime of the street. His lights were off, and he sat in darkness, watching the city lights, listening to Brahms and thinking he should turn it up a little louder. He took another sip of whisky instead.

His phone purred softly on the hardwood table by his soft leather chair, as another phone pinged to indicate a deposit had been made to an account in a bank far away.

Before he answered he engaged the voice encryption app and entered the key they had shared for the after-job call. “Hello, Meyer,” he said.

“Congratulations, Mr. Rodriguez.” Meyer said. Of course that was no more his actual name than Meyers was the name of the man calling him. “My supervisor is well-pleased.”

“Always glad to be of service,” Javy said. “Is there anything else I can help you with?” Meyer’s organization, whoever they were, had been steady customers for a while.

Meyers hesitated. “Actually, Mr. Rodriguez, I have some bad news. My supervisor has decided to cut some costs, and I’m afraid you are one of those costs.”

“So… he or she has decided to not engage in this sort of business anymore?”

Meyers hesitated again. “No, it’s not that. It’s just that your services are frightfully expensive.”

“Are you trying to get me to lower my price? This is a high-risk business, and not just for me. Sloppy work could get you in trouble as well.”

“Oh, I agree,” Meyer said. “But what can you do? My supervisor recently discovered a service called iSassin. Have you heard of it?”

“I-what?”

“iSassin. Apparently some Silicon Valley money guy has decided to ‘disrupt the murder space’. Quietly, of course. Most of the people listing themselves there seem perfectly competent.”

“Perfectly competent until something unexpected happens. This is bullshit and you know it.”

“Welcome to the future, Mr. Rodrigues.”

2

Trump is a Felon

Trump has been convicted of being a liar and a cheat. Some people are howling about it, saying with some legitimacy that this was a simple bookkeeping lie that got expanded into a felony only because it was election-adjacent.

I’m not buying that, but it shows there is one thing everyone agrees on: Convicted felon Donald Trump has done much worse. I look forward to him facing the music for those things as well.

2

Making a Difference

I got a text not long ago, from the Democratic Party, asking if maybe I’d be interested in running for local office.

I did not say no. I didn’t even ignore the message. A thought occurred to me: maybe a white older guy with post-chemo hair could be an electable surrogate for the under-represented.

It’s sad that such a thought should even occur. But I have strong feelings about how things should be. My hometown police are already reluctantly giving back some of the military gear they’ve collected (an armored car!), so I’m not alone there. Imagine how many school breakfasts that armored car could have bought.

We should feed our residents, starting with children. Let’s help people addicted to drugs, rather than wait for them to commit crimes and throw them in jail, at astronomical taxpayer expense.

Let’s build houses for people with no place to live.

“But that’s expensive!”

Yes. And in a city like San Jose with no real profitable businesses, that’s a problem. (That was a joke, son.) But actually it is a problem, unless you tax the rich. There are individuals in this town that could pay for it all with pocket change. But if they don’t volunteer, well, it’s time for them to pay for the people and community that made them rich in the first place.

If those rich assholes decide to move rather than pay, San Jose loses nothing, because they’re not paying much now. Whoever buys their houses will pay more property tax than they were paying.

What could I do as a tiny voice at the bottom of the policy pyramid? I don’t honestly know. The way cities tax the rich is through property taxes, and in California those are carefully controlled at the state level by Proposition 13. But I think I could matter to the people in this city.

The thing is, I already have a job – a job I simply can’t afford to leave. A tech job, and though I’m well-paid I’m also making billionaires richer.

Tax me. Tax those billionaires even more. It is time to fundamentally change the way we value work.

Prop 13 was born because soaring property values were leading to a situation where people who had lived in their homes for a long time were being taxed onto the streets. I do not disagree with the foundational goal of Prop 13.

But as time has passed, the flaws in the ideal have become apparent. The biggest problem is that if you own a rental property, you can keep jacking up the rent, but your tax liability hardly moves at all. In that situation, Prop 13 is working against the people who only want to say in their homes.

Rental properties should either not be protected by Prop 13, or perhaps more simply the property value should be based on rent collected, and not on the assessed value at all. The property is worth what it makes, after all. You could add some complexity and make the valuation based on net profit rather than gross, which would theoretically reward landlords who maintained their properties, but that seems like it would be subject to abuse.

This would be very bad for the economics of owning rental properties, and would ideally also be bad for Air BnB nonsense. The prop 13 tax relief was meant for the people who live in their own homes. I am completely behind that. It’s the other assholes getting rich off Prop 13 that we have to take down.

Any office I might run for would have to work with the existing tax structure, however, so the above is not actually a campaign plank. We will just have to find some other way to tax the rich. Maybe a tax on gas-guzzlers not used for business, offset by free public transport. Still working on that.

There will be future episodes where I spell out my campaign platform more specifically. I’d be afraid to run, if I weren’t too liberal to ever get elected.

2

The Third Horseman has Arrived

I am not a Bible scholar, but like any real Bible scholar I can cherry-pick passages to comment on. Here is some version or other of the Christian Bible describing the third horseman of the Apocalypse:

“(5) And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand. (6) And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.” (Revelation 6:5-6)

Other versions replace “penny” with “a days’ labor”. In other words, this passage doesn’t say there will be no food, it says that working people won’t be able to afford it. I’ll let “the oil and the wine” speak for itself.

The third seal is some guy on a horse telling us that a time will come when there exists a calamitous situation known as “working poor”. That a day’s wages cannot feed your family. Sure you can take the passage to mean that there will be shortages that drive up prices, or you can recognize that in one of the fattest nations on Earth the children of working parents don’t get enough to eat.

That guy with the balances in his hand reminds me a lot of the people arguing against living wages. The whole thing is framed as economics. That horseman is on the board of directors at Amazon, and Uber, and almost everywhere else. The horseman is working hard to make sure that bonuses to executives aren’t reduced because they have to pay the people who make them rich enough so those people can survive.

3