Author: Mark Alexander

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D’oh!

Back in December, when I got my new (old) CD player, it didn’t come with either the remote or the owner’s manual. I could grab a copy of the horrificly scanned—and apparently only—PDF online, but I wanted a real, original, tangible manual. Fortunately, I located one seller who had a copy and I ordered it. A few days later the packet arrived, but he’d sent the Service Manual, an entirely different beast altogether. I emailed him and he wrote back, apologizing profusely and instructed me to instigate a return through eBay. I did as directed and got the return postage mailing label and my account was refunded.

I reached out to the seller a few days later and asked how I could pay for the manual since eBay had already refunded me. After several more days with no response I emailed him again. (This is a seller with a 99.5% positive feedback rating with whom I’ve done business before.) He wrote back and apologized again for the delay, telling me he was out of town and he would “try to find” the correct manual upon his return.

Another week passed and I heard nothing. So I wrote him again. He said he was having trouble locating it.

At this point I said fuck it, and told him not to worry about it. It was obvious he either didn’t have a clue where it was, or he was dealing with something personal that was preventing him from responding in a timely manner and to just forget about the whole thing.

No response. Of course.

Well, apparently this particular manual—much like the matching remote control for my unit—is rarer than proverbial hens’ teeth. I set a trigger on eBay to notify me if one ever showed up again and basically sulked off.

Today, I was attempting to locate the instructions in my desk folders for a CD Walkman I just put up for sale. And what should pop out?

My original instruction manual for the deck that I purchased in 1990!

There was obviously a reason the seller couldn’t find his copy.

Sometimes the universe smiles laughs at you.

In thanks, I’ve scanned this physical copy and upload it to the hifiengine.com repository so a good copy will be available to others.

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Wide Awake

4 am and I’m wide awake. Fuckin’ cortisol…

After laying in bed, tossing and turning for an hour and the entirety of Jazz At The Pawnshop 3 failing to lull me back to sleep, I finally decided to just get up. Apparently both pups also needed to go out, so it was apparently meant to be. I heard Sophie in the kitchen attacking her empty bowl, so I also fed her. (Raffi had already gone back to bed.)

At this point I think I’m up for the day. But one of the nice things about retirement is I have nothing on my schedule today,  so if I need a nap calls…

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An Explanation…

An explanation for the last week’s worth of very-Richard-Bach-Messiah’s-Handbook-style inspirational quotes from the author herself:

You are stardust that learned to overthink.

You are a walking, breathing impossibility, atoms that figured out how to fall in love, get anxious about font choices, and wonder if their email subject line was “too much”.

You’re hurtling through space on a rock that somehow grew trees and oceans and you and you’re still not sure your weirdness “fits”.

We treat creativity like it’s something to earn. Like there’s a prerequisite. A readiness level. Some imaginary threshold of “good enough” or “acceptable” we need to cross before we’re allowed to make something.

But you were literally forged in the death of a star. The iron in your blood is billions of years old. Your atoms have been recycling through the universe since before this planet existed. You are ancient material arranged into something that has never existed before and will never exist again.

The creative cost of waiting until you’re “ready” is collective. Every unmade thing is a map someone else can’t navigate by. Every unsaid thought is a conversation that never gets to happen. Every voice that sands itself down to fit is one less frequency in a world that desperately needs the full spectrum.

Creative Living exists because we believe creativity isn’t a hobby or a side quest or something you get back to when life calms down. It’s how you fully experience the absurdity of being alive.

It’s how impossible, stardust, skeleton-riding, dream-hallucinating, conscious-universe-folded-into-a-body humans like you make sense of the fact that you’re here at all.

[@loismac on Instagram]

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Back At It

This one—a player that was a total lost cause—is a surprise gift to be sent to my tech who repairs this shit for me. I think he’s the only one in my circle who can appreciate it.

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Every Accusation Is A Confession

James Cockrell has been arrested on 2nd degree child exploitation charges in South Carolina.

Following a child s*xual abuse materials investigation into Cockrell, authorities found a child living in a condemned home covered with rat feces and holes in the floor.

Cockrell’s X account is filled with posts idolizing Donald Trump, referring to him as “god.” Cockrell ironically calls for a p*dophile to be killed in another post.

Not a drag queen.
Not trans.
Not an immigrant.
Not Muslim.
✔️MAGA!

 

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Tuesday Tiedrich

oh look, United States President Piss-Baby McDiaperload is once again doing what he does best: whining because reality is being mean to him.

“and I hadda go through, and I still do, fake stories, fake polls … I saw one today. 40%. I’m not at 40%. I’m at— much higher. I mean I’d love to run against anybody. the real polls say ‘you’d kill everybody. wouldn’t even be close.’”

oh boo fucking hoo, you pathetic sad-sack. stuff a sock in it already.

go press that big red button on the Resolute Desk, and when Walt Nauta comes scampering in with your diet coke, tell him you need your diaper changed, pronto.

here’s one of those ‘fake’ polls that has Donny shitting himself blind.

CNN’s Harren Enter: “Trump’s net approval rating. look at the pre-SOTU polls, the State of the Union. look at that — negative 27 points! my goodness gracious. Compare that to where he was in 2020, 2019, and 2017 — minus 10, way lower now. the bottom line is Donald Trump has never been weaker going into a State of the Union address, according our CNN polling than he is right now, and weaker by a considerable amount.”

Donny’s poll numbers are circling the drain right now because none of this shit is popular, and all of it is fucked up.

aside from the brain-dead cultists for whom Dear Leader can never ever do wrong, nobody voted for any of the fascist shit going on right now.

nobody voted for the historic and stately East Wing to be demolished so that Donny can replace it with some vulgar Epstein Dance Hall — and speaking of Donny’s dead pedo bestie, nobody voted for the continuing cover-up of a massive pedophile ring.

nobody voted for off-the-charts corruption and greed.

nobody voted for masked ICE thugs teargassing children, and murdering anyone who looks at them funny. nobody voted for innocent immigrants to be disappeared off the streets and shipped off to far-away slave-labor gulags.

nobody voted for our allies to be insulted and ignored, or for Ukraine to be thrown to the wolves, or for Greenland to be perpetually harassed, or for Venezuela to become a vassal state.

nobody voted for the price of everything continuing to skyrocket — especially when Donny promised bring all that shit down on Day One.

and it’s sure as shit that nobody voted for whatever the fuck this is.

“why— why would you do this? and they walk in— nobody even asks for— like, you have an identification? do you have an ID? um— [long pause] it’s so crazy. you know, the Mayor of New York, and he’s a very nice person, I, I met him. his ideology is not, not too good. but uhhhh— we’re having a massive snowstorm right now, and I’ve heard that he’s asked people to come out and help shovel the snow. okay, so you get a shovel and you start shoveling. what? what the hell, you’re not gonna help too much, but you help— [points to a woman in the audience] hello, darling, how are you? [points again] no, right behind you. look. my friend, right? are you okay? yes, you. are you okay? are you okay? [long pause] good. good. are your eyes okay? I gave her money to get her eyes fixed. lotta money, to get her eyes fixed. that doctor ripped me off, but that’s okay.”

holy shit. what in the actual fuck did we just listen to?

my dear sweet lord. it was just last week that the entire media ecosystem dogpiled AOC, because she paused and said ‘um’ in the middle of an answer — but Donny somehow gets an endless series of free passes to shit out incoherent nonsense on a daily basis. nobody in the press blinks, nobody says boo. it’s fucking maddening.

here’s a thing historian Timothy Snyder said yesterday on the Jim Acosta Show. Snyder had just returned from ten days abroad, and he was stuck by what he saw watching other nations’ leaders on TV.

“I mean, I just abroad for the last 10 days or so and I was watching other people’s TV and other people’s leaders. And when you do that and then you come back and you watch our TV and our leaders it takes some adjustment, right? Like, that person that we were just watching, he does not seem well, in any sense.”

“I realize if you watch it day after day after day, it kind of maybe seems normal, but when you contrast it to people who can actually finish sentences and people who can stay on the topic and people who are perhaps sharing the same reality as you, it is really striking. I mean, that guy — just abstracting from the fact that he’s the president of the United States — he does not … He just doesn’t look well.”

Snyder gets it right: President Pudding Cup is not well — physically or mentally. and as much as we try to remind ourselves that none of this is normal, we can’t help but become inured to it.

Donny’s minders are still having to spackle makeup all over his bloated, corpse-like hand — and they’re not telling us why. nobody voted for a medical coverup.

and it’s damned certain that nobody voted for absolute batshit bugfuckery.

when Donny blithers on about “I can use Licenses to do absolutely ‘terrible’ things to foreign countries” he’s giving away the game. tariffs were never about responsible or coherent economic policy. they were about having a hammer with with to punish the shit out of any country that pissed him off.

nobody voted for a buffoonish dipshit in decline who makes everything about him.

Jesus wept. Donny can’t just let the US Olympic hockey team enjoy their own victory. he has to horn in and pretend he had something to do with it. how weak. how sad. how small and petty.

did you vote for that? I didn’t.

here’s your Zero of the Day: it’s Judge Aileen Cannon, up to her usual fuckery.

Cannon is so easy to loathe. amateurish, dumb as shit, and totally in the tank for Donny Convict, she’s less a judge and more a member of Donny’s own legal team.

Judge Fangirl took some time off from scrawling ‘Mrs. Aileen Trump’ over and over on the covers of all her notebooks to commit an evil.

“Breaking: The Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon has permanently blocked the release of special counsel Jack Smith’s report on the classified documents case — saying releasing the report would be unfair to Trump and his co-defendants.”

when Cannon says the releasing the report would be ‘unfair’ to Donny, she gives away her game.

Melanie D’Arrigo, can you please explain to the nice people why that is?

“Blocking the release of a report on potential crimes committed by Trump and his co-defendants because it would be ‘unfair’ to them, is admitting that the report contains compelling evidence of crimes committed by them.”

exactly. Donny is guilty as fuck, and everyone knows it — even Judge Fangirl.

and now, here’s your Hero of the Day: whistleblower Ryan Schwank.

last week, Schwank resigned from his job at an ICE academy in Georgia, and yesterday he testified before Congress about all the evil shit ICE expected him to do.

 

“on my first day, I received secretive orders to teach new cadets to violate the Constitution, by entering homes without a judicial warrant. for the last five months, I watched ICE dismantle the training program, cutting 240 hours of vital classes from a 584-hour program. classes that teach the Constitution, our legal system, firearms training, the use of force, lawful arrests, proper detention, and the limits of officers’ authority. for example, they ceased all of the legal instructions regarding use of force. this means that cadets are not taught what it means to be objectively reasonable. the very standard which the law requires them to meet when deciding whether or not to use deadly force. our jobs as instructors are to teach them so well, that they can make split-second decisions about what they can and cannot do in life-or-death situations. yet in the name churning out an endless stream of officers, DHS leadership has dismantled the academic and practical tests the we need to know that cadets can safely and lawfully perform their job. all to satisfy an administration demanding that they train thousands of new officers before the end of the year.”

brave man.

this is going to be my closing message for the foreseeable future:

practice self-care. do what you need to do to keep sane. if that means you need to disengage with my daily posts for a while, I get it. this community of ours will still be here when you return.

to all the people who have signed on in the days since the election, welcome aboard. settle in as we all try to deal with the shitfuckery that’s ahead of us.

we are all in this together, and we are all here for each other.

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Damn You, YouTube!

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Your atoms were forged in the belly of a dying star.

The iron in your blood is ancient.

The calcium in your bones was made in a supernova.

You are literally made of reincarnated stars.

And you’re worried about being “too much”?

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3am Musings

I’ve felt it. You’ve felt it. Things feel off. Things don’t work the way we’ve come to accept as normal and expected. Whether that’s our institutions, our devices, or—dare I say—our bodies (TBH, the latter may be colored by my own experiences over the past year). The simplest tasks are glitching. Trying to get anything accomplished through customer service anywhere is a lesson in frustration. Nothing is working the way it should.

I have a theory.

Judging from the prevalence of YouTube videos on the subject, as is the case with many older people I find myself waking up almost every night like clockwork around 3 am. Sometimes I can fall right back asleep; other times—like this morning—not so much. My mind starts wandering.

I know I’m not the only one—again, because I spend too much time on YouTube—that everything just feels off. In fact, I will go so far as reality itself has felt off since I watched those planes slam into the Twin Towers on the morning news that fateful day in 2001 as I was getting ready for work—although nowhere near as much as it has over the past five or six years.

“High strangeness” is the only way I can describe it. Yes, life eventually returned to normal—and for a few brief months our country was united in a way I now doubt we’ll ever see again. But then Republicans got a war hard-on and Bush invaded Iraq (even though it had nothing to do with the attacks) and things started unraveling.

This morning, while laying awake listening to Ben breathe beside me, I envisioned reality as a meticulously maintained Jenga tower; a tower representing our shared reality.

Bear with me here. This is kind of in the weeds and I’m not sure I can adequately convey it in words.

This tower of our shared reality is composed of blocks made of 8+ billion smaller towers representing our individual lives. When we die the small gaps left in the structure from our individual towers disappearing are replaced by new towers of those who follow after us. The big, life-altering events we each experience individually can be represented by blocks being knocked out of our personal towers. It’s never enough to bring down the entire fabric of reality, but these events definitely affect our personal realities, forcing us to change. (see: cancer, etc.)

But something happened in 2001. Something came along and knocked out several rows wholesale making everything unbalanced. The tower started listing.

When it descended that golden escalator in 2015, more critical rows were knocked out. The tower started leaning dangerously and it’s only gotten worse over the past decade. That’s this feeling of everything being off. Because it is.

COVID, 2020. Another block pushed—although not immeidately out of the tower. Somehow this managed to give our collective reality an opportunity to reset. But then, BAM! It was knocked out as well and it was back to business as usual. The tower was beginning to look like a certain monument in Pisa, Italy.

I fear all it’s going to take is one more event, one more loss of a row of blocks and…

I don’t know about y’all, but I keep feeling like this is just around the corner.

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You are a conscious universe folded into a temporary body for approximately 80-90 years—4,000 weeks—and you’ve spent some of them worrying that your email was too long.

That your voice was too much.

That your ideas weren’t ready.

My love, you’re a MIRACLE that physics cannot fully explain.