Going Solo For The Weekend

Going solo, not going to Solo (a movie, despite my Star Wars fandom, I'm in absolutely no hurry to see).

Ben is in El Paso with his friend Barry for the weekend, and I had no plans other than in his absence to give this place a thorough cleaning and decluttering. To that end, Friday evening I got the living and dining room swept,  dusted (including the top of the bookcase, something I'm embarrassed to admit that I haven't touched in over a year) and decluttered. I spent the rest of the evening enjoying music on my new old stereo.

It was old school analog up in this house last night. THP ORCHESTRA: TWO HOT FOR LOVE

Today the dogs let me sleep in until nearly 6am. After getting up, feeding and letting them out to do their business, we all went back to bed for a couple more hours.

The rest of the morning was taken up with laundry, cleaning the bathroom, mopping the floors, and finally clearing out crap from under the kitchen sink. (Every time we look under there Ben and I look at each other and say, "We really need to…") Some of the shit down there dated from Denver and was long past any reasonable expiration date.

After making myself lunch (it was already 103℉ outside by that time and I had no desire to venture into that just to grab lunch), I called it quits for the day and the dogs and I laid down for a much deserved, cool afternoon nap.

Tomorrow my plans are to finish up laundry, dust and sweep the bedroom, and then head to the coffeehouse for a few hours to relax and then run to Target for the weekly shopping.

Not as fun a weekend as Ben is having, but I do take a degree of satisfaction in knowing "This house is clean!"

Photos That Speak


Photos that speak: Fuck your fountain. Fuck your tree. Fuck voter suppression. Fuck your labels. Fuck your stereotypes. Fuck your hatred. Fuck your restaurants. Fuck that dude. Fuck police brutality. Fuck white supremacy. 

Shower Thoughts

If Breaking Bad had been set in the UK it would have been a very different show. A chemistry teacher gets cancer, gets treatment, goes into remission and then carries on with his life.

I'm Going To Hell


"Jules wins one competition and she's acting like she's America's next drag superst….WAIT! How the fuck did she get that car onto the runway?!?"

God Has Nothing To Do With Trump Being President

From John Pavlovitz:

If I hear one more Evangelical claim that God chose Donald Trump, I'm swear I'm gonna rapture myself.

Christian Trumpers really need to stop spiritualizing the man, his campaign, and his Presidency.

It's sinful.
It's blasphemous.
It's lousy evangelism.
It's also just plain asinine.

The hypocrisy on display is historic: after spending the past 8 years straining to find infinitesimal specks in Barack Obama's eye that they could condemn as dealbreakers—Evangelicals are now perfectly fine with Trump's forest of Redwoods.

In fact, in the most dizzying display of theological spin doctoring, it is now precisely his ever-growing trail of personal toxic discharge that supposedly proves evidence of God's hand in it all.

So Trump's multiple marriages, his porn star affairs, his mountain of sexual assault claims, his verbal obscenities, his disregard for rule of law, his compulsive lying, his clear racism, his unrelenting attacks on marginalized communities (things these Christians would have figuratively and almost literally crucified Obama for) are now unmistakable signs that God is using this President.

This is nonsense of Biblical proportions; to try and draw some line between Jesus of Nazareth and Don of New York, is about as farcical as you can get without actually spontaneously combusting from the cognitive dissonance.

Dying to justify their own allegiances to Trump, Evangelicals have lumped him in with other famously flawed heroes of Scripture, suggesting he is actually  God's anointed, imperfect tool of salvation—in the tradition of the Old Testament.(Well, God did apparently use the jawbone of an ass, so I guess there is precedent).

Seriously, this sanctified retrofitting of this godless President to any kind of Providential momentum is the height of absurdity. By that measurement, let's find all the most reprehensible human beings we can, give them carte blanche in our seats of power—and see just what God can do!

No, Donald Trump wasn't anointed by God.
He isn't an instrument of Divine will.
He isn't Biblically hastening Armageddon or Jesus' return.
He's just a hateful, indecent, predatory fraud who is destroying the environment, stripping people of their human rights, and making America a global laughing-stock.

His ascension is not prophetic but pathetic, the result of:

●   Russian interference
●   Fake News
●   Gerrymandering
●   Voter Suppression
●   Hillary Hatred
●   Obama Resentment
●   Fox News Brainwashing
●   Democratic Stumbles
●   The Votes of Bigoted Evangelicals, whites terrified of losing market share, and third-party voters—and the inaction of 100 million Americans who couldn't be bothered to participate in one of the greatest responsibilities of living here.

That's it.

No Providence.
No Divine messages.
No Biblical prophecies.
No spiritual movements.

Just ordinary human beings who chose really, really poorly when they should have known better.

This isn't a mystery or a miracle—and it sure as hell isn't God. Christians need to stop passing the buck to God, and just own the compromises and sick bedfellows they've been willing to make for Supreme Court seats, anti-LGBTQ legislation, weapon stockpiling, and a rapidly assembling white Christian theocracy.

Stop namedropping God.

God wasn't generating fake news or showing up at his campaign rallies or stumping for him at nationwide crusades or using him as an expression of their misogyny.
God didn't vote for the guy who said he could grab women by the genitalia.
God didn't choose the guy who said protestors should be beaten.
God didn't go with the guy endorsed by the KKK.
God didn't excuse the bankruptcies and overlook the affairs and laugh off the racist remarks.

I'm pretty sure people did that—lots of supposedly Christian folks.

And God isn't now taunting teenage shooting victims on social media, or ignoring thousands of lost immigrant children, or turning a blind eye to Constitutional crises, or celebrating LGBTQ discrimination, or laughing off collusion, treason, and human rights atrocities.

Again, Christians.

We really should stop pretending God is responsible for this fast food dumpster fire, when it's clear whose hand is in it all.

This reality is the rotten fruit of misogyny, racism, Nationalism, fear, xenophobia, and bigotry—all released by people who want God to consent to it all so they don't have to deal with their own culpability or face their own repentance.

God does not consent.

Pray on that.

Shower Thoughts

Maybe aliens are waiting for us to go one full day without us killing a member of our own species before making contact. If that's the case, they've got a long wait ahead of them.

I'm So Tired Of Dealing With Assholes

So in their infinite wisdom, the I.T. Powers-That-Be decided that all the techs need to get fingerprinted and pass an FBI background check in the unlikely event that any one of us may be called upon to cover for the usual tech who supports our Enforcement building. Or something. Because reasons.

No big deal. I've done this before and there's nothing in my background to raise any red flags.

My coworker (the one who I wrote about earlier who randomly gives me attitude when he apparently gets up on the wrong side of the bed in the morning) and I were both scheduled to get fingerprinted at the same time at the same location. It seemed stupid for us to take two cars there, so I asked if I could catch a ride with him.

You'd think I asked for a goddamn kidney.

"Well, I was going to go by myself…"

So you can disappear for hours off-campus the way you do when you're on-campus?

I told him it didn't make any sense for us to take two cars if we were going to the same place at the same time.

He reluctantly agreed to let me ride with him.

The more I thought about it, the more pissed off I got. The next morning I sent him an email that simply said, "I've decided to take my own car. Thanks anyway."

His response: "Are you sure?"

Really? Really?

Yes, I'm sure. I should never have asked you in the first place, motherfucker.

There were four of us (the other two were from different sites) scheduled at the same time. Said coworker was the next to last to arrive because he hadn't bothered to read the email to know where to park. Yet he was the one who pushed his way to the head of the line when they started calling us back.

When I was finished with all the bullshit—and since I was driving my own car—I decided to take a short detour on the way back to the office and stop at my local coffee shop to grab an extra-large Tuxedo mocha before returning to work. Because reasons. Fuck it.

Earworm

MAKE IT STOP! (Don't get me wrong—I love this song, but it's been on endless repeat in my head since yesterday afternoon!

Grace Jones: I'm Not Perfect (1986)