(h/t as they used to say)

***

I wrote the last post, took a bath full of thought, and scribbled this down before I left the house.

It’s not so much about rushing to get the classes done darling.

and

(that’s) What I’ve Been Afraid-Of
confront it
dose it
dream

afraid-of
-poverty. very real. homeless even in SF being hounded and ground in the dirt by some allegedly liberal mayor.
-identifying
-being identified
-telling you my name

***

And now, it is evening, 9:30 of the same day, and I’m spilling more because I need to. The date on this post is therefore approximate. I intend to keep it as a draft, open and ready for adding-to, until the accurate night twenty-four hours from now.

Tuesday this week I realized that this was a completely uncommitted four-day weekend coming up, because of Vets Day Monday. On Wednesday I had a harder day than it needed to be, partly because the day of open lab means a lot of unstructured random conversation with co-workers anyway (it’s hard on me even when it’s good), but mostly, always mostly, because of fear of course. The fear of not being good enough fast enough, even though I was prepping a short chapter in a class I’m expert at. It ran away with me, just a little, and I fought back with the naproxen and the balm of tigers and a certain willfulness.

By this morning I was much better and I wrote that thing tripping over the Mates. I got to the last work day pretty early. I pulled a bunch of downloads, including more Gabor. I studiously knocked out the day’s prep, and also much more, getting grading caught up, sketching out the whole last month of the semester in detail, and finally teaching the networks as scheduled with a confident and almost amused air.

Before I left the office I put on a song I love at a shouting volume and sang along with it in a whisper.

And as I left I started to feel the stress come back, the aching in the muscles of the neck. I know now, that those pains have to be fear manifesting. So what was I fearing? I thought about it, and the answer came. I was afraid of wasting these four glorious days of quasi-retirement.

I’m home now and they stretch out before me. They will not be wasted, and if I make sure of that, I don’t have to fear, and I don’t have to hurt.

***

I do still need a bit of standard unwinding though, so this part is literally a weblog post, a log of my culling from the web.

This is from a vid by the estimable Kyle Kulinski at Secular Talk:

Your shopping dollars at work. This is why the camera cord I finally ordered and will pick up tomorrow came from Best Egg instead of Amazon. This is why the virtual private server I will soon rent is coming from a small provider and not AWS, GCP, or Microsoft Azure.

Nothing notable worth sharing on TYT or Jimmy Dore or The Hill …

***(the morning proper)

… but I did unearth more double Maté in the grayzone. Fascinating stuff going a little deeper into Aaron’s standard take on ‘russiagate’ and how it relates to the trauma of the trump years. Rather than link it, I’ll recommend that you search YT on ‘america in denial gabor’, because you’ll get back a selection of related stuff that way, with the one I’m watching now as the first hit. Like five minutes on How Culture Makes Us Feel Lost.

When it’s done, I’m making a run into the big city.

***

From whence I finally retrieved the odd non-standard cord for getting the pix off the effing camera.

This is randomness I took some weeks back when I got the little photog kit.

And this I took, second pic with it ever, tonight as soon as I got back to the ranch.

Next time I pray the posted imagery will be slightly more spectacular.