Mapping Memories

The Land of Confusion

Life was pretty confusing for me as a kid in Sand Land. I have very few memories from that time; I barely spoke the language (though I could read and write), and, as I often couldn’t understand what was going on around me, I spent much of my childhood in a world of my own imagination. We moved around a lot, and so my treasured childhood possessions often ended up in lost luggage or abandoned, leaving nothing to remind me of that time…

But a few memories stand out in my mind: Frozen Suntop Juice boxes with collectible stickers, warm, U-shaped za’atar rolls they served for lunch, and a mysterious, trapezoidal concrete building I liked to climb.

“Can’t you see this is a land of confusion?”
– Genesis, 1986

A Few Words About a Mysterious Trapazoidal Structure…

I don’t recall what the structure was used for; it might have been concrete bleachers, bathrooms, or a storage building. It was made of solid concrete, which wasn’t particularly remarkable at the time and place, but what was noteworthy about it was its sloping sides. They looked something like this:

I recall some details, such as it being adjacent to the outdoor basketball court, and that you could see the dirt soccer fields and jogging track from it. Having poor proprioception, I couldn’t swear to direction or orientation – the sun always hung oppressively in the sky with recess being in the middle of the day, and it was always dry and dusty.

I didn’t play basketball, wasn’t very good at soccer, and wasn’t particularly social, so I usually looked for ways to spend my time by myself. On a whim, I decided to try to climb the sides of the building. My first few attempts failed, but I worked out that with a running start, as long as I maintained my momentum, I could sprint most of the way up, catch the lip of the roof with my fingers, and pull myself up the rest of the way.

I don’t know why this memory has stuck with me all this time, but as the years marched on, I began to wonder just how accurate it was. After waking up one morning thinking about it, I decided to look into it…

Putting Together the Pieces

I knew the city’s name, but hadn’t realized until I looked closely at the map that it was divided into an old part of town and a new industrial city, built only a few years before my family’s arrival in the early 80s. I have other fond memories of my black BMX bike, and my father would sometimes drive us down to the long, concrete promenade that ran parallel to the ocean.

We lived in a new subdivision, and every house looked much like the rest, so finding a particular neighborhood was out of the question. Though how many elementary schools might there be, given that some were for expats, and the one I went to was for nationals, and was a boys’ school (though most aspects of life in that part of the world are segregated).

After an aerial search on Google Earth, I eventually located what I think was the school. According to the scalebar, 90 pixels represented approximately 20 feet, which, if true, is a remarkable resolution of ~0.067 meters/pixel or about 6.7cm/pixel. So I measured a known object (passenger sedan) for scale, and sure enough, the dimensions worked out to be about 2.66″ per pixel, which is remarkably good!

After carefully reviewing large areas of the map, I finally found what I was looking for:

The details loosely align with my memory; however, I recall there were two soccer fields (side by side), both dirt, not grass (which was rare and very expensive at the time). If you wind back the clock to 2006 or  earlier, you can see that my recollection was accurate (i.e., dirt soccer fields):

The more recent image seems to have a scale of approximately 2.7″ per pixel, which is remarkably good. This would give the mystery building a footprint of approximately 80′ long by 40′ wide.

Filling in the Blanks

The names of both the district and the elementary school were also familiar to me after reading them, as well as other secondary details, such as the thoroughfare, named for the King whose visage appeared on the local currency at the time.

All that to say that I was as reasonably sure that this was indeed the location I spent many recesses, sipping an orange Suntop and daydreaming before being thrown back into the endless boredom of the classroom. The only thing I can liken it to is the Adults in a Charlie Brown cartoon, if Charlie only understood about 25% of what was being said…

Vindication, However Limited

Although I tried to find pictures of the grounds, most outdoor shots featured the soccer field and faced west (away from the structure/basketball court), so I suppose I’ll just have to be happy with what I found. It’s quite remarkable when you think about it in its entirety:

  • The structure still existed 40 years later
  • Sufficiently detailed satellite photos were available and [publicly] accessible
  • The names of the district, the school, and the thoroughfares were familiar to me, once I’d read them
  • The memory turned out to be true, not some invention of my overactive imagination…

For instance, one of my childhood friends who had a similar ancestry to mine used to make up stories about how Kermit the Frog would sneak into your bedroom at night and shove needles up your butt, then collect your diarrhea in a glass jar (yes, really), which was accompanied by the song of the same name.

It’s fair to say that I had a very strange childhood…

News of the World

Afterlife Afterthoughts

A couple of weeks ago, I dreamt that Jim messaged me via Discord. He didn’t have much to say, only asking, “How’s it goin’?”

In the dream, I remember being confused, wondering if a friend or family member accessed his account, or if it was really him, either returned from the dead, or maybe he even faked his own death! Then I woke up…

Perhaps this was the ghost of Jim looking in on his old friend. Or perhaps it was just my subconscious replaying an old memory fragment in a misguided attempt to give me some closure. Or maybe I just missed my friend…

McPublicity Stunts

On a lighter note, the current McCEO of McDonald’s decided to make a video of himself pretending to eat a Big Arch Burger. It reminded me of the time McCEO Steve shot down the McWhopper collab; it turns out he was later fired for McSexting using his company’s McEmail address, and paying female employees for limey McDick suckings (probably) with McStock Options (I get a lot of mileage out of McJokes)…

A lot of people are shitting on the video, and for good reason…

  • His apparent inability to hold a hamburger properly
  • The awkward little bite
  • Declaring his intent to eat this burger for lunch (you’re not fooling anybody!)
  • His use of corpo-speak phrases like “beef notes” and referring to it as a “product” as opposed to, oh, I don’t know? Maybe…Burger…or Sandwich?

Now I’ve had my share of McDonald’s (and then some)… so I actually wanted to try this fucken thing and see what all the fuss is about. I was unimpressed, here’s why…

  • The reason the Big Arch is so fucken hard to hold is that it’s basically a Double Quarter Pounder, but with Big Mac fixins; the thousand island drenched onions and lettuce create a viscous barrier between the patties, causing them to slip, and makin’ a fucken mess all over the place.
  • The Big Mac solves this by including a middle bun for structural integrity. Seriously, look it up! They can’t do this with the Big Arch because the goddamn thing is already 1,100 calories, so you’re basically adding another 100 calories on top of that, not to mention the Mc Brick you’d excrete later…
  • While the Big Arch contains a slightly different lineup (i.e., white cheddar instead of American cheese, crispy onions, and a slightly more thousand-islandy McSauce – i.e., it has ketchup in it) than the Big Mac, I struggled to taste much of a difference, and still prefer the Big Mac or a Royale with Cheese (I learned that this was a real thing when I lived in Sand Land).

All in all, it’s just another out-of-touch, expensive McShitwich. These fads come and go (anybody remember the Clear Cola Craze© of the early 90s?). But once was enough to learn my lesson :).

FPS Fuckery

Last month, I decided to prematurely upgrade the PC I had built about 3.5 years ago. I’ve been going 4-5+ years between upgrade cycles, and truth be told, didn’t quite get as much PC as I wanted for the money I spent.

It started with an RTX 5080 GPU, and followed by a new motherboard (mine only supported DDR4, even though DDR5 had been out for a couple of years prior), and hell, why not go all in and get a current-gen CPU while we’re at it?

I’ve typically been team Intel, but with the price of RAM being through the roof ($885 for 64GB of DDR5-6000 CL36), I got lucky with a NewEgg bundle, only paying $939 for an AMD 9800X3D (arguably the best gaming CPU on the market at the time of writing this), a mid-range motherboard, and 64GB of DDR5 RAM. They also threw in a free mid-tower ATX case and an AIO!

So I took freebies and built a second PC out of my old spare parts, picking up an Intel B580 GPU (slightly better than the one that came with the PC I bought for Jim).

“I’ll bet those golden tickets make the chocolate taste terrible.”
– Charlie Bucket

I cranked every graphics setting to 11 and could still eke out 240+ FPS (albeit with 4x frame gen), but what I didn’t count on was how distracting all the bloom, volumetric fog, and the like would be. Charlie Bucket once speculated that the golden tickets would make the chocolate taste terrible, and I think I finally understand what he meant.

The game is most enjoyable when stripped down to its purest core – the window dressing isn’t just superfluous, I’d argue that it’s a net negative. FPS is a big fucken lie – what really matters is local latency, and with the frame gen overhead, I was pushing 55-65ms whereas ‘good’ is somewhere in the 25-45 range… Perhaps I’m just jaded?

The Really Real World

“Cinco De Mayo,
Fed Up With Politicians,
They are All Liars.”
– A Haiku by Joe Jim, 5/05/2026

I’m not a Democrat, nor am I a Republican. The last presidential election seemed like the difference between hot dogs made from lips and assholes, or ones made from foreskin and gallbladders. Neither party has my best interests in mind. So the question becomes, “Which one am I likely to survive with most of my freedoms intact?”

My Blue-Blooded Blue No Matter Who™ friend seems to suffer from a brand of TDS, characterized by Tourette-like ticks where he must explain his disgust whenever any right-wing associated figure (or Catholic) appears on screen – or at least that’s how it appeared to me at first. Having gotten to know him better, I think what he’s exhibiting is more of a Pavlovian stimulus as always seems to look to me for a reaction, which I fail to give, partly because I just don’t care that much, and partly because I’ve come to accept a simple truth; Left or Right, it’s all the same, and I’m tired of pretending otherwise.

I only go into the office a couple of times per week, so I don’t need to fill the tank more than once a month. The last time I did, I noticed the price of gas was the highest I’d ever seen it here by about a dollar/gallon. It’s funny what it takes to manifest an abstract concept, a war being fought 7,150 miles away into reality. Only then did it become ‘real’ to me.

Life is Harder for Some People

I don’t have many friends, but I try to look out for the ones I do. Most of my life has been an uphill struggle, and while the top of the mountain isn’t as tall as the dreams of my youth, it has a pleasant view, and I can see myself being happy here for a very long time (if I let myself be). It’s lonely up here, though, and as much as I’d like to bring my friends with me. My work often feels like I’m saving the world, yet I cannot save my friends from themselves…

“Hey, hey, I saved the world today!
…And everybody’s happy now,
The bad thing’s gone away!
And everybody’s happy now,
The good thing’s here to stay!”
– Eurythmics, I Saved the World Today

It seems that life is just harder for some people, even for simple things like keeping a job or even an appointment. They mean well, but have proven time and again to be utterly unreliable. I’ve given this problem a lot of thought, trying to understand why some people make it, and others don’t. What follows are my reflections on this…

Safety Nets

About 20 years ago, I was completing the last year of my undergrad. I’d quit my internship for my first big-boy job, working for a local telephone division in enterprise support. I’d get up around 7 or 8 pm, eat something, then head to the office to start my shift at 10 pm. I’d work until 7 am, drive 40 minutes to school for my 8 am capstone courses, then on to my second job working at the library, and finally, home sometime early afternoon to try to sleep, then do it all over again the next day.

I did this because I had to support my wife and myself. There were no safety nets, and no one to turn to for help. My mother and father separated when I was 10, my eldest brother left home when I was 13, and my parents officially divorced when I was 15. I wasn’t particularly close to my other siblings, and I left home the first chance I got, and never looked back. I had to learn self-reliance because I had no choice. I had no one else to look to but myself. I made a lot of mistakes, but I learned from them.

On the other end of the spectrum, I’ve had smart, capable friends in their late 20s, even 30s or 40s, who couldn’t keep a job at a fast-food restaurant for more than 2-3 months at a time, let alone pursue any career. Most of them lived with a parent, sibling, or friend. Hell, I’ve taken in many friends to help them get back on their feet, and it almost always ended the friendship. Easy come, easy go, I suppose… people tend to take things for granted when they don’t have to struggle for them.

They give themselves permission to fail, reasoning that someone will always be there to help them. They may not be proud of it, but that blow to their pride isn’t a sufficient deterrent, or they just refuse to accept responsibility…

It’s Always Someone (or Something) Else’s Fault

A common trait among my friends who suffer from this is a tendency to deflect responsibility onto someone or something else… This is normal for children, but I expect better from grown-ass men…

Yes, sometimes, somebody might have it in for you. Yes, the odds aren’t in your favor, and things are harder than they have to be, but that’s life! The trick is to accept the hand you’ve been dealt, and make the most of it! But what does that look like?

For me, it was turtling up, buckling down, and making do with what I had for years on end. I didn’t go out. I lived modestly. I didn’t take vacations. I didn’t travel. I stayed at home, and my computer was my sole source of entertainment. But not these guys!

I have a friend we’ll call “Cap’n Fazoli”. He had aspirations of doing contractor work as a side hustle and needed a work truck. Around here, that shouldn’t cost more than $3-5k if you know what to look for. It doesn’t have to look good; it just needs to run.

Instead, he found his “Dream Truck” (a late-70s show vehicle) and paid about $10,000 for it (borrowed from his parents, of course). It wasn’t long before the cracks started to show (oil leaks, wiring problems, etc.. It became apparent that it would need a lot of work and was never intended to be a daily driver, let alone a proper work truck.

Now he’s saddled with a $400/month payment (about a quarter of his paycheck). He complains about money trouble but continues to spend cash he doesn’t have on things like guns (bought an $800 pistol), going out to eat, and frequent vacations, even though he hasn’t been in his job long enough to have PTO to use.

Fazoli blames his wife, who, admittedly, he should never have married. She’s mentally unstable and suffers from frequent crash-outs. These episodes seem to be limited to her interactions with him (and other social situations like work), leading me to believe that this is how she’s learned to manipulate him into getting her way…

I have to remind myself that he alone is responsible for his own situation, and he alone has the power to change it. All I can do is try to be there for him when he needs someone to talk to, and encourage him to work it out for himself.

I did manage to get him a job working for a municipal government, so if he can stick with it for 5-10+ years, he’ll have a nice safety net. He’s just now finished his 6-month probationary period, so I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see.

Some People Aren’t Ready for Help

“It is impossible for anyone to be responsible for another person’s behavior. I spoke of myself as ‘responsible’ for this group; that was verbal shorthand. The most I can do, or you, or any leader-is to encourage each one to be responsible for himself.”
– Robert A. Heinlein, Farnham’s Freehold, 1964

The last point/realization is the most devastating: Some people aren’t going to make it, and there’s nothing you can do to help them. Porkbun was one of them. Porkbun was a big, friendly doofus, touched with the ’tism. Now that I think about it, conversations with him were a lot like conversations with generative AI; he was overly eager, enthusiastic, could repeat facts he’d learned, but utterly dependent on being told what to do and how to do it. No imagination.

There came an opportunity at my side hustle to bring on someone to handle the low-hanging fruit. They didn’t have to be particularly bright, and the position wasn’t well-paid, but it was just perfect for someone who needed help breaking into the industry. I arranged a call with the CEO, and everything went well, but then he had to go and shoot himself in the foot.

I made the mistake of having a side channel conversation with him in Discord, which he took out of context and shared with his mother. Mother Porkbun then insisted the whole thing was a scam, which utterly baffled me. I spent about an hour on the phone with him, explaining that, for that to be true, it would have been a long con to put Victor Lustig to shame!

I patiently explained that, over the course of several years, I had helped him with job applications, reviewed job postings with him and explained the particulars, helped him with his resume, and even hosted his website, which was intended to be a portfolio of his work that he could share with prospective employers.

It was then that I realized that I was not dealing with a 28-year-old man, but rather a child – incapable of making his own decisions. So I rescinded the offer, citing that I didn’t think he was ready, and withdrew all personal association with him.

I asked if he had any interest in keeping his website, and although he’d only logged in 7 times over the 3 years I’d hosted it for him, he insisted he did, so I backed it up and helped him transfer it to his own provider. With that, I washed my hands of him.

I don’t blame Porkbun – he couldn’t help what he was. The fault lay with me for not recognizing his limitations. One day, I’ll learn to mind my own goddamn business…

Priorities, Part II

“Y’know, the world’s gone crazy, and it ain’t safe on the streets.”
– Cheeseburger, Comin’ Home, 2008

A few years ago, I wrote a blog post lamenting the pointless fatalities during the mostly peaceful rioting. This year, we’re seeing more of the same, and once again, stupid people are learning the hard way that if you go looking for death, you’re sure to find it.

“…life’s hard, but it’s harder if you’re stupid.”
– George V. Higgins, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, 1970

Parallels: Sovereign Citizens and Mostly Peaceful Rioters

My YouTube feed has been sending me a lot of sovereign citizen arrest videos, and I find them as fascinating as they are formulaic. Essentially, “john doe” [sic]. A “natural man” representing the corporate entity known as “JOHN DOE” gets pulled over for an easily avoidable traffic violation (i.e., displaying a bogus license plate), then exacerbates the situation by refusing to identify himself or comply with lawful orders. Invariably, the officer reaches a point where he’s had enough of the SC’s shit and gets him (or her) out of the vehicle, in cuffs, and off to jail they go…

Watching these interactions through the lens of the officer’s bodycam, I can’t help but marvel at the SC’s surprise. What did he think would happen? Whether they, in their stupidity, earnestly believed what they were doing was right and just, or they were just another antisocial fuck trying to game the system, is irrelevant; the result is the same…

What Did You Think Would Happen?

When I hear about the coordinated mobs of people blocking streets, harassing fellow citizens after mistaking them for ICE (even after it was established that they weren’t), and stalking, doxing, threatening, obstructing, and attacking federal agents, I can’t help but be reminded of those sovereign citizens. I ask again, “What did you think would happen?”

I have no love for cops, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m afraid of them. It’s within their lawful authority to detain, search, arrest, and use (and sometimes abuse) deadly force. Yes, there are rules and standards, but most hinge on the officer’s reasonable belief; they must be able to act decisively in uncertain situations, and sometimes mistakes happen…

Their response to a given situation is contextual. On one side of the spectrum, you have Smokey the Bear, benign and preventative. On the other end is a man-eating grizzly. Depending on the circumstances, things can quickly escalate from Smokey to Cocaine Bear. Do not poke the bear!

In situations like this, I ask myself, what compelled a mother of three to intentionally prevent ICE agents from conducting a lawful investigation? Why did an ICU nurse vandalize a federal vehicle, resist arrest, and obstruct law enforcement? Did they earnestly believe that they were revolutionaries protecting their communities from jack-booted thugs, kidnapping innocent people off the streets? Or were they antisocial miscreants looking for trouble?

Did You Think This Was a Game?

“We don’t rise to our expectations. We fall to our level of training.”
– Archilochus, 645 BC (possibly)

The partner of the young mother who was shot in the head when she attempted to flee from federal agents is alleged to have shouted, “Why did you have real bullets?”

I find this statement to be quite telling, and she isn’t alone in her (mis)understanding of how the world works. In a later conversation I had with a friend, he expressed similar childish naivety. We got to talking about the shootings, and he mentioned a video he’d seen where the crowd managed to snatch someone who was being arrested back, and another where a community of people came out of the woodwork and chased off those nasty ICE people. It sounded like he was describing how to play ‘Red Rover’. At one point, I interrupted him to ask, “Do you think this is a game?”

The partner also said in the aftermath, “I made her come down here; she didn’t want to come; it’s my fault.”

Some of the worst trouble [with the law] I’ve ever been in, and certainly the closest I ever came to losing my liberty, was the result of being in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong people. I suppose I was lucky, as all it cost me was 3 hours in jail – but I learned my lesson! These two weren’t so fortunate…

From all accounts, they were good people, but fell in with the wrong crowd, followed bad advice (e.g.,”…put your body on the line”), and paid for it with their lives.

Here Endeth the Lesson

At first, I pitied them… but then I think about the criminals ICE is trying to remove, and their victims… Victims like Victoria Eileen Harwell. She was a mother, too! No one wants to talk about her. No one is protesting for her. No one is giving speeches about her. Do black lives stop mattering when they’re politically inconvenient?

There’s a section up on the DHS website, forty-one pages there by now, probably more. I do wish these people would go out and count them sometime, maybe they’d learn a lesson. No, probably not.

Epilogue

“If it doesn’t matter in 20 years, it doesn’t matter.”
– Dave, the Guy on the Couch, 1998

There’s a lot to suggest that some of these agitators were [Minnesota] state-sponsored, and possibly even used as fodder to distract from widespread fraud. It wouldn’t surprise me either way, and I’m no longer bothered by it…

###

When I was a kid, just starting out on my own, I lived in a flophouse with Jungle George, a pot dealer and Capoeira enthusiast, and his old friend Dave, ‘the guy on the couch’.

Dave had a hard life and desperately clung to whatever dignity he had left, despite being well beyond caring about what anyone thought of him. His most redeeming quality was that he viciously stood up to anyone who challenged his friends, and was always there to offer helpful advice to us young, dumb, hormone-fuelled idiots.

In an effort to comfort me through a bad breakup, Dave relayed a little piece of wisdom allegedly passed down to him by an old Mafioso: “If it doesn’t matter in 20 years, it doesn’t matter.”

This made me feel better, but more importantly, he was right! It’s a shame more people don’t think this way… perhaps the world would be a better place.

 

Ramen, My Way

Fancy shin ramen black
Print Recipe

My last couple of posts have been a bit on the heavier side, so I thought it was time for something a bit more light-hearted and playful, just like the old days. Today, I made some ramen for a friend who came over to redo some shit the contractors fucked up in my guest bathroom. When I was living in Sand Land, instant ramen was a frequent staple, and being reminded of the this site's roots, was inspired to make theis post. Enjoy!
Student of Ramen Eating: Master, Soup first, or noodles first?
Master of Ramen Eating: First, observe the whole bowl. Appreciate its gestalt, savor the aromas. Jewels of fat glittering on the surface. Shinachinku roots shining. Seaweed slowly sinking. Spring onions floating. Concentrate on the three pork slices...they play the key role, but stay modestly hidden... what's important here is to apologize to the pork by saying, "See you soon."
Prep Time1 day
Cook Time10 minutes
Course: Main Dish
Cuisine: Japanese, Korean, Merican
Servings: 1 Ramen Enjoyer
Calories: 800kcal
Author: Joe-Jim

Ingredients

  • 1 package instant ramen (spicy) I recommend Paldo Namja Ramen, Nongshim Shin Ramyun, or Shin Black, but really any spicy instant ramen would work.
  • 1 whole egg Soft boiled, marinated if you wanna get fancy.
  • 2 ounces green onion chopped
  • 2 ounces kimchi Or seasoned bamboo shoots, or vaguely asian pickled vegtable of your choice
  • 2 ounces meat The featured image of the post was gochujang ground beef, but chicken, left over thanksgiving turkey, bits of steak, bacon, or even hot links would work here.
  • 1 tbsp Lao Gan Ma Spicy Chili Crisp Optional, but if find yourself outside of the US, get the forbidden beef one!

Marinade Mix

  • .5 cup water
  • .25 cup soy sauce
  • .25 cup dark soy sauce
  • 3 tbsp rice wine vinegar
  • 2 tbsp hot chili flakes I use a ghost chili blend, but whatever you like, so long as your butthole can cash the check that your mouth writes.
  • 1 tbsp Lao Gan Ma Spicy Chili Crisp Because you can never have enough of it...
  • 2 tbsp gochujang Preferably the hotter variety

Instructions

Spicy Marinated Soy Eggs (Day Before)

  • Soft-boil a few eggs for 6.5-8 minutes. My saucepan holds about 10, so that's generally how many I do.
  • Halt the cooking process by running the eggs under cold water, or give them a nice ice bath, Wim Hof style.
  • While the eggs cool, in a large plastic container, mix the marinade ingredients together.
  • Peel the eggs and place them in the marinade. Cover them with a clean paper towel, absorbing the marinade, so the eggs get a nice, even coverage. Place an airtight lid on the container, then put it in the fridge over night.

Ramen

  • Melt a pad of butter at the bottom of your saucepan.
  • Place thinly sliced beef (or other meat of your choosing) in the pan and lightly sear it on both sides. Don't cook it all the way through, it'll cook some more in the boiling broth!
  • Pour 500ml* of water into the saucepan. Add any flavor and dried vegetable sachets, and a spoonful of Lao Gan Ma Spicy Chili Crisp.
  • When the water begins to boil, add the noodle block. Gently agitate the noodles with your spoon, chopsticks, or whatever utensil is handy.
  • When the ramen block separates into strands and softens slightly, pour the contents of the saucepan into a large bowl.
  • Garnish with green onions, a marinated egg (sliced in half), and kimchi. Other fresh vegetables that work well are mushrooms (white button, shitake, or whatever you can get your hands on), bok choy, bamboo shoots, and corn (although that's actually a grain).

Notes

*With Shin Ramyun, the instructions call for 560ml of water; I use less because I like a bit thicker broth.
Alternatively, if you wanna go a bit simpler and more 'traditional', you can poach a raw egg in the broth while it's boiling, then add a slice of American cheese on top of the noodles and some kimchi.
"The important thing is eating the Ramen, not how you get to it."
~ Cord (probably)

Grumbles From the Grave: I am Tom From the Boondocks

Below is an email I received from Jim nearly 10 years ago. Looking back, it was probably one of the most lucid and self-aware messages he’d ever written to me, and it provided some profound insight into how troubled he was then…

On Friday, April 29, 2016, at 1:18 AM, Big Jim <email@redacted.null> wrote:

Joe Jim,

I have two overwhelming fears in life, phobias, if you like. One you can probably recall from our previous talks: violent home invasion. I am deathly afraid of some shit bags kicking in my door and torturing my mother and myself. This fear has subsided since I left Gary, IN. I live in the country on the out skirts off a really small town where crime outside of drunken driving does not occur.

I have nothing to fear like I did before, or the guilt of thinking I did something wrong. I have told many people to get off my porch before, no matter what their story was. Maybe all those claims of needing to use a phone, or “I’m bleeding, please help,” were true. I have no idea, but I never lost sleep – or my life – over them.

My other fear is wrongful imprisonment and being railroaded through the system. I have no defense against this. No amount of security lights, guns, or dogs is going to help. I feel like I am dangling in the wind by the powers that be. I am honestly fucking terrified.

It is not always enough to know you are innocent. This whole situation has me stressed out to the extreme. I am not eating or sleeping well.  For the past week, every time a car slows down in front of the house and my dogs start barking, I am thinking, “Great, here we go. I am going to get hauled off.”

I know this is an irrational fear. I am more likely to get run over by an Amish buggy, but my rational thinking side does nothing to help the butterflies in my stomach, sweaty palms, and deep-seated fear of becoming a statistic.

Sadly, he managed to manifest his fears into a self-fulfilling prophecy, and all his worst nightmares came true…

On June 24th, 2019, Jim got into a verbal altercation with his mother. What followed is unclear, but the police were called, and Jim, who was outside with a rifle slung on his shoulder when they arrived, went back into the house, up to his room, and passed out.

SWAT went upstairs where Jim was passed out at his computer, and he awoke to the smell of blood (his) and gun powder. They shot him from behind, twice in the arm, and once in the leg. He almost died in prison when his wounds became infected, but he pulled through, though it left him with severe nerve damage – a sensation of constant pain and discomfort he described as agonizing pins and needles that never went away.

Arguably, it worked out for the best; It was the kick in the ass Jim needed to turn his life around, although perhaps too late… He moved to Mexico, lost 120 lbs, met a lovely woman, and got married. He lived a quiet life, managing his pain through pot and LSD, and once again, we gamed and we bullshitted about fitness and food. In life, there are no happy endings, but his was as close as one can hope for.

~~~

Footnote: The featured image is a picture of Jim’s dogs, sent to me on August 25, 2015. The doggo on the right is Darwin, I never knew the name of the other. 

Murdered for Wrongthink

I Just Can’t…

I tried. I really tried to imagine someone I didn’t know personally, but strongly disagreed with [politically]. Then I tried to imagine gloating over their murder, and I just couldn’t do it. I can’t understand why people, the left in particular,  think it’s socially acceptable to celebrate the murder of a political opponent, guilty only of having a difference of opinion.

I didn’t particularly like Charlie Kirk. His videos always felt like he was punching down. He went to campuses, and engaged over-educated, Adoral-addled retards, then posting these interlocutional encounters on YouBoob with masturclickbator titles like, “CHARLIE KIRK DESTOOOOOOYS SOME DUMB A$$HOLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11”

These fuckers didn’t stand a chance – he knew their arguments better than they did… But what they lacked in debating skills and intellect, they made up for in sheer numbers. It takes a lot of balls to face down a crowd of hostile ideologues – ask me how I know? This might be why I have such a strong distrust and hatred of large gatherings…

It’s a Different World Now

I feel fortunate that I was an adult before social media became a thing. I think back to the most embarrassing moments in my young life, and feel very fortunate that none of them were immortalized on the internet… I’m further grateful that I can distinguish between internet memes and reality, but many young people today can’t. To them, the morality of murder depends solely on the ethnicity and sexual orientations of those involved – traits I couldn’t give two shits about…

“…you know that color does not matter to me. I want to know other things about a man. Is his word good? Does he meet his obligations? Does he do honest work? Is he brave? Will he stand up and be counted?” – Robert Heinlein, Farnham’s Freehold (1964)

Color doesn’t matter to me, either. It can’t! I’m a fucken half-breed myself, and don’t fit in anywhere! An unrepentant, life-long misfit who has finally reached an age and level of success where I proudly extend my middle finger and proclaim a cathartic, “Fuck you!” to people who bother me. But I don’t want to change them, and I don’t demand that anyone think the way I do, or believe what I believe, and would certainly never murder someone for voicing a contrary view!

It’s early days yet, and from what I’ve read, the asshole who did this used a Mauser 18 Savanna, chambered in .30-06. The irony is that the shooter, who is purportedly ‘anti-fascist’, would choose a modern Mauser rifle. Yep! The same manufacturer who armed the Third Reich… Then again, the world has never been short on walking contradictions…

“I’m a man without conviction.
I’m a man who doesn’t know –
How to sell a contradiction.
You come and go, you come and go.”
– Culture Club, Karma Chameleon (1983)

Resilience

After moping around the Tree of Woe for a few days, I’ve come to the conclusion that what these Stalinistic shit-heels lack is resilience – their fragile little egos can’t stand to be disagreed with, and believe that the world must change to suit them. I know better – the world is what it is, and before you can change it, you have to understand it, and perhaps I never will… This is why I’ve elected instead to carve out my little nook and live content in my own life and leave everyone else the hell alone to live theirs…

Idle Hands

I had lunch today with some old college buddies. Our politics run the gamut from moderate left to moderate right, and everything in between. But through all of this, we found humor and camaraderie in the Library and the pub down the road. We drank to the solemn memories of those who passed, and to bright futures we dreamt of all those years ago, just now coming to fruition.

I never understood the phrase “Idle hands are the Devil’s workshop” until now, or the more modern turn of phrase “unemployed behavior.”

It seems to me that many of the World’s sorrows are sewn by those who have nothing better to do…

“If your heart is good and weary,
Thank the Lord that you’re not a bum!
You got a job, and you’re not a bum!
You’re in love, and you’re not a bum!
But you could be,
Pretty quickly,
You could easily become a bum!
If your money flies way,
If you lose part of your brain!
But you’ve not lost everything now,
So go ahead and stand up tall and be proud!”
– “The Real” Brad Neely, America Now – Topic: Morale (2009)

I’ve been out of work before. There have been times in my life when I didn’t have a place to stay and didn’t know where my next meal would come from. I’ve excavated dirt by hand and hauled concrete for $6.00 an hour. I’ve waited tables and washed dishes. I’ve called strangers on the phone and talked them into changing their long-distance phone plans (remember when that was a thing?), and sold timeshare pitches disguised as inexpensive minivacations…

Eventually, I took the plunge and borrowed a metric ass-load of money for school, and spent it on an education from a vocational school as a working adult in my mid-20s. I never had the ‘college’ experience with dorms, parties, and so on…  Likewise, no one ever came to my school to debate anyone – the most excitement we ever had was a Library employee who no-showed on his third week, and we had to escort his drug dealers off campus when they came to pick up his check #TrueStory.

But it kept me busy! At first, I worked part-time at the Library, which was enough to cover insurance and gas money. Then I landed an internship. The semester before graduation, I was hired full-time to work overnight at a major telco, troubleshooting connectivity issues on enterprise circuits.

Point being, I was always too goddamn busy to get into trouble! I didn’t have time to sit around, getting my dick sucked by a tranny in a furry costume while plotting to ‘unalive’ (as the young people say) my political rivals on Discord…

Besides, Jim never did make good on his threat to ship me a helper primate, although sending me a Thai Ladyboy dressed up as one would have tracked with his sense of humor…

If You Can’t Say Anything Nice…

As I write this, a couple of contractors are redoing my guest bathroom. One of them has made some offhand remarks about “the crazy guy in the white house.”

This didn’t upset me, and I only mention it to illustrate a point: The difference between the side I sympathize with and the one that murdered Charlie is that the latter would have…

  • Fired him on the spot
  • Accused him of being a Nazi and/or Fascist
  • Taken to social media to dox/publicly shame him/get him ‘cancelled’
  • Maybe even assaulted him (because it’s okay to punch Nazis)
  • Nazis are anyone you happen to disagree with at a given moment…

The prior (like me) would have ignored the comment (as I did). I don’t have to like what he said, and certainly don’t have to agree with it, but I do hold sacred his right to say it. I don’t agree with his opinions, but many others do, and for all I know, maybe I’m the asshole?

Left or Wright?

The other day, I found a cartoon created by Colin Wright to describe his experience as a “center-left liberal”:

This mirrors my experience, and the irony isn’t lost on me… I have a feeling things will get worse before they get better, but I sure hope they get better in my lifetime… If not, well, I suppose I’m used to my hermetic lifestyle!

A Good Fork

This, you can trust!

I am a man who can appreciate good flatware. I’m not talking about fancy silverware or some gimmicky Ginsu… I’m talking about simple, honest, stainless steel. Something with a bit of heft to it, not like those flimsy, stamped metal ones you can bend like a Uri Geller prop…

“Fire and wind come from the sky, from the gods of the sky. But Crom is your god, Crom and he lives in the earth. Once, giants lived in the Earth, Conan. And in the darkness of chaos, they fooled Crom, and they took from him the enigma of steel. Crom was angered. And the Earth shook. Fire and wind struck down these giants, and they threw their bodies into the waters, but in their rage, the gods forgot the secret of steel and left it on the battlefield.

We who found it are just men. Not gods. Not giants. Just men. The secret of steel has always carried with it a mystery. You must learn its riddle, Conan. You must learn its discipline. For no one – no one in this world can you trust. Not men, not women, not beasts. This (Gestures at the fork) you can trust!” – Conan’s Father Figurine

Part of my home renovation included having all of my cabinets painted, and as a consequence, I had to clear everything out… my plates, bowls, pots, pans, all that shit… it all went into bags and totes, carted off into the garage… Unable to cook, I had to subsist on takeout, which wasn’t good for my wallet or my waistline, but worst of all, plastic… fucken… forks!

Although it did give me a brief respite from doing the dishes, it created a backlog of garbage given the influx of cardboard, plastic, and styrofoam containers, all taking up space in my bin…Contemplate THAT on the Tree of Woe!

Recovery…

Thankfully, that’s all over. Since then, I’ve slowly hauled all my stuff back upstairs, allowing me to sort through it all, reorganize what goes where, and get rid of all the tat former roommates and house-sitters kindly left… It’s all queued up in the garage, awaiting the next Great Purging™, two days hence…

In the meantime, I will continue to enjoy the simple pleasures of a good fork, stabbing firm chunks of spicy meat, and slowly slim back down to a more comfortable size while Ghost Jim nods in approval, suggesting I make some homemade corn tortillas to go with that, and polish it all off with a nice, tall cup of Yerba Maté.