More of the Same now with more sameness in Normal entries

Fish Tacos. What do fish tacos have to do with anything? Same as anything else, I guess, they don’t have to do with much except fish tacos. I like fish tacos. It’s been a while since I had one. I could have a —yankee? Gringo? — fish taco delivered to my door, but … the only thing worse than a soggy fish taco is anything else that you don’t like soggy. There isn’t a service that makes fish tacos on my front stoop. Today I don’t think they’d even need to bring a grill. Hot out there. It’s also humid enough rehydrate c-rations and then make them soggy. I’d rather have a soggy fish taco than a soggy c-rat, but, I’m feeling rather blessed to have neither. That’s how you count a blessing motherfuckers, being grateful for shit you ain’t got.

Ok, I’m rusty at being grateful. Not saying it doesn’t take a special kind of savant to be grateful for not having a soggy fish taco, just saying when you denigrate what you ain’t got your intentions get all muddy. I could say muddy fish tacos make me homesick, but the idea that it rains all the time in the Portland area or that the rain makes things muddy, is some moderate to severe hyperbole. And when you mention rain to a Midwesterner, what they picture is wildly different than how it rains in Portland.

I’ve seen white out rain in the mid-west. I’ve even seen it here too, though only once or twice. Damn near every time I’m driving through Iowa or Nebraska it’s not just raining, it’s hella raining. Granted, I’ve only done that six times since the advent of y2k, but my average prior to that is more like six times a decade and I didn’t do it a single time my first decade on this planet. Forgive me, I’ve done it a few times in winter too, hitch-hiking. A blizzard both times. Not round trip either, the first time I took highway 10 (San Diego, CA to Jacksonville, Fla) an easy three-day hitch-hike, two of which are spent in Texas. Being in bad weather in Texas is redundant, no, ok, yeah, but no that’s not what I mean. Whatever the weather is, it’s a distant second to being in Texas, but, at least you don’t feel insecure about God loosing his wrath on you like Nebraska and Iowa. It’s hard not to take personal, though, I’m sure, there are plenty of people who’ve been through Iowa and Nebraska and thought it was swell. Hmmm I might have mixed my past perfect with my past —imperfect? — they thought Iowa and Nebraska were swollen.

My memories are weird. I don’t mean because they’re unreliable (so are yours) lately, unreliable as in not on time or fully present, at best just phoning it in. I mean the way I remember stuff. Out of any context at all, when I think about rain in Michigan, I’m a kid of some indeterminate age, arms folded, chin on hands. I’m looking out the window and trying to make a good guess at how high the rain bounces when it hits the street. I figured it was half my height. I “see” this memory through my own eyes, mostly I feel it. There are memories very similar except I go running out into the rain. In thirty-five years of living in the Portland Metro area, I never saw rain like that. I can count on one hand the number of times I saw rain bounce at all. In the rain forest, at least that rain forest, the rain falls. Light, mal-nourished rain drops surrendering to gravity eventually. The ceiling is low. I could romanticize the Portland rain, treat it like a fish taco, but then I’d have to bitch about the rain here. One small bitch. A summer thunderstorm might clear the air while it’s happening, but, afterwards you can actually see it steam and hang in the air, making things more humid, you could take a shower, the same principle applies though.
It’s possible my memories aren’t weird at all, that the reason memories are always described as visual is because it’s convenient or because that’s how other people describe them. And sure, other senses are memory triggers too, but, if the smell of baking bread reminds you of your grandmother, you aren’t smelling her memory, you’re actually smelling bread baking and however your memory actually recalls thing to you tells you, or looks like, or, god please don’t, feels like or, even worse, tastes like grandma. If you know what your grandma tastes like please don’t tell me. If all your memories come in flavors please tell me, just not the specifics; the method, not the events.

It’s really fucking hot and humid out. I made a firm and irrational decision to type as a way of cooling down. You’re wondering if it’s working. This is the information age, I bet you could find the stats, in general, of what significant percentile of the group taking the placebo show signs of improvement. I want to say it’s like 25%. I could google search until I found an article that agrees with me. It might take a while. I’m pretty sure my margin of error is like 5%, still, that’s either one fifth or close to a third. That’s sometimes better than the real product. They actually test SSRI’s. Test them then release them into a saturated market and the really successful ones get longer than a year on the shelves when they are marketed for the side effects. Well-butrin, for instance, was a big deal as an SSRI when it was first released, I think because it had less kick than a placebo. One of the side effects was depression, a lack of desire. Something like 20% of depressed smokers got that extra kick into depression and just didn’t feel like smoking, lost the desire. It was on the market as a stop smoking tool, they even advertised that you can smoke as much as you want and sometime in the following ten days (they changed that to sixty later) you just won’t want to. It was a diet pill for a while too, again, lack of desire and a few things that didn’t register with me. So, to answer your question; hell yes, it’s frosty up in here. To pose your other question —Is it wise to fuck with your serotonin levels? Frosty.

I wrote this song when I was married to singer, the chorus of said song was —
If you have to ask
The answers always yes
And he died from the funk inside his drawers.
I wrote other songs, better songs. I think there are chimps on both sides of highway 10 who have written better songs. There were a lot of things I liked about her, her song writing ability was not among them. The band she had been in, doing originals, had the guitarist writing most of the music and she wrote most of the lyrics. I liked how the songs sounded and her voice, but the lyrics sounded like they were written by a talented teenager trying to find for voice. Hmmm I don’t mean immature, I don’t not mean immature either, the emphasis was on Trying. They were trying. And she had to explain them. No, she didn’t have to, she felt compelled to. It’s like explaining a joke before you wait to hear if anyone laughed.

I started this yesterday and, I don’t know, passed out from heat exhaustion or a trout swimming in the air whacked me in the noggin. It doesn’t matter, for the purposes of this happy horseshit it’s the same thing, though there’s no good ‘the one that got away’ joke for heat stroke. It’s not like today is wildly different. I’m still possessing a marked lack of fish tacos and everything is steamy hot, not in a good way. That’s all I can remember and I’m not going back to read this stuff. I probably drifted far afield because I do that, often.

It was 63 degrees, that’d be Fahrenheit, in Portland while I was bitching about the heat. Last year, however, this summer was mild and theirs was not. Even Portland’s winter was extreme for Portland.

You know all that helmet and kneepad horseshit we used to make fun of the kids for? I mean like when we were kids we didn’t wear helmets and kneepads? Well, more shocking than wanting to protect your kids head … When we were kids we had to roll our own joints. Now, not only can you buy pre-rolled, but they sell papers in a tube with a hard mouthpiece on the end and if you’re extra lazy there’s a tool, like a flat funnel, for getting your herbal product into the hollow tube. I don’t mean you can these at specialty stores, I mean if you ask for papers they assume you mean cones. My personal opinion is if you still can’t manage the perfect joint you should wear a helmet to smoke.

That sort of seems how industry works in the U S of A, advancements tend to edge out the DIY end user and/or the DIY end user has to become more sophisticated. The example of that phenomenon that pissed me off the most is when they started putting computers in cars way back when. Not the kind of computer you could crack open and fiddle with, closer to the black box in an airplane without the indestructible business. I had this brand new hoopdee Dodge Omni, mid-eighties I think, and it was something simple like adjusting the timing. I even borrowed one of those light gun strobe thingys. No matter how fine I set the timing the computer just didn’t believe it and set it back to chug-a-chug-a-CHUG-ah-ah. I couldn’t even get a mechanic to give me the code and the internet was a wildly different beast in those days. Of the handful of hard won auto repair knowledge … shit I typed myself into a corner … I used to know a few things about auto repair, they were made obsolete.

I do know just enough about computer repair, well, hardware, to stay current, but they sure do fuck you with the software. Kind of makes me wanna roll my own joints. I could say there was an art to it, and there is, but I’m not a joint rolling artist. My talent was being able to roll a joint in a blizzard on a freeway with the top down and light a match. Not high art but good old stoner high workmanship. Like everyone else, I thought I wrote well when stoned. Turns out I was mistaken as so many are, I was probably the hump of the bell curve mistaken. The downward slopes to either side were folks who wrote well or shitty when cold stone sober or, at least, tepid packing peanut sober.

The above paragraph or two deals with empirical changes to constructs. It gets a whole lot weirder the more abstract you get, like, say, conventional wisdom. If you live long enough conventional wisdom does enough turn-abouts to field a football team. Coffee and eggs being good examples. I could expand on that, but if I seem incoherent to you (that’s me owning you not understanding) a bunch of extra words isn’t going to help much. Diet books are a multi-billion dollar a year industry and when a new diet book comes out the next fifty are just like it, then one comes out either refuting or just plain old advocating the opposite and the next fifty are like that one. Eat in moderation and exercise, if that doesn’t work either fuck it and accept who you are or consider that somethings out of whack that an aging movie star can’t fix with the paleo ketogenic eat on a treadmill diet. Human physiology is really slow to change, so, the diet that worked for you 10,000 years ago probably still should. Huh. That all sounded smart ass, it was supposed to be a relatable example of applied abstract empiricism and the attempt to make it seem as confusing as rolling a joint or pedaling without a helmet.

Conventional wisdom also has little pearls about cracks and your moms back too. I’ve yet to hear a new theory on that. Back surgeons pull in mid-6 figures and they have all kinds of alternate theories. Stepping on a crack, however, has endured as the prevailing theory on mother back issues.

Thunderstorms should be rolling in long about one AM.