Jim Baumer's Blog, page 7

Holding More Than One Idea (The Err of Caution)

What week of lockdown is this? I’ve lost track.

I hope everyone’s holding up, well. I’m guessing many are not. Actually, I know many aren’t.

My daytime job involves taking calls in a healthcare setting. Since early March, I’ve listened to people cry, melt down, and I’ve experienced and uncomfortable level of fear being projected my way for the past weeks and now, months. This has got to stop!

As a parent coping with the loss of a son, I’ve been struggling with the feeling of sliding back into that “deep dark hole” that’s taken me months to get to the lip of, and then, up into the light of living again. Why has this pandemic triggered these former emotions that were more painful than any human should be forced to endure? I’ve asked the question “why me?” so many times I can’t even come up with a reasonable guess.

I’m not sure why, but often following Mark’s death, I was so fucking angry. I simply wanted to hit someone or worse. Rather than acting out on this urge, I simply turned inward. I remember a former radio psychologist, Dr. Joy Brown, saying that depression was “anger turned inward.” I’d concur. I was so depressed that I contemplated suicide.

Picking up the guitar saved me nearly two years ago. I’ve played my old acoustic (or my newer electric) nearly every single day since August 2018. I’m amazed that two guitars (and a Vox amp) could have made such a difference, but they have. Still, the past 8 to 10 weeks have been difficult as hell, even playing and writing songs and performing via the interwebs. There’s only so much shit that even my guitars can deflect away.

When the Covid-19 outbreak ramped up, there were conflicting reports of its severity. Initially, some said that it wasn’t any worse than the common flu and that “people were overreacting.” Then, protocols were established as cases exploded, especially in the large, urban population centers like Boston, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

Social distancing began being rolled out in early March. That’s when this period of quarantine commenced. We’ve been in a state of purgatory (some would say, “hell”) ever since.

Initially, we were told that social distancing was necessary to “flatten the curve.” That made sense. Anyone who knows anything about America’s healthcare system knows that it’s broken at best. Beds were in short supply due to market mechanisms inherent in our current global capitalist (neoliberal) economy. Too many sick patients would “overwhelm” the system and cause it to crash. At least that’s what we were told and by-and-large, the good sheeple we are, we held onto that.

But, once it was apparent that the center would hold, governors and other lifelong political hacks recognized that this pandemic would be a terrible thing to waste. Power—the absolute kind that non-term-limited pols are granted in whatever system of governance we have in America—began to do its work—corrupting and corrupting in an absolute and monarchical way.

As someone ensconced on the American left for a good stretch, I watched first with interest that soon morphed into anger, how complicit the media was with shutting everything down. MSNBC and Rachel Maddow in particular, began fogging fear into my saloon, nightly. At one point, I turned to Mary and said, “I’m done with this bullshit.” I haven’t watched the network for six weeks.

I’m capable of holding multiple thoughts, ideas, and paradigms simultaneously. Many intelligent, well-informed people are. Yet, most of my left-of-center friends were melting down in front of me on Facebook. One guy I kind of know (got to know him as a result of Mark’s death), a former Portland restaurant worker, became a daily source of irritation to me. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it was his hypocrisy. But we’re all hypocrites in various ways. Maybe it was the way he flaunted his ignorance as a form of virtue signaling. He became one of the first people I followed on Facebook who engaged in mask-shaming. Mask-shaming with a barrage of f-bombs and personal attacks on a host of people, including the industry that allowed him a pretty damn good living simply because he could manage a busy bar in a city that was full of similar places catering to people who’ll pay $10 and $12 for a mixed drink.

We all have lost our shit in various ways. But the moral superiority and elitism coming from people I thought I liked was a bit too much for me. Once again, I was regularly muttering to myself that I “fucking hate humans,” just like I did in the weeks and months following Mark’s death.

At some point about a month ago, my anger and agitation was becoming a problem. I decided to begin limiting my screen time. I stopped watching all but a few minutes of morning news on the local network. I started listening to a few podcasts. One of them was Michael Savage’s. I know—I just outed myself to the “good” liberals who know me. I don’t fucking care. This might surprise you but I think it’s possible to be a hybrid of a Burkean Conservative seasoned with some sense of a Marxist worldview. But once again, for someone who most of you have abandoned to a world of nearly constant psychic struggle and emotional dissonance, I no longer give two shits what anyone thinks about me.

Savage had on a journalist named Alex Berenson a few weeks back. I listened with interest. As someone with investigative journalism chops and who actually has always tried to practice the basic tenets of journalism via my writing (in most instances), I’m appalled how the mainstream media has carried water for what’s become propaganda in the best connotation. Often, journalists simply lie to further their agenda. I know most of the media covering national politics loathe President Trump, so the constant drumbeat of “orange man bad” has gotten tiresome. Flip the record over because the tone arm is scraping up against the label.

When I left fundamentalism back in the mid-1980s in Indiana, I was working at a prison as a med tech. A number of former Bible school students I once attended classes with were guards there. A few of them would come into the med room I worked in shepherding sick inmates to be checked-out. One of these guards tried to impugn my decision in front of my co-worker. I basically threw him out of the med room and intimated he’d better not ever come back with his bullshit. I’d made my choice and just because he couldn’t abide by it, it was my right.

Listening to Berenson recount his own experience with former colleagues rang true to me. Berenson is a real journalist. A true journalist follows information where it takes you. Most media hacks today have an agenda and a narrative and they simply bend the notes to fit their own tune. That’s not journalism.

Maine’s governor—like most of her Democrat colleagues occupying governorships across the country—has erred on the side of caution. I guess caution’s okay: except when it guarantees many of your citizens are going to experience ongoing economic fallout from turning off the state’s economy. And please, don’t give me your tired lines about “safety and science.”

Every morning, I drive into work from Biddeford. I drive 65 to 72 on roads that have speed limits of 70. Regularly, cars blast by at speeds well above 80 and even higher than that. Speed limits are based upon clear parameters. By-and-large they are determined by what’s safe during ideal driving conditions: dry pavement, a vehicle with properly-inflated tires, functional tires and brakes that operating at peak levels. Then, there are elements of driver skill, etc. Driving 80 on the interstate is unsafe. Excessive speed kills. And every year, somewhere between 35,000 and 40,000 people die on American roadways from automobile accidents. Speed is a significant factor in many of these deaths.

Yet, some of the same Nazi assholes mask-shaming everyone and their neighbor, are the ones who violate a host of traffic laws and probably a whole bunch of other legal statutes. Hypocrisy? I don’t know: if the shoe fits….

All of these kinds of observations have afflicted me for weeks now. It’s what initially made me pissed off about masks.

Personally, I’m not totally on-board with the mask thing. But you know what? My chiropractor wears a mask. I have the utmost respect for his ability as a professional to keep my upright. He’s kept his practice open throughout the pandemic. So I wear a mask when I go to see him. If masks prove that they protect him and his staff from me (possibly being contagious, but asymptomatic like many of us), then I can wear something that I find uncomfortable at best.

While in Brunswick yesterday for an appointment, Mary asked me if I could get a few things at Morning Glory Natural Foods, the town’s health food emporium. Being vegan, there are some things we can only get at places like Morning Glory, like Violife vegan parmesan cheese. Pandemic or not: people gotta’ eat (and eat well).

Morning Glory limits the number of shoppers in the store to five people at a time. Walking down Maine Street towards the store, I saw a line outside. Most of those standing on the sidewalk near the entrance were wearing masks. I took mine out of my vest pocket and put it on. I waited patiently. In 10 minutes, I was in the store getting what I needed and I was out in another 10 minutes.

Come on, Jim! Put your damn mask on!

Wearing the mask didn’t kill me. It was me simply nodding to my fellow humans (who I don’t always like being around) and indicating that I respect them enough to do something I don’t know for sure that it’s effective, but this is the world we are now living in. It’s okay to have more than one mind about masks. I liked some of my ideas my sister wrote about, incorporating masks into a fashion statement—instead, much of our mask behavior has been pretty damn ugly.

Brunswick’s downtown is a veritable ghost town. The governor, bureaucratic hacks like Heather Johnson and their ilk will have a lot to answer for in the coming months. Maybe all the fear, dissonance, and very real suffering they’ve inflicted was necessary to keep us all “safe.” But I think (because I believe we could do much better) that creativity like places like Morning Glory and a manufacturing facility like Volk Packaging (they’ve stayed open and had no Covid cases) have exhibited could (and should) have been the public response, instead of shutting off the economy and impacting livelihoods (and the well-being) of working people under the guise of science and safety.

TPTB are creating ghost towns everywhere (Brunswick, ME)

Friends and Enemies

We’ve all heard the expression, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” What does this mean? Should it even matter?

For a few weeks now, I’ve been ruminating on several things during this period of lockdown, or as I call it, “house arrest.” One of them is how social interactions and the so-called “glue” that holds us together seems to have been altered (perhaps permanently damaged?) by the novel coronavirus—maybe even worse than the lungs of someone who acquired Covid-19.

I’ve been spending minimal time in Zuckerberg’s Lunchroom, aka, Facebook. Why? Because people I once respected, or at the very least—could tolerate—have become people I hope I never have to ever spend time with in real time, again.

I know that I’ve been scarred by grief and loss. To not recognize this shows ignorance about anything related to the loss of someone held dear. At the very least, when someone is snatched from your life, you forever carry that experience and it colors perceptions, emotions, and human interactions.

Having touched on that, the process of moving through the time of days, weeks, months, and even years after a tragedy forces you into various altered states. It’s an evolution back to some newly-constructed “normalcy.” Then, you are thrown into stasis induced by stay-at-home orders and you feel like you have been ejected back into a place of darkness, pain, and you’re flailing about struggling to stand again.

We know little about how these weeks of isolation and distancing will shake out in societal ways. Because we’ve chosen to obsess about the medical fallout from ‘Crona, we’ve rarely considered the social-psychological aspects. My sense is that the latter will be much greater and will affect us in ways that will tack towards darkness. But I could be entirely wrong.

I hate the limitations of left-right explanations of politics and ideology. But because we’re slaves to the binary, it’s what is most often utilized by way of framing events, especially across our media landscape. Using this, then, I offer this observation: the left has glommed onto “keeping us safe” as a primary narrative arc. Liberals have tended towards demonizing anyone who dares to vary from this and the mantras of “Orange Man bad,” and “put on a damn mask.” If a group of people dare to challenge what is an obvious (to me and others) hijacking of liberties and elements clearly guaranteed to us in the Constitution, they are impugned as ____________ (pick your go-to pejorative: dumb, stupid, selfish, benighted, etc.). We are the “deplorables” highlighted by Hillary Clinton during her unsuccessful run for president in 2016.

These ad hominem attacks are particularly rich when I see them on Facebook coming from people I know. There’s a guy I met after Mark was killed. He’s been a foodworker in Portland. His occupation of bartender has permitted him to make a decent living in the high-end restaurant industry. I also know he’s grown tired of the life, at least that’s what he told me three years ago. At the time, I tried to offer him some encouragement during my own period of deep loss. As someone who ventured out to follow my own dreams of writing, I told him he was capable of following his own inclination towards something new and perhaps better than waiting on elitist assholes who probably can’t make a grilled cheese, but fancy themselves as “foodies.”

Seeing him on Facebook makes me sad. Since Covid-19 changed life for all of us, he’s been one of the “virtuous” types common across the Zuckerberg platform. He’s now an authority” on almost every element of how we should all be living. I think he’s probably really stressed out about being a new dad, or perhaps his move to the western part of rural Maine is causing anxiety, I don’t know. At times, he seems to have come unglued—like many people have during this time of moving 6+ feet beyond one another. He’s railed against his former employer, the industry that’s done a good job of providing an income for the past 20 years, and it seems like he’s forgotten that. But then again, all of us are doing our damned-well-best to hold it together these days. I just wish he’d spend less time inveighing against anyone who doesn’t subscribe to his own versions of conspiracy theories dressed up as virtue signaling, or at least that’s what it seems like when he’s on his soapbox. Then again, I’ve been mounting my own platform over the past few weeks. I hope things go well for him, actually. He was someone who was there for me in the first year after Mark was killed and I miss him and sometimes this comes out as anger.

Facebook is full of way too much anger and accusations, IMHO. That’s why I rarely go there other than to play a bit of music. Once open mics come back, I might never return.

I heard a quote attributed to Katie Couric the other day. I think it might have been offered by that day’s fill-in for Rush Limbaugh. [I can hear the liberals, now, who know me: “Oh no! Why is Jim listening to Rush Limbaugh?”] Anyways, Couric apparently was offering her assessment of our current news-gathering mores and said something like this: “People consume news for “affirmation not information.” The context noted was that this is due to our country being so divided, politically. I’d concur with her assessment.

If you are someone who continues to use information to deepen your understanding of the complexities of life and the world, however, this need for continual affirmation is troubling. It creates dissonance. I live in a state that’s usually dissonant.

Fritz Heider was an Austrian-American social psychologist. He was one of the founders of interpersonal social psychology. One of his most important contributions was balance theory: he explained how people develop relationships with others and their environment. He maintained that people have a preference for “balance” in relationships and understanding their sense of place. People prefer balance to dissonance. It’s much easier to affirm those things that make us feel at-home in our worlds.

Lately, I find being told that my “wellness” is of great concern to people like Janet Mills and her medical sidekick, Dr. Shah to be irritating at best. The sheeple of the great state of Maine seem to have grown fond of the Shah man. I’m not sure why. He’s not anyone I’d ever want to spend a minute with. But, they gush about his daily briefings offering up little for moving forward with life beyond quarantine.

Save us from Mills and Shah (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)

I work in Portland. I’m forced to spend my time in the city to collect a few shekels to barely pay my bills. As soon as my shift if done, I high-tail it south to get as far away from the social do-gooders, like Spencer Thibodeau, Kate Snyder and their types. They know better than we do what’s best for us, collectively. That’s our governor, and Dr. Shah, along with Anthony Fauci, another “scientist” who’s never had to run a business, meet a payroll, or do anything else except to live in his hermetically-sealed worldview (politically-motivated at that).

These forays back to blogging take me away from my music. I wish I’d spent the past 20 years learning to play the guitar better. But woulda-coulda-shoulda never changes a fucking thing. It only keeps us from what we have right now, which is today.

Music is always “on” in my life. This week, I’m listening to lots of Replacements’. On my excursions to and from work, it’s been the live discs that got released in 2017. The ‘Mats never got their due as a live band, which is where their greatness is revealed in all its drunken, sloppy glory on For Sale: Live at Maxwell’s, recorded back in 1986. It exists as one of the few good recordings (in a sea of bad bootlegs) of their live performances.

Paul Westerberg and the boys were from the deplorable class, like me. We were born into working-class sensibilities, which means we got the shitty end of the stick in terms of social class structure. I’ve been thinking of this line a lot, from “Bastards of Young.”

The ones, love us best are the ones we’ll lay to rest

And visit their graves on holidays at best

The ones, love us least are the ones we’ll die to please

If it’s any consolation, I don’t begin to understand them

Like Westerberg, I don’t pretend to understand life’s complexities. But I still attempt to see beyond mere binary ways that constrict and limit the possibilities. And I live with the dissonance that goes with the territory.

Saturday Science Lesson-UV Light/Vitamin D

In the times we’re living in, it’s nearly impossible (notice I said, “nearly”) to find useful and accurate information. If you are relying on Mark Zuckerberg’s Lunchroom (aka Facebook) for your science updates, then more often than not (always?) you are going to be misinformed or just plain wrong.

As a public service, I’m going to devote some space here at the JBE to science. Perhaps I’ll start doing these weekly until Janet Mills lets us out of our bunkers. Let me do the heavy lifting and thinking for you.

Did you know that the “dreaded” Michael Savage is a scientist? Yes, he is. In fact, he is has a biology degree. He also has his master’s in medical anthropology. Then, he picked up a Ph.D in nutritional ethnomedicine from UCal-Berkeley. He next went to South Africa to study medicinal herbs. This was well before he ended up on the radio. He has more scientific credentials than most of you (and me), that’s for sure. But of course, don’t listen to a scientist unless he’s in the tank for your team.

Back in 1986, he wrote a book, Maximum Immunity. The book addressed the body’s immune system and how to fortify it against infections, cancer, and arthritis, along with other diseases. I wish I’d grabbed it at the used book fair last summer when I saw it available for $2. Now, it’s selling used on Amazon for close to $500.

Michael Savage, an actual scientist

Just this morning, Peter Alexander, the White House reporter (mimbo?) for NBC was hosting the weekend edition of the Today Show. He opened the broadcast by spending 15 minutes choreographing another media mocking of the president. I say “mocking” because that’s what television news has become—a never-ending equivalent of ring-around-the-rosy that goes something like this: “Orange Man bad; Orange Man bad.”

Is Peter Alexander a scientist? Is Anderson Cooper a scientist? Or, Rachel Maddow? No, no, and no! But Savage is. But of course, we can’t listen to him because he’s supported the president in the past (and also honestly criticized him, too) and isn’t in the tank for the Democrats. But I digress. Back to science.

We are hearing things about Vitamin D and UV light. Should you be supplementing with Vitamin D? Well, maybe. But, if you are a person with a suppressed immune system, then taking Vitamin D supplements would be unwise. If you are relatively healthy and want to supplement with Vitamin D, then 50 to 500 IUs daily is the recommended level. But, consult your physician or other healthcare expert. I don’t pretend to be one. I’m just pretty good at doing basic research and connecting dots. I’ve been doing that as a blogger for nearly 20 years.

I’ll end with this on Vitamin D. Most of us know that we get Vitamin D from sunlight. So getting out and getting sunlight (and fresh air) is a positive thing. Of course, like most things, moderation matters. Standing out in direct sunlight for hours on end without any kind of UV screen can cause skin cancer. But you already knew that, right?

This study is worth reading. It’s science-based, so I’ll leave it up to you how much or how little you choose to access.

Back to Savage for a moment and thinking. I don’t expect some of you lurkers and some of the people who acted like you thought my son was someone special in the days and weeks following his death to understand. For a group with far more academic credentials than I have, you are terribly predictable and reliable in your liberal quiescence to the standard narrative. And honestly, if Mark were still around, I know he’d be wincing, reading that his good ole’ dad brought up Savage and his science credentials. But what was always true with my son: he’d hear me out and offer  least worthy counter-arguments. And he’d never write me off. The rest of you, however, will just go back to your same old biases sources.

How/where have you cultivated your own critical thinking skills? Do you actually have any? I think it’s imperative for me and everyone else to work at holding multiple ideas simultaneously. We need to resist the binary default.

No person, race, ideology is inherently good or superior. Likewise, no person, race, or ideology is inherently bad, or evil (in the case of the Orange Man). Resist lumping people together, or believing your ideas and political ideology is superior.

Let me leave you with this on sunlight (UV effects) and the novel coronavirus. The president mentioned that UV light might be a possible cure for those affected by coronavirus.

There are a host of actual studies (science, my scientific “friends”) that actually speak to UV light and inhaled therapeutics. They are worth consulting.

So Trump actually said this about UV light.

“…supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to test that too… So, we’ll see, but the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute – that’s pretty powerful.”

While he’s not a scientist. He doesn’t say he is and at the end of the quote that everyone is talking about, he defers to the doctors.

Trump was free associating. If you’ve ever done that (as I have as a public speaker), then you know that you’ll say things (thinking out loud) that if taken out of context, can get you in trouble. And Trump gets himself into trouble, often. I’ll leave it at that.

So, if you are actually interested in science and being honest about Mr. Trump’s statements he’s being excoriated for making, then there are numerous studies worth reading. This one on UV blood irradiation is one of them. But if you just want to keep walking around like zombies mindlessly chanting “Orange Man bad; Orange Man, bad,” take a fucking hike (with your face mask) somewhere else. It’s more than likely, you already have.

Putting the Hammer Down

In the midst of ‘Crona, I’m shaping my own reality. Safe beyond the pitchfork-waving sheeple and their chants of “Orange Man is bad,” and “Put on a damn mask,” I’m sitting in my basement with guitar in-hand, offering some songs (and a few screeds).

I’m not sure why, but the name “Joel Plaskett’ went rattling around my synapses yesterday. Not familiar with this Canadian music treasure? Why am I not surprised.

This week, I decided I’m done offering explanations to anyone. Why the fuck do I need to justify anything I do? If you are in my very small tribe, you get me. If you aren’t, then turn the channel and find someone else to watch.

This song by Plaskett really lit a fire for me. Maybe it’s the sense of nostalgia of looking back to the carefree days of high school. At least when I was in high school, we were free from pandemics and the ubiquity of social media trucking in fear-fogging and hysteria. Those were better days for sure. We might have been drunk off our asses, but we also learned a couple of things that I’m not sure today’s Zoom-infused kids will ever know. Then again, a good many of the people that I got closer to six feet of back in the late 1970s seem to have shit for brains. A few of our teachers seem brain-addled too. Oh well.

Here are two Plaskett vids. The first one is just classic “take me back to the good ole’ days.” We all had our own version of “Johnny Hook-Me-Up.” The second is another one that gets my motor revving, too.

But then again, my tastes probably aren’t for everyone.

Waiting for Live Music

The Covid-19 state of house arrest continues. Will it ever end? The “experts” at the New York Times are talking two years to return to normal.

I’m bummed that I won’t get to see one of my favorite bands, Car Seat Headrest in June. Their tour is cancelled, as is almost everything else.

Their new record, Making a Door Less Open is good, at least what I’ve heard. Here are two of the tracks, “Martin,” and “Hollywood.”

I like the new character, Trait, wearing a mask. Look at that!!

Let Them Eat Ice Cream

During the run-up to the 2016 presidential election that would deliver Donald Trump as our 45th president, I wrote several posts about the neoliberal Democrat Hillary Clinton, like this one. That followed Bernie Sanders’ first bait-and-switch, where Bernie “I’m going to deliver a revolution” Socialist Sanders turtled, dropped-out, and endorsed a corporatist in Clinton.

We all know the end-game, don’t we? And yet, duped progressives again threw significant support behind Bernie’s faux revolutionary rhetoric and Democratic Socialism once more. Is it any surprise that the result was basically the same yet again?

Blame it on the Orange Man.

Because most Americans are binary to a fault, they can’t get their brains around the idea that Sanders was a Socialist sham. I mean here was a 78-year-old white guy who hadn’t held a job outside politics since 1980, when he was elected for the first time as mayor of Burlington, Vermont.

Democrats have one narrative trope and one only: blame it all on the Orange Man. Actually that’s become a Democratic cliché.

Question: Who caused the coronavirus pandemic?

Democrat: The Orange Man.

Whatever the problem is, the Democrat scapegoating will always lead back to the Orange Man. Both CNN and MSNBC, the “liberal” equivalent to Fox News has gavel-to-gavel coverage of the latest “bad” that the Orange Man has done, or whatever incorrect thing he’s said that day, rehashed over the week, magnified for months, and dating backwards a year or longer.

That’s not to say that the Orange Man should be anyone’s choice for a model of how to live one’s life, or a mentor, or hero. But, how about turning the record over, eh?

Democrats have united behind another old white guy. Joe Biden. Biden’s kind of “creepy” don’t you think? Google “Joe Biden” and “Creepy” and see what comes up.

Since Democrats have no purpose in life other than defeating the Orange Man in November or whatever month we decide it’s safe to vote, that’s the choice. The Orange Man, or Pervy, Creepy Joe.

And the response from “legitimate” journalistic sources is this garbage, with Democrats again excusing their white male from being held responsible for sexual assault (like they did with Bill Clinton). At least one Democrat’s not sweeping this shit under the rug. This publication asks, why are the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Nation taking a man’s word over a women’s? Come on drive-by, be better! Objectivity isn’t covering-up the bad things on your side of the ideological divide.

Oh, yeah. We gotta’ get to the ice cream thing.

Enough of the old white guys. An old white gal, Nancy Pelosi, seems to think it’s okay to show-off two refrigerators that cost slightly less than I’ll make in my primary job this year, stocked full of bougie ice cream. Can you say, “tone deaf”?

Nancy “Antoinette” Pelosi says, “Let them eat ice cream”

Nancy and most of her corporate Democrats don’t give a rat’s ass about people like you and me, those of us who don’t live in gated communities and wonder what the hell we’re going to do if the economy doesn’t find a road back to something approximating normalcy, any time soon.

But of course, just keep blaming the Orange Man.

Sheeple Speak

The sheeple have spoken. It is deemed correct. We must all cower in fear, wear masks, and wait for Armageddon.

My faith in humanity has been sorely tested over the past three years. I am all but done done with my fellow humans. The exception comes when it becomes absolutely necessary to interact with them: work, and some rare exceptions I’ll decide on.

People who I thought might have some redemptive qualities have come unglued over the past six to eight weeks. I can’t spend any time on Facebook, since it resembles a catalog for bad-looking masks that won’t do shit other than signal the wearer’s virtue. That’s the platform at it’s best these days.

A couple of articles I read this week made sense to me. Ironically, the first one comes from a Catholic, which is rich for someone like me, an agnostic at best. There are things to fear more than death. Ironically, so many progressives are pretty fucking selective on the lives they value.

It doesn’t really matter what I post in this space anyways, since no one appears capable of reading anything longer than 250 words, especially here.

I’ve been a fan of Andrew Sullivan for quite some time. When he writes, I usually read.

Perhaps some sanity and reasons for hope present, soon.

That rare person I still harbor some respect for posted this on his Facebook page (perhaps the only thing of value I’ve found there during Krona, except Bob Marley videos).

I’ll end with this musical non sequitur.

I saw the late Scotty Weiland and STP at the old CCCC in Portland. Melvins opened up for them, which was awesome!

Weiland and the boys were late coming on and the crowd was restless, waiting. Then, STP came out and they ripped it up. I can still hear Scotty singing “Crackerman.”

This is my favorite from their catalog. I got out the electric this afternoon and worked my way through the song’s chords and riffs. It was a healthy diversion for me.

Find Your Way

Came up with another song this week. I “found” this chord progression one night before bed, just noodling around on my acoustic. Wrote most of it on the electric, which is not usually how I write–at least in this brief seven month stretch since I’ve been developing songs.

Find Your Way

Verse I

Living pulls me along,

Not sure where I belong

Heart’s sad every day,

Wish that feeling would go away

Verse II

Pain’s a part of life they say,

Black & white but mainly gray

Birds singing in the sky,

Mind’s darkness pushed aside

Chorus I

Told by most that you are wrong,

A broken record, the same old song

People want a man who smiles,

No sense, ain’t walked those miles

Verse III

Dark forest many trees

Deep breaths, a healing breeze

Passing through the hurt again,

Forever triggered, no plans to explain

Chorus II

Life cycles around & ‘round,

Nothing new, the same old sound

Days passing on towards death,

Keep on living & taking breath

Coda

Find your way to a brand new place,

A world of light & some open space

©EverysongYeah 2020

Mindful of Muffins

Baking was never something I aspired to. Ever.

Then, a year ago while looking through Veganomicon, one of our favorite vegan cookbooks, I spied a recipe for muffins. I read the ingredients and directions. I told Mrs. B. I was going to make them. And I did. They turned out well and were delicious. She was actually impressed. I’ve made them several times, since.

Descriptive muffin (sub bananas)

Muffin-making guidebook and supplies.

Mark loved over-ripe bananas. Some of you might remember the video where he ate like 21 bananas in one day. Me, I’m not a fan of the overly-ripe variety—you know: the ones with brown spots and they’re “mushy.” But, they are good for baking—at least that’s what my wife told me.

My go-to recipe from our vegan cookbook calls for unsweetened applesauce as a main ingredient. Living life during Crona, we’re doing our best to stay away from the superette. We’re eating through what we have on-hand, in our pantry, and one our shelves.

While we didn’t have unsweetened applesauce, we had all the other baking supplies I needed. In place of the applesauce, I substituted three very ripe bananas.

The muffins came out perfect and boy, were they delicious!

Plating muffins.

While my baked goods were pretty healthy and vegan to boot, there was an added bonus to making them, I think. Getting up and collecting my wits and following baking instructions helped me off to a positive start on my day (a day free from wage labor). There was a sense of accomplishment and joy in sharing them with the love of my life.

While having breakfast, Mary read from a little book devoted to self-care. She shared the advisement of taking ten breaths. Mary’s mom, who had been given the book by a family member had written in at the top of the page, “to solve a problem.”

Eat muffins and breathe.

When you feel yourself becoming entangled in a problem you can’t solve, take ten deep breaths and put the problem aside. Deep breathing increases the flow of oxygen to your brain and slows your heart rate. Later, consider a way to solve the problem—differently.

Notice that sharing on Facebook or Instagram isn’t mentioned.

Data Set

I keep hearing calls for data, data, data. Then, there are the data plotters on Facebook, keen to jockey and posit their own political agenda under the guise of scientific neutrality.

For the purposes of full disclosure: I am not a scientist–I am a writer with experience as a journalist. The kind of journalism I cut my teeth doing didn’t consist of culling stories from Twitter feeds, either.

With that said, how would you rectify my very primitive spreadsheet comparing previous flu season data from the CDC with the Covid-19 numbers?

Flu virus by the numbers

Then, read what I think is a reasonable thought piece from an actual doctor, on balancing the needs to keep people safe overall, with the hysteria that’s been whipped up by members of the media and many of you on Facebook. He certainly has more legitimacy than most of you projecting holier-than-thou screeds about masks, distancing and a host of other things. Like, why do you have such a need to virtue signal with your unproven call for everyone to don a mask?

Someone tossed their dirty Crona mask on our front lawn.

What sayeth all you Einsteins and fear-foggers out there?