In the Before Times I used to put as much money as I could manage into my savings so I could spend it on Black Friday sales. Since my buying power could end up being 200% of normal (or more!), it just made financial sense to buy everything I need for the year on this one day. Especially clothes.
But then I remodeled my kitchen, did a bit of landscaping in my front yard, and had a water leak... and all of a sudden my savings are more than gone. They are non-existent.
Which is not that bad for once. I don't need any electronics or appliances or housewares. The clothes I have are in wearable condition. There are no tools, video games, or cool toys I am dying to have. My car is still mostly running. And my shoes are still in one piece. Albeit thanks to Shoe Goo.
My boots and shoes don't get a lot of heavy use, but they still fall apart. Mostly when the sole's toe-cover comes unglued. Fortunately that's an easy fix. Shoe Goo and an overnight stay in a bucket to keep it held in place is all it takes...
So... yeah... not much happening today for me. Certainly not like it's been for other years.
I've still got nearly a half-tube of Shoe Goo left, so I'm good.
As a vegetarian, today is far from "Turkey Day" to me.
I haven't eaten meat for over 37 years, but I was never much of a turkey guy to begin with. I'd eat it... but at a 50/50 ratio with jellied cranberry. I also didn't care for steaks, ribs, sausage, ham, pork chops, chicken, or any kind of seafood. The only meats I did like were hamburgers, bacon, and pepperoni. That's it. Everything else was eaten reluctantly.
Turns out I was predisposed towards vegetarianism from the start. But discovering Buddhism was what it took to push me over the edge.
I'm rather happy with the vegetarian alternatives to hamburger and bacon. And, believe it or not, I was never a fan of hotdogs until I discovered the vegetarian variety.
There is no adequate vegetarian substitute for pepperoni.
If there was, that would be something to be thankful for.
They say it's never too late to start over.
I suppose it depends on how old you are. And what you mean by "starting over. Many things in my life... from the area where I live to the career I have to the people I hang out with... have been the same for decades. But in other ways I've started over a multitude of times. Intentionally. It keeps things interesting for me when the basics of my life never change.
As the cold and darkness of Winter starts settling in, I started trying to think of something else I could change to shake things up. Break up the monotomy of the season.
And came up empty.
I don't know if it's because I've suddenly gotten too set in my ways or don't want to put the effort in or what, but there's no change I could think of that I actually want to make. Which makes me think I need to do something radical like dye my hair pink or pierce my nose or move to Scotland.
Or maybe all three.
It's funny the things you remember.
I rewatched the Wham! documentary on Netflix and it got me thinking about the George Michael video for Faith with his iconic jukbox, cross earring, and BSA jacket, which made me run to YouTube to watch it (and then, of course, the follow-up video for Freedom where he sets all of it on fire)...
All of a sudden I had a flashback to a pair of pajamas my grandma made me when I was little. But I wasn't wearing them in the flashback... I was looking at me wearing them. Probably in a photo. So I went running to look through all my scans of old family photos and, yep, there it was...
What's amazing is that I recognized the pajamas as being BSA pajamas even though I couldn't really read it until I zoomed in and digitally enhanced it, which means I likely remembered it in my subconscious from when I was a kid somehow...
I have no idea why BSA fabric was being sold here in the very rural valley we live considering the brand is British (BSA = Birmingham Small Arms). Nor do I know why my grandma selected it to make pajamas for me. Although it might have been because I've been a motorcycle fan from a very young age...
All due respect to George Michael, but I think I wore it better...
Weird how I can remember a pair of pajamas from 50 years ago, but can't remember why I walked into the kitchen ten minutes ago.
I'm single because I want to be.
I don't know that this statement needs defending, but if I were forced to do so I'd say that "It's just the way I'm wired." I love being alone. Just me, two cats, and an empty house. It's bliss. I'm totally set. Tried the whole relationship thing multiple times and it wasn't a good fit, so I decided I'd rather live for my friends and occasional hook-ups than be miserable.
Or, if I'm being honest, making somebody else miserable. Because haven't women suffered enough?
Men get to be alone. Sure people tend to think we're gay for wanting it, but we're largely left to our own devices. Women, on the other hand, are labeled "UNFULFILLED" and "SAD" and "A DETRIMENT TO SOCIETY" when they want to be alone. As if not wanting a husband and children somehow makes them "less than." Which would be laughable if it weren't so harmful. Personally, I can't understand why people give a shit. Some people want to be on their own, so just let us be.
In the last decade there's been a lot to be said about the incels. Meaning "involuntarily celibate men." These are guys who are alone because they can't find a woman willing to put up with their superiority bullshit... and blame women for it! And since it's "totally not their fault because they're just being an alpha male" they feel justified badmouthing women at every opportunity and committing heinous acts where they lash out against society (in general) and women (specifically). It's a serious, serious problem, and the violence born out of it is no laughing matter.
Where it all takes a turn are the men who own the "incel" label... but claim it's because a terrible women did them wrong. To them it's justified. They hate on all women now and it's a woman's fault. To an extent, I do get that. A bad relationship can easily cause enough pain for people to lash out in illogical ways. I've been there. I'm not going to go into the crazy details, but suffice to say that when I was in my worst relationship I was lied to, betrayed, cheated on, and exploited. It was awful. It resulted in me drinking too much and contemplating self-harm. And for years after I dug myself out of that hole, I felt I'd rather be alone the rest of my life than to risk going through that again. I didn't blame "all women" for what she put me through, but I can see how a guy could make that leap. For a while. But to turn it into your entire identity for life? That's on you. And women not wanting to be with that is also on you.
But that's not the only road that gets traveled.
Over the weekend I was scrolling through the cesspool that is social media and ran across what I thought was an incel rabbit hole. But as I continued to scroll... I saw that the men participating in this new trend of sharing their feelings about being alone are not blaming women for their situation at all. They're just expressing how sad they are that they can't find a partner to share their lives with. They're not violent about it. They don't feel women "owe" them anything. They're not raging against all womankind.
They're just... lonely.
After a while of watching I was overwhelmed with compassion.
But, since this is the internet, "compassion" is not the normal response. There's loads of people branding them as "beta males" and "weak" and, of course, "incels" (from the other side of the spectrum). Telling them to "buck up" and "be a man" and "stop embarrassing yourself." Despite the fact that these guys have done absolutely nothing to deserve any of it. Men don't get to be sad and vulnerable out of loneliness, you see. That... that... deserves to be mocked, belittled, demeaned, and dismissed.
And so now I'm feeling bad for being a part of the problem.
Here's me, absolutely loving being single and alone watching guys pour their heart out about how the crushing loneliness is breaking them. And the first thing to enter my head was to lump them in with men who don't want to change their shitty behavior so that a woman might actually want to be with them. As I was watching, I kept waiting for them to unload the "I'M ENTITLED TO SEX BECAUSE I'M A MAN AND WOMEN SHOULD DROP TO THEIR KNEES AND BE GRATEFUL THAT I'D WANT TO HAVE SEX WITH THEM!" rhetoric. But I didn't see it.
Well, I did, because TikTok can't distinguish between lonely single guys and hate-filled incels, but the majority of the videos were not that.
And of course it's not just guys. Plenty of women being crushed by loneliness too. Not surprisingly, society is no more kind to them than they are the men.
Being alone is exactly what I want and I don't ever feel lonely because of it. So it's difficult for me to comprehend the mindset of somebody dying of loneliness. Of dying from a broken heart that they have never been able to give to another person. But I don't have to understand it to feel for people who are in this boat. Everybody deserves to find love, and somebody who has never had it deserves every bit the compassion as a guy whose wife of 60 years just died. A broken heart is a broken heart.
My first reaction was a bad one. I hope I can do better in the future.
And I really hope that I can be less dismissive of my fellow men who are hurting and just want to be heard. To be treated with kindness when they're in pain. That's really not a lot to ask.
Despite our toxic society telling us otherwise.
Be kind out there, my friends.
I have written before about the decade I spent getting out of credit card debt. It was a slow, very painful process, and I have tried my level best to not go back to that life*. It's not always possible because emergencies do happen, but I've been fairly lucky overall.
The process I used to get out of debt was the "snowball" method where you consolidate as much as you can into lower-interest debt, then pay off the remainder by making minimum payments on everything except your smallest balance. On that account, you throw the maximum amount of money you can to get it paid off. Then you move to your next smallest balance. And so on. Until finally you're on the low-interest mega-balance, which you put every last cent into paying down.
I think the process took just over seven years, where I only spent money on the absolute bare essentials... eating and living as cheaply as possible so I had the most money to pay off debt.
Back then I used a spreadsheet to budget and plan.
Now I use financial apps which link to your various accounts and estimate your bills so you can get an overview of how much money you have and how much you owe. They're really handy.
For the longest time I used Truebill, but they started sending my financial data unencrypted through the email and said "Oopsies, there's no way to stop this from happening," so I moved on to Mint which had been bought out by Intuit. Mint is a fucking abhorrent app. I hate it with every fiber of my being. You can't turn off notification, which are constant and annoying. You also can't turn off ads, which are also constant and annoying. But it's free... so whatever. I deal with it.
Except now Intuit is shutting down Mint, so I'll be saying goodbye. Because it's so shitty, I won't miss it. What I will miss is having a way of tracking my finances that's free. Rocket Mortgage bought out Truebill, so what I may do is go back to that to see if the privacy bullshit has been cleared up. So long as you don't update more than daily, it's free.
Or maybe I'll move on to a paid solution and see if it's worth it to me. I mean, anything is worth not going into debt again... I just mean that it's worth not going back to a spreadshet.
*Well, except for my mortgage, because it's actually cheaper to go into debt buying a house than it is to rent now-a-days.
Not so long ago I noted how strange it is to hear about tragedy in a place I've been on Facebook.
Since I've been to a lot of places on this earth, this seems to happen more and more often.
Not so long ago I posted this:
And now this...
For around a decade I had work taking me to Lisbon, Maine.
Twice a year I would fly into Portland then drive up to the city of Auburn, where I always stayed at the Hilton Garden Inn. It's a nice, reasonably-priced location overlooking the Androscoggin River. The region is home to some very nice people (including those that I worked with), and has interesting eateries across the river I enjoyed like She Doesn't Like Guthries and Pedro O’Hara’s*, a Mexican-Irish restaurant.
Also across the river? The city of Lewiston.
If you've been watching the news since Wednesday night, you know why this has been haunting me.
A single shooter with an assault rifle mass-murdered 18 people in two locations in Lewiston, Maine. Needless to say, I had a rough night followed by two rough days wondering if anybody I know was hurt or killed. As of now I am still wondering because I can't bring myself to email anybody to find out. They have enough to deal with, as the shooter is still at large.
This fucking sucks.
My post about Bangkok was 23 days ago. I didn't even have a month to get over that before this happens. And that's just places I am familiar with. There's loads upon loads upon loads of places going through exactly this kind of thing week by week. And I'm mortified that it's just become background noise to me.
Until it's not in the background. Like Lewiston, Maine.
Lewiston may be the second-largest city in Maine after Portland, but it's not a big city. The first shooting at a children's league bowling alley event is just next door to a restaurant I liked. The second shooting at a cornhole competition even bar & grill is just down the street from a McDonald's that I stopped at for breakfast dozens of times. So, yeah, you might say I'm familiar with the area where the shootings occurred. An area where on Wednesday night people were just living their lives, never knowing that 18 of them would end up dead with even more injured.
Which is all kinds of fucked up. Especially when now-a-days you can't even say you're sad that 18 people were murdered without being told you're "anti-gun" or "woke" or whatever other bullshit labels get hurled by assholes lacking any sense of empathy, decency, or compassion. Something I'm getting used to, despite it never making any sense.
Not that anything surrounding mass-murder ever could.
Oh boy.
Here is the photo...
Long time Blogography readers might recognize this as a still from a video I made fifteen years ago for a video edition of "Bullet Sunday"...
But anyway...
I've started increasingly commenting on posts that are racist, bigoted, antisemitic, hateful, or stupid. The reaction is mostly what you'd expect. And I'm used to the hate... this is not my first time on the internet. But now the comments are all about my profile pic, not my comment. I have been called absolutely every name you can imagine. Because I'm wearing black makeup. For Halloween.
This is weird to me because I don't think much about my appearance (which should be obvious to anybody who meets me). The idea of having perfectly matching clothes or dressing in the latest style or looking "cool" or whatever just doesn't interest me. Except when it comes to Halloween, apparently.
I'm fascinated how people don't bother to make an actual argument about what I've said now. They don't like what I'm saying and how I look in my profile pic, but it's how I look that's what they choose to comment on. Which just reinforces the fact that ignorant assholes are ultimately bullies above everything else. Hating people for how they look or how they choose to dress is their priority.
I am trying to be unshocked, but this is not remotely surprising. It's the easiest shot to take, because forming an argument in support of your opinion is hard. And the easy shot is all they know.
Not that I really care. Goth Dave is the hottest Dave.
The past couple nights have been cold and rainy. But today the cold and rainy weather didn't wait for evening. It was cold and rainy when I left work at 4:00pm.
Which is unfortunate because this is exactly the kind of weather that drains what little energy I have left. All I'm good for is sitting in front of the television drinking hot chocolate while wrapped up in a blanket. That's it. I'm done. If I'm lucky I grabbed some Halloween candy before I sat down.
Guess I need to start wearing a jacket to work now. Bleh.
Remember when ovens had a knob you turn and the heat came on and cooked your food?
Now you can only get these stupid-as-shit electronic button boards, and so often when I set mine, IT JUST SHUTS OFF WITHOUT COOKING SHIT! Ironically, you can get knobs if you get a gas stove (not an option where I live) or buy a super-expensive one (which I can't afford).
This blows.
I don't understand why burners have knobs and it's no problem, but ovens are all getting idiotic electronics. I'm guessing it's a cost-savings thing but, if that's the case, then why aren't the burners getting electronic panels as well?
Everything is shitty and nothing makes sense.
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