Anyway, it seems like everyone wants to make themselves into a brand these days. It’s not enough to just go about your life, doing whatever it is you do and finding your own way in the world anymore – you need to develop a personal brand and become an influencer along the way. Because we’re all just Cheetos in Hasbro’s Coca-Cola edition of Disney’s Game of Life or something. I dunno, pick a corporate metaphor.

Become a content creator and market yourself to grow into a really real influencer people look up to and aspire to become. Get lots of likes and shares and followers – validate your existence through social metrics and all of your wildest dreams will come true.

Or something like that anyway. Except it’s all bullshit.

While it’s true that some people become influential through merit and hard work, it’s a whole lot easier to just buy your way to the illusion of success. It’s becoming increasingly common, especially for the fake-it-till-you-make-it crowd. An entire industry has grown around the idea of helping nobodies become internet-somebodies, and companies that specialize in creating influencers generally do a pretty good job at it.

As long as you have the money.

How to Become an Influencer

• Have money
• Pay someone to create your content for you
• Pay to get that content published in pay-to-play media
• Pay more to get it featured/boosted/highlighted
• Pay to buy fake followers and fake likes/shares/comments
• Pay other influencers to plug your personal brand
• Pay to finance as much additional media coverage as possible
• Repeat until you either fool everyone or run out of money, whichever comes first

See? There’s nothing to it. You don’t actually need to be experienced or talented in any way, as long as you can afford to pay enough to get someone else to make it seem like you are. You don’t have to stop there, though. Depending on your budget, you can do all sorts of things to make your fake success seem legit.

Pay a ghostwriter to write a book for you – it doesn’t even have to be anything special. Your average, run-of-the-mill self-help book is a great start. You can fill it with bog standard advice and meaningless platitudes you’ve cribbed from a lifetime spent imitating other people, and as long as you can afford to buy up enough copies to make it onto a few best-seller lists, it won’t even matter that you’re not actually providing anything of value to anyone. People will just assume you’re saying something worth listening to if you’re on a best-seller list, and the success will just snowball from there.

You can also buy your way onto the talk show circuit, if you’ve got the cash. Pay to get on as many shows as you can, plug the book you paid to have written, and the show will plug your social media for you. It’s like compounding interest, but with clicks and shares.

If you have serious money, you can even finance your own reality show and get it distributed somewhere. Streaming services are hungry for content and have no qualms about pay-to-play when it comes to adding your content to their roster, especially if it doesn’t really cost them anything.

You could also try finding a TEDx event in your area or somewhere nearby and get yourself on the list of presenters. It’s not hard. TEDx isn’t at all exclusive, you don’t need to be an actual expert at anything, and the list of qualifications is exactly zero requirements long. The fun part is most people don’t distinguish between TEDx events and actual TED Talks, so you’ll seem perfectly legitimate to a wide audience. Pay someone to write your presentation and design your PowerPoint slides, then all you have to do is show up and read from the teleprompter. Instant legitimacy!

This dude is a pretty good example of what I’m talking about. You might’ve seen him on TikTok recently, singing about how he feels no holes because he’s a rectangle or something. I dunno, your guess is as good as mine.

Now what makes him special? Well, he’s also the CEO of a company called Treefrog, where his bio is something to behold. At roughly 2,000 self-infatuated words long, it’s giving Pick Me Girl and Michael Scott energy at the same time. But he doesn’t stop there. Remember what I said about TEDx a minute ago?

Well, there you go. Now you know what an entrepreneur is, so you’ve got that going for you.

This man oozes desperation, but he’s got money that someone out there was perfectly happy to take to help transform him into what I’m sure he considers a media sensation. And that’s really all there is to the scam.

Have money. Pay people to make things, then pay to have those things “published” and boosted all over the place. With enough exposure, you’ll be able to convince plenty of people that you know what you’re talking about.

Remember this guy?

Yeah, he’s still at it. He also has a TEDx talk because of course he does.

And this is all before even touching the complete shitshow that is LinkedIn. People like to give social media like Instagram a bad rap for being fake, but that’s only because they’ve probably never been on LinkedIn. Nothing there is real in the slightest.

There’s an entire subreddit devoted to r/linkedinlunatics because the content to keep it going never stops flowing. LinkedIn is a place where phonies go to inspire other phonies and talentless hacks motivate their employees to click like and share on anything they post. There’s a constant barrage of techbro and influencer newsletters that are always announced as “HOT OFF THE PRESS!” for some reason, and they cover everything from AI hype to how to get followers and seem cool at parties. Then there are carousels and slideshows and videos, and the list of copycat gimmicks just keeps on growing.

Of course, they’re all posted by super influential people you’ve never actually heard of before because their influence is entirely fake. They just run the same scam as everyone else – have money, buy followers, pay for content and pay to publish it – and since LinkedIn is a giant C-suite circlejerk, they interpret the inevitable likes and shares as validation, despite everyone only interacting with other people’s content in the hopes that they’ll reciprocate and interact with theirs. It’s just how LinkedIn works. Don’t believe me? There are tons of LinkedIn influencers who will be happy to sell you a zillion-dollar course that’ll tell you the same thing. Just ask them! (Money up front, though.)

Speaking of LinkedIn, have you ever looked at someone’s profile and noticed that they’ve listed themselves as a “contributor” or “columnist” for a bunch of influential magazines that seem entirely legit? People stick them in their Experience section so it looks like they’ve actually worked for or sold articles to wherever. Yeah, that’s a scam too. Chances are, none of those publications have ever paid them to write a single word. It’s usually the other way around.

Most of the major publications most popular in the business world have programs that people can apply for and pay a membership fee to join – after which, they’re free to write articles that will be “published” by the magazine. To the average reader, it’ll look like they write for the publication, that their thoughts and opinions are valuable enough to Important Sounding Magazine that the publisher has sought them out specifically, and now they’re a featured columnist/contributor. How exciting!

The foundational rule of being a professional writer is called Yog’s Law, and all it says is that money always flows toward the writer. If you write something that someone is willing to pay you for, you’re a writer. But if you have to pay anyone to publish anything, you’re just playing make-believe. And paying for the privilege.

The publications themselves aren’t really scamming anyone, though. Not technically. They tend to indicate when an article is written for one of their fee-based programs (usually branded as some kind of expert council or forum), but readers don’t often pay very close attention to the fine print – which is what the people calling themselves “columnists” and “contributors” bank on.

Now, with the rise of Generative AI like ChatGPT, it’s easier than ever to become a “writer” despite having no knowledge, experience, or talent at writing. You don’t even need to pay a ghostwriter anymore. Sure, Artificial Intelligence Doesn’t Exist, Actually and all the robots are capable of producing are basic, flat, lifeless articles that often contain made-up “facts” with hallucinated “sources” – but hey, it’s cheap. So there’s that.

All of this is not to say that you can’t find the occasional worthwhile needle amongst the haystack of nonsense, but there’s just so much of it out there that sifting through it all to distinguish the real from the fake can be exhausting.

My advice would be to just not bother. The dirty little secret of the publishing world is that no one really pays attention to bylines anyway. Nobody who finds your article through a search is going to care about who wrote it. Which is, I guess, where social media comes in because at least people will have an idea that your self-promotion is promoting yourself, but I’ve always found that the least appealing part of creating anything.

Then again, I’m probably just an outlier. I don’t want to be recognized, I feel all kinds of awkward on the rare occasion that I am, and I’d much rather just stay fairly anonymous behind my pixel avatar and whatever name I’m using to publish under. If I’m writing for myself, it’ll always be my actual name – but I write a lot of other stuff too, and I don’t want to draw attention to anything that isn’t 100% me.

I don’t think most people want to be genuine, though. Not really. They may think they do, and they’ll probably get a bunch of articles ghostwritten that talk about how important it is to be your authentic self or whatever, but if social media has taught us anything, it’s that people are only ever as authentic as they need to be to get the clicks. Everything is curated, sanitized, and romanticized until it meets presentable standards, and only when it’s ready does it ever go online and out into the world.

Which is especially true for LinkedIn, where everything is fake and nothing is ever real.

I don’t treat my LinkedIn any differently than other social media because it’s not worth faking my life for. I don’t treat it as an extension of my resume, I don’t use it for networking, and I’m far from whatever “being professional” is supposed to mean. I post silly jokes and goofy rants and sometimes recipes, and I’m fine with that. LinkedIn is so far removed from any kind of reality that I can only laugh at anyone who takes any of it seriously. Nobody is ever going to look at my LinkedIn profile and be like, omg the insights! I must hire this person immediately! (And the kind of employer that would isn’t the type of company I’d want to work for.)

If you want to provide anyone with anything of actual value, you need to be real and be yourself. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with enlisting the aid of a ghostwriter, you’d be better off working with a seasoned editor who could take something you’ve written and actually help you develop your own voice to produce content people genuinely want to read and articles that publishers will happily pay you to write.

As long as you’re paying other people to do the work and then paying someone else to publish it, you’ll never have a true voice, and you’ll never say anything worth listening to. Your voice needs to be your voice, and it can take years to develop one that’s genuine and not some sanitized version an agency would create or that your PR department would approve of. Being authentic to your audience means being authentic to yourself first, but that’s not something most people are very comfortable doing.

Authenticity requires true self-reflection, unflinching self-analysis, and harsh self-criticism, along with the courage to show all your jagged edges to the world – and I’m here to tell you, kids, that ain’t always an easy thing to do.

But you know what is easy? Money.

Well, money makes things easier, anyway. With enough money, you never actually have to become whatever it is you’re pretending to be. Just keep faking it and you’ll eventually look like you’ve made it.

As long as the money doesn’t run out.

The post How to Become an Influencer appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

The secret to the steak is its simplicity and the roasted peanut oil, which is impossible to find where we live so I have to order it off the internet dot com like some kind of ’90s wayfarer. You could make it with standard peanut oil or any other high smoke point oil if you really want to, but it won’t be nearly as good and you’ll want to blame me for your failure – but I ain’t got time for that kind of negativity in my life so take ownership of your mistakes for once, willya?

Oh yeah, about the smoke. If you live in an apartment or if your stove isn’t vented very well, you’ll probably want to cover your smoke detectors and open a window or two. Fair warning.

Anyway, that’s the steak. It’s amazing if you do it right, so try to do it right. It’s not rocket science. I believe in you!

The spinach is a whole other thing. I wouldn’t eat it on its own, to be honest. It’s good but it really only exists here as a flavor enhancer for the steak. Take a bite of steak, then a little bite of the spinach and you’ll understand. The two just create some kind of culinary magic when they meet. It’d probably be good with other things too, but I wouldn’t know about any of that because I’m just here for the meat meet.

Just don’t skimp on the nutmeg.

The Steak

Reagents

• Steak (I go for ribeye, myself)
• Roasted Peanut Oil (order it online if you have to)
• Kosher Salt
• Freshly Coarse-Ground Black Pepper
• Coarse-Ground Garlic Powder

The Destructions

• Grab your steak out of the fridge so it can get up to room temperature
• Grab one of the racks in your oven and set it directly on the oven floor if you can, or the lowest position possible
• Toss an iron skillet on that rack
• Crank up your oven as high as it will go, whatever that is (mine tops out at 500°)
• Let that skillet sit and heat up for 30 minutes to an hour
• When your skillet is ready, grab your steak and pat it as dry as you can with a paper towel, then season it on both sides (and the edges) with way more kosher salt than you think you need (trust me), then do the same with the black pepper and garlic powder and make sure to smoosh it all in
• Turn one of your stovetop burners as high as it will go
• Grab your iron skillet from the oven and toss it on the burner, then pour in a good glug of the roasted peanut oil
• Plop your steak in one side of the skillet and let it sear for about a minute
• Grab it with some tongs, flip it over, and set it on the other side of the skillet for another minute
• If you did it right, it shouldn’t stick at all and you’ll be left with an excellent crust on both sides
• You can also sear around the sides at this point, if you’re extra
• Flip it again and toss it in the oven for two or three minutes for medium, a little less for medium rare, a little more for medium well (the thickness of your steak will affect this; I’m using a pretty standard thick cut ribeye)
• Take it out of the skillet and let it rest on a wire rack for a little bit
• Slice into thin strips, then serve with a drizzle of the skillet oil on top

The Spinach

Reagents

• Three 10oz. bags of fresh spinach (or around two pounds)
• 1/2 cup butter
• 1/4 cup finely minced shallot
• 1/2 cup finely minced onion
• 3 cloves finely minced garlic (or a tablespoon of jarlic)
• 2 cups of whipping cream (maybe more, if you need it)
• 1 teaspoon of nutmeg (you’ll probably add more to taste, but start with a teaspoon)
• Salt
• Pepper

The Destructions

• Rinse all the spinach really well
• Grab the rinsed spinach by the handful and drop it in a big pot, cover and wilt it down over medium heat until it’s, well, wilted down. Feel free to add a little extra water if you need to.
• Strain the wilted spinach under cold water while you mix it around and squeeze it
• Once it’s cooled down, smoosh all the water you can out of it, then divide it into two halves
• Throw one half in a blender with a cup or so of whipping cream (you can use more if it’s having trouble blending) and puree it all
• Finely chop up the other half (for texture, dontchaknow)
• In a large pot/saucepan melt the butter over medium heat
• Toss in the shallot and onion and saute until they’re however you like them (I do mine for a bit past translucent). When they’re just about ready, throw the garlic in and give it a minute
• Add in the pureed spinach along with another cup of whipping cream (more if you need it) and the rest of the spinach
• Stir it all around, then add in the nutmeg, salt, and pepper to taste while it simmers

You’re welcome.

The post That Time Popeye Met a Cowboy: A Steak and Spinach Romance appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

I mean, that’s how these things are supposed to go, right? I did kinda do it with my gumbo recipe, I guess. Same with my chocolate pie, too. But at least I included jump links right at the top that take you straight to the recipe. So there’s that.

Also, I don’t do recipes very well. Most of these measurements are approximations based on what I think “some of this” looks like in tablespoons or however many cups “a handful or so” is. Should do you fine, though. Adjust as needed. I accept no responsibility for the consequences of your actions.

The Reagents

Meat
2 pounds of 80/20 ground beef

Roux (I said what I said; consider this the Louisiana part)
1 cup oil
1 cup flour

Spice blend
Chilis –
If you’re fancy:
Dried ancho/chipotle/whatever chilis you like, de-seeded and ground in a spice grinder to equal around 5 tablespoons of chili powder
If you’re a normal person (honestly, just use the chili powder; we’re going to bloom all the spices anyway so it’ll be fine)
2.5 tablespoons light chili powder
2.5 tablespoons dark chili powder
The rest of the stuff –
1.5-2 tablespoons cumin (depending on how much you like cumin, obvi)
1-2 teaspoons cinnamon (depending on how much you like cinnamon, obvi)
1-2 teaspoons coarse ground garlic powder (do I have to keep saying this?)
1-2 teaspoons onion powder (you get the idea)
However much cayenne pepper you want (or just throw a couple teaspoons of Slap Ya Mama in there and call it done)
Anything else you like, there are no rules

Veggies
Finely minced garlic
If you’re fancy:
1 Large Onion
3 Celery Stalks
2 Bell Peppers
If you’re a normal person:
Skip all the chopping and just buy a 24oz bag of Pictosweet’s Seasoning Blend from the freezer section

Other Stuff
32-64oz Beef stock (32 should be fine but you might want to have more on hand if you need to thin things out, but water would work fine too)
1 bottle of stout (Guinness or whatever)
4.5-6oz Tomato paste
40 grams or so of 70%ish Dark chocolate (or however much you want, but I’d start with 40ish grams then add more if you like it – you can also go for an even darker chocolate if you prefer, I won’t tell The Authorities or anything)

Optional

1 teaspoon (or so) of MSG

Extremely Optional
1 tablespoon ground coffee (use at your own risk; it’s already a dish with a pretty complex flavor profile, so you might want to leave it out the first time or every time, whatever. I don’t normally add it, but if I’m feeling frisky…)

If You Absolutely Must
A couple of cans of kidney beans, but listen. If you insist on adding beans, you are no longer legally allowed to call this Texas chili. Also, beans are gross. But whatever, live how you wanna live, I guess.

The Destructions

Mix the spice blend together and set aside

In your Dutch oven (you’ll need one of those because this is all going in the actual oven eventually), add the oil and flour over medium heat if you don’t know what you’re doing, or crank it up hotter if you do. Stir constantly until you have a nice, dark roux. (It should look like melted chocolate.)

While making sure to keep stirring your roux, go ahead and get your ground beef browning.

Put a little oil or bacon grease in a separate pan and toss in about 1/3 of the veggies and saute them for a few minutes before tossing in a heaping teaspoon or so of minced garlic, then mix that around for a minute before adding the ground beef – which you’re going to remember to season, right? Right. Just put whatever you like on it, or just salt and pepper. You do you. (I like Trager’s Beef Rub, myself.) Cook until browned.

The roux you’ve been remembering to keep stirring this whole time should be the dark chocolate color we’re looking for around the time your ground beef is done browning. (If the meat is done sooner, don’t panic. Just take it off the heat and let it sit there to think about what it’s done.) Add the rest of your veggies to the roux, stir them around, and let them cook for a bit in that before adding in the spice blend. Stir all that together for a minute (this is the blooming part I mentioned), then toss in another heaping teaspoon or so of minced garlic and dump everything from your other pan (the one with the ground beef and the rest of the veggies) straight into the Dutch oven where the party’s getting started.

Dump in a bottle of stout, I use Guinness Extra Stout, and stir it around a little, then add 32oz of beef stock and the tomato paste, then do the stir-stir thing until everything’s nice and mixed in and the roux is fully dissolved. If you aren’t susceptible to racist media scare tactics and really want to kick up the flavor, you can also add in around a teaspoon or so of MSG (easy to find branded as Ac’cent Flavor Enhancer). If you are susceptible to racist media scare tactics, you could just toss in a bouillon cube since it’s basically just MSG in disguise for white people who are scared of MSG because they’re susceptible to racist media scare tactics. (You’d also add the beans here, if you’re the kind of philistine that considers nothing upon this good earth sacred at all.) Bring the whole thing to a boil while stirring occasionally, then slap the lid on and toss it in a 300° oven for somewhere around an hour, hour-and-a-half.

Grab the Dutch oven out of the, well, oven oven and skim off some of the excess fat that’ll have risen to the top while you’re here. If you even want to, that is. Fat is flavor, so feel free to leave it. Up to you. I’m not telling anyone how to live.

Anyway, give it a good stir and taste it. Add whatever you may think it’s missing but keep in mind that the flavors will continue to intensify over time (especially the next day). Then, just toss it back in the oven – uncovered this time – for another 30-45 minutes or however long it takes to thicken to your desired consistency. Check on it and just keep cooking it uncovered until it looks right to you. Helping to get just the right consistency is one of the reasons for the roux – it’ll make adjusting things a bit easier. (If it gets too thick, just add more beef stock or water. If you add too much and it gets too thin, then just leave it in the oven longer until it’s back to where you wanted it before you messed up and went dumping more beef stock in there with reckless abandon.)

Once it’s how you want it, taste everything and make sure it’s all on point, then toss in the dark chocolate. Yep, trust me. Just toss it in there and stir everything up. Let it sit for, I dunno, 15 minutes or so, then give it another quick stir and you should be good to go.

It’s ready to serve at this point, which you should absolutely do because it’s taken a while and everyone’s hungry, but it’ll be even better tomorrow and the next day or however long it takes you to gobble it up like the gluttonous wretch you are.

If you need me to tell you what to top it with once you have it in a bowl, then you’ve never eaten chili before and I can’t help you. Personally, I just put a little cheese on top while the wife prefers sour cream. Do whatever you want, though. Or don’t do anything. Everything is fake and nothing is real, anyway. Go crazy.

The post How I Make Texas Chili In Lousiana appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

Machine learning exists.
Large Language Models exist.
Algorithms exist.
But AI? Not so much.

AI won’t take your job, either. Well it will, but not because it’s remotely capable of doing your job – it isn’t (because AI doesn’t exist, actually) – but it will take your job because some bozo with an MBA and a weekend habit thinks it can. A whole lot of people are going to get sacked simply because toddler princes are running the kingdom with Dunning-Kruger confidence and Artificial Intelligence PhDs they printed off the back of a cereal box in the copy room last Thursday when Donna wasn’t looking.

The good news is that it doesn’t mean you won’t eventually get your job back. It’ll just be a different job that pays less and demands more because you’ll be the one cleaning up all the garbage some generative AI produces for the intellectually destitute “prompt engineer” your boss hired to command the robots at a rate five times higher than what he was paying all the people he fired so AI could take their jobs.

Just look at what’s happening with the writer’s strike. Studios want to be able to use generative tools to “write” screenplays and then pay actual writers even less than they do now to edit the silly little chatbot’s silly little output and create something of quality from the questionable mishmash the bot spits out since it has no way of knowing if a joke is funny or if a tear-jerker will jerk any tears. It doesn’t understand how to elicit any emotion because it doesn’t even know what emotions are.

Because AI doesn’t exist, actually.

Of course, for computer and data scientists, the catch-all term of “artificial intelligence” does exist and is used interchangeably with other aspects of the field, but no true expert (or anyone who understands anything) believes any of the systems people are currently hocking as “AI” are in any way intelligent. Because they’re not – but you wouldn’t know that from all the NotScientists promising revolutions.

“But,” I hear you shouting, “Elon Mush and Sam Walkman believe it! Microsoft and Google, too! Not to mention my buddy Earl down at the Gas-N-Sip or that hopped-up dropout I knew in college who’s inventing the next big AI tool! How could they all be wrong? They’re changing the world!”

Well, sure. They’re changing the world, all right – one Greater Fool at a time. Invest early, kids. Get in on the ground floor of the latest reskinned GPT-3 or 4 or 5 or 6-7-8… (or any other float in the parade of constant loathing made up of all the other LLMs doing the exact same thing).

Ever notice how there are never any actual scientists on the stage whenever any of AI’s industry leaders are talking? Sure, there are plenty of CEOs and C-Suite sycophants in hoodies and business casual cargo shorts their wives keep begging them to throw away – but where are all the computer scientists? The data scientists? The really real linguists? You know, the actual experts and not just a bunch of salespeople and sometimes an engineer. Why are they always absent?

It’s because all of these “amazing” new AI tools do the same thing, and none of them are remotely intelligent. (And the scientists know that. Because AI doesn’t exist, actually.)

All these chatbots do is break your prompt down into a statistical model they then compare against the datasets they were trained on to look for patterns and statistically predict the next word (or pixel) with varying levels of accuracy. It’s playing Guess Who with numbers, not thinking. That’s it. That’s the tweet.

LLMs don’t understand their prompts. They don’t understand any of the words in their prompts. They can’t interpret symbolism and metaphors embarrass them at parties. They are incapable of assigning meaning to anything, and they’re not actually having a conversation with you. They’re not sentient, they never will be sentient, and they will never, ever be capable of any sort of intelligence, artificial or otherwise.

We do not now, nor have we ever, had an artificially intelligent system of any kind. At all. Because AI doesn’t exist, actually.

I get why so many business people are so excited about generative AI, though. You know the type – the Big Brain Idea Guys who believe that having ideas is some magical thing that only they can do, and are completely oblivious to the fact that everyone has great ideas. There’s never been a shortage of ideas – it’s having the talent (or access to investment capital) to realize them that’s in short supply, and generative AI provides a quick pathway to creating something while having exactly none of the skills needed to do much of anything. (Which is where “prompt engineering” comes into play, otherwise known in polite society as simply being able to effectively communicate.)

AI may exist eventually, but it won’t be virginally birthed from an LLM’s sacred loins, no matter how much “it’ll get better” time goes by or how big their datasets get. That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works. The technology that may eventually lead to Artificial General Intelligence (or Artificial Super Intelligence if we’re talking about an Effective Altruism / Longtermist’s eugenics-powered fever dream) is fundamentally different from the way Large Language Models work.

Comparing LLMs to AGI isn’t even apples and oranges. One will not and cannot lead to the other. It’s more like Fruit-by-the-Foot and your grandma’s ’67 Coupe deVille that’s been rusting in her driveway since Gerald Ford was president – it’s a wholly nonsensical comparison. Believing that one has anything at all to do with the other only shows just how much your average True Believer doesn’t understand anything.

That’s not to say that ML/DL/LLMs/etc tools can’t be phenomenally useful – we’ve been using them for decades – it’s only after AI became a hip new marketing buzzword that we started calling anything with an algorithm and a dataset Artificial Intelligence, though.

A whole bunch of actual science is done with the help of machine learning. Oodles of physics and medicine and an endless list of other applications are aided by deep learning and sophisticated algorithms. Practically every industry is using – and has been using – some form of what we’re suddenly calling “AI” for decades now. If you’re reading this on or from a social media app or a search result you clicked in Google – you’re using AI right now.

People call it “the algorithm” a lot – the YouTube algorithm, the TikTok algorithm, the Facebook algorithm – they’re all using machine learning and have been all along. It’s likely they’ll all soon be rebranded as whatever “AI-powered” is supposed to mean, but nothing will have fundamentally changed. And the androids will continue to not dream of electric sheep.

Artificial Intelligence as “understood” by the general public and easily duped is simply science fiction masquerading as science fact. Generative AI can’t think or understand or analyze or reason, even if it’s really good at pretending it can. It can’t analyze what it can’t understand because it’s not intelligent and lacks any sort of cognitive ability whatsoever. It’s just finding statistical averages and guessing without ever actually knowing what it’s saying. It’s not Data from Star Trek or C-3PO from Star Wars or even the Sixth Sense kid when he was in that Spielberg movie about Robot Pinnochio.

Because AI doesn’t exist, actually.

During one of tech’s previous Next Big Thing hype cycles, I remember being able to come to only two possible conclusions for anyone who believed NFTs were ever going to amount to anything:

1. People who didn’t understand the technology
2. People who did understand the technology and were just in on the grift

It’s pretty much the same with AI. If you actually understand how the technology works, you either hop on the hype train and ride it as far as you can or you start writing excessively long rants about how it’s all a bunch of smoke and mirrors because you just can’t take it anymore.

(I guess a third option would just be not understanding any of it but pretending you do, which probably accounts for the lion’s share of early adopters and LinkedIn pundits now that I think about it.)

It’s a money grab right now, which is why every company is rushing some “revolutionary” new AI product to market that isn’t all that new, isn’t revolutionary, and is either just doing the same thing it’s always done but now Siri is called, I dunno, some stupid AI marketing name – or it’s just another LLM doing the same thing every other LLM is doing.

Remember the iEverything craze back in the late ’90s and early 2000s after the translucent iMac (followed by the iPod) came out, when it seemed like every company on the planet started launching iSomething products even if they had nothing at all to do with the internet?

Like that, but today with AI.

You don’t even have to think back that far. Remember ten minutes ago when every company was rushing some “revolutionary” new blockchain product to market? How are those working out today? Or how about five minutes ago when the metaverse was going to change everything? Or a half hour ago, when everyone from respected financial institutions to major video game publishers were going to do something “game changing” with NFTs? Or every day since your brother-in-law went down the crypto rabbit hole and lost his life savings but still won’t stop shouting HODL TO THE MOON every time your wife invites him over for dinner?

Another day, another hustle.

Just because a bunch of companies start shilling nonsense, it doesn’t suddenly stop being nonsense. There’s just a lot of money to be made in tech when they’re marketing something that looks cool, seems inevitable, and is generally misunderstood by nearly everyone involved. There are always plenty of Greater Fools out there, and mining the rich FOMO fields of techbro, Steve Jobs wannabes is lucrative…while it lasts.

When the dust settles and people finally come to their senses, they’ll see generative AI for what it truly is – a collection of semi-useful tools/toys for niche applications that lie a lot and are rarely very helpful outside of being a handy crutch for the creatively and ethically bankrupt. (Also, let’s not forget how incredibly useful generative AI is to scammers and fraudsters and people who want to disrupt the foundational core of democracy. And also some pervs with image generators. Probably a lot of pervs, actually. So many pervs.)

Some form of “AI” will eventually be added to every app and program and service under the sun, even if it’s something that’s always been there and especially if it’s a worse version of something we already have. (Fun fact: “Making worse versions of things we already have” is the unofficial slogan of tech billionaires everywhere.)

Generative functionality will quickly become as ubiquitous as the search box or spellcheck (although nowhere near as useful while also being biased and discriminatory and perpetuating stereotypes while promoting statistical mediocrity all at the same time). People will eventually stop caring, and a lot of folks are going to lose whatever money they had left to invest in Random AI Startup #5,437 after they fell for web3 and blockchain and crypto and NFTs and the metaverse and…

Look, just be wary of anyone selling the latest digital snake oil, whatever it is. Silicon Valley trots out some “revolutionary” new bit of tech every few years so con-artists entrepreneurs can run the startup hustle of faking it while hoping to make it just far enough to be able to pay their daddy’s investment capital back and cash out with a profit before people realize that nearly every tech startup is running the same Theranos scam and Elizabeth Holmes only got caught because she bought her own hype and stayed in the game too long.

Then again, Musk has built an empire out of scamming people and they still believe every lie he sells them, so what do I know? He’s even got his own AI now, which alone should tell you everything you need to know about the scamminess of the whole scammy scam, but invest in whatever you want, I guess. I’m not the boss of you.

But AI still doesn’t exist.
Actually.

The post Artificial Intelligence Doesn’t Exist, Actually appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

Anyway, I cheated.

Well, cheating is a pretty strong word. Basically, I just refused to be bound by the arbitrary rules imposed upon me by an uncaring universe. Or by a gaggle of Cajun cousins I’d never met before. Whichever.

Growing up, we didn’t do many family reunions, probably on account of how they were usually held in places that took too much gas to drive to. We didn’t have a lot of money.

But we did manage to make exactly two reunions on my Dad’s side. They were both over Easter, somewhere not in Lake Charles, Louisiana, but close enough to drive to from Beaumont, Texas without breaking our 1980-something gas budget. It was called The Ole Place, near Sugar Town. (Not to be confused with Sugar Land in Texas, which is just another word for the endless urban sprawl that is Houston.)

The first one we went to was fun, if a little awkward. I didn’t know anyone there, and any cousins my age had about as much use for the scrawny, nerdy comic book kid as the scrawny, nerdy comic book kid had for a bunch of cousins who could probably punch him into the next parish using only their pinkie fingers and a determined glare.

We had a big Easter egg hunt, followed by a round of smacking our eggs together to see whose egg cracked first. This, I would later come to find out about five minutes ago when I looked it up, was called paqueing (or one of the entries on the aforementioned list of alternate terminology). It was probably the only game they actually played with me as an equal, so I had fun. But I lost a lot.

The next year, I went prepared.

For some weird reason known only to herself, my mother had a collection of alabaster eggs she’d put out as a decoration every Easter. I snatched a few off the shelf, then boiled some of those goofy shrink-wrap bands onto them that were probably new and revolutionary in the ‘80s, but just seem cheap and kind of stupid now. (This pretty much describes a lot of the ’80s, now that I think about it.) Still, once wrapped, the alabaster eggs looked more or less like regular Easter eggs, so I figured we were good.

I was ready. When it came time for the annual smacking of the eggs, I strode onto the field of battle with a level of confidence my scrawny nerd body had never known before. Then, I found my first victim.

tap…tap
tap…tap
*smack*
*crack*

I WIN!

I mowed through rows of cousins, each one falling to the might of my mysterious, impervious eggs. I did have the good sense to bring a few spares, though. I’d switch them out every now and again to avoid too much suspicion, just so the other kids might think I’d lost once or twice.

I never did.

The field of battle was littered that day with the shells of those crushed beneath my righteous fury. My egg was fortified with years of oppressed nerd rage, and I was unstoppable!

Right up until one of the cousins stopped me.

He snatched my egg from my gloating fist when I wasn’t paying attention and shouted, “HEY! HE’S GOTS ROCK EGGS!”

The other cousins ran up and gathered around, sensing my fear like a hundred hungry vultures circling a tiny woodland creature with a promising limp.

“GET HIM!”

I ran.

They caught me.

As punishment for my crimes, I was held down and basically waterboarded with off-brand Kool-Aid. You know, that weird red punch that comes in plastic milk jugs and tastes faintly of vomit that was ubiquitous at every kid’s birthday party back in the day? Yeah. That’s the one.

Ah, memories…

Looking back, I probably bit off more than I could chew. Or maybe I just got too cocky with each new win. If I’d just quit while I was ahead, then I might have walked away un-punched and the totally rad neon shirt I was wearing that day wouldn’t have been ruined.

Then again, I also wouldn’t have yet another humiliating story from my youth that I could capitalize on later as a grown-up trying to sell you this book. (Assuming you’re reading this in a bookstore or in an online preview or sample post or whatever passes for marketing these days, anyway.)

Life is all about balance, y’all.

(If you enjoyed this excerpt from A Lifetime of Questionable Decisions, why not buy the book and impress all your friends with how fun you are at parties? All the cool kids are buying it. Don’t you want to be cool, too?)

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The post Peter Pocking Tail appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

That may sound harsh, but it’s the hardest truth writers need to acknowledge and understand before they’ll ever be able to write anything of value. Because writing isn’t about the writer — it’s about the reader.

It doesn’t matter what you’re writing. Write a novel all about how your life got flipped, turned upside down and people might take a minute to just sit right there but they’re not going to listen while you ramble on for days about how you became the Prince of Bel-Air if every word you write is only about yourself. Your experiences, your reflections — how things in your life have affected you only matter to you. For your writing to have any value to a reader, it has to be about how your experiences may affect them.

If you’re writing an essay, a business article, a tech primer — it doesn’t matter. The only value your writing has lies in whether or not your readers are willing to give it the time and consideration every writer so desperately wants. The problem is too many writers don’t write for readers. They write in their own self-interests, to prove themselves to the world — then they’re surprised when no one reads their work.

It’s not their fault, though. This is how we’re taught to write. Writing is as fundamental as ABCs and 123s in school, and it’s taught that way — as a means to convey mastery of a subject rather than affect readers, which is why everything you think you know about writing is wrong.

Think about it. How were you taught to write? What was the purpose behind every paper you wrote in school? Was it to add value to a concept your teacher wanted to improve her understanding of or was it to prove that you’d mastered the material? Were your research papers designed to challenge the status quo, to solve a reader’s problem, or change their minds? Or were they to show that yes, you’d read the assignments, you’d passed the tests, and here’s the proof.

Readers don’t care if you understand a subject. If you’re writing about something, they will assume you already do. No one is reading your work to be convinced of your brilliance, your wit, or your expertise — so stop trying to prove it to them.

Consider any recent article you’ve likely read. How was it structured? How did it start? What was the body like? What’d you think of its conclusion? Chances are, it was the standard five-paragraph essay you’ve been writing (and reading) since high school, even if it had a lot more paragraphs, a bunch of subheadings, and looked a little different. It was still structured in the shape of an hourglass.

It probably started with a broad generalization, maybe including some explanation with a definition or two thrown in. After that, its focus likely narrowed a bit onto a few key points where the writer put a lot of effort into proving just how much they understood the assignment before wrapping everything up with another broad generalization summarizing everything you just read, assuming you even made it to the end.

Did the article provide any real value? Can you even really remember it at all?

The probability is high that you either never finished it or forgot all about the thing as soon as you’d clicked away and moved on to whatever you read next…which was likely another five-paragraph essay in disguise.

This is because people write how they were taught to write — to prove understanding — rather than how to write anything of value to readers. It’s why your writing is bad, why a whole lot of my past writing is just gawd awful, and why most of what you read on the internet is as forgettable as whatever the last thing you read was that you can’t remember right now unless you really think about it. And even then…

So how do you fix it? As with most things, the solution is very simple. Execution, on the other hand, gets a little tricky.

Write something of value to readers. That’s it. That’s the secret.

To know what your readers will find value in, you first need to understand who you’re trying to reach. Identify your audience and write for those specific people in a way that creates something they want to read. If you’re appealing to other subject matter experts or influential professionals in a specific field, you don’t need to explain generalities or define terms. They already know what the words mean. They already know what the problems are. They’re looking to you to provide solutions or at least enhance their understanding of a problem. They don’t care about your credentials, they’re not interested in your personal observations, and they certainly have no desire to listen to you try and prove yourself in a thousand words or less.

Writing is about the reader, not the writer — and your work has to offer something of value to readers that they can’t get anywhere else but your article, your essay, your novel. Whatever it is you’re writing, if you’re just trying to communicate your ideas, you’ve already failed. Instead, identify your readers’ ideas, then write something that will either add to their understanding or change how they think altogether. Don’t be timid and don’t waste time trying to prove you understand the material — punch hard, punch up, and punch fast. Nobody has time to read oceans of text about what matters to someone else. Readers want to read about what matters to them. Not you.

State the problem, show the reader why it’s costing them something (time, money, resources — everything has a price), and provide a solution that will either minimize that cost or provide a benefit that outweighs the expense. That’s it. That’s all your writing has to do to be valuable to a reader.

Of course, getting there is harder than it looks. For a reader to even consider your writing, it must be crafted well, with proper technique backed by a talented pen. The mechanics of writing are the things worth learning in school, even if we get them mixed up with purpose by the time we graduate. But when you get it right — when you’re writing at the highest level with the understanding that your work isn’t about you, and you’re instead hyperfocused on providing something of tangible value to the reader, they’ll remember your name. They’ll look you up, search for other things you’ve written, and come to rely on your voice as a leading expert in your field.

A valuable essay challenges readers with conflict and tension, for which it also supplies relief. Make your reader feel uneasy, force them to worry about a problem they might not have considered before, and show them the cost of not solving it. Give them a reason to be concerned, then calm them down by providing a solution. Write an article that saves your readers time, money, whatever the resource is — and you’ll have written something of value.

(Yes, I know. The mechanics of fiction work a little bit differently so don’t come for me. Still, the goal is the same no matter what you’re writing — write for your readers, not yourself. Stick to that basic idea, and the rest will come naturally.)

Don’t pull your punches, don’t self-aggrandize, and take yourself out of the equation. Nobody cares about you. Nobody cares about me. The only things readers care about are the words on the page and whether or not they add any value to their lives. The sooner you understand this one simple concept, the faster your writing will improve. Your articles will get more clicks, more shares, and more of that sweet, sweet recognition every writer craves — but you won’t get there by following the rules you learned in school. Those rules taught you how to write for teachers. You need to start writing for readers.

Write hard.
Write fast.
No mercy.

The post Everything You Think You Know About Writing Is Wrong — Here’s Why appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

Well, it wasn’t so much a scream as it was just shouting my name as loud as she could to get my attention, which has the same chilling effect on my delicate husband psyche as any other kind of yelling. Usually, it’s because of something I did that I didn’t know I did until a sudden, sharp shout alerted me to the fact that I had, in fact, done whatever it was that prompted the shouting. It’s a vicious circle.

However, this time it wasn’t anything I’d done wrong. Kind of. More or less. Let me explain.

She was only yelling because she opened an olden wooden “treasure chest” (that was really just a fancy jewelry box) my mom had given me when I was a kid. I used it to hold onto knickknacks and keepsakes that were important to me when I was younger. It’s got a lot of ticket stubs, a couple of two-dollar bills my grandfather used to give me for luck, and a lot of rocks and pencil shavings, for some reason.

It’s also kept an envelope full of cash and a tiny plastic baby safe since 1993.

It was the envelope that prompted my wife’s shouting, probably more because of the cash than the little naked baby. There is, of course, a story behind this.

I grew up in Southeast Texas during the fabulous ‘80s, if that’s what anyone except me calls the decade. I know about the roaring ‘20s and the groovy ‘70s, but I’m not sure the ‘80s ever got a cool nickname, not that it matters. Those ten years were indeed fabulous (at least if you were a kid), and that’s all there is to it. But back to the story…

This being the ‘80s, I didn’t really know much about Mardi Gras. I had some cousins in Lake Charles that got time off from school for it, so I’d at least heard of it, but that’s as far as it went. (The good people of Southeast Texas would eventually climb aboard the hype train and start having Mardi Gras parades and events of their very own, but this was way before they got religion.)

I was normally a pretty good kid, being more afraid of getting caught breaking the rules than anything else, so I never had much experience with disciplinary actions in school until I hit eighth grade at the tail end of the decade. It was 1988 and I don’t remember what I did, but whatever it was got me “lunch detention” which meant I had to sit alone at a little table in the front of the cafeteria while all the other kids walked by and laughed. After I was done eating, I had to pick up trash and start sweeping the floor with a giant broom while everyone else went outside.

I was sentenced to two weeks of what was essentially the middle school version of putting me in the stocks so villagers could throw rotten tomatoes at my face in the town square, but at least I made a friend.

Her name was Miss Betty, the sweet little old lady who ran the cafeteria. Her approximate age was impossible to guess, but she had silver hair that was always frizzy whenever she wasn’t wearing her official cafeteria lady hair net, and her hands were wrinkled and spotty and shook whenever she handed back your change.

We didn’t talk much the first week of my detention, but she always flashed me a knowing kind of sympathetic smile whenever I went through the line that almost seemed to apologize for my predicament. After I’d finished eating on my first day, she took me through the kitchen to a little utility closet by the back door that held the giant broom. After that, it was mostly just me sweeping the cafeteria floor by myself while a few slow eaters finished up their juice boxes.

The first day of my second week was different. Miss Betty was more excited than usual, with more smiles and kind glances than normal, which is saying something. I never saw her angry or upset about anything. She was just that type of person.

I overheard her talking to the other cafeteria workers about Fat Tuesday coming up (which wasn’t a school holiday in Texas like it is Louisiana), but I just assumed she was making a joke about food. She worked in a cafeteria, after all. Made sense.

The next day, after I’d been sweeping for a while and the slow eaters had finally gone outside to run around during what wasn’t technically recess since we were supposed to have outgrown that by middle school (but it totally was), she popped her head out from the kitchen, smiled, and waved me over.

All the cafeteria workers were gathered around a prep table in the back, each one holding a plate and eating a slice of the most garish, ugliest little cake I’d ever seen. It looked like some kind of weird, knotted lump of a thing sprinkled with green, gold, and purple sugar with icing drizzling down the side. Miss Betty walked over and handed me a plate.

I’d never had king cake before and new food scared me, but something about Miss Betty’s smile told me I wouldn’t regret it. So I tried a bite. And then another. And another.

The cake was delicious. The garish icing and sugar were sweeter than I’d expected and the cinnamon of the cake itself was detectable but not overpowering. It definitely wasn’t the typical white cake I was used to eating at birthday parties.

On one of my last bites, I bit down on something hard: the baby. The look on my face when it happened must’ve tipped the ladies off because everyone started laughing and Miss Betty walked over to me with a grin on her weathered face.

I don’t remember what she said or even, all these years later, what her voice sounded like, but she explained a bit about Mardi Gras and the cake, and that getting the baby meant I got to be king for a day – and had to make the cake next year.

Which I did.

I spent most of my eighth-grade year in one type of trouble or another. Puberty has that effect on boys. This also meant that I spent most of the year in lunch detention, getting to know Miss Betty and the other ladies a little better, who could all see that I wasn’t a bad kid and didn’t treat me like one.

I went off to high school the next year, but when Mardi Gras rolled around, I stuck to my promise and made a king cake. Technically, my mom made it after calling my dad’s grandmother for the recipe, and she also drove me back to my old campus after school on Fat Tuesday.

When I walked in, I remember the office staff stopping me since I didn’t belong there anymore, but a quick word from my mom to the principal got everything sorted and I carried the cake to the cafeteria, where I barely caught Miss Betty before she left for the day.

She saw me holding the cake, smiled, and ran over to give me a great big hug. She still smelled the same, somehow like green beans and pizza boat mixed with vanilla and peppermint. She flipped the lights back on in the kitchen, and I set the cake down on the table. While Miss Betty grabbed a knife from somewhere in the kitchen, I inspected the cake for a small mark my mom and I put on the cake so I could tell roughly where we’d added the baby just before putting it in the oven.

I cut us a couple of slices. We talked and ate and caught up until she bit down on something hard. I laughed and told her it was the same baby from last year, then she laughed and promised to bake next year’s cake for me.

Which she did.

The PA system crackled to life at the end of my last period on Fat Tuesday in 1991, calling me to the principal’s office. I packed up my things, stopped by my locker, then walked to the office to find Miss Betty waiting there, smiling and holding a piece of king cake. Spoilers: I got the baby. Again.

I was able to drive myself back to the middle school campus the next year, transporting a slice of king cake on a paper plate covered in plastic wrap in the passenger seat of my beat-up old pick-up truck. I walked inside, nodded to the office staff, and kept on making my way to the cafeteria where Miss Betty was waiting. Somehow, that same baby made it in her slice again this year. Weird, huh?

My senior year went by pretty quickly, as senior years tend to do, but I remember things slowing down around Mardi Gras, when Fat Tuesday came and went…without Miss Betty. She never showed up to deliver my slice of cake. I thought maybe she just forgot or didn’t have time, but she didn’t show up the next day, either. Or the next. By the time Friday rolled around, I drove to her campus after school.

When I walked inside, the secretary waved me into the office. The principal walked out a minute or two later, holding an envelope. He told me Miss Betty retired at the end of last year, and she’d asked him to deliver it to me when I showed up for my king cake. I thanked him, took the envelope, and left.

She’d written my name on the front in delicate, broken cursive. I didn’t open it.

I could feel the baby inside it, of course, along with what was probably a letter I just wasn’t ready to read yet. With all the life changes getting thrown at me as soon as I’d graduate a few months later, I didn’t want to accept that I’d probably never see Miss Betty again. Too much change. Too fast.

I don’t remember how old I was or what I was doing when I eventually got around to opening it, but I was right about the baby and the letter. I just hadn’t expected the cash.

The letter was brief and sweet and to this day, whenever I think about it, I can still catch the faint scent of green beans and peppermint. She’d enclosed $250, the grand total of all the meager Christmas bonuses the school district had given her since we’d become friends, plus fifty bucks of “bingo money” she ended up saving for my graduation present.

The one line she wrote that I’ll repeat here sums up everything there was to know about Miss Betty.

She wrote, “This isn’t much, but even big things start small. You have the baby now. Go be the king of your life.”

I never spent the money and I probably never will. It’s still in that old envelope along with the baby and her letter, which my wife put back in the treasure box after I told her the story.

I might pass the baby along to someone else one day, but not yet. It’s still too soon. Almost three decades ago and it’s still too soon.

Maybe next year.

The post A Mardi Gras Memory (a short story) appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

I decided to put on my sweatpants when I got home after work, which were in my laundry room, sitting on top of a mountain of dirty clothes that was only getting bigger and bigger because I hadn’t washed anything in several days. Why? I’ll get to that in a minute. For now, let’s focus on the sweatpants. I just wanted to do a quick change into my fat clothes so I could relax for a while, so I went into the laundry room, closed the door, and put them on. Or tried to, anyway. What I actually did was lose my footing somewhere around mid-thigh on the first leg.

I started to fall but caught myself on the edge of the dryer. Or thought I did, anyway. Turns out, it was actually the dustpan that was resting on the edge of the dryer, and it was full of screws and dirt that went flying into the air as the dustpan itself flipped over and sent me plummeting to the floor. Face first, butt in the air, half-dressed from the left thigh down.

Lying there in total darkness because I hadn’t bothered to turn on the light, I slowly pushed myself up and brought my knees under my chest. Or thought I did, anyway. What I actually did was place the soft flesh of my naked right knee directly over one of the screws from the dustpan that I couldn’t see because of the total darkness, which had naturally fallen pointy-end up. I jolted from the instant pain, but my foot caught on the waistband of my sweatpants, and I somehow managed to propel myself forward. Headfirst. Into the back porch door.

I turned over, my tender bits scraping against unseen dust boulders and the occasional vindictive bit of metal, pushed my back up against the door, and slowly got to my feet. I switched on the light, then grabbed on to what I was confident, this time, was the actual edge of the actual dryer, steadied myself, and pulled my sweatpants back up my left leg. And then my right. Until I was fully clothed again.

I COULD HAVE DIED.

Now, you might be wondering why a dustpan full of screws and dirt was left resting precariously upon the edge of my dryer amidst a growing mountain of dirty clothes, and it’s a fair question.

Let me explain.

I have a very old dryer, which I love precisely because it is a very old dryer, and is, therefore, possible to repair whenever something goes wrong with it. New appliances are designed to fail and then be too expensive to fix, forcing you toward the cheaper route of just buying a brand new appliance before it, too, breaks down, and you’re forced to repeat the same horrible process all over again.

An old appliance, on the other hand, is fairly easy to repair if you know what you’re doing. The downside is that, because it’s an old appliance, it’s prone to breaking down, so you get to fix it a lot. This isn’t really a problem if, as I said, you know what you’re doing. Unfortunately, I rarely know what I’m doing.

The dustpan that almost killed me earlier was holding the screws I had to remove from the back cover of the dryer after it broke down (again) several days ago. Fortunately, I realized that I didn’t know what I was doing as soon as I opened it, so I did what any good husband would do and just pushed everything back to where it was and told my wife it wasn’t really a problem because we still had plenty of clean clothes to go through before we’d need to wash anything again. (This was only partially true.)

Yes, we had plenty of clean clothes to wear, but most of them involved garments that were only clean because we never really wear them in the first place. If I didn’t fix the dryer soon, I knew I’d have to wear my old suit from 1997 to work, and nobody wants that. (Do people even still wear novelty ties anymore? Did they ever?)

After my unexpected education in gravity by way of complete sweatpants failure, I decided I should probably try to fix the dread machine. But remember, I had no idea what I was doing.

Nevertheless, I persisted…

The failure was actually pretty simple to diagnose. A little doohickey that holds a wire that slips into a thingamajig was to blame. Or, more specifically, the wire itself was to blame because it broke for some reason and was just hanging there. At any rate, I reasoned that a loose, dangling wire was a pretty good indicator of where the problem was.

I picked up the little doohickey, then got medieval on it with some pliers until I had freed the bit of amputated wire it still held tight in its little metal jaws. I then went back to the dryer, sat down on the floor, and began affixing the doohickey back to the rest of the wire that was still dangling inside the machine.

It was at this point that I realized I hadn’t unplugged the dryer. It was also at this point that I realized this one particular wire carried rather a lot of electrical current.

As I began to smash the pliers over the doohickey’s jaws to clamp them down upon the wire, the whole machine sprang to life like something out of a horror movie. I remember a very loud pop, followed by a slight metallic ping before a shower of really impressive yellow sparks flew off the wire in a kind of terrifying grand finale to my life. (Spoilers: I did not die at this time.)

I managed to stand up and, to my credit, very calmly remove the plug from the wall. I stood there for a minute, sniffing the rusty scent of ozone in the air while I surveyed the damage, which is when I heard The Child come running down the stairs, shouting and asking me if I was okay. I shouted back that everything was fine and not to worry. (Yes, I lied to my own child.)

Once reassured, the kid went back upstairs, and I went back to slaying my white whale. I found the doohickey that had been blown off the wire (the little metallic ping I heard was it hitting the side of the dryer), then I cut the wire back and twisted it tightly before crimping the doohickey back on, which I then tried to slip back into the thingamajig, only to discover that I’d cut back too much of the wire, and now it wasn’t long enough to plug in.

Undaunted, I traced the wire back through the bundled nest of other wires, removed it, and ran it straight to the thingamajig it’s supposed to plug into. There was plenty of wire now that it had a direct path, and I was feeling pretty pleased with myself. I plugged the doohickey back into the thingamajig, then plugged the power cord back into the wall, stood back a safe distance, and pushed the start button.

Nothing happened.

At first, I thought I’d finally killed the machine, but then I realized that I might have only blown a breaker during the whole explosion incident. I checked the fuse box and realized I had, so I reset it and tried again. The dryer sprang to life. The heating element came on. Clothes began to tumble.

It worked!

I took the screws from the dustpan and used them to secure the back cover onto the dryer, then shoved everything back into place and began celebrating my victory by way of washing and drying every piece of clothing from the Great Mountain of Unclean Things.

Which was going great until the dryer broke again because hope is a fragile tinderbox, and the flame of joy is quickly extinguished in this cruel, uncaring world. (I was beginning to get depressed.)

After some time had passed and I was done feeling sorry for myself for being a failure both as a husband and a man, I realized that I had pushed the poor old dryer too hard. I’d just performed open-heart surgery on the thing, but hadn’t given it any time to recover before I put it back into active duty. I had only myself to blame. I took the back cover off and noticed that the same thing had happened again, which is when I noticed how brittle and discolored the far end of the wire was.

I unplugged the power cord. (This was, I had recently learned, an important first step in any repair job involving electricity.)

The wire looked and felt much healthier farther down the line, so I cut it back some more, then crimped the doohickey back around it before plugging it back into the thingamajig once again. I jammed the power cord back into the wall, then pushed the start button, and everything started working. I finished up the last two loads of laundry, and nothing at all exploded.

I considered this a great success.

Satisfied and feeling pretty good about myself, I thought it’d be a good idea to clean up before my wife got home, so I sanitized the crime scene to remove all evidence of how I almost died. Multiple times. In my own laundry room.

The moral of the story? Always remember to unplug whatever it is you’re about to work on before you start working on it, and always – always – put your sweatpants on very carefully.

Preferably under adult supervision.

UPDATE: We eventually bought a new dryer.

(If you enjoyed this excerpt from A Lifetime of Questionable Decisions, why not buy the book and impress all your friends with how fun you are at parties? All the cool kids are buying it. Don’t you want to be cool, too?)

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The post How I Almost Died appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

True story.

She was also deeply devoted to following any recipe she found to the letter, with no deviation whatsoever. I get a little more experimental in the kitchen myself, which is how my mom’s secret Macaroni and Cheese recipe transformed from something reasonable yet tasty into the monster it is now. I won’t divulge my secrets here, but I will say that it involves a blonde roux just this side of brown, 16 ounces of butter, nearly a gallon of milk, and four pounds of cheese. Eating it might kill you, but at least you’ll die happy. (If you want that recipe, it might or might not be included in a cookbook I may or may not be working on. In the meantime, let me show you how to make gumbo. You’re welcome.)

As for the best pie you’ll ever eat – don’t worry, I’ll give you the recipe in a minute (or click here to jump straight to it if you hate words) – it started out as a simple, normal chocolate pie. There was nothing offensive or spectacular about it. It was just your standard, ordinary old chocolate pie. Serviceable, but the dial tone of the dessert world. My grandmother would make it, I’d eat it, and there was never anything particularly memorable about it.

But that was before…The Incident.

You see, the recipe came from my aunt, whose name was Turla for some reason, but who everyone just called Aunt Sissy. She was a sweet lady who never had much in the way of money or worldly possessions, so she’d always give out handmade gifts for the holidays. She’d carve and paint Christmas tree ornaments one year and hand out boxes of recipe cards she hunted-and-pecked together on a manual typewriter from 1920-something the next. She was a neat lady.

My grandmother first made the pie the year she got the box of recipes, and continued making it every year after that until she passed away. She always made it the same way, too: according to the exact measurements and directions of the recipe.

Until she messed up.

Like many of the world’s greatest scientific achievements, she created the best chocolate pie in the known universe entirely by accident. While attempting to follow the recipe the same way she always had, she neglected to properly read the amount of one key ingredient: the milk.

The recipe calls for one and three-fourths cups of milk, but my aunt’s old manual typewriter from the time dinosaurs roamed the earth squeezed the 1 part of the 1 3/4 cups all the way to the edge of the card. And my grandmother missed it.

Which is how the pie was born.

By only adding 3/4 of a cup of milk, the pie took on a whole new dimension of chocolatey goodness. It was rich and thick, and more decadent than that slice of cake in the second Matrix movie that made a nice lady have to leave the table over accidental indecency in the workplace. Anyway, it was, in short, the best chocolate pie I’d ever tasted. My grandmother, however, was horrified. She thought she’d ruined Christmas with a defective pie and was convinced that I was just being nice when I stopped her from throwing it out and starting over. I wasn’t. It was delicious.

My dad and I ended up modifying the recipe a bit more over the years, from the standard rules of baking that involve always adding more vanilla than a recipe calls for and a little more salt to any dish that has chocolate in it, to more extreme measures like changing the pie crust from a boring old regular crust to an Oreo cookie crust that can inexplicably only be found at Walmart these days.*

*Yes, this pie actually makes me want to go to Walmart, which is saying a lot.

Now, as promised, I’ll share the recipe with you. Make this pie for your next family gathering or work party, or just any time you want to impress everyone around you. One word of caution, though. If you do make this pie, you should probably double the recipe and make two of them. They go quickly.

I’m only modifying the amount of milk here, and I changed the margarine to butter, because live a little. It won’t kill you. Probably.†

† I hereby absolve myself of all legal responsibility if eating this pie makes your heart explode.

I also suggest adding a little more vanilla‡ and an extra pinch of salt, but I’m not here to tell you how to live your
life. Oh, and if you want to be extra, make your own whipped cream. It’ll impress your in-laws.

‡ Just double it. If the butter doesn’t kill you, you’ve already made it through the scary part.

The Recipe

3/4 CUP SUGAR
1/2 TEASPOON SALT
1/3 CUP FLOUR
3 TABLESPOONS COCOA
3/4 CUP MILK
2 EGGS, SEPARATED
1 TABLESPOON BUTTER
1 TEASPOON VANILLA

Mix sugar, salt, flour and cocoa together, then add milk, beaten egg yolks, and butter.

Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until thickened. (The pie has a tendency to go goopy if you don’t cook it long enough. So watch for that.)

Remove from heat and add vanilla.

Beat egg whites until stiff, but not too dry, then fold into the custard mixture.

Pour into an Oreo pie crust and chill in the refrigerator until firm.

Top with whipped cream and grated chocolate. (Or chocolate sprinkles. Whichever you prefer. You do you.)

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(If you enjoyed this excerpt from A Lifetime of Questionable Decisions, why not buy the book and impress all your friends with how fun you are at parties? All the cool kids are buying it. Don’t you want to be cool, too?)

The post The Best Chocolate Pie Ever. In Like, the Entire History of the World. For Real. appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

Oh, hey. Before I get into a long, involved story about the time a bowl of gumbo saved my life when I was a Dickensian street urchin working the coal mines, you can skip straight to the recipe here. You’re welcome.

I’m all for quick and easy gumbo, though. Cheat Gumbo, you can call it. You don’t have to make your own roux if you don’t want to. You don’t even have to chop your own vegetables or cook any chicken. There are ways. Sadly, most of the methods you’ll find on the internet are just too lazy.

Everyone knows the key to cooking up a great gumbo is the roux. The reason purists will tell you it’s important to make your own isn’t because slowly cooking up your own oil and flour combo is better than using someone else’s pre-cooked oil and flour combo. In the end, the roux will pretty much taste the same.

Nope, the difference is what you do with the roux. If you make your own, what you do when it’s ready is toss in your holy trinity (onion, celery, bell pepper) and saute those veggies right in the roux since it’ll be roughly the temperature at the heart of a dying star at that point. That’ll flavor up the roux and the veggies, and you’ll have a great base to build the rest of your pot on.

However, what almost everyone on the internet says to do with jar roux just makes my heart sad. They all want you to dissolve it in boiling water and then dump all your raw ingredients into the pot after its boiled for a couple of hours or so. No. No, no, no. You can make a pretty decent watery gumbo-flavored soup this way, but no. You’re not making Gumbo with the capital G. You gotta earn that.

My way is less lazy but just as easy, and you’ll end up with a very flavorful stew, like how Gumbo should be. (See? Capital G right there.) Here’s how.

Buy you some store-bought roux. I like Savoie’s, but really, it’s all just oil and flour anyway. Buy whichever one you want. (If you get to making your own roux, you can use vegetable oil if you want, but never use olive oil. I don’t care what the cooking show chef on your talking box said. Don’t do it. Also, if you want a really great roux, use bacon grease or lard for your oil. Trust me. Equal parts oil and flour, cook over medium heat stirring constantly until you get a rich, chocolate color. Simple.)

Toss that roux in a big pot you’re gonna cook up the gumbo in. I use a whole jar for my pot, so the rest of this super easy recipe will follow that. Add a little oil to it if you need to (jar roux will be very, very dense and dry) and put it over a low heat, stirring constantly until it’s all smooth. After that, keep the heat on low and stir it regularly while you do the next steps. (The reason jar users don’t saute their vegetables in the roux is because it’s already cooked and pretty easy to burn if you try to bring it all the way up to temperature from the get-go. That’s why I bring the roux up slowly over a low heat while I do the other stuff.)

The sausage! Use whatever sausage you want. My favorite won’t be your favorite, so pick what you like. I recommend a sausage that tastes red because sausage that tastes too brown just screws everything up. (Shout out to all my synesthesia folks out there who understand what I’m talking about.) Cut it into thick slices, dump the slices into a separate pan, and brown them up on both sides. (The Maillard reaction brings out extra flavor.) When you’re done with that, dump the sausage into a bowl or some other kind of temporary container.

Stir that roux a bit.

Without taking your now empty pan (except for some grease and a bunch of bits stuck to the bottom) off the heat, toss in your veggies (or, if you want to be extra lazy like me, you can buy a “seasoning blend” of veggies in your grocer’s freezer section that’ll be just fine as long as it’s got onions, celery, and bell peppers). Dump in the whole 24oz bag, and cook them until they’re nice and cooked down and soft. Nobody wants crunchy veggies in their gumbo.

Stir that roux a bit.

When you dump the veggies in the sausage pan, the moisture will deglaze it and bring all that goodness up that was stuck on the bottom. You should also have plenty of grease from the sausage to cook up the veggies. (All this adds flavor, you know.)

Stir that roux a bit. Go ahead and turn the heat up to a low medium while you’re at it.

When your veggies are ready, dump them a little at a time into the gumbo pot with the roux. Stir it all together, then add a little more. (If your roux starts to seize up on you, just add a little oil.) Keep stirring the veggies in until you have all you want in there. (I usually have, I dunno, maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of a cup left over.)

Stir the roux and veggies up a minute, then dump in the sausage and stir it all together. Now add a couple of boxes of chicken stock. Just dump it in, stir everything around, and make sure everything is all nice and smooth and the roux has completely dissolved.

You should season up the liquid now with some salt and pepper. Don’t add any “Cajun spice” blends, though. That’s just dumb and you don’t need them. Instead, add a couple of teaspoons of filé to the pot and stir it up. (It’s just ground sassafras. Nothing fancy.) The filé will not only flavor your Gumbo (ooooh, that capital G is back now), it’ll also help thicken it a little to just the right amount. Maybe start with 1.5 teaspoons, although you can always add a little water to the pot later if it gets too thick.

After you get that done, try and get at least three pounds of meat off a few fully cooked rotisserie chickens, shred it, and toss it in the pot. This is the fastest/easiest/laziest way, and it still tastes great. The best way is to marinate some boneless chicken thighs – skip the white meat entirely – overnight then season them up and bake ’em in the oven. (Or the quickest (but less flavorful) way is to just boil them in water with salt and pepper, some dried oregano, a couple of bay leaves, and half an onion (no need to chop it). But if you’re really lazy, just pick up some thighs from Popeyes, take the skin off and chunk them into the pot (just be warned your chicken will be a little dry this way.)

I like to add some finely chopped garlic just before I toss in the chicken, by the way. I don’t saute it first because it’ll be plenty hot enough to cook it in the pot, and I want the flavor that comes from tossing it in this way. If you’d like a more mellow garlic, saute it first or just sprinkle in some garlic powder. I don’t care. Some people like to add a bay leaf at this point because I guess they think it does a damn thing, so go on ahead and do that if you want to plant a tree in your pot. I don’t think it brings anything to the party though, so I don’t invite it to mingle.

Anyway, now all you gotta do is let that simmer (bring it to just below a boil, then turn the heat down to a low simmer) for however long you want. The longer you go, the more flavor you’ll get, but it’ll be ready to eat whenever you decide you can’t wait anymore. (And it’ll be even better the next day and the day after that and the day after that…)

If I’m gonna put rice in my gumbo, I like to serve it on the side to add to my bowl as I go. Honestly though, rice is just a stretcher to make thin, watery gumbo last longer and serve more. My Gumbo is thicker – but not too thick – and is more of a rich stew, so you really don’t need the rice. Have some if you want, though. I’m not the boss of you.

Okay, now here’s the quick version for everyone who just jumped straight to the bottom of the post for the recipe. You jerks.

Chicken and Sausage Gumbo
Lazy Cheater’s Recipe

• 1 16oz jar of dark roux (or 2 cups oil and 2 cups flour; protip – (lard and/or bacon grease is great; or use Bacon-Up in a pinch)
• 1 24oz bag frozen seasoning blend (or chop your own: equal parts onions, celery, bell pepper)
• 2 pounds of sausage, sliced (you can add more, but not less)
• 3-5 pounds of chicken (again, you can add more, but not less – also, I recommend boneless, skinless thighs)
• 96 ounces (three 32-ounce boxes) chicken stock or broth (you can grab an extra box to have on hand if you need more liquid, or you could always just add some water)
• However many cloves of garlic you want, finely chopped
• 2 teaspoons gumbo filé (or a lot more, if you prefer — I go with a lot more)
• Bay leaves

Caution: You really need a large stockpot for this. If you just have a normal pot, it’s fine. But you’ll probably want to halve everything.

Cook your chicken first, however you like – or you can get some fully cooked rotisserie chickens and use those. I like chicken thighs, myself – boneless, skinless. You can cook them in a pan, in the oven, on the grill, however you like. Just remember to season them first (after marinating them, if you’re extra). Once cooked, just shred them with a couple of forks or, if you spend too much time on TikTok, use a hand mixer on them. There are no rules here.

In a large pot, add the jar of roux and maybe a little oil (if you want to stir it a little more easily before it’s heated up) over low heat, stirring constantly until smooth. (Stir occasionally after that, while you do the next steps.) If you’re making your own roux and you’re not experienced, you might want to save this step for after your sausages are done.

Cut sausage into slices and brown in separate pan. When browned on both sides, remove from the pan (but leave the grease), put it in a temporary container and set to the side.

In the same pan you used for the sausage, saute seasoning blend (onions, celery, and bell peppers) until well cooked and soft.

(If you’re making your own roux, do it now.)

Add veggies to large pot with roux a little at a time, kind of like you’re tempering chocolate. Add sausage to pot and increase heat to medium, stirring constantly.

Pour in chicken stock. Stir until roux dissolves completely. Season with salt and pepper. Add chopped garlic and filé, then put down that jar of “Cajun spice” I know you’re about to try and sprinkle in there. I can see you. Trust me, you don’t need it. Just stir your pot.

Add chicken, bring to just below a boil, then reduce heat and simmer with a couple of dried bay leaves until you can’t stand it anymore. The longer the better, but I’ll understand if you just can’t wait.

Eat.

The post Authentic Cajun Gumbo: It’s Okay To Cheat appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

Insurance has changed. FEMA assistance has changed. All aid policies have changed. The help simply isn’t there anymore, and what little remains has been significantly minimized to the point of being effectively useless.

Insurance policies are underpaying (when they pay at all), charging separate deductibles for each storm through a legal loophole, requiring absurd levels of documentation and evidence of damages to such ridiculous extremes that simply going through the effort of providing such evidence would end up costing people more than if they just replaced the items on their own, all while denying every claim they can as desk adjusters reevaluate the determinations made by their own field adjusters and reduce their findings in favor of the insurance companies.

FEMA only steps in if you don’t have insurance, which automatically excludes all the people who already aren’t getting the coverage they’ve paid for. When it does help, the funds are small and aid is slow to come, if it comes at all.

There have been no significant national fundraisers to help Southwest Louisiana like there were after other storms hit more recognizable cities. Charitable organizations lack donations and volunteers to be able to effectively help people. The rest of the nation has moved on and assumes everything is back to normal here.

It isn’t.

Remember, while the same area getting hit by two separate hurricanes within weeks of each other itself is unprecedented, all of this is happening in the middle of an ongoing pandemic that had already decimated the nation’s economy months earlier and absolutely devastated local economies nationwide.

People just don’t have the money to spend after months of covid along with two evacuations and two rounds of rebuilding. Local businesses don’t have the money to rebuild and resupply their stocks. Thousands of workers are unable to work, due either to their places of employment being closed or destroyed, or to the complete lack of anywhere to live if their homes were significantly damaged.

Lake Charles, a working-class city of roughly 78,000 people, has been eviscerated by Hurricanes Laura and Delta. Thousands of residents remain displaced, and the dire needs of the city have been overlooked. https://t.co/SpVSAOkh1r

— The New York Times (@nytimes) October 20, 2020

There are no available hotel rooms, with the few operational places booked solid. There are no available rental properties, and what few remain have doubled or tripled their rents. Trailers, campers, and RVs are impossible to find and cost a small fortune if you’re lucky enough to stumble upon a battered up and heavily used model just to have some kind of roof over your head.

It’s an awful situation and no one has been through it before. No one has been through two back-to-back hurricanes before, with one being on record as the strongest storm to ever hit the state. No one has done it in the middle of a global pandemic. And no one has done it since all the laws and policies were quietly changed to favor corporate interests after previous storms cost them too much.

See beyond your own experience and realize the world has changed since whatever words of advice or criticism you had to offer were relevant. If you’re willing to actually help us, you are most welcome here. If not, we’d all very much appreciate it if you’d just shut up.

The post We Are Not Okay: Southwest Louisiana After Laura. And Delta. And Covid. (Oh, my!) appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

For everyone shocked at The Social Dilemma, you really shouldn’t be. Data mining and user manipulation are overt purposes of the various social platforms. It’s basically printed right there on the front of the social media box.

But what you don’t see if you just watch The Social Dilemma (and you really should; it’s a fantastic documentary) is how much worse everything is, how much of your data is mined by websites loading your browser to the gills with tracking cookies, banks, apps you install on your phone, and even your own ISP. (ISPs have been selling user data for ages, and they have a lot more detail on you than Facebook or even Google.)

Besides, data mining is just the start. The pipeline works like this: data is mined then analyzed to produce predictive analytics that are then used to programmatically select and serve not only the most influential advertisements but also the most relevant content that could motivate you toward making specific, favorable choices.

And they’re good at it, too.

It’s why people think their microphones are listening to them after they mention a product to a friend and then see ads for that product the next day. Your microphone doesn’t come into it. The various systems just know you so well (data mining) they can predict (predictive analytics) what advertisements and content you’ll buy and click with alarming accuracy, often before you even realize you want them.

Advertising itself is only the most recognizable, overt, and relatively benign goal, anyway. The real purpose is user manipulation. Being able to accurately predict a population’s reactions to various events and policies has long been the holy grail of any system of control because if you know how people will react to something, you can run models to find the best reactions for realizing your ultimate goals. There are different terms for it – years back we called it forecasting – but it’s all the same in the end. If you know how people will react to anything, you can figure out what you need to do to get the reaction you want.

This is all big money at high level stuff, though. Most people just put a little money into the machine and tell it what they want to happen. Want to find people interested in buying your handmade whatever in your Etsy ship? Just toss a couple hundred bucks to Facebook, check off a few demographic tick boxes, and algorithms will take it from there. Data is the new oil, and the people who can most successfully mine and process it are ridiculously wealthy and, consequently, ludicrously powerful.

It’s not conspiracy. It’s just how the modern consumer technology landscape works at the most fundamental level. It’s surveillance capitalism, and it shows no signs of slowing. Sure, it started mostly innocently, with ideals of personal digital assistants curating content and advertising to your interests so you could dial back on the cacophony of information noise in your life, but it didn’t take long for the powers that be to realize the unprecedented level of control these systems offer.

These forces are the cause of the disease that leads to The Flat Earth Society, Birthers, 9/11 Truthers (who have obviously never watched the blacksmith at a renaissance festival and simply can’t understand you don’t need to melt steel to bend and break it), anti-vaxxers, and QAnon. They are what made Brexit and Trump possible, and they’re what’s keeping progressive policies from making any, well, progress despite the overwhelming majority of Americans favoring most of them. They’re the reason we can’t agree on climate change or economic policy or anything at all anymore, really. They’re why we have All Lives Matter people who genuinely believe the majority gives a damn about their racist, bigoted, ignorant ideology.

The echo chambers of social media and the programmatic serving of content and advertising are why a small minority of toxic assholes mistakenly believe their outmoded, outdated, toxic views are still somehow the norm. That most people really do think like them in 2020, rather than the relative handful of walking anachronisms who actually do. That anything they think matters to anyone other than the aging population of their peers that’s slowly dying out right alongside their Cro-Magnon politics.

But they won’t see any of this, not unless they come looking for it. The various algorithms running the internet today aren’t likely to show my little website to any of them, which is just as well. They’re the type of people who like to leave comments, as if this is site is some kind of diary blog from whatever past it is they live in. Nobody reads the comments anymore, Karen. Nobody cares, least of all me.

So yeah, watch The Social Dilemma and be horrified. Just understand it’s only the tip of a very large, very deep, very dangerous iceberg, and our captains of industry are steering us right into it, full steam ahead.

Cool.

The post The Social Dilemma Is Just The Beginning appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

I wish people who don’t live in a hurricane zone could remotely understand what it’s like to go through a historic storm. Every hurricane is terrible in its own way, but the really bad ones – the historic ones – are on a whole other level.

Everyone affected by this storm – which is everyone who lives anywhere in Southwest Louisiana (and parts of Southeast Texas) – has gone so far past exhaustion at this point, there’s really no word severe enough to convey just how over it all of us are. We can’t do it anymore. We’re past the breaking point. But here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter.

Hurricane survivors don’t get to burn out and take a break because there are no breaks. There is no rest, no brief respite from the million things that have to be done, no distraction from the devastation all around us. If you’re lucky and your home is livable with power and probably/maybe clean water, you have to worry about when you can get to the store during their limited hours, and what might be available so you can scrape together some kind of dinner every night – assuming you have cash to pay with because no internet means no digital transactions (no debit cards, no credit cards, no checks). You might have power but your neighbors don’t, so the generators are still running 24/7. Sleep comes hard, if it comes at all.

If you were less lucky, you’re still trying to dig out whatever bits of your life you can still excavate from the rubble of what was once your home before you have to say enough’s and enough and write off anything left as unsalvageable, even when all that’s left are mementos and memories that can never be replaced.

Most people are somewhere between the extremes, with severely damaged but not entirely destroyed homes, which means trying to work while meeting with insurance adjusters, sitting on the phone while calling contractors and listening to hours upon hours of terrible hold music, only to hit one dead end after another, with this claim being denied, or that appraisal being too low, or wait, you still need to find a place to live for the next year or so while you wait your turn in line for a roofer or plumber or electrician.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world has moved on and expects you to behave as if nothing at all has changed. As if you still have a complete home, with walls and a roof and electricity and clean water and internet access so you can finally file your TPS reports with corporate and get Karen in Accounting off your back.

Bill collectors start calling. They’ve sent you several notices they insist you should’ve received despite your house being off its slab and you not having a mailbox. All the promises different companies made of discounts and grace periods during the storm go flying out the window as just so much PR hot air when you can only get as far as some dude named Peter in India who has no idea what you’re talking about and can only help you with setting up a payment plan for a modest penalty fee.

The other day, I paid for a full month of electricity I did not use, a full month of internet I still can’t use, and a month’s insurance to a company that has yet to give me a penny. A post in a local Facebook group for hurricane recovery popped up last night with a guy renting out campers – yes, campers – for $200/day or $5,000/month, and I’ve already seen rental properties renting at twice their pre-Laura rates. These are the kinds of things we’re dealing with and will continue to deal with for months and years to come, all while trying to piece our lives and homes back together as we continue playing along with the rest of our obligations as if everything’s fine.

Then we get to listen to all the people who’ve gone through anything stronger than a thunderstorm tell us they’ve been there and know how we feel. That they know, somewhere where the climate is moderate and they don’t even need air conditioning to survive, what we’re going through. That they actually understand what working and sleeping in 100+ degree heat and 97% humidity every day, never able to escape it, is like. That they have even the slightest concept of mosquito swarms so thick and so bad, they’re literally killing off herds of livestock.

Life goes on everywhere but here, where we just experienced the strongest hurricane to hit the Louisiana coast in 150 years, but everyone around us wants to act like it’s not really that big of a deal while comparing it to this storm or that storm they went through without ever having set foot in a city like post-Laura Lake Charles and seen the unprecedented level of devastation across not only our entire city but the entire region. It’s the same everywhere: barely any structures came through the storm unscathed, with nearly everything taking some level of damage from the moderate to severe and straight on through to catastrophic.

I’ve lived through every named stormed to hit the Gulf Coast since 1975, so I can speak on this with at least some level of authority, and I’ve never seen windstorm damage of this magnitude at this scale. Sure, I’ve seen the same level of localized damage, and I’ve seen widespread lesser damage, but never this much complete destruction over this large an area. That’s the difference. That’s what we’re dealing with that people who’ve been through other storms haven’t. When I say “we” I’m not talking about me, my family, our friends, or our neighbors. I’m talking about an enormous swath of land and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people all hit the same, all at once, with everything being affected across hundreds of miles. No, Karen. You don’t know what it’s like.

The only people who think they’ve gone through a hurricane remotely similar to Laura are people who didn’t go through Laura.

We barely have power back, with much of what’s been done being piecemeal temporary fixes just to keep us going until more permanent repairs can be made. Clean water is still hard to come by, and internet? What’s the internet now in Southwest Louisiana but tin cans tied together on a string we make squeaky-squawky noises through and pretend like we’re doing something. Seriously, there is no internet access here. All most of us have right now are our cell phones or mobile hotspots (if we’re lucky enough to score one before the latest shipments sell out), with the bandwidth of functional cell towers maxed out as everyone tries to get work done or stream movies at resolutions so pixelated and blurry, we’d be better off just reenacting our favorite scenes on the front lawn where our living rooms used to be.

On top of everything else, we’re still in the days of COVID-19. And, despite how you might feel about our country’s (and state’s) response to it – and a lot of people sure do feel all types of ways about it – the fact is, like it or not, we’ve all been under Phase Something-Or-Other since March. The economy is in shambles, we haven’t been able to go out and socialize or do anything normal for months, and here comes the most devastating hurricane I’ve ever personally witnessed. Even if you’ve been through an awful storm, did you do it during a pandemic? No. No, you did not.

Well, unless you’re reading this after Sally and probably Wilfred or Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, and Zeta hit after we run out of names because this year is a legit Greek Tragedy and just can’t seem to stop getting worse.

UPDATE: It got worse.

Anyway, the point is it’s rough. It’s been rough for weeks and it’s going to stay rough for more weeks. And months. Maybe years for some. A lot of businesses won’t rebuild. A lot of locals will move somewhere else or just plant roots in whatever city they evacuated to. Renters are going to have to figure out if staying here is worth it after landlords send rent skyrocketing to profit off insurance companies willing to pay outrageous rates for their policyholders to have places to live while their actual homes are being repaired or rebuilt. Everything is going to get more expensive, wages aren’t going to go up to compensate, and large swaths of the city will be entirely remade by the powers that be, their populations removed and relocated through the power of economic policy.

All that said, the future is not as bleak as it seems right now. Communities are coming together to help each other. Volunteers are jumping in to lend helping hands where they can. There are lots of resources and plenty of information available. Yes, there will be a lot of greedy people exploiting the situation, but good people will always be there, helping each other. Will it be enough to rebuild everything just like it was? Probably not. Can we build something better? Hopefully.

I wish I had more pictures to share with people who haven’t seen the devastation firsthand, but the roads are still difficult to navigate, there’s still debris to dodge (roofing nails and other sharp, tire-puncturing hazards are everywhere), and whenever I get out on the roads, I’m too busy driving and trying not to die at four-way intersections nobody knows how to properly react to when the stoplights are out to take photos. (There’s this nice gallery from a local photographer over on Facebook, though.)

So to everyone who wants to help but doesn’t live here or who has never been through anything like Hurricane Laura – and very few of you have – then maybe instead of trying to identify or one-up us with your personal natural disaster stories, just listen. Listen, maybe nod in agreement here and there, then offer to help if you can. If you can’t, then sometimes just listening is enough.

As for the rest of you who aren’t actually interested in lending a hand and just want to either talk at us or demand we just get on with our lives as if nothing is wrong, we’re doing the best we can with next to nothing and every chip stacked against us.

Give us a break.

The post What It’s Really Like To Survive A Historic Hurricane, For People Who Think They Know But Don’t appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

After the dentist, I took her over to CVS to get her prescriptions filled, but they were somehow out of one of them, so we had to go to another pharmacy and wait an hour for them to count out a couple dozen pills on I what I can only assume was the world’s slowest pharmacological abacus or something, but we eventually got everything she needed and made it home.

Then, while taking her pills with a Boost at the kitchen sink because she hadn’t eaten all day and needed something in her system, the liquid slid into one of the extraction sites and she almost died but managed to stay on this side of the river Styx by way of shouting at the devil or, more accurately, cry-yelling at the ferryman until he decided she was too much trouble and backed off.

She finally made it into the bed where she still hasn’t fallen asleep, but being a good parental figure, I made homemade chicken strips for dinner because hey, Trey and I didn’t experience any invasive dental trauma today and we were hungry, too. This proved nice for us but because I’m an awful husband, turned out to be a new form of torture for the poor woman starving in the bedroom as the scent of it all flowed down the hall and mocked her inability to chew.

This all started at 3:00pm and ended about an hour ago when Trey discovered a YouTube video of, like, fourteen deleted Hamilton songs they started watching together as I left the room to finish up work for the day.

Everything is done now though, and I just split the last chicken strip between our two dogs who have both developed emotional doggie whiplash by rapidly alternating between extreme concern for my wife’s well-being and the overwhelming urge to eat all the everything I cooked.

The house is finally calm again. Trey is talking with his friends over Discord in his room and one of the dogs is curled up on his bed while the other is curled up at my feet as I type this up and prepare to go play a video game for the next, oh, twenty eight minutes or so until I hear a slight whimper coming from the back of the house building into a one-woman chorus of ultimate suffering as her painkillers wear off in, oh, I’d say about twenty seven minutes now.

Twenty six.
Twenty five.
Twenty four…

The post Smart Outside Bones appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

Got it? Great. Now, if you’re still with me or just want ammunition to fire back at me about how wrong I am, keep reading and I’ll tell you all about how this thing got flipped, turned upside down. It’ll only take a minute, just sit right there…

Organized child abuse by sinister, secret forces is nothing new. Well, I should say, the idea of it is it nothing new, and it comes around in cycles just like brand new diet crazes that were brand new diet crazes thirty years ago and again thirty years before that. Wait a generation and you have a whole new bunch of people to con.

Back in the late-’80s, the McMartin Preschool Trial was in full swing. If you’re too young to remember that far back, it was the Pizzagate of the ALF era. Basically, they were allegedly abusing and torturing children at their day care facility, which came complete with underground tunnels and rooms. You know, like with Pizzagate. Weird. I guess satanic pedophiles have a thing for digging.

You can go read the Wikipedia article on it if you want, or just Google “McMartin Preschool Trial” and click on whichever conspiracy site floats your boat. There are plenty.

Around the same time, we also had the Franklin Child Prostitution Ring which more or less amounted to the same thing as the McMartin case but added in layers of intrigue with the rich and powerful sneaking kids away from Boy’s Town to be sex slaves in Washington D.C. for the night, then it was back to Nebraska. A documentary was made on that one, which you can easily find on the internet if you’re so inclined.

Both cases had no such satanic pedophile cabals or anything, though. Some unsavory characters in the mix, sure. But a highly organized clandestine sex trafficking ring? Nah, dawg. Didn’t happen.

Now we have Pizzagate and the Wayfair Scandal and whatever other nonsense QAnon is rehashing, especially in light of the #MeToo movement and Jeffrey Epstein. Here’s the thing, though. Abuse happens. It happens a lot. It happens often. And it happens everywhere – except in the dramatic, exciting, cloak-and-dagger ways these stupid conspiracy theories portray it.

I’m not gonna bother trying to debunk any of these conspiracies because smarter people than me already have, but believing in this crap breaks your brain. There’s really no other way to say it. A perfectly ordinary person of reasonable, even advanced, intelligence can find themselves slipping into these conspiratorial patterns of thinking and, before too long, they’ve been dragged deep into a web of sinister organizations out to rule the world.

Which would be fine, I guess. Whatever makes life worth living for you. It’s just that believing in nonsense when it comes to the sexual abuse of children tends to blind people to the very real sexual abuse that happens every single day across the nation.

The only high-level conspiracy going on as it relates to pedophilia is in the Catholic Church, but people don’t like talking about that – and, even then, we know about it. It didn’t stay hidden forever. Some of us have known about it longer than we’ve (collectively) known about it, too. Sinéad O’Connor lost her career trying to bring awareness to it way back in 1992, right around the time many people were ready to believe in outlandish, cartoonishly-evil satanic pedophile rings. They just weren’t ready to see it so close to home yet, and definitely not in their churches.

Yes, hundreds of thousands of kids go missing every year. That’s a true statistic the conspiracy theorists love to cite. However, what they leave out is how most of them are found and returned home just fine. Those who aren’t are usually abducted by a friend or family member, not random sex trafficker snatchers who scoop them up at the bus stop one day before renting them out to a senator on the black market the next.

Seeing these theories go around pisses me off because people would rather believe in some vast, global conspiracy than the mundane abuse they choose to ignore. The uncle who’s a little too friendly with his nieces or nephews. The family friend who has an awful lot of little boys hanging out at his place on the weekends. The kindly priest in your parish with the glint in his eye. The youth pastor with the spiky hair and the cool goatee and the extra grabby hands. (I wrote a book with stories directly addressing this shit. Abuse is very real and very raw and always awful, and none of it has anything at all to do with paranoid conspiracy fantasies on YouTube.)

This is where abuse really happens. But yes, there is plenty of abuse in Hollywood. The #MeToo movement has shown that beyond a shadow of a doubt. Are kids abused in Tinseltown, too? Of course they are. That town, that whole industry, exists to use people until they’ve run their course and it spits them out. I can’t think of any reason why it wouldn’t do that with kids as well as adults.

Does that mean it’s an organized cabal, though? Nah. These things are always limited to a small circle because anything larger without, say, the resources of the Catholic Church to help keep things quiet, tend to attract attention and the truth comes out. Sure, some of you might be saying that’s exactly what we’re seeing happen now, but it isn’t. What we’re seeing now is the same thing we saw with the McMartin case and the Franklin case and Pizzagate and anything you hear about “the elite” doing awful things with children on a grand scale. It’s all bunk. It’s all distraction.

Dig deep enough, and these things are like mystery religions in that they withhold the “truth” until you’re fully committed to the cause. They most often have their origins in racism and bigotry, usually aimed at “international bankers and the wealthy elite who run this country” who, when you keep digging, almost always turn out to be Jewish families. Weird, huh?

These days, the surface level of “elites” most often means liberal democrats, since the latest conspiracies are being touted by far right ideologues. But keep digging, and I’m sure you’ll hit bedrock at the Rothschilds. It’s always the Rothschilds.

Do people born into dynastic wealth get up to some freaky shit? No doubt. When you can do and buy anything, eventually the only exciting things are all the things you’re not supposed to be able to do or buy. I get it. But do they control a secret sex trafficking network so they can ritually abuse kids for their dark lord Satan?

Prolly not.

Quick sidenote: I’ve always found it odd that Christians are quick to label atheists as Satanists. A friend on Facebook recently posted some miracle conversion from a wannabe actor/musician who left behind his “atheist Satanic lifestyle” to follow the baby Jesus and cash in on his recovery with eBooks and sponsored YouTube videos. Whatever. More power to him, I guess. Make that money, yo. Still, atheists don’t worship Satan. They don’t believe in Satan. That’s why they’re called atheists.

Look, I know some of you have the best intentions. You just want to protect kids, and what could be wrong with that? Absolutely nothing! That’s a great goal to have. Just don’t let these conspiracies drag you down into the nonsensical depths because then the only people you’ll be helping are the ones shoveling the bullshit.

Social media and conspiracy theories break your brain. They really do. Occam’s Razor goes out the window and you suddenly start seeing the most complicated, convoluted, ridiculously complex solution as the only probable one. To put it another way, that’s the exact opposite way reality works.

See? I told you this would get flipped, turned upside down.

Want an example? ‘Course ya do! Here’s one. Ask yourself why it’s more likely leaders across the entire world conspired with every doctor and scientist and healthcare professional in every country on the planet to invent a hoax virus to keep Trump from being re-elected than it is to just believe shit happens and then we have deal with it.

Even Epstein didn’t have an intricate sex trafficking ring going on. He did what pretty much every abuser does: he identified vulnerable kids, groomed them to accept his advances, then moved on with the abuse. Now, could he have involved other adults? Of course. He did, probably more than we’ll ever know about. Still a small circle though, not a complex satanic ring of pedophiles who torture kids to drink their adrenalized blood. (Yeah, that’s a thing they do, apparently. Those wacky satanist, y’all.)

That last one actually has its roots in the UFO community, specifically on the David Icke branch of the family tree, but that’s another essay for another time.

For now, if you want to help kids, keep an eye on the adults in their lives. If you see something suspicious, let someone know. If you get a bad vibe off that creepy uncle, let somebody know. If a kid comes to you with an allegation, listen to them and let somebody know.

Real abuse really happens.
Let somebody know.

The post Secret Cabals of Satanic Pedophiles Are on the Rise. Again. appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

No one has asked for my take on it, of course, but no one asked you to click on whatever link you took to find this post either, but here we are. Might as well get it over with.

First of all, nope.

Second, third, and fourth of all: on the great, big list of all the bullshit teachers have to put up with, hastily constructing makeshift PPE out of cheap plastic pipe and dollar store shower curtains ranks somewhere near the not even on it. They shouldn’t have to buy their own materials, either. They shouldn’t have to be doing any of this because we should not be opening schools yet.

I get that teachers are scared – and they should be. I know a lot of teachers. My entire family is made up of teachers, and I worked in education for years. The few friends I have left in this world who somehow manage to endure me are, by and large, teachers. So, when I tell you most teachers are very much in the at-risk group for COVID-19 due to underlying conditions, please don’t take it as hyperbole. That’s a damn fact, jack.

Sure, there are a lot of young, fresh-faced teachers out there ready for dangerous minds to lean on them so they can stand and deliver, but there are a whole lot more older teachers who’ve spent years being disillusioned by being overworked, underpaid, over-evaluated, and underappreciated. It takes a toll, both mentally and physically.

My mom battled through cancer and chemo and diabetes and hypertension as a lifelong teacher, and if she were alive today and still teaching, she wouldn’t be by the end of this school year. I firmly believe that, and it terrifies me on behalf of every single teacher I know.

We’re asking teachers and all school staff to, quite literally, risk their lives so we can all get the kids out of the house and either go back to work or spend the day doing whatever it is people who apparently don’t like their kids very much do when they’re at school. Oh, sure. There’s a whole lot of talk about how important it is for kids to get back to school, but for all the flowery rhetoric I’m hearing about how vital and important and essential public education is now, there’s a great, gaping funding hole in the nobody gives a shit of the not-too-distant then.

(*There’s one of those If You Don’t Like Me At My Defunding Our Liberal Arts Programs, You Don’t Deserve Me At My Free Daycare meme in here somewhere…)

But let’s get back to the piecemeal PPE the photo is suggesting teachers build for themselves. I really don’t think it’s a good idea.

First, it’s bound to violate some kind of fire or safety code since there’s roughly twenty bazillion of the things when it comes to public school buildings, but more importantly, who’s gonna clean the damn things?

We’re all hearing plenty of assurances from school districts about their constant cleaning and sanitizing guidelines, but not much in the way of explaining where all the money they didn’t have yesterday is coming from today to even afford the additional cleaning supplies, much less hire enough custodial staff to handle the job. I guarantee teachers will be responsible for sanitizing their own classrooms. I guarantee it.

If these things aren’t wiped down and cleaned regularly, they’re going to become clear plastic Petri dishes with who knows what growing on them, not to mention how quickly kids will figure out how much fun it is to stab holes in the things and generally destroy them in much the same way as they metaphorically chip away at their teacher’s will to go on.

Also, those desks aren’t six feet apart at all. Yeah, there’s a sheet of dollar store plastic between them, but I’m not entirely certain it’ll offer a lot of protection. I mean, I’m sure it’s been rated for sterile medical use and is not at all filled with lead and whatever else made it into whichever sweatshop hellhole it was manufactured in and all, but I buy a lot of stuff from Dollar General. There’s a reason everything there costs a dollar.

I totally get wanting to do something, though. Anything is better than nothing when the country just passed four million cumulative cases and we’re getting ready to bring the nation’s children bouncing back into overcrowded, under-funded, and under-maintained school buildings. I just don’t think this something is the right anything, and could end up doing more harm than good.

The right thing to do is delay the start of school until districts receive the funding and time necessary to make their campuses safe for everyone, teachers and staff included. (I’m not even gonna go into how bad of an idea it is to start colleges and universities back up except to point out how the “college experience” in America can be broken down into three distinct parts: Learning, Partying, and Getting Laid. When students can’t really do two-thirds of what they’re paying tens of thousands of dollars for while social distancing, most just won’t bother worrying about it. Well, there’s that, and then there’s the pathogenic wonderland that is your average college dorm…)

To slow the spread, we’ve canceled concerts, closed theme parks, and shut down every local festival imaginable across the nation. But packing dozens of kids into small, confined spaces for hours at a time five days a week in a building full of hundreds of other kids doing the same thing? No problem!

What, do schools have magical covid-nullifying force fields or something? If it spreads in a church, it’ll spread in a school. If it spreads at a concert, it’ll spread in a school. If it spreads in a prison, it for damn sure will spread in a school, which is basically just prison misspelled.

School days, school days
Hope you don’t get covid days
Reading and writing and ‘rithmetic
Coughing and sneezing and getting sick
Build us a plastic barrier
Our teacher got sick, we buried her
And you wrote on my slate, “I’ve got covid toe.”
When we were a couple of kids

TL;DR – If teachers have to build their own PPE out of scavenged dollar store supplies like a Great Value MacGyver, we should not be reopening schools.

READ MORE:

• No, Online-Only Education Will NOT Be Available to EVERY Student. That’s a Lie. Here’s Why.
• Parents, Please Keep an Eye on Your Kid’s Virtual Classroom
• Worse Things Happen At Sea, You Know

The post It’s Amazing How Well Prepared Schools Aren’t appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

Look, I’m all for practical education. But this meme is just another way for baby boomers (and younger bastard lucky enough to be born to the right boomer parents) to shift the blame to younger generations for having inherited a world that won’t let them escape living in it as the working poor.

If the appeals to financial literacy don’t work, there’s always the magical thinking of whatever self-help book somebody read they really thought was swell and you should read it too, if you don’t want to be a filthy poor. People who lucked into being born at the right time and/or to the right parents truly buy that all their success is down to hard work and their own strength of character. They read (and write) books to motivate the poors by giving them revelatory advice like learn as much as you can, save whatever money you can, and don’t pee in the boss’s coffee pot. That sort of thing. It’s always painfully obvious common sense stuff all the working stiffs of the world have already been doing, but the scam is all of that advice only works in hindsight after you’re successful. It’s self-congratulatory drivel designed as benevolent advice and sage wisdom. It makes the jackasses feel like they earned their wealth and the reason you’re poor is all your fault.

Newsflash: Poor people aren’t stupid. It’s not a lack of financial education keeping them from earning a livable wage. It’s their paychecks.

It’s fine to laugh at them for renting to own a set of tires as if they aren’t fully aware of how much more expensive that is in the long run. But when you don’t make enough to save for emergencies, you do what you have to so you can still make it to work to earn the pittance you’re given.

Sure, it’s cheaper to buy in bulk at Sam’s Club or whatever, but maybe you don’t have enough money to buy the cheaper option. You’d love to spend $100 on that box of whatever at Costco, but you only have $30 in the food budget this week so you eat ramen or head to the dollar menu at Taco Bell. You know it’s unhealthy, you know it’s more expensive in the long run, but you gotta eat today before you can plan for tomorrow.

This idea that people who are working 40+ hours a week are only struggling because they don’t know how to manage their finances is ridiculous. It’s insulting and demonstrably wrong.

Poor people know payday loans are awful, but sometimes you have no other option. Poor people know they should save 20% of each paycheck, but that’s kinda hard when they’re already living on the bare essentials and still coming up short every month. Poor people know they should invest, but the baby needs formula more than Mom needs a stock portfolio.

The fact is people are struggling because wages are stagnant and, while unemployment might be down, the jobs being created are low-paying, insecure positions with no future.

The wealth in this country is being consolidated at the top at an alarming, ever-increasing rate and has been since Reagan. What scraps remain for the rest of us are spread so thin and doled our so stingily that it’s no wonder retail stores are closing left and right. The people the wealthy depend on to buy the goods and services that keep them wealthy don’t have any damn money to spend.

It’s not about financial literacy. It’s about corporate greed and fleecing the working man. Always has been, always will be.

Everything’s a scam.

But sure, tell us more about how stupid everyone who wasn’t born into a world of opportunity is. Tell us more about our bootstraps and how you worked your way through college at the soda shop when kids today have to take out $100,000+ loans to earn increasingly worthless degrees. Tell us more about your starter homes and your pension plans and every other damn thing we don’t have. Tell us how stupid we all are because we didn’t make the same choices you did because those options were never available to us in the first place.

Tell us more!

The post The Working Poor Need Better Wages, Not Boomer Memes appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

First, some quick background so you know I’m not totally talking out of my butt here. These days, I make my living as a writer and editor, but in a previous life, I was deeply involved in IT for public education before moving on to much more lucrative work elsewhere in the DevOps and Cybersecurity fields. I left the intense stress of that world behind a few years ago, but please understand this isn’t going to be one of those ill-informed scare pieces. I’m not trying to frighten anyone. I don’t need to get clicks, I don’t run ads on my site, and I don’t gather user data to sell anywhere. I don’t have to be sensational, just truthful.

This fall, more families will move toward allowing remote access into their homes and lives than ever before. This brings risks, not just from hackers (I’m not even going to cover that aspect here) but from the very people who are supposed to be there: teachers and faculty…and support staff…and administrative overseers…and really anyone else the powers that be at your local school district decides to give access to.

Again, I’m not trying to scare anyone, but teachers talking to kids in their bedrooms brings a whole new level of intimacy with adults into their lives than anything we’ve seen before, at least on a fully sanctioned and parent-approved level.

Statistically, some of any group of people, including educators, aren’t going to be good people, so it’s probably best to keep the school computer out of your kid’s bedroom, for starters – and not just for the creepy, turning-on-their-webcams-and-watching-your-kids-get-dressed aspect. Realistically, that’s probably not going to happen, as that type of functionality isn’t likely to even be part of the virtual learning software they’ll be using. (Although there has been at least one case where a school district turned student webcams into remote spycams, so the whole webcam issue isn’t totally outside the realm of possibility.)

However, there have been multiple cases of kids getting themselves in trouble when their schools begin to monitor their online activity, your agreement to which is probably buried somewhere on page 547 of the user agreement nobody reads. That’s something to keep in mind, especially if you’re turning the family computer into the school computer.

Which is probably an extraordinarily bad idea, by the way. Unless, of course, you don’t mind your search history or the contents of your hard drive being available to Rick in IT down at the admin building. -I’m mostly kidding here, as that’d be granting an unusually high level of access to educational software, but since it’s not entirely outside the realm of possibility (especially if you need online support), I figured I’d at least mention it.

If you’re using a school-supplied computer, then tell your kids – and everyone else in the family – to only use it for school-related purposes because I guarantee it will be chock-full of surveillance tools. They aren’t there for nefarious purposes, but are part of the legal CYA school districts do so they can have a paper trail of what the computer has been used for if and when they need it.

It’s also just good practice to keep your webcam physically covered when not in use. Seriously. Just get a strip of electrical tape of a light binder clip and snap it over the top of the laptop whenever you’re not actively using the webcam. It’s good advice because there are a million ways nefarious people can gain access to it. Some laptops come equipped with a little privacy cover or you can even buy covers specially made for keeping webcams private. It’s a thing. Keep it covered.

While there’s not a high realistic probability of a teacher or any other school staff member inappropriately coming at your kids through official school software, the very nature of distance learning tends to encourage follow-up emails and chat windows, which can easily lead to outside channels of communication which, for the vast, overwhelming majority of educators would be still be used appropriately, but for some, it won’t be.

Keep an eye on your kids.

Moving on from security issues, let’s talk quality of education. The public education system isn’t designed for virtual learning, so it’s having to work very fast to get up to speed. We all are. Things aren’t going to be anywhere close to perfect for a long while, so what’s going to happen is what always happens. More well-off parents will supplement their kids’ education in the areas they need more help with by hiring private, remote tutors while other parents will be forced to just keep sitting at the kitchen table every night, struggling to understand what the hell a number sentence is or why Susie would ever need to figure out how evenly divide 47 tambourines among four people.

Even with the more egalitarian, one-size-fits-all structure that most school districts will adopt when it comes to virtual learning (by way of using third-party courseware, especially for the upper grades), thereby minimizing the zip code variable when it comes to how well-funded any particular school is, the more money parents have, the better the education their kids will still receive. It shouldn’t be that way, but whatever. I can’t solve all of America’s many systemic flaws in a simple essay.

What I can do is talk about private tutors. I’ve personally offered to help anyone’s kid with English or any writing-related work they’re struggling with free of charge to try and bridge that income/education quality gap in whatever little way I can (hit me up on Twitter), but my offer comes with a few very important caveats.

First, my help is limited to remote assistance and subject to my availability. Second, I will only work directly with a student through video or any other chat feature with a parent present on the chat. And finally, any and all emails and other communications sent between me and the student will always either go directly through a parent or at least have the parent copied on the conversation.

I recommend any parent seeking outside help demand the same from any tutor they hire. Is it a foolproof way to keep your kids safe? Nope. If they want to, kids can find a way around anything. So can determined adults. However, it does put any potential predators on alert that you’re an aware and informed parent who will be paying close attention, which might be enough to scare anyone with bad intentions away, but again, nothing is foolproof.

Keep an eye on your kids.

Personally, I’d rather have students physically back on campus – but my own kid is going with the online-only option this year because we’re simply opening schools too soon. We’re repeating the same mistake of having moved too quickly through phased openings we’re now paying for with a second wave, except now we’re going to open schools back up prematurely only to have to close them back down again, thereby extending the total amount of time we spend in shutdown mode we could’ve avoided if we’d just not been in such a rush to open everything back up so soon in the first place.

Why we can’t delay the start of school until this latest wave dies down? It’d at least give the schools more time (and funding) to enact real, effective preventative measures so six feet apart could actually mean six feet apart instead of “the best we can do” being the best they can do. I dunno. Like I said, I can’t solve all of America’s systemic problems in one essay.

Just keep an eye on your kids, okay?

READ MORE:

• It’s Amazing How Well Prepared Schools Aren’t
• No, Online-Only Education Will NOT Be Available to EVERY Student. That’s a Lie. Here’s Why.
• Worse Things Happen At Sea, You Know

The post Parents, Please Keep an Eye on Your Kid’s Virtual Classroom appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

I love how we’ve arrived at the “but most people don’t die” rationalization with this virus. Everything’s a zero sum game with some of you people. Pass or fail. Win or lose. Republican or godless devil worshiping heathen communist baby eater.

Here’s the thing, kids. The vastly different ways covid affects different people of differing ages with wildly varying degrees of intensity means yeah, maybe you won’t die. Maybe you and your kids will be fine.

Or maybe you’ll develop a debilitating chronic condition you’ll have to live with the rest of your (probably shorter) life. Maybe you’ll have permanently decreased lung capacity or oooh, even organ failure. That sounds fun! I bet dealing with the transplant committee is a hoot. I hear permanent testicular damage is a thing it’s doing to dudes now, too. So that’s nice.

This is a new, still largely unknown virus with oceans of unexplored depths to the many possible ways it can wreck your health and ruin your life that might take you right up to the edge but, sure, stop just short of killing you. Winning, amirite?

A friend of mine is fond of calling conservatives a death cult. Honestly, it keeps getting harder to see how he’s wrong.

But yes, please lecture us all on mortality rates some more. I’m sure it all comes down to a great big hilarious game of, “But did you die, though?”

Preach to us about exposing everyone to develop herd immunity as if you know or understand the slightest scintilla of the consequences to what you’re talking about. Or maybe you do know and just don’t care. It’s gotta be one or the other, right?

It pains me to admit this because I actually really do care for every single person on my friends list, but some of you people are pushing me toward the ineluctable conclusion that you are either deeply, hopelessly, hitherto unimaginably stupid or you’re just one of the many sap-faced flavors of that good old mundanity of evil they don’t like talking about in Sunday school.

Pass or fail. Live or die. Chicken or beef.

Idiot or asshole.

READ MORE:

• It’s Amazing How Well Prepared Schools Aren’t
• Parents, Please Keep an Eye on Your Kid’s Virtual Classroom
• No, Online-Only Education Will NOT Be Available to EVERY Student. That’s a Lie. Here’s Why.

The post Worse Things Happen At Sea, You Know appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

It’s not.

How do I know this? Simple. I used to work in IT for a fairly large district.

While it’s true that, with the rise in importance of STEM and the increasing role of tech in today’s world, school districts have received enormous amounts of funding and grants for technology, that money is normally reserved for purchasing devices, not paying salaries.

IT departments are, as with most things in public education, severely understaffed and underfunded when it comes to personnel. They don’t have the budget to hire as many people as they need, and they don’t have enough money to pay the people they do have what they deserve.

My local district has around 32,000 students. If every student elected online-only, they’d need to get 32,000 devices purchased, unboxed, tested, configured, and distributed within the next few weeks.

No district in the country has an IT staff prepared for even half that.

But it won’t just be online-only, will it? Some students will go online and others will return to campus. The IT department now has to service every device on every campus while maintaining the entire network, as well as a whole bunch of new remote devices in people’s homes.

The typical IT department might have a staff of, let’s be really generous, and say about a dozen people who, between them, are qualified to do all the things that will need to be done. Qualified to do them, sure, but without enough hours in the day to get them done.

Parents could easily expose the sham by pulling an old fashioned “run on the banks” sort of deal wherein far too many parents choose online-only than the district is prepared for and they quickly run out of devices to distribute to students. But it goes beyond that.

We’re now asking IT departments already stretched thin with maybe a dozen people trying to support every device on dozens of campuses to support just as many devices scattered across the city in people’s homes, being used by who knows how many family members for who knows what.

It’s a logistical nightmare not a single school district’s IT department will be able to adequately handle, no matter how good they are. It’s a problem of scale and it’s not one likely to be addressed.

• What does a student do when their district-supplied laptop won’t boot? They call IT.
• What happens when the online-learning app they’re using locks up? They call IT.
• What happens when a kid hax0rs his laptop with l33t sk1llz? They call IT.
  

This is all bad enough when it’s confined to on-campus devices limited by on-campus network security, but you can’t have that same level of security remotely. (Well, you can, but not without making the support nightmare exponentially worse.)

In summary, the online-only option will only be realistically available to a small fraction of the total student population – and every school district knows this. They’re just banking on parents not taking them up on it.

Call their bluff.

If too many parents select the option, the whole thing will come crashing down. The start of school will experience any number of delays as the tech gets sorted out and poor IT staff members across the country slowly lose their minds.

So don’t actually call their bluff.

It’s not their fault. It might not even be their district’s fault. The blame lies with politicians and pundits and crywhining imbeciles on Facebook, all screaming that we absolutely must start school in the fall like normal, as if anything is at all normal right now.

Instead, call your state and local leaders and tell them you want to delay the start of school. We shouldn’t be resuming school while we’re breaking new infection rate records every day. School can wait another month. Or two. Three. However long. Education has no expiration date.

Besides, school districts will need a certain number of students to select the online-only option in order to have any hope of socially distancing students on campus in the fall. They can’t actually make classrooms bigger on the inside, you know.

Speaking of, if you think on-campus learning will be safe or consistent, get ready to be shocked and disappointed.

You can’t decrease class sizes and socially distance students with the same staff, same buildings, same equipment, same schedule, and same underfunded budget.

We’ve been ripping vital funding from education for decades while also adding millions of dollars of security to harden them against school shooters and now we think they’ll also be able to convert aging, poorly-maintained buildings into medically sterile environments overnight?

Get real. Be serious. School is meant to educate your children, not be free publicly-funded babysitting so you can go on Facebook and moan about socialism while you pretend to work your meaningless job in the private sector.

TL;DR – School districts need a certain, undisclosed number of students to go online-only to have any hope of implementing any reductions in class sizes or social distancing on-campus, but not too many or the online-only system will completely break down.

Everything is awful.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

READ MORE:

• It’s Amazing How Well Prepared Schools Aren’t
• Parents, Please Keep an Eye on Your Kid’s Virtual Classroom
• Worse Things Happen At Sea, You Know

Photo by NEC Corporation of America with Creative Commons license.

The post No, Online-Only Education Will NOT Be Available to EVERY Student. That’s a Lie. Here’s Why. appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

(Update – Father’s Day, 2022: This piece was originally written several years ago, and many things have changed as we navigate the uncharted, teenage waters upon the seemingly endless Sea of Perpetual Angst. While the most important things have stayed the same, the he/him references to Trey would be they/them references to Lily, if I’d written it today.

It occurs to me now that Father’s Day happening during Pride Month is no small thing, and it likely serves as a difficult time for far too many in the LGBTQ+ community who don’t have supportive dads. I’m glad to say Lily does — two, in fact, along with two moms — but many children of less than accepting parents may find the day a struggle to get through.

I don’t have any words that will make it any easier to bear, but know that you will get through it. Just like you’ve already made it through countless hardships to get to where you are today. If you’re reading this, you’re still here. That means every day is a new victory, despite how things can feel sometimes. Just keep going, and who knows? One day, your dad may come around. And if he doesn’t, you can always find a new one. If I’ve learned anything from being a stepparent, it’s that family doesn’t have to be limited to accidents of birth. Family can be whatever we decide it is, with its members being whoever we choose to let into our lives.

Happy Father’s Day and Happy Pride, kids. Keep going.)

**

I never saw myself being a parent until I became one. Now, I can’t imagine being anything else. I’m sure that sounds cliche (especially to people who aren’t parents), but it’s the truth.

The path to parenthood was a direct one for me, with no twisting turns or detours along the road. Back in 2008, as soon as Brittany and I started dating and became serious, I got to meet Trey for the first time. (Which took a few months because she had to run a background check on me like I was some kind of monster in suburbanite camouflage.)

He’d just turned two a few weeks earlier, and I showed up to her apartment for dinner and a movie. I was nervous. She was nervous. Trey was two, so he probably wasn’t.

I picked up some food from a place called Chicken Express (which I’m convinced is the Los Pollos Hermanos of the Gulf Coast. I just haven’t been able to prove it. Yet.) on my way, and showed up bearing chicken strips and frozen custard. She introduced me to Trey, I played a little game with him that combined the wonders of peek-a-boo with me making a derp face and going, “Blah, blah, blah” at him every time I’d pop out. It’s a game every toddler I’ve ever met loves, so I came prepared. (He also referred to me as Blah-Blah for the next several months.)

We ate dinner, Trey devoured his frozen custard, and then it was movie time. Brittany popped Charlotte’s Web in the DVD player and sat down with Trey on the couch. Unsure of my position in all this, I elected to sit on the floor.

About five minutes in, Trey had already crawled down and into my lap, where he stayed for the rest of the movie. We played some more “Blah, blah, blah” and did silly things, and by the time we got to the That’s some pig part, I was done. I knew I was in it for the long haul, and marrying Brittany was a certainty. It was something that had already happened, somewhere out at a specific point in space-time. We just hadn’t gotten there yet.

But we would.

Falling in love with both Brittany and Trey is the best decision I never made because it just sort of happened. I didn’t have much say in it, one way or the other.

Of course, while meeting Trey made me an instant parent, it took a little while to learn the ropes. Which was something made very clear to me later that same night, after Brittany tucked him in and told him night-night.

He said he was thirsty and asked for a drink, so she sent me into the little kitchen of her apartment to pour him a sippy cup of juice. (Spoilers: There was more to it than that.)

I nodded and headed off to do my part, but since I didn’t immediately see the apple juice hiding behind a jug of milk when I opened her refrigerator, I just grabbed the first juice I saw: V8 Splash.

I poured some straight into the sippy cup, screwed the lid on tight, then headed back to his room, confident in a job well done.

About twenty minutes later, his walls were covered in V8 vomit.

Turns out, you don’t just give straight juice to a two-year-old – and that’s when we’re talking plain old apple juice. You dilute it first, so the kid’s basically just drinking water that tastes like an apple might have, at some point, taken a brief swim in it. (You know, like with LaCroix.)

What you definitely do not do is give the kid pure, concentrated V8 Splash. Oh, sure. His eyes will get huge as he gulps it down like he’s just discovered mainlining heroin or something, but there will be Consequences later. And you’ll never get the smell out. Not really.

Lesson learned.

Later, after we were happily married and living together like married couples do, Brittany went to work and left me home alone with Trey for the first time.

She should not have done this.

We were fine for the first few hours, playing silly games and watching cartoons and whatnot, but then the Incident happened.

I’d changed his diaper before. Or maybe it was a pull-up. I can’t remember. At any rate, I’d cleaned up poop before. It’s one of the first things you learn to do as a parent, right after developing the highly specialized skill of being able to fall asleep standing up with your head wedged in the corner of a room while your feet are uniquely positioned to keep you from falling down whenever you lose consciousness. Still, I was not prepared for what happened.

To call the arcane horror than manifested that day poop is doing a disservice to ancient unseen nightmares since the dawn of time. It was Lovecraftian.

Or maybe tar. It was probably just tar. Like, he got into a jar of tar someone had carelessly left just lying around, ate it like it was Nutella, and now it was coming out the other end.

And sticking to everything. The…stuff that came out of this child’s poopin’ hole instantly hardened the second it touched anything. His butt cheeks. His legs. The floor. The wall. His hands, for inexplicable reasons. Probably the ceiling too, but I was too afraid to check.

I called Brittany immediately.
She didn’t answer.
I texted Brittany immediately after that.
She responded.
“lolololololololol“

I was clearly on my own.

The first weapon I chose in my epic battle with this excremental terror was the mighty Baby Wipe. If you’re not a parent, you probably don’t know how magical these things are, but you can trust me when I tell you they can clean anything. You can go ahead and scrap 95% of whatever cleaning products you’re wasting your money on right now and just invest in a few packs of baby wipes. They get the job done.

Usually.

This time, however, things would not be so simple. The poop just laughed at my efforts. I tried adding a little old-fashioned elbow grease to the mix, but this proved too intense for Trey’s delicate skin and he let me know that I should never try it again under any circumstances.

Stopping just short of grabbing a hammer and a flathead screwdriver to try and chisel the poop spakle from his tender baby flesh, I decided that trying a gentler approach would be the better idea.

We headed into the bathtub.

I warmed up the water, he hopped in the tub, and I went to work with a washcloth.

The poop resisted.

In the end, it took the combined effort of soap, the aforementioned washcloth, and our massaging shower head on its maximum setting to even begin to dislodge the stuff.

Eventually, I managed to get him cleaned up, dried off, and redressed. But the smell?

The smell lingered.

****

I didn’t officially become Papa until a couple of years after first meeting Trey. I never wanted to tell him what to call me, so I just let it work itself out. At first, he called me Blah-Blah. After that, he called me Kris-Kris for a little while, then moved on to Daddy Kris. However, his dad wasn’t comfortable with that, so he asked Brittany to do something about it, which is how I eventually became Papa.

Trey has always referred to Brittany as Mama, so when she was talking with him one day and trying to find a new name to call me, she eventually suggested Papa and it stuck. He liked it because it rhymed with Mama, and I liked it because it wasn’t typical. I’m a big fan of not being typical.

And that’s the story of how I became Papa, except that there’s a whole lot more to it than that. Papa is just a name. Becoming a father was something else entirely. I was 33 when Brittany and I met, and 34 when we got married. I had an instant family the second I said, “I do.” And I’ve never regretted a single moment after that. (This is not entirely true. While I don’t regret a single moment spent with my wife and child, I still make a lot of really stupid life choices.)

It has been difficult being a stepdad, though. Not because of Trey or anything. Brittany won the lottery when she had him. He’s objectively the best kid ever, and I’ll have words with anyone who says any different.

The struggle has always been with maintaining my place as just a stepdad, and never overstepping my line into actual dad territory. I got attached to the little guy that very first night while we were watching “the pig movie.” We had an instant bond that nothing can ever break – but there have been challenges.

The issue with what Trey calls me ever being an issue in the first place was one. Differences of opinion in how to raise him, values, beliefs, etc… all these things are a negotiation in mixed families. Little things that might’ve been easily worked out between Mom and Dad when they were married have a tendency to become massive hills everyone wants to die on, and it’s hard to know the right way to resolve all the tiny (and not so tiny) conflicts that arise from time to time.

As a stepparent, there’s not much I can do to influence things either way. Or, at least, there’s not much I feel like I can do. Some things just have to be worked out by the parents, while the steps are there to provide moral support.

We’re not real parents, after all.

This is because stepparents get a bad rap. In pop culture and fairy tales, we’re usually evil, heartless meanies who either care nothing for our stepchildren, or have the annoying habit of trying to bake them into pies all the time. In sitcoms on network television, we’re bumbling fools and inconsistent sources of unsteady drama. We’re the extra bits tacked onto the three points of the Mom, Dad and Child triangle that make it stick out at embarrassing angles all the other shapes point at and laugh. In short, we’re not worth very much to anybody.

That’s the stereotype, anyway.

In truth, being a stepdad or stepmom is noble sort of thing, if you tilt your head just right and squint a little. After all, stepparents choose to add our stepchildren to our lives, rather than roll the DNA dice and hope they land on seven. (Assuming that’s a good thing. I don’t really understand how Craps works.) We usually aren’t around for the baby days, so we accept our stepchildren as they already are: partially formed, at whatever age they are when we meet them.

If we do things right, we take our place in a kind of familial pyramid, where the four points of Mom and Dad, and Stepmom and Stepdad make up the base of a pyramid that supports the kiddo capstone at the top. I suspect that’s how it’s supposed to work, anyway. It’s been well over a decade for me, and I’m still trying to figure all this out.

Your mileage may vary.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(If you enjoyed this excerpt from A Lifetime of Questionable Decisions, why not buy the book and impress all your friends with how fun you are at parties? All the cool kids are buying it. Don’t you want to be cool, too?)

The post Becoming Papa appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

I started the day by sleeping through my alarm and been awoken by the gentle sounds of my wife SCREAMING AT EVERYONE. So that was nice.

Then, I went to get something to wear out of the dryer since laundry day was yesterday, and I realized the last load we did last night was the one with all my clothes in it, which we subsequently forgot to switch over to the dryer before going to bed.

So, yeah. All my work clothes were wet.

Undaunted, I ran upstairs to find something, anything at all, to wear and ended up grabbing a pair of jeans I would soon discover had a broken zipper. After digging through literally everything else I own, I finally settled on a ratty old pair of jeans I wear for yard work that have a giant hole in the knee.

I then proceeded to take some boxers and socks out of the socks-and-boxers drawer and head downstairs. Literally. I headed down the stairs.

Lemme explain…

We have two dogs and, while downstairs has hardwood, everything upstairs is carpeted. Although the dogs are both house trained, my wife has a deathly fear of one of them happily trotting up the stairs to pee and I guess mark the thermostat as theirs or whatever, so they’re not allowed up without supervision.

Which brings me to The Barrier.

Its construction is comprised of an old printer box and laundry hamper turned on its side to provide full blockage for the dogs, who can, of course, easily shove it aside whenever they want to, but usually don’t. It’s basically Trump’s border wall, only slightly more effective.

Trey and I hate The Barrier. HATE IT. However, you have to make certain compromises when engaged in domestic endeavors with others, so we tolerate its existence even as complain and whine about it constantly.

And with good reason! Take this morning, for example. While attempting to circumvent said Barrier on my way back downstairs, my right foot – coincidentally attached to the same leg wearing the jeans with a hole in the knee – caught the edge of the laundry hamper component of the Barrier’s questionable construction, and down I went.

I tumbled, Aunt Bunny style, down the remaining five or six stairs before coming to a gentle stop by way of crashing head-first into the front door.

Hearing all this, my wife proceeded to run to my side and begin asking me, repeatedly, if I was okay, which is a ridiculous question to ask a middle age dude who just tumbled down the stairs and broke his fall by way of his head smacking into a metal door, but whatever. It was a nice gesture.

I pulled myself up and grabbed my shoes, which is when I discovered that one of the socks from the pair I’d grabbed from the back of the drawer had a hole in the toe, for some reason.

Now here I am, sitting at my desk at work while wearing a ratty old pair of jeans and a sock with a hole in the toe while my clothes remain wet and in the washer since I don’t like leaving the house with the dryer running unattended, and all I want is for it not to be Monday.

When I get home, I’ll have to rewash the clothes that have been sitting there beginning to smell of mildew (whether they actually do or not is irrelevant because I’ll think they do, regardless), but at least there will be pot roast for dinner.

FOOD IS MY ONLY COMFORT NOW.

So anyway, that’s how my morning went. How’s your day going?

The post Because I Could Not Stop for Death, He Kindly Ruined My Day appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

Being very young and very little, I spent most of my time waiting for everyone else to have time for me. I’d while away the hours playing make-believe with stuffed animals who were my snuggle buddies at nighttime and my best friends during the day. My sister was much older and concerned with big kid things like clothes and books and boys. She didn’t have much time for me.

My father worked at a factory where my mother once told me they made the fuel we put in our cars. I think he must have been a very important person at work because he’d always leave our little house very early each morning even before the sun came up. Usually, I was asleep when he left but sometimes I’d wake up in time to see him walking out the front door carrying a big metal lunchbox in his hand and a white hard hat tucked under his arm.

On those mornings when I was awake, I’d run back to my room as soon as he’d closed the door so I could watch from my window as he climbed into his old truck and backed out of our little driveway. I’d wave to him as hard as I could as he drove away, but he never waved back. It was probably too dark for him to see.

Later, my sister would start getting ready for school, which usually involved her screaming at my mother while my mother yelled back at her to hurry up or she was going to be late. Minutes would tick by as she tore through the house, slamming doors and sighing while my mother called her things like young lady and warned her about the dangers of having a bad attitude.

Eventually, she’d run out the door and sprint to the school bus that would be waiting at the end of our little street. I never waved goodbye to her. She was always in too much of a rush to notice, anyway.

My mother would leave for work a little while later, and my grandmother would arrive to take care of me for the day. Mom was always in just as much of a rush as my sister, and would often mumble to herself about being late as she ran out the door, never saying goodbye.

I don’t think it was because she didn’t care, but grown-ups have important problems to worry about that little kids don’t. We weren’t ever poor, but I don’t think we had much money. I’d occasionally hear my parents talking and worrying about bills late at night when they thought I was asleep. Everyone but me had a job, including my sister. I don’t know what she did after school, but she always came home smelling like cheeseburgers.

I think I would’ve spent most of my days alone, if not for my grandmother. She was kind and attentive, always taking time to play pretend with me and my stuffed animals. Sometimes, we’d watch cartoons and she’d laugh at all the jokes other grown-ups didn’t seem to understand. I called her Nana and, other than my stuffed animals, she was my only friend.

On rainy days, we’d go on adventures around the house. My favorite teddy bear was our leader. Some days, we’d go on safari, hunting my other stuffed animals and “shooting” them with blown kisses. Other times, we’d have elaborate dinners and “practice” birthday parties where we’d gather around the kitchen table and sing the birthday song over some stale cupcakes that were always in the back of the cupboard.

Toward the end of the afternoon, my grandmother would turn on the television to watch her stories, and I’d fall asleep with my head in her lap as she stroked my hair while we waited for my parents to come home.

This went on for a long time, every morning the same with everyone ignoring me and rushing out the door. Eventually, my sister left one day with suitcases and never came back. A few years later, my parents did the same thing.

The house is empty now, except for me and my grandmother and all my stuffed animal friends. We still play pretend and go on adventures, and sometimes strangers come over while a nice lady with long blonde hair walks them through the house.

The lady usually comes over early to unlock all the doors and light a bunch of candles that smell like cookies. When the strangers arrive, she takes them around and points at things while they turn and look and nod their heads, but they never seem to notice me or my grandmother until we turn on the television. The lady with the blonde hair is always startled by this and she tries to turn it off, but my grandmother just switches it back on again.

Eventually, the lady will try unplugging the television from the wall, but we can still turn it back on. We can always turn it back on. The strangers seem to leave after that.

And when they go, my grandmother leans back on the couch and I curl up beside her to lay my head in her lap as she watches her stories and strokes my hair while we wait for my family to come home.

Forever.

Not all ghost stories have to be scary, at least from the point of view of the ghosts themselves. This same story told differently might involve frightening bumps in the night or strange noises coming from empty bedrooms, but that’s just what the living see. To the ghosts – to these ghosts – they’re just playing and having fun while waiting for a time that will never come.

The noises we hear in lonely hours of the night might seem to us like the haunted scrapes and scratches of a terrifying spirit shuffling across the attic floor, but sometimes the distant sounds of childhood laughter and the pitter-patter of unseen footfalls running down the hallway aren’t things to be afraid of.

I wrote this thinking about my grandmother, who I really did call Nana. My parents both worked, so when I was sick, I’d go stay at her house instead of going to school. She’d play with me and make me feel better, and I’d always end up falling asleep with my head in her lap while she watched soap operas and stroked my hair.

She called them her stories, and to this day, whenever I’m sick, I can turn on the television and lie down on my couch, then close my eyes and feel the touch of her arthritic fingers running through my hair thirty-six years ago.

The post Marking Time in the Waiting House (a short story) appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

Yeah, I’m petty. Sue me.

Look, it’s no secret that I find accidents of blood a ridiculous basis for forming family bonds over. I’ve written about it before. Family is who you choose, not who you were born to. I believe that on both a philosophical level and, to an extent, a scientific one.

When it comes to inherited traits and genetic conditions, of course it matters who your parents are, and who their parents were, and who their parents’ parents were. But it only goes so far before it stops being useful.

It’s the same way with nonsense ideas like bloodlines and eugenics. Granted, any decent person knows eugenics has always been bullshit, but people still cling to the idea that who they’re related to in history actually matters. Conspiracy theorists especially love the idea of ruling elite bloodlines, but normal people just enjoy bragging about how they’re a “direct descendent” of Shakespeare or whoever.

Which is stupid.

Here’s why: We’re all related to some degree, because that’s just how biology works. Tracing your “lineage” back to an impressive historic figure might make you feel special, but chances are your neighbor or spouse is related to the same person. You might even be related to me.

I’m sorry.

Anyway, take this study, which was impressively done by a 12-year-old, that found all but one U.S. president are directly related. It’s true. The only president she couldn’t trace back to King John (yes, that King John) was Martin van Buren (probably because he was protected by sideburns magic).

Sounds like an illuminati conspiracy, doesn’t it? Forty-two of our forty-three presidents all tracing their ancestry back to the same king has to mean something, right? Bloodlines, yo!

Nope.

King John reigned around 800 years ago, which means there’s a good chance you’re related to him. Just in case you skipped your sex ed class, it always takes two parents to make a child, which means, in theory, you double your number of ancestors each generation: 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 16 great grands, 32 great greats, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, etc…

Of course, that model falls apart after awhile because you end up having more ancestors than were alive on the planet at a specific point in history, which tends to shatter the whole idea of continuous, distinct bloodlines. This is because, while we might like to think of genealogy as a tree or an inverted pyramid, it’s actually shaped more like a diamond.

You’re at the pointy bottom, which expands up toward the middle just like an inverted pyramid – but after a certain point, it starts to narrow again before ending in another point at the top. Why? Because the farther back you go, the more inbred your ancestors get.

If genealogy worked like an inverted pyramid, we could go back to the time of Charlemagne and find we have a potential for 281 trillion ancestors all living around 800AD, which is impossible because there weren’t that many people on the planet back then. (The current world population is just shy of 8 billion.) Instead, what you find is a lot of close cousins were busy making babies way back when, so those distinct branches of the family tree we’re all familiar with start getting less and less distinct over time. More like a family shrubbery or something. I dunno. Pick your own metaphor.

For example, let’s just look at a family tree going back to great-grandparents. In modern times, we’d expect to see 14 ancestors at that point: 2 parents, 4 grandparents, and 8 great grandparents because we tend to frown on cousin lovin’ these days. But if you go back farther to pick another person earlier in your tree and go back to his or her great-grandparents, you’ll likely find they only have 12 ancestors at the great-grandparents level.

In fact, one Anthropology professor at Rutgers has suggested it’s likely that 80% of all historical marriages were between second cousins or closer.

It’s called pedigree collapse, and it happens more and more often the farther back you go. If two first cousins along your family tree had a kid, that kid would only have six great-grandparents instead of the eight we’d expect to see in the inverted pyramid model, and that effect would only amplify itself the farther back you went.

Here’s a chart if you need some help visualizing that. (I’m a tremendous artist, I know.)

In short, the farther back you go, the more likely you are to be related to some famous historical figure as your genealogy diamond narrows. Go back far enough, say around 800 years ago, and you’ll find a whole bunch of people related to King John. Like maybe, say, 42 out of 43 U.S. presidents.

TL;DR – Ancestry and bloodlines are bullshit.

The post Ancestry Is Nonsense appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

Every now and then, a game comes along that’s so amazing, it changes everything. Ultima IX was not one of those games. Except that it kinda was.

People hate this game. Like, way more than should be legal. And I’ve never understood why. It’s not a bad game, and it’s definitely nowhere near the “worst RPG ever” as some have described it. Nor is it a betrayal, as Noah Antwiler (in)famously proclaimed it to be. It’s just what it is: a good game wrapped in impossible expectations, with a side of french fried bad timing.

First up, the hate. It’s actually been building over the years, like an angry little snowball rolling down the side of a mountain in a Saturday morning cartoon. However, contrary to what people want to believe now, it wasn’t actually hated then. Not really. Sure, it wasn’t given glowing reviews, but it wasn’t universally loathed in the legendary way it has become. It was received with, at worst, mediocre reviews.

The biggest gripe fans had way back in 1999 when the game came out had to do with performance and compatibility issues more than anything to do with the game itself. People didn’t start ripping apart the plot and yelling about things like, “What’s a paladin?” until much later, after YouTube happened and taking giant dumps on other people’s hard work became a subscriber-fetching trend.

So let’s roll the clocks back to November 24, 1999 – which is the day Wikipedia tells me Ultima IX came out, because I’m too old and senile to remember it. But whatever day it came out is the day that I had it. And the Dragon Edition, no less; I still have my tarot cards to prove it!

Feast your eyes upon its glorious glory!

Imagine me driving back to my apartment, giddy with excitement to play the latest installment of a game series that meant a lot to me, growing up. It’s something I played with my Dad, and it forms some of my earliest memories. We bonded over stopping Minax. We learned about each other by discussing Ultima IV. We yelled in solidarity when we played Ultima VII and just wanted EVERYBODY TO SIT THE HELL DOWN ALREADY in the damn wagon. It was a thing my Dad and I shared that kept me from ever entering that horrible father-hating teenage rebellion stage, and I will always – always – be thankful to Richard Garriott for giving us that.

But anyway, it’s not 1985, so enough with my Dad-memories. It’s 1999, and I’ve just arrived home and installed the game. I load it up and…it probably crashed. Because that’s what Ultima IX did when it was released. It crashed a lot. But so did every Origin game, which people tend to forget. Games from Origin were always demanding, always punishing to older systems, and always, always buggy. But this was 1999, and the Internet had happened, which made getting patches a whole lot faster and easier than the BBS days, and the U9 team was quick with early patching.

I didn’t have a lot of the same problems other people had with the game, because I had a 3DFX card in my system. However, a lot of people didn’t, at this point. Ultima IX had the misfortune of coming out during the awkward transition period between Glide and Direct3D. In the early days of 3D PC gaming, 3DFX was king – and everything used Glide. OpenGL and D3D cards weren’t very big in those early days, and the ones that did exist were usually slow and clumsy things when compared with the screaming speed of dual Voodoo 2s.

But U9 hit when things were beginning to change, after Nvidia came on the scene with their TNT line of graphics cards. They were getting popular, and Origin didn’t see it coming. Or, if they did, they didn’t have time to adjust.

But before that, the very first iteration of U9 didn’t even take 3DFX cards into account, as it was entirely software-rendered. But once the rise of graphics accelerators happened, they knew that they had to get on board, otherwise their game would be behind the curve. So they scrapped the engine and wrote a new one – and, well, this story has been famously told and retold to the point that most every gamer knows what happened by heart.

In short: EA moved the U9 dev team to Ultima Online, then back to U9 when it was done, after which they slapped it with a restrictive budget and impossible deadline. And the rest is history.

Or is it?

One commonly held belief is that Ultima IX was always intended to be the last Ultima, at least by the time development started on the third and final iteration of the game. It turns out, though, that’s not entirely true.

When I asked Richard Garriott about this over on Twitter, he had this to say:

“That was never intended to be the last Ultima! It was only the end of the trilogy of trilogies. Ultima ended with my departure.”

This is an important point to consider when remembering Ultima IX, because the one thing a lot of people seem to have developed a problem with (over time) is its story. Specifically, with how it basically saddles the Avatar with amnesia regarding the events of the previous games, along with breaking series canon in numerous ways. But more on that in a minute. First, we need to get back to me playing U9 back in good old 1999.

I loved it. I installed the game, I patched the game, I tweaked my machine until it ran the game as smoothly as it was ever going to, and I played the game. AND I LOVED IT.

Seeing Britannia come to life in 3D for the first time (outside of the Underworld games) was a revelation. Sure, sacrifices had to be made to render the world in all three of the glorious dimensions, but I didn’t mind that Britain was suddenly a tiny hamlet, or that you could see the skybox inside Lord British’s throne room because the view distance was so short. I was a lifelong gamer. I understood the nature of compromise when it came getting the technology to do what you wanted it to do.

And those graphics? They hold up. Even today, they’re still pretty to look at, and more detailed than anything else out there at the time. Britannia wasn’t just a bunch of polygons on a tiny worldmap. It was alive with fluttering birds and skittering insects. There were trees and foliage. Things in caves went drip. It was entirely immersive, despite the limitations of the engine.

What else was doing what Ultima IX did in 1999? Nothing, that’s what.

Sure, Quake hit in ’96, and it was fast and looked great, but it wasn’t a very richly detailed world. Unreal looked even better than Quake – and it had some life in it, with waterfalls and insects buzzing around, but it was still a nailed-down shooter. The geometry was a set to run around in, not a world to be explored.

But Ultima IX was filled with little details like the sound of footfalls being attached to world textures so that when you ran over sand, it sounded like sand, and when you ran over wood or stone, it sounded like wood or stone. That was new back then. People forget.

There were also no loading screens. None. Once you were in the world, you stayed in the world. You didn’t open a door to watch a loading screen hit you with a separate Tavern Instance. You just opened the door and walked in. Same with dungeons. An open world with no loading screens. Nothing else was doing that in 1999. People forget.

And about those dungeons: they were great! Even the annoying ones (I’m looking at you, Hythloth) were detailed and intricate and fun. The closest comparison one could make with the complexity of Ultima IX’s dungeons would be along the lines of the Tomb Raider series. Of course, the Avatar wasn’t as agile as Lara Croft, but the puzzles, the length, the immersion was all there – along with the open world above ground, and the NPCs, and the dialog trees, and the overall plot, and the multiple locations. Everything. In nineteen freaking ninety nine.

PEOPLE FORGET.

Also released in 1999, EverQuest was the closest anything came to doing what Ultima 9 did. Look at that ground texture. JUST LOOK AT IT.

Once the technical hurdles had been overcome with the final patches from Origin, people who wanted to dislike the game – or who were still feeling burned by its unfinished nature at release – moved on from performance issues to gameplay and story problems. Which is where Noah Antwiler comes in.

Now, I don’t want to rag on the guy. He looks like he works hard on his YouTube videos and such, and seems like a nice enough fellow – and most of his Ultima series retrospective is a lot of fun to watch. He clearly loves the series, and poking fun at its varied gooferies is all in good fun. Until, that is, he gets to Ultima 9.

The dude hated Ultima 9 so much he devoted three videos to trashing it for a total runtime longer than most feature-length movies. And most of his complaints stem from the story, and from his sense of betrayal at the hands of an uncaring developer. Or, rather, publisher. He blames EA.

And so do I. So does everyone. Ultima IX without Electronic Arts would’ve undoubtedly been one of those amazing games I mentioned at the beginning of this post, just like every Ultima before 8 was one of those amazing games that changed everything. Nobody likes EA. I get that. We all get that.

But…it’s not entirely EA’s fault.

Nor is anyone to blame for things that aren’t really problems, to begin with.

Yes, Ultima 9 severely retconned the previous fiction.
Yes, Ultima 9 basically gave the Avatar amnesia.
Yes, Ultima 9 catered more to new players than it did to returning players.

AND NONE OF THIS WAS BAD.

The landscape of gaming was changing dramatically in 1999. Not only had 3D taken a firm hold of the future, but the entire industry was changing. The era of the “hardcore” gamer was ending, and gaming was transitioning into something more mainstream. Naturally, the hardcore gamers resented this – just look at the hate something like Deus Ex 2 received due to how it was “dumbed down” and “console-ified” to see it. (Note to self: Write something about how DX2 also didn’t suck.)

The hardcore market was also shrinking. People tend to get less “hardcore” about anything as they get older, and other demands for their time start taking priority over gaming. Careers, family, children, mortgages, student loans, etc… Things add up, and people start leaving the hobby, or at least abandoning the “hardcore” games for titles that are easier to slip into and back out of again after the baby monitor goes off and you’ve got to get a crying infant back to sleep. It happens.

This sword was especially sharp for something like Ultima, which not only needed to attract new players, but somehow still please the returning ones. Which brings me around to what I said I’d get to in a minute earlier: that Ultima IX was never intended to be the last Ultima.

It’s a popular sentiment now, that EA always knew Ultima IX was going to be the last single-player Ultima game. It’s become accepted as just how it was, and I think that idea is partly behind some of the hardcore gamers’ hate for the game. Why cater to new players, after all, if you’re ending the series? Why “dumb down” the game for the fans, just so you can attract new players to a series that won’t have another installment?

And I totally get that. I’d probably be angry, too, if that were the case. But, as Richard said, Ultima IX was not always meant to be the end to the series – just the final installment of the third trilogy. The series didn’t end until he left, regardless of what EA might’ve had in mind.

So, yes. At the time it was being developed, Ultima IX had to adapt to the new gaming landscape. It had to bring in new players, and it had to go easy on returning players who might not have memorized every last little detail and event that happened over the course of a series that had been running continuously for the past EIGHTEEN YEARS.

A lot of Ultima fans in 1999 who had come on board with Ultima VI or VII probably weren’t even alive when Ultima 1 came out. Hell, even a 15 year old kid loading up Ultima IX for the first time would’ve only been 7 or 8 years old when the start of the Guardian trilogy – Ultima VII – was released. How much detail could you remember at 15 from when you were only 7? Probably not very much.

Which is why Ultima 9 needed to do something for everyone who wasn’t a member of the hardcore superfans club. In an era before the concept of rebooting a franchise ever occurred to anyone, Ultima 9 had to straddle the line between introduction and continuation, in a sort of quasi-reboot dance that a lot of players have since come to look back on with disdain.

Which, I think, is faulting the game for something beyond its control. Sure, it wasn’t handled as adeptly as we’ve come to expect from more recent attempts at doing the same thing (the Marvel cinematic universe comes to mind), but it was charting new territory. Again.

This was my childhood.

Because that’s what Ultima did. With every new entry in the series, it did something new. Most of the time, it worked. Ultima IV was a bombshell that showed you could have an engaging RPG without a Slay The Foozle plot. Ultimas V and VI heaped pounds of ambiguity onto the virtuous narrative, and gave the series more and more nuance. Ultima VII poked the religion bear with a stick. And each new game featured new tech. Each and every one.

Other times – *cough* Ultima VIII *cough* – they didn’t quite hit the mark. But for every one U8 (or, I admit, the horribly misguided and woefully executed romance subplot of U9), I can show you 7.5 other Ultima games that nailed it, along with two others that took the adventure to the Underworld and did things no one had ever seen before.

That’s a pretty good track record, and Ultima IX is somewhere closer to the Good side of that number line than the Bad side. Yes, it’s closer to U8 – but only by way of it not being Ultima 4 or 7. It’s less good by comparison, but it is in no way bad.

In fact, it’s even improved with age. The graphics really do hold up, and the GOG.com version is stable, with higher framerates, resolutions, and view distances than were ever possible back in 1999. You should really check it out.

I know I’ve been having fun with it. I think you will, too.

So, go on.

Try it.

All the cool kids are playing Ultima IX. Don’t you want to be cool, too?

Oh, and just in case I still haven’t sold you on Ultima IX, and you’re still longing for a return to those Elysian days of classic Ultima: Don’t worry. Richard has you covered, with Shroud of the Avatar:

“I hope SotA is a modernized best of: Ultima IV Story focus on Virtues, Ultima VII world sim, UO deep roles for emergent behavior.”

YOU ARE WELCOME.

-Excerpt from “Life Bytes: Growing Up Geek” (buy the book!)

The post Life Bytes: Ultima 9 Edition appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

Hey there, internet! I’m very happy to announce that the first book in my new, three-part series detailing a personal history of (mostly PC) gaming from the mid-’70s to the present will be available to purchase via Amazon on January 15, 2019 is available right now, with very special thanks to Richard “Lord British” Garriott, founder of Origin Systems and creator of the Ultima series for providing the Foreword.

The series will comprise three oversized, coffee table type books with full-color images throughout. At this point, no eBook versions are planned, but that could change over time if there’s sufficient interest. I think it works best as a physical book you can hold in your hand and leave out for guests to thumb through, but if you’d rather have an eBook, let me know. I’m not here to tell you how to live your life.*

*Okay, you win. A DRM-free eBook version was released with the physical book. YOU ARE WELCOME. (Of course, if you buy the print copy, you get the eBook for free…)

This first book starts shortly after I came into the world and picked up the controller of a Fairchild Channel F while I was still potty-training in the 1970s, and covers my own, personal history of gaming through the year I graduated high school in 1993. It deals a bit with early consoles like the Channel F and moves into computer gaming pretty quickly, beginning with the Apple ][ (or, in my case, one of its many clones) before moving on to IBM-compatible PCs.

The biggest names in PC gaming at the time are all represented, from Origin Systems and Lucasfilm Games, to Sierra On-Line and some other, smaller studios. Also included are several interludes for specific remembrances including a hilarious, narrated play-through of a beloved classic game I never could quite get the hang of, along with a comprehensive bonus feature covering my personal list of the 70 best PC games from 1982-1993.

Whether you’re longing for a nostalgic trip down memory lane or just missed out on the early days of gaming and are wondering what all the fuss was about, the Life Bytes: Growing Up Geek series will give you plenty of warm fuzzies along with an occasional laugh or two because I never could take anything too seriously.

The other two books in the series are coming soon, with a staggered release throughout the year.

Follow my Amazon author page for updates and to pick up some of my other books while you’re there. You know, if you feel like it or whatever.

The post Life Bytes: Growing Up Geek, Part One – The New Frontier appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

These three stories should give you a pretty good idea of the tone and nature of the other stories in the book, so you can decide whether or not you want to buy it when it comes out later this month.

In the meantime, can always check out my other books. I won’t mind.

Other sample stories from the anthology, She and Rapture, are available to read for free here.

The Space That Isn’t There

Three delicate knocks strike a door in the early morning hours; the latch clicks after the second one. and the door is open by the third. A man slips in, walking with soft steps to the same chair he left last night. He reaches over the bed’s railing as he sits.

Two hands meet. One is old and rough, wrinkled from age and leathered by work. The other isn’t.

Fingers intertwine. The covers stir. Eyelids peel open. Tired lips smile.

“You’re back.”

The man leans forward in his chair, tightening the grip of his hand’s embrace. He sighs and says, “We don’t have long.”

“I know.”

“I don’t want to go.”

“It’s okay.” Another hand emerges from the bed, cupping itself over the others. “I don’t want to go, either.”

Forced grins. Awkward laughter.

“How’s Mary, Chief?” asks the man in the bed, whose name is Peter, but who likes to be called Hoss.

“Bossy, Hoss.” replies the man in the chair, whose name is also Peter, but who likes to be called Chief. “As usual.”

Hoss smiles. “That’s why you’re marrying her.”

“She called me at the hotel this morning, you know,” says Chief. “Wanting to know if I’d ironed my underwear before my flight.”

“Iron your underwear?”

“I know. Who does that?”

“What’d you tell her?”

Chief shakes his head. “I told her I did. But she didn’t believe me.”

“Had you really?”

“Of course not, but we’d have gotten into a fight about it if I had.”

Hoss just stares, letting his eyes ask for an explanation.

Chief sighs, and leans back in his chair. “Remember that time Mom asked me to clean out the garage, and we got into a huge fight about it because I thought I already had, but she didn’t believe me because we had so much stuff in there it didn’t look like I’d actually done much of anything?”

Between coughs, a weak laugh. “Yeah,” says Hoss. “You just started throwing boxes onto the driveway and she was running around in her nightgown, screaming and trying to catch stuff rolling out into the street.” He pauses and shakes his head. “And I was just trying to calm both of you down.”

Chief laughs. “See? If I’d just lied to her in the first place, I wouldn’t have gotten so mad when she thought I didn’t do what I thought I had.”

“So what you’re saying is that you’re still bad at ironing?”

“Awful,” replies Chief. He shakes his head. “And I think it’s too late for me to learn now.”

“You always were stubborn.”

“Yeah, but so is Mary. It balances out.”

Hoss starts coughing again. A machine goes ping.

“What was that?” asks Chief. “Should I call the nurse?”

Hoss shakes his head. “No. It just does that sometimes. I think it’s letting me know I’m not dead yet.”

More awkward laughter.

“When’s your flight?” asks Hoss.

“Couple of hours.”

“You need to get on the road soon, then. Traffic gets bad in the morning.”

“I can come back next week. I just have to close on the house.”

“It’s okay, Chief. We had our time. You’ve got a life to get back to.”

“Yes, but –”

“And I don’t.”

“But –”

Hoss lets go of Chief’s hand. “But nothing. I know you love me, and you’re here now. And that’s enough.”

Chief pulls him back, gripping his hand even tighter than before. “I can close on the house any time. They can wait.”

“No,” says Hoss. “They can’t. How long have you been trying to sell that place? Now somebody finally wants to buy it, you’re gonna go sell it to them. You deserve it, Chief. You and Mary. I like her.”

“Even if she makes me iron my underwear?”

“Because,” Hoss smiles, “she makes you iron your underwear.”

“Mom never made me iron my underwear, you know.”

Hoss smiles again. “I’ll tell her you said thanks for that.” He squeezes Chief’s hand one more time. “When I see her. Now, get going.”

An old and wrinkled finger pushes a call button. Nurses file into the room, doctors trailing behind. Forms are signed. Permissions given. Tears shed.

And then, it’s time.

Chief lowers the railing and lies down, cramming into a space that isn’t there. He wraps his arms around Hoss, pulling him close to his chest.

“Remember how we used to snuggle?” he asks.

Hoss smiles through his own tears. “Just like this,” he replies.

“Just like this,” says Chief.

They hold each other for more time than it seems, which doesn’t seem like enough. Then, Chief closes his eyes and nods toward a doctor. The doctor nods back.

A syringe emerges from his pocket.

And then, it’s done.

Hoss, still clinging to Chief’s chest, begins to fall asleep. “I love you, Papa,” he says. “I love you so much.”

Chief squeezes as hard as his old muscles allow. “I love you more.”

“No,” sighs Hoss, his voice thin. “I love you the most.”

“I love you more than that,” says Chief.

“No. I love…” his voice trails off, and his body grows still. His hug loosens. And he’s gone.

A machine goes ping. A nurse switches it off.

The old man lies there for what some might say is too long, but no one dares. The nurses and doctors leave the room. They can come back later.

Chief, whose real name is Peter, but who misses being called Papa, pulls his son close to him one more time. One last time.

“Remember,” he whispers, “how we used to snuggle?”

And he cries.

********

Other sample stories from the anthology, She and Rapture, are available to read for free here.

The post The Space That Isn’t There – A Short Story appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

Rapture

The first angel blew his trumpet. Hail and fire, mixed with blood, came pouring down on the earth. A third of the earth was burned up, a third of the trees, and every blade of green grass.
-Revelation 8:6

No one saw it coming, neither NASA nor any international observatory detected even a hint of its approach before it was too late. They didn’t even have time to name it.

A low growl pierced the atmosphere, followed by a great wail heard around the world. And then, an explosion. The earth on fire.

A second comet followed, crashing into the Pacific and turning the water against the land. Enormous, unspeakable tsunamis ripped through the eastern seaboard at supersonic speeds, destroying entire states in their wake. The United Kingdom was washed away, along with most of Western Europe. The deserts of northern Africa were underwater.

The scientists had no answers, no explanations. Politicians floundered, grasping for reason, trying to provide meaning and leadership, but there was none to be found. The people looked to the priests. The clergy. The learned wise men of scripture.

There, they found answers and argued over truth. Trashcan prophets proclaimed the end of days from their street corner pulpits. Apocalyptic sects retreated into their bunkers, armed with buckets of freeze-dried potatoes and enough bullets to murder the world. And they, too, would die.

Armchair scholars uncovered newfound prophecy, interpreting the signs around them. Conspiracy flourished, the tendrils of deceit and malfeasance wrapping like a squid around the institutions of power, squeezing important men and driving them from their thrones and their boardrooms. Accusations were made and heads were taken. The people of the earth became all as enemies to one another.

War broke out among the remaining nations as disease and famine spread. The nuclear proliferation of decades past ended in fire from the sky as ash gathered on the ground and floated in the breeze. People breathed it. They ate it. It was in the air and in their food, and no one who would yet live could escape the slow, creeping horror of irradiated death.

Mothers cried over the limp and broken bodies of their ravaged children, tears lost in an ocean of sorrow. Lamentations sounded from every corner of the world, desperate cries falling unheard on the deaf ears of a god who was no longer there.

Those who remained were alone.
Those who remained were abandoned.
Those who remained were still alive.
And they, too, would die.

********

Some time earlier, a sweet little old lady sat down at her breakfast table to enjoy her morning tea and thumb through the obituaries, as old people tend to do. She was an altogether unremarkable old bird, having achieved little with her life apart from raising two ungrateful children who didn’t call her anymore but that she still loved, anyway. Her husband passed away, oh, about ten years back or so, leaving her alone in a tiny house in the middle of nowhere because it was all she could afford. She kept to herself, helped people when she could, and baked fruitcakes for the poor every winter. She was, by all conceivable measure, entirely unremarkable.

This morning, she sipped her tea and held a silent memorial for Mr. Darnell Sharpton of Mossville, the nice old gentlemen who always held the door for her at the Piggly Wiggly. He’d passed away in his sleep over the weekend and was survived by his wife and their two daughters, Biddy and Ida of Hackberry.

Rest his soul.

She set her teacup down and closed the paper. Then, steadying her unsure body with one trembling hand on the back of her chair and the other on the table, pushed herself up. The ancient wood creaked in protest but held firm, and she began shuffling her slippered feet into the kitchen. She’d almost reached the kettle when her body vanished. To an onlooker, she would have simply been there one minute and gone the next, leaving only her worn and faded nightgown to fall to the chipped linoleum tile of the kitchen floor, draping itself over her little pink slippers.

The sudden, miraculous disappearance of one unremarkable little old lady from a busy, otherwise occupied world warranted no attention from anyone whatsoever, save for one important detail her ungrateful children would come to realize, to their horror, much later: She had been the only one.

Outside, a great wail sounded over the whole of the Earth.

Everyone else was fucked.

*

I wrote this story while watching the results come in during the night of the November 2018 midterms. As I sat and witnessed the great state of Texas vote for a skeezy, reptilian coward slithering his way toward victory over one of the most charismatic and genuine politicians I’ve ever seen in my lifetime, I couldn’t help but wonder why.

Other sample stories from the anthology, She and The Space That Isn’t There, are available to read for free here.

Why would people vote for Donald Trump’s lapdog? What would make them hate Cheeto Gaston but elect his sniveling LeFou? When asked about their vote, not one person was able to point me toward a political or policy reason behind their decisions. The answer was always simple and always the same: “Ted Cruz is a good man.”

Thinking about this contradiction – how people who oppose Trump on virtually every topic could vote for one of his most loyal enablers, it hit me. They’ll accept anything, literally anything, from anyone as long as that person isn’t a Democrat. The Religious Right has been so successful in transforming the GOP into God’s party while turning Democrats into Satan’s concubines that people of faith cannot, under any circumstances, vote for the Devil.

Which is why otherwise decent people will still vote for Trump again in 2020, despite how much they profess to despise what he’s done to the country. Ideology and religion will be the death of us all, while those who claim to hold the faith the strongest are often the ones farthest from salvation.

This story has actually been kicking around the dusty cobwebs of my braincase for years now, but I never quite had a handle on how to set the whole thing up until last night. I didn’t intend it to be part of my next book, but it’ll be there. Consider this the second sample story from Naked Shingles, available November 20, 2018. (You can read the first story here.)

The post Rapture – A Short Story appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

Other sample stories from the anthology, Rapture and The Space That Isn’t There, are available to read for free here.

WARNING: This story contains graphic sexual content, triggers for sexual assault/rape.

She.

She is born.

She has her first birthday. Cake smash.

She’s five years old, starting Kindergarten. On the third day of class, a boy pinches her arm. On the fourth day, he pinches it again. Fifth day, pinch. Sixth, pinch. Seventh, eighth, nineteenth, thirty-fourth, ninety-sixth…

She complains.

“It just means he likes you, sweetheart.”

She’s twelve years old. Middle school. Puberty. She’s crushing on the boy in the third row of Math class. He tells his friends she’s ugly. She cries.

She tells her dad.

“That’s just how boys are.”

Sweet sixteen. The boy from Math class is older now. Mature. Popular. He smiles at her. She smiles back. He stops at her locker and hands her a note. Party tonight. Be there.

She’s there. The boy smiles again. Says hello. Touches her hand.

Her stomach flips.

He takes her outside, under the stars. Where it’s quiet. Where they can talk.

They talk.

He leans in, she leans back. Her stomach flips again and she stops. Their lips meet. Clumsy. Sloppy. Beautiful. He pulls back and smiles again. He leads her back inside. Up the stairs.

He closes the door behind him and sits on the edge of the bed, beautiful and perfect. He calls to her. She goes to him, eager. Excited. Wanted.

He kisses her again, gently. Sweetly. Her stomach does backflips. Her hands tremble. She touches his face. He cradles hers, his thumb in front of her ear, his hand caressing her neck, fingers trailing through the back of her long hair. He squeezes. Just a little. Her heart skips. He kisses her harder. He breathes harder. She leans back.

His hand moves to her shoulder. Slowly. Slides to her chest. Slowly. His fingers find her breast. Slowly, his hand squeezes. She moves her hand to his, covering it. Squeezes. Eager. Excited. Wanted.

He pulls his leg over her lap, rests it between her knees. They lie there, quiet. Breathing, kissing, touching, exploring. New. Mature. Grown up.

His hand moves from her breast, fingers trailing softly down her side, then back up. Under her shirt. Her heart skips again, but different this time. Worried. She moves her hand to his and holds it. He pushes back. She resists. Kisses him harder. Can’t this just be enough?

She forgets about his leg until she feels it again. Moving between her knees, forcing a split. His leg bends, he pulls his knee forward. Pushes it into her. She gasps. Distracted.

Forgets his hand, which moves like lightning over her bare skin. His fingers crawl under her bra. He rubs his knee against her. Her body reacts. Natural. Instinct. Uninvited pleasure. Her voice betrays her will. A moan.

Encouraged, his lips kiss her harder. His hand squeezes her harder. His knee rubs her harder.

No.

She pushes back harder.

He moves his knee down, pushes it against her thigh. She tries to sit up. He holds her down. She tries to roll over. He slides on top of her. She starts to scream.

He covers her mouth.

“Shhhhh…”

She moves a hand to his chest. Pushes. He grabs her wrist with his other hand, holds it down. He moves his mouth to her neck. Nibbles her ear.

She starts to cry. She tries to push him away, angry. Heartbroken. Betrayed.

She feels him against her, a lump of denim grinding into her skirt. She screams through his hand. Her teeth find flesh. She bites.

He recoils, clutching his hand, releasing hers. Eyes closed and clenched from tears and rage, her arms flail. She punches. Slaps. Anything.

He grabs her arms, pushes them back down. Takes a pillow. Covers her face.

No! Please! Please, no!

He rolls to his side, pressing her arms against the bed with his body, the pillow to her face. His hand fumbles. She hears the tinkle of metal against metal, then the pop of a button fly opening.

Why? What did I do wrong?

He leans into her harder, the full weight of his body crushing against her face and arms. She hears denim drop to the floor. Her heart races.

Oh, god. This is my fault.

She thinks of her mother as she feels his hand move up her thigh. Thinks of her father as his fingers find her waist. Thinks of middle school when he pulls off her skirt. Kindergarten, when he penetrates her. She feels it, pushing into her like a piston through concrete. Dull and hot, shredding her apart piece by piece. Each thrust rips, each pull tears, her own blood lubricating the violation.

She screams into the pillow. Unheard.

Oh god, mom. Dad? Mommy? I’m sorry!

He heaves into her faster, now. Smoother. He glides. She cries.

He grunts heavy into her ear. She feels his spit on her neck, smells his sweat through the pillow. His body tenses. He groans, collapsing beside her.

He’s done.

She rolls away from him, off the bed. Hits the floor. She scrambles for her clothes, eyes pouring. Spit and snot and mucus drain from her face. She pulls her underwear and skirt on at the same time, her panties bunching up beneath. She feels the blood pooling into them. She doesn’t care.

She hears his voice, looks at the bed. He doesn’t smile. His eyes flash from angry to desperate.

“I’m sorry!”

His arms reach out. She sees him for the first time. Naked from the waist down, limp. Absurd. Disgusting.

She grabs her shoes from the floor, turns to the door.

“Wait!”

She cries, runs down the stairs. Passes curious faces. Oh god. Out the front door. They know. Into the night.

She walks home, still crying. Still feeling him. Inside.

The rage builds, then the shame. She thinks about her mother.

“It just means he likes you, sweetheart.”

********

She’s twenty-three years old. Entry-level. Making her way.

Her boss leers. She ignores it. He flirts. She flirts back. Job security.

Her co-workers tell jokes. She laughs. Outwardly.

She meets a nice guy, for once. They click. Date night.

She’s twenty-four years old. Engaged. Planning. The rest of their lives.

“I do.”

She’s twenty-six. Pregnant. Excited. Not like last time.

She’s twenty-nine years old. Likes being called Mommy. She has a house, a car, a husband. The dream.

She wakes up.

He’s heaving on top of her, fast. Quick. He sees her eyes open. He smiles.

“Good morning.”

She’s sixteen again. She looks at her husband, sees the boy from Math class.

“I wanted to wake you up sweetly.”

I didn’t ask you to.

She forces a smile. Not his fault. He doesn’t know.

He pushes deeper. She winces. Tries to hide it.

“I love you.”

He collapses into her, dead weight on her chest. She wraps her arms around his back. Runs her nails softly over his skin. Love you, too.

She turns thirty. He comes home later every night, wearing a different perfume each time. Until one night, it’s the same as the last night. And the next.

They fight. Over money, over time, over attention. They make up. Angry sex. Violent. Exciting. He gets rougher. Leaves bruises. He gets angrier. Leaves scars. She tries harder.

He’s met someone else. They fight. They separate. They fight. Divorce. Custody fight. He remarries. Their daughter stays with mommy.

He moves on.

She’s thirty-one. He calls sometimes, says he’s sorry. Says the right things. She listens, eager. Excited. Wanted.

She’s thirty-two. He comes over, drunk. Hate fucks her. Hard. She doesn’t know why she likes it.

Am I broken?

He goes. She cries. And waits for him to call again.

She wonders why he won’t just leave, why he won’t stay gone. She wonders why she still waits for him, still welcomes his touch. She wonders why he hates her so much. Why he hurts her so much. Why he’s so cruel.

It must just mean he loves me.

********

Their daughter has a birthday.

She’s five years old, starting Kindergarten.

On the third day of class, a boy pinches her arm. She complains.

“It just means he likes you, sweetheart.”

That’s just how boys are.

********

Author’s Notes

According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, one in five women will be raped at some point in their lives. One in five. That’s a staggering statistic, but the horrifying truth is that the actual statistic is probably much worse. There are reasons most rapes go unreported and remain hidden. Many reasons, actually. This story is about one.

It wasn’t originally. When I first wrote She., there was a lot more to the story. I cut most of it.

Why? A couple of reasons. First, while I wanted the voice of the story to have a certain sharp, sort of detached rhythm with truncated grammar, I found that there were large sections where I really wasn’t doing that. It was in these sections that I was filling in as the omniscient narrator, telling you everything the character was thinking. It didn’t work, neither tonally with the voice I was going for nor thematically, with what I was trying to say.

What I was doing was mansplaining everything, which was the first thing one of my early sensitivity readers pointed out. I fought against it, but she was right. So I started cutting – the only problem was that I was cutting out all of the reasoning and justifications behind the character’s actions by the end of the story, which was a problem. The original version made it very clear that none of this was her fault, not what happened to her at the party, not what happened with her husband, and certainly not how she ends up perpetuating the cycle with her own daughter at the end.

That was a core theme of the story, and I wanted to preserve it. But then something weird happened. As I cut this bit and excised that one, more and more layers of the very ambiguity I sought to avoid began piling on until, ultimately, the story began to more accurately reflect reality than anything I’d written trying to avoid it.

The truth is that when your first sexual experience is one of violation, it permanently affects your identity for the rest of your life. While psychologists have shown that it might not directly affect your thoughts and actions regarding sex itself, it does do lasting damage to your self-image. Your sense of worth, of value, of your place in any future relationship. This is why the circle of toxic masculinity remains unbroken for so many, and why rape culture seems normal.

Because it — sadly — is.

One in five women. Rape isn’t the exception anymore, if it’s ever been. Men being horrible isn’t an aberration. It’s the norm, even though it shouldn’t be. When the character reinforces the idea, “That’s just how boys are,” she’s just accepting the harsh reality of everything she’s been told and everything she’s known of men throughout her entire life. That really is how the boys she’s known are. She’s not wrong.

She hasn’t known a reality where men aren’t sexual predators – even the nice ones. (There were bits with her ex-husband I cut that made this clear, but I didn’t need to show that. The implication was enough, or even the lack of implication. If readers see her husband as a nice guy from the outside when he was anything but behind closed doors, then that’s just how reality works. These are the monsters that hide in plain sight behind a smile and a dozen roses. The world doesn’t see the dark expectations beneath their apparent kindness, their sense of entitlement underlying every public display of affection, their presumption of ownership over their wives.)

The fact that people can interpret the story in such a way as to blame the main character for perpetuating the cycle of abuse, that anyone can read this story and come away with a sense that I’m victim blaming or shaming her is frustrating, but it’s entirely accurate – because that’s how reality works. In cases of sexual assault against women, while there are obviously hard, clear lines of right and wrong, we too often choose not to acknowledge them. We let ambiguity take over. We saw that with Clarence Thomas, and we saw it again with Brett Kavanaugh. We see it every day.

Women attempting to call out their abusers are paddling a rowboat across an ocean of ambiguity, right into a maelstrom of doubts, accusations, and excuses. It’s a terrifying prospect, which is something any decent human being could see – and feel – on Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s face during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings.

We could see her fear then, and admire her bravery. And still, it didn’t make a difference. The people who wanted Kavanaugh installed on the Supreme Court chose to believe what they wanted to believe, then justified those beliefs with the ambiguity they allowed to build up around Dr. Ford. Doubts, accusations, and excuses. The circle goes unbroken.

In the end, what was originally one of the longer stories in the anthology became the shortest. What started as a story with a very clear and distinct message became shrouded in ambiguity and open to interpretation.

And it’s all the better for it.

********

Other sample stories from the anthology, Rapture and The Space That Isn’t There, are available to read for free here.

The post She. – A Short Story appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

My next book is a short story collection centered around unsettling themes. It’s going to be hard to read – and it’s been even harder to write – but I think it’s important. Maybe nobody will read it. Probably nobody should. But I still think it’s important.

Naked Shingles

The flagship story, She. (read it for free here), if there even is such a thing in an anthology, is a sort of #WhyIDidn’tReport metaphor, and writing it damn near killed me. If you enjoyed being slightly creeped out with the (mostly safe) spookiness of “A Trick of Light and Shadow” or laughing along with my many hilarious mistakes in “A Lifetime of Questionable Decisions” and think my next book will be along the same lines, you’re gonna have a bad time.

Even if you like disturbing fiction, you’ll still have a bad time. That’s kind of the point.

These stories delve deep into heavy, heartbreaking themes. There are no happy endings. It’s not a horror collection in the traditional sense, but every story is horrific in its own right. But more importantly, they’re all about what happens after the horror is over. Horror novels and movies exist to, yes, scare you – but then leave you feeling better than when you went in. When the credits roll, you survived the roller coaster – but it was always just a ride.

For the characters in horror stories, the nightmare doesn’t end when you finish the book. It’s just getting started, and they’ll carry that damage with them for the rest of their lives.

Trauma. Abuse. Assault. Terror. Disillusionment. Every story in this book shines a great big spotlight on the central idea of looking for justice and coming up empty. Some of the stories are fantastical, while others are all too real.

The entire book should come with a trigger warning, so I’ll forgive you if you want to pass it up. Of course, if you think you’re up to it, you’ll be able to check it out soon. Very soon.

Keep an eye on my author page, my books page, or follow me over on Twitter for the exact release date when I announce it.

You won’t have to wait very long.

The post Naked Shingles: My Next Book appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

Flickr / kraybon

It’s a commonly known fact of the universe that dudes have disgusting feet. Whether it’s a quirk of nature or by design is up for debate, but the inescapable fact is that nobody – except maybe a certain niche corner of the internet – wants to look at them. Nobody. Ever.

And yet, everywhere I go lies an ocean of hairy toes and foot fat before me. It’s almost enough to put me off my lunch, but a man’s gotta eat. I power through it.

What’s wrong with shoes, though? You know, those things what decent folk wear on their feet to hide their weird clodhoppers from the world? I don’t mean to foot shame anyone, sincerely, and I could understand if we were on the beach and everyone was wearing flippity-flops or whatever, but I should be able to go out to eat at a restaurant without having to endure a parade of constant toenail torment while I’m trying to avert my eyes from the twin disasters flapping around at the end of your legs.

I’m not just talking about Birkenstocks, either. Or the knock-off Walmart brand you got on sale the other day. There are also those Nike slipper/sandal things that guys are wearing these days, but at least they usually have enough self-respect to wear socks with them. Sure, they shuffle along like shambling dad zombies in the convenience store and look like they just got out of bed, but whatever. At least I don’t have to see their toes.

Women, of course, can get away with open-toe shoes and sandals. Sure, you could call it a double standard if you really wanted to, but the fairer sex just has fairer feet. It’s a scientific fact that scientists have proven with science. Fight me.

Yeah, they’re still feet, but they’re usually not hairy, hobbit-toed abominations just hanging out like it’s no big deal. Maybe it’s because they get pedicures and sometimes paint their toenails, but I don’t really think any of that matters. They just have better feet than us guys. Accept it.

I could be wrong, though. Maybe I’m the only person in the world who doesn’t understand why exposed man feet are acceptable in a professional setting. I’m no fashion expert or anything, and I usually shuffle around the office looking like a Dickensian street urchin most of the time because I don’t believe ironing t-shirts contributes anything to society, but at least I wear shoes to work.

I even wear shoes at home, although they’re more comfortable and called slippers. I change into them every day when I walk in the door like Mr. Rogers taught me, and I’m pretty sure my marriage is happier because of it.

BECAUSE NOBODY – NOT EVEN MY OWN WIFE – WANTS TO LOOK AT MY FEET.

Except for the previously mentioned hidden corner of the internet, or course. And if disgusting dude toes are your jam, more power to you. Everybody’s got their thing, and I’m not here to kink shame. You do you. Just keep it in the privacy of your own home or on OnlyFans where it belongs.

When you go out to walk amongst the good people of the general public, either hide your secret shame like the rest of us, or you can just head on back to the Shire, Frodo.

The post ‘Just Say No!’ to Exposed Dude Toes appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

Hello, internet. My name is Trey. You probably don’t know me, but if you do, it might be because my stepdad talks a lot about me online. I’m not sure why.

Anyway, I’m 11-years-old and in the 6th grade. About a month ago, not too long after the school shooting in Florida, I experienced a lockdown at my school where we didn’t know what was happening, and while the lockdown was only precautionary and we were in no danger, we didn’t know that until after it was over. The entire experience was terrifying, especially for me, because I pay attention to things going on in the world today. Like school shootings.

The entire situation was very frightening because of what had just happened on Valentine’s Day in Florida, and at the time, it seemed like it was happening to us. Here, at my school. Also, knowing that gun control has not been controlled (and still hasn’t been), it sent shivers up my bones, leaving me one of the most scared kids in the room.

Being so scared, I immediately took precautions in a way that probably wouldn’t have actually done anything, but it made me feel safe, so that helped. During the time, I was in 3rd period, which is a visual effects class because I go to a technology school that has all sorts of cool stuff…like toy lightsabers in the prop room we use for projects. In my infinite wisdom, I devised a plan that would protect me from anyone who might invade my classroom.

It involved toy lightsabers.
And pencils. Very sharp pencils.
It was a whole thing.

I sprinted to the prop room, opened the door, and grabbed the first lightsaber I saw. Then, I gathered all the pencils I had, flew to my teacher’s desk, and began furiously jamming every single one of them into his sharpener until I finished in a matter of five seconds flat, victoriously holding my pencils in my hand, my plan almost complete. I rushed over to the table where I’d put the lightsaber, grabbed some tape from my binder, and began to fashion the most impressive, terrifying spear anyone could ever imagine being made from a toy lightsaber and pencils. By an 11-year-old.

It wasn’t that impressive.

If it had been a weapon in a video game, it would have done negative damage and broken on the first hit. But it was all I had, and it was enough. Of course, immediately after I finished my spectacular spear of ultimate destruction, my teacher told me to take it apart. (Teachers apparently frown on spectacular spears of ultimate destruction. Weird.)

Which is when I learned no one was actually attacking my school. There was just something going on down the road, and my principal locked down our school just to be extra safe – but at the time, it felt real. And that’s the point.

Ever since this happened, I haven’t exactly felt traumatized, but it’s still been there, in the back of my head, like that feeling you get when you think someone’s watching you. I didn’t like it, but I think I can image what kids who have actually been through a shooting or a real lockdown might feel like, which is why, when my stepdad told me about the March For Our Lives protests happening across the country, I was immediately interested in going to the one happening here.

Both me and my stepdad had no idea what the march would be like, considering we had both never been to a protest before. My stepdad was explaining what it might be like, and he mentioned that people sometimes make signs. I realized I had leftover poster board from an earlier Math project, so I grabbed a magic marker and went to work. I wrote on both sides of the poster board, used a ruler as a handle, and it was ready. We headed out to the march.

When we got there, we didn’t get there. Wait, let me explain.

We didn’t know how many people would show up, but it was more than we thought and my stepdad was having a lot of trouble finding a place to park, so we ended up driving around the protest two or three times before we finally found a parking space way down the street. Once we’d journey across the countryside over to where the protest was taking place, we saw nearly 100 people holding signs and shouting phrases.

It was a little intimidating.

We awkwardly walked over and discovered that a lot of people had the same signs, which made me think that we were supposed to print out a special sign to bring. I was wrong. They just had some there for people who hadn’t made their own signs.

Once we got out of our awkward phase (specifically me, because my stepdad is always awkward), I started really getting into it. I was jumping up and down, flailing my sign and spinning it around as I tried to get cars to honk in support. Most cars did. Some cars didn’t, and a few cars shouted nasty things. (How dare you say that around children!) Of course, there weren’t really many children there. During the entire time, I was surprised at how few students there were at the protest. It was mostly people even older than my stepdad, but at least a few high school kids were there.

The entire experience was very memorable.

Serious talk now. The entire situation on school shootings and gun control deserves to be fixed, and as a tween, I don’t think I should have to be worrying about whether or not I’m going to be able to defend myself if a shooting happens, outside of school or not, when I’m supposed to be thinking about the proper way to construct a persuasive essay or if I’ve completed my chores or not. (I usually haven’t. Ask my mom. She’ll tell you.)

This entire situation should not have been an issue to begin with. It’s not like us kids actually have a choice on this. We have to go to school. Parents make us. (Trust me, I’ve tried to get out of it. It never works. Ask my mom. She’ll tell you.)

Today, I heard about a senator who said kids shouldn’t be looking for someone else to solve our problem, but it’s not a problem we created. The most we can do is start these protests to try and at least get some public attention toward it. I respect everyone’s opinion, but don’t tell us to stop protesting the problem, until you start fixing the problem.

I don’t know how to solve these issues. I just want to feel safe at school, and I think all students do. Plus, I’m only 11-years-old, and sometimes I forget to do my homework. I can’t fix America’s gun problem or school shootings, but I can at least have a voice in raising awareness for it.

Please listen.

The post My First Protest: A 6th Grader’s #MarchForOurLives Experience appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

Before I get started about everything that goes into second puberty, let me first clear up a simple misconception: second puberty happens during middle age, not in your early 30s. I guess it’s fun to joke about if you work for Buzzfeed and are looking for something to publish/steal from College Humor, but it’s not actually a thing when you’re that young. It just isn’t. All that’s happening there is adjusting to the awfulness of being an adult. It is, after all, nothing at all like any of us were promised when we were kids, so I have a feeling a lot of thirty-somethings are just coming to grips with how much being a grown-up sucks.

Spoiler Alert: It never gets any better.

Actual second puberty goes way beyond just not feeling like an unstoppable twenty-something god anymore. Your body literally starts going through a second round of changes that are inexplicably a lot like the first round of changes, but without all of the rest of your life to look forward to when it’s over. Some things people like to call second puberty are really just normal parts of getting older. Sure, your hairline recedes and you start growing unwanted body hair, but comedians have been making jokes about those things for years, usually sandwiched between hilarious and super original bits regarding the differences between men and women and about how Florida looks like America’s penis. Aging isn’t second puberty, though.

Sidenote: For the record, my hairline still hasn’t receded, so I guess I’ve got that going for me. Unfortunately, while I don’t yet have to spend time doing weird things like mastering the intricacies of a 20-point combover, I do have to get my hair cut all the time. All. The. Time.

It hasn’t even started thinning yet, which might sound like I’m bragging, but you have no idea. Instead of losing my hair like a normal person, it just started multiplying like I was injecting my scalp with Bob Ross growth hormones. Like, the left side of my head must be really fertile soil for hair trees or whatever, because it grows like crazy on that side. It grows like crazy all over my head, to be honest, but by the time I go in for a haircut, there are pockets of hair that are so much longer and puffier than others, that I always have to provide the barber with a reference photo of what it’s supposed to look like before he powers up the weed whacker and gets to work.I also don’t have unwanted body hair yet, which is probably a blessing. That said, I still don’t have wanted body hair yet, as my chest is basically a blank canvas upon which god hath not yet painted. Which isn’t a bad thing, really. Some guys manscape chest hair away like they’re trying to shave 0.002 seconds off their Olympic swim time, and I don’t even have to wax. So that’s nice.

What I do have are all the hallmarks of first puberty coming back with a vengeance:

• My voice cracks.
• I get pimples.
• I have days where I’m oddly clumsy, and I’m knocking things over like I’m not used to having arms.
• I get ridiculously emotional over stupid things.
• I have angst.

There are more, but let’s just tackle these for now.

First up: my voice.

I don’t know exactly when it started happening again, but every so often my voice will crack in the exact same way it did when I was a teen and my entire family would tease me about it around the dinner table. Sometimes, I’ll just be casually talking about nothing with my wife, and it’ll happen. Other times, I’m singing in the car – quite beautifully, I assure you – and when I reach for that one note, my voice runs the other way. I don’t know why this is a thing again, but my own kid is slouching toward puberty himself, so at least it gives us some common ground to talk about, even if we sound like startled chipmunks when we do.

As for the pimples, they’re not usually noticeable because I work hard to maintain a standard amount of beard stubble at all times. I’ve done this for years, since the only thing separating my 43-year-old face from my 15-year-old face is some small amount of facial hair. Honestly, without the stubble, I’ll still get carded for a lottery ticket. I’ve never been one for Grizzly Adams/hipster beards though, and even though I went through an unfortunate, carefully-shaped Riker beard phase I don’t like to talk about, I’m not really a fan of normal beards, either. Just give me some stubble, a little 5 o’clock shadow, and I’m good. There are, however, problems with this.To begin with, I wasn’t joking about that whole 43 to 15 thing. I have plenty of grey in my beard, which instantly sends me to middle age the second I let the stubble grow just a little too long. I prefer to call it platinum blonde, even though I know it’s a lie and I’m not fooling anyone. It makes me feel better though, which is another thing that happens during second puberty: you start lying to yourself.

When the same brand of jeans you’ve been buying in the same size for decades slowly stop fitting and you lack the upper body strength necessary to bring the top button in line, you don’t immediately blame all the cookies you’ve been eating to keep the loneliness birds away. Nope, you tell yourself that Levi’s must’ve changed its sizing parameters, so what used to be a 28 waist is now a 30. A few years later, they’ll change it again, and 32 will be the new 30, then 34, and so on…

When all those cool t-shirts you bought over the years start stretching their designs in weird places, you’ll blame years of going through the wash for shrinking them long before you’ll admit that the real reason Captain America’s round shield has slowly become more of an oval is because you just like to eat, dang it. Nothing wrong with that.

All the lies that become your life add up as you move through second puberty, until you either accept the hand time has dealt you, or you try to fight back with exercise programs and diet fads that promise to recapture your youthful vigor if you’ll just become a partner in the multi-level marketing scheme a girl you knew in high school keeps promoting as a “premium lifestyle” on Facebook.

I’ve just accepted it. It’s cheaper that way.Getting back to my list, I’ve also become ridiculously clumsy. I trip over my own feet like they’ve grown two sizes overnight, and I knock things over with my torso tentacles more often that I manage to successfully grab a can of soda and drink it like a normal person. (Which, now that I’m opening up to you, I manage to spill down my chin more often than I’d like to admit because I guess I’ve forgotten how gravity works.) This same awkwardness happened after every growth spurt during first puberty, but I have no clue why it’s happening again. I don’t think my arms and legs are still growing, but I haven’t actually measured any part of my body in a long time. Ignorance is, as they say, bliss. And I prefer to remain as ignorant of my body’s latest changes for as long as possible.

Which brings me to the emotional turmoil of second puberty. Maybe this is more down to me being a parent than it is to any sort of biological changes, but movies I watched years ago that I mocked for having cliched subplots about sick kids now overwhelm my emotions in ways I never thought possible. I can’t even watch Lorenzo’s Oil or The Road anymore, for example. I mean that literally, too. I am physically incapable of finishing either movie because, at some point, I will start crying, which will burn my eyes and make them tear up even more until I have to walk away and splash some cold water on my face to make it stop.

Don’t even get me started on Pixar movies, either. If you want to see what an emotional trainwreck looks like in a middle-aged man, just start up the last few minutes of Toy Story 3 and I’ll be right with you.As for the sudden resurgence in teenage angst, I’m not entirely sure that actually has anything to do with second puberty, now that I think about it. Yes, I have mornings when I wake up angry and spend the rest of the day feeling like no one understands me, but come on. It’s 2018, I live in the Deep South, and Donald Trump is President. If you spent every waking moment of your life feeling like you were in the Upside Down, you’d get pretty angsty, too.

As long as I don’t start writing poetry, I’ll probably be fine.

Probably…

If you enjoyed this story, you’ll find it and plenty more in my book,  A Lifetime of Questionable Decisions.

The post Second Puberty Is No Joke, Y’all appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

It all seemed so innocent at the time. It was mid-December, Christmas was still a week or so away, presents were building up into little piles under the tree, and everyone was on their best behavior. There was no way to know that I was about to make one of the biggest mistakes of my life, or at least one of the biggest mistakes of the past few months. (The mistakes that define me all kind of bleed together, at this point. You’ll understand when you get older.)

(Excerpt from A Lifetime of Questionable Decisions)

It seemed like such a simple deal, too. I’d noticed that one of the candy canes we hang on the tree each year had spent the past several days being victimized by gravity, and was inching its way toward inevitable death upon the unyielding planks of the hardwood floor over which it so precariously dangled. Naturally, I made a joke about it.

“When that candy cane falls,” I said with stupid confidence, “we’ll know it’s time to take the tree down.”

My wife and child jumped at the idea, and we all had a fun time being overly dramatic with various metaphors involving the candy cane giving up on life and, consequently, ending the innocence of the holiday season when its body lay shattered and broken beneath the uncaring arms of the tree that rejected it.

Okay, maybe that was mostly me with the metaphors, but that’s not important right now. What is important is that my child took me seriously, and it was decided then and there that we would leave our Christmas tree up until that candy cane had fallen.

You can probably see where this is going…

Before I get into what happened, it’s important to note how hard I work to try and always keep my word, especially to my kid. It’s something my own father taught me, to a ridiculous fault.

For example, when I started driving an ancient pick-up truck held together by duct tape and dirt when I was 16, my dad offered to pay my insurance indefinitely, as long as I never got a ticket.

I’m 43 now. I’ve never had a ticket.

I’ve no doubt that poor man would still be paying my insurance to this day, if I hadn’t let him off the hook years ago when I became an adult. That’s just the kind of guy my dad is. He always keeps his word, and it’s one of the many valuable lessons he’s taught me by example over the years.

Which leads me to the problem. You can see it, can’t you? I gave my word that we wouldn’t take the tree down until the candy cane had fallen.

This was a mistake.

To further complicate matters, I made a joke about the whole situation over on Twitter, where a friend of mine in Japan chimed in and offered to send us a package if we still had the tree up when Easter rolled around, which I stupidly told my kid about, and that was that. We’d crossed the Rubicon. There was no turning back.

I talk about my kid a lot on social media, to the point where I’m fairly certain a large number of strangers feel like he’s part of their family. Through my relentless photos and updates on his life, they have, after all, watched him grow up. They’re invested.

People he’s never met have sent him things from abroad before, too. Once, a friend in Poland sent us a box of Polish candies and various goodies, and another friend in Canada sent us a box of weird Canadian chips and maple pancake gravy. The point is, people love him (naturally), and they sometimes send us things. He especially likes receiving international packages, so there was no way he’d ever forget about our deal once I told him about a potential gift from Japan.

The tree wasn’t going anywhere.

As the days after Christmas became weeks and the weeks became months, I began to give up all hope that we’d ever be rid of the dead thing in our living room. I’d unplugged the lights once it was clear we were in this for the long haul, but I never imagined how stubbornly that wretched candy cane would cling to life.

By the time it finally fell, it had been defying the natural laws of physics for about a week or so, somehow managing to hold on to a branch that had nearly gone vertical. I’d begun to suspect that someone had super glued the thing, but I wasn’t brave enough to touch it to see if it moved.

Yes, I eventually became as invested in the candy cane’s survival as our son. After a point, it just became an object of fascination for me. How long could this go on?

The day it finally fell was pretty dramatic. I was watching TV when it happened: out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of movement and heard a rustling in the branches. This, in and of itself, was not unusual at this point. It was late January, and ornaments had been dropping off the tree since my birthday earlier in the month. However, this time I saw some white and red streak down, so I jumped out of my chair to investigate.

The candy cane had fallen, but not all the way to the ground. The dang thing had caught itself on yet another branch halfway through its fall, and was holding on for dear life. I called my kid to come see. He came and saw. Then, a few hours later, it fell again.

Again, it did not touch the ground. It only hovered mere inches over the floor, having caught itself this time upon a string of lights that was drooping from the bottom branches of the tree. My worst fear had been realized: the candy cane wasn’t going anywhere now. All hope was lost. The tree had become part of me now, part of my life. I would die with it by my side, haunting my dreams, the soundtrack of my life punctuated by the rainfall of every other ornament splashing to the ground. Every ornament except that accursed candied cane.

Never give up.
Never surrender.

Remembering that the only difference between a happy ending and a sad one is where you stop the story, I clung to the dream that, one day, a miracle would happen: maybe one of our dogs would grab the candy cane off the tree, or maybe the lights would droop low enough that some part of it would eventually touch the ground. My secret hope was that, at the very least, Easter would get here before the tree burst into flames and started giving me commandments.

Of course, none of these things actually happened. That’s the thing about miracles. You never can tell what shape they’ll take.

A package arrived on our doorstep this weekend. I do not know from whence it came, or by whom it was sent, but there it was, all the same: a plain, cardboard box with no return address.

I should’ve been worried. I’ve spent a large part of my life making people angry on the internet, and suspicious packages have caused problems in the past, but for whatever reason, I threw caution to the wind this time and just opened that sucker up. Inside, there was a smaller package, surrounded by packing peanuts. I reached in, and slowly lifted my prize from the box like some kind of religious leader revealing a sacred artifact to his congregation, except no one was home but me. Still, it was pretty impressive. Pretty sure I heard angels.

Someone had sent what appeared to be a Super Mario figurine of Japanese origin to my front door.

My miracle had just happened.

Seizing the opportunity to finally be rid of the evergreen monstrosity decaying in my living room, I immediately set to work removing what few ornaments hadn’t yet plunged to the ground, but I left the candy cane for last. I wanted to remember this moment. To savor it.

I sent a quick video text to my kid of me removing the candy cane and tossing it to the ground, which was not met with a positive reaction. I probably should’ve led with the whole Japanese package thing, but whatever. I told him about it eventually.

Once I’d removed all the ornaments, I began wrestling with the various strands of lights I’d so smartly layered deeper and deeper into the tree to create a beautiful effect back when Christmas was on the horizon and the pine needles were still soft. Now, though, the tree was filled with little stilettos, each branch holding a veritable arsenal of tiny death daggers that stabbed at my tender bits each time I reached in to untangle yet another bundle of wires.

Eventually, it was done. The tree was bare. All that was left was to put it out on the curb for the city to pick up later.

It was at this time that it occurred to me that I was about to put a dead Christmas tree out on the curb in front of my home. In March. Three months after Christmas. What would the neighbors think?

I panicked, which is when I slipped into full-on paranoia mode as if I’d just committed murder.

Not wanting anyone to know my secret shame, I decided then and there that I’d hide the crime. I went into the laundry room and grabbed a handsaw from my toolbox, then turned and headed back to the living room. To the body.

I spent the next several minutes creating a nightmare crime scene of pine needles and dried tree sap as I hacked the corpse of our once happy tree into tiny, manageable pieces. My plan was to keep them in the house where they’d go unseen as I slowly added one or two pieces to my garbage can each week. No one would see the tree on the curb that way. No one would ever know.

The perfect crime.

Unfortunately, while I’d managed to chop up the trunk into small logs, I hadn’t factored in how wide each section would be with all the branches jutting out. There was no way I was going to be able to fit any of them into my garbage can, especially the lower pieces where the branches were the longest.

I panicked again, but eventually calmed down long enough to concoct yet another plan. This time, I would wait until the dead of night, then I would take each piece and sort of scatter them along the curb in front of a shrubbery we have out there. With any luck, it’d just look like we’d done some yard work recently, and no one would be able to tell that the scattered remains had once been a Christmas tree.

Of course, after putting all the pieces outside, I realized that I’d left a trail of pine needles and snapped branches leading directly to my front door.

I did not, however, panic this time. Instead, I just grabbed a broom and started sweeping the evidence away, like some kind of Old West outlaw covering his tracks by dragging branches over the dirt behind him. Keep in mind, I was doing all of this at roughly 3:00am Sunday morning, which isn’t at all weird or anything.

Don’t judge me.

After I’d done enough to convince myself that no one would be able to trace the tree’s corpse back to me, I went inside and surveyed the damage. There was carnage everywhere. Bits of broken branches were scattered in places they had no right to be, and the blood spatter of pine needles definitely indicated a crime had been committed here. I had to clean it up. I had to clean everything up.

I spent the next hour or so sanitizing the murder site until my living room slowly began to look like nobody had hacked up the dead body of a decaying Christmas tree in the middle of it or anything, and I could finally go to bed. It was about 4:30 in the morning at this point, and I was pretty tired.

And that’s how I spent my weekend: committing aboral murder and hiding the evidence. You know, like people do.

The moral of this story, if there is one, is to be careful what deals you make with your children. You never know what twists and turns life might take, and even the most innocent of promises can become a nightmare scenario that could very well scar you for life.

In my dreams, I can still hear the tree.

It’s screaming.

UPDATE: I’ve been discovered.

UPDATE 2: This year’s candy cane has been chosen. The tree will stay up until it falls. It is known.

UPDATE #3: January 4, 2020 – The mighty have fallen. Trey has been informed. Please respect our family’s privacy in these difficult times.

The post Never Negotiate With Children, or: Why My Christmas Tree Stayed up for Months appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

We’re talking about “hardening” schools against potential shooters with things like automated systems that will lock doors, alert law enforcement, and deploy countermeasures against an attacker. We’re talking about making our school campuses as secure as prisons – which is actually pretty smart, when you stop to think about it. It’s sad that we even need to think about these things, but prisons know how to handle emergency lockdown situations, and in today’s world, we’d be wise to adopt some of their practices.

Which is fine. All of it. Honestly, if that’s what it takes to keep our children safe, then let’s do it, or at least keep talking about it until we find the answer. They’re all valid ideas worth discussing, and I’m not here to argue for or against any of them.

I’m also not here to advocate gun control or defend the second amendment, either. Plenty of people way smarter than me are already doing that on both sides, which is fantastic. Having a serious discussion about the issue is the first step to finding a solution that works for everyone.

That said, all anyone is doing is proposing ways to lock down a campus and contain a shooter. It’s all about keeping bad guys out of the school in the first place, or keeping them contained if they do get in. Which, again, is a discussion worth having.

However, the issue no one is bringing up is the single most vulnerable aspect of a school campus: the pick-up line, which is something I’ve been thinking about since the first day I picked up my kid from school after the Florida shooting, but I’ve been hesitant to write about it for fear of giving some lunatic out there any ideas.

I’ve wrestled with raising awareness over this for days, but I was finally forced to come to the inevitable conclusion that I’m not nearly as smart as I think I am, so I can’t possibly be the only person who’s thought about this. Therefore, it’s better to talk about it now, before something happens, rather than to wait until it’s too late.

When a visitor wants to visit most any school campus these days, they must first go through a sort of airlock situation in the front lobby, prove who they are and that they have a valid reason for being there, and often times have their IDs scanned. This is good. We should keep doing this.

The pick-up line works differently, though. Every day when school lets out, there’s a line of cars snaking through the campus and trailing out into the street of most every elementary and middle school across the nation. Students are usually huddled into a tight group outside, often under some sort of carport, while they wait for their parents to make it through the line to pick them up.

The problem is that there’s no airlock to go through in the pick-up line. Any crazed gunman who wants can pull into it and patiently wait his turn to pull up next to the carport before unleashing the unthinkable.

The kids are so densely packed under the carport that it would take only seconds for a tragedy to unfold that dwarfs other school shootings, including the one in Florida. Even with an armed officer on duty with a lightning-quick reaction time and a perfect response to eliminate the threat, it’s still an unthinkable scenario.

And it’s one no one is talking about. Trust me, I’ve been listening.

There are things we could do to mitigate this threat, and some schools are already on top of it, but all of them need to be.

Keeping students inside instead of leaving them exposed under a carport is the most obvious first step. Then, through the use of school radios or even a smartphone app, students could be called outside as their parents pull up to get them. No groups of students should be standing outside, exposed and vulnerable. Not anymore.

People more qualified than me can sort out the logistics of such an operation, but since I first thought of this problem, it’s all I’ve thought about. We need to add this to the discussion when we’re talking about hardening schools – because, as the saying goes, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

Right now, the weakest link is the pick-up line.

And it terrifies me.

The post The School Shooting Threat No One Is Talking About appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

Second, allow me to dispel any notions that this will be some sordid story about exactly how and why my first marriage failed. It just did. These things happen. Boy meets girl, boy marries girl, it turns out girl has an unhealthy obsession with Madonna, and then it’s all downhill from there.

Irreconcilable differences.
Let me explain.

The importance of music in a marriage cannot be overstated, especially in today’s digital world, where the entire library of every song or album you’ve ever bought follows you around like the memory of that embarrassing thing that happened to you in middle school that likes to pop into your head every night, just when you’re trying – and failing – to fall asleep.

For the record, I’ve made plenty of questionable music choices in my life, mostly involving virtually every album I bought in my twenties. I’d like to chalk it up to my younger self being very mature about trying new things, but I know it was mostly because I was deeply stupid. Most twenty-somethings are. It’s part of their charm.

In my defense, I started my twenties in 1995 and ended them ten years later, as one does, in 2005. If you go back and look at the music that was coming out over those ten years, a lot of my choices weren’t choices at all. Bad music was everywhere. Fo dah summah. Fo dah summah.

I went through a grunge phase just like everyone else did in the ‘90s, and the less said about that, the better. I then entered a brief country phase while I was away at school in College Station, Texas, mostly because, in College Station, Texas, listening to any music that isn’t country music is generally considered to be the primary means by which the devil steals your immortal soul. I also went through what I thought was a punk rock phase, but it turned out that Chumbawamba album I bought was as close to punk as I’d ever get – and, even then, it was really only ever the one song, which wasn’t at all punk – something I realized as soon as I tried to listen to any other song on that album.

All this is to say that I am not above having once liked objectively bad music. We’re all victims of the bad tastes of our younger selves, so I make no apologies for having once bought the single to Aqua’s Barbie Girl. I was twenty-two, and it seemed like a good idea at the time.

For my wife’s part, she used to love boy bands. Nobody’s perfect.

She still likes the boy bands she listened to when she was younger, but we all have our quirks. She typically switches them on when there’s housework to be done, which I’ve come to have a kind of Pavlovian response to whenever I hear N’Sync crank up on an early Saturday. Dishes and dusting are in my immediate future.

However, by and large, we both grew out of our terrible music phases, and can now agree on most songs. Sure, there are exceptions, like my ‘80s heavy metal she’ll always skip whenever it comes on Shuffle, or her weird infatuation with James Taylor, but we agree far more than we disagree when it comes to our playlists. We like good music where we find it, whether it’s classic rock, country, R&B…it doesn’t matter. A good song is a good song, and we generally agree on what’s worth listening to.

This, I think, is essential for a lasting marriage. I didn’t have this in my first marriage, which is probably the root cause behind all the trouble I had with it. And, beause I made the mistake of signing up for iTunes Match before I purged my library after the divorce, it’s still filled with the painful memories of Fergie and Miley Cyrus, Gwen Stefani and Coldplay…and Madonna.

So. Much. Madonna.

It is now a commonly known fact that one of the most effective forms or “enhanced interrogation” performed at places like Abu Gharib involves playing terrible music on a continuous loop until someone cracks and reveals to you the location of the hidden revel base on Alderaan. While I don’t suspect my ex-wife of intentional torture or anything, the end result was the same. I cracked.

Madonna’s entire discography of auditory horrors assaulted my delicate hearing holes on a daily basis. I’m intimately familiar with the full details of every trivial factoid about her life, and know the complete lyrics to far too many of her songs, which still haunt my dreams. To this day, I break out into a cold sweat whenever I hear the opening synths of Material Girl.

I’m not saying that our conflicting taste in music was the sole reason our marriage failed. We married young, and grew into different people. I’m just saying it didn’t help. It likely formed the cracks into which all the other ugly bits of a dysfunctional relationship flow and expand until the whole thing shatters.

In a healthy, lasting relationship, you should both be able to switch on a playlist without worry or concern for your partner – because, while there might be a few songs here or there that one of you doesn’t like, the majority of your listening experience will be mutually enjoyable. If it’s not – if you ever find yourself either routinely subjecting your partner to a constant stream of songs they hate, or you’re the one being victimized by the dulcet tones of Josh Groban on a daily basis, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Life has far too many natural pain points without adding bad music to the list.

With all that in mind, I leave you with the following piece of advice: before you enter into a serious relationship with anyone, skip prying into their text messages and emails, and go straight for their playlists. Whether or not you can endure a lifetime of listening to those songs will tell you everything you need to know about your future with that person.

And if you’re not ready to spend the rest of your life listening to Nelly Furtado, do yourself a favor and back out early. There’s no shame in it, and you’ll spare yourself a lot of heartache – and earaches – in the long run.

Some boys kiss me, some boys hug me
I think they’re okay…

THE STUFF OF NIGHTMARES.

The post The Importance of Music in a Marriage appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

’Twas the night of Thanksgiving, when in the White House
Prince Trumperdinck was tweeting, ignoring his spouse;
“I hate fake news, Hannity’s my only comrade,
But CNN and the New York Times are just SAD!”

Eric and Junior were all snug in their beds,
While visions of indictments danced in their heads;
Trump rose from the toilet and put down the phone,
Then flushed a big poopie down his golden throne.

When out on the lawn came a sound like a canon,
He knew in a moment it must be Steve Bannon.
Away to the window he waddled with care,
Only to find his pal Bannon not there.

The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow,
Gave the lustre of White Purity to objects below,
When, what to his old racist eyes should appear,
But a miniature Nazi: David Duke with a beer.

With a little old bigot, so hateful and white,
Trump’s heart skipped a beat; he loved the alt-right.
More rapid than eagles his minions they came,
And he whistled and shouted, and called them by name:

“Now, BANNON! Now, SESSIONS! Now MNUCHIN and PERRY!
On, KUSHNER! On DEVOS! On CONWAY and SCARAMUCCI!
To the top of the country! To the top of my wall!
Now tax away! Tax away! Tax away all!”

As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
You know what? Screw Puerto Rico. Those darkies can die!
So up to the White House, his minions they flew,
And guess who was there? Papadopoulos, too!

“I don’t know that guy,” Trump said with a smirk,
“Don’t talk to Mueller! That dude’s a jerk.”
He welcomed them all, his friends on the Right,
Then went to the kitchen, “Let’s have a quick bite!”

He called to the turkey he’d pardoned that morning,
Then reminded the bird of his dire warning:
“I will save you today, then kill you tonight.
My friends need to eat. My friends that are white.”

The bird, how she trembled! Her terror, how merry!
Her blood was like roses, her heart like a cherry!
Trump raised her limp body and called out to his god,
Then yelled out to America, “KNEEL BEFORE ZOD!”

Trump cooked up that turkey, and ate it with glee,
Then wondered where in hell Melania could be.
He looked in the Oval Office, and checked the West Wing,
But his queen was still missing; she needed her king.

He called out to Ivanka, then Eric and Donny,
He forgot about Barron, but remembered Tomi.
“She’ll find Ivanka, I know that she can!”
Trump said to himself, before dialing the Klan.

But no one had seen her, not Fox or its Friends,
Not The Blaze or Sean Hannity, not Bannon or Pence.
“I guess she is lost,” Trump whined with a sigh,
Then picked up his phone to give Twitter a try.

“My wife is lost. Has she run away from these lands?
I never even hit her, not with these tiny hands.”
Then a notification went off; the reply was from Mueller,
“You’re gonna need an attorney, you fucking preschooler.”

The post Trumpsgiving – A Thanksgiving Story appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The post A Few Words About Undercarriage Proctology appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

In case you haven’t heard, Twitter is raising the character limit on tweets from 140 characters to 280, which should make Donald Trump’s late night toilet-tweeting twice as completely freaking mental.

To give you an idea of what that might look like, I’ve taken 10 of his old tweets and bumped them up to exactly 280 characters each.

You know, for clarity.

Great solidarity for our National Anthem and for our Country. Standing with locked arms is good, kneeling is not acceptable. Bad ratings!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 24, 2017

If NFL fans refuse to go to games until players stop disrespecting our Flag & Country, you will see change take place fast. Fire or suspend!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 24, 2017

Obama is, without question, the WORST EVER president. I predict he will now do something really bad and totally stupid to show manhood!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 6, 2014

Rand Paul is a friend of mine but he is such a negative force when it comes to fixing healthcare. Graham-Cassidy Bill is GREAT! Ends Ocare!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 20, 2017

26,000 unreported sexual assults in the military-only 238 convictions. What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 7, 2013

The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 6, 2012

The U.S. cannot allow EBOLA infected people back. People that go to far away places to help out are great-but must suffer the consequences!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 2, 2014

Sorry losers and haters, but my I.Q. is one of the highest -and you all know it! Please don't feel so stupid or insecure,it's not your fault

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 9, 2013

Robert I'm getting a lot of heat for saying you should dump Kristen- but I'm right. If you saw the Miss Universe girls you would reconsider.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 18, 2012

The post What Trump’s Old Tweets Would Look Like With 280 Characters appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

Yesterday, I wrote about how ridiculous it is for people to be offended over other people offended – and I stand by that. Taking offense to offense is just some next level Inception type shit, but without all the cool zero gravity hallway fights. It’s dumb, and you should stop doing that. Assuming you’re one of the people who’s doing it, that is. If you’re not one of the ones doing it, keep right on doing everything you’re not doing. Or something. I’m confused now.

See? INCEPTION.

Today, I want to talk about the act of kneeling as a form of protest. Whether or not you agree with the reasons behind the NFL kneeling isn’t part of this. I just want to talk about what’s actually happening when people kneel during the national anthem, because a whole lot of people out there are screaming that it doesn’t accomplish anything, and that it means things it doesn’t mean.

Keep in mind, these are usually the same people who love to tell other people how they should express their discontent. If they mass together in an open protest, they should get a job because they’re obviously not working like Good People are. Which is nonsense. If they block traffic to show the disparity between an inconvenience and actual oppression, they’re told they’re being a nuisance and just looking for attention. If they riot over an injustice, they’re called thugs, which is around about the time white people start quoting Martin Luther King, Jr. and telling black people that, if they want to protest, they should do it peacefully.

And then you have people kneeling during the national anthem at football games. I can’t think of a more peaceful – and respectful (more on that in a minute) – form of protest than that.

Here’s why.

First up – and I shouldn’t even have to say this – no one is disrespecting the flag or the national anthem. They’re not even disrespecting the country. They’re showing enormous respect by simply kneeling – traditionally, a humble act of reverence – and looking at the flag while our national anthem plays. They’re not dishonoring our country at all. They’re actually doing the exact opposite.

When people kneel during the anthem, they’re respecting everything about what makes our country great – while quietly and nobly expressing something that goes beyond words. They’re showing that they love what our country could be and should be – what it is at its best, when fully realizing the ideals being sung about in the anthem – while, simultaneously, calling attention to just how far from those ideals we are right now.

After my last essay on this subject, a reader in Germany contacted me, and shared the story of a German Chancellor named Willy Brandt. Back in 1970, he did something shocking and controversial that many in his country objected to and were offended by. It happened when Brandt visited Poland to sign the Treaty of Warsaw between West Germany and the People’s Republic of Poland. Signed by Brandt and Prime Minister Józef Cyrankiewicz on December 7, 1970, the treaty between the two countries committed both sides to nonviolence and an acceptance of the Oder-Neisse Line – the border imposed on Germany by the Allied powers after WWII, at the Potsdam Conference.

To translate all that from boring Historyspeak, the treaty was a big deal because, while East Germany had already accepted the border way back in 1950, the Conservatives in West Germany wanted no part of any of it. They considered Brandt’s signing of the Warsaw Treaty in 1970 a betrayal of the country, of its ideals and its destiny, and they were pretty pissed about the whole thing.

But that’s not the controversial part. Okay, it is, and he took plenty of crap for it, but it’s not the controversial part I want to talk about right now. It’s this one, which was arguably even more outrageous and offensive to many German people.

On the same day he signed the treaty, Willy Brandt visited a monument commemorating the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising – an act of Jewish resistance in German-occupied Poland opposing the Nazi’s final effort to relocate the ghetto to Treblinka in 1943. Around 13,000 Jewish people died in the uprising, with many being burned alive after SS-Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop ordered the entire ghetto burned to the ground, block by block. It was a horrible thing, and it is one of many wounds the people of Poland will never forget.

So, not only did Brandt travel to Poland to sign a treaty many people in his country opposed – he also visited a memorial to a tragic event Germany bore complete responsibility for, which is something the Conservatives back in his home country would’ve preferred to ignore. (Kind of like how the alt-right of America likes to gloss over the worst parts of our own history…)

Then, he did the unthinkable: he laid down a wreath and, moved by the moment and the place, and everything it represented, he fell to his knees, and knelt. Spontaneously. For 30 seconds.

No one saw it coming.

The German Chancellor – after negotiating a treaty that people in his own country strongly opposed – not only did the right thing by signing it in defiance of the loud cries of his angry countrymen, but he took it a step further and actually knelt before the memorial. That single act of defiance against the chorus of opposition back home, and a humbling apology to the Polish people came to be known as Kniefall von Warschau – or, Warsaw Genuflection. It was an act of contrition for, and an acceptance and acknowledgement of the terrible things Germany had done under the Nazi regime. While some in his country saw it as disrespectful and offensive, many others were forced to face their own part, however small, in the terrors their country had inflicted upon the world. Willy Brandt’s simple act of kneeling in that specific situation made people stop and think about another point of view, if only for a few minutes. And it changed them.

The German people now respect and admire the Kniefall, and see kneeling as a powerful expression one can use in a time when there are no words strong enough, or actions firm enough, to represent and encompass everything one needs to say.

Brandt himself summarized it best: “Under the weight of recent history, I did what people do when words fail them. In this way, I commemorated millions of murdered people.”

Apply that now to what we all saw this past weekend. Were not the players kneeling under the weight of recent history, and commemorating the deaths of countless people?

Eric Garner
Freddie Gray
Christian Taylor
Walter Scott
Natasha McKena
Michael Brown
Philando Castile
Trayvon Martin
Tamir Brown – 12 years old

The list goes on. And on. And on.

You don’t need to believe that every death was justified to acknowledge that there’s a problem. Whether you believe it’s bad cops in a systemically racist institution of law enforcement, or a failure of the education system or society to provide opportunity to people of color that leads to crime – there’s obviously a problem. Maybe we just have too many bad cops, or maybe we just have too many criminals. Maybe it’s both. We have to face that, acknowledge it, and come to terms with all the different forces at play before we can fix it.

When people kneel during the national anthem, they’re not asking you to change the world. They’re not even asking you to change yourself. They’re simply wanting you to stop and think. They’re asking you to pause and see things from another perspective, if for only a moment – those few short minutes while the national anthem plays, and everyone’s gaze turns to our flag – and everything it’s supposed to represent. For everyone.

It’s not an act of defiance. It’s an act of contrition – remorse for what’s become of our country – and a silent plea that we all do something about it. It’s not meant to offend. It’s meant to inspire.

It’s what people do when words fail them.

The post Kniefalling in the NFL appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

We’ve all heard about the Great Controversy Of Our Time, or really, the day. The hour, maybe. Honestly, it’s impossible to keep track these days. I feel like maybe we should be keeping some sort of permanent, up-to-the-minute record for future generations, but I’m not sure there’s even a data center big enough to catalog and store them all.

We used to just limit this sort of crap to Christmas and maybe whatever ridiculous space vagina meat suit Lady Gaga was wearing at any given moment, but now it’s all the time. And that’s not even counting literally everything Trump puts on Twitter, because I’m pretty sure World War III is going to start over Kim Jong-Un throwing some shade in a subtweet since that’s the world we live in now, but whatever. This is just about one specific controversy people wouldn’t shut up about over the weekend.

You know the one I’m talking about, where the Mother of Dragons recruited a new army of no-neck dudes in shoulder pads and then had everyone bend the knee, which pissed off the Lord of Light or whoever the fire god is, and okay fine, it’s not that – but shut up. Game of Thrones abandoned me this past season, and I’m still a little sore about it. Don’t judge.

Of course, I’m talking about the overwhelming display of solidarity with Colin Kaepernick made by a ton of NFL players that literally set my computer, laptop, iPad, iPhone, and Playstation on fire with ALL THE RAGE OF A FURIOUS INTERNET.

All right, maybe not literally. But I’m still stuck on that whole Daenerys thing.

Back to the football controvery.

Here’s the thing about the whole outrage over outrage movement that I’ll never understand. WHY THE HELL DO YOU PEOPLE EVEN GIVE A CRAP?

Seriously. It is possible to not support the protest without having to spew your righteous indignation all over every single screen I own. It’s not a zero-sum game. You could always just ignore it. That’s an option I think people tend to forget about these days when it comes to outrage over outrage – and that’s all I’m talking about here. It’s not The Cause or The Protest that I have a problem with, even all the ones I think are stupid. It’s this weird compulsion people have to be angry about other people being angry that confuses me.

Why can’t we just let people be unhappy and express themselves however they want, as long as whatever they’re doing isn’t hurting anyone? (I mean literal hurting here. Butthurt crywhining does not apply.)

I guarantee that a bunch of thick-headed lineman taking a knee during the national anthem didn’t hurt anyone, except maybe themselves because, honestly, have you seen some of those dudes? Their knees are all doing the heavy lifting, is all I’m saying. Kneeling for any reason can’t feel good.

But did it hurt you? At all? Did it take anything away from your life, or do one single thing other than just annoy you a little bit?

I can understand religious people getting their holy knickers in a twist whenever some wackadoo artist decides that putting the baby Jesus in a bucket of pig manure is a good idea, but someone kneeling during the national anthem? How the hell does that even remotely affect your life? It’s not like anyone was trying to make you kneel or anything. Calm down.

At least the religious people might be legit freaked out that their all-powerful sky god is gonna send down a rain of horny toads or something as punishment, but dissing the freaking Star Spangled Banner? What unknowable cosmic horror is that possibly gonna piss off?

You know where things like the national anthem and flag are revered as holy iconography? ALL THE PLACES YOU WANT TO BOMB THE SHIT OUT OF BECAUSE THEY DO THINGS LIKE REVERE THEIR NATIONAL ANTHEMS AND FLAGS AND PICTURES OF DEAR LEADER RIDING BAREBACK THROUGH A STREAM LINED WITH NUCLEAR WARHEADS AND TANKS ON EITHER SHORE.

Or maybe not that specific example, but you get the idea. This is America, kids. Not North Korea.

This is the home of the free and the land of the brave, after all – so how about you snowflakes swallow a courage pill and stand up for that whole freedom part of the song you love so much talks about?

Freedom is ugly. People are going to do and say things that make us want to murder them in the face for being so stupid, because that’s what freedom is all about. People pissing each other off, but somehow still having each other’s backs. You know, like with family.

If people are only free to say and do things you agree with, then you’ve got some Joseph Stalin level bullshit you need to work through, because that crap don’t fly here in the U S of A.

So why all the outrage over other people being outraged? If you don’t like it, just ignore it. IT DOES NOT AFFECT YOU.

Granted, it’d be nice if you’d just stop for a hot second and maybe consider another point of view for once in your miserable, judgmental life, but I know that’s a long wait on a train that don’t come, shepherd. (Great. Now I miss Firefly again.)

But how about instead of being mad at the woman who found Hobby Lobby’s cotton decoration offensive, we just let her be offended and move on with our day? Why do we feel compelled to leave nasty comments on someone’s Facebook share, or post our own furious screed about how stupid and awful this person none of us have ever met must be?

Am I personally offended by cotton stalks being sold as decoration? Nope! I don’t care – but I’m also a palefaced white dude who has no reason to be offended by a tangible reminder of centuries of my people being raised, sold, and killed in bondage to other people. I get the luxury of certain imagery not being a painful reminder of the not-too-distant past on account of how the random accident of my birth had me slosh out of a white lady’s baby hole rather than a black mom’s uterus.

But do I completely understand why someone whose ancestors were victimized and persecuted and enslaved in service of the almighty cotton plantation might take offense to such a thing? Yep. And so, I let her be offended.

By the same token, am I offended by that stupid artist who put the baby Jesus in pig shit (and was probably Yoko Ono but I can’t prove it)? Nope, not at all. I think it was kind of a stupid thing to do and nobody wants to see it, but I’m not offended by it because I have no skin in the holy roller game.

But do I completely understand why someone whose entire life is intractably tied to their faith might take offense to such a thing? Yep. And so, I let them be offended.

What I don’t do is go all Facebook Bugfuck and start posting eight million status updates about how a bunch of football players peacefully protesting the very real problem of systemic racial inequality and societal injustice should be fired or shot, or fired then shot, or any one of the many other horrible things I saw people writing this weekend.

I don’t post a thousand insipid memes whenever some suburban soccer mom gets miffed because her Starbucks cup doesn’t say what she wants it to at Christmas. I let her have her outrage, maybe I snicker about it for a minute, and I move on. As a free American, she has every right to be offended, and it doesn’t matter at all how silly I think the whole thing is.

BECAUSE I LET PEOPLE HATE THINGS.

It’s not hard.

Besides, if you want to stage a counter protest to this whole kneeling business, then the only sensible thing to do would be to stand up during the national anthem. Which is perfect, because it’s not only what you’re supposed to do while the song is playing, it’s also the exact opposite of what the people you hate are doing. Everybody wins!

Next time you start to take offense to someone else taking offense over something, how about you try pouring an ice-cold glass of calm the hell down, and then shut the fuck up. I promise, it’ll be a whole lot more refreshing than that bottle of ragebile you keep gargling.

Of course, this entire essay is basically just me being outraged over outrage over outrage, so what do I know?

I should probably just take my own advice and shut up.

The post Can We Please Stop Being Offended Over People Being Offended? appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

Among all the lies we teach our children in Kindergarten, the most pernicious is the value of integrity. We tell them they should share and play fair when their only objects of desire are whichever toy they’re playing with at any given moment, or the prized plastic shovel the kid who licks his shoes keeps hogging over in the sandbox. We teach them the Golden Rule and tell them to treat others as they would want to be treated. We tell them the world is just, that goodness is its own reward, and that virtue always wins. Basically, we take every decent value of the human condition and slam it like a shiv in the prison yard directly through the anterior fontanelle of their soft little heads – and we do this because it makes them compliant and easier to raise.

Once they get older, they start to learn the real values in life from watching us. They see that we don’t play fair, they hear their parents screaming about the redistribution of wealth, and that sharing is for suckers and caring is for libtards. We show them that the universe isn’t fair, that it’s better to sucker punch the other guy square in the jaw before he ever sees you coming, and that every single value we told them was important in Kindergarten doesn’t mean a high hill of shit in the real world.

But the biggest lie we tell them, we also tell ourselves: that having integrity is good. We all like to think we have it, just like we all like to think we’re excellent drivers, despite however many jellyheaded assholes we encounter on the road – but the real truth, the balls-honest reality of life, is that most people possess about as much actual integrity as a thimbleful of rancid chicken grease. Of course, I’m not talking about you – because you’re obviously the exception. Everyone always is.

Here’s the real secret, kids: integrity makes life harder. Having it means staying consistent in the face of confrontation, of always doing what you feel is right, even when the consequences are nothing but wrong. It means standing up to the school bully knowing you’ll be expelled for your trouble, speaking the truth knowing you’ll be shouted down, and never taking anyone else’s bullshit when they’re wrong.

Having integrity – real, honest, jagged-bone integrity – will make it nearly impossible to find your place in the world, because you won’t fit in anywhere. People don’t want to hear the truth all the time; people want to hear a version of the truth that makes them feel good; a comforting lie that justifies their awfulness, and validates their invalid views. As Harlan Ellison once said (more on him in a minute), “If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; but if you really make them think, they’ll hate you.”

This is the great, unspoken reality of the world, from executives who pay lip service to the quality of their product while only really caring about the bottom line, to people who care about you only up to the point where it stops benefiting them: integrity will get you nowhere.

I am not a virtuous person, although I try to be. I have a long list of sins to my name, and more flaws in my character than an uncut blood diamond smuggled up the ass of a pissed off elephant. I get more things wrong than I ever get right, and my life consists almost entirely of moving from one failure to the next while trying to juggle the 50,000 bowling pins of adulthood without dropping them all. I am a difficult person to know, and an even harder man to live with – as my wife would probably be more than happy to verify – but most of my troubles, most of my failures, and most of my flaws come from one place.

Integrity.

Let me explain.

Sometimes, you’re able to trace events in your life back to a single, defining source. Whether it’s the moment that made you fall in love, or one fateful decision that led to a cascade of dominoes, if you look hard enough and think back far enough, you can almost always find that one key point that changed everything.

I’ve had several of these over the years, but if I had to choose one single, defining moment that made me the way I am, then the first time I read Harlan Ellison would undoubtedly be the singularity that spawned my own, personal universe. For better or worse, Harlan taught me the terrible algebra of integrity, and I’ve lived my life by it.

I’d always been a certain way even as a kid, but exposure to Harlan’s work – particularly, his essays – was a galvanizing experience. I didn’t know then how much of a lasting, permanent impact he would go on to have in my life, but the moment I read the very first words on the very first page of the very first Ellison book I picked up, I could tell something had changed. Something big.

I don’t have many heroes. Never had much use for most of them. My dad was my first and most lasting, always a rock of security and a great example of how to be a husband and a father. But other heroes? They’re too often too human, frail and paper-thin, encased in layers of shiny, impressive armor to keep safe the fragile thing inside. And, too often, the chinks give way and we catch a glimpse of the monster hiding within.

Harlan was never a hero. Never claimed to be, never tried to be. He’s always been stubbornly, obstinately, gloriously human.

Angry, terrifying, intimidating. Caring, understanding, graceful. Warts and polish, all at the same time. He’s never put on any armor, because he’s never had to. He’s never had any illusions to protect. He is what he is: a buoy of truth on an ocean of deceit, and an unreasonable voice of reason. An unstoppable force.

Which made him a hero to me.

As many people hate him as love him, even more have no idea who he is, and even more than those will never realize how greatly he’s influenced so much of what they cherish. And that’s okay. For me, his words, his talent, his passion, and his advice will always guide everything I do, long after he’s gone. Even when I think I don’t want it to, his voice will always be with me, screaming inside my head.

Which pretty much makes me an impossible person.

I don’t have many friends, because people tend to cast off the burdens of their own integrity as they go through life, sacrificing a principle for a promotion at work here, or a long-held personal belief in exchange for getting along with a co-worker there. Every step we take in our treks through life’s desert is another chance to shed one of the heavy winter coats of those values we all learned in Kindergarten, because doing so makes our journeys easier to bear.

But when you don’t do that – when you refuse to compromise – when you truly do what you were shown and taught was the right thing, all the time, all you can do is watch as those around you slowly become other people, until your friends who were progressive and decent once turn into sniveling, keeping-up-with-the-joneses assholes, or the lover you went to bed with in your 20s wakes up with a brand new personality in their 30s. The world changes around you, and people who were once close slowly fade into the distance until all you have of them is a whisp of the memory of who they used to be.

When you don’t compromise your principles, you don’t bend to the changing wind. When you refuse to say the right thing because it’s the wrong thing, you pay the price. When you don’t take anyone’s bullshit when they’re wrong, you’ll never be whatever a “team player” is, and you’re always – always, always, always – going to be The Troublemaker.

The truth is, everyone sells their souls to get by in this miserable world. It’s the price of admission to the great, big theme park of Getting What You Want Out Of Life, and an E-Ticket ride on the flip-flop roller coaster is the key to everything. If, for example, you grow up in the racist South, you either eventually join the club and become a racist yourself, or you find out you don’t fit in, and no one ever invites you to any parties. If you start to toe any line despite your convictions, little by little – innocent concession by innocent concession – you slowly become the thing you once hated. It’s how hippies turned into yuppies, why liberal youth yields to conservative age, and why rebellion erodes into acquiescence.

We all let the world boil our frog, in one way or another, turning up the heat in tiny increments so gradual that we never notice until it’s too late. If anyone ever does have an impossible moment of self-awareness later in life and looks beyond the artifice of their “success” – their manicured lawns and cushy, middle management bullshit jobs – to see the true cost all of it came at, maybe they’ll be able to find a defining moment. Maybe they can trace everything back to one decision that changed everything – but, most likely, they’ll come up empty if they try. Because, while we all sell our souls, most of us do it by the nickle and the dime over decades. It’s impossible to find where it all went wrong, because it’s always been wrong.

Because you never really had any integrity.

When you don’t have integrity, you can tell people what they want to hear to get ahead.
When you don’t have integrity, you get to stand silent amidst injustice, and be rewarded for your privilege.
When you don’t have integrity, every road is smooth and leads downhill.
When you don’t have integrity, you can talk a great game while standing on the corpses of everyone you betrayed for success, and feel no irony.

All of that changes when you don’t yield to pressure, when you don’t bend and you never compromise. Nothing gets any easier when you can see every nuance of any issue, but ultimately know that every single problem in life comes down to Right or Wrong. True or False. Black or white. Terry Prattchett once wrote, “There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby.”

He wasn’t wrong.

If you have integrity, you can’t ever be a corporate Yes Man.
If you have integrity, you can never go with the flow.
If you have integrity, every road is the one less taken.
If you have integrity, each day brings a new fight.

I’m no saint, I’m not the smartest guy in the room, I’m a terrible friend and probably a worse husband, but the one thing I’m not is a liar. I always tell the truth, even for stupid, harmless things. I refuse to let my white get grubby, which means if a friend asks for my advice when what they really want is validation or absolution, I tell them the painful truth and they hate me for it. If my wife asks me if the dinner she spent all day preparing is good, I won’t say it is if it isn’t, and I needlessly hurt her feelings. If – as regularly happened when I was working in the world of government contracting – the boss tells me to over-bill a contract because it’s what everyone does, I won’t do it. If throwing a co-worker under the bus would save me a reprimand for my mistake, I jump in front of it myself – but if it’s someone else’s screwup, I’ll make damn sure everyone knows it and he can just go die on his own damn cross.

I also fight everyone. All the time. I’ve gone toe-to-toe with powerful politicians and scheming millionaires. I’ve faced down scary law firms and private stalkers. I’ve tangled with massive corporations, and been slapped with more cease and desist letters than I can remember. And I’ve always won – even when I’ve lost, and lost big. Because the real battle isn’t over exposing this corruption, or that lie, or losing this friend on that principle, or any of the other bullshit. The real war is over my soul, with integrity as my best and only defense.

Harlan taught me that. He once told me, “You’re one of the good ones, kid” – and I’ve done my best to live up to his compliment, because the man does not dole out praise lightly. I’ve had ridiculous views in my life, backward and ignorant and stupid. The conversation that ended with Harlan saying what he did started as a debate over one of those wrongheaded views, and only turned out well because I realized he was right, and I was wrong – and I had the integrity to admit it, and change my beliefs.

Having integrity isn’t about never changing at all; it’s about never changing what makes you tick, deep down, in your gut. It’s about always doing what you think is the right thing regardless of the consequence, and it’s knowing that every new experience can and should change your perception – but it’s never about adapting to the status quo because it’s easier. Honestly, most of the time it’s shooting yourself in the foot and being proud of yourself for it. Like an idiot.

The trouble with integrity is that it’s a really dumb thing to cling to. It makes fitting in anywhere impossible, it destroys relationships, and it salts every square inch of the scorched earth you leave smoldering in your wake. It’ll make you an honest dollar, but it won’t ever make you rich.

And it’s totally worth it.

ALL THAT BEING SAID, has this whole essay been a self-congratulatory missive on my own quiet nobility? Eh, maybe. If you want it to be. It’s not my intention, but writing is never a one-sided endeavor. It’s a collaboration between the writer and the reader, and you’re gonna take from it whatever you feel like walking away with. What I intend my message to be – what I hope it is – isn’t that I’m some swell, misunderstood dude – that’s bullshit. I’m a thick-headed asshole. I don’t want anyone to walk away from this post thinking it was all about how terrific I am. I mean, who the fuck am I to you? A big, fat nobody. I’m just using my own, personal experience as an example of what clinging to one’s principles like a stubborn junkyard dog gets you in life. I’m mostly a failure as an adult. I’ve never found my place in the world, and I probably never will. I’ve ruined more relationships than I can count, burned more bridges than there are rivers to cross, and I piss people off without meaning to. All the time. I’m easy-going and easy to get along with…right up until Something Happens. And something always happens.

My point is, I don’t know how to be any other way – and I wouldn’t want to be. Being right (even when I’m too dumb to know I’m wrong) will always be more important to me than being happy. I can’t explain why I never back down, or why my fight-or-flight response is permanently stuck on fight-or-fight. It’s stupid! I’m an idiot for living the way I go through life. It won’t ever win me any friends, doesn’t get me anywhere professionally, and it’s pretty much just an albatross of liability hanging around my neck that I refuse to take off.

I have acquaintances who have never compromised their integrity, yet went on on to enjoy much-deserved success. They have rows of novels lining bookstore shelves, hit TV shows on the air, and blockbuster movies in theaters. They figured out how to do it. They learned the terrible algebra and managed to solve the equation. I haven’t. Not yet, anyway. Maybe I’m not smart enough, maybe I haven’t tried hard enough, or maybe I’m just not talented enough. Maybe it’s all of those things and more. I don’t know what I don’t know, but I do know that I don’t know a lot. All I can do is keep trying, and remember this: The only difference between a happy ending and a sad one is where you stop the story, and I’m not done. I’ll never be done.

If you can walk away from this thinking I’m holding myself up as some kind of paragon of virtue or an example to live by, then I’ve failed entirely at what I set out to do.

Wouldn’t be the first time.
Won’t be the last.

But fuck you if you think I’ll ever change.

The post The Trouble With Integrity appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

I posted that to Facebook in response to many of my Conservative friends who continue to rage against “Liberals” (or Liberal’s, because they never quite learned how apostrophes work) who they see as the only people who would oppose President Donald Trump. And, if he were anyone or any president other than Donald Trump, they might be right. But when it comes to this guy, they couldn’t be more wrong if they tried. And they are trying. Hard.

I’ve disliked some presidents before, and I’ve disagreed, to some degree, with every president. I don’t agree with everything Barack Obama did, and I’m still upset over a lot of things he didn’t do. I disagreed with almost everything George W. Bush did, but he did get a few things right. Bill Clinton was a handful of diamonds in a bagful of snakes, and I disliked almost every aspect of the man himself, even while I agreed with most – but certainly not all – of his policies.

The point is, this is normal. No one should like everything a president does, and most people don’t. However, over recent memory, the dividing line between Liberal and Conservative has become so strong that almost every single political issue comes down to an Us vs. Them situation, where people pick their team and cheer from the sidelines like we’re all watching some kind of bizarre game of Presidential Football. It’s become entertainment, and a means of self-identification every bit as important to people as all the other stupid things we’ve been told define us, like the cars we drive or the clothes we wear.

For most presidents, that would be fine. That is, in fact, how it has been for more presidents. But Donald Trump is not most presidents.

Donald Trump is a menace.

Opposing what President Trump has been doing while in office for just over a week isn’t a fight over Liberal or Conservative ideals. It’s a battle for the soul of our nation. Trump isn’t playing along party lines, and he doesn’t seem to care what effects his actions will have either on individuals or the country itself. He’s changing the paradigm of what it means to be an American by undermining the very bedrock upon which our nation was built.

I’m told tweeting politics hurts book sales + I should just write my novel. But when country’s burning down around me, silence = cowardice.

— tess gerritsen (@tessgerritsen) January 28, 2017

In short, President Donald Trump may very well prove to be the biggest threat to democracy America has ever faced. Which is something that should concern all of us, regardless of which side of the political fence we each sit on.

I’m not going to go through an itemized list of every executive action Trump has taken so far, because I only want to focus on the most dangerous ones. For example, messing with the ACA was inevitable and, for better or worse, healthcare reform has and will always remain a partisan issue. Things that follow the established party lines are expected, and people are right to scream Liberal vs. Conservative whenever they come up. They’re not my focus here.

Instead, let’s talk about things like Trump freezing regulations, which is a preamble to dismantling regulations. That, by itself, is kind of a Conservative issue, but when you add in Trump’s gag order affecting government entities like the EPA, it gets a little darker. First, we get rid of the regulations that, while flawed, were put in place to protect and preserve American lives and our environment. Then, he gags the EPA so they can’t release any information on studies proving what a bad idea getting rid of all the regulations was until that hard science has been screened and doctored by political hacks. It all adds up to a conspiracy of silence that will hurt us all, even as it dramatically benefits a few.

Transparency is the cornerstone of a functioning democracy (or Democratic Republic, as someone is bound to scream at me). We have to know what our government is up to if we’re going to keep a watchful eye on it as good citizens and mindful stewards of our future. Obfuscating the truth, forcing impartial scientific findings to be reviewed and approved by a partisan political committee, and crippling the regulatory agencies charged with the very function of protecting the best interests of Americans against the best interests of those who would exploit our land and water and air for profit is the exact opposite of transparency. It’s hiding the truth because there’s something there worth hiding.

Words are important. Trump’s decision to refer to the media as “the opposition party” is significant. It’s nationalist populism taken one step further, and a natural extension of the Us vs. Them mentality, only now it’s not Republicans against Democrats, but Trump against anyone who would oppose him. He  is attempting to redefine the federal government as an extension of his brand. In his mind, there is only himself – and you’re either with him, or against him. Which is why he identifies the media as the opposition party – because he wants you to think only the media and its reporting oppose him.

And when truth becomes the opposition…

Make no mistake, either. In newsrooms and boardrooms and conference rooms across the country, employees are being told to either stay neutral and not comment on politics at all – neither professionally nor personally – or they’re being told to only come out on Trump’s side. This is not an exaggeration, either. Several of my colleagues at different media outlets – both in typical, impartial newsrooms where it’s expected, and in more informal, editorial and opinion-related lines of work – have been warned to either go pro-Trump or keep quiet. Which is fine when you work for a private corporation that owns the sentences you write or the words you say professionally, but when they want to take your personal, non-professional voice away? That’s a problem.

Dear fellow Americans: Steve Bannon’s attack on journalists is an attack on you, too. Silence us = silence you. #connectthedots #journalism

— Connie Schultz (@ConnieSchultz) January 26, 2017

What do we have in a democracy, if not our voices of dissent? Trump himself has called the validity of our electoral process – the very core of our political system – into question. As retired US Navy Chief Warrant Officer, Jim Wright, pointed out, this puts the very Republic in jeopardy. If we don’t have a valid electoral process in place, then we do not have a valid government. If Trump truly means what he says, then we must have an immediate overhaul of our process to strengthen and guarantee its validity, then we must have new elections for every office in every branch of government in the entire country.

Of course, it won’t come to that. This is all just more theater President Trump is putting on as a master showman. But it’s having a chilling effect on another core principle of our country: our freedom of speech. Yes, the 1st Amendment only protects you from governmental interference with your right to express yourself, but when the companies we work for (which is not at all limited to the media, as this couple found out) begin policing our personal voices on behalf of a government they follow either out of blind respect or abject fear, then it becomes everyone’s problem. Because soon, I fear the only thing we’ll have are our voices.

If we’re not careful, the title of one of Harlan Ellison’s classic short stories could easily become the tagline of every single one of us in Trump’s America: I HAVE NO MOUTH, AND I MUST SCREAM.

Getting back to Trump’s policies, let’s move on to his Great Wall of America, which I suspect has less to do with border security and more to do with Trump just wanting to erect a massive monument to his fragile ego. In his mind, he’s Emperor Qin Shi Huang, ordering construction of the actual Great Wall. Or maybe he sees it as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, or the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. Whichever wonder he’s attempting to construct, you can be certain it doesn’t have anything to do with making America great again. He just wants a lasting, eternal monument to himself, and he’s using the wall to get it.

It took my 10-year-old all of five seconds to dismiss Trump’s wall as lunacy. He’s no great student of Geography or anything, which is something we’ve been working on pretty hard in his Social Studies class, but he is learned enough in the general shape of our country to realize that walls can’t cover the ocean. There’s a reason Border Patrol agents run back and forth along the Gulf Coast – just as they go up and down the East and West coasts – because coastlines are borders, too. Erecting a wall over roughly 2,000 miles of dry (and sometimes mountainous) terrain will be hard (and expensive) enough, but unless Trump is also planning to wrap the entire Gulf Coast and most of the Floridian peninsula in his giant concrete freedom condom, it’s not going to do much of anything. Which is something my 10-year-old observed when he pointed out that they have boats in Mexico. And planes.

The wall is an enormous waste of money and resources, but beyond that, it’s distinctly un-American. We are a nation of immigrants. My ancestors immigrated to this country, and so did yours. And yours. (And you too, way in the back with your head down. I can see you.)

Closing off our borders and erecting massive walls is a far cry from welcoming new people into that great big melting pot we all learned about in school. Which leads me to my next point…

The refugee and immigration ban.

Trump signed this particular action on January 27, which also happened to be Holocaust Remembrance Day, which I guess is something Trump forgot about. The Holocaust, I mean, not the remembrance day. It’s fine to chant, “Never again” as long as you’re actually working to make sure it never happens again, but cutting off refugees seeking asylum in America who will quite likely die if they can’t leave the nightmare of their homeland behind? That’s kind of doing the opposite of never letting it happen again. It’s guaranteeing that it will happen again. Because it’s happening right now.

1939: Dear Jews, sorry you’re being murdered in your own countries but you can’t come here

1945: Never again!

2016: Dear Muslims…

— Stonekettle (@Stonekettle) January 28, 2017

When Trump says he wants to make America great again, I have to wonder what part of American history he’s hoping to go back to, exactly.

Is he going for the period of isolationism that kept us from entering World War II until it was nearly too late, and that saw us turning away thousands of refugees fleeing Nazi persecution until they ended up murdered by the millions in places like Auschwitz?

Maybe he’s aiming for the so-called Roaring Twenties that greatly benefited a small few while driving inequity between the have’s and the have not’s to untenable proportions until the greed and reckless financial practices all came crashing down and kicked off the single greatest economic disaster our country has ever faced?

Or maybe he just wants to turn the clock back to a time when a woman’s place was barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, and a black man’s place was gasping for breath while dodging the master’s whip out in the cotton field?

I don’t know. Maybe he wants all of them. Maybe he wants that elusive (and entirely fictional) version of an America-That-Never-Was that the Religious Right has been promoting for decades now, because everything he’s doing certainly points to that. Women don’t need control over their own bodies in Trump’s America. Latinos don’t belong in Trump’s America, stealing jobs from hard-working white Christians in Trump’s America. Facts have no place in Trump’s America, until they’ve been passed through and massaged by Trump’s Alternative Fact Machine.

Listen. Trump isn’t a Republican. He’s not a Democrat. He’s neither Conservative nor Liberal. He’s a demagogue, and he’s dangerous.

I don’t want to live divided by a wall in Cold War-era Berlin.
I don’t want to live an isolationist, North Korean dictatorship.
I don’t want to live in the ugly past of our great nation.

I want to live in America. In 2017. Where we keep moving forward, not backward.

Don’t you?

#RESIST

The post #Resist appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

None of this is remotely true, which means it’s all real. More or less. The first Cajun Thanksgiving was probably a lot like the first Thanksgiving anywhere, just with more alligators and fewer pilgrim hats. Then again, no one who was there is still around to tell anybody what it was really like, so this is probably exactly how it happened.

THE FIRST CAJUN THANKSGIVING

A short, round man with a short, round face crinkled his brow in confusion, then tilted his head to one side and asked, “What you think them is, Thibaut?”

“I dunno, Remy,” replied a taller, more rectangular man. “But we gotta cook ‘em.”

“How?”

“Fry ‘em, maybe?” replied Thibaut.

Remy pointed at the strange creatures hopping around over by the shed. “They ain’t no chickens, though” he said.

“Yeah,” replied Thibaut. “But they still birds. We can probably fry ‘em.”

Remy took a step toward The Things That Were Not Chickens, which the five not-chickens took as an act of aggression against their sovereign nation of Over By The Shed and, in response, began to sing the song of their people.

Gobble, gobble, gobble

Remy jumped back. “Who dat?!”

Thibaut ran up next to his friend and tugged on his shoulder. “Get back, Remy! Them chickens is hostile!”

“MAIS!” shouted Remy, as Thibaut pulled him to the ground. “Whatcha know about dat?”

The pair scrambled across the ground until they’d put a safe distance between themselves and the not-chickens. They eyed the area over by the shed. The not-chickens eyed them back.

“Whatcha think dat flappy thing is?” asked Remy.

“Darned if I know,” replied Thibaut. “But it don’t look natural.”

“No,” said Remy, shaking his head. “It don’t.”

“We need a plan.”

“No. We need a gun.”

Thibaut turned his head and called out to someone in the house. “Hey, Mary!” he shouted. “Catch me my scattergun!”

Remy shook his head. “We gonna be picking shot out them chickens for days, Thibaut.”

“They ain’t chickens, Remy. Besides, whatcha wanna do? Get pecked to death?”

The backdoor of the house opened, and a stern looking woman appeared, carrying a shotgun. “Whatcha need dis for?”

“To kill them things,” replied Thibaut, pointing a quivering finger toward the shed.

Mary walked up next to the frightened men and held out the shotgun. “Why you need a shotgun, though?”

Remy jumped up. “Because they’s hostile!” he shouted, never taking his eyes of the not-chickens.

In her late fifties, Mary had a gravel voice from decades of chain smoking, and the years had not been kind to her skin, which now resembled something more like thin strips of animal hide spread over yellowed parchment like some kind of leathery, sun-bleached paper mache nightmare.

“Hostile?” she asked. “Of course they’s hostile. We ‘bout to cook ‘em up!”

“You don’t understand,” replied Remy. “They’s organized, too.”

“Whatcha mean?”

Thibaut nodded toward Remy. “He took one step toward them, and they’s all started caterwauling something awful, Mary. You ain’t never heard such a sound! And dat one over there,” he said, pointing at the largest, meanest looking Thing That Was Not A Chicken, “I think dat’s their leader.”

Mary scoffed. “So,” she said. “Kill it first, then. Make an example.”

“Whatcha think I’m about to do with dis scattergun?”

“Make a mess,” replied Mary. “I ain’t about to be spittin’ shot out my mouth all Thanksgiving.”

“You got a better idea?” asked Thibaut.

“Yeah,” she said. “I do.”

In one smooth motion, Mary moved her hand to her hip, then raised it again, only now it was holding a giant pistol.

She turned and pointed the hand cannon at the biggest not-chicken, which eyeballed her with contempt. Then, she pulled the trigger. And it would never eyeball anything again.

“GLORY!” shouted Remy. “You blew its whole dang head off!”

The not-chicken’s headless body stood still for a moment, not quite sure what had just happened to it. Then, with no brain left to figure things out, it eventually gave up and collapsed to the ground.

“There,” said Mary, handing her pistol to Thibaut and squinting her eyes. “Now see to the rest.”

********

No one knows when the first turkeys appeared in Louisiana, but everyone generally agrees that it was probably by accident. Especially the turkeys.

The first Cajun Thanksgiving happened many years after the first American Thanksgiving with the pilgrim hats and shoe buckles crowd. It’s hard to pin an exact year down on it, though, because time passes differently in the swamp. Slower, usually. Except for when you’re being chased by an alligator or almost step on a cottonmouth. Things tend to speed up pretty fast after that.

Louisiana didn’t even become part of the union until April 30, 1812, and then the War of 1812 broke out a couple months later. Which was probably just coincidence, but you never know. What we do know is that a bunch of pirates and Cajuns (and probably Cajun pirates) ended it with the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, and the UK never attacked America again, so…

The point is, you don’t mess with Louisiana, despite what Texas says.

This is something the turkeys Over By The Shed learned very quickly the morning of the first Cajun Thanksgiving, which was, not coincidentally, the turkeys’ very last Thanksgiving.

********

“Whoo, boy! Dat’s a mess, right dere,” said Remy.

The war for control of Over By The Shed had not gone cleanly. Various bits of not-chicken littered the battlefield, and there were feathers everywhere.

“Yeah, well, they’s dead,” replied Thibaut.

Remy crossed his arms and shrugged. “What we gonna do now?”

“I guess we gotta pluck ‘em,” said Thibaut. “And then figure out how we gonna cook ‘em up.”

“We ain’t frying them?” asked Remy.

“Maybe one,” said Thibaut. “We’ll heat up some lard and toss one in. After Mary does her whatevers to it, ‘course.”

Mary’s “whatevers” was a term used to refer to the mysterious black magic voodoo she routinely performed in the kitchen. The men didn’t understand it, but they knew better than to ask questions.

The thing about Louisiana in the days before interstate commerce and international shipping was that there were very few things native to the state that were actually edible. At first glance, anyway. And second glance. Straight down through eighty-fifth glance, at which point you were so hungry that you’d just give up and try anything.

Which is how Cajun cuisine happened.

Creatures in the swamp tended to sloop and droop, if they did anything at all. Others just tried to eat you. But apart from a few fish, the last thing any sane person would do is consider putting anything that creeps and crawls along the bayou into their mouths.

However, it was precisely because there wasn’t much to cook in Louisiana that local chefs were willing to try anything and everything. Which explains crawfish, really.

Early Louisiana settlers had to be just a little bit crazy, otherwise they’d have starved and died out long before some confused turkeys stumble-gobbled their way into the state.

Of course, just heating something up doesn’t make it taste good, which is where the voodoo comes in. A good Cajun cook can crush the gnarled roots of some unpronounceable plant into a powder, then add some butter and mix the resulting paste with a few drops of bayou water and a couple of pinches off some otherwise deadly leaf before stirring in a bucket full of unidentifiable tails and tentacles to produce a culinary masterpiece that good boys would slap their mamas for.

Mary was one of those cooks.

********

Remy hauled one of the not-chicken carcasses into the kitchen and dropped it on the countertop.

“You best go pluck dat,” she said.

“I can’t, me,” replied Remy. “We gotta clean up the rest of thems.”

“Fine,” grunted Mary, as she scooped up the not-chicken. “How you want me to cook dis one?”

“Thibaut says fry it in some lard,” replied Remy.

“Dat man wanna fry everything. Okay, then,” she said, getting to work on getting rid of the feathers.

Remy went back outside, and Thibaut waved him over to the shed.

“I got me another idea,” he shouted.

As Remy got closer, he could see Thibaut was already working at the feathers of the next bird. “We gonna grill dis one,” he said. Then, he pointed at the rest of the not-chickens. “And dat one we gonna smoke, dat other one we gonna stick it on a beer can and cook it up some on a fire so dat beer gonna boil right up its wherevers*.”

(*The first beer available to buy in cans came out in 1935, which moves our story somewhen into the 20th century. News usually takes a while to swim through the hot water-air of the Deep South. Holidays aren’t any different.)

Remy shrugged and grabbed one of the birds. The two worked on plucking them clean for the next hour or so.

“Go fire up the grill,” said Thibaut as he unceremoniously yanked the final feathers from the last not-chicken. “Take these two,” he said, handing a couple of the birds off to Remy. “I’ll get the smoker going.”

Mary wandered outside with a large pot full of lard, which she put over the trash fire pit the trio always left smoldering. She tossed some old junk on the pile, then grabbed a handful of lard from the pot and tossed it into the fire pit. By the time she went back into the house and came out with the not-chicken, the fire was blazing.

“Dis one ain’t gonna take too long,” she called out to Remy and Thibaut in the distance.

Remy shouted back. “These ones gonna need about tree hours!”

“Good!” hollered Mary. “We can snack on dis one while we wait on them other ones.”

Once all four of the not-chickens were cooking away, Remy, Mary, and Thibaut gathered around the trash fire pit.

“Dis gonna be a good Thanksgiving,” said Thibaut.

“What’s it all about, anyway?” asked Remy.

“What’s what about?” replied Thibaut.

“Thanksgiving.”

Thibaut rubbed his neck. “I dunno,” he replied. “But I think it’s somethin’ to do with we eat these here birds and then we say thanks.”

“Who are we thanking, though? Mister Clovis down at the hard-to-get-to store? And what is these birds, anyway?”

Mary chimed in. “Turkeys,” she replied in the smug voice of know-it-alls everywhere. “They’re called turkeys.”

“How you know dat?”

“Because dat’s what Clovis called ‘em down at the store.”

“Where they come from?”

Mary shrugged. “I dunno. Ask Clovis.”

Thibaut sniffed the air. “They sure smell good, though.”

Mary and Remy took their own sniffs. “Dat they do,” they replied, in unison. “Dat they do.”

The trio was enjoying their fried turkey and smacking their lips when Remy paused mid-chew. He turned his head and looked over his left shoulder. He blinked. He turned and looked over his right shoulder. He blinked again.

“Um, Thibaut?” he asked.

“What dat, Remy?”

“How many of them turkeys we got?”

“Whatchoo mean? We got dis one right here. Them others is cookin’ up, they.”

Chewing resumed, but the talking didn’t.

A few minutes later, Thibaut glanced over Remy’s left shoulder, then his right. “Um,” he said. “Why you ask for?”

“Well,” said Remy. “When we was first attacked over by the shed, they was five of thems, right?”

Mary chimed in. “I got five of them from Mr. Clovis, dat’s right.”

Remy nodded. “Only,” he said, “we got dis one right here we’s eatin’ on now, and we got dat one on the grill,” he continued, counting out with his fingers as he went down the line, “then dat other one over in the smoker, and one what we done sat on a beer can to boil up its wherevers.”

“Yeah?” replied Thibaut. “So?”

“So,” said Mary, ice dripping from the word, “one’s missing.”

It was at that moment, due to the narrative laws of story logic imposed upon an otherwise disinterested universe, that the Lone Turkey emerged from the backside of the shed. Its beady bird eyes glared in defiance.

It charged.

“GLORY!” shouted Remy, as he dropped his half-eaten fried turkey leg and scrambled to stand up. “THEY’S COME BACK FOR REVENGE!”

Thibaut sprang to his feet, accidentally kicking over the pot of lard still resting over the fire. “HOLY MOTHER!” he shouted, as the lard ignited and summoned forth the flames of perdition from the trash fire pit.

“Get the scattergun!” shouted Mary, as she shoved her way between Remy and Thibaut, searching for the shotgun.

Remy tripped over his own feet and fell head first into what was left of the fried turkey. The fires of the trash pit billowed the heavy, black smoke of used tires smoldering over an open flame, and the air grew thick with the smell of rubber and lard, and probably a bit of Remy’s hair, since the turkey he fell into was still quite hot on the inside.

“Murfle himmerphlist!” shouted Remy from inside the smoking remains of the deep fried turkey carcass. He threw his hands in the air and began running madly around, in much the same way a not-chicken with its head cut off would.

Thibaut spotted the shotgun just as the Lone Chicken appeared through the smoke and fire like some kind of bobbling vengeance demon from the very depths of Hades. He dove for the scattergun.

Gobble gobble gobble!

Mary spied the gun at the same time, and also dove for it. Her head met Thibaut’s with an audible crack, and the two began to roll around on the ground, clutching at their skulls.

Quack quack quack!

Thibaut, slightly concussed at this point and not at all well, attempted to shake it off and come to terms with what was going on around him. Had he just heard a gobble and a quack?

Waddling just behind the Lone Turkey was an angry duck, its eyes alight with the furious fire of righteous indignation reflected in its beak. And just behind the duck…

Cluck cluck cluck!

Remy pulled the smoldering fried turkey carcass off his head just in time to see three devil birds – the forgotten turkey, an angry duck, and an unapologetic chicken, all barreling toward him at breakneck wobble. The Lone Turkey had recruited allies.

“GLORY!” he shouted. “THEY’S ORGANIZED AGAIN!” He threw his hands back into the air, turned around, and ran screaming toward the house.

Mary was lying semi-unconscious, still reeling from her head smack with Thibaut, who didn’t have long to act.

Thibaut reached for the shotgun just as the poultry death squad was almost on him, beaks at the ready. In unison, they lunged toward him, a mass of feathers and wobbly bits and rage.

He pointed the business end of his boomstick at the approaching trio, closed his eyes, and pulled the trigger.

*BOOM*

********

When the smoke and feathers cleared, all three of the birds were dead. And, after having been hit at point blank range with a shotgun, were now in pieces scattered around the fire pit.

Remy peeked out from the backdoor of the house. “Is it over?” he asked.

Mary had come to, and was busy collecting up the various bits of turkey and duck and chicken scattered about the place. “Yes,” she said. “Now come out here and help.

For his part, Thibaut was still traumatized and remained silent, his fingers clenched tightly around the shotgun’s trigger.

“Don’t mind him,” said Mary. “Catch me my roasting pan.”

********

Mary went into the kitchen with various bits of three different birds piled onto separate plates. Never one to let anything go to waste, she set upon each pile with a pinch of this and a sprinkle of that, until her occult culinary ritual was complete. She then grabbed the turkey, which was mostly still intact, and took a handful of duck along with a handful of chicken and got to work.

A few hours later, the Turducken was born.

********

Remy, Mary, and Thibaut sat down to Thanksgiving dinner later that night, with four gorgeous turkeys set before them on the table (what was left of the fifth one after they were done snacking on it was tossed into the eternal flame of the trash fire pit).

“So what we do now?” asked Thibaut.

Mary smiled. “We all hold hands, then we take turns saying what we’s thankful for,” she explained.

“I’ll go first,” volunteered Remy.

Mary and Thibaut nodded.

“I’m thankful for these four turkeys dat ain’t chickens. Dat fried one was good, but gave me an ahnvee somethin’ awful.”

“My turn,” said Thibaut. “I’m thankful for dis turkey we done gave the cabris to with dat duck and chicken.”

Mary cleared her throat. “I,” she began, “am thankful for the turkeys and the ducks and the chickens. I’m thankful for Remy and Thibaut and Mama, rest her soul. I’m thankful we got food to eat and friends to share it with.”

The three thankful people all smiled at each other, which soon turned awkward when none of them knew what to do next.

“What now?” asked Remy.

“Maybe we say Amen or something’?” suggested Thibaut.

“Amen,” said Mary.

“Amen,” replied Remy and Thibaut.

********

That’s how the First Cajun Thanksgiving happened, or at least it’s how I imagine it happened. I don’t know when it happened or exactly where it happened, but I do know that deep frying turkey or cooking it on a beer can is delicious, and both methods were born in Louisiana.

The origins of the Turducken remain in dispute, with everyone from Paul Prudhomme to a surgeon in New Orleans claiming to have invented it. However, history never remembers the Thibauts and Remys and Marys of the world, who are usually the true inventors of all the good things that fancier people come along and take credit for later.

Not that any of it matters, really. The First Cajun Thanksgiving happened however anyone wants to remember it, which is just how things work in Louisiana. It’s a state that does what it wants when it wants, and it doesn’t need anyone’s approval to do anything.

Which works out well for the rest of the country, since everything Louisiana does always turns out delicious.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING, AMERICA!

The post The First Cajun Thanksgiving appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

June 4, 2018

Two years to the day, a grim anniversary. It doesn’t seem like that long, but still somehow feels longer.

A few days ago, a calendar reminder. May 31st. Would’ve been 71, if my math is right. It probably isn’t. I was never a very good son when it came to remembering things, and now I can’t forget. Funny how that works.

Time marches on. Always forward, forever trampling the present. Relentless. All we can do is look back into the distance as the current carries us ever onward, and watch what was once bright and big and here grow dim and small and there…until one day, it fades into the horizon.

After that, it’s only memories.

And we can never forget.

March 19, 2018

It’s been nearly two years, and weird things keep popping up from time to time, to remind me of my mother and make me sad about her passing all over again. The other day, it was a minor issue with the kid’s school that I mixed into in much the same way she would do to me when I was a kid. When it was resolved and I’d achieved a small victory, I wanted to call her to tell her about it. I thought she’d be proud of me, and laugh about how I’m following her example.

But I couldn’t.

Today, I had to start the process of having her removed from an account of mine I forgot she was still on, after I received a notice in the mail regarding updating her records. Of course, I couldn’t do it over the phone because they require, among other things, a copy of her death certificate.

The cruel mundanity of bureaucracy.

I was able to update some of the records, though. But I had to think about it. The one question that stumped me was when they asked for the date of her death, and all I could remember was that it was in the summer of 2016. After thinking about it for way too long, trying to remember, I was able to recall getting the call in early June, but that’s it. The days, the moments, everything all started blurring together the second I hung up the phone that day.

Fortunately, I had this post to go back to. I pulled it up and determined the date, which I still don’t know is entirely accurate. I’ve always been bad with dates – I can tell you when my parents’ birthdays are, for example, but can’t tell you their birth years – and I definitely can’t remember much of anything that happened after that call.

I still have to get with my dad to get a copy of the certificate, and then we have to go file paperwork…which will all probably happen at some distant time in the future because I really don’t care about the formality of removing her name from the account.

I kind of like that it’s there, even though I’d forgotten about it.

Which, I think, is the way it goes with parents.
We like them to be there, even though we tend to forget to let them know.

I wish I’d remembered more often.

June 13, 2016

My mom died a week ago this past Saturday. Her funeral was last Wednesday. We buried her Thursday. And that’s all I have to say about that.

I hadn’t planned on writing anything about her passing, but it’s my first day back at work since the funeral, and all the grief I’ve suppressed by placing it on the back burner of my mind threatens to boil over and ruin the stove. My mind rages against the banality of a normal Monday morning, chittering away inside my braincase, demanding acknowledgment.

So I’m acknowledging it.

Publicly, for anyone to read.

Because the thing about parents is that everyone has them. And everyone will, one day, lose them. Maybe you’ve already lost yours. If so, then I’ll trade you my sympathies in exchange for a membership card to the exclusive club you’re in that no one ever wants to join.

I know this because I’m a member now. But I don’t want to be.

I’ve spent most of my time since I got The Call that Saturday, worrying about my dad. He was completely devoted to my mom for 45 years, and somehow even more dedicated the past several years. Back in the late ‘90s, she was diagnosed with cancer, and he dropped everything to take care of her. Eventually, the cancer went into remission, but her body never really came back. If cancer is a scary monster, then chemotherapy is the even scarier monster that eats other monsters. And it takes a toll.

The past few years, as her health deteriorated, all he did was care for her. It’s all he knows. How do you go back to “normal” when everything that was normal is gone?

That’s not a rhetorical question, either. I honestly don’t know the answer, but I think it probably involves some kind of squishy, new age, Deepak Chopra logic where some kindly, well-meaning jellyhead tells you that you can’t go back to where things were. That you have to move on to a new place, develop new routines, and find new things to live for.

Which might be true, but it’s probably crap.

Like everything else everyone always says when someone dies.

I didn’t want to go up to my mom’s casket during the funeral, but managed to work up the strength at the last minute, just before it was closed forever. I don’t like open caskets. I don’t like looking at dead people, and having that image be something that pops up in the slideshow of my memory every time I think of someone I’ve loved who’s gone.

But everyone kept telling me it would help me find closure, so I did it.

I went up to the casket and looked at my mom while people patted me on the back and whispered words I didn’t hear, and then I didn’t get any closure at all.

Because closure is crap.

I didn’t need to find a firm answer to my mom’s death to eliminate ambiguity in my mind. She died. It’s not ambiguous. She’s gone, and she’s never coming back. That’s as firm as you get.

I think what people meant is that seeing her body lying there would help me deal with things. That putting a finality to the Finality of the situation would help me close the book on all the chapters of my life that had my mom in them.

Which is also crap.

My mom died, but she raised me. She taught me about the world. She gave me an incredible childhood, and showed me what it means to be a parent. She’ll always be a character in my life story, even if she doesn’t get any more dialog.

Except she does.

Every time I’m about to do something I know I shouldn’t, I’ll hear her voice telling me right from wrong. Whenever I’m nervous about doing something risky, I’ll hear her give me the same advice she always gave me growing up, and then I’ll probably ignore it like I always did and end up regretting it later. Like I always have.

I’ll hear her every Christmas, when I’m planning my kid’s holiday. I’ll hear her insisting we BAKE ALL THE THINGS, even if no one even likes whatever Russian Tea Cakes are. I’ll hear her voice every Thanksgiving, going over her recipe as I make the macaroni and cheese casserole everyone loves.

If closure means giving all that up, you can keep it.

But now it’s Monday morning, and I’m back at work. I’ve taken my bereavement days, so I should be fine now, right? Judging by all the people knocking on my office door for every little thing today, I guess I should be. Grieving time is over. Back to the grind.

It’s nice to be needed, though. To know my absence was felt while I was away, and that people are happy I’m back. It still feels weird, though.

Things that seemed super important a few weeks ago seem less important now. I know they’re not. I know it’s my job to treat every problem as urgent and critical, but it’s hard going back to normal after everything changes.

Which brings me back to my dad, and how he doesn’t have a normal to go back to. He hasn’t known anything other than taking care of my mom for years, and he’s never been one to take care of himself before anyone else. I don’t know what he’s going to do, but I’m sure whatever it is will have nothing at all to do with closure.

I managed to convince him to come stay with us for a little while, after the burial. He needed to get out of that familiar house, the familiar setting, the familiar couch and bed and all the utilitarian, antiseptic props that accumulate when you’re caring for someone who’s dying.

He spent most of the time this weekend upstairs, asleep or just being alone. Processing, I guess. As much as anyone can.

We got him out of the house a little bit yesterday, though. Although he hasn’t lived here in decades, he grew up in this city, so we drove around and just got out for a little while.

We took him to the awesome Central Library, near the home he grew up in. We drove by and showed him where my kid goes to school. We went to Dollar Tree and Kroger, and ate lunch at one of my favorite places to take visitors.

He smiled a few times. Even laughed once. The first steps down a new road. A lonelier path, but walkable.

All I can do is be there for him when he needs me, and maybe walk in front of him with a machete, cutting away some of the overgrowth on the unused path ahead. Or maybe this is a stupid metaphor, and I need to wrap this up.

If you still have your parents, give them a call. I know they can be annoying, but trust me. Eventually, you’ll miss all those obnoxious phone calls you hate getting right now.

Pause the show and answer the phone when you’re having dinner in front of the TV.

Go to all those stupid family events that you hate, because they’re important to your folks.

And always – I don’t even care how old you are – always call your mom when you get there.

Because one day, you won’t be able to.

The post The Death of My Mother, Helen Bland appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

• Do you like this site?
• Have you ever enjoyed reading anything here?
• Did you ever find anything helpful, informative, or even just funny?

Then now’s the time to pledge your support and not get a free tote bag or whatever PBS is shilling these days. I don’t even have any cool interns to man the phone banks I also don’t have, so don’t expect any of that business, either.

PROGRESS TO GOAL: 100%
[wppb progress=100]

ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED!

Thanks to everyone who validated my efforts by contributing toward funding my site for another year. It means a lot to me, and you shall be rewarded!

What? Now? No. Come back in a few days. I didn’t actually expect there to be enough people who gave a damn about my words, so I never really thought we’d hit the goal.

But a surprise is coming! Just check back later this weekend. Maybe tomorrow night, maybe Saturday. It depends on FACTORS.

And thanks again! You guys rock.

(You can still send me money, if you really want to. My metaphorical door is always open far enough to slip a few bills in the crack.)

What I do have is the yearly renewal on my hosting plan coming up, with nothing budgeted to pay for it. I recently started a new job, which required a small move, which required fighting a ridiculous custody battle that I can’t even describe, which depleted any savings we had, etc…

Things are fine now, financially and in every other way. We’re back on our feet and things are turning around; I can pay our bills and our lawyer (because that particular nightmare isn’t over yet), I can put food on the table and a nice new roof over our heads. I could probably even pay to renew my hosting plan, if I really wanted to. But that’s money that could be better spent on Trey, so that’s where I want to spend it.

So, that being said, what am I going to do with Coquetting Tarradiddles? Well, that’s entirely up to you.

To renew my server hosting at its current level (which is pretty necessary, unless you want the site crashing every time I get a traffic spike, or whenever some jellyheaded script kiddie tries to hack my Gibson), it’ll cost me $250 clams. That I don’t want to spend anymore.

I don’t run ads here, because I think they’re annoying. I get no revenue from this site whatsoever, so it’s all just expense. Back when I was helping fight the good fight to fix the local school district in Beaumont, Texas, I hosted gigabytes of data for the community to access – and none of it came free. Or even cheap. But I could help, so I did help. Or tried to, anyway.

I’ve written a lot of stuff about a lot of different things. Some of what I’ve written (such as my posts on Depression) have had a significant impact on the lives of a surprising number of people, which is why I wrote them. I’ve helped people, and they’ve helped me. I’ve tried to entertain you guys with silly posts, goofy jokes, and even a few short stories (the most successful of which ended with a pathetic SWATTING attempt by just a really super cool dude, so that was fun).

What I’m getting at here is this: I’ve been writing and paying to host this site for a little over 8 years now, and I’ve always done it for free. And I want to keep doing it for free, but I just don’t feel like paying to do it for free anymore.

Which is where you come in.

I need to raise $250 by the 15th, or Coquetting Tarradiddles will cease to coquette or tarradiddle. Forever.

So, I ask you again:

• Do you like this site?
• Have you ever enjoyed reading anything here?
• Did you ever find anything helpful, informative, or even just funny?

If the answer to any of those questions is yes – and if you want this site to continue – then head over here and toss me a couple of pennies to pay for the hosting renewal.

NOTE: THIS IS NOT CHARITY.

This is for nothing more or less than paying the minimal cost to keep Coquetting Tarradiddles alive and running for another year. If that’s something you want to see happen, then contribute what you can. If it’s not, then don’t. Simple, really.

I might come back later and add some kind of progress bar or something, to indicate how close to (or far, far away from) we are to the $250 goal.

PROGRESS TO GOAL: 100%
[wppb progress=100]

Once (if) we hit it, I’ll update this page and tell people to stop sending me money unless they just really, really want to because they’re crazy and rich and wipe their gold-plated butts with $100 bills or whatever. Like I said, this isn’t charity. I’m not asking for a handout, or for any money to do anything other than keep this site alive. I considered setting up Patreon, but this isn’t a regular thing. I don’t need you to pay me to write. I’ll do that for free; I just don’t want to pay for the privilege. Besides, I don’t have nearly enough hipster facial hair for patrons.

I’ve paid the tab here for 8 years now. If you want me to keep going, it’s your turn.

I’ll probably come up with some kind of thank you to send to anyone who contributes, although I have no idea what that will be yet. I might put up a poll, and you can just tell me what you want. A new short story? An insightful commentary on the dichotomy of good and evil? A ten page report of the efficacy of fart jokes? The possibilities are endless.

The point is, you’ll get something for giving anything. I just don’t know what that is yet.

All the cool kids are doing it. Don’t you want to be cool, too?

The post Dolla Dolla Bills, Y’all appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

Once upon a time, a legendary candyman held a contest in which five lucky children won a tour of his mythical chocolate factory. That man was Mr. Wonka, and this is the story you were never told…

The moment Wonka launched his famous contest, rival candy maker Slugworth Cruz immediately began trying to steal Wonka’s secrets for himself. He prowled the streets at night, looking for the first winner by approaching random children in the darkness to ask them about golden tickets and candy. It was kinda weird.

“Hey. Got any candy?”

The first winner was a large, angry young man who was driven by an all-consuming passion to consume anything could. Augustus Christie was his name, but he never made it to the factory. Tragically, he insulted Wonka’s union workers in his acceptance speech, who then tricked him into mistaking the brown water of one of New Jersey’s rivers for chocolate. Augustus Christie dove in, head first, and was never seen again.

“Trumpa Lumpa, Doopa Dee Doo…”

The next winner was also the youngest. His name was Rubio Teevee, and Slugworth Cruz found him before he ever left for the factory. No one knows what Cruz whispered into Rubio’s young ears while the pair sat on his mother’s couch in the family room, but from that moment on, all Rubio Teevee could do was repeat the same three or four sentences over and over.

“Wonka knows EXACTLY what he’s doing.”

Ben Carson would’ve won a ticket, but he fell asleep before he finished opening his Wonka Bar, then stashed it away in a pyramid for later after he woke up. Violet Fiorina also would’ve won a ticket, but she laid off the entire staff she’d hired to unwrap candy bars just before the winning one was found.

The next lucky winner was Veruca Clinton, who felt winning the contest was her birthright because she felt that winning everything was her birthright. Spoiled, loud and obnoxious, she was last seen demanding Wonka give her a goose to lay gold eggs for Easter. Wonka just smiled and tossed her down a garbage shoot.

“Bad egg,” he said.

“It’s mine. Whatever it is, it’s mine. Gimme!”

The last young man to win a ticket was approximately 800 years old, which was getting on for a 12 year old boy, but the years had not been kind. Born into poverty, Bernie Bucket was convinced he would win a ticket, because he wanted it more than anyone. Positive that he could use the contest to infiltrate the inner sanctum of the 1% and expose Wonka for the elitist fraud that he was, Bernie fished around in raw sewage for a coin some rich guy dropped, then miraculously bought the last winning Wonka Bar in existence.

“Let them eat chocolate.”

But then he redistributed Fizzy Lifting Drinks to the 99% and bumped into the ceiling which then had to be washed and sterilized, so he got nothing.

None of the children won the real prize that day, which would’ve seen one of them inheriting Obama Wonka’s factory after he retired. However, Wonka was now more convinced than ever that no other living human would ever be qualified for the job, so he just smiled to himself, breathed deeply, and decided to stay. Forever.

“I said good day, sir!”

The post I’ve Got A Golden Ticket! appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

My parents were my first authority figures, which probably isn’t all that much of a surprise, since parents are pretty much everyone’s first authority figures. And I believed everything they ever told me, which is a fact they routinely exploited with the kind of sadistic relish only parents delivering a little payback to their weirdo kid can.

For example, a favorite pastime of my folks was alternating between telling me that they were either going to ship me off to the orphanage, or some supernatural force was going to murder me. ALL THE TIME.

[sc:mem-toc ]

The orphanage threats usually came at the end of some parental frustration involving my being annoying, obnoxious, loud, or excessively weird. Probably all at the same time. And in public.

We’d get in the car, and they tell me they’d had it. They couldn’t take it anymore, and it was off to Boy’s Haven with me, which wasn’t really an orphanage so much as it’s a great local organization that takes in boys aged 5-17 who need a little help, and gives it to them. But in my home, it was basically a Dickensian work house for pickpockets and street urchins.

I did not want to go to there.

But every time I acted up, we were, in fact, going to there. My parents would even start driving and pointing out landmarks along the way, like they were following some kind terrifying treasure map that led directly to my incarceration. The whole time, they’d be telling me things like no one there would be nice to me, I wouldn’t ever get tucked into bed, and – when I did go to bed – I wouldn’t be able to snuggle with my favorite stuffed animals BECAUSE THEY WOULDN’T LET ME TAKE THEM.

It was basically the saddest scene in a Toy Story movie, but worse because I knew they wouldn’t understand. My stuffed animals, I mean. I hadn’t even been given the opportunity to explain the situation to them or even say goodbye. For all they’d know, I just got tired of them one day and never came back. The guilt weighed heavily on my young soul.

Of course, I never did get shipped off to the orphanage. Because they lied.

Spoiler alert, I guess.

Happy Teddy! Nooooo!

The times when they’d convince me that the devil himself was out to eat my soul were, I think, meant more playfully. I don’t think I was being punished for anything when my dad suddenly cut power to the house one night and started walking into the living room with a life-sized, glow-in-the-dark skeleton while he made moaning sounds and said things like, “Mister Funnybones wants your soul.”

Yeah, I think that was just being playful.

Or all the times when we were riding in the car at night, and both my mom and dad would start FREAKING THE FUCK OUT because they’d just seen a witch out the rear window, and she was chasing us. My dad would pretend to speed up, my mom would start having a panic attack, and then…then the witch would attack the car.

We could hear her big, buckled pilgrim boot-heels scraping against the roof. We could hear her long talon nails tearing through the metal of the trunk. We dared not look.

I’d find out later that all the noises came from the power of suggestion and a little help from the retractable radio antenna on the car. It made this whirring, electric, scraping noise that, if you didn’t know any better (because you trusted your parents when they told you that evil, soul-sucking monsters were out to murder your entire family), sounded a lot like a witch attack.

And that’s not even going into how, when we’d go to visit my grandparents on my dad’s side, the car would always barely make the drive across the Swamp Monster Bridge, where all the elaborate stories of supernatural murder, death, and mayhem were that much more believable because the bridge was is Louisiana. Which you’d understand if you’ve ever been to Louisiana.

Those were just the standard lies, though. Then there were the exceptional ones.

The very same year I was being shipped off to The Special Class every few days at school, my dad decided to tell me how BBs were made. We’d gone on a camping trip with the Indian Guides (because I was way too nerdy for the Boy Scouts, and I guess my parents figured adding racially insensitive feathered headdresses into the mix couldn’t really make things any worse), when it happened.

I was marveling at a super tall lookout tower near a lake at the campground (which could’ve just been a normal lifeguard’s chair, now that I think about it), when my dad decided to ruin my life. He pulled me aside and, in whispered tones, conveyed to me the secret of BB manufacturing.

“You see that platform up at the very top of the tower, son?”

“Uh-huh.”

“That’s where they make BBs.”

“Really? How?”

“Well,” he said – and this is where he would’ve leaned back in his chair and taken a long, satisfied puff off his pipe if we were near a chair and if he’d smoked a pipe – “it takes two guys. One guy climbs way up to the top with a bucket of water. And another guy stands underneath him on the ground, with an empty bucket.”

“Then what?”

“Then, the guy at the top takes an eyedropper and sucks up a little water. Then, he carefully squeezes out just one drop over the edge of the platform. And as it falls, it spins and spins and spins so fast that it turns into a metal ball, and the guy at the bottom catches it in his bucket.”

Seems legit.

“But,” I asked, seriously concerned for the safety of the poor guy at the bottom, “what if he misses the bucket?”

“Ah,” replied my dad, taking another happy draw from his imaginary pipe, “that’s why he wears a hard hat.”

And that’s how I learned how BBs were made. Which I would excitedly tell all of my classmates at school the following week, but not before I’d burned my foot on a hot coal and rescued a fish from certain death.

See, on that same camping trip, we also went fishing. I only remember two things about it, though: the kid who went to cast his line, caught his hook on his own back fat and then…well, it was gruesome. Let’s not dwell.

The other thing I remember was The Fish. I think it was a perch, because every fish is a perch to me since I know exactly jack shit about fish. At any rate, I managed to catch a fish, and I think it was a perch. But that’s not the important part.

The important part was my immediate regret over having caught the fish. I didn’t want it to die, but I also didn’t want to be the one kid who didn’t want to kill a fish on the camping trip, so I didn’t throw it back. We tossed it in a cooler where it flopped around, gasping for water-air and crushing my soul. I showed everyone I caught it, then closed the cooler and went off to pack up our tent and cry.

Which is when I walked right over the fire pit someone did a horrible job of covering with dirt, because my bare foot found a still-hot coal. Right in the arch. Burned like hell.

So now I’m crying and my foot’s on fire, my fish is dying in a cooler, and all I want to do is go home and never again venture into the great outdoors where sadness lives. We finish packing up, then hop in my dad’s old red truck and head on down the road. With me still crying, my fish still dying, and my foot still burning.

My dad pulls off into a gas station along the way, then goes inside and comes back out with a little styrofoam bowl of water. He sticks The Fish inside, then pops a lid on the bowl and tells me to hold onto it. But not to open the lid, because then bad things would happen and it would probably die.

It was already dead, of course. But I believed him when he said it wasn’t, because authority figure.

He gets back in the truck, then turns on the air conditioner and tells me to stick my foot up next to one of the vents. The AC cools it down and I manage to stop crying for a little while, with my foot getting some relief up on the vent and my fish potentially not dying in my lap.

*Styrofoam bowl not to scale

Of course, it was basically Schrödinger’s Fish at that point, both alive and dead at the same time, and only by opening the lid would I collapse the probability wave or whatever. So I kept the lid on tight. But any time I would start questioning why it didn’t feel like the fish was moving around in the bowl, my dad would come up with some kind of believable reason, and then switch the AC over from Cool to Heat.

Which my foot would quickly realize before I did, after which I’d scream and start crying again. My dad would laugh and shout, “Say hello to Mister Fire!”

After a minute of that, he’d switch it back, and, for a little while, I’d be too angry and confused to question the condition of The Fish.

Before we got home, we took a slight detour near a drainage ditch. My dad hopped out of the truck, came around to my side, and asked me for the fish. I handed it to him, then he told me he was going to set it free in this large body of water I thought looked nothing at all like a drainage ditch. Probably very little poop in it.

He walked over to the water, knelt down, I heard a little splash, and then he came back.

My dad shouted, “He made it!” – and I didn’t question a word of it.

That was a good lie. But then I went back to school Monday morning and decided to tell everyone who would listen how BBs were made, which is how I ended up getting into a fight with a kid named Chuck because SHUT UP, MY DAD WOULDN’T LIE TO ME!

The post Lies. All Lies! appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.

Not in the way that the women are, with jagged bone honesty and brutal humor to highlight how ridiculous everything is. The few men who are writing about mental health tend to write like, well, men writing about mental health. It’s usually very cold and antiseptic, as if depression can be conquered through spreadsheets and actuarial tables.

Now, I don’t subscribe to the idea that men are from one planet and women are from another, because I really don’t think we’re all that different from each other. Not really. We tell ourselves we’re different – and, more importantly, we’re told how different we are all our lives – but it’s all just stupid marketing. Boys have a penis, girls have a vagina. And that’s about as deep as it goes, except that my penis doesn’t bleed every month, and I can’t grow babies in my testicles. I suspect there was some divergent limb on the evolutionary tree that tried this once – men being the baby makers – but natural selection probably kicked in after every single dude just started lying around in the fetal position, clutching his balls and crying for days at a time every month, and nipped that in the bud.

The point is, while plenty of brilliant women are writing brilliant things on the subject, men remain pretty silent. Why? If we’re not so different, then why aren’t more men trying to do what I’m probably failing at doing?

I think it’s probably down to gender roles and behavioral psychology and stuff. You know, the same crap that tells little boys they can’t play with dolls, or that girls need princess tiaras and pink everything. But that’s all over my head, and best left to people who have, I dunno, gone to school and learned something about it or whatever. The tweed jackets with elbow patches crowd.

All I know is that writing about this crap has helped me not only keep pushing through a serious bout with depression, but with putting my entire life into ridiculous perspective. Some of the things I’ve done have just been crazy weird. Most of the things I still do are crazy weird.

I’m crazy weird.

And so are a lot of other dudes. Even if they haven’t been able to admit it yet, because no one has told them it’s okay.

Instead, we lurk over at The Bloggess or find quiet solidarity in Hyperbole and a Half, but as far as anyone else knows, we’re only there to laugh at the jokes, and all the touchy-feely stuff is for the girls. Like watching a romcom – we’ll do it as long as there’s enough John Cusack to counteract the Katherine Heigl, but we’ll pretend like we’re not really enjoying it the whole time.

Men also hide behind manly manliness, which here in the south means taking long hunting trips or talking about sports. We’ll buy things, too. Cars in the shape of a midlife penis crisis, expensive sunglasses, stupid active wear we pretend does some really cool sciency thing, but that we’re only buying for the stupid logo, etc… We’ll even plop down a stack of cash for a ridiculous ice chest because it’s the cool new thing to do. (See also: Toyota’s Scion, Ray Bans, Under Armour, Yeti Coolers…)

Which is fine, I guess. Whatever gets you through it. It’s better than breaking up with your girlfriend or cheating on your wife, like a whole lot of other dudes do along their misguided quests to find fulfillment.

But what are guys who hate brand marketing, can’t stand sports, despise trends, and would never cheat on their spouses or go to the store for a loaf of bread and not come back until 20 years later supposed to do?

Oh. Wait. I hope you’re not expecting me to have an answer for that one, because I don’t. I play video games, watch Netflix, read books and write dumb blog posts. And cookies. I eat a lot of cookies.

I have no idea what I’m doing.

The only thing better than gingerbread is nerd gingerbread.

I’m not even sure I have a valid reason to be depressed, which is how depression likes to make you feel. Sure, getting laid off and being pretty hardcore unemployable when I live in the Deep South and write about things like feelings and how stupid I think the God, Guns, and Jesus mentality is around here is probably a “valid” reason for feeling depressed, but I was depressed even before my job went to India.

I worked hard at my last job. I was called the “go to” guy of my group. I routinely resolved more cases than everyone else on my team combined. Every week. I was basically on call 24/7/365 because I was “the guy who gets things done”.

But I also had Hillbilly Voldemort.

Hillbilly Voldemort, if you’re new around here, is the name I gave to the opportunistic, slackjawed bully who was my last middle manager, before he failed upward and moved on to upper management after contract renegotiations with our client took a turn and my company ended up partnering with an outsourcing firm. And, armed with the power of layoffs, he systematically went through the company roster and eliminated everyone who was ever a threat to him, or who he just didn’t like. It was a common theme in hushed employee-to-employee conversations when it was all going down.

Someone else being laid off would ask, “Oh, hey. Did you, by any chance, ever happen to piss off Steve?”

And then The Stories would be told, and yup. Common theme.

So maybe I have a right to be depressed now, but why was I depressed back when I was making good money, before The Dark Lord rose like a pimple off the back of some slimy dude’s head?

I have no idea.

I didn’t have a bad childhood. If anything, my childhood was too good, because I constantly want to go back there. It’s why I’ve devoted countless hours to writing a nostalgia-soaked trip down memory lane. Sure, life wasn’t perfect back then, but it was a damn sight better than it usually is now.

I was such a cute kid. WITH PERFECT EARS.

Yeah, I was a goofy kid. I didn’t have many friends and I was kind of a weirdo, but my parents made time for me and made me feel loved, even if they did worry a little too much about my weirdness at times. In short, I had a nice time.

Even if I’ve filled my life with Questionable Decisions.

Even if I always worried about everything.

Even if the emotional scars left by my childhood peer groups haunt me to this day, to the point that if I ever walk near any group of people who start laughing, I’m instantly convinced they’re laughing at me, and I start running through a mental checklist of everything I’ve been doing since I’ve been in their eyeline, trying to track down exactly what it was that set them off in their open mockery of everything awful about myself. And that goes triple if it’s a giggling group of teenage girls, which is basically the scariest thing on earth.

But the way depression works – for me, at least – is that it makes me feel bad for feeling bad. Right now, I have something to be depressed about: I’m unemployed, money is running out, and I can’t find a job anywhere. So I’m good on the nodding heads and sympathetic looks from people I know front. For now. (Speaking of…if you’re looking for an employee, I’m great at IT work, systems administration, web solutions, and SharePoint. I’m comfortable working remotely, and I can even handle PR, technical writing, and making really lame jokes during awkward staff meetings. Hire me!)

All the other times, though… Times when things are good, when I’ve got money in the bank and plans on the horizon, when things are happening and all seems right with the world – those are the times when I hate myself for feeling like I hate myself.

Other people have it worse!

Be grateful for what you have!

Stop whining.

Why are you so awful?!

The shouts in my head never stop, even as some other part of my fractured psyche shouts back that I DON’T KNOW WHY.

I don’t know why I wake up every morning feeling like a failure, even on the increasingly rare mornings when I wake up after having not recently failed at anything. I don’t know why I don’t trust good days, or why I think happiness is out to get me. I don’t know why I’m always waiting for the other shoe to drop, the unexpected phone call, the red letter in the mail.

I DON’T KNOW WHY.

I don’t know why I feel like I haven’t accomplished a damn thing in my life, or why it feels like I peaked in high school when I really didn’t do anything in high school. I wasn’t class president, I hated pep rallies, I didn’t have many friends, and I did the bare minimum needed to pass my classes and graduate. If that’s my peak – then my life is a damn greek tragedy.

But without any of the heroic, monster-slaying bits.

I don’t know why I’m sitting here, typing this out and making myself feel worse. I don’t know why I wake up every morning, and the only thing I look forward to doing all day is going back to sleep. Or eating cookies. Preferably just before going back to sleep.

I don’t know why every post I write that gets a lot of traffic but hardly any shares feels like a waste of time. I don’t know why I keep hoping someone influential will find what I’ve written and help get me noticed. I don’t know why not being noticed makes me feel like a failure, when being noticed makes me feel like a fraud.

I don’t know why I think the success of nerds being nerds has created a bizarre tiered nerd hierarchy, where someone as awesome as Felicia Day makes me feel like even more of a loser because I’m not a cool enough nerd to roll 20-sided dice and eat cold Pop-Tarts at her super nerdy lunch table.

I DON’T KNOW WHY.

But I do know I wish other guys were talking about it. I’m sure they’re out there – and if you know of any, or if you’re one of them – please let me know. Send me an email, or leave a comment and link me in their direction. Because as great and inspirational as it is to read Jenny and Felicia and Allie, I need to know that there’s at least one other tripod out there who’s been where I’m at. Who’s going through what I’m going through. Who knows the difference between who’s and whose without having to look it up every damn time.

Ok, maybe not that last one.

But really, why isn’t there a community of struggling daddy bloggers? Or depressed single guy bloggers (who aren’t misogynistic asshats)? Or stay-at-home dads who constantly get emails from their kid’s school addressed to Moms?

Where’s my tribe?

Don’t get me wrong. I feel a great sense of community and belonging from the wonderful people who frequent the other sites I’ve mentioned, but I need more dude stories.

Are there other guys out there one leaky pipe away from a total breakdown because plumbing is terrifying? Do any other dads try to follow the “some assembly required” instructions of any given toy, only to feel like an abject failure when none of the included, easily-followable instructions make any damn sense at all? Does the thought of interacting with other dads scare the shit out of anyone else, when all anyone ever wants to talk about are hunting, sports, and cars? Are any other husbands kinda scared that writing about all your internalized oddities will freak out your wives, who will inevitably leave you for someone less weird who’s the exact opposite of you and therefore cool and sexy and everything you aren’t?

Or am I just alone out here, shouting nonsense at the heart of the world?

Because it sure feels like that, at times.

It feels like I don’t have a right to be depressed, or to worry, or to be depressed over worrying about things, and then angry at myself for being worried that I’m depressed about how much I worry.

It still feels like I’m weird for enjoying video games rather than football. It still feels like I’m weird for wanting to pet animals rather than murder them. It still feels like I’m weird for never feeling like I’m doing enough for my kid, or that everything I am doing is wrong. It still feels like I’m weird when I talk about how much I love him, or that I crave his hugs. Because none of that is man stuff.

It’s just stuff that makes me weird.

I just fixed this today. Not ideal, but it’ll quiet my head demons. FOR NOW.

And that’s not even going into all the things that make me feel crazy. Like…

• How I can’t stand for anything to be upside down, even when it’s a soggy candy bar wrapper underneath a layer of leftover spaghetti in the trash can. AND I MUST FIX IT.
• My weird fetishes for certain numbers, all of which are even. I really dig 4 and 12, for some reason.
• My equally weird aversions to other numbers, most of which are odd. Basically, any number between 1 and 25 that isn’t 4 or 12 is suspect, and should be treated with caution.
• My obsession over symmetry. Shelving, for instance, must have EXACT SPACING, and then whatever I put on them has to balance out on all sides or it’s just a nightmare and I want to burn the house down.
• My handwriting, which is just made worse by the fact that I can’t have a single unclosed letter anywhere in a word. If the circle part of a lowercase d doesn’t fully connect to the tall part, I go back over it. With fury.
• My nail biting, which is ridiculous.
• My social anxiety, which makes me fear the pizza man and has seen me hiding in my back bedroom with the door closed whenever the lawn crew has shown up when I didn’t want them to mow the grass.
• My compulsion to personify inanimate objects. I still have my two favorite stuffed animals from childhood and fuck you, THEY’RE ALIVE. Shut up.
• My crippling aversion to change, which has kept me in bad situations for a lot longer than should be legal.
• My outrage over stupid things. Like bad font choices, or crappy grammar in ad copy. THAT SOMEONE APPROVED.
• My debilitating fear of being wrong. Or looking stupid. Or being wrong because I’m stupid.
• My certainty that everyone, everywhere is always making fun of me. Especially those damn groups of giggling girls.
• My tendency toward hoarding, which has seen me digging one of my kid’s school workbooks out of the trash, after my wife thought she could quietly slip it in there and DEPRIVE ME OF MY MEMORIES.
• The weird way I have to “unwind” myself if I make a complete circle in one direction, which even extends to video games. Poor Mario. How many times have I made you run clockwise into the lava, after you narrowly dodged a koopa shell by running counter-clockwise? I AM SORRY.
• How I can never click the Save icon just once. Or even twice. And I certainly can’t stop clicking on an uneven number, so…

You get the idea.

Maybe I am alone. When you start listing out just a handful of your odd little quirks off the top of your head as bullet points, it tends to put things into perspective.

Yeah.

I’m crazy weird.

The post Am I crazy weird? appeared first on Coquetting Tarradiddles.