“When a chick says you need to talk,
you might as well start punching yourself in the balls.”
— Eric Cartman
210118.1: In what manner do you put serious thought into decisions affecting your work, financial stability, or the future for yourself, or your friendship with us?
210121.1: I’m not convinced that I ever put much “serious thought” into my decisions. It seems that most of my decisions have been impulsive and emotional. When employed I would do the best that I could, and watched the rewards go to those who knew how to do less while impressing more. I’d given up any expectations of “financial stability” long ago when my employment track record became unmistakably clear. I would have no financial security. I would just have to work very hard for as long as they would let me, and then they would replace me with someone nicer. In the meantime, I would try to be careful about my expenses while being attentive to my personal and social desires. It’s been a precarious balancing act for a long time, but finally Social Security and the VA have promised to catch me if I fall too hard. The plans I had for my future involved space travel and exploration and building grand structures in orbit where people could pursue lives of health, beauty, prosperity, and longevity, and a supportive multi-faceted family with redundant support for infants and the infirm. My current plans are to keep writing and to see if I can ever figure out how to sell any of it without debasing myself. I once yearned for and expected that your friendship would be a part of all that. It could be that you have other plans. I have backed off on the masonry and other presumptions that seem to have engendered resentment. I don’t know whether I should keep backing away from anticipated new offenses, or just “rip off the band-aid” and run. As ever, I am in the grip of paralysis as my desires collide with reality.
210118.2: Why did you not tell us you quit your job for 1½ months, and then do it through “FascBuch?”
210119.2: Isolation has compromised my communications skills, but not my counting skills. I believed (accurately, as it turns out) that that would be provocative and would merit a more thorough discussion and meticulous analysis than telephone communication could afford. Realizing that the logistics really didn’t permit that kind of luxury, I composed what I thought was a detailed description of my circumstance, and, deeming it the second best approach, put that up on my ‘b log. Then of course, awaited the inevitable, and, clinging desperately as ever to optimism, hoped that it could come at the most opportune of moments, when we could drop the filters and speak. It was, I believe, the end of August when I was dismissed, and checking the time stamp on the ‘b log, I read, “2 September 2020,” which makes about a week, I guess. I don’t know when or whether (I guess I must have) I might have echoed it to FascBuch, or when you might have seen it. So I guess the short answer is I’m clumsy, and cowardly, and optimistic, and stupid.
210118.3: Why did you stop masking, etc when you knew how important it was to us, and then double down by posting all sorts of stuff on Facebook and your blog showing disdain for those who think masks are important?
210120.3: I “stop masking” every time I exit a private property confinement that requires masking for occupancy. I have followed, and will continue to follow, the prudent masking and distancing protocols that you’ve requested prior to visiting. I have not discontinued my practice of “singling down” on the differences between “important” and “urgent” and “everything.” My disdain is not for those who consider provisional masking to be prudent, or even important, but for those whose posture and rhetoric and highly charged emotional response reveal that, to them, masking is everything, and any deviation therefrom is tantamount to reckless endangerment or depraved indifference to human life or safety. I am not killing anyone’s Grandma by breathing freely (except, of course, in the sense that I threaten innocent strangers every time I take my car onto the road or dislodge a rock from an elevated hiking trail), though arguably Frau Braun did kill L’Historienne‘s and Stargazer’s and The Enumerator‘s and all their cousins’ Grandma through her cruel and oppressive “quarantine of terror.”
210327.3: It is clear now that my isolation has rather less to do with any actual dangers from an aggressive virus than it does with my disgracefully offensive attitude. It is not enough to PRACTICE the protocol; one must take pains to avoid discerning any of the costs or disadvantages of the single-minded pursuit of security. The “invitation [wa]s rescinded” NOT because I wasn’t assiduously masking and distancing, but because, while I WAS assiduously masking and distancing, I was also expressing honest (albeit game and sarcastic) skepticism of its efficacy, AND celebrating instances of enlightened (or selfish and stupid and potentially murderous) masklessness. It’s like adhering to the Dicta of the Christ without acknowledging His Divinity. Gods (Hebrews 11:6) are not alone in their jealousy. Obedience without faith is empty.
210118.4: Were you purposely posting the anti-mask stuff on Facebook in order to communicate with me without [talking to me?] Is this a way of telling me, I’m not going to “tell” you what to do?
210121.4: I was purposely posting skeptical and sarcastic comments and images regarding universal masking protocols as a way of evoking emotional responses from the righteously confident. I have learned over the decades that logic has no power over faith, but that shock, surprise, anger, and humor have. I oppose wide scale masking because it is wasteful, cruel, and counterproductive. I would no more mask every healthy being, particularly children (!), than I would issue every GI his own personal nuke. There is a common thread binding hypervigilants of all sects. They act as if they believe in one overriding and all-consuming threat. Maybe I WAS talking to you. I didn’t think so at the time, but I am now saddened to realize it. So, on the second question of this section, maybe “Yeah.” This does appear to echo my previously stated intention to never mask unless… blah blah blah… private property, and… blah blah blah… compromised immune or pulmonary system, or… blah blah blah… the neonatal or infirm…
220801: I would never presume to “tell” anyone that they may not establish conditions for access to their own property, and as a guest on yours I have usually attempted to subordinate my immediate inclinations to your requirements. Whether it is smoking tobacco in the house, or burning leaves outside of it, I have tried to honor your wishes and to follow both the letter and spirit of cited conditions.
210118.5: Did you follow our requirements for you isolating before coming down here for your last few visits, or did you decide we were over-reacting and you were willing to take the chance of infecting us?
210121.5: Knowing the nature of viral infections, I have risked your lives and health since 1981. I did follow your requirements prior to the last few visits, but only because I am not comfortable with casual lies. I thought that I’d made it clear that I believed that you were over-reacting when you’d asked, and I have, since the re-emphasis of your… concerns… practiced both the letter AND spirit of the protocol prior to visits. And IF a virally laden droplet were to land on the wet welcoming membrane of your eye, or Bud‘s, or mine, completely bypassing the arguably effective facial mask just below its entryway, and was later exhaled into common space, and then taken up by the more vulnerable, and one were to sicken and die… it would be MY fault and I could never be forgiven. Even if we practiced assiduous scrubbing and masking and distancing, as long as none of us wears goggles, we are vulnerable to a very real (if vanishingly small) chance of infection. Being so distrusted as I am, how could it be OTHER than my fault? No denial could have any weight coming from a convicted liar.
25 February 2023 — to be continuing… when I’m up for the next wave…
Neither the Irish, nor Russians, nor Hillbillies are inclined to put down a perfectly good grudge. (Slaps roof.) “This baby’s got decades on it, yet!” And while I’m only part Irish, and not Russian at all, I was immersed in hillbilly culture growing up — forced on me by an angry little step-father with an exaggerated Napoleonic complex.
29 April 2023 — Q1: Okeh… so no questions at all, just sadness and scorn. And a tantalizing reference to a “book,” with or without a message. Big talk or procrastination? Hawthorne, Huxley, or Nourse? And that’s just assuming it is one of my lost treasures, rather than an overdue(?) retaliation on behalf of tribe, alliance, or ideology. Maybe that IS the “message.” “Book” has been used as a metaphor before, and I am not sure that’s not the case now. Or the even more obvious possibility of taunting. But most likely, it is the benign and innocent act of procrastination, so I will neither offer nor request more anon until persuaded otherwise. And while my faith remains insignificantly tiny, my hopes remain great. Hope may be a poor plan, but it’s an effective palliative, on a par almost with laughter itself.