Category: Jerks

A Dimmer

My mind is a bit muddled tonight, like my brain is saturated in goo, owing to a whopping two hours of sleep. I just didn’t feel tired when last my head hit a pillow, perhaps because I forgot to turn on my blue light filter, f.lux. That app is a lifesaver when I remember to use it. It gradually turns your screen a dark salmon color as the sun sets outside. The idea is to keep your eyes from tricking your brain into thinking it’s daylight. Daywalkers need that like a hole in the head, so I’m glad for the wonders of modern technology that counter the other wonders of modern technology.

No, this is not sponsored content. I’ve been using that app for years. An ex-boyfriend who was partially color-blind hated it, so when I stayed at his place and wanted to keep him from looking over my shoulder while I was reading or writing, I’d turn it on.

See, one night, before you could stream YouTube directly out of your TV, I VERY STUPIDLY agreed to hook up my laptop to his huge flat-screen so we could indulge our sadistic humor with some FAIL videos. I had another tab open on my browser which just happened to display an old private blog of mine that had some randy fiction I had written when earthly pleasures like that still interested me. He clicked on the tab and the first line to the story on the screen was a doozy: Jake was always up for a good, hard fuck.

“NICE.”

“Oops. I had forgotten about that.”

“Who’s Jake?”

Ah, crap. Here we go.

“Don’t worry. This entire blog is fiction.”

“But who IS he?”

“It’s FICTION.”

“Who’s it ABOUT?”

“NO one.”

After about four rounds of that I said, “Will you look at the date on this, please? It was before I divorced my ex-husband.”

“So it’s about HIM?”

“No. I said it was FICTION.”

“So you made it up?”

“That’s what fiction is, yes?”

“I guess.”

I don’t think he bought it because for three months after that he kept trying to figure out who Jake was.

Anyway, that’s when I started turning f.lux on as a deterrent whenever I was reading or writing on my laptop at his place. That was about 12 years ago, so it’s an old app.

And this, kids, is why you don’t go poking around your beloved’s laptop when your beloved is a writer. You might up in said writer’s public blog years after you break up.

Now I need refreshment, so I leave you with this:

An oil slick, with a haiku that says "dark prism/slips over surface/suffocation"
Image: Ante Hamersmit on Unsplash

Stop Being Awful

Two chicks resting in a person's hands.
Image: Duygu Güngör on Unsplash

Oh, my word. There has been such ugliness these past few days. First, I’m going to put this out there about how people are reacting to Joe Biden’s cancer. I think it says everything that needs to be said with respect to how a lot of MAGA people are calling the diagnosis “karma.”

Indeed. It seems empathy and compassion are completely shot in the U.S.

Look at what Congress and the Senate are doing. The current budget bill would pretty much destroy Medicare, Medicaid, and SNAP. These odious Republicans are not going to be happy until the poor have nothing left to lose. It’s very short-sighted of them. See: France, 1789. Tell ya what, though. Most people aren’t going to care about which party someone belongs to when it comes to putting heads on pikes. At that point, all politicians are going to look the same because deep down, most of them are. Cory Booker, I’m looking at you. (Booker voted to approve Ivanka Trump’s felonious father-in-law as ambassador to France.) You’re not much better, Bernie Sanders, what with your comments on “identity politics.” Thanks for reminding us all that you are, at heart, an obliviously privileged cis-het white male.

And then my heart just broke today when I read of the 14,000 chicks abandoned in a hot USPS truck for three days without food and water so that nearly 4,000 of them died. Who in heaven’s name made it legal to ship chicks through the mail?

If you’d like to help with a donation, foster, or adoption, the name of the shelter that is caring for them is First State Animal Shelter and SPCA. You can make a donation through their website.

Yep. People need to stop being awful.

Still Alive

How are you doing?

Things are hell in the U.S. Capital, thanks.

I could say so much about who needs to watch out for their rights being eroded. As in, married women who have taken their husband’s last name and don’t have a passport are the latest target, with the re-introduction of a Bill for the SAVE Act. Their birth certificates would no longer be a valid way of proving their eligibility to register to vote because it has their maiden, and not current, last name on it. If that’s you, either get a passport or change your name back to your maiden name legally. Same for if you’re divorced or widowed. You know, assuming we even have another election.

But there are so many people who are at risk that honestly? Going forward I think it’s up to each person individually to figure out their risks and how to protect themselves. It sounds cold, but freedom isn’t free. If ya want it, yer gonna have to work for it and be vigilant in protecting it. Get on your non-Facebook socials, preferably Threads, and start reading. I recommend Guy Fawkes News, who is also on BlueSky. Why? Because with the possible exception of the Associated Press, the mainstream media is not reporting everything, like, say, the protest in front of USAID where people were screaming “Shut down the Senate!” or the various activities of Anonymous, which as the kids say, has entered the chat. Anonymous has come out in opposition to the regime and have already doxxed the Phony Stark minions at DOGE who got into the government systems. As I understand it, Anonymous is having a hard time finding Phony Stark’s Social Security Number, which could very well mean that the SOB is not even an American citizen—which, by the way, would make the Fanta Führer guilty of treason by way of giving state secrets to foreign entities. See also, did you know USAID was instrumental in breaking Apartheid, and that the Inspector General for USAID was investigating Starlink’s business dealings with Ukraine right before Phony Stark shut the agency down? Make no mistake, the Fanta Führer isn’t running the country. Phony Stark is.

Anyway, the media is getting shut out and isn’t even going down swinging, so you’re going to have to rely on socials and that’s a you thing. Definitely get to BlueSky because if ZuckerBorg gets a wild hair up his arse, Meta products will become problematic, even Threads. If you don’t make the effort to inform yourself in nontraditional channels, you’re going to be an easy target and it’ll be your own fault so don’t come bitchin’ because you’ve been told—just like all the #leavingMAGA people were told all along that they wouldn’t be spared because of their whiteness.

And speaking of those people, yeah, no. No sympathy. Some on the left—usually men, because men have not been suffering since the Dobbs decision—have been talking about how we need to welcome the leavingMAGA people into the tent. Nah, this is the “find out” part of “fuck around and find out.” The leavingMAGA people are extra odious because they didn’t care about human rights and voting rights and deportation and government purges and cuts to social programs and so on until it affected them personally. Nah, it’s time for tough love, buppies, so…

Just remember, no matter how low you think the regime can go, it will go lower, because decent people just can’t imagine that kind of evil.

P.S. Dear Canada: We don’t want Wayne Gretzky, either. And it’s okay for you to turn off the lights. Don’t let Fanta Führer fool you. You’re going to have to treat him, and the USA, like a recalcitrant five-year-old who is waiting with boundless patience for half a chance to put his hand in the cookie jar when no one is looking. So keep watching, and boycott us. And that goes for the rest of the world, too. Boycott us until the Fourth Reich’s balls fall off.

Until next time, which is I don’t know when.

Subversively yours,

Zen