Rarely is this blog concise. Should it be? I have no idea. It’s a place for a writer to dump thoughts, not necessarily a place for a reader to pick them up readily. A good author would focus on the needs of the reader and edit. For most of these exercises, that isn’t the point. With my day job, it is a requirement prior to becoming “customer facing” material. Luckily, I’m on a flight and not at work.

Good actors don’t move in a scene without purpose or intent. If you watch a seasoned actor, they behave like a statue for most of whatever moment they’re acting in, unless there is a reason to move. If they’re fidgeting, often they are trying to communicate a looming threat through concerning movements. If they’re fidgeting and there is no purpose for the behavior, they’re likely a bad actor.

I sometimes find the lack of movement in actors boring, when paired with a dialogue heavy film, this can make for an exhaustingly boring couple of hours. A director can cheat, and they often do, by giving actors fake real world tasks. Say this line while digging through a filing cabinet, this dialogue will take place while walking through a parking lot. A better director will pair another stream of information in the action, like defusing a bomb while discussing next steps in a relationship. If you want information to hit the hardest, do less, say less, just before delivering a nice, concise bit of information.

How long should a story be? How long should an article about koala’s fucking be? As short as possible to convey the information. At least that’s the general guidance, you can stretch it for art or beauty’s sake, so long as your audience is there for it.

The disconnect in this post, is that I won’t edit it, so you’re either as interested in this journey and process as I am, or you saw multiple paragraphs, so the proposed content in the beginning and are already doom scrolling your favorite social media nightmare. Luckily, I didn’t write this for the reader who is gone and I don’t care that I’ve lost them.

I’ve touched on this theme before, so I don’t need to rehash my feelings about the process. I will say that for all the trouble I’m putting you, the reader through, I do want you to understand that editing is essential. In fact, being concise is essential, because when you’re trying to grab someone’s attention in the real world, whether one on one or in front of 300 people, knowing what will engage them and keep them listening is critical.

Learn to move only with intent, like that borderline boring actor, learn to speak with the fewest words. Learn to reduce or eliminate disfluencies (stutters, stammers, filler sounds and words). When people assume you’re only speaking or moving or writing with purpose, they will be more engaged.

Same is true with writing, but this might not be that, this might be more chasing the beauty of the art, it might be poetry, it might even be a waste of everyone’s time including yours and mine. So I’ll post it now, and get back to my flight, because I’m not yet at work.

We needed to know our blood types. It had been a while since I last had an American Red Cross card and I couldn’t remember if I was O, O positive, or O negative. It’s funny how important blood is for humans and not even our primary care physicians care to know. Booking a sailing charter, the captain wanted to know. If we needed a transfusion in a foreign country, it seems important information to have on hand.

So the best way to find out is to donate blood. You find out your blood type and get some complimentary juice and cookies and some people you don’t know, get some blood to hopefully save their lives from whatever awful trauma has put their own blood in short supply. It’s win/win even if you have less energy for activities for a week or so.

O positive by the way. My partner is A+, obviously. Easy to remember. I’m positive I’m O and she’s always been good at tests.

So the American Red Cross is extremely aggressive with getting you back in the chair when your blood proves to be safe and viable. So expect a lot of reminders, phone calls, texts, emails. We booked again not because they joined us but because it seems like a helpful thing to do for people when you don’t have a lot of time to volunteer otherwise.

You get to talking about these things. Probably gloating, that you actually did something considerate. The first time didn’t count anyways, because we were in it for ourselves. So you find out that the real donors are also giving platelets and power blood. Power blood is something where if you have a great blood type, they might take twice the red cells but with half the fluid. I haven’t done it but I think that’s the gist.

To give platelets you have to sit still for 2 hours. They give you an inlet tube and an outlet tube on veins on opposing arms. They have a machine with all sorts of archaic tubes and motorized wheels that pumps saline into your arm, it mixes with the blood and builds a steady circuit of blood flowing out one arm, through an extraction machine and returns it back into the other arm.

You have a personal screen for watching Netflix. Pick your entertainment at the beginning since you’re not permitted to move your arms or hands, other than to squeeze a ball with the extraction arm to keep the pump steady. I chose to watch “All Quiet on the Western Front”, good enough to remind you why people might need blood, watching all these people bleeding out for the entire duration.

The Red Cross has an app, who doesn’t? They give you points for donating which you can use to purchase donation branded swag. What’s interesting is that you might get more points if you deliver a more beneficial load. For instance, I get bonus points just for having O+ blood since it’s somewhat more versatile to patients than other types.

So you’re interested after a donation about how much they extracted, any notable details about your yield or quality, and most importantly, how many gift points did you earn?

I donated Sunday, I had a call from the Red Cross while sitting in a work meeting, I didn’t answer. They don’t waste any time in trying to book that next appointment.

My message said my platelets were outside the usual quantity and they wouldn’t be able to use them. That before I give again they will test me in advance, it’s possible I won’t be a useful donor for platelets. Will have to stick with whole blood donations.

I checked the app, the acceptable range for platelets is 150,000 to 450,000 uL (some concentration of litres or millilitres). 60,000 seemed noticeably outside the range so I looked it up. Don’t do that, the internet has awful news about any deviation of health metrics. Everything is a sign of cancer or death when you go far enough down the possibilities.

Red Cross called me again the next day. They don’t want me to test before my next donation. They want me to come in as soon as possible to retest. I’m in Arkansas which is not where I live so it’s going to need to be when I get back from my trip.

So their urgency doesn’t make me feel any better about my lack of clotting particles in my blood. The internet says I should have issues stopping bleeding when cut or bruise easily. I’ve never had issues with bleeding. I inspect my body for bruises, nothing, I punch my leg hard, to see if maybe a bruise will form the next day, it doesn’t. I don’t seem to have the traits of someone running out of platelets.

Maybe a false reading, the internet says unlikely but possible. I wonder if their urgency is more to verify if the two units of platelets and 1 unit of plasma could still be useful. A count as low as mine would not be therapeutic and would need to be discarded. The app reports my donations are currently in storage. My appointment is Tuesday, if I’m good, maybe they’ll take it out of the cooler and let their machines have another taste.

It’s interesting how the dread of eminent death shifts based on what you believe is the most likely thing to kill you. Is it the boat you’re going to sleep on? The rental car you’re trying to get familiar with, that has seemingly enormous blind spots? The turbulent flight? Your friends who recently died or unexpected heart attacks or died in their sleep?

Middle age is the craziest with thoughts of death. You recognize that it’ll be any minute now, or in another 50 or 60 years. You have no idea but you seem to come to terms with it and fear everything at the same time.

Most of my assets have designated beneficiaries but I still need to get a will going. Being prepared to die, seems to decrease the overall anxiety of never being able to know when it will happen. It reminds me that I need to continue de-cluttering as well. Why do I have so much stuff?

I’m assuming this is all deeply embedded biological instinct. This is why animals find their routines and keep their dens clean. It’s why occasionally they eat their young when they’re starving. An awareness that things could turn for the worst at some unpredictable point and you’re going to be obnoxious about it to all creatures around you.

What I’d like to be is zen about the whole thing. I literally have no bucket list or am working on anything critical to society. I don’t have much of a desire to, society itself, fame, history, all of it is a flash in a pan. Literally none of it matters other than trying to make things better in the moments we exist. I just want things to be as decent as possible for any being that is experiencing existence.

What gives me gratification is whatever I can do to not make things worse. Neutral or better than if I wasn’t in the room is what I strive for. It’s a meager goal in life but it’s a challenge to stay consistent. There is an old timey animal lacking the back of my mind like everyone else.

One thing I very much enjoy in life is being with family or friends, eat delicious food, and imbibe enough to keep things loose. One possible cause of low platelets is an underperforming liver paired with alcohol and so that’s another problem.

My middle finger traces the contour of the cup’s upper lip as my thumb keeps track of the sippy hole.

My index finger and wrist join to provide a smooth rotation as the perfect alignment is found. I think of space exploration films and the complexity of docking airlocks.

The lid is nearly flawless, aside from being made from a known contaminant, the mold is perfect.The flaw that needs to be mitigated is in the seam of the paper cup.

When the cup seam aligns with the sipper orifice of the lid, predictable leaks and drips will appear on your dress shirt, with t-shirts, it’s not as noticeable. Placing the seam at 180 degrees from the drinking hole eliminates this risk.

Most people don’t know this, I watch them spend multiple minutes pouring additional substances into their coffee, tasting test sips along the way. Such careful attention to making a perfect drink to stain their attire.

People have no idea that I’m waiting behind them. That I enjoy a black coffee because it is strong, and bitter, and faster. My alignment with the lid is nearly instantaneous.

The paper cup is awful at containing heat, the transfer is so direct that there are cardboard sleeves to apply to the cup so that your hand is not burned. I usually forgo the sleeve to avoid the  added waste and time.

If you can stretch your hand and pinch the lid and bottom edge of the cup with your thumb and pinky, you can dodge the heat. Avoiding the sleeve allows the coffee to cool faster so that it can be enjoyed by the tongue sooner.

The cup size one larger than the desired ounces is the correct choice. Always leave close to an inch or more between the coffee level and the brim. “Leave room” is the American way of saying this.

I see thinkers sometimes pouring out this inch into the garbage. They know that coffee at the top of the cup will wave itself right through the mouth cutout and onto your freshly burned hand. Two inches is not even too much, if you desire more coffee, get two, or work on reducing your tolerance for caffeine.

In life, there is no one path, but with coffee, there is a process to follow and I think awful thoughts about those who deviate.

Why write a blog? Why would I sit and start typing to answer a question I’ve barely even thought about? Why wouldn’t I review, edit, and redraft this post? Why would I just start writing, review some thoughts and then, when it feels finished, end the post? It’s how I’ve been blogging and it’s as interesting a question to me as it is to my hand which is typing these thoughts just a hair slower than I’m thinking them.

Quality vs quantity, high quality vs high volume. The great debate for artists. There are both types of artists for sure, is there a better strategy? Probably not. Some people love refining, some people love variety. High volume affords a potentially higher variety of creativity, higher refinement allows for greater precision with a more curated and careful result.

Doing nothing, creates nothing, and hones no skill. Pushing volume creates muscle memory and efficiency in bulk delivery, it conditions the mind to do the work to get started, it’s sloppy but it’s movement. Striving for perfection can only be applied to a person who is comfortable with delivering volume. I’m not a writer, so writing is a good start to developing the first skill needed to be one, the ability to sit, and put thoughts into written words. To organize ideas for transmission.

Somewhere around 38 years old, I was gifted a guitar. It was some time in the early days of Covid lockdown and there was an assumption we might learn some instruments with the downtime. It didn’t work. I didn’t start. I didn’t pick the thing up. When lockdown lifted, there was an idea of donating the unused instruments we had accumulated to free up space, instead, we signed up for guitar lessons. Well, my partner signed me up for a couple, which was brilliant.

A single guitar lesson, forces you to increase your playing output.  Your playing time, goes from 0% to 100% on day one. If your lesson is an hour, that’s a pretty significant bump from 0 seconds of prior work. Even if you never practice, a weekly lesson is some progress towards a goal. In a million years at that pace, you would become a master just before dying. Being 38, I thought it would be better to try to practice the thing daily. Guitar practice is part volume and part precision. Chord shapes, chord changes, fingering and strumming patterns, metronome work, noodling.

Noodling is playing things on the guitar that you enjoy playing but don’t progress your skill. It’s an enjoyment of the instrument but it doesn’t necessarily make you better at playing it. Practice is the harder part, practice is a bit frustrating, you aren’t reading the music correctly, your hands can’t retain the correct shapes, your arm and fingers are strumming or plucking the correct strings.

They say practice at least 15 minutes a day, they mean the frustrating part. Noodling is the gift to yourself as you’re able to make music with the tool after all the frustration you’ve poured into it. When you practice for a short time daily, you do progress and that time you spend pushing your brain and muscles to absorb new patterns becomes justified. Like a soldier dying peacefully on a battlefield assuming they served some purpose, the song takes the pain of learning away. It becomes easier to practice as the muscle memory of the process becomes clear.

It’s true with running. Your mind wants to escape to process for the first mile, but after the 7th mile, it settles in to accepting its fate. When thinking back on the run, after the pain has faded, you only remember a vague idea of the pain but a vivid memory of the scenic hills in the first mile, or the Washington monument around mile nine as you worked your way through all of Baltimore.

This is the problem with volume. What would I edit out of what I’ve just written? What is pertinent to the audience? Doesn’t matter. I’m building reps. Am I noodling? Doesn’t feel like it. This feels like guitar practice. It feels like running that first mile. Maybe I’m not writing enough. Maybe I’ve got to put a volume of thoughts into words, into sentences, into paragraphs, into posts before I nail this thing down.

If I could get comfortable with generating the work, where the process itself feels effortless, maybe then I’ll add the effort for revisions and drafts and tight edits, right now, writing is its own challenge, and I’m enjoying the fight.

I listened to an interview with Bill Burr and Terry Gross a couple of weeks ago. Bill was being more candid than he typically is, because he was discussing abuse and trauma. At one point he blames women for some awful aspect of men, and Terry calls him out for it. Why would he blame women and not the men for their own behavior and lack of accountability within their own group? Bill couldn’t really process a valid response. He provided an obviously canned answer which didn’t address the concern. Then I realized he had pinned his opinion on the matter to his joke and couldn’t see his way around it.

The work of a master stand up comedian is not creating a joke, it is editing a joke into the most precise form of the joke, so that it is concise, easily understood, and most importantly, consistently delivers a laugh. This is brutal to see in action, if you have a local comedy club, go to open mics and watch new comedians tell the same jokes night after night with the slightest modifications each time. I love comedy, I’ve done some stand up, I hate this process, I hate telling the same dozen jokes over and over again, it absolutely makes better jokes but it limits ideas.

A master comedian is going to be much closer to the finished structure from the very beginning because they largely have a sense of what will work from all of their previous success but they still go through this process.

I recognized in Bill Burr’s response to Terry Gross, that he had thought about the irony that the me-too movement had missed other behaviors that men are guilty of that may or may not be worse than the lesser reasons some people were “cancelled” (became unmarketable if you ask me). Bill had processed this thought as a joke, women had created the me-too movement, me were being punished, but also men were becoming more vocal about being Nazis, isn’t it funny women didn’t address that?

The structure is there, it’s a joke, it has funny impressions that can be worked into it, and a little bit of thought but when confronted on the logic, it made no sense, and after all the reps Bill had put in to perfect the structure, he had convinced himself the idea was sound. You could tell in his response to the question of why don’t men hold men accountable that he hadn’t considered it but recognized his folly. He took an initial idea, and diligently polished it, even though the idea itself is stupid.

Bill Burr is a brilliant comedian, and stupid ideas are the foundation of all kinds of comedy, and it’s completely fine for a joke to not reflect the principles of the teller. There are more serious refinements in the world that have much more hazardous outcomes. Donald J Trump got it in his head in the 1980s that a lack of tariffs were the main reason the U.S. was losing jobs to manufacturing overseas. He’s refined his idea to believe that they’re the solution to that and all other foreign policy challenges. A refinement navigating a herd off a cliff,  finely polishing the wings off the commercial airliner that is the U.S. economy, or, this is where a comedian would put an additional joke to satisfy the rule of threes in comedy but I have no editor.

I think I like not being so cornered in my thinking. Quality requires refinement and locks things into a shape. The metronome makes for a perfectly executed performance but the closer to the metronome you get, the more the music sounds robotic. The uneven delivery of a human makes it sound much more satisfying. The unexpected end to a blog post has a similar resonance.

In U.S. political chatter, there are lot of assumptions that the opposite end of the political spectrum does not understand your point of view, or concerns, or the dangers of their own ideology.

We spend a lot of time trying to open their eyes to the reality we’re certain of, that if they could see the awfulness that their leaders are imposing on the world, or how the implications of those policies horribly impact on their own lives, or their families or neighbors, that they will alter their support.

This could be true for some people who truly have trouble sorting through all of the facts and lies and can’t tell who is being honest. With this new administration in the U.S. I imagine those people have been minimized. The policies and lies are so blatantly in your face, that the apocalyptic dark humor of Doctor Strangelove would be lost on today’s public.

So we have to assume that there is a disturbingly high number of disturbed Americans who are happy to support cruelty, chaos, a collapse of all moral and ethical boundaries, as well as unprecedented grift, and direct attacks on the foundations of democracy, including disregard for the separation of powers or the assaults on elections themselves.

The whole of American democracy is teetering on collapse and we have to assume that this bulk of human beings, is praying for it.

I imagine, if I were reading this, I would take it as hyperbolic. That Americans are just misled and they need to be educated. What I’m concerned with, is what if that is just not the case. What if your neighbors are operating with the full intent of sinking the ship. What if they don’t believe in democracy? If they don’t, what is the recourse. What is the strategy to save democracy against those who want to destroy it from within? To protect the Constitution from those in power who don’t believe in its principles and look to dissolve it with the support of enough of society to get away with it?

It’s probably not coincidental that this whole concept reminds me of this documentary from American Experience Nazi Town USA. It covers the rise of the German-American Bund group which sought to abandon U.S. democracy to install a similar Nazi dictatorship to what Hitler had created in Germany. It was hugely popular in the U.S. until we entered the war against Germany and people were too afraid to be associated with Nazis and the movement quickly dissolved. It struck me that there was such a large portion of Americans who were willing to abandon democracy when they thought it best served their interests.

That’s where I think we’re currently at. You can’t educate these people into changing their minds by explaining the fall of democracy. It’s likely what they want.

Many Americans believe there is a looming civil war. I think it’s unlikely because the distribution of political polarization seems to split between cities and rural areas rather than geographic lines, which would make a war difficult in the historic sense. I wouldn’t rule out mass violence however, or an attempt at politicide. I hope it’s unlikely but I also thought it was unlikely that a large portion of Americans didn’t hold the core requirements for democracy as we know it to be sacred.

So thinking about this. If it were true that many Americans are ready and willing to throw our governmental system in the trashcan, to make way for a dictatorship, plutocracy, or oligarchy, what would we do about that? Assume they know what it means to move in that direction. What is the peaceful, and democratic process for obstructing the people’s will to abandon democracy? Is it even democratic to do so, or do we just work with the rubble they create when the destruction is done?

I’d like to be engaged, protests historically don’t fair well under authoritarianism, nor do public debates. I find violence to be completely barbaric and have no interest in engaging on that level. Peaceful collapse is better than violent resistance in my mind. So what would be the strategy? What is the historical success story for walking citizens back away from the cliff and from falling into fascism and authoritarianism? How do we build on that quickly, who would we organize or work with?

It’s interesting blogging into the void. I’d love to have a deep dialogue. Most people I speak with are more optimistic or too tuned out to think any of this is worth pondering. That or they’re on-board with the Trump agenda. So what?

I’ve seen a few memes over the past someamountoftime (my observational bias could have this as a couple of weeks or three years but it feels recent) that state something like “all these kids with their $30 water bottles and I don’t remember drinking water until I was 25”.

Geez. (Jeez? What is this word)

Where I grew up there were bubblers. (Bubblahs if you want that Massachusetts accent) They’re called by other names. Drinking Fountain I believe is most on the nose. Here is a stolen internet graphic.

These fountains used to be a staple of modern life. I remember they were in nearly every hallway, corner, by the bathroom of every indoor  professional building. They were outside in city public areas, parks, the roller rink, whatever. Free clean water everywhere. They even would place multiple, of different, heights to accommodate different  people.

Many had a cooling element to get the temperature just right and from everything I’ve ever read, having separate ones for dark skinned people and light skinned people was the greatest offense of the Jim Crow laws separating public services based on “race”.  I fully understand that of all the horrible things Jim Crow laws were, this is not even close to the worst offender but it’s prominence in my education as a main issue is as  concerning to look back on as people thinking we didn’t drink water when it was so common, you didn’t need to carry a bottle to carry it in.

Oh, this is sort of what they looked like in this other stolen internet photo.

You probably recognize it. They still have them at some stadiums, old public buildings, or at the airport. The modern ones often have a water bottle filling station which helps bridge the cultural divide between generations. The biggest difference between now and when I was young, is there is never a line now, whereas 20 years ago, when a class or movie let out, many people would race to them to avoid the line. “Hey pal, leave some water for the fish” was the most common way of saying “hurry the fuck up, I’m thirsty” back then.

I have no idea how it happened, but it’s obvious with this and tap. We’ve been convinced to stop trusting our public water supply because risk of contamination to find more costly water from plastic bottles that are complete contaminated or by buying very costly home filters. Often while receiving steep water bills to ensure the water getting to our homes and public spaces are clean. It’s a whole environmental thing you could read about for weeks. The better way would be demand clean water everywhere, but that’s going to be tough with politicians also trying to roll back those requirements so businesses can put a half percentage on their margin by dumping toxins back into the rivers or air. Hail capitalism.

We used to drink out of houses too, which has a very toxic taste and mouth feel but is catalogued in my mind as a comfort food and I’ll still partake if thirsty.

I think for a lot of people the act of lapping at a fountain stream of water reminded them of being a dog. With the lines that used to form (always behind the person for the privacy sake of the bent lapping) there was always an awareness of everyone thinking “what a dog this person is being right now. Woof” which probably led to the first person thinking, maybe I’ll bring mine in a bottle next time and derailing the whole fucking project.

This photo I took myself and I’ll leave the stock photo tag to prove it.

Anyways, yes we drank water all the time in the 70s and 80s but we were forced to lap at it, like fucking dogs.

Two things I always take pictures of are informational icons which are funny to me, and bathrooms that I think people should know about.

A lot of the time, I’m dazzled by the lack of upkeep or generous graffiti, both strategies welcome a dangerous level of carelessness and contamination. The grossest ones are usually in the most fun bars or clubs.

I also like when they get kinda cutesy with it. Simple decorations are all you need to keep people from writing or pissing all over the walls. You can go all out with sexy images but really, a picture of dogs dressed like bees 🐝 🐝 will keep people on their best behavior.

Plane jane is cool too. Just need to recognize that people hate blank slates and a white surface invites markers. I don’t know why anyone would throw a bottle in a toilet, there is a psychological profile to be learned there but I’m not even interested in knowing what type of person does that.

Unfortunately. I am the type of dingbat that will take a picture of even a friend’s bathroom and post it on the internet. Just give me half a reason and BAM. There it is.

I don’t even know how many of these pictures I have. This was just an assortment of a quick search in my gallery. Maybe I’ll do a round 2, or a post of my information icons. We’ll see.

Mail me a handwritten letter if you want the metadata revealing the locations of any of the shots above.

Happy Pooping 💩

Is my favorite idiom that people actually say out loud.

We just finished running a Saint Patrick’s Day 5K and were walking back to the car from the finish line. Was it because we had on the green shamrock themed shirts the race provided? Was it because there was a parade scheduled shortly after the race? Did she think we were a parade of people? There were 4 of us together with maybe some others scattered in the area.

It’s a weird thing to shout from a car window. Also, if you’re going to take the time to forcefully declare a historical belief, why not leave your window down for a bit to hear the response of the debate. I’m not as quick on my toes as I wish I could be but I did yell back “god isn’t real!”.

This was three days ago and I’m still thinking about. This woman who yelled “Saint Patrick was Italian!” was certainly not Italian. Her accent was some form of thick Marylander, the distorted vowels and attitude made us think she’s likely from Dundalk, although really could be Essex or even Pasadena, definitely not from Italy, probably never been there.

Americans are goofballs with heritage. I was once waiting for a train in Boston when a townie came up to me and told me “I don’t like you Irish fucks”. I had been out drinking and it was definitely more morning than evening, and I was nice enough to respond “that’s fine, you don’t have to”. This tiny man then went on to explain to me that he’s Italian and I’m Irish and in Boston, they’re not supposed to get along. This man, regardless of who his ancestors were, was not Italian, I’m not Irish.

If I were to go to Ireland, would it make sense to say I’m Irish? How Irish even are the people there? I mean, they’re certainly Irish in the literal, present tense, but do they have this long standing connection to Ireland? Or are they similar to Americans and claim heritage to where they came from prior to where they actually have lived their whole lives? I’m fairly certain they’re not descended from druids or Neanderthals or whoever was settled in Ireland prior to their family. How many generations is it before you claim from where you’re from and not from where your grandparents or great grandparents or distant ancestors were from?

There is an ignorance to the whole thing which mirrors racist tropes. People say “of course I’m this way, I’m German” to describe why they would be loud and spill beer all over the replica beer garden. You’re Irish, you get it… Actually, my ancestors were also from France, so maybe I don’t get it.

The distance between France and Ireland is like that of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, it doesn’t strike me as the type of geographical isolation or stretch of time needed for significant genetic drift, let alone evolution. Maybe natural selection moved faster before the automobile was invented.

At any rate, why did this lady scream such a thing? Doesn’t matter who Saint Patrick was, we’re running as a reminder to not stay so fat, while meeting up with friends, and justify the extreme cost of the race by acknowledging the charities listed on the back of the T-shirt.

If Patrick is celebrated for missionary work, converting much of Ireland to Catholicism than I say “fuck him”. The Catholic Church is a global pedophile ring which only pursues expansion and power. If this lady believes she is Italian, and trying to make claim to such a villain, without ever having met the man, or acknowledging the awful crime that is the Catholic Church, or never having set foot on Ireland or Italy, then “fuck her too”.

To the rest of you, Happy Saint Patrick’s Day! 🍀

When the Supreme Court decided that U.S. presidents are immune from investigation, let alone prosecution, for all official acts, Joe Biden should have imprisoned them in Guantanamo Bay and jailed Donald Trump and friends (even those in the Senate) for their coup attempt.

He would have been a complete monster. He would have spurred Congress to impeach him in record time. There would have been emergency changes to clarify the constitution and revision to standing laws so that the president is in no way immune to U.S. law.

Instead he chose to lead by example. Except when it came to pardoning his son, there he just couldn’t help himself. So he folded on perfect ethics and still tried to hold the moral high ground. Even in a world where the vast difference of his Joe Biden’s morality could honestly be measured against Donald Trump’s total disregard for honesty, decency, ethics, and virtue, it still wouldn’t have mattered.

Honest and ethical people might compete against each other for moral high ground. When you have a complete fucking villain on one side of the equation, the only solution is tit for tat.

People don’t mind when their hero abuses a system. They cheer it on. Break the rules! It benefits all of us! They complain when the opposition does it. In order to break a spell like what you have with Trump, a Democrat needs to lead by destroying their own reputation and being the villain.

It’s not easy mind you, most people who enter politics, even if they do get corrupted, believe they are serving for the good of the public. Most politicians, only want to be remembered for all of the good they accomplish. It’s only incidental in most instances where they do something that turns out to be awful and history turns on them.

Joe Biden wasn’t willing to lead by example when the example had to be an egregious overstepping of power to limit it for the next guy. The next guy is now in office and has almost unlimited power. Republicans will not work to correct this overstep and if Democrats did, Republicans would cry foul.

The Supreme Court has tilted into radical lunacy. By the time this candidacy is over, they’ll be on Mars. They aren’t going to fix anything. Congress needs to fix the constitution and the laws. They need to be clear and direct. They won’t fix anything without a true constitutional crisis regarding the president and Republicans won’t acknowledge a crisis as long as it’s their leader.

It needs to be a Democrat, they need to be a total fucking monster, they need to win the next presidency and break whatever is left of the system in such a painful way, that both sides of the aisle freak out and Congress makes sweeping changes.

Yes, it will ruin that person’s reputation. Yes it will destroy the Democratic party. The Republican party has already destroyed itself, they just haven’t acknowledged it yet. At the very least though, it might save our democracy to have someone decent try to destroy it.