My great grandmother used to put out saucers of Coke to kill mice. She believed it worked because rodents can’t burp. I have no idea whether any of this is true.

Like most parents, my mom was uncomfortable talking to me about sex, but unlike most other parents, she recognized her discomfort as her problem and she did her best to work around it. She didn’t want me to have the same hangups. Fortunately, this was the 1970s, and she had a lot of resources available. There were lots of books about sex, and she gave me some, and left others around the house for me to read when I wanted.

At the time, I don’t think there was any specific law against allowing your kid to look at, say Playboy magazine, much less more explicit material. You’d probably get prosecuted for it now, which is reasonable. At that time, Playboy was still fairly softcore, just air-brushed breasts and gauzy drapes. And there were “nudist” or “natural” publications, with people having sex out in nature without the photo tricks used today, so you really couldn’t see much. I was allowed to look at those for a while, although I think the adults felt ishy about it, and soon put those away.

In this capitalist hellscape, I think it’s almost impossible to hire anyone to do anything without exploiting them. I’m fairly convinced that the whole “opioid crisis” is really just a chronic pain crisis, brought about by our system that works people to death; nearly everyone over the age of 40 has incurred some kind of permanent physical or emotional damage while working. There are degrees of exploitation, of course, but I’m not sure we can put sex work in a special category based on exploitation alone.

Most older gospel is wonderful. Here’s a song by an artist you’ve probably never heard of, because she only released this one single. She had a gorgeous, rich gospel voice, and the record company was all set to promote her as the next Janice Joplin. But she feared the music business would corrupt her soul, so pop music lost a brilliant voice. She’s dead now. I like to imagine her cranking out great albums in heaven.

https://youtu.be/Q2G1F8urLtE

I think our brains can only do so much major cognitive work at a time. Playing from your soul, and feeling big feelings, these things override the ability to maintain social control over your facial expression. Perhaps keeping emotions off our faces is a skill that evolved more recently than having emotions, and thus it’s the first to go when we’re concentrating on other things.

I’m really glad you at least partially qualified what you mean by forgiveness. Or at least what you do not mean by it. The type of forgiveness I think you’re trying to suggest is more of an internal process. It’s not really about the other person at all. For example, there are some family members of murder victims who say they have forgiven the killer. They are not saying the killer deserves to go free. They’re just saying they don’t want to carry that hatred through the rest of their lives. By that definition, I don’t think any of us know what we might be able to let go of.

Not really a lesson learned, but a line that stayed with me. I forget which book it’s in, maybe Post Office, but he writes about a winning streak he had at the track. It was so good he either quit or took a leave of absence from his job. He woke late, enjoyed steak and scotch, then ambled down to the track. And then he says, “it was a great life, and I did not tire of it.”

All our lives, we’re told that wealth won’t buy happiness, that the only true fulfillment comes from hard work, and that getting what we want will only lead to misery. But here’s Bukowski describing a life of utter self-indulgence, and saying he never got tired of it. Profound.

A bunch of us kids were hanging out one day, with the radio on. One of the boys was flirting with a girl named Caroline, and just as he sat down next to her, Sweet Caroline by Neil Diamond came on.

This isn’t a winnable argument, it’s a statement of genocidal intent. Engaging with this is worse than a waste of time. It provides legitimacy to evil.

It’s ruined art for me. Someone posts something, and I don’t know if it’s real art or a theft of other people’s work.

I believe that all things happen in love and in war, usually because of rotten bastards who exploit human vulnerability as a sport.

Go to bed early so you can get a good night’s sleep. I have heard this so many times, and I’m convinced it was the cause of many sleepless nights. It’s probably great advice for people with a normal circadian rhythm, but it’s useless for those with a non-standard chronotype. That shit is baked into your DNA, and medicine currently has no idea how to change it. Especially since it’s so much easier just to blame the night owl.

Years ago, I was working on a house where there were several nests of these wicked looking red wasps. I had been working around them all morning quite safely. At lunch, I drank half a beer, and was almost immediately stung twice when I went back to work. I don’t know if it affected my timing or my scent, or something else.

My old partner and I used to travel to rural areas in our rv, to work on low income ppl’s houses, as part of a different government program, and our clients often gave us some of their commodities. That cheese made some mighty good tacos. I used to make them directly on the propane flame to melt the cheese and toast the tortilla. We’d stuff them with avocado and alfalfa sprouts because we were hippy weirdos. The honey was great, too.

When certain people have the freedom to hurt others, no one is safe.

“Like they should have stopped Hitler at Munich, they should never let him get away with that, they was just asking for bad trouble.” Peter Clemenza, The Godfather