Thoughts and whatnot

I turned 41 yesterday.  I celebrated by working like a Botard.  Not a big deal.  I'm not one for making a big deal out of it.  I did get several nice wishes from folks, so that's gratifying.

Today's the day off.  And the last one until March 2, owing to vacations and whatnot.  At least they're all opening shifts.  I've been doing mostly closing shifts since late summer.  It sucks.  Not only do you not get weekends or holidays off, you also don't get evenings.  Now that we have a fourth MoD (we've been essentially short for about a year), I'd like to see that schedule change a bit.  We haven't been able to do anything regularly since the summer.  And that makes me easily aggravated.

Spending the morning finishing up the Defenders series on Netflix.  Part of it was the move, and not having decent internet until the fall, but I keep noticing how much Iron Fist really took me out of the whole little pocket of the Marvel Cinematic Universe that Netflix has created.  I never finished Iron Fist.  It was bad.  It was boring.  It had little of the humor or action and none of the direction of purpose that the first seasons of Daredevil, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage have.  And while I won't comment on the second season of Daredevil, which turded it up a bit, owing to this constant need to put The Punisher into things.

Defenders itself isn't bad, but it feels bland, compared to the others.  It feels too much like Iron Fist, if you wanna know the truth.  And while I like the Elektra aspect, I felt like it needed a bigger bad.  Maybe I'm just so enfatuated with Vincent D'Onofrio's Kingpin that I want to see him at every turn.

(A sidebar....during last year's Spider-Man: Homecoming, I was sitting next to a guy who was geeking out for every part of the flick.  During the mid-credits sting scene, you hear somebody offscreen yell to Michael Keaton's Vulture, and this guy next to me jumps for joy  And then out of the corner of my eye, you see him visible deflate.  "I was hoping it was the Kingpin," he says to himself.  I laughed, because that possiblity had occurred to me right about the time that he started getting excited). 

Anyway, Defenders isn't bad.  I just wasn't as excited for it as the other Marvel Netflix offerings.  Punisher is out already, but I'm just not all that interested.  A boring character with no arc that I'm interested in.  If I hear enough positive, I may give it a try down the road, but right now, I'll pass....

Too many dumb shits

We have too many dumb shits in this country.

We have too much dumb gun love.

We have too much want for profitability in things that should just strive to be solvent.

We don't have enough health care.

We don't have enough mental health resources.

We don't pay cops enough.  We don't give the FBI enough resources.

Sorry, gun folks.  I'm telling you this as a guy who respects your right to bear arms:  if you aren't willing to belly up to the bar to help pay the tab on mental health care, to make sure that the FBI and local authorities (who are also paid like shit) aren't shirking their responsibilities when it comes to a guy who's had the cops called on him times running up into the dozens?  Then we gotta start taking some of the guns off the streets.  We gotta start making them harder to get.  We have to make it harder for dumb shits to get guns.  You don't get to yell about Libtards blaming the gun while yelling about cops coming to his house a few dozen times.

You wanna know why those cops didn't do anything more to stop him?  Because they had other shit to deal with, too.  Because they were tired, perhaps.  Because they weren't trained on how to recognize, perhaps.  Or because they didn't want to have to dive into a river of red tape when it comes to getting somebody proper mental health.  Or any combination of those and any other factors up to and including wanting to go home or having to go take a shit.  I'm just guessing.  But when you're risking your life for a pittance?  You're not gonna catch everything.  Should something more have been done one of those times?  As a person who's had the cops called on me less than once?  Yeah, that's excessive.  Something should have been done.  But it wasn't.  And now we have more dead kids.

Should there be accountability there?  Absolutely.  Roll some heads.  Still, it won't unkill those kids, though.  And won't change the fact that we have underpaid cops and federal agents all over this nation who don't have the correct combination of resources and wherewithal to get all the jobs done every time.

If you're a responsible gun owner?  That's great.  That's just swell.

Not everybody is.  They're not all responsible.  They're not all smart.  And worse, they don't all care.  They don't all respect human life.  Sorry.  We got a lot of bad eggs in this country.  I don't think the ratio is actually any worse than at any other time, in fact, oddly, that ratio may be a little better than average, but I just think we have two things working against us:  first, there's a whole helluva lot more of us in 2018 than there was even 30 years ago, and two, we have an echo chamber interweb that lets the crazies find acceptance and cultivation for their crazy ass ideas that wasn't around at this degree even 20 years ago.

I say all that to say this:  if you're not willing to help educate in that regard?  Shut the fuck up.

And if you are?  And those people aren't willing to sit down for an educational process?  Take their fucking guns away.

And don't come at me with some kind of argument about "well what's an assault rifle, Tommy?" or "any gun can be modified" or "even a chainsaw can kill people" because you're not looking to solve a problem, you're just looking to be the smartest guy in the room.  And on a mostly defunct blog called "Stupid" Tommy, that's just low hanging fruit.  You go back to 2002 and get your own goddamn blogamathing and go be the smartest person there.

Although to that last point, let me say this:  A knife is only going to do so much damage before somebody stops the knifer.  The chances of you coming in and knifing 17 people to death before they either stop you or run away is pretty slim, unless you're pretty fit and/or have a good amount of training.  (Which our guy didn't/wasn't) .  The chances of you killing 17 people with a chainsaw is also pretty slim, because chainsaws are pretty fucking heavy, when it comes to waving it around and trying to kill people, despite what Bruce Campbell has shown us (unless you've seen the classic My Name is Bruce, in which even he admits Chainsaws are heavy).

I'm tired.  I'm tired of people hollering about "liberals" do this and "conservatives" do this.  If that's your first, second all the way up to the fourteenth response to this endless cycle of calamity we find ourselves in?  Shut The Fuck Up.  Write your little opinion down on a piece of paper, roll it up really tight, and jam it into your nose until it won't come out.  If you look in a mirror and see a little piece of paper hanging out, you better just push a little farther.

Liberals aren't the bad guy.  Conservatives aren't the bad guy.  Get out of that lizard fight or flight reflex mindset.  Quit trying to turn your neighbor into the bad guy in your own little self-agrandizing superhero drama.

I'm tired.  I don't have an answer.  We need better health care.  We need stricter gun laws.

I don't have time to fix it because I'm working 60 hours a week.

Congress won't fix it.  Hell, somebody came and shot up a Congressional baseball practice last year, and they aren't in any hurry to fix things.  This shooting was hundreds of miles away, and if you turn off your TeeVee?  You don't have to hear about it!

The bottom line is this:  I'm worried.  I'm a 40-year-old middle aged man.  And this shit worries me.  I'm worried that some dumb shit teenager is going to walk into a school where my sister teaches and shoot the place up.  I'm worried that some old disgruntled piece of shit is going to walk into the Senior Center where my friend works and where my Mom does Tai Chi and shoot the place up because somebody turned off Fox News.  I'm worried that somebody will walk into my nephew's school, and shoot a bunch of kids because the cops made them come turn their music down.  I'm worried that somebody will walk into my store, perhaps an employee that I've disgruntled (and here's the rub....I'm in the business of disgruntling teenagers, lately) will decide to shoot my fat ass and the fat asses of everybody there.

So, I dunno.  What's the pragmatic answer?  Learn to run?  Because I'm a decent shot, but I've never been in a firefight.  I've never shot at a person, and I've certainly never been shot at.  So run?  Duck?  I probably need to shed several dozen pounds off my fat ass just to decrease my target?

I guess the last thing I'll say is this, and I echo my friend Sheila:   If I'm ever shot to death, please politicize the hell out of it.  I will not care. In fact, I'd prefer to you to shout it from far and wide that the person who shot me to death probably didn't need the gun he was carrying.

Vacation

Wandered out to Fall Creek Falls for a few days.  Got a cabin over the water.  Ended up with pretty decent weather...highs in the fifties and sixties.  Was nice, even if it did rain a bit.  All the better...Shyam and I between work and illness have been wandering withing spitting distance of exhaustion since Thanksgiving.  I think we both put 10 hours of the big sleep board between nights and naps in a day...

A couple pictures: 

Frog Eggs we found a a damp ditch.  Gift card added for scale.  They were jiggly....

Mongo and Shyam.

Sunrise, on a Windy Morning