Stream of Consciousness

[Svengoolie 3]

I worked on fixing a hole on my kitchen floor and building a paint station today.

Oh, cool! Was this before or after you went to work?

Given the number and length of your posts here I concluded posting here is your career.

[ER]

I worked on fixing a hole on my kitchen floor and building a paint station today.

Oh, cool! Was this before or after you went to work?

Given the number and length of your posts here I concluded posting here is your career.

Dang, Sven, you're actually right. Or at least it was til midnight last night, and now my employers have reassigned me. The irony is in your sarcasm you're right. I was employed to hide codes within messages. You're astute.

[ER]

I've been thinking of how we in our own iteration of the present consider ourselves so much more sophisticated than the Victorians because we have a cultural openness about sexual matters and they did not, yet we in turn  shun death and hide it away from our sight, our houses, our thoughts, cruelly encasing our elders in hospitals, there to die instead of at home, when Victorians faced mortality, spoke about it seemingly every day, were brave in its nearness. Who really then is the more solid, we who define our sophistication in things of pleasure, or our forebears who didn't flinch at unpleasantness, as we do?

[ER]

I was surprised by today's news that my cousin's daughter is moving back to the US this summer after being in Argentina since right after high school graduation in 2014. She's one of the most determined and interesting people I know, making plans as early as middle school to live in Buenos Aires, mastering Argentine Spanish, saving up, then actually having the courage to go alone at age eighteen and support herself in a foreign country. Not many thirty-year-olds could do that, let alone a teenage girl. She's bitingly intelligent in a Wednesday Addams way and has had a uniquely fierce quality her entire life that I admire but couldn't possibly duplicate. She is also militantly proud of never having had sex, and not in some wispy "saving-myself" way, more like how an ancient Amazon warrior might be, and given her maternal DNA (especially the way their mom's swivvy-loving genes manifested in her younger brother) that's an achievement. I'm looking forward to her being back this summer because she makes life more interesting but I will miss her reports which have taught me a lot, including the fact that Argentine people love faux English pubs, which dot B.A., despite the Argentines mistakenly thinking they should own the Falklands. I wrote and told her she's one of my heroes. Her reply? "I am? Why's that?" I love her.

[ER]

I've taken up Talmudic studies again through our local Jewish center and came across something said by the Medieval French rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki, known to history of course as Rashi, who opined:

"When another transgresses upon you, set aside his offense. Though G-d has not granted that we should leave it unremembered, it is holy to act as if we have."

That's pretty dang apt.

[ER]

Where I am the snow is falling so hard visibility isn't fifty feet. It's beautiful and unexpected and potentially deadly with wrecks and overturned trucks everywhere and still the squall continues interchanging white-outs with sudden patches of baby blue skies, delicate as powder.  We made a fire and it's crackling in the century-old fireplace beneath the German mantel my grandfather bought my grandma as a present in 1972, while the hot chocolate steams and my old dog lies so close to the flames her fur seems to rise and fall in the air that dances the orange serpents. Winter's last kiss may be a hard one, mashing lips with its ivory teeth but it's still a kiss.

[Alex]

Oooooooh, winter beside a roaring fireplace. Slightly jealous.

[ER]

A couple days ago I suddenly realized I was still working a job I was no longer getting paid to do and having no fun doing it. Light bulb went off in my head.

[Alex]

Many years ago, long before even considering my current job I did briefly (for about half an hour) entertain thoughts about becoming a globe trotting assassin (people kept offering me money to kill people, so I figured it was worth thinking about). The girl who wanted to accompany me on these 'adventures' however could not stand the sight of blood, got upset by swearing (on the plus side though she had phoned me up at 4 am in the morning and asked me how much I would charge to kill her younger sister) and I had to generally consider her as ill suited to such a job and besides what is that point of doing that job if you don't have a glamourous woman to share in it with you?

Anyway, I decided the disadvantages of the job (risk of long prison sentence, p**sed off relatives trying to hire someone to bump you off in retaliation and so on) outweighed the potential advantages.

Plus I could see that it would be much more cost effective to record people trying to hire me to kill off someone for them and then use this as blackmail material. After all if you kill someone you can only really get paid for that once, whereas if you can threaten to give proof of someone trying to get someone else killed you can milk that for money for years. I mean I am sure not just the police but the potential target would be very interested in that information.

Oh, and I guess there is a whole moral component to the thing that should be considered. Of course, now with a baby, Lone Wolf and Cub aside it would be pretty hard to follow such a career. One of these days though I am going to work out just how much money I have been offered through my life to kill people and estimate what kind of earnings I could have potentially made if I had taken it up. Not because I really wish I had done it, but just out of curiosity. I am happy with my life and how it has went. :)

[ER]

f**k me, man, I've known those types, not one was an American, and they're like psychopathic nerds more than the popular depiction of them. I'm glad you reconsidered, you'd have to look over your shoulder the rest of your life til life itself was bleached white of all goodness.

Oh, and then you die and come back as a nun in Haiti.

Strictly a compliment to say you're too good inside to be one of those.

[Alex]

Lol, no one has ever told me that I am too good to be a Haitian nun before. Thanks. 

[ER]

Most terrifying of all life forms, nuns.

[Alex]

Must be why I never get to hear nun of those jokes about them. We'll have nun of your mockery here then. 

[RCMerchant]

Oooooooh, winter beside a roaring fireplace. Slightly jealous.

Yeah- come to Michigan-you'll get all that s**t you wan't-and then some. You'll curse Old Man Winter within days.
But it's been beautiful here for the last week or so-in the 40's and 50's. Snow's melted! Kids are riding bikes and wearing short sleeve shirts! (40's weather in Michigan-kids wear short sleeve shirts-truly Michiganders.  )

[indianasmith]

I wish someone would send some snow our way.  This is three winters in a row with NO significant frozen precip!