Shitshitshitshit.... gasp... SHIT!

It's nearly midnight. My heart rate is currently 176 bpm resting*, and is irregular as all hell.

I'm trying to calm down and let the drugs work their magic but sonofabitch this is awful. I guess my grand experiment to get off the drugs was a bad idea. I'd rather be fatigued and exhausted and sluggish than in heart hyper-drive.  Shitty options but they're all I've got at the moment.

For the first time I'm actually looking forward to this surgery.

*thanks to the nifty heart rate monitor on my galaxy s5, I know this with silly amounts of accuracy.

Update #5,235

Heart surgery scheduled for the 15^th.  I expect blogging to remain pretty light until then. 

Apparently it is a 6 hour procedure.  I don’t know why, but that fact, above and beyond all the others, really terrified me.  A lot can go wrong in 6 hours. 

Fuck.  Just… 

…fuck… 

I can only pray that at 34 years old, that this is the fix that I need, instead of a sign of things to come.  I’m too young to start having heart problems.  

Comment Trolls, Stalkers, and Prolific Internet Bloggers...

I want to preface this all by saying that I’m not a white knight.  I’ve no delusions of sweeping in to rescue the fair maiden in any situation, much less this one.  I’m happily married, and fat and too lazy, really, to try and do something about all of this.  Furthermore, I’m certain that of all people, Tam is the last person on Earth that would need me to rush to her rescue. 

So none of this is posted in defense of Tam.  Far be it from me to presume that she wants or needs my help.  I want you all to read this as if I was writing it about a comment troll on Borepatch’s blog, as much as one on Tam’s.  This is all posted because of my insatiable need for justice, and to point out that which is unjust, for all to see.

(And by all, I mean both of you who read this…)

This, gentle reader, is meant as an impeachment of the person who has been trolling her blog, and comment stalking her to the point to where she shut her blog down. 

Artist's rendition

As is very typical of stalkers, he persists in showing up despite being told multiple times that he’s not welcome.  He admits that he’s been banned under several names, and keeps changing his name so he can come back and troll her some more.  He cannot stand that fact that she disagrees with him on several items.  He proceeds under the delusion that:

1.       Tam owes him something, somehow, and that her kicking him off of her blog is a monumental injustice that simply cannot stand, and that he will not be ignored (crazy);
2.           Tam is somehow obligated to agree with him on all things, and if she disagrees, he is entitled to item 3 (insane);
3.       Tam deserves to be berated and abused for not accepting items 1 and 2 (batshit)  
4.       Tam is obligated to present him only in a positive light, and portraying anything that he said in less than glowing terms is taking it “out of context” or “misinterpreting it” when in fact, any clear-thinking person could only interpret it the way Tam did. 

He’s lost his bully pulpit in the form of Tam’s site, so he has resorted to posting his long, trollish rants on Tam’s roommate’s site.  Roberta X, being the intelligent person that she is, left his rant up for all to see.  Go, read.

Vomit...

He starts out by posting a threat to all of the people that have “threatened” him.  Of course, I’ve seen no evidence at all that anyone has threatened him, but it is par for the course for the delusional to spin themselves into the victim role.  He then makes a hilarious legal threat, which Popehat would have a heyday with.  It even goes so far as to hint at saying “govern yourself accordingly, because I has multiple lawyers and I’m not afraid to use them!” 

I'm also a douchebag!

He then moves into a long justification for why what he’s doing is totally right and proper, and in the process, essentially admits to being a troll stalker.  Sort of like “I didn’t do anything wrong at all, you guys!  All I did was say things that Tam didn’t like, keep saying them until she banned me, then changed my name multiple times, through multiple bannings, so I could keep coming back and saying those things, over and over again!  I mean, seriously, what I did was totally rational!” 

He peppers his rant with delusions of persecution, as if being asked to leave someone’s private property because you’re being a asshole is an injustice that he’s never heard of, and is the only person on Earth to ever be subjected to such a travesty.

He fills it with excuses, like the time when he was plainly referring to showing up somewhere that Tam was so he could “see his little Georgia Girl” (Tam is originally from Georgia) he claims that he was, like, totes talking about his wife, you guys, serial…

"She lives in another town.  You wouldn't know her, but she's totally hot!"

And what, you might ask, is he saying that’s getting him banned?  Well, read the screed, dear reader.  In those three long-winded posts, I see him refer to Tam as bitter, barren, old, and “old maid”, a shrew, and a “shriveled shrew” (or other combination thereof) multiple times.  I’m not here to debate whether he’s right or wrong about Tam.  As I said, she can defend herself just fine.  But I want to point out that if you make it a habit of entering someone’s living room, calling them such names, then whining your guts out because that person asked you to leave, you are really spinning some serious rationalization dances to convince yourself that YOU are the aggrieved party. 

But seriously, can you imagine what insults like that must do to a person over time?  No one but Tam knows why she didn’t have kids, but what if it wasn’t by choice?  What kind of a total fuckhead runs around calling women “barren spinsters” and claiming that THEY are the victim?  My wife and I tried for many years to have a child.  If it turned out that we couldn’t, we would both have been heartbroken, and it would be a raw wound for the rest of our lives.  But this guy wants to claim that Tam is being completely unreasonable for banning him for heaping on such abuse. 

I’m just at a loss with this guy.  I cannot even imagine the depth of his delusion, that he thinks that he is in the right and Tam is in the wrong here.    

So if he comes here and reads this, allow me to posit a solution – come over here and comment troll ME, motherfucker.  I’d actually enjoy it, and I’ve got zero buttons to push.  You’ll be eating paste by the end of the week. 

Flame Suit On...

http://deadline.com/2014/08/padma-lakshmi-boston-teamsters-attack-top-chef-820137/

What other business or organization on Earth feels justified in being violent and vitriolic to this extent, simply because someone decided to use their competition instead of them?

How would you feel if the local Cadillac dealer attacked Ms. Lakshmi in similar fashion because she decided to buy a Lincoln?  Or if a local construction company did the same because she hired their competitor to remodel her restaurant?  To call her a whore and threaten to break her face because she decided to use the competition?

Why have we become so accustomed to, and accepting of, the violent, vitiriolic actions of labor unions?  Especially when you consider that all they are is a business organization in competition in the market, who sometimes gets outbid by their competitors?

Why do union people feel like they are entitled to other people’s money?  Why aren’t their demands to be hired at higher prices when other, less expensive alternatives exist, considered nothing more than that – entitlement to another’s money? 

Imagine your local Cadillac dealer calling you a filthy whore and threatening to smash your face in because you bought a less expensive Lincoln.  Imagine the entitlement one must have to consider you to be bound to pay more for the same service, because they say so. 

What other organization can act this way and survive? 

The answer, dear reader, comes stark and obvious upon further thought: No other legal organization is allowed to act this way.  The only other organizations that do are all on the shady side of the law.  Organized crime. 

I call it like I see it, and when people in labor unions act like this, I can come to no other conclusion.  

Sigh...

Stress test went okay.  Apparently I’m not tolerating my anti-arrhythmic drugs very well, so the doc wants me to get off of them ASAP.  Which means surgery ASAP. 

Going in for another MRI tomorrow, for which they are planning to sedate me, because they want my heart to be beating as slowly as possible, and I’m claustrophobic, so keeping my heart rate down while shoved into a tiny tube is sort of hard without medicinal intervention. 

Apparently, they want the MRI for something to do with the surgery.  The surgery is on September 15^th. 

Irony of ironies, the anti-arrhythmic drugs are actually causing an arrhythmia.  Something about elongating my QRS or something like that, which is apparently concerning since it indicates that the drug might be causing toxicity.  They are also making me tired.  So, so wretchedly tired and fatigued that I find it hard to get out of bed in the morning, and function during the day. 

I’m also depressed.  I realized that last night, too.  I’ve battled with depression occasionally in my life, but I’m afraid I’ve got a big one coming.  Maybe it’s already here.  I was cooking dinner last night and almost broke into tears over nothing.  Literally nothing.  I wasn’t even having trouble opening a jar or anything.  Just standing there, fresh off of an argument with a subcontractor who is not honoring his contractual obligations to my project, cooking dinner for my family, and this big sob just attacked me out of nowhere.  I managed to bottle it up and told Mrs. Goober that I’d just burned myself, no big deal, that’s why I “gasped”.    

I hope like hell that I can keep this from sticking around. 

I’m going to ask for the rest of the day off and go home for a while, to see if I can’t get my head straight.  Because right now I have no business trying to do business.  

On ISIS and War

Tam tweets to make her opinion known on the whole “ISIS beheading an American on video and threatening to do another one if we don’t comply with their demands” thing.

"We don't negotiate with terrorists!" - President Bill Pullman
Source: IMDB

Look, I’m about as anti-war as they come (not pacifist, that’s another matter entirely).  My personal opinion is that the last war that the US got involved in that we had any business being involved in was the war against Japan in the ‘40s.  You could probably convince me that the Taliban-smashing effort in Afghanistan was just, but was then tarnished by a subsequent ten-year “nation building” effort that was entirely folly. Not that it wasn't with good intentions, or a noble attempt to reduce suffering, but you can't force a western government on a people that don't want one.  

Throughout history, many people have been kept from
voting at gunpoint.  We Americans now like
to FORCE people to vote at gunpoint.  Because
that's okay, or something.

But even my anti-war ass looks at ISIS’ brutal, animalistic beheading of an American prisoner/kidnapping victim, and threat to do another if we don’t bow to their will, as about the most clear-cut causus belli imaginable.  I would whole-heartedly support any effort that the United States Government chooses to implement in response, as long as the goal of that response is the complete and total destruction of everything even peripherally related to ISIS.

Figure out a way to minimize collateral damage, first, maybe...

As commenter Kristophr put it on Tam’s blog:

If punishing barbarians that kill it’s citizens is not part of a government’s duty, then what is a government even for?  

My Painstaking Analysis of the Ferguson Shooting...

Everybody needs to just shut up and wait until the facts come out in court. Anything occurring prior to that is rank speculation and rumor-mongering, which is doing none of us any good at all.

Enough said.