Making Sense of Orlando

How classless.  Here we face a tragedy, in which 49 innocent people died for nothing but the rantings of yet another deranged lunatic, and our President, instead of marking the memorial as an occasion of solemnity, decides to go on a childish rant about politics. 

Apparently, according to him, I’M the one who lacks common sense, and the only people who have it are the ones who agree to “common sense” gun control (which, I’ll point out, none of the laws being suggested would actually have done fuck-all to stop this tragedy, but that sort of critical thinking is apparently not “common sense” according to the most brilliant motherfucker on Earth).  To me, “common sense” would dictate that you don’t use a memorial for 49 dead innocents to make political hay, but whatever, I’m not the smartest sumbitch on the planet, like he is.  But I’m not here to talk about politics, even though that’s how this screed started.

No, I’m here to make sure that the people in Orlando who lost loved ones, and those who are currently in a hospital fighting for their life know that my heart is broken for you all.  It is broken because this never should have happened, and your loss is so profound and deep that I can’t even imagine.  I’m so sorry.  Be strong.  Take solace in whatever you can, and carry on.  Your loved ones would want that. 

Don’t try to make sense of the senseless, you’ll go insane.  There is no sense to what happened, whether the scumbag was motivated by hatred of gays, radical Islamism, or just regular old insanity does not matter – the result is the same, and I cannot imagine how it makes a lick of difference, now, why he chose to do what he did.  Would it really make you feel better to know why the piece of shit did what he did?  Because I’ll guarantee you that even if you knew, 100% without question what his motive was, it would seem petty, silly, and completely out of proportion to his actions, no matter what it was.  Would it help to know that your love one died in the name of Allah?  Died because the guy hated their sexuality? Died because the piece of shit’s dog told him to do it?  Would it really help? 

Your loved one never hurt him.  Your loved one never even knew him.  Your loved one did nothing wrong, and yet, faced the evil that this man decided to share with them anyway.  It is senseless, so don’t bother trying to make sense of it.  You’ll do so much harm to yourself trying to make sense of it. 

Readers might ask, what, Goober, do you know about losing someone to violence?  How could you possibly know to tell these people these things?  How could you have experience to know what they’re going through?

I’ll answer with a link.  My cousin was Craig Sorger.  He was a harmless, sweet boy, and he did not deserve what happened to him.  I loved him.  Our entire family loved him, and we spent so much time, to this day, even, trying to make sense out of it.  The monster that murdered him never provided a motive (in fact, he proclaims his innocence to this day).  I spent years of my life trying to make sense of it, but realized after spending those years beating my head against that rock, that there is no sense to any of this.  You can’t make sense out of evil and madness.  You remember the one you lost, do your best to honor their memory, and you, sadly, move on without them.  Those are your only choices.  It sucks. 

It sucks so, so much.  

Delicious and Savory....

I just can’t resist the opportunity to point out that the complaints of Bernie Sanders, over the awarding of delegates to Hillary Clinton that are rightfully his, are just delicious, in a schadenfreudey and totally savory way.  This is a man who’s entire worldview, belief system, and political will is directed towards a system where we strategically take things away from people that earned those things and gift them to others that have not, complaining his guts out when that exact thing happens to him.  It proves to me that he is a disgusting, pathetic, avaricious, and lazy man.  He has no redeeming qualities, whatsoever.  To stand in front of the nation and advocate the looting of the successful for the benefit of the indolent, incapable, and lazy, and then complain when he is looted, himself, is despicable. 

More proof, as it were, that the people that simply LOVE socialism, only actually love it when they are either immune from its injustices (ie, they are the ruling class) or are the beneficiaries of them (ie, they are the looting class).  As soon as you turn the tables, and they no longer benefit, it amazes me to see how quickly they scuttle for cover and start claiming that “this is not what we had in mind!” 

*Quick caveat – this is not to say that all of the poor and disadvantaged are indolent, incapable, or lazy.  Some of them, in fact, perhaps even most of them, are genuine cases of need, but I don’t think one needs to install socialism to deal with these cases.  Socialism, on the other hand, is a broad-stroke reward for all of those qualities, and is a dangerous thing as a result.  

Memorial Day

Perhaps I’m not looking at it correctly, but it’s occurred to me on more than one occasion that the displaying of the American flag on Memorial Day is a little obscene. 

Easy, fella, let me explain…

You see, in a substantial portion of the men we are “memorializing” on this day – ie, the men who fought and died in this Country’s armed forces – it were representatives of that flag that came to said memorialized individual and told him something along the lines of “go fight this war, or we’ll throw you in prison.” 

In the American Civil War, the line was often much more harsh.  Something more like “go and fight this war, or we’ll hang you where you stand.” 

Celebrating THAT sacrifice by flying the flag of the very people that sent the poor man, against his will, to fight in bloody conflict, just seems kind of wrong to me. 

There should be some other symbol.  Similar to the “yellow ribbon” that we put up to show support and solidarity with our deployed troops, there should be some other symbol for Memorial Day than the display of the flag of the nation that forced these men to die.  It almost feels like rubbing it in the faces of the poor draftees that fought valiantly and bravely, and died terribly, because they were MADE TO by threat of being thrown in a cage, shunned socially, and made unemployable forever, if they did not. 

This isn’t an attempt to discuss the justness of this war or that.  World War Two is possibly the most just of wars ever fought by America, and yet I feel the same way about the draftees in that war as I do any other.  The sacrifice of the draftee is the most painful, in my opinion, because they didn’t choose it.  It was forced on them, and for the most part, they did the best they could with what they were faced with.  

Regardless of how you feel about everything else I just posted, take a moment to give thanks to all the men who've shed blood in defense of this country. 

Election Season...

So let me get this straight…

The two parties, lead by people that I’m meant to believe are infinitely smarter than me (so shut up and quit complaining) have nominated exactly WHO for president? 

A woman who, if not part of the political elite and thus not subject to the laws of mere mortals, would otherwise be a multiple felon (and apparently may become one yet, shortly, depending on how “in the pocket” the folks at the FBI are).

"We here at the FBI do not have a pocket, that we're aware of"

Or, alternatively, a trust-fund brat who would have made more money if he’d just left his inheritance in mutual funds than tried (and failed) in so many terrible business ventures that one loses count. 

I'll drive hard bargains, get GOOD DEALS.  You know, at slightly less than market return!

On one hand, a woman who’s entire purpose throughout her entire life, was to feed her political ambitions, not by accomplishing a goddamned thing, but by making sure that none of the multiple scandals popping up around her due to incompetence can actually stick to her.  A woman who had used her powerful, elite status to dodge indictment on things that would have any one of us plebes behind bars in a federal “pound me in the ass prison”.  Who, and I can’t stress this enough, has zero actual accomplishments to her name, other than managing to get elected and appointed to higher and higher offices after she was married to the president two decades ago.    Seriously, I’ve asked multiple Clinton fans to list her accomplishments, and I’ve never heard one of them list something that was a result of her actually “rolling up her sleeves and getting a job done”, as she’s so apt to claim she does in her campaign speeches.  No, her only accomplishments are:

• 1.       Being married to Bill Clinton;
• 2.       Getting elected senator of New York;
• 3.       Being appointed Secretary of State;
• 4.       Fucking everything up that she touched in every one of those positions, and then making sure to pin the blame on other people;

On the other hand, you’ve got, what, 6 bankruptcies?  An arrogant, condescending attitude?  Authoritarianism taken to a near Stalinist extreme? (I know, hyperbole, I got it).  A guy that was so “good” at business that when given untold millions in inheritance, he managed to make slightly less than the rate of return on the mutual fund market over 40 years of work?  A guy who’s policies on complex, intricate issues distill to incendiary one-liners about “rounding up” people and “building a wall and making Mexico pay for it?  No discussion about the implications of “rounding up” 12 million people and shipping them off to Mexico?  The human rights implications alone boggle the mind.  I know, they’re criminals – but consider the severity of their crime, versus the logistical nightmare of “rounding them up.”  With whom?  SWAT teams with guns?  You know there are going to be some bad guys in the mix, who will shoot back, so that means every one of these folks is going to get a SWAT raid.  At 2 hours per raid, times, say, 6 guys per raid, and 4 illegals per household, you’re talking 36,000,000 (MILLION!) man hours just in the “rounding up”, much less the investigations to determine who is actually here illegally.  36 million man hours, at 2,080 man hours per year, that’s pushing 18 THOUSAND full time positions to get this done in a year.  And recall, that’s just the tip of the spear, it doesn’t account for the investigation time, which will almost certainly be more than the actual “round up” time.  So say we suddenly need to create 40,000 full-time positions to get this done.  Where do we get them all?  How many are qualified?  Or are we talking a multi-year operations?  How long? 

It says "Homeland Security".  Why don't I feel secure seeing this photo?

How many legal immigrants get caught in that net, facing years of hassle and fear fighting their ILLEGAL deportation from a foreign country where they don’t belong?  How many parents of natural born American citizens are going to get deported, leaving a natural born American Citizen minor without parents?  Who now become wards of the State, and move into foster care at taxpayer expense.  Is this really the best solution to the problem that you can think of?  Or have you just not really considered the implications?

Which is probably the scariest part – I truly think that’s what the deal is.  He just hasn’t thought about it.  He truly thinks that running the country is all about popular sound bites, like, I don’t know, a reality TV show. 

He said to Vladimir Putin right before WWIII started

Or maybe he’s just a shill, running to get Hillary elected.  Who knows?  Not me. 

"You don't think they'll really fall for this, do you?"

But I do know that the current state of American politics is fucking embarrassing, and for the first time I can remember, I’m not exactly sure I want to be a part of this anymore.  The IDEA of America is fantastic.  But the actual practice of America has become increasingly disappointing.  

She Thinks My Dump Truck's Sexy...

So I mentioned in a previous post that I own a dump truck. 

I find that owning a dump truck has many advantages when you live outside of the urban center, where you’ve got to do a lot of the things that your local municipality would normally do for you. 

For instance, the private road I live on is about a mile long to my driveway, and my driveway is 1,850 feet long.  That’s over a third of a mile of road that I have to maintain all by myself, and another mile that me and my four neighbors maintain between us.  There is a gravel pit 3 miles from my place, that charges 11.50 a ton for 5/8 minus gravel.  Or, if you pick it up yourself in your own dump truck, it’s 6 bucks a ton.  That’s a 5.50 per ton savings for a six mile round trip. 

Also, as the construction projects proceed, I find myself in need of a dumpster to pick up all the non-compostable scraps.  Drywall, plastic tarps, strapping, nails, etc all add up.  Instead of paying for a dumpster, you just park your dump truck close to the site and use it for a dumpster.  The local transfer station charges $60 a ton for garbage.  Generally I can fill the truck and go dump the load up there for $20 a pop.  Just pull this lever right here… 

It’s also very efficient for moving dirt around on my 25 acres.  A ¼ yard tractor bucket at a time for the length of the property takes years.  A 6 yard dump load at a time takes hours. 

Now, about my truck.  She needs some help.  Restoration projects will commence sometime next year, but in the meantime, she’s going to stay rusty and ugly.  She’s a 1964 International Loadstar 1700.  27,500 pounds gross weight, and about a 6 yard capacity. 

She’s got some rust, and she was 16 years old before I was even born, but she runs good, works hard, and gets the job done.  This truck is 52 years old, has ten speeds (5 speed transmission with a 2 speed rear end), and 180 blistering horsepower.  It’s a 345 cubic inch gasoline engine, meaning my wife’s Tahoe has a bigger, more powerful engine in it.  She ain’t fast, but she gets the job done. 

I call her Mater, after the rusty old tow truck in the movie “Cars.”  You know, like “TO-mater” only without the “Tow”.  

Property Update

God willing and the creek don't rise, it's dried out enough to bring in premix trucks and I am going to pour the new shop floor Thursday.

Worked like hell today to get the slab gravel in and level. 50 yards of gravel it took.

Good thing I have a dump truck.

Oh, did I not mention I got a dump truck?

It's a 1964 international loadstar with a 345 V8 and a 10 speed transmission. 180 blistering horsepower,  5 yards at a time. I'll post pics tomorrow maybe.

Ahem...

Tap tap tap…

*feedback*

“Hello?  This thing on?” 

I guess it’s still working. 

I doubt anyone even visits here anymore, and I don’t blame any of them.  But I still felt compelled to provide an update, since I didn’t leave in a real good state when I decided to leave. 

I’m still alive.  It was touch and go for a while, I think.  After I departed here, things got worse before they got better.  As a result of the surgery to remove the growth inside my heart, I started throwing clots, had a mini-stroke that caused me to lose my ability to make sense of what I was seeing for about four hours, got put on additional blood thinners, which had me bleeding out of…

…well, let’s just say everywhere, and leave it at that. 

As I previously mentioned, I lost my job amidst all of this, because my previous employer was a typical personality in the construction industry – not “what have you ever done for me?” but “what are you doing for me today?” type of guy. They fired me on the same day I went in for the GI bleed, in part because I had to miss an owner meeting to get that taken care of.  I guess they wanted me to go to the meeting while bleeding internally.

In fact, during my job hunt last winter, he was actively bad-mouthing me to potential employers, trying to keep them from hiring me.  See, with health issues like I have, I’m a liability to employers.  I cost a lot of money, and to smaller outfits, costs like mine can get an employer canceled from their health insurance program.  I’m not saying that’s why I got fired, but it is oddly coincidental that they lost their health care provider and had to switch right around the time I got sent down the river. 

Oh well, they did me a favor in the long run. 

Since last winter, it’s been a long road to what I think is full recovery.  I haven’t had any more episodes of fainting or arrhythmia, and my blood pressure is down to normal, although I still take meds to keep it that way, as well as blood thinners, which I’ll have to take forever as a result of the arrhythmia and the micro-stroke or whatever the hell it was.   My heart rate also went from an average of 92 beats per minute this time last year, to around 75 BPM this year.  It’s having to work so much less to pump the same amount of blood now that there isn’t a big-ass growth/tumor thing in the way. 

Since we talked last, I got that job I was hoping to get, and have been as busy as I’ve ever been, for a variety of reasons.  I’ve been working hard to keep myself moving in this organization, as much for my own mental well-being as for the company.  You see, it takes a lot out of me to admit that I got fired.  Even with extenuating circumstances, no one can argue that I was literally unable to do my job last year, and I got fired as a result.  I’ve never had anything like that happen to me. That was  a huge blow to my ego, and threatened to drop me into another bout with depression.  Which I don’t want to do again, ever. 

So I am working to fix that by exceling over here.  The company I work for is a little different, does a different kind of contracting than I’m used to, and the ways that they were running work were a little different, also.  So they’ve been tapping my knowledge on how to run work in the way they do it in my industry, and I’ve been learning from them, too.  It’s been really great.

On the down side, my office is 92 miles from my old house.  I say “old” house, because I just sold it, because after almost exactly a year of commuting, Mrs. Goober and I decided that we were going to relocate to a home closer to where I work, so I can actually spend time with my family.  The way the roads around here work, 92 miles is about 2 hours.  That’s 4 hours on the road, EVERY SINGLE GODDAMNED DAY.  That, as much as anything else, is why I stopped posting here – I just didn’t have any time.

As I mentioned before, during all of the mess and rigmarole of late 2014 and early 2015, while I was sick and getting myself fired, and worried that I had cancer in my heart that was going to kill me, the Mrs. Was pregnant with mini-Goob #2.  Today is mini-Goob #2’s first birthday.  She’s adorable, and so is her sister, and I thank the good Lord that I got lucky, and that what I had was not cancer, and that I’m still alive to enjoy my girls, because they are everything to me.  I’m so glad to be able to spend more of my days with her, and less of my days driving. 

But, as in anything in life, there are tradeoffs. 

We decided to build a house, because I’m a masochist and apparently needed more stress.  The plan was that I’d get the shop built, put a bathroom and shower in the shop, put our nice 34 foot 5^th wheel in the shop, and live there while the house was getting built. 

Then we had the wettest spring I can recall, and I’ve been sitting on my ass waiting for it to get dry enough to accomplish fuck-all.  We sold our house February 5^th, and I just got final inspection on the new shop building yesterday.  Thank God my folks went to Arizona this year, so we had a place to live for a bit. 

We’re in our 5^th wheel now, in my buddy’s driveway, until the middle of May when I’m able to finish the bathroom and get a slab in the shop, and then we’re moving onto our property.  It’s 25 acres in the timber, about 10 minutes out of town.  It’s heaven.  It’s my sanctuary.  I think it might even save my life. 

If it doesn’t fucking kill me, first… 

Should break ground on the house by the end of May. 

Posting here may resume, or it may not.  I’m not entirely sure what I’m planning to do.  I need to focus, and taking time after work every day to research a topic and write about it, while enjoyable, is perhaps something I don’t have the time to do for the time being.  Maybe once the house is built I’ll go back to it.  Or maybe sooner.  I don’t know.

But the upshot is that I’ve made it through the tough time, I see the light at the end of the tunnel, and for the first time in quite some time, I feel like things are getting better, rather than worse.