105 and feeling fine ... okay ... bit rubbery

I spent an hour and three-quarters deep within the Necronomicon but dealing with the more fun side of overwhelming ancient space evil. It seems weird a tome of ultimate foulness can have its lighter moments, more positive ones, and that's what I got to chew into.

theboy asked when I'd be done so he could have water time outside with the hose so I said "Okay, at twelve" and made it just in time.

I went in to let him know but he'd he'd decided to build a blanket pillow fort in the lounge room instead. 

I don't think that will afford much protection from the Elder ones but hey, at least he's trying. 

I took two V post event, but didn't have any before it since it was the equivalent of a sunny daisy field where you're running away from sanity-warping horror instead of the more traditional locale of a semi-ruined house at night that is bigger on the inside dripping with ichor and blight. 

Now for battle anthems to soothe and salve.

balding V rain

I am balding but was without a hat. There is rain coming down. I had to make the three foot gap between the cover of the patio roof and the shed. Balding and rain on balding is not fun.

So I raised my hand above my head and waved at speed figuring the blur of motion would defeat most of the drops. 

It worked. But it did seem a bit silly. A hat would have been better. 

I have so many hats; just not when I need them. It's a conspiracy I tell you.

And the dumbest chicken is...

It is raining. All the chickens have sought shelter save one; the gray silkie. 

For it appears she is now the dumbest of the chickens.

But then I got my leg wet from sitting on a stool part exposed to the rain to see who the dumbest chicken was.

So who is dumber? The chicken or me for watching it not get out of the rain as I myself did not get out of the rain.

Self-fail.

UPDATE: The grey silkie was in the hutch, her position outside in the rain taken by the gray speckled bantam. It's like they tagged in and out like in wrestling. 

UPDATE2: It's getting on dusk and since they were all in I locked their hutch. But I had to do a head count to be sure—I do it by breed since there are three of each—and it took a half minute ... of me in the rain ... bent over with maximum exposure of back to falling sky water ... making me dumber than a chicken.

UPDATE3: I just got a glass of water from the back tap. Then stayed in the rain to drink half of it before realising I was getting wet as I was hydrating the innards. I walked past the dry chicks and back into the shed.

You won this round, chickens.

Peeps sad peeping

The half-grown chicks were moved into the big chicken pen with the big chickens now confined to their fox-proof cage. While the big chickens still have space their quality of life has dropped until these new chicks are the same size. 

But the pecking order is that the gray one is in charge even though it is in a cage inside the pen. Last night the chicks instead of going into their hutch to sleep lay clustered between the pen fence and the fox cage metal—about half a foot in width—with the big gray chicken standing over them on top of a side-hatch to her hutch inside her cage.

She stayed there even after we moved the chicks into their hutch.

It will be an interesting dynamic when they're all together at last.

But the peeps sad peeping because they no longer have the run of the garden and patio is heart-wrenching.

Last night we spent an hour hosing the patio from the last two weeks of chick-freedom-to-roam. I fell back on my fruit and veg shop skillz and deftly hosed the many, many, many turds from the brick and onto the lawn. 

That is why they must no longer roam. Because we had to use crocs when outside because within the space of a foot's print was more than likely a turd. 

It's reduced quality of life for them too and that is sad. But the big pen is theirs now until the bigs are let out.

The sad peeping though ... awful.

Fabian Mikey keeps on Fabianing

There's an organisation called the Fabian Society which started in the nineteenth century to push for democratic socialist policies and thus nudging the moral arc towards justice—as MLK famously stated before he was unjustly assassinated (1).

As the FS wiki notes, they chose a tortoise for their logo as it "represented the group’s predilection for a slow, imperceptible transition to socialism.".

Which means they took a far view and worked out ways to achieve, in the long-term, a better society for more people (2).

Anyway, the tortoise thing. Getting things fixed takes time and it takes effort; grueling, brutal, mental-health-risking effort. At multiple points you want to give up.

But sometimes, if you keep going, you might just see a cabbage in the distance.

WFTW.

(1) A fact celebrated at the FBI according to the book I am reading with an Atlanta-based agent doing a jig and another screaming "ZORRO IS DEAD!" and thus completely unaware of the irony of his statement.
(2) While technology has made our lives and poverty far more easier to deal with we are back at a point of record inequality; because when the toffs at the top have almost all the dosh it means the peeps below suffer because the toffs are forever trying to take the safety net away from said peeps so they can have even more dosh.

A YouTube ad I liked so much I searched for it on YouTube to watch it again

Comedy-meets-branding perfection. Whoever thought of this pitch; just stunning. 

(Mikey claps for unknown ad-person who came up with the concept)

Sanity check II

I needed to do a side-dish to take my mind away from trauma so I decided to update theboy's D&D 3.5 PDF character sheet. 

Only I couldn't remember where I put it. So I did a search for "*.pdf" using Explorer to find it.

What came up was a list of sanity defying PDFs as they were the most recent PDFs laid down on that machine when I sorted by date.

To return to the Call of Cthulhu RPG experience then it's as if I walked into a library and saw they had a shelf of the ten most illuminating and madness-inducing super tomes that are a big part of the game's "what is this gibbering foulness we are afflicted with?!" experience. Just reading the spines would be a call for a sanity check (1).

I quickly clicked away then remembered the PDF I wanted was on a USB stick. Now to enter the side-dish and take me from spacing out about fucked shit that is just fucked and shit.

Fortunately I'd fortified with two Valium from an earlier anxiety beat and laughed as I left the house with the thought that I'd had yet another sanity check experience and this one just from seeing their titles alone in a murderers row.

UPDATE: I sent a status email and then got the jitters straight after. I didn't mean to; they just kicked in. Fucking shaking hands and being on the edge of fight flight at eleven at night. Great, that's going to make for some great sleep attempting.

Thus to blank what I did I will now Netflix some kewl shit. Take me away, N!

(1) though in the game most "tomes" are a mishmash of assorted-liquid stained "paper" crammed together beneath an aging hide-cover-from-some-creature-unknown and lack proper book manufacture etiquette such as putting the name of it on the book's spine.

He sits!

Because of my fucked skeleton I could never sit with my legs crossed like a normal kid without discomfort. So I sat on my knees. I did that on chairs as well and got water-on-the-knee and then it was mild mobility impairment (slash) discomfort and no sport from then on. 

My son is sitting under the climbing tree trying to entice the chicks with bread. He was sitting cross-legged. I asked if he was okay—as a younger child he sat on his knees in the W position a lot—and he was. He was fine. 

I handed him the bread—he'd run out and I was on a re-supply mission—then combined with adult horror came the swamping feelings of rage at a childhood I did not get that my brothers did. A childhood where I was negged by parents because I was short, fat and occasionally not-agile (1).

I am glad and elated his journey is not mine—because mine was caused by gestational neglect and thewife took so much care with hers he was born skinny without fat with with bones and a skeleton formed as they should.

I once said if there was a supernatural process before you reincarnated where you got a choice to have a good body but a child of yours would not but that if you said yes to malformation then they would be fine that I would choose that every time because without my childhood horror show and shit body there would have been no him—and he gets the good body. 

If my parents got that choice then it would have been "fuck that, give me a good body". Then, when they got to be parents, they got the added joy of negging their short, fat, mobility-affected son for his physical failings that were caused by pre-natal neglect. 

I'm angrysadhappy. It's a complicated feeling to have. But the best revenge is doing well and my son is not theirs and he will be fine because unlike them I give a shit and unlike them I don't revel in putting my foot on his neck and pressing down.

(1) Bizarrely though, and I put it down to the size of the court and the fact I was short and could lunge for low balls, I found in year ten I loved and enjoyed playing squash. I can't anymore because of the hip replacement—running into a wall and the whole lunging aspect of squash is a hip pop-out risk. But I could play it and was reasonably good. 

Reflected horror

A friend is going through work horror and is fortifying with counselling. He's doing all the right things—and he isn't crippled by mental illness and injury like me—but work horror has happened to him again and again and it's happening again now. 

I sent a lengthy text and noted he may experience acute anger and grief and to know that it's a normal part of the counselling process when you start. But it teaches you how to deal with those memories and Cognitive Behaviour Therapy techniques to use when reason and calm is swamped by animal fear and rage. 

His horror reflected on me and my shit—but made worse because he is a joy-bearing technocrat being monstered once again and because when I was crippled and trying to be back in the workplace he was there to help me from the moment we met.

And it's another example of how a failed system fails people. Because when people at the top of the system no longer give a fuck about actual government and create systems within government that suppresses the best ideas and people then government goes fucked. 

But they do these things, those specific people at the top, even at the cost of actual macro-state and societal impact. 

Because they are monsters and that's what monsters do.

Frisbee bread

I let the half-grown chicks out and they swarmed onto the lawn to find food and defile the grass with their super poos.

Sometimes I throw a whole bread slice out and let them have at it in their own way.

Only when I just did it I frisbeed the bread right into the head of one of the Polish Scruffs. It was momentarily nonplussed but recovered and enjoyed the surprise bread along with the others.

I guess the people equivalent would be getting clocked in the head by a fat roll of cash, which doesn't hurt but is startling, but then you get to use the cash roll.

I think I'd be okay with that. For example, if the Monopoly man avatar came to life, took the now-real-car-former-token around town and threw rolls of cash at people.

But how pissed would you be if it happened and the cash he threw was still Monopoly money? I think I'd be more weirded out about the whole "the Monopoly man has come to life, as did the car, and he threw cash at me" aspect and presume a really specific hallucination just landed.

It makes more sense than him coming to life; occam's razor, people!

I tried to talk to them through the medium of flaps

The half-grown chickens, especially when first released from their hutch, like to stretch their wings then have a flap. One causes another to do it and so on and there's a chain reaction where suddenly almost all take to the air in around the same spot and bump into each other; it's like moshing for chickens.

I was in the garden, wisely wearing crocs V the chicken crap, and thought for a moment that if I ran around flapping my arms it might spark a flap off. I flapped like a kid doing an airplane but with the rubber pencil thing going for the arms instead of straight out. I added the clucking.

Nothing happened. They see me as comfortfoodman, because I feed them bread and try not to grab them even though they're cute and you just want a cuddle. I respect their bodies and don't force it on them.

Or they see me as actual food since one of them had a go through a croc hole? In its defence I did pull my entire right toenail off yesterday and  it could sense the presence of exposed meat as the nail bed heals over. 

It was a nasty one too; I pissed blood everywhere. But I picked off the sticking up bit, that stuck above the rest of the nail like an iceberg, but that ripped out the entire nail's centre. So with tweezers and tissues I had to soak blood then find the remaining nail shards to extract before the blood welled back to obscure it and it was time for another soak. 

I know the nail thing is part of the OCPD; I could have just cut it level. But it was so thick it was like another nail had grown over the top of the first nail. But it's all connected hence the centre ripped out. 

It's a grotesque habit, to have nails that are removed whole or nearly in part on a regular basis. It's getting harder to do now I can't reach my feet. But I got it last night then got almost all of it then had to take the rest. 

Stupid OCPD and bodythatdoesn'tworkright. 

Anyway, I tried to talk to some chickens whilst flapping my arms and the night before I ripped off an entire big toe nail in bloody chunks like I'd passed a tapeworm. 

I mean when you sum it up that just sounds nuts. Not manly shack and manifesto nuts; just regular nuts. 

The sad thing is I'm dreadfully sane; that's why I have OCPD, PTSD, anxiety and depression. 

Stupid brainthatalsodoesn'tworkright.

How does it feel to have no nail? It stings; especially in the shower. Will I stop this habit? I doubt it; I've done it for as long as I can remember. 

It's funny what damaged people who got damaged can do to themselves. For if they hadn't got damaged then they wouldn't self-damage at all.

Unabomber loved the library

Before the internet the library was the place to be if you wanted to read. Originally they were private lending institutions but over time society deemed the public library a public good. It was government at its greatest because it enabled the masses to consume works and be influenced by them.

I chewed through the Netflix series and the wiki on him and about half of his manifesto before I gave up. I wanted to see what he said even though he killed a bunch of people before he apparently needed people to hear him.

The dude is insane; properly insane. Criminally even. But what rubs me raw about his whole "I am better than you because I live as we all should" attitude, apart from the whole murder and maiming aspect, is his use and apparent support of his local library.

You can't have it both ways, fuckhead. You cannot rail against government and the way we live when you relied on an institution that is government; a fucking library. With books that required people to typeset them and print them.

Apart from any of that it's complete shit that he did this all so his views would be known. He didn't warn people or list demands or his ideas for the first eight or so death traps---he just murdered from afar.

And he used a library.

I know he's insane but a lot of people seemed to have thought his work worthy of attention. But he only sought it after he anonymously bombed a bunch of people he did not know because "angersads".

The Netflix series has a logline about how the UB was right that we self-regulate because of technology---such as stopping at a red light when there seems to be no traffic about. I do that because I presume there's a camera and because I cannot be sure a vehicle such as a bike without lights isn't going to cross in front of me. I wear a seat belt because it makes me safer. My life would not exist without modern tech because I would not have survived childhood without tech and without a library. I spent chunks of my childhood in libraries because I couldn't do physical things like UB could in his manly tiny shack where he survived off the land and murdered people.

So fuck the Unabomber and fuck the fuckheads that read his shit and think "hmmm".

Because your "hmmm" is only possible because of government and the way we managed to break the chain of most of us spending our lives grubbing in the muck to grow enough food to live another year.

He is insane. But to treat his views having dignity and of being of worth remember his selective application of his "destroy the machine" lifestyle. He used a library and there is no such thing without government and without technological progression. Yes, governments use technology for both good and evil but as all governments have since governments began. For every war chariot there's a windmill.

It was your choice to shack up in a shack---and use your government-provided local library. And your choice to murder.

Then to retcon your career that it was all to just to spread your views? What a fuckstick.

Practical tips for PTSD—the clothes peg

If you have PTSD, and your condition is bad, then having the symptom of hand tremour and fingers that open by themselves due to injury and medication is one of the more annoying everyday aspects. 

Don't get me wrong—a PTSD-fuelled anxiety attack is its most hideous manifestation. But if you do have hand tremour and difficulty manipulating everyday objects then it's something you deal with constantly because being a success in life means being able to pick up objects and handle them.

Bread tags are a particular shit to deal with—to get off and to put on again. 

So in my journey of PTSD and finger fun I've discovered the advantages of the humble clothes peg. Not shitty wooden ones with the spring that decay in nine seconds on contact with the rain but the industrial plastic and or rubber ones that have a fat end and are easy to pick up. 

A clothes peg is something you can pick up and hold and use. So instead of bread tags I use a clothes peg—we keep a dozen on the cord for the emergency torch that hangs down near the kettle for use in any form of bag sealing. I can twist a bag around to air seal it then whack on a clothes peg.

The brown hen from the previous post made her way into the garden proper and I cornered her for collection. Once back in the pen I had two green wire sections of fencing—each the size of a large chopping board, and then used half a dozen industrial pegs to secure it. 

I could have used cable ties and thread them through the star picket that hold the lower section of fencing but my hands don't let me do that. So it was pegs. 

She's having a go at getting through. Let's see if it worked. 

UPDATE (while writing): It did not work; she just threw herself at the barrier and knocked the first panel in. So I have relocated an old extendable plant climbing frame across the top and in theory she won't be able to get through. 

Of course I won't know until I catch her again if that new fence will hold.

It doesn't take away from clothes pegs being useful; it did secure the fencing. I didn't factor her in simply bull rushing through it. See, cable ties would have worked for that.

But I have trouble picking up pencils and teasing pages apart of a paper; CTs are beyond me—for now. 

UPDATE2: I got her—she was in the worst place she could have gone, the vegetable patch. It's fenced off from the chicks but adult brown came in the back way where the fencing is low and she has a greater leap for her size. But she's in the pen and I cannot hear her having a go at the extender frame that serves as the additional height to that section of fence. Hooray!

It's humid as fuck in Canberra, it will rain at some point, and all the fencing and multiple chicken retrievals (three) have moistened a sheen on my balding head. Time for a shower and to wash away the running around like a chicken because I was running around after a chicken who was running around like a chicken.  

UPDATE3: Came out to see her sitting on the bowed out lower section of fencing trying to work her way past the extender frame.

So I used my Australian flag headband wrapped around my bare arm as a peg point and went in with a half-dozen pegs to secure the upper fencing to the lower fencing and to de-bulge that lower part so she can't hop on it. Will she try? Of course! Can she? We will see...

UPDATE4: Came out to find the brown hen still in the pen—the victory against her part secured by pegs. I hand fed her some seeds to let her know I appreciated her white hat efforts. 

UPDATE5: Still in the pen; I think I won. I have matched wits with a brown chicken and bested her. I just sang a victory song at her to the tune of "Bigger than Tina".  

I have to confess I heard and sang it as Jesus and not Tina. That's a Freudian horror show right there. 

Back door found and deft use of a corn stalk

My suspicion that the adult brown hen was able to get past the behind-the-shed fence was confirmed when I went in and saw her behind the shed and past the behind-the-shed fence. I don't know if this is a recent thing—or even if she can get, for example, back into the pen—but it does explain the noises of animal activity I heard through the shed wall but which I worried was a cat lurking ready to have a go at the chicks.

I have no ability to extract the brown from behind the shed so I will have to bide my time until she is either in the garden proper or she's made it back into the pen—and when she does up will go more fencing.

One of the adult chickens, perhaps like people, had saved up a massive load of shit for a morning dump. She dumped it—it was the size of a calf's cow pat—right in the walk zone behind the gate.

thewife had pulled a corn plant up and chucked the prize to the big hens a week before. I used the lower half of the stalk and the still attached roots as a makeshift broom to sweep the super shit out of the walking area. 

It is easily the biggest chicken shit I have ever seen. And if you'd showed it to me I would have presumed some sort of mass-chicken shit effort where together they turned, crapped, and it joined into one mega-turd.

So yay for nature's broom, the lower end of a corn stalk plus roots, that allowed me to sweep that mega-turd from whence I tread.

It's hard to feel self important when you tread in shit.

Chicken Jezus

Growing up in a church-going household unfortunately meant going to church. There I learned that much harder I should hate myself. I didn't break the habit until grade 12 because I had a Saturday job and I was owed a day off. That and cracks in faith were deep and I'm guessing gone by uni as far as a belief system went. If I did go from then on it was for an event and to support someone participating. Which meant more than one uncomfortable late Xmas eve service where I was always drunk beforehand unless I was driving.

As a kid it meant Sunday school with actual school-based Jesus action too that at one point was up to four days a week due to choir.

And there you would see him, pictures or stained glass of handsome, long-haired, bearded, anachronistically white Jesus with a bunch of young children around him or gazing up at him. Though I note that without the religious backlight of a suffused glow or a halo to indicate the divine if you saw that happening in real life you'd call the authorities. Actually you still would because that creepy long-haired and robed white dude has fully-rigged up a fluorocent circlet as a lure like an angler fish.

I just had that experience, only if Jesus was squished into a short, fat version---the middle s in his name scrunched to a z---went bald and the blessed young were half-grown chickens.

It was raining as I fed them from the garden swing, half a piece of bread in each hand. A couple of times they pecked me instead of the food.

In a real Jesus with children scenario that means an angry kid cooked off and clocked him one in the nuts.

That Jesus, he puts up with so much. 

Half-naked in the rain and wearing a hat

A thunderstorm came sweeping in and I was already bare-chested from the preceding humidity.

But the chicks were out and I had to get them in.

A wet shirt would be more hassle than a wet upper body but I needed the hat to protect the balding because cold lashing rain on a skin-only part of your skull is deeply unpleasant.

So is herding the flock back into the hutch. The little yellow one was the last hold out and I suffered five minutes of cold rain slashing me as I got her in.

I locked up the big chickens' cage presuming them in their hutch and came out to find the brown one had escaped. I think she got through the back of the shed way which we thought we'd blocked off. I then had to catch an adult chicken in a thunderstorm as the rain was on me. Use of a green pole to direct her direction proved useful and I got her on the first lunge. Oddly she showed no resistance and stayed comfortable under one tucked arm as I jittery-fumbled with the d-clasps on the cage door so I could chuck her in. After locking it, to be sure gray chicken was there, I went back into the pen with my green pole, inserted it through the cage and levered up a hutch side flap to confirm she was in.

Then with crocs filled with chicken pen yuck I staggered away to shower and recover.

At least my half-nakedness was not exposed to the street this time. 

But I bet if they had seen me their first thought would be "in the rain with no shirt but a hat...?"

150 minutes

I promised myself a max of an hour a day when dealing with sanity destroying texts. But to make up for the "treat yourself" day and because I was on a roll I ended up doing 150 minutes.

That was a long time to be a bio-robot.

I didn't take Valium beforehand so I will see how I go. I may cook off when my brain takes me to there again. For now it's off to my safe place—the shower—for a hard-earned soak.

I'd like to end this with a quote from a book and its movie adaption. 

"The horror ... the horror..."

UPDATE: I was two minutes inside the house before I even got to the shower when the hands shaking kicked in. Took two V then to the safe space. I have to do something now well away from that to heal the mind tear.

Half-naked in the front yard

My body is not pleasant—to be in or to view. I am the contrast that allows beauty to shine—for every Edward Cullins there is a Rumpelstiltskin. 

So I am shy about my frame and don't like being seen part-naked by people who don't know me or even fully-naked by those that do—the most recent uncomfortable moment being my son taking a five minute shit while I was in the romantic clam-shell spa-bath but standing to use the shower.

There was no curtain between us.

We have a rogue cat that comes round to annoy our house-bound cats and its preferred way to our yard is over the front fence or through the gap in the gate. I know it can likely leap the six feet from the ground to the fence top—and it can (and will) use the neighbour's yard to spring onto greater heights until it can jump right into ours but I still wanted to make it harder to go the front way.

For we've got half-grown chicks that we let out sometimes roaming the yard and I saw the rogue visit in daylight having came in and out via the gate gap or to make that jump.

My still-wet-from-the-shower head that stayed damp with humidity brushed through a tree with some sort of leaf pod pollen business and I got that crap through the sweaty remains of my hair.

Fuck it; I took my shirt off, wiped the worst of the muck away, then finished moving packing frames and a bulk rubbish skip from the fence to make it harder for that cat to leap.

The chicks are the perfect height and speed for a cat to kill as nature instructs they must. By making it harder at the front then hopefully it will only come at night as it only goes via the neighbour's in the dark. During the day the adult chickens are there and they're tough enough to fuck-off a cat. The gray chicken fought off a fox for fuck's sake—a cat is nothing.

But for a good ten or more minutes I was out the front, shirt off, like a competitor at a "man whose torso most looks like a potato" contest.

I bet if I entered I'd come second and collect ten dollars.

Ninety minutes of bio-robot action

I lasted 90 minutes engaging with sanity wrecking texts and only lasted that long because I was just doing stat collection for later analysis. But it still reminded me of what warped my very notion of what is sane.

I had yesterday off from this and a day off from exercise to to give the just-popped-again leg boil a chance to heal over. It was a "treat yourself" day ala Parks and Recreation.

Today I set myself the one task of stat collection. So with mission accomplished it's off to my safe space—the shower—to recover. 

I downed two Valium before I started. That helped keep the trigger pulling on the screaming heebie-jeebies..

They may still come. Ninety minutes was a long time to spend in that horror hole.

Easy climber

I'm watching The Sting. Someone just jogged up a flight of stairs. It was so natural and graceful that I got mad that I have to take care with every stair, up or down, and while both are painful the up is worse.

Yesterday there was a story about a Cuban boy who died from complications after the operation to remove a ten pound tumour from his face. I took two goes to read it because his before photo was such an awful horror that I clicked out two paras in.

Then, as a living person who didn't die at 14 after a ten pound lump was removed from his face, I owed it to him to read his story. It puts your own crap into perspective. 

So I can't dash around or go up and down with bodily ease. That's nothing compared to the fuckery dealt to Emanuel Zayas. 

I don't know how to end this because it's just unfair; brutally, visciously unfair. I can remember 14 and feeling self-sad. But I made it through that to middle-age mostly intact and only part-artificial.

Emanuel had his head destroyed by a genetic misfire and died at 14.

That's fucked. That's how you end it. By just saying "that's fucked" and have gratitude your crap pales to what he lived and died through.

White death in a dead tree

There's a dead tree we face when joining onto a road that takes us to another near our house. The dead tree is wreathed in vine.

On this morning's drive I saw them roosting there, a whole flock.

Cockatoos.

If you believed in intelligent design then you'd have to ask what the fuck the designer was thinking. I get the visual appeal of the bird—handsome with the white feathers and the yellow crest. Sometimes you see them in movies, on a perch in someone's house. When you see them in such they are not vocally active because to do so would expose the aural senses of the movie patrons to the exploding hell scream that is the cockatoo call.

I liken it to a dry retch with menace; like someone came up to you in the street, got in in your face and made a strangled, loud retching noise at you. That's what it's like, on the violation front, to hear those fuckers go off. 

When we first came to Canberra we had a rented house where a flock roosted on a power pole at the back. I had rheumatoid arthritis from pneumonia. Whenever they screeched their hell scream my arthritic joints would "call back" in reaction. For me they are forever linked with joint pain.

If there was a hell then maybe that's where the cockatoos go.

Not because they've been bad; but as musak for the damned.

UPDATE: I was pacing on the patio doing this as a bit then added the screech. The chicks in the hutch are sad because they have not been let out in the rain. They've been sad peeping. They stopped and stayed still about a minute after I did it. I walked past them as they roosted still poised in case of attack. I don't blame them. If a cockatoo screeched near me I'd presume it was an incoming attack too.

Fooled a cat and other happenings

Black cat, bad cat
The black cat has a habit of sneaking under the double bed around bedtime so she can come out and lick someone at 3 am.

We have two ways into the big room—through the shared bathroom or the door to the room from the corridor. She is black and waits in the dark. If you open the door to the room she will dart in and go under the bed.

Thus far the only way to get her out is to entice her out—or rage lift the mattress—by luring her with promises of wet cat food, the kind that comes in silvery pouches. The crinkle of the pouch and a nudge of the bowl the food goes in is usually enough to get her out from under the bed.

I made the noise and held up the packet as both cats came, the black one from under the bed and the ginger one that doesn't sneak under the bed for a surprise morning licking. I held it up, unopened, then when the black cat was past me I threw it into the kitchen and hustled to shut the bedroom door.

Then I went back and actually opened the packet and fed them; I'm not an arsehole.

Pwned by David Sedaris
I got the second of his books and asked him it dedicate to thewife because I failed to give her a present due to a leg boil which she opened on Christmas morning—the only "present" she got from me.

His dedication said "You deserve better".

Then he did a prop comedy bit for my son—likely the youngest person at his reading. It was gold; a personal comedy bit from David Sedaris.

A thanks for a thanks
I pitched a project plan in October to some peeps and they wrote back to say thanks. I wrote back to thank them for taking the time to read it and that they made my day for actually getting back to me to say it was useful. Then I got a follow up thanking me for the thanks. How nice is that? I pitched it with no expectation it would even get looked at and it did. Here's hoping the ideas get passed on.

When you're born the world is thrown at you; some lucky fuckers get to push the world back. 

I want to be one of them. 

Recumbent Bike II
I passed the Booger-looking dude with the recumbent bike. He was riding it—is that the right word for it?—with an open-faced motorbike helmet on and aviator shades. To me recumbent bikes are to bikes as fanny packs are to the world of fashion, a wound on its soul. 

But then who am I to judge? I ride a adult-sized trike with the only thing not making it a 1:2 scale tricycle is the fact all three wheels are the same size. 

And I've crashed it more than once, toppling onto roads and the ground. He's not going to topple unless he's stunt riding and I've yet to see anyone stunt ride a recumbent bike.

What's the bet they're safer to use as well?

Maybe I'm like one of those arseholes from the '60s who refused to wear the new-fangled seat belt on the unlikely grounds he might get trapped in flaming wreckage versus the far more likely result of smashing through his windshield.

I have been very wrong about things before. Like that time I thought the next President of the United States would likely be a centrist Democrat sliding into office on the strength of Obama's performance. I actually said "I am not worried".

Then Donald Trump became president.

On his recent cognition test—the one they give elderly people to confirm if they're mentally damaged—he bragged he got the highest score any president before him got; one hundred percent!

One of the questions is apparently "who is the current President of the United States?"

It's a test they only give to people they suspect have physical brain impairment or degradation.

To be honest I thought they wouldn't even do the test on the risk he'd fail it. 

So he's not got dementia; this is just him and how he operates.

Probs save us all—for this truly is the darkest timeline.