shartsandpain

[shartsandpain]

I am a problem, specifically, I am a problem to Spotify. The Algorithm doesn't know what to do with me. My music tastes range far and wide. What will it be today? Mastodon? Bruce Springsteen? Ghost? Yo-Yo Ma? Wynonie Harris?Primus? GUNSHIP? Sure, throw it all in the cart and let it play.

Which is why, when I play anything new, Spotify has no idea what to do and decides to throw that artist or album into every single 'daily' mix they make.

The long at the short of it is I decided to try listening to They Might Be Giants' album Flood the other day. I wasn't the biggest fan when it was new, but I figured maybe age has change me. It was....fine. My problem now is the same problem then: It feels like they are trying way too hard to be weird and quirky. And I like weird, quirky stuff (I love Primus and Weird Al for christ's sake). Maybe it's the aggressive 'tweeness' of it. I don't know. Anyway, TMBG are not one of my favorites.

That said, now, because I played Flood once Spotify now feels compelled to throw tracks randomly into daily mixes. Usually along side Bob Vylan, The Misfits, R.E.M., John Doe, Depeche Mode, and Morphine.

[shartsandpain]

I feel like I want to write about death. But I'm not sure exactly where to start or what to say.

I guess I'll start with why it might be something I think about.

I met my first wife when I was finishing my freshman year of college. She wasn't in school at the time, but we were only a month apart in age. We hit it off instantly.

The next year we lived in my dorm room together, getting married shortly after I graduated.

I'm not sure if it was a perfect relationship, but early on, things were good. She realized she had a drinking problem and got sober.

Then she was in a major car accident. No broken bones, but soft tissue damage and a concussion. Back then they didn't see anything so sent her on her way once they confirmed there were no broken bones. In hind sight, she clearly suffered a TBI.

She did ok for a bit, but chronic pain crept in and she started having progressive symptoms of CTE. She started drinking again, in part to deal with the pain, in part to deal with the progressive CTE symptoms, in part to deal with the PTSD, depression, and anxiety that were getting perpetually worse.

I watched someone who had a near photographic memory and extroverted personality turn into a shut in with memory problems. Turn into someone with emotional regulatory issues.

I was on a business trip in San Francisco and she came with me. The second morning there, I woke up and the room felt far more quiet and still than it should. I reached over to touch her and her body was cool.

Logically, my brain knew it was too late, but I leapt out of bed, pulled her onto the floor. Mentally I noted that she already had livor mortis. I could smell a vomit-like smell. I started chest compressions. I could hear the fluid in her lungs as I performed compressions. It wasn't vomit she aspirated, it was that she had been gone long enough fluid had drained into them. I called 911 while I was giving chest compressions.

When they got there they performed some actions, I know they knew it was futile. it was clear she was gone.

They let me stay in the room with her until the medical examiner? Coroner? Whoever, got there to declare her death.

I called my parents, I called hers. My cousin rushed to fly up from southern California.

After I walked around San Francisco, a strange city full of strangers. I had coworkers there, but not who I considered friends.

I talked to a couple of people on the phone. I went into a brew pub and had a beer or two. I remember thinking how surreal it was that there were people sitting there having a good time and I had just gone through what I went through.

My cousin got there, we to shit faced drunk. My parents got there the next day. We went to a funeral home. I remember thinking that she would have appreciated that it looked like it could have been a stand in for the funeral home in Six Feet Under, which had been one of her favorite shows.

The autopsy found the cause of death to be "acute multidrug toxicity". A combination of alcohol, Wellburtin, and Ativan. None of them were in excessive levels, other than the alcohol. And none in concentrations out of line than she had consumed hundreds of times before. "The Heath Ledger" special she would have called it. She had honestly said before it was how she would want to go. Just stop breathing in her sleep.

Before that, we had talked, many times, about getting her into treatment. She was scared.

I had honestly started to lose her years before I lost her. She suffered, we suffered. The last few years it felt like we were just surviving.

When she died, it felt like someone set off a grenade in my chest and the pieces of a shell were left.

I consciously told myself, I was going to put the pieces back together and build something good and healthy for myself.

I had a lot of help along the way. And I would very much make the choice to get out and not collapse in on myself, especially when it was hard.

I didn't always have a straight path there, but I am in a good place now. I reconnected with a friend from high school. We have been together 5 years now and are now married.

I am happy. I have had a lot of trauma. I am here.

[shartsandpain]

I have a pet peeve. Ok, I have many pet peeves, but in this case I’m talking about one: When people unnecessarily bold, italicize, underline, highlight or otherwise markup text in a work post or email. (For now, we're going to leave aside those that feel the need to end questions with multiple question marks. Do they feel like it's adding something ??? ) I have a coworker who does this in every single communication they make. Does this person think the rest of us are morons? I feel like this is doubtful, I've seen the questions they ask. This is not a person I would put solidly in the "highly skilled and intelligent" column.

Are they trying to be a smart ass? Possibly...

No matter the motivation, it makes me unreasonably pissy. And then I feel compelled to reply with random words marked up in a similar fashioned.

Which really does make me an asshole. However, I feel like it makes me a justified asshole.

Seriously, don't unnecessarily markup words, it makes you look like a tool.

[shartsandpain]

I produce nothing of value. At least not through work. I work for a large company and while I’m not sure my actions actively make the world a worse place, I am also pretty sure we’re not making the world a better place.

In my personal life, I do try to be a good person. To be there for the people in my life and help where I can; I think I do an ok job of this. Really, this is where everyone needs to focus on. You can’t do shit about Reginald Stankbred III esq., 5th generation billionaire and CEO, and his impact on the world. But you can impact on the people close to you, being a safe space and an ally.

The thing I primarily send out into the world through my paid job are subtly snarky emails calling out easily found sections of documentation people couldn’t be bothered to read.

I know I am not the smartest, most skilled, or hardest working person by a long stretch. And for a long time, I definitely had some imposter syndrome going on.

What I have come to realize over the years, especially as I have gotten to know more and more people “higher up” at various companies, is that a vast majority of people, are morons and are really not that good at their jobs.

Seriously, if you show up, shit in box and put a bow on it, you are doing better than at least 25% of people out there.Whether you want to mark that box as guaranteed is a discussion for another time.

Show up, do you job in a timely manner, and you will honestly be doing better than a large majority of people in just about any company.

Now this all ignores that larger philosophical / psychological / evolutionary / sociological problems that we, as human, are just not meant to toil away at company jobs while our surplus labor value benefits ultrarich fuckers while all of our wages stagnate and we increasingly struggle with things that were easy to obtain for our parents and grandparents.

That’s probably why we drink and drug so much. To cope in some small way with the existential dread and crushing realizations that we futilely struggle within a machine designed to consume our souls in exchange for shareholder value that neither we, nor our children, will ever see any benefit from.

Anyway....this was a motivational post. Don’t you feel better? I feel better. I suppose I better go sell a little more of my soul and time to the machine.

[shartsandpain]

Hello, Void? It’s me.

I’ve had this account for a while and done precisely fuck all with it. Lately, I’ve felt an increasing need to scream into the void. Then I figured, what better void than the internet and what better scream than tumblr. Let’s bring back that old school Live Journal energy. So I am not really sure where this will go, most likely incoherent ramblings. I’m not under any illusions that the way I feel or think about things is special or unique or that I can write about them any better than anyone else. So anyway, the long and the short of it is, I have completely lost faith in humanity. Years ago, my first wife asked me what I believed in. I told her I believed in people, that I had faith in humanity. To be fair, I was in my 20s and things were generally looking up for us as a species. In retrospect, I was naive. Then, right wing fuck-nuggets started gaining press and momentum in the US. It wasn’t that I was unaware there were right wingnuts in the US, I grew up seeing the Oklahoma City Bombing aftermath live. I lived in the same general area as the leader of a regional militia group. But with the rise of the Tea Party, then the Freedom Caucus, Palin, then Trump, it seemed like so many people suddenly felt they had permission to publicly and loudly be their absolute worst selves.

The amplification of ‘I got mine, fuck you’, ‘fuck your feelings’, ‘you can’t force me to do anything’ into the mainstream consciousness. This shift from civic and community responsibility (or at least the illusion of it) to the mentality of, as a friend puts it: Some people don’t care if they are living under a highway overpass cooking a pigeon over a garbage fire as long as the person next to them doesn’t have a pigeon.

I’m not sure what to do with this knowledge. The knowledge that so many people around us have absolutely no empathy or compassion for anyone around them. That right wing fascist fuckheads are gaining support and are emboldened. That any of the gains for  LGBTQ+, women, the environment, workers are being hammered away.

It is utterly disheartening that so many people simply do not give a fuck or are openly hostile. That so many people wish harm on others. On people I care deeply about. We are being worn down by greed and self interest. And at a time when we should be banding together lifting each other up, so many people have fractured off and actively work to make things worse for others.

[shartsandpain]

Growing up is the worst. (via therealthing)

[shartsandpain]

They’re so talented!

[shartsandpain]

Life comes at ya pretty fast.

[shartsandpain]

cheating is not “bound to happen” i’ve been alive almost 24 years and not once have i ever thought “hey i wonder what it’d be like to go outside of my relationship and destroy a persons self esteem and ability to trust”

never bitch

cheating is an active choice. its not second nature. and if it is second nature to you, then you need to do some real soul searching and figure out what the fuck went wrong in your life

[shartsandpain]

Basically my thoughts on the “Millennials are Killing X” trend.

[shartsandpain]

With sexual assault being a “pre-existing condition” of course less people are going to report their assaults. And of course more people are going to rape, knowing that their victims could lose health insurance if they ever said a word about it.

Sexual assault is on that list for no reason other than to silence victims.

Tell me that’s not rape culture.

I dare you.

[shartsandpain]

whoop there it is.

[shartsandpain]

What did we do to deserve George Takei.

[shartsandpain]

I’m loving these protest pups!

[shartsandpain]

We have a great saying in German when people are saying or doing something stupid: 

“Herr, wirf Hirn vom Himmel!”

“Lord, throw some brains from the heavens.“ 

[shartsandpain]

Stop saying “this is what they want” when people act violently against nazis. What they want is a debate. They want genocide to be something polite society can agree or disagree with. They want to be elevated to the general public discourse by having their ideas argued with. Violence is the exact opposite of what they want. Richard Spencer didn’t want to get punched in the face, he wanted good people to keep quiet, to respect his rights and let him calmly discuss white nationalism. Violence throws a wrench in all their plans. It shows them their carefully planned tactics to infiltrate mainstream discussion are utterly failing. Punching a nazi will get you in legal trouble but don’t let people tell you it’s what they want.