Adaptive Curmudgeon

It had been a fun adventurous day and a chilly but pleasant evening. The campground was now completely deserted so I decided to give shortwave another try.

I had no idea why my awesome little radio (which had been flawless until Bigfoot messed with it) had gone nutty but I approached it with a needle in hand…

An aside about shortwave:

I own and highly recommend my TecSun PL-880. You can find it here on Amazon.

There are cheaper shortwave radios. In general, they suck. They’re cool as a concept (“I made a radio with two bottlecaps and a pack of Skittles crammed in an Altoids tin”) but in practice they’re a PITA. Unless you just plain like dinking around with crap gadgets, it’ll either sour you on shortwave or you’ll (like me) upgrade. Skip the wasted money of a stupid first step and start with something with decent quality. The PL-880 will set you back about $160 and it’ll probably work very well until the day you die… provided you don’t let Bigfoot get to it.

There are more expensive shortwave radios (which I haven’t owned). They’re awesome but they tend to have a drawback. They feel like work to me. They have so many “features” that you practically need a PhD in electromagnetics to operate them.

That’s why I settled on the PL-880 for the sweet spot of “damn good at receiving broadcasts”, “good quality to last”, and “you don’t need to hit shift/alt/menu/F6 to turn the damn thing on”.

One other note; the original, included, easily replaceable, rechargeable battery works incredibly well. I have mercilessly abused it… letting it go dead, forgetting about it for months, leaving it in a freezing cold truck, etc… It works great no matter what I do. (It recharges via USB.)

The PL-880 has a reset function. It’s one of those little things in which you stick a pin. I’ve never used it (never needed to). Having thawed out by the fire, made a fine meal, and finished half a flask of bourbon… I was in an ideal mood for using fine motor skills on delicate electronics in the pitch dark. I was going to reset the living shit out of the radio!

The best I can say is that the radio knew. I clicked it on and it worked flawlessly; as if to say “Wait! Not the needle! I’ll be good.” Indeed it worked so well (as it always had) that I suspect it was user error (gasp!) that caused the earlier problem. …or Bigfoot.

I put the needle away (much to the radio’s relief) and set it on the dark picnic table. Then I unleashed it to scan the universe. I like the PL-880’s scanning feature. It’s brainless enough that a Neandertal like me can use it. I like to extend the antenna and let it sniff about. I never know what it’ll find.

The world is a big place and it scanned for a while. Sometimes, it would pause on a signal too weak for me to care about. Sometimes it was something that came in strong but I didn’t care about what I was hearing. Occasionally, it would grab a signal out of the aether that was fascinating but I was too slow to find the radio in the dark and click the button to stop the scan. For a while I was listening to music in a language I didn’t recognize using instruments I also didn’t recognize. It was like synth-pop done with a theremin… if you asked a dog to explain it. That kept me occupied for a while. But always I’d come back to that scan button. I didn’t know what I was looking for but I suspected it was out there.

Eventually I found myself listening to one of the most beautiful and sorrowful songs I’d ever heard. I wrote down what the announcer said but I misspelled every damn word. It took a little internet sleuthing to reconstruct my half drunk chickenscratch. I think I was listening to “Alla Pavlova B 1953 Elegy For Piano And Strings 1998”. (Ugh, no wonder I spelled it wrong! You’d think they’d name things in a way I could remember! I never have a problem remembering “Tube Snake Boogie” or “Du Hast” by ZZ Top and Rammstein respectively.)

Anyway, if you’re feeling chill on a level that approaches catatonic you may be receptive to the song I heard as the moon rose over the dead silent pines:

In each day, there’s a moment that cannot be eclipsed. That was the moment.

Utterly relaxed clear to my soul, I turned in. That night I slept better than I have in six months. Sure it could have been the flask of bourbon, or the many miles of hiking in the hot sun, or the very cold ride home… but I like to think it was a moment of peak mellow penetrating the stress caused by 20 months of social madness. If I’d done nothing more this year than listen to that song, at that time, in that place… it would be a life lived well.

Stay tuned… there will be more.

Rather than return to camp like a wise man, I went the opposite way, toward Antler. I did this for the very illogical reason that I’d never seen Antler. Also, I had just installed a new headlight and felt (for some reason) that testing it in the actual dark, in the actual forest, a zillion miles from nowhere, with no alternative in mind, was a great idea. When I test stuff I ‘aint messing around!

The road to Antler was very pleasant but a bit long. It was almost twilight when I got there. Antler is basically just a dot on a map but it has an informal campground I wanted to scout out. It was under tall pines, well maintained, free, and totally abandoned. It had a hand pump that might (or might not) supply water. I made plans to setup base camp here in the future.

Wait a minute! There was no outhouse! I’m a tent camper. How’s a hundred year old campsite without outhouses supposed to work? Daaaamn. It was a great place for a camper trailer but off my list. I should have explored more but it was getting dark and I was in a hurry.

(Update, I couldn’t stand the mystery of no outhouse so when I got home I poured over satellite photos. Turns out there is an outhouse. It was tucked behind some trees. In my haste I’d missed it. Thank God because the situation was otherwise baffling.)

Nearby was a fire tower. I didn’t have time to climb it. I kept going.

Then… the oddest thing of all… a cell phone tower. WTF was a cell phone tower doing out here?

(In case you’re wondering, there’s spotty text level cell service at Unremarkable State Park. It can do voice for a few minutes at a time at most. Beyond that, it invariably drops out. There’s no way in hell I could check my blog from there. Just sending a text is all I can do from that locale. All of which is fine with me. Of course, my SpotX works about the same no matter where I am.)

I stopped and checked my phone. All day I’d had between one and zero bars. My phone plays games and will say one bar when there is no chance in hell of making a connection. That’s why I have a SpotX. This time it was at absolutely zero bars. The phone was like “nope, no service here”. I waved it at the tower as if it could see. Apparently the two devices weren’t on speaking terms.

Whatever the tower was servicing, it wasn’t me. It was near the fire tower so I assume this place has a commanding view. Maybe it services some industrial outfit far away but within line of sight? Either I’ll don a tinfoil hat and blame the illuminati or revisit the mystery again someday.

Meanwhile, I was running out of daylight. My newly installed headlight was aimed terribly. Low beam was too high. The road was nearly invisible on low beam. On the other hand, it would probably go straight into the cerebral cortex of any oncoming driver and so I’d definitely be seen. High beam was pretty spiffy. It hit the ground right where I wanted and I could see road surface pretty dang well. I never saw another car so I never used low beam. 

The temperature dropped and my formerly roasted self was now freezing. I had miles and miles to go. Damn!

About halfway home, I stopped and “adapted”. I put on my hunting gear and then put my motorcycle jacket over that. It was a tight fit but nothing is colder than a bike in the dark. The combination did the job well enough. I rode home chilly but not suffering. 

My new headlight made the road manageable and has officially earned my seal of approval. I arrived well after dark and desperately ready for a warm campfire. It was pitch black. I really ought to learn to get to camp by dark. 

Five minutes later the fire was going. I didn’t bother with the folding stove this time. I was cold and wanted heat ASAP. I dumped some pallet wood into the fire ring and started it up. (Pallet wood lights a lot easier than corral wood.) Soon I had my coffee pot (emptied of coffee) heating up water. It was Mountain House Chili Mac and Cheese night at Chez Curmudgeon! Since Bigfoot drank all my beer, it was whiskey time. I warmed by the fire and happily drank all the bourbon in my flask. Life was good.

The next day I was groggy. I hung around brewing coffee. There was at least one grouse drumming right near camp! Of course, there’s no hunting here. I can live with that. Nobody needs to be sound asleep in their 5th wheel when some grungy freak starts blasting wildlife with a shotgun.

I procrastinated for several hours but finally rolled out on Honey Badger. I have figured out how to easily stow a hunting implement (hereafter referred to as a pool cue) on tiny Honey Badger. It works very well, but deployment is slow… if I see a grouse while riding, the bird will have time to make a cup of tea, lay an egg, and still have time to scamper off into the brush while I’m messing with straps. Not to mention only in fiction can one aim a pool cue while wearing a full face helmet.

Not knowing where else to go, I rode about 10 miles to one of many ghost towns in the area. Call it “Champion”. Champion is now nothing but a picnic table under a pavilion, an outhouse, a collapsed building, and a place to park my truck. But it’s a good marker from which to navigate this area. You can’t help but recognize it.

Champion also has the nicest outhouse you’ve ever seen. Something like “the ladies auxiliary of Champion supporters” maintain it. There’s decent woodwork, a broom to tidy up, plenty of extra fluffy toilet paper, and potpourri! I’m a fan of anything done well and I declare that all outhouses should have potpourri. In fact, if a person wound up homeless, there’s a lot worse places to hang out than this outhouse. It’s just so pretty. If there was a coffee can there, I’d leave a buck as a tip every time I use it… in support of the ladies auxiliary .

I didn’t take any photos. I just plain forgot. Sorry.

I thought about hunting right there but it’s a ghost town. I’d probably fall in a well. So I rode a few miles away and set out on foot. There was a nice trail. Everything looked good. I did flush a few. But in the end, I came back to the bike empty handed. Honey Badger was like “what the hell was that all about?” What can I say, I tried.

It was unusually hot and I’d worked up a sweat. I’d only hiked a couple miles by the trail but I’d beaten the brush all around and was worn out. When some rando on the internet says they’ll ride out social collapse “living off the land”… they have no clue. They’ll be dead in a week. Skeletons in excellent matching camo, carrying two AR-15s and six full mags. Give ‘em a week and they’d trade it all for a Cliff Bar and a water filter. That’s the truth of it; hunting is hard work! Everything outdoors is hard work.

I wolfed down a couple handfuls of gorp and headed for greener pastures.

Ten miles to the east I found a road that specifically bans ATV’s (a rarity in these parts). It took a bit to puzzle it out. I think the land accessed by that particular road is managed by some slightly different agency than the others. It probably applies blanket restrictions written by Yalies in DC. 

“We’re a stiff uptight wildlife oriented agency. We can’t have Deplorables riding around having fun!”

“OK sir, so you want to close every road?”

“Yes!”

“This will reduce our funding to the same as roadless wilderness. It was nice knowing you.”

“Wait, what?!?”

“Nobody wants to fund absolute wilderness at a higher per-acre rate than more heavily used land. Do you want a gate on the road or shall we have excavators dig a hole to block it?”

“We gotta’ protect our phoney baloney jobs! What do National Parks do?”

“They allow licensed vehicles on some roads, ATVs on none, and hassle everyone while they do it.”

“OK fine, do that.”

“Very well sir.”

That’s how I legally rolled past a sign that bans 1,500 pound ATVs but allows a 6,000 pound Ford Truck. This happened in a forest that overall has more ATVs (UTVs) than all the cars/trucks/Curmudgeons combined. Does that make sense? Of course not, it’s the 20^th month of 2020 and nothing makes sense! 

I don’t make the rules but its handy when I can use them to my advantage. The license plate on the back of a street legal Yamaha TW200 sometimes does magic. At the moment I could go places that are denied to mechanically superior UTVs. It’s not fair but life ‘ain’t fair. 

In case you’re wondering, Honey Badger probably weighs 500 pounds counting my fat ass and all the gear I’ve strapped to it. Ridden the way I operate it, my outfit is probably lighter on the land than almost anything with wheels. Not that such things matter to regulators, I’m just sayin’.

I’m glad I took this path. It was such a pretty road! Like every good scenic road, it went nowhere and took it’s sweet time getting there. 

After several miles I found a spot, hopped off, and went hunting. By now it was blistering hot. I hunted my ass off… no dice. Sometimes earnest effort don’t mean shit.

When I got back to my bike I’d had enough. I was roasted and maybe a little dehydrated. When the game is outwitting you that bad you’re not hunting at all, you’ve devolved to armed hiking. I was tired of that!

I drank a ton of water, took a Tylenol, and ate a Cliff bar. I decided the rest of the day was “riding time”. The fresh breeze would cool me down. There would be no grouse dinner tonight but that’s why God created Mountain House freeze dried meals. 

Two miles later a rabbit flashed by Honey Badger’s front tire so close I could see his beady little eyes. No chance I’d get the shotgun out in time. He was gone. Rabbit dinner would have been cool.

The road got gnarly. Any truck could have handled the first part. Now it was lifted Jeep terrain… which my bike shrugged off like it was no big deal. There were deep ruts that might eat a stock SUV. Despite this, I rode like a King on rails; navigating the easy 2’ wide raised center between brutally deep wheel ruts. Sometimes that’s a hard peak to stay on (they get pointy) but this one was flat at the top (probably shaved down by someone’s rear differential) so it was like a highway just for me. I felt smug dodging deep treacherous ruts without much work at all. After the rough patch it smoothed out. I passed some abandoned cabins and a well maintained little graveyard but I was enjoying the cool breeze too much to stop and faff about. Eventually my sweet little road ditched back out on a main system dirt road. 

By now, the sun was low in the horizon. The wise choice was to head for camp. Of course I didn’t do that…

I’d had the most mellow evening I could ever want. However, my night’s sleep didn’t fare well. My injury (which I will not specify but has absolutely nothing to do with covid so nobody in medical fields would care anyway) kept me up. I was comfortable on my cot but the ache kept me awake. Not “eyes wide and screaming in pain” awake, just “you aint getting a lot of REM tonight” awake.

Then the coyotes started a rave outside my tent. I’ve always had the theory that there’s wolf territory and coyote territory. Where wolves prowl coyotes stay quiet. This was wolf territory, but the coyotes were howling like maniacs. 

When that passed I drifted off… gently… quietly…

YOWWWLWLWWYLWLLL

More damn coyotes. Like a million of ‘em and they were out there with Bigfoot who drank my beer and they were just tearing it up out there. It was like a rugby team on PCBs.

So much for quiet forests.

I was near a lake. Maybe a half mile off or less. It’s the fall migration (I guess) because the damn birds got all pissed off by the coyotes. They started squawking like my hens when there’s a raccoon in the feed bin. I don’t really know what I was hearing. It sounded like six million Canadian geese and a hundred coyotes were having their own version of Burning Man.

I did get some sleep, eventually. It wasn’t as much as I’d have liked. Life is like that. Sometimes Bigfoot screws up the settings on your shortwave and the damn geese won’t shut up.

Sometime in the night, after the geese wore out and the coyotes packed it in, my injury flared up and I had to go to the truck to find ibuprofen. A grouse was drumming. I took that as a good sign. I’d bag a few grouse on the morrow!

More to follow.

Nothing dramatic happened all evening… which was the whole point. 

I’ve found myself setting up camp in places I’ve already been just to avoid drama. I’m practically a local now. “That’s Curmudgeon, he’s a quasi-permanent resident of campsite # Non-zero Integer”. Is that what a “comfort zone” feels like? I can grok the attraction.

The place was nearly deserted. I expected a herd of grouse hunters, but few people were there; probably no grouse hunters at all. That’s fine with me. 

Before leaving I’d taken a few minutes to chop up some old pallets with my radial arm saw. Parts with metal are garbage, the rest is burnable kiln dried wood that I use in my folding stove. It’s a flawless system! 

On a whim, I chopped up some old corral rails too. These rails are very old. Older than me for sure. How many cow asses had rubbed these rails is known only to God. All I can say is they look untreated and I ‘ain’t afraid of cowshit. After many decades of dry rot and weather a few had given out. I’d tossed them aside this spring when re-doing the pig fence. Now was their time to go out in a literal blaze of glory. They did very well. Plenty of heat and they even smelled nice (not like cowshit at all!). 

I’m glad I brought them. After dinner I simply flipped over my little firebox (where I’d been using small bits of pallet wood) and dumped everything in the fire pit. Then I added the much larger corral wood. Easy peasy. 

Camping alone is rare. Virtually nobody does it. Everyone goes camping with family, or hunting buddies, or with Scouts as a kid, or whatever. I didn’t think I could even experience “loneliness” but camping alone does test one’s mettle. There’s solitude and loneliness. You must enjoy the former without falling into the latter. It’s wise to deploy adaptive measures to make your time more fun. Here’s what I did:

First, I was at a State Park where I’m familiar with the layout and humans were out and about. Sometimes this makes a difference. Comfort zone… what a novel concept! I’m going to have to cogitate more on that idea.

Second, I had creature comforts; a cheery little fire, beer, and a comfy lawnchair. 

Third, I stayed the hell away from depressing literature. 

Fourth, I brought a toy to amuse myself. I have a spiffy shortwave radio that I very much like. It’s  high quality and has a million features. I never seem to get time to listen to it. No time is better than when you’re alone at a campsite. It was packed somewhere in my truck. I’d fetch it in due time.

While I was happily roasting bratwurst, Bigfoot showed up and drank several beers. That’s the only explanation. I was nursing just one beer… only one! All of a sudden I noticed several empties. Damn Bigfoot.

When I dug out the shortwave radio I had a bit of a moral dilemma. Radios are a cardinal sin if they harsh someone else’s “forest experience”. I can’t get in the groove with nature if some dipstick a campsite over is playing “Achy Breaky Heart” while tuning their UTV. I would never do that to someone else! 

I planned carefully and tuned the little radio way low. There was an occupied campsite about 60 yards away and I wanted nothing louder than quiet conversation. 

I turned on the radio and all hell broke loose! An avalanche of sound spewed forth. Nooooo! The racket of shortwave beeps and bips and someone talking in Spanish and static was crazy loud. I fiddled with the volume dial but nothing happened. Oh no!

I fiddled with it but, probably because Bigfoot drank all my beer, I couldn’t figure it out. The volume dial just didn’t do its thing! Shortwave receivers are pretty sophisticated and I was baffled. I was mortified that I’d made loud electronic noise. I clicked it off and felt like a jerk for the noisy outburst.

Confused and embarrassed, I switched to my “backup” radio. I have a slick little CC Crane weather-band radio. It has the world’s smallest speaker but I put in headphones anyway. I wound up listening to classical music on FM on a radio about the size of a stack of business cards. 

I hummed along while guarding my last few beers from Bigfoot and burning old corral rails. Such a fine evening!

I’m not particularly informed about classical music but sitting in the dark listening is a good way to start. I’ve decided that conductor Sergei Prokofiev’s (1891-1953) music is based on the same demon space aliens that caused Hieronymus Bosch’s (1450-1516) paintings. I love Bosch’s weird paintings but Prokofiev’s music was a bit much. I think some of his chord changes broke my ear.

Mrs. Curmudgeon, who has forgotten more about “high culture” than I’ll ever know, reminds me that Prokofiev also wrote Peter and the Wolf… which is one of my favorite melodies. WTF? Now I don’t know what to think! I guess that’s the point. There’s more out there than just the stuff in front of your nose. Analyzing Russian Prokofiev and sipping Oktoberfest beer next to an American campfire isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but it made me happy. 

All in all it was a good night. More to come…

I found myself installing a new headlight at Unremarkable State Park. Whenever I leave my homestead, an almost laughable cascade of events will inevitably delay my departure. In the week prior I’d had a fencing issue lead to “pigtastrophies”, an appliance failure, a truck maintenance problem, and I sustained an injury. That’s just a sample of the drama.

But I had a new headlight and was dying to test it out. I packed more or less randomly… and fled.

I wanted to install my new motorcycle part from the convenient location of my shop; like a sane person in a rational world. Instead, I literally hurled my tool box onto the passenger seat and ran. I was gone before my house dealt me another dramatic reason why I should stay home.

This dumb idea worked surprisingly well. I learned that I can do a headlight swap with just my “emergency tools”. Nice to know. Especially since I’d forgotten my tool box is the world’s shittiest tool box. It seems to attract water like a sponge. All my “handy to have but not on the bike itself” tools were wet… again! In a massive stroke of irony (and good luck), I’d already purchased a replacement tool box. I’d left it in my truck bed during a flurry of medical activity earlier in the week. In the hubub I’d forgotten about it. It was still in the truck bed when I arrived at camp. I didn’t do a wise transfer of equipment, I just dumped shit from one box to the other and wiped down some stuff with an old t-shirt to keep rust at bay.

The old tool box was “Craftsman”. Don’t give me shit about how grandpappy had a great Craftsman tool box back in the day… their stuff is shit now. I replaced it with an Action Packer.

I guess my official camping “kit” for a motorcycle campout includes two Action Packers. (I regularly throw my camping shit in an Action Packer and leave it in my truck bed for days at a time.) One for my camping kitchen stuff and dry food. The other for “Yamaha support” for when I break stuff.

Incidentally I recommend Action Packers for car (truck) camping. They’re expensive but worth it. The lid never blows off and stuff inside stays dry. Regular totes pale in comparison. So far no forest critter has chewed into one. (They’re obviously not bear proof.)

The new headlight was great. Very beefy and plug and play… money well spent! That said, those things ‘ain’t cheap! I’m wondering if I should get armor to protect it?

As always, I was a day late and a dollar short. I got the headlight installed literally minutes before dark. That’s good because I was afraid I’d drop a screw or something. Try finding a lost screw in a pine needle forest floor!

Lucky for me, I now have “instant camp” down to a science. My wonderful “super tent” was up with the cot installed, the mattress rolled out, the sleeping bag laid on the mattress in just under 15 minutes. I’m definitely pleased with my tent/cot! (Note: if the weather is dry, roll out your sleeping bag far in advance and it’ll have more time to “loft”. Loft is the word pretentious backpackers use to describe the process by which your sleeping bag “fluffs up”. I also love having a big rectangular bag instead of the coffin like mummy bags I formerly used out of necessity.)

Despite the dark (the dang moon didn’t rise until much later!), I had plenty of time to start a pallet wood fire in my firebox and roast a few brats. I also had beer… which makes everything better.

I use a little LED area light for camping and it does the job well, but I started thinking about my antique Coleman lantern. If I’m going to get into a groove (rut?) of State Park camping, maybe a brighter light emanating from a delicate device is appropriate? Electronics are super handy and lantern mantles break. But an antique would fit my attitude, not a small concession.

(Update, I’ve done some checking. It’s a Coleman single mantle from 1971. 50 years young. Now I gotta’ see if I can use it!)

More to come.

I recently mentioned something about headlamps and then went off line. You’re probably wondering where I was. I went out into the hinterland in search of Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane.

I didn’t find an imaginary comic relief 1970’s Southern sheriff. But then again he never existed. As a rational man I know that. The reason I went was mostly to forget for a while the implausible modern world in which we all live. As a rational man, I needed a break. Rationality happened. I call that a win.

Lest you think I’ve gone down the rabbit hole… I haven’t. I’m standing next to the hole. I marvel at the masses at the bottom frantically digging deeper by the hour.

“You guys want me to throw down a rope or something?”

“Your insistence on standing next to this hole is why we must dig.”

By comparison, my memories of a goofy sheriff with a funny dog are quaint. Oddly, he was more “realistic” than our current reality. He had logical reasons for his choices. He interpreted and enforced laws according to the words in which they were written. He was a crooked cheater but still waited for the Duke boys to screw up before acting. He didn’t simply make up accusations out of whole cloth… the boys really were speeding. Speeding really is illegal.

He didn’t armor up and kick in their door at midnight. He didn’t impound the General Lee for committing a crime and force the Dukes to prove they weren’t running heroin with it. He didn’t shoot the Duke boys, set fire to their barn, or drive local mechanic Cooter out of business for fixing their car. He liked his dog, hired an honest underling, did slapstick hijinks, and generally was closer to Mayberry 1950 than Minneapolis 2021.

The butt of every joke, the antagonist of the plotlines, a crooked cheating liar… he was more moral than almost everyone in politics or media right now. For that matter, Boss Hogg didn’t import 500 refugees from New York City and use them to cement forever control of the little county.

Compare that dumb fictional show to our current world. Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad and we’re madder than any LSD trip Timothy Leary conjured on his worst day. There’s no particular realm free of madness. Dinner out at a restaurant hinges on a Governor’s imagined or real emergency powers and the emergency du jour (which may also be imagined or real). Sports went woke. Entertainment quit entertaining. Science fiction books have sucked for decades. Surf social media for a photo of a puppy and you’ll wind up “informed” of the government’s mandatory truth. It will be delivered in a theoretically non-government panopticon that has completely merged with one of two parties. Our shared experiences became battlegrounds because our society was not built for this much enforced conformity. Workplaces face it too. First unreality and then force, either implied or explicit. Parrot groupthink or you will be ostracized, and then punished. Get with the program; irretrievably commit to the unreality or be burned at the stake.

Suppose you’re doing honest labor that’s completely non-political, say mixing cement. Such work should be without political drama. It might even be fulfilling; especially if you like cement. In this era, your job might require you get injected, by force if necessary, lest a vaccine fail to inoculate the initial voluntary patient. None of this has anything to do with the pros and cons of concrete versus cement. Plus you’re worried about the HR people… who wouldn’t know cement if you put it in their herbal tea. Interacting like normal people is dangerous and cement has less and less to do with your job at a cement plant. Things just keep doubling down.

How can any of that be a normal world?

(If my cement plant analogy seems odd to you, pick up and examine some other irrationality from the growing pile. For example, try to explain to yourself why greenbacks backed with a debt of $28,429,870,638,746,795.00 still buy groceries. Give it a shot. I’ll wait. If you can’t do it, you can put down the shovel. I’ll throw you a rope if you want.)

Time, once again, to turn the page in my choose your own adventure book:

• For an action story turn to page 42 where Australian cops mace an old lady to protect her from a virus.
• For a paranoid thriller turn to page 1984 and see if Facebook will let you display it.
• For Aldus Huxley, toke up on legal weed and then turn to page 1984.
• For a horror story, turn to page 666 and read about the history of forced injections.

Or, if the bullshit is too much, go camping; which is what I did. Stay tuned.

For those of you who missed the 1970’s (which generally sucked so don’t feel bad), here’s an introduction to Roscoe. He’s an old timey fictionalized corrupt cop:

Here’s a real picture from 2020. Technically these cops aren’t corrupt. This is supposedly what the good guys look like in 2020:

This is an 1987 fictionalized cyborg law enforcement officer from the future. He patrols the dystopian hellhole of New Detroit. This too is supposedly the good guy.

These are cops in England in 2017 (I chose 2017 because it’s long before Covid-madness). These are supposedly good guys.

Frankly Roscoe, corrupt but human, seems a whole lot safer for all of us than any of the other examples.