It is 8:27 PM on Friday September 22nd, 2017. I’m out in my shed/office/clubhouse writing this post. The weather is chilly as usual but I’ve got a very warm heat lamp not two feet away to keep me warm. I can actually see the stars and there is a fantastic waning crescent moon just over Pedro Point. It would be nice if it were hanging over Linda Mar but it is a little too far south this time of year.
I was reading posts in the Nextdoor app to catch up on what is happening in the neighborhood. Apparently Highway 1 is also called the Hobo Highway by transients who go from San Diego up to Oregon. Many have set up camp in the brush and woods down near Rockaway Beach, my favorite little cove where I often hang out with my son to play Pokemón. One in particular has been threatening people on the trail and kicking them. Obviously it is a hobo with a mental illness. What gets me though is the posts on Nextdoor which turned that notification into a thread talking about the shortage of housing, the red legged frog and garter snakes among outreach for the mentally ill. After a while it starts to irritate me because it is unacceptable to have a hobo threatening to kill passersby and the locals convert it into a housing/rent/wildlife issue. It makes me want to stop being a liberal and adopt the term “snowflake,” to describe them.
That just reminded me of a joke I just read on Reddit. A Democrat, a Republican and a priest are on a boat that is sinking. The Democrat yells “save the children!” The Republican yells “Fuck the children!” The Priest yells, “Do you think we have time?” Absolutely terrible but does hit a perfect note for the terrible times we live in these days. After all, we’ve got Republicans who want to seriously harm their own population, a situation with North Korea that literally has millions of lives hanging in the balance and a church filled with pedophiles.
I was brought up Catholic and always taught to respect priests authority. Well, not one, not two but three of them, yes three at the two churches I know had pedophiles in them that were shuffled around until the church couldn’t hide in anymore. Now that many priests are my age and younger I cannot help but thinking they are very odd weirdoes indeed. The last mass I went to was at the local parish and I actually listened to the homily which was terrible. The priest rambled on for about 30 minutes making absolutely no sense. I meet the younger priests and realize how weird they are. Who in their right mind would go into a career like that in an organization full of pedophiles, whose doctrines have been filled with so many terrible errors throughout history. Yet people continue to follow this church simply because they cannot break from tradition and what they’ve been taught to believe their entire lives. I think that people that the majority of priests and nuns run away from life, to a shelter which protects them from having to face reality, from having to grow up.
Anyway, I’ve gotten off on a tangent. Listening to my neighbors on Nextdoor makes me less of a liberal. For the first time I really understand why the moniker “snowflake” fits so well. Of course I still am a liberal, but just not an extreme hippy which is easy to find over here.
In other news there is karate. Things have become much tougher as a green belt because now I have to fight more and the black belts don’t shy away from the head kicks. I’m not afraid of pain or blocking a head kick but I hate the fatigue that comes with having to fight so many times in a row. I guess I’ll have to get in shape for that sort of thing or I won’t go much further than a green belt.
Going back to the subject of North Korea it is a very strange experience to be thinking about death so much due to the situation. We go about our daily lives, read the news, make glib comments on the internet, all when San Francisco or part of Japan be gone tomorrow. This is not a joke and not to be taken lightly. I think the entire world thinks this will all blow over and things will just get back to normal. It is my opinion that we’re on a path where war cannot be avoided and there could be a million deaths. Even if we were to survive nuclear war, life would forever change. The stock market would plummet, I’d be out of work and we could no longer live here. We would have nothing and have to start completely over provided we didn’t die from the radiation. How strange the world has become in just half a year. And yet, the world looks on with passing interest believing the powers that be will get this resolved and aren’t losing much sleep so far.
Life has been pretty much at peace here in the empire for most of the population with the recent wars really not affecting the way people live much at all. Vietnam happened and many Americans lost high school friends, while the Vietnamese suffered immensely. Yet, life didn’t change that much for most. I think that with North Korea and China/Russia being involved things could change very quickly and very dramatically for everyone. I think the proverbial shit is going to hit the fan before Christmas and I cannot help checking the BBC many times a day for updates.
But there is nothing I can do short of uprooting my family, move to Canada and try to make a new life which isn’t going to happen. We’re on the same train as this empire, the USA and even if terrible things did happen our only escape would be to Japan which is even closer to the fire. These types of thoughts never entered my mind even just a few short months ago and now they are always there. They get pushed to the back while I go through my daily routine but until this North Korean issue finds a solution the thoughts that my life could forever change never leaves my head.
Well, it is 8:57 PM and I can feel my eyelids getting heavy. I have karate tomorrow and so I really cannot just relax like I used to on Friday evenings. I’ll have to fight a few times tomorrow and now my favorite time of the weekend is at 12:00 PM when karate class ends. But I must keep going, time never stops and everything continues to change.
