Tag: Me Myself I

Personal stuff

No Joy In Mudville

The Gun Thing

I’ve always loved guns.  Some of my best childhood memories are of taking the Diana .177 pellet rifle out to the backyard, setting up a host of tin cans, and blasting away at them until I ran out of pellets.  At a rough guess, I was shooting about 500 pellets per week.

It was my first gun, and shooting it gave me a wonderful solitary activity that was only rivaled by my love of reading.

Later, when I was about 14, I graduated to shooting my dad’s Winchester 63 .22:

Compared to .177 pellets, .22 ammo was really spendy for a boy’s allowance (even back then), so I probably only shot off a hundred-odd rounds a week.  I did that for the next five or so years, until I bought my first centerfire rifle.

Here, my memory fails me;  it was either an Oviedo Mauser in 7x57mm, or else an Israeli Mauser (the K98k, rechambered to 7.62x51mm/.308 Win in the late 1950s).

Whatever, I had both, and used them in my first forays into hunting, which only really began in my mid-twenties — although I would shoot off a few boxes for practice each month (rifle ammo was really expensive in Seffrica, even though by then I was earning a salary).

Then I moved to the U.S., and after I could buy them legally, my love of guns and shooting went stratospheric, and my gun ownership ditto.

Of course, occasional periods of poverty followed, meaning that during those times I was forced to sell a few, and at one time almost all.  And that hurt, it really did;  but I consoled myself with the thought that when my finances recovered, I could always buy replacements… which I did.

Then quite recently, my desire to own guns kinda tailed off.  Most probably, this came from getting to age 70 and the concomitant realization that whereas in the past my appetite for shooting was boundless, now it was more circumspect.  Was I ever going to go hunting again?  (no, probably not.)  Was I going to take up clay shooting?  (also, probably not.)  I’d long since quit any kind of competitive shooting as my eyesight started its decline, and even the occasional trip to Boomershoot suddenly became less appealing — maybe because of the distance involved, but that had never stopped me before.

So as you all know, when my financial circumstances recently demanded some remedial action, I started selling off my guns to anyone who was interested, keeping pretty much only the ones I could foresee myself using at least quite often (.22 rifles and handguns, etc.) or ones that I might need in certain “social” occasions, if you get my drift.

I at least contented myself with weekly range visits because their senior citizen discount made it affordable, but even those have tailed off, for no real reason.  I don’t know why that is;  I still love my guns — the few I’ve kept, anyway — but the urge to shoot them, other than for practice, has more or less disappeared.

And I’m certainly never going to restock the larder, so to speak.  Those days are definitely gone.

I’ve had many invitations to go shooting with various friends and Readers, and when I’ve taken them up, I’ve enjoyed the range time, but enjoyed still more the after-shoot coffees and so on:  the socializing part of the event more so than the shooting, which is a complete inversion of my enjoyment in times gone by.

So something that has been a huge part of my life has gone, maybe forever, and I mourn its passing dreadfully.

Maybe it will come back — I hope it does — but until then, I’m left with this hollow feeling at the disappearance of something that has been part of my entire life.

So now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to read a book.

The Elephant In The Room

Housekeeping

Folks, it’s time to approach this topic head-on.

I refer here to the issues that several Readers have had with the Comments on this website — i.e. email addresses blocked, unable to re-register, etc. all with the end result that you are unable to post comments.

The problem appears to be with WordPress (hic delenda est), and neither I nor Tech Support II have been able to fix it.

I can only surmise that this is being caused by the old version of WordPress that I currently have installed, but I have to confess that I’m really nervous about upgrading because the last time I did so, all sorts of things changed and it took me about a week to fix it all up.

Nevertheless, I’m going to do the upgrade sometime over the next weekend in the hope that this will fix Comments, but I’m not too sanguine that it will.  If everything gets fucked up as a result, please be patient with me.

In the meantime, if you absolutely want your comment published but your access has been nuked, please email it to me and I’ll pop it under the relevant post.  Just put in the Subject line:  Comment for post [title] and I’ll get to it as soon as I can.

I really miss my old website, but that software was compiled from scratch and maintained by Connie, and there’s absolutely no chance that it can ever be resurrected, more’s the pity.

Anyway… wish me luck.

 

Secret Fears

Health

I am surprisingly sympathetic to this story from writer Bryony Gordon:

What if I had done something awful to someone on the Tube the evening before and blanked it out because I was secretly a psychopath? Had I accidentally sent my child to school with a water bottle full of bleach? Had I emailed a terrible, abusive message to her teacher and deleted it from my sent items to hide the evidence? 

The “blanked out” thing is what caught my attention.

Many years ago, I was afflicted with terrible PTSD dreams.  I mean the kind of dreams where you wake up shaking in terror — all horribly violent, all involving death (my own) — and they happened often, sometimes three times a week.  And they were also repetitive, revolving around being attacked by lions, and getting into a street fight being two examples.

But they weren’t the worst.  I actually learned to cope with those dreams after a while, by simply recognizing them as they began to unfold, and forcing myself to wake up before they got any worse.  Now, I only get them maybe once a year, and they’re easily overcome.

The worst of my dreams, however, is where I become two characters in a murder mystery:  a cop or investigator of some kind on the track of a serial killer, a killer whose murders are gruesome and revolting.  And part of the investigation is my seeming ability to visualize the murders as they’re taking place — as portrayed in the movie The Eyes Of Laura Mars. 

After a while (in the dream), the realization would begin to dawn that the reason I could visualize the gruesome murders was that I was the murderer, and this manifested itself in the dreadful fear of discovery.

I would wake up, and so realistic were the dreams that in process of awakening I would ask myself if I actually was a murderer in real life and had somehow managed to get away with the killing.  The feeling of horror (at being that kind of person and of being discovered) was as strong in my semi-wakened state as it had been in the dream.

It would take me a long time, as much as an hour of rational thinking, to dispel those fears.

Fortunately, I haven’t had one of those dreams in a couple of years.  Maybe they’re gone — I certainly hope so.

I cannot imagine that feeling of dread happening to me in an awakened state.  It must be awful, just terrible;  and that’s why I’m sympathetic towards Bryony Gordon.

Nobody deserves to have the mind play such foul tricks on them.

An afterthought:  many times, these kinds of dreams and hallucinations are caused by psychotropic drugs, taken to suppress things like feelings of panic or depression.  Mine weren’t, because I’ve never taken such drugs;  that’s why they’re all the more terrifying.

I’ve tried to analyze why I get them.  The most plausible explanation is that when writing fiction, writers have to envision the plot from both sides of the mystery so that the plot doesn’t have holes in it.  And even if I’m not in the process of writing a book, I’m always developing plots and storylines in my head.  I haven’t done any such writing for a while, now, and maybe that’s why I haven’t had those dreams recently.

I just hope that writing about them today doesn’t cause a re-occurrence.

So Much For That

Food & Drink, Health

For a while now — about five months — I’ve not been taking Ozempic because I cannot in all conscience afford the (rip-off) price of $250 a month for the rest of my life.  As my old buddy Patterson puts it so succinctly:  “Fuck that for a tale.”

And he’s right.

Anyway, I had my semi-annual physical yesterday, and got weighed with a certain degree of trepidation because there are all sorts of stories extant that say categorically that if you quit taking your weekly stomach-jab, the weight comes screaming back on.  To recap (for those unfamiliar with my tale of woe):  I weighed about 275 lbs. before I started taking Ozempic;  several months later I was down to 230 lbs. (n.b. my Army weight after boot camp was 225 lbs.), and at my annual checkup last November I was back up slightly (still on Ozempic), to 235 lbs.

So I got weighed yesterday, fearing for the worst:  236 lbs.

When I told the doctor that I had quit taking Ozempic, therefore, he just shrugged and said, “No big deal.  Your weight seems to have stabilized.”

Then he said that I was one of his healthiest patients, and for my 70 years of decrepitude, the healthiest he’d seen in years.  Then (as usual), he told me to fuck off and stop wasting his time because he had sick people to look after.

The interesting thing that happened to me with Ozempic was that my appetite disappeared completely:  three meals a day plus much snacking dwindled away to one meal a day, with maybe a snack every few days.  And what’s still more interesting is that the smaller food intake has become habitual;  I haven’t gone back to gorging myself on a daily basis. (The day before yesterday, for instance, I had a couple pieces of biltong at lunchtime followed by an egg and bacon sandwich for dinner — that’s one egg and two strips of bacon on a piece of French baguette.)

And if I feel really hungry during the day, the biltong (with maybe a piece of Jarlsberg cheese) takes care of it.

As to why I have my main meal in the evening:  I seldom feel like food first thing in the morning at the best of times;  I take my meds at night (because they work better that way) and it’s best if I take them on a full stomach than an empty one;  and finally, I enjoy having dinner with New Wife because marriage.

Sorry about all that personal stuff, I know: “TMI shuddup Kim.”  But the takeaway from all this is that for some people — for me, at any rate — taking Ozempic doesn’t have to be a life sentence as they warn it will be.

So fukkem all:  the drug company who makes Ozempic (apparently from diamond dust and gold flakes), and the doomsayers and all the worrywarts who infest our lives.

I’m doing fine, thank you, and that’s all there is to say about it.

And now, if you’ll excuse me… I’m off to a happy place.

Same Here

Government Thugs, Rights, Surveillance Society

Tom Knighton has written an article which resonates with me, for obvious reasons:

By now, we’re all well aware of the Biden-era “Strategic Implementation Plan for Countering Domestic Terrorism,” which has some very troubling language in it.

As Just the News reported earlier on Tuesday, the criteria included buying guns, being a veteran, and what was termed as “‘xenophobic’ disinformation.”

I’m a veteran and gun owner, and I was pretty critical of China during the whole pandemic, at least on social media. Now, I’m curious as to whether my own government was monitoring my lawful activity simply because I wasn’t a raging leftist loon willing to toe the progressive party line on these issues.

Was I considered a threat to become a domestic terrorist?

Anyone see any parallels between Knighton and me?  The only difference between us is that I’m a veteran of another country’s army — but I’m still a veteran.  (As for the criticism of the foul ChiComs, and buying guns:  ipse dixit.)

I have no idea what is/was meant by “xenophobic disinformation”, but if it means saying that I heartily dislike furriners who creep illegally over our borders to take jobs away from U.S. citizens, commit other crimes, engage in espionage or otherwise try to undermine our country, then I’d have to plead nolo contendere*.

Knighton goes on:

I’m sure I could file a FOIA request and find out, and part of me is considering doing just that, but another part of me would rather not know.

I do have one hint that I may be on such a list if “undesirables”:  back in 2017 (that would have been under the Obama administration), I had the dreaded “SSSS” designation appear on one of my air tickets, but it was for one flight only (among several others in that year and the year following), and Obama had only been  in  out of power for a few months at that point.

I’m fairly sure  that I was “noted” by some government apparatchik during the latter years of his presidency, and if not then, I have absolutely no doubt that I was flagged during the Biden era.

This website is my only “online presence” (no Twatter, no Fecesbook, no Instagram and certainly no ChiCom-based Tik Tok either), but over the years several of my posts have engendered (shall we say) some notoriety, and it wouldn’t take much for those to have got me noted and monitored by some DHS/FBI drone.

Anyway, my interest in such surveillance by the .gov is minimal, although I am a kindred spirit of Tom Knighton’s in that:

Finding out that I was monitored because of my views and lawful behavior might just be too much for me to tolerate, and I’m seeing too much that I’m incapable of tolerating as it is.

Amen, Brother Tom.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the range.  My AK-47 is feeling all neglected and stuff.

*Whole lotta Latin in this post… sorry.

If I Were A Paranoid Man

Marketing / Advertising

We’re all familiar with the situation:  you post something about a government conspiracy and the very next day you get a pop-up ad when you open a web page somewhere:

As I said in the title, if I were a paranoid man…

Not long ago I was running an errand which took me down the horrible I-35 south of Dallas.  It’s horrible not because of the road per se, but because to get to the I-35 south of Dallas from where I am, I have to somehow get around the Dallas downtown area, which as any local yokel will tell you, can be a terrifying experience.  (What tourists or newcomers feel when facing this situation I cannot even begin to fathom.)

Anyway, as any local yokel will tell you, South Dallas is a place to be avoided at all costs (think:  East L.A., South Side Chicago, Boston’s Combat Zone etc.).  Yet there I was, trundling along…

…and got a puncture which tore my right-hand rear tire to shreds.

Fortunately, it happened about 50 yards before an off-ramp, so I managed to get off the interstate and pull into a service station parking lot, there to await the arrival of roadside service.

Tangent:  I know how to change a tire, I’ve done it dozens of times before, but I’m decades older than I was the last time I did it, and as my insurance company provides the service for free… why the hell not?

However, I soon noticed that my environs were not the most salubrious, in that when I went into the little convenience store to get a Coke, the cashier was encased behind what looked like 12″-thick armored glass and stout steel bars.  The message was obvious, so I decided to forego the Coke and get back to my car ASAP.

I didn’t get back inside the car because that way I wouldn’t be able to get a 360° view of my surroundings, and more importantly, by standing next to the car I would have easy access to both my trusty 1911 and its backup, should that be necessary.

I waited for about an hour for the roadside service guy, and was only accosted by one scrote who needed a $5 gift “for gas to get to work”, a likely story as he looked like the last time he worked was during the elder Bush presidency.  Besides, I wasn’t going to get my wallet out only to be confronted by a knife.

Because if that happened, I’d have to shoot the asshole and then would come the cops, the call to my SCCA attorney, endless paperwork, confiscation of my 1911, forget about keeping my appointment… you get the picture:  all that hassle just because I might ventilate someone totally deserving of ventilation.

So I just pointed at my tire-less rim, and snarled that I had my own fucking problems and to leave me the fuck alone.

Which he did, fairly quickly and without any fuss.  Clearly, I didn’t look like a potential victim, for some reason.

Anyway, roadside service arrived and put on my “spare” (just a donut, 2,000-word rant omitted ).  Except that the donut was flat, despite the assurance from my last oil-change provider whom I’d asked to check on the thing (another 2,000-word rant omitted, but he just lost my business).  Fortunately, road service guy had one of those little quick-pump thingies which took care of the problem right there, so off I went, late for my appointment, but buoyed by the certain knowledge that afterwards, I’d have to stop by Discount Tires to get a replacement, oh joy, because there was no way the donut would get me the fifty-odd miles home, on said Dallas-area freeways where you get run off the road for daring to drive at only 70mph.

Anyway, I told you all that so I could tell you this.

Two days ago, I got an email which featured one of these:

It was the first such ad I’ve ever got in this manner, and if I were a paranoid man…

So the question is — because the coincidence seems a little too strong, even for me — how did these hucksters get my email addy?  From the insurance company, or the tire outlet?

Your guesses in Comments.

Afterword #1:  I actually already have one of the above in the trunk of the car, but I couldn’t remember when last I charged it up, which is why I relied on the roadside service guy to handle the problem.  I did recharge it when I got home.

Afterword #2:   I ended up getting four new tires, because apparently the 50,000-mile warranty didn’t cover tires that had passed the 100,000-mile mark some time back.  As the tire guy put it:  “You’re damn lucky you haven’t had at least two blowouts by now.” 
And the only way I was able to afford those four new tires was because of my Readers’ generosity during this, my Last Appeal (which still has a day or so to run, hint, hint ).