Scrape the scum!

We had company coming to stay for a couple of days. While we have had many dinner guests, it has been some time since we had a sleepover party. Whee! And that meant it was time for Molecular Level Cleaning. 

We love the family, and this also provided a motivation to get that pesky, er, spring cleaning done. Okay, so we were a little late. 

It was a bit of an adventure. The kind of thing where the curtains are getting washed, the beds are lifted to vacuum the carpet below, and at some point you just look around and say HOW DO WE LIVE LIKE THIS? 

By the time the discouragement sets in, though, you're in too deep. The only way out is through. And I like to think that we presented a very pleasant and low-dust (and even low-dog-hair) environment. 

It's getting to the point where it's time to scale down. Time to get a smaller place. Time to stop having to make a monthly mortgage payment, that's for doggone sure, and a smaller place ought to let us pay cash with the proceeds from our larger home.

What kind of smaller house? Well, I don't know. I have always felt that my grandmother had it good in her old age. She literally lived in a cottage, a winterized beach cottage of which there were many in the outer boroughs at the time. (Real estate speculators and Hurricane Sandy have put paid to a lot of those since.) It was a little place, three rooms, but manageable for her and all she needed; she would get up in the morning, have a bit of breakfast, do her chores, perhaps toddle to the market, and watch TV or enjoy the sunshine. She didn't have to put up with annoying people on the other side of the wall, or a stupid roommate, or anything like that. I thought she had it made. 

I have always sort of thought that she had a great retirement plan. And then I realized that this retirement plan was to be a woodland creature in a British children's book.

Mrs. Squirrel realized she was out of tea. "Oh, dear, best go round the shops." So she put on her scarf and a lovely hat and left her cottage in the woods. 

"Hello, Mrs. Squirrel!" said Mr. Trash Panda, popping up from his smelly dumpster. "Lovely day, is it not?"

"Quite so, Mr. Panda!" said Mrs. Squirrel, who did not feel close enough as a friend to call him Trash. "I'm just going to the shops. Do you need anything?"

"No, thank you kindly, as someone has thrown away half a pizza."

And so on and so forth. 

It's a pleasant thought, but I must bear in mind that my grandmother had my dad a few miles away to help her out as needed (she did not drive). Also, she herself was tough as nails. Whereas I and my wife will likely flee New York and not be near family, and I personally am about as tough as Bubble Yum. 

Plus, if the housing market craters, I may have to move in with Mr. T. Panda or perhaps in a hollow tree. Getting older is hard, even when you're not scrubbing the hallway. 

Self-manslaughter.

I was thinking of a family member who had an awful car accident a couple of decades back. Actually it could have been much worse; the car hit a low concrete barrier at speed and flipped. Physically she came through just fine. Mentally she was not well afterward. In fact, she was not at all well beforehand. 

The woman in question had lost her husband of many years, and was driving back home to their empty house after coming up to New York for the funeral. When I found out about this accident -- to a woman with a perfectly clean driving record -- my thought was then as it is now, that her intense grief led to an involuntary suicide attempt. Not self-murder, but self-manslaughter. 

Probably all but the most even keeled or self-possessed of us have had those times when we're so overwhelmed with anger or sorrow or some other form of emotional pain that for a brief period we would blow up the world (or our own world) just to stop the pain. For most it would not bring us to suicide, but it could certainly make us so out of control that we could cause some horrific harm to ourselves by accident. This is very like manslaughter -- there was no intention of killing someone, but a terrifying lapse of control has led to just that -- except the victim is us.  

According to the CDC's provisional data for 2023, heart diseases are still the top cause of death in America, followed by cancer. Accidental deaths are next by a considerable margin, not even a third of heart disease deaths. But they're all awful, because they each took the life of someone who could have lived another day. 

And now I wonder -- how many of them could technically have been caused by self-harm, which is eleventh on the list? I wouldn't be surprised if psychiatrists and statisticians have looked into this, but I doubt there's a way to know. Maybe a population sample that seeks out those who died accidentally to see how many were known to be suffering distress -- but who can say? A lot of men, and women too, try to hide these feelings for a variety of reasons. There's no way to know who was going along, outwardly in control, who suddenly had a moment in which he or she said I can't take one more second of this -- or felt that way without putting it into conscious words -- and made a small mistake with fatal consequences. 

If you're feeling that way as you read this, I ask that you not wait until it escalates but tell someone. The 988 crisis hotline has a good rep. And if you're in a stage of catastrophic distress but don't think it will rise to the level of danger, still try to find a positive way forward. The lady with the car accident I described lived almost four years longer and died of natural causes, but not for one day did she ever move forward out of her grief. She didn't deserve to suffer that way. 

Finer heroes were never bread.

 

Cards for kids.

I saw an ad for some kind of tea online, an ad that tried to hit all those FOMO buttons. Each loving leaf of this tea was carefully curated by twelfth-generation tea growers in their paradisical tea garden in Teadonia blah blah blah. It occurred to me that so much of Internet advertising is essentially trying to find a way to get you to pay five bucks for a teabag. Because if you don't, you're missing out, you don't know what good tea is, and you're a loser. 

I mentioned to my wife that the young adults who might fall for this kind of appeal are likely the same ones who complain that they are unable to pay back their student loans. She raised an excellent point about a real hole in their education, one I would like to share today. 

But first, I want to say that I do sympathize with kids getting hammered by student loans. Colleges have become obscenely overpriced in the last thirty years, using guaranteed loans to guarantee themselves enormous raises while continuing to promote the idea that the only path to a fulfilling career is through their gold-plated doors. Knowing that much of college teaching is provided by underpaid adjuncts, we all should be asking: What the hell are you bastards doing with the money? That's all beside the point, but I wanted to note that I am aware college debt has gotten out of control since I was a fresh-faced undergrad. 

Now: To business! 

My wife and I were talking about the days when we lived in a much more cash-centric society. You could not put anything from an impromptu piano purchase to the change for the air machine to inflate your tires on plastic. Sure, some places took credit cards, fewer took ATM cards, and some people still wrote checks at the supermarket. For everything else, you got some cash and that was it until the next trip to the bank. 

This, as my wife put it, is why young adults now don't think through the ramifications of overpriced tea and the like. The junior varsity credit and debit cards they were given as kids, the ones that were supposed to teach them to manage money, removed the crushing fear of being caught short in a difficult spot. In our youth it was: No cash? No taxi. No cash? No Big Mac. Didn't bring your checkbook? Better not spend too much on the groceries or you'll have to make the Return Request of Shame. ("Um... Can I put the steaks? And the Frusen Glädjé? And the, er, toilet paper?") I prided myself on keeping a running estimate as I went, and I don't think I ever got caught short. 

Fear is a great motivator and can be a great teacher. You can learn about the wonders of store brands, the importance of learning to sew, the glory of not paying $65 for a pair of adult booties from Bombas. But when you're not thinking about the money you're spending and counting on that high limit and overdraft protection, you may feel fearless -- but it may be a whole different feeling when the texts from the bank and credit card company start pinging on your phone.

I never really thought those starter credit cards were a great idea. Better to open a savings account for the squirt and actually put cash into it. Yeah, the interest the banks give on savings is so poor these days that it actually counts as an insult, but that's not the point. The point is learning the value of money and why it's important to be careful with it. 

Insert obligatory final line here, wishing that Washington would learn the same lesson. Well, I can dream, can't I?

Offloading trouble.

In the final days leading up to the election, I heard several things that upon reflection made me think of the famous story by Ursula K. Le Guin called "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." The imaginative premise of the story, in brief, is that there is a city of perpetual happiness and peace called Omelas, but its happy state rests entirely on a dark secret -- that one child be held in perpetual misery and darkness. Everyone else is joyful and free, but that child must remain in a state of sheer horror or the whole thing collapses. 

What brought it to mind was that, over and over again, I would hear from citizens of this free country demanding that the government guarantee so-called positive rights -- a right to food, education, health care, housing -- rather than the negative rights of just staying out of our faces -- not interfering with speech, religion, person freedom, etc. The more I heard this, the more I got to wonder why supposed adults would expect that someone else must always be required to foot the bill for them, and in many or even most cases even to free them from the bare requirements of survival, or even the consequences of their own actions. 

For example, no authority stops someone from being irresponsible over sex. They are free to do as they like. But they also want to be free from the consequences of the behavior. Someone else must pay for the health care, the drugs, the abortion, the child care and all that entails (if they keep the baby). If not, it is unfair and shows the system is corrupt and evil. 

I've heard of no-fault divorces, no-fault insurance, and no-fault claims, but what they want are no-fault lives.

In a way, though, all of us are citizens of Omelas, in the sense that the bulk of our own citizens benefit from the work of other citizens in jobs we would never want to do. Cops, prison guards, firemen, stool sample examiners, high-rise window washers, sewer workers, nurses in Alzheimer's patient wards, teachers in bad neighborhoods, and so on. We'd rather not think about them. We worry more about the garbage than the garbagemen.  

In one way most of are and really can't help but be citizens of Omelas. That is, the reason we are free and at liberty to fight one another rather than fight other nations is because, for all its faults, we still have the finest military in the world. Most of are too old or too young or just not physically capable of going to war. Whether we like to think about it or not, our active military and our veterans have made our largely pleasant lives possible. 

They have also made us proud. They have endured and suffered, in some cases beyond most of our understanding, so that we may have a chance to be happy and free -- even free to ignore who they are and what they have given for us. 

So I want to thank our veterans on this post on this Veterans Day. They really have secured the blessings of our liberty. May God bless them and may our nation be grateful to them. 

Catching up.

Sorry I've been away from the blog. Let's get caught up, shall we? 

For those of you concerned that I was eaten by the black bear that's been hanging around -- no, it did not happen. His doctor probably warned him I was bad for his cholesterol. No new bear sightings, not since this trash can raid on October 29. Well, it was either the bear or the raccoons are getting organized. 

I was and am grateful for the results of the elections last Tuesday, although as usual New York boned up. Ludicrous nonentity Kirsten Gillibrand returns to the Senate to be Chuck Schumer's flunky. And the state assembly has pulled a fast one, getting a proposition past the voters that will open the door to all kinds of shenanigans. This is what people who did not do their homework saw on the ballot: 

Abstract of Proposal Number One, An Amendment

Amendment to Protect Against Unequal Treatment

This proposal amends Article 1, Section 11 of the New York Constitution. Section 11 now protects against unequal treatment based on race, color, creed, and religion. The proposal will amend the act to also protect against unequal treatment based on ethnicity, national origin, age, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy, and pregnancy outcomes, as well as reproductive healthcare and autonomy.  The amendment allows laws to prevent or undo past discrimination.

It passed because New Yorkers are dumb and don't read, and they saw nice words like protect and against unequal and autonomy said all right. Okay, well, who isn't in favor of protecting against unequal treatment, right? It was sold as a means of protecting abortion, which former gubernatorial candidate John Faso accurately explained was horse hockey in the Albany paper. 

Of course, what this will actually mean is, first off, boys will be walloping girls in girls' sports. But that's just the beginning. It also undermines parental authority, in opposition to existing state law. When the state takes a 10-year-old away from his parents because he wants to get his willie chopped off and be a girl and they don't want him to do that, maybe someone will point out to those parents that they should not have voted this way. 

It is literally the only proposition on a ballot I have ever seen that the archdiocese and every priest in it begged parishioners not to support. Oh, well. Vote in haste, cry your eyes out the rest of your life. 

But the rest of the nation did all right, and I am grateful to them. So let's move on to thanksgiving! 

Thanksgiving decorations are more of a thing this year, or so I notice around the neighborhood, and maybe that's not a coincidence. This house chimed in on a popular Thanksgiving meme:

Another house brilliantly stuck it to a blog post of mine from TEN YEARS AGO. Way back in 2014, I wrote:  

Christmas is green and red. Halloween is orange and black. St. Patrick's Day is green. First day of school is red and black (schools and blackboards). New Year's is white, black, and silver. Easter is anything, as long as it's pastel. I suppose it's only a matter of time before porch lights are available for all these holidays and more. But Thanksgiving is restricted to the colors of late fall, and by the end of November there are virtually no colors left. The leaves have fallen, been raked up, mulched, gone. Bare trees remain, and pine cones. Thanksgiving is brown. Who does brown lights?

Well, now they have those strip lights that can be turned to any color in the spectrum! And guess what? I found a house lit up in brown lights for the season! Very nice, and I applaud their effort and the desire to celebrate the great Thanksgiving holiday. 

I couldn't believe my brown light tirade ran a whole decade ago. But yeah, I've been blogging on this site for almost eleven years, and on another host prior to than for a couple more. Maybe that's enough out of me already. 

Boo who?

Around Halloween we were chatting about the UNICEF boxes, the cardboard boxes that some poor kids had to schlep around to go schnorring on behalf of the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund. I think I did it once. Sometimes in school they'd put the guilt screws on you, and you felt obliged to participate. Well, I figured that UNICEF boxes had gone the way of leisure suits and Pet Rocks. 

Nope.

It's back.

When I was a kid, living in the Five Boroughs, there were plenty of true believers among the parents. They had grown up under the threat of World War and nuclear holocaust, and they believed that the United Nations was an important means to bring countries together and do good throughout the world. Sure, the Communists were always on the march, and the UN reps were always fighting, but as long as the Soviets or the Chinese didn't actually declare war on the United States or Western Europe, then surely the UN was working. It was acting as a "cooling dish" to prevent hotheads from bumbling into war, and a meeting place to try to work out treaties in the presence of other nations, preventing a treaty-based honor system that would require half the world to go to war against the other half as in 1914. 

UNICEF was another helpful idea. It would show that the nations of the world could work together to help children, all children, everywhere, when disaster or famine or illness struck. The pennies, nickels, and dimes we collected along with our fun-size Krackels (yay!) and Hershey Special Darks (boo!) would help the UN perform this mission. 

I'm not sure where it really started to go wrong. Publicly wrong, anyway. It was as the Cold War was coming to a close. In 1988, the Nobel Committee gave its Peace Prize to the UN Peacekeeping Forces for "reducing tensions where an armistice has been negotiated but a peace treaty has yet to be established." By 1996 it had been noted that in half the nations the UN Peacekeeping Forces went, there was a "rapid rise in child prostitution".

Does anyone expect anything good out of the UN anymore? It seemed like its World Health Organization might be useful, but its reputation went in the garbage with just about every other major health organization during COVID. A genuine investigation into how the pandemic started and who started it would turn things around, but these groups would rather ride the train to hell than admit fault, rattle the Communist Chinese, or (worst of all) give the plebes any chance of vindication. All the UN is good for is condemning Israel and sometimes the United States, working with terrorists, and demanding that we beasts in the West take more rapists and murderers into our bosom (as if we don't have enough of our own). 

So no, I will never recommend anyone give to UNICEF or any other concern in which the UN is involved. I don't know how well UNICEF does what it purports to do, but the United Nations as a whole has never lived up to its promise, so why should UNICEF? There are better charities.