The Post-Partisan Emporium

  The Gift of the Antagonist A Mirror for Self Reflection Kalihi Valley Druid Working class jobs come with their downsides. One of them is that I am regularly surrounded by knuckleheads. Even worse are people like myself who have moderate intelligence and figured out that we get a way better deal collecting blood blisters and trading dirty jokes than the "more successful" office-bound flora. That means there's no shortage of underachievers who consider themselves smarter than everyone else and imagine they will leave us all behind someday once they get around to doing some really amazing accomplishment that's going to bring them fame and fortune. Month after month passes without appreciable results, and gradually the walls of age close in as their grandiose dreams dry up and reality sets in. They get a lot easier to deal with once they hit their first Saturn Return and learn some humility, but until then they have plenty of energy in their 20's and 30's and we...

  Nature is Calling Jailbreaking from the Matrix Collapse Kalihi Valley Druid "I can see the mountains I can see the skies with 3 more minutes to go And it’s to dern pretty for a man that don’t want to die 2 more minutes to go" -Johnny Cash, 25 Minutes To Go Yesterday I had to run some errands in town and finally got the energy to do so. It wasn't particularly difficult except for trying to find a small business using my phone gps. For some reason the device kept freezing up, sending me to the wrong address, and literally had me driving around in circles until I gave up and called the place to get directions. What I found most suspicious was that even power cycling the device didn't seem to have any effect. All my apps were running super slow or crashing, and the navigation voice kept alternating from the saccharine melody of a modern female AI back to the stunted robo-speech of ten years ago. On a whim I tried covering up the cameras and instantly everything was func...

  The Last Quarter Surfing, Getting Older, and the End of Western Civilization Kalihi Valley Druid How many more of these do we get? They say there are two distinct periods in life where you feel a noticeable physical decline. One comes when you are around 45 and the other arrives around 60. When 45 hit it was quite remarkable for me, especially because it brought the hard realization that I wasn’t going to be able to go out and fight the rip at 10 foot Sunset Beach forever. Then all of a sudden the old habit of thinking about my trail of mistakes and blown opportunities took on a whole new sting. It turns out there aren’t endless second chances after all, and the cruel joke of the universe dictates that by the time we get our first dim understanding of how the bigger picture works and are finally in the proper frame of mind to make something happen, the end of the tunnel is already coming up. These thoughts have weighted heavily on my mind lately, especially as I watch the years r...