2nd Session

Life has been crazy. I have not had any opportunity to have a second session, even though it's now getting close to a month since our first session. (Actually, it might be more than that by now.) However, we're about to leave town in just under a week, and we'll be gone for over two weeks; until nearly New Year's Eve. The reason for the trip is my son's wedding out of state, but after that, we're going to remain out of state (at my in-laws big house, mostly) until we leave town in the week between Christmas and New Years. I will be bringing my "D&D kit" in its big canvas backpack, with my books, dice, and all that jazz along with me, and hopefully we'll knock out at least a couple of sessions while we're out of town. We don't actually have a ton of plans, although I'm sure that we'll end up doing plenty of things while we're out there, but I'm sure we'll also have plenty of time sitting around looking at each other. It'd be nice to have something besides "let's watch another Hallmark movie" or "let's go see some ridiculous Hollywood offering" or "let's go to the mall" available to do.

What I'd like to do when I get home, is continue with the 5x5s, and start fleshing out CULT OF UNDEATH.

In the meantime, I feel like the only fantasy I feel is the fantasy of some free time especially out west in the bright cold sun of a Wyoming (or Montana, or Colorado, or Utah, or Idaho or even New Mexico or Arizona) winter's day in the wilderness, the horror is the horror of whatever fire is going to happen at work on top of all of the other manufactured fires that I already am juggling, and the only madness is caused by the horror of work. Sigh. At least I can post a picture of someplace I'd love to be, even if I can't actually be there right now.

I'm grateful to this job which came along so quickly after being laid off in 2022, and it does pay me pretty well. But it doesn't treat me very well, and I'm feeling a lot of burnout already. In this, sadly, I'm not alone in my family. I've heard a lot from my youngest son about his frustration with work, I'm sure my other younger son is also frustrated with work and investigating a new job. My daughter has had lots of work woes, although the good news for her is that the main source of most of those woes is leaving in a few days, so brighter days ahead for her, hopefully. And my oldest son just quit work to finish his Masters (which he's just done in the last couple of weeks) and has been interviewing for a new job.

A side effect of my layoff is that my retirement plan, which was heavily dependent on the expected value of my pension, will not be realized. I still have a pension, but it will be considerably less than I expected it to be because I didn't get to thirty years seniority, where it plateaus; I was laid off with 22 years. Blegh. Of course, I also didn't save as much as I probably should have; because I thought my pension was going to be better. My 401(k) on the other hand, is pretty skimpy given that my pension rug was pulled out from under me and I'm already over 50. I'll probably have to work quite a bit longer than I hoped. And, given the broken housing market, I'm probably stuck where I am. I had thought that once we became empty nesters (again) I could maybe find some retirement part time work out west, either working for the Church or for the National Park Service, or something, not only to keep me busy but also to supplement my retirement income. Maybe that's still an option, if housing crashes and I can bail on my Midwest house and move somewhere better.

Anyway, a somewhat melancholy post, I know, about banal yet frustrating and worrisome personal issues. I've joked but not really joking told my kids that they'll probably have to have us move in with them when I'm finally too old to work. Sadly, that might actually end up being true. Or maybe that's not so sad. With the exception of the Boomer generation and one or two other generations, that was just what you did; extended family stuck together and took care of their young, elderly and infirm. Maybe I should recognize that the situation that I planned for was a societal anomaly, never seen before or probably since. And by combining my 401(k), my pension, and social security, maybe that's a benefit to the kids who take us in, as we can help finance their dreams too, which are otherwise increasingly unobtainable to people of their generation.

UPDATE: Work has been more tolerable these last few days than I anticipated. I might actually glide relatively easily into vacation. Which... starts tomorrow right after work. I have to drive 6 hours after work before the evening is done, and then another long day after that. However, after that, I actually ease into the stuff that I'm leaving for, i.e., my son's wedding out of state.

I'll be working remotely a few days of the week before Christmas, but we'll see how busy the week before Christmas actually ends up being...

Musk and Iger

People have been all "in a tizzy" the last few days because Elon Musk specifically called out Iger for pulling his ads for making a perfectly reasonable off-hand observation that happened to involve the Jews not getting a free pass to do whatever the heck that they want to, so the usual suspects started predictably trotting out the "antisemitism" hoax. For the most part, people seem to have focused on the free speech and bully aspects of the discussion. What few seem willing to touch is the JQ aspect which is really at the core of the question.

(((Andrew Sorkin))) who conducted the interview with Musk is, of course, Jewish himself, and he thought he understood the script pretty well, and was observably and obviously gob-smacked and unable to recover from the fact that Musk refused to play the part of the contrite Jew-loving lickspittle that the script would have placed him in. This is really the core of the issue. The Jews have pushed everyone too far. They've tried to get away with everything through sheer chutzpah, which given the fact that the word comes to us from Yiddish, for cryin' out loud, highlights how important it is to the Jewish identity. And chutzpah is imposter syndrome writ large, and you can only be an imposter for so long before it catches up to you. The Jews are not any more special than any other people in the rest of the world, and the fact that they've been casually exploiting everyone else that they can get away with, particularly Europeans (both in Europe in in diaspora situations, like America) for generations is finally catching up with them. They went too far in Gaza recently, and people are pushing back. They're trying to contain the narrative by the usual tactics, which have more or less worked in the past, but now, the more they try and do that, the more they are ripping the curtain off of its hangings and showing the tired old man pretending to be Oz. Now, we're getting to the point where Elon Musk is openly telling Bob Iger to "go f*** himself" and that he wasn't going to budge because of his Jew-bullying.

Ultimately, that's the crux of the issue, not free speech, or woke bullying, or whatever people are pretending that it's about. It's about the Jews trying to maintain their stanglehold on their tribal supremacist practices and the whole world, as Elon Musk points out, being done with it.

It's a fascinating thing to see happen in realtime.