Week 4

Maybe about three and a half weeks have passed since the first symptoms of shingles appeared. This was just the aching, which was mysterious at that point. It was a week after that that I got the rash. Statistically, it's not surprising I'm not completely over it yet, but I think I have improved and am on the fabled Road to Recovery. So much about that, except, maybe, thank God for Gabapentin and Ibuprofin.

The Kansas City Chiefs football team won the Superbowl. A parade was held a few days later, going right past my apartment and through downtown and on to the Union Station about two miles south, where a rally was held. Lots and lots of people came and observed one or both. Some say about one million. The population of the Kansas City "metro area" is about 2.3 million, so, something less than half of the entire population of Kansas City came to celebrate the Chiefs' victory. Football games generally take place in cold weather. The day of the parade it was 25 degrees (F) when people began to assemble on the streets to get a good spot to see the parade, fully six hours before it started. A hardy lot.

My partner and I went up to the rooftop of our building to take a peek at the parade route. There were already three dozen or so people up there already. We stayed about twenty minutes before wimping out and returning to the apartment. Some pics:

That is all.  Still waiting for spring.

But What Have I Done Lately?

The answer to the question, what have I done lately, is, nothing. Nothing much. In a way, killing time. I plan to move to a larger apartment this summer, and meanwhile caught shingles. Here I must highly recommend the shingles shots if you have not had them yet, unless you somehow had the chicken pox vaccination--in which case you would be too young to know the likes of me, but anyway.
Shingles is painful. I had a very mild case of it when I was around twenty-one years old, and it was painful even though I only had one little area of rash. This time, many many years later, my whole right side, front and back, was covered in rashes and . . .  I had no idea there were so many varieties of pain. Good grief. I'm better but still on the pain meds.  It can take weeks and weeks to get over this.  I had the anti-viral meds so I hope I escape that. So, to summarize, get the shots. Word to the wise.  'Nuf sed. And so on.

You may or may not know that my hometown football team, the Kansas City Chiefs, won the Superbowl last night. I have jokingly been telling people I just hope both teams will have fun, but last night the San Francisco 49ers were not having fun after the game. Tons of people in Kansas City were, however. I live downtown so from out my third story window I saw the streams of people and cars leaving after watching the game on giant TV screens in a few places downtown. Happy screams and woo-hooooos filling the air, horns honking, streetcars stalled in place, flasher on as they gave up trying to move up and down Main Street, occasional sirens. Good for them. I'm not a football fan, really, but it's nice to see an entire city the size of Kansas City in good spirits and all in accord.

Even President Trump caught the fever and Tweeted his congratulations and in his own inimitable fashion said the Chiefs represented the great state of Kansas in their victory--except of course as I've said many many times, KANSAS CITY IS IN MISSOURI---NOT KANSAS. (If you mean Kansas City, Kansas, then you must say: "Kansas City, Kansas.")  The tweet was corrected almost immediately of course, but the damage is done. You Missourians and Kansans who live in at least two states that "went Trump" during the 2016 election would do well to realize that the man doesn't give a flying f**k about either state along with many of the surrounding states in the center of the country, as he demonstrated last night when he revealed not only his ignorance but his unwillingness to inform himself for lack of . . . a flying f**k.

But I digress.

That's about all from Missouri, now in the middle of the oddest winter here that I can remember, for it's frequent freaky warm spells--not that I'm complaining. Anyway, spring is coming, as it always does.

Note: Kansas City was named before the Territory of Kansas was a state and named Kansas. Hence the confusion for all of us who do not have a staff of highly intelligent and well-informed aids at our disposal.

The Sun is UP

As I write this morning, the sun, uncaring of the calendrical round numbers that we humans find so intriguing, is rising from last year's horizon. It is a good, cloudless day--if a little chilly. This is Kansas City, so it will get colder from this day out until the planet rights itself a little bit later this year.
No New Year's resolutions. I'm still working on 1998.
To use a phrase from the 60's, I just flashed on something: there are plenty of people walking around right now who regard the 20th century--the Nineteen-hundreds--as history. What the. 
More to come. The 1998 resolution was to pursue writing.
Keep flossing.
-Roy

Some Shallow Post-Christmas Reflections

So . . . what did you all get for Christmas? And why, or why not? And why, as we age, do we want, more and more, for Santa Claus to be real? Are we so shallow that by being plied with gifts our loyalties could be so easily bought, hopes so easily aroused, neural pathways so deeply etched?

I got nothing.  We agreed.  I am left with no new camera, and no new guitar. My old guitar--and I'm down to one acoustic guitar now--which I purchased in 1972, is finally starting to warp.  After all these years of abuse, it is now slowly but surely becoming unplayable.

It's OK.  I am still very lucky.  Sure I am adrift in a world sans Santa after having spent my childhood a mere victim of exuberant post-war marketing, but I have my health. Didn't that used to piss you off when old people told you that? Little did we know, mainly because we had all those toys, perhaps.

I'll probably buy another guitar before too long. I'm too used to having one around. They never lie hidden in the case at my house. My Alvarez is hanging on a guitar stand so I can pick it up and play it any time I walk by if I want. I have been doing that for decades. My playing is surprisingly amateurish.

This is the season when we normally think about what happened during the past year, and maybe how to either make it stop, or how to keep it going in the coming year. Or even think of something new. It gets more difficult every time. So much has happened in 2019 that it seems like a ve-eeery long year, indeed, and a lot to consider.
I live in Kansas City now.  I got here at the end of July, about four and a half months ago. You might or might not remember I left Kansas City just about a year before. In between, I lived in Chico, and then Tucson. I don't judge, but I did decide that I wouldn't want to live permanently in either place. California in particular was very disappointing, but mainly only because I kept comparing it to my memory of it in the Fifties, Sixties and very early Seventies. A good lesson--things sometimes get worse, or perhaps I mean evolution does not necessarily equate with improvement. Tell that to the Neanderthals.
It sounds like I'm dissing California. Maybe I am, but let me explain. After living in what most Californians would call "the Midwest" since the 70s, I learned that regardless of what east and west coasters might think, all the stuff in between is what America is. For good or aught. Sure things are changing, and the coasts have their influence, just as any region does (more or less,) on the changing culture, but, like Texas, perhaps, they can do what they want but they shouldn't pretend they have the right to hijack the rest of the country.
I might add about here that I am a self-identified Liberal.  Just thinkin' out loud.
Anyway, I'll stop here. Might as well try to figure out if a moderate Democrat is the exact same thing as a moderate Republican, which, if you think about it, is exactly where the dialog should be--not way over to the left, or to the right, where the statistical outliers all stand and yell at the middle.
What I have really learned, I think, is that life isn't just where you live. What would I have written about this morning if I had never moved anywhere?

Hmmm

 "˙ǝןʎʇs ʇɐq" 'sǝןʞuɐ ʎɯ ɯoɹɟ buıbuɐɥ ǝןıɥʍ ʇsod boןq ǝɹıʇuǝ uɐ ǝʇɐǝɹɔ uɐɔ ı ɟı ʇno puıɟ oʇ ʇuǝɯıɹǝdxǝ uɐ ʎןǝɹǝɯ sı sıɥʇ

The Pay Wall

I like browsing around in Google News, scanning headlines and clicking here or there on links to interesting looking articles. More and more, once I go to a website like the New York Times or the Washington Post, I encounter a paywall, which keeps me from reading the article until I sign up for a paid subscription. As if I had enough money to buy a subscription for every web site that I encounter this way.  It would cost me hundreds of dollars a month.

I know.  We used to pay for newspapers delivered to the full gutters of the streets in front of our houses, or somewhere near the base of our driveway. We would read them while eating a bowl of cereal (your routine may vary,) and do the crossword puzzle. But that was the paper from our home town.  It was understandable that we were all willing to pay by the month to have it delivered to our doorstep, or even somewhere vaguely on our property.

But this is the Internet. There are thousands of web sites that provide information of some sort, and the customary way of reading them is to browse. People are always referring to "browsing" the Internet. It doesn't seem reasonable to buy a monthly subscription to a site just because one stumbles across it via a link somewhere. I'm not saying all this stuff should be free.  Just that it's a goofy business model.

Of course if I love a certain site and I read something on it every day, I suppose I might want to get a subscription. As it is, though, when I click on a link supplied by Google or Facebook and it leads me to a news article, say, that throws up a paywall after showing me a couple paragraphs, that seems more like an advertisement for that web site, and not a useful link at all. Just more click-bait. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I say this all the time, but what's maddening is that I already pay for the medium that is bringing me this junk.

I'll end this with the idea that I already understand these companies aren't required to give out free stuff. It only seems that way because that's how the Internet started. And it all seemed great at the time--but not that great.


I want to add that the two sites I specifically mentioned, NYT and WP, probably are worthy of any reasonable subscription fees they might levy, and they're not the only ones.  It just really gets funny when other, perhaps lesser well known, sites have the nerve to even act like they should get money from anyone for subjecting them to their misspelled headlines, horrid grammar and sloppy and ill-conceived articles. That would be like me charging you to read this blog. Please.