As my wife and I were taking a walk the other day, the simple pleasure of being outdoors on a calm, crisp, and cold winter afternoon was interrupted by the thought of Vladimir Putin, of all people. And others like him.

While we were just taking a stroll on quiet streets enjoying the bright sunshine and blue sky, the revelry was spoiled by the thought of that little beady-eyed twerp plotting an assault, threatening to invade, to visit destruction and heartless chaos on millions of people who, for all I know, also want to know the joy of taking a walk on peaceful streets or country roads on a cold, crisp winter afternoon. People who want to live their lives without the specter of interference and war and death hanging over their heads.

It’s difficult to find the words to describe how wrong this seems. How totally unacceptable it is for anyone to arbitrarily decide, with no thought of consultation, to make life a living hell for others who just want to make it through another day, to find some level of contentment and joy and happiness. How dare he think he has the right to ruin so many lives. It’s an abomination, evil on a cosmic scale.

The world should be tiring of violence, and the world is watching, but of course Vlad doesn’t care. It’s all about playing the great hits of the 50s and 60s for him. Pure power play, a twisted trip down memory lane. Dead bodies and ruined lives apparently mean nothing to him, the son of a bitch.

What do the people in his own country, or the soldiers poised on the front lines, really think of all this? What are they being told? Does he really think that invading Ukraine will make him look like a strong man? He’s just the latest in a long line of petrified delusional anachronisms who rule by fear, who think skewed, selfish thoughts.

Children as pawns.

“Concerned” parents will raise their voices at school board meetings and say that their children are being damaged by having to wear a mask. Others trusted to be in the know argue that children are resilient and may not care all that much about having to wear a mask, or be affected by wearing one.

So, children are delicate flowers who have been denied normal development. Or children are resilient and flexible—perhaps much more so than their elders who seem bent on looking for ways to make mountains out of mole hills would be willing to admit.

Who’s right? I don’t know. Maybe the answer lies somewhere in the unsatisfying middle, where concessions have to be made because a pandemic has lingered longer than it needed to.

I can’t find the article or remember the exact context, but the numbers are indicative of current conditions: U.S Covid deaths per day: two thousand something; current China Covid deaths per day: three, if one can believe the info coming out of a state-controlled media. But it’s all about freedom. Freedom gets you the second highest death toll of all the countries on earth, behind only Brazil. And let’s add a lackluster overall response since the very beginning.

Freedom, though.

At least we’ve preserved our freedom. Hardly a thought for anything or anyone else. It’s always just been about “me.” Forget about the immuno-compromised or the health care workers running on fumes and contemplating a change of vocation, or the backlog of other procedures foregone because hospitals can handle little else beyond the steady stream of Covid patients. Let’s forget about reason and logic and science, while we’re at it.

Zero tolerance isn’t remotely possible in the land of the supposedly free and the home of the… brave? Nah.

The death toll hovers around 900,000. We should be bursting with pride over such a large number. A beautiful, large number. Nearly the largest of numbers. So beautiful.

Barry Bonds got snubbed in the Hall of Fame balloting in his last year of eligibility. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy…

His “stellar” stats aside, he lives with a giant asterisk next to his name for the rest of his life. By his choice. He took the chance, probably figuring in his own annoyingly boastful way, he’d get away with it or just deny until people gave in. If he didn’t have such a contrary personality, maybe some would have given him the benefit of the doubt by now. Guess he must have really been juicin’. Same goes for Mr. Clemens.

It’s really quite simple: they both cheated. They crossed the line in the perverted quest for that competitive edge.

Congrats to Big Papi, I think.

Rumbles of war. Fucking war. Along with everything else. How can anyone still have a stomach for such bullshit? We’re still a bunch of knuckle draggers.

President Biden is weighing sending thousands of troops to Eastern Europe. He’ll say it’s the hardest thing he’ll ever have to do. Well, then don’t do it! Don’t do the automatic thing and send our brothers, sisters, husbands, wives, cousins, aunts, uncles, friends into harm’s way yet again because YET ANOTHER tyrant who thinks dead humans are mere collateral damage wants something he has no rights to.

We have loftier, more important things to tend to besides humoring a tiny little man trying to shore up his stature as he pines for the “good old days.” Go to hell, Vlad.

Is the problem with Democrats that they’ve spent too much time waiting for the Republicans to play fair? Are they just idealists beholden to process who haven’t learned that the world doesn’t necessarily work that way? Their good intentions are being left to rot in the morass of stonewalling and filibustering and gerrymandering and a Republican minority’s desire to hold onto power any possible way they can.

The Democrats truly seem weak and impotent. They represent 40 million more people, I guess, but have no power to address their needs. I don’t know if 40 million is an accurate number, but one has to believe that there are many more people who align with the platform of the Democratic party than with the tired Republican talking points of convenient Christianity and tax breaks for people who don’t need them and government downsizing and abolishment of Roe v Wade. Oh, and lily whiteness.

The next presidential election cycle, if it involves T****, is not going to go well. By then we may indeed be waist-deep in civil war. It’s not a sign of health when a minority keeps finding ways to stymie legislation intended to relieve suffering, level the playing field, and create opportunity. Anger is going to spill over. Everywhere.

Surely we know the deal by now: the longer people remain unvaccinated, the higher the likelihood that Covid will continue mutating. Sounds like Omicron may not be the last variant. Can’t we just trust the people who have been saying this all along? Why can’t we believe the ones who actually know something about disease progression and infectious diseases in general?

Nobody has all the answers, but many have no answers at all. They don’t know where to begin. They can’t even ask the right questions. They just tap into the lunacy and over-reacting, claiming it’s all about freedom and rights and avoiding that godforsaken nanny state. Meanwhile, our healthcare system crumbles, and school age children and youth continue missing out on what was once taken for granted—a normal school day.

Don’t blame the teachers in Chicago. Look in the mirror instead.

2022.

A number that would have sounded wildly futuristic back in, say, the early 70s. But it’s here. We’re 13 days in now, and it seems like we’re still traveling in the fast lane, either on a road to nowhere or on some sort of collision course.

We’re almost two years into a pandemic, the caseloads and hospitalizations currently the worst they’ve ever been, though maybe there’s finally a light at the end of the tunnel. The earth seems to be telegraphing some not-so-subtle hints that it is ready to be done with us, ready to flick us off its skin like so many blood-sucking mosquitos.

Donald Trump in all his sulking ugliness is still lurking, eternally sore over losing bigly to Sleepy Joe in 2020. The country seems to be lurching toward civil war again. There are still a lot of people sleeping with their loaded AR-15s and a stunted understanding of freedom, who still love Trump and prefer things provincial and simple and white.

On a brighter note, we are awaiting the full use of the James Webb Space Telescope, recently fully deployed and getting closer to its L2 position, orbiting almost a million miles from Earth. Who knows what it will reveal about the universe? $10 billion to look further backwards in time. It’d be nice if we could learn something helpful after spending all that money. Quite the achievement, though. If it works.

I know I am a cynical Eeyore, and there are few things less attractive and less interesting than a person who seems to derive pleasure from always waiting for the other shoe to drop. But I look around and see and hear things that make no sense to me. That infuriate and sadden. That serve only to confirm the existence of people who are incapable of growth, who prefer to shoot first and dispense with the questions altogether.

I see a world crying out for redemption and healing. So in the meantime, I’ll try to be more grateful for the occasional signs of intelligent life.

So the latest “outrage” is over why the response to those stranded on I-95 a few days ago was not more robust…

Your outrage threshold is way too low. Sometimes you’re on your own, at the mercy of the elements and your own poor planning. You could have rolled with the punches and asked for help from the stranded motorists around you. You had a built-in community of people all in the same boat. Don’t resort to the blame game.

I’m sure local emergency response efforts ramped up as the situation became apparent, but it must have been a logistical nightmare, between staffing shortages and an event crews probably don’t spend a lot of time planning for.

And did you really need to be out and about in the middle of a snowstorm?

There’s a place for personal responsibility and preparation for exactly such an eventuality. Reel in your sense of “outrage.” The world doesn’t revolve around you, whoever you are.

I’m wondering if it’s the same people complaining about their kids getting shortchanged out of all things school-related who are also among the sizeable legion of those who have put up a stink all along the way about everything Covid—masks, distancing, other precautions, the demons at CDC and NIH, the dangerous vaccines, not to mention doubting the virus’s very existence.

Sorry, folks. You can’t turn your noses up at everything you could have been doing and then shit on those who have actually been working the problem and trying to keep people safe this whole friggin’ time.

Well, you can, but you just end up looking and sounding like schmucks.