It’s been upgrade time lately, with regard to new laptops, which both my wife and I use for different reasons. Since Microsoft has stopped their service on Windows 10, and my machine was not equipped for the upgrade to 11, I looked for and found a replacement on Amazon—an Acer Aspire 3. Nothing fancy, but faster, with more RAM and decent storage.

My wife had found a nice Lenovo Yoga at Best Buy but returned it a couple days ago because of some driver glitch involving the touch pad and touch screen.

I have become cognizant of a difference in build quality between the Acer and Lenovo machines—materials-wise, sound-wise, keyboard design, etc. The Lenovo, sadly, would have been a nice one to hold onto, but apparently my wife’s wasn’t the first one to have these driver issues.

The Aspire will work for me, since I basically use it for writing and watching woodturning videos on YouTube, though the sound is, in a relative way, pathetic, compared to the Dell Inspiron I had been using for the previous 7 or 8 years.

My wife is still looking, though she might have found something at Staples. It’s a different Lenovo model, so we’ll see what happens.

Until it happens, we dread it and think it can’t happen. The shooting in Minneapolis a couple days ago has triggered unrest and righteous anger, but it has also focused attention on the thing we feared perhaps more than anything—ICE agents killing someone and being shielded from facing any kind of consequences. As if it is always going to be the victim’s(s’) fault.

This administration and the media who support it are an ugly stain, a stunning, aberrant departure from sanity and good judgment. They instill fear, they are driven by the worst of intentions, and are doing their utmost to cast a pall over the nation.

There is no joy in Mudville. Nothing but a call to resist, and most likely a call to arms. I hate going there, but when insufficiently trained bigots and lemmings fueled by a big payday are handed weapons and unleashed on citizens trying to go about their day, it can’t be long until things get out of hand.

Nice going, MAGA faithful. Did you think it would get this bad? It’s likely to get much worse.

Oh, that’s right. You apparently are loving this.

James Carville thinks that the operation in Venezuela is more distraction from the Epstein files. He’s most likely on to something. Rachel Maddow theorizes that this operation paves the way to use some normally judiciously-used federal statute to deport U.S. citizens of Venezuelan descent, and perhaps from other places as well. She’s most likely on to something, too. Jon Stewart posits that the recent action in Venezuela is just the latest shot across the bow from a President who plans on using the military as he pleases, as if it is his own personal army.

Whatever just unfolded in Venezuela, under the pretense of removing an illegitimate leader and drug kingpin, is perhaps all these things, and more—a thirst for oil, a distraction from a scandal that seems unlikely to go away, and an excuse for deporting more dark-skinned people.

So this is what America First looks like– a Stephen Miller wet dream come to fruition, an ill-advised, American-backed coup, with the “assurance” that we will run Venezuela for the time being.

In what universe does this kind of thinking fly?

Trump just says stuff, most likely at the behest of somebody, and then leaves it to people like Miller, Rubio and… Hegseth? to work things out. I think Mr. Carville, Mr. Stewart, and Ms. Maddow are all barking up the right tree—all of this is a continued effort to shift attention away from the lowering boom of Epstein files and Jack Smith’s investigation, along with groundwork for ethnic cleansing and authoritarian aspirations. Imagine that.

And one more thing: the highly praised special forces success in extracting Maduro and his wife might be likened to walking into a daughter’s bedroom and stealing a couple figures out of a doll house. The whole scene reeks of someone bringing a nuclear bomb to a 5^th-grade shoving match. Definitely not anything to be proud of, or impressed by, as if the efficiency of the operation is the only takeaway here. We’re looking at a military apparently ready to do a rogue leader’s bidding, warming up for further “acquisitions.”

And they probably already have some deal worked out with Maduro to make it look like he’s in big trouble. Maybe he and his wife will enjoy a little R&R with Ms. Maxwell. Or they’ll find a place for Nicolas in Trump’s Cabinet. Ooh, how about the FDA?

I‘ve touched on this before, but I have to try and flesh it out again: namely, the absurdity of being alive.

Here we are, all 8 billion-plus of us, thrown into the mix at some point, with absolutely no say in whether or not we came to exist, all trying to make it through the day, all expected to cope, to work, to serve and protect and be responsible and get along and find a way to survive. We had no say in any of these matters—whether or not we even wanted to take it all on. Oh, many of us do once we’re here, but the initial event of our arrival and existence was out of our hands.

It reminds me of the story my father told us about how he learned to swim—his dad threw him in a pond by their house, when he wasn’t even two years old. I don’t know if that’s true or if I dreamed it at some point, but he could swim like a fish, so maybe even at that tender age he decided he’d rather swim than sink. Or maybe he was just naturally buoyant.

I guess the thing I keep wrestling with is that there is a certain coldness to human existence. We may have the luxury of feeling entitled, we may get lucky and be born into stable families with loving parents, our ways being paved, certain rough edges being smoothed along the way. But there is enough misery and pain and unwarranted suffering to get one thinking that life isn’t a gift, our presence here on this tiny orb isn’t some pre-ordained miracle—it wasn’t “in the stars” or destiny or anything else that makes for a shmaltzy Hallmark movie.

Parents watch their 3-year-old daughter fade away from cancer, or get word that a shooter has taken the life of their 4^th grader at school, or grandparents die in the rubble of bombed out housing because religious zealots and other warmongers refuse to work things out. Or another slaughter unfolds somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa because there are too many people living on terrain which can’t sustain them, and because humans are just more sophisticated animals with basic instincts for survival and an urge to dominate.

There’s nothing magic about this life. There are no givens, which doesn’t mean we can’t feel loved, or be inspired, or awestruck, or moved by the beauty of a sunset or the serenity of a warm Spring day. It just means that, from the get-go, there is no fairness, no blue print beyond being born, living some sort of long or abbreviated life, and dying. What happens to us between the beginning and the end is dependent on a million different things.