When my dad was diagnosed with myeloma I told him I didn't know what to say. He said there's nothing to say about it.

Rather than talk about our feelings, which my family never really did, we just continued shooting the shit and joking and sending each other the equivalent of cat pics for old people.

Despite myeloma being incurable, it's treatable and some people last a long time and you kind of cling to the hope that this case will be one of those. Despite the statistics.

When the melonomas appeared though, every conversation became incredibly weird and difficult because we both basically assumed we were just waiting for him to die, which he did quite soon.

Sorry for making this about me and again, I'm not really sure what to say to you. The death in life sucks. Not sure about your relationship with your mom is like, but I hope you can avoid my situation of being weirded out talking to each other.

One thing that always shocks me here, seeing a large swastika tattoo. My heart races and the type of guy who has one has always been very scary. I'm generally not a scared man and those guys scare the living shit out of me.

This is the only city I've lived in that I'm not surprised to see it, it's always surprising but it's no surprise if you can see what I mean.

Is the myth of Portlandia done now? I don't know, it was always a little bit true and mostly bullshit.

Hell of Proud Boy parade yesterday downtown. Why were the police unable to police them? It's cool, I know that answer already and black police chiefs don't amount to much when the rank and file has made up their minds. Will we see less of them or more now one proud boy lies dead? I've been waiting for someone to die, I figured a cop would tackle a kid into a fire hydrant and bash their brain in, I never in a million years imagined that it'd be Proud Boy.

There was a great block party two blocks from my house tonight. Three hundred or so people showed up. The block boarders a park, so it was pretty easy to social distance that many people. I'd say about 80% masked but many of the non masks put a pretty healthy amount of distance between their patch and the next groups. The crowd was about 50/50 Blacks and Whites. A food vendor sold brisket to at least a hundred people. The band played soul hits, every thing from Lauren hill to Zhane and they were smokin, great singers tight rhythm section. I guess our neighborhood pushed back the dark.

Did you see that the kid who identified Kyle Rittenhouse was seventeen year old Garrison (Teargas Proof) Davis? Young Garrison has been a front line journalist for the last 90 days of protests. kid has sucked a lot of gas and taken some blows. Don't tell me a seventeen year old can't be a journalist, this kids going places.

Most the racist are from out of town. You don't have to go far to find em. It seems like a pretty shitty state when you get to know it. There are few bastions of decency but for the most part it's somewhat backward and hateful.

Washington State and Idaho are more than competitive. One odd thing I've been more fully conceptualizing is that everywhere has mean backwards racists but they come in different flavors. They have different cultures and their mean spirited evil manifests differently.

This town is tense. I haven't had this many people cry at the counter since Trump was elected. I think the Proud Boy killing shook people today, on top of COVID, and the election and the kids not going back to school next week and what a shit ass deal kids are about to get. The moms are weepy and scared.

I'll take the time to read that piece, I'm shook today and I really can't atm. Robert Evans has a pretty good overview of why Oregon is in the running as the most racist state on his Behind the Bastards Podcast. Pretty decent podcast and Rob just had his hand broke by a Proud Boys baton last week when he was doing some journalism, lets not forget his hard work.

Nope. Not buyin' it. Many of the excesses of capitalism can be traced to indentured servitude prior to slavery and many more can be traced back to penal servitude prior to indentured servitude. The excesses of capitalism were imported directly from England, which wasn't a standout in Europe for feudal brutality by any measure.

More than that, we fought a war against slavery and it's not like things got better for everyone after the elimination of slavery, nor were things fine and dandy in the North where slavery was abolished. Most of the worst aspects of capitalism arose during the Gilded Age where wage slavery was an essential part of the economy and where industrialists thought it was fine and dandy to hire private armies like the Pinkertons to murder union sympathizers and organizers.

American capitalism is brutal because America, Britain and the other "neoliberal" countries of the world cast capitalism and socialism as Manichean absolutes whereas the rest of the world saw them as poles on a spectrum. Once the Tsar fell, the world spent a hundred years realigning itself on that spectrum. Those forces that were most directly oppositional to communism ended up with the most free-market excesses; those that were most directly oppositional to capitalism ended up with the most excesses of a command economy.

The non-aligned movement allowed nations that were not directly required to kowtow to one ideology or another to pick and choose the market characteristics that they wanted without adhering solely to one pole or the other. This is why countries like France have many free-market aspects and many socialist aspects. The effects are masked in other nations by graft, corruption and cronyism but by and large, the rest of the world uses socialist aspects where they make sense and capitalist aspects where they make money without crushing everyone. The problem is that cronyism destroys socialism eventually while it buttresses and strengthens capitalism.

American capitalism is brutal because for 60 years we were able to point at the Soviet Union and China and Cuba and Vietnam and Cambodia and Nicaragua and Venezuela and say "WE DON'T WANT THAT AND IF YOU DO YOU ARE THE ENEMY." Up until 2016, "socialist" was an epithet in American political discourse. Up until 1989, "socialist" was part of the title of our greatest enemy. Therefore, anything that sniffed of socialism was un-American by definition and anything capitalist was desirable.

Survival of the fittest, bitchez.

It does seem light, they could have appointed him to the supreme court and that's life.

Have you known many women who were sexually assaulted and ignored, shamed or blamed? Know anyone who's life was ruined by it, left to be fearful, mentally ill or unable to have well adjusted adult relationships?

I think the current witch hunt is of way less importance than the change it might make in our world.

Too bad for the ones who get cut down in all innocence, we may never know who they are.

Have you ever pressured for sex?

Maybe it wasn't rape but maybe it wasn't really what she wanted.

It's a horrible unfair world.

Maybe this is what has to happen for it to be a little less so in the future.

It didn't seem like it was going to change without some kind of revolution and no revolution happens without some blood in the streets.

I hope a guy in college is afraid when he's trying to coerce my daughter into to doing something she doesn't want to.

I hope that it comes around to making those people with the least power safer from their bosses, their landlords the cops.

My mom, a school teacher who retired to become a librarian, a women of modest demeanor and habits says that she and almost all her female friends have been sexually harassed by cops during traffic stops.

It's been a shitty brutal and fearful world to be a women.

Maybe someday soon, maybe tomorrow it will be a little less so.

Engaged.

There's a girl in The Horrible Art Class. We'll call her Rebecca. In the first of four "allow me to memorize your names" segments The Horrible Teacher said "Rabak? Rebech? Arbitch?" at which point Rebecca, blushing, said "Rebecca. My first name doesn't fit on the attendance records for some reason." She was embarrassed by this.

Rebecca's hair is too long and her clothes are frumpy. But her eyes are alive under too much makeup. She's one of the Annoyed Ones in That Horrible Art Class; or, at least she's one of the ones who jets as quickly as she can.

Monday she was wearing a too-large sweatshirt. It said "In Case of (mid-life) Emergency Dial (Porsche) 9-1-1" and had a crude representation of a red RUF turbo on it. I asked her "So who saddled you with the shirt? Who has the disease?" and she said "My dad had a 911" and I plowed straight through "I just got one they're great everyone should have one" without touching on "what happened to it" "what happened to your dad" "why are you wearing your dad's sweatshirt." But you can see it. Whatever the circumstances there's a good possibility she's going through life minus a parent.

I just want to tell her she looks nice. I want to tell her to be brave enough to cut her hair, to stop hiding. I want to make everything be all right. I think when you're a teenager you're too busy being consumed by your own fragility to notice that you're all standing around like scared deer waiting for the tigers to come.

I've surrounded myself with children in the virtual world for fifteen years now. When surrounded by real ones my instincts are the same. Protect, inform, advise. I think I've realized that my overwhelmingly paternal instincts are an overreaction to my fundamentally feral upbringing.

My wife got back from a conference a couple weeks ago. They were talking about ACE scores and how many in the midwifery community tend to score higher than baseline. My wife and her new employee remarked that they were "zero" and "one" respectively but the argument was that if you have a non-zero score and your patient has a non-zero score your relationship has a cumulative score and in a traumatic birth your interactions are going to be a product of the cumulative, not the individuals. Curious, I took the test and scored a six.

It bugs the shit out of me that my altruism is motivated by the shadow effects of 30-year-old bullshit. It's disempowering. It makes it feel fake. It means I became Reddit's Father Confessor not because I wanted to do good but because I was flailing to fill the hole dug there decades earlier.

Now all I can notice is how stinky teenagers are. I wonder if they always were and now I sound like David Fucking Brooks.

I wasn't really prepared for the emotional toll that leaving all these preschoolers was going to have on me. I still have a few more days teaching, but I've told the kids I'm leaving and they are... not pleased, to say the least.

The hardest one has been a 3 year old kid named Ian, who's been at the school since it opened. I babysit him sometimes, because his family's a mess. His parents just finalized a divorce, his brother bullies him all the time, etc. When I was babysitting him yesterday, I told him that I'm leaving soon, but we still have time to play at the school a few more times.

His exact response was:

big tears

"BUT YOU'RE MY BEST GROWN UP"

Starts running away from me in the Fred Meyers food court

Once I caught him, which thankfully didn't take long, he told me that it's okay I'm moving, because soon he's just going to get a jet, and use that jet to bring me and my family to live at his house.

So, there's that.

The pain was beautiful, because it meant I cared a lot once

Houseplants are important psychologically. They demand nothing from us other than water and light, yet they are a living thing whose existence depends on us. By requiring our care they allow us to shift our focus from ourselves to something else, but at a much lower concentration than pets or humans. They're useful for staving off depression. The hard part is when the depression wins.

Mine started about ten. I'd had a couple houseplants and an aquarium in my room in 5th grade; when we moved in sixth I took the opportunity to plan a large skylight (which I never got - my parents put them in two other rooms but) and hang up a couple 4' grow lamps. By the time I was sixteen I had maybe 25 pots of various foliage, two aquariums and a hand-me-down cage full of finches.

By the time I was seventeen my sister was stealing my shit to sell to her friends, my parents weren't interacting with me unless it was to give me shit, I was a full-blown exercise bulimic and I was trapped.

And I let it all die.

At one point I went away for four or five days and my parents broke into my room because they suspected there were things to be fed in there. They apologized when they realized everything was long since dead.

But they never wondered what the fuck happened, and they never did anything about it.

I like green, growing things. My own little Silent Running in the middle of the fucking New Mexico desert was my escape capsule. And the fact that I couldn't keep it alive still messes me up.

The fact that my parents never gave a fuck made me angry for a very, very long time.

Would a sociopath hold a golf outing for kids with cancer only to funnel a significant portion of the proceeds to himself? Oh wait. Yes. Yes, he would.

I've been broken. I've been healed by the transformative power of love, the possibility of hope even in a dark time.

Another thing that strikes me about your story is the sudden transition from darkness to possibility. That's how it happens. One minute you're on a bridge: the next you're finding a sense of Oneness with another sentient being.

Finally all through your journey, the highs and the lows, you've understood this: Stories happen to those who can tell them. I always felt that even during your saddest times, you had a sense of the narrative possibilities, so you crafted a story out of the darkness and shared it with us out here in the Hubskiverse. Sharing it helps you carry it a little more lightly.

There will always be someone better off than you, there will always be someone worse off. For me, the goal is to always be better off than that guy I was last year.

I don't know what to tell you Taco that you don't already know. Obviously the months (years?) leading up to this moment have been a rollercoaster. Perhaps, like me many times past and present, you're thinking that you've just had a stroke of bad luck lately and if people would just fuck off and give you some space to get your collective shit together everything will go back to normal. It won't. I think we both know that. The only question you need to ask yourself is how far down the rabbit hole you're willing to go?

Do you have any criminal charges pending? Probation? Before you make any harsh decisions about rehab realize they WILL make those for you eventually. You'd be better off just letting go and letting God as the AA nuts are wont to say. It'll go a lot harder for you if you don't, believe me. Don't even think about driving anywhere far right now. If you plan on sleeping in your car don't you dare keep any shit in it. They will find you, and your family, love notwithstanding, WILL let you rot in jail.

Have you ever been homeless? I spent about half a year in my car and IT SUCKED. Worst months of my life. Spent a week truly roughing it when a cop dropped me at the doors of a state facility and didn't bother to check me in himself. I learned a lot about myself and the world around us that week, none of it inspiring. That is a dark road man, and it's getting colder outside. That's what stuck with me the most: the cold.

Rehab SUCKS. I've been to the best and the worst and they're all fucking miserable. THEY'RE SUPPOSED TO BE. You will meet some truly sad and crazy individuals there. You will be sick. Hopefully they'll give you some decent meds and you'll hit the pink cloud within the week. By the month's end you'll be more than ready to get the fuck out of there. You'll think that was a one time thing and you've got your addiction under control now. You will be wrong.

You've still got family that cares about your welfare. That's a plus for sure. No matter how much you may hate them or how much you think they hate you, you've got people and that's most important. What you decide now will determine how many of those loved ones will remain once the dust settles.

You're one of us now. It's a big club. You're not special. Left unchecked you will die a lonely, excruciating death. AA is mostly bullshit. It's bullshit you would be wise to suffer through at least a couple months. There's no going back. You will have this disease the rest of your life. Like I said: HOW FAR DOWN ARE YOU WILLING TO GO?

I'll be thirty next year. My addictions have cost me half my family, several relationships, over a year in county, half a dozen hospital visits... my sanity. Yet, even with all that misery, I still go back. She welcomes me with open arms every time. One day I fear she'll never let go.

Get your shit together man. I'll keep you close to heart. Take your medicine and come back to us stronger and wiser.

You are being ridiculous. Please stop mischaracterizing what I say. You clearly have no idea about any of my views or philosophies. Notice how instead of refuting any of my points, you simply went into an attack on my character as a whole.

I have a BS in Biochemistry. I am working towards a PhD in bioengineering. This does not make me a fascist biotechnology dictator. It does not make me an agricultural shill. It does make me more qualified to talk about this topic than you.

You're argument all along has been that GMOs are unsafe and should be banned. I have refuted that point several times, giving you several examples of evidence to the contrary. I have pointed out that the only evidence showing GMOs are unsafe has come from scientific hacks. I have pointed out that there is no correlation between the introduction of GMOs into a country and the markers of that country's health.

Do you know what labels I am perfectly fine with?

I used to manage food for a house of 60 hippies. I'd buy all of the above. I support opt-in labels driven by consumer desire. I support farmers choosing the stock of seeds amenable to their practice. But I don't support the FUD you bring to this discussion.

So I'm blocking you. Good day.

Just wanted to let you know you inspired me to get sober. Thanks.

-all western art before about 1400 kinda sucked, then we learned how to draw people

-all western art after about 1915 absolutely sucks, since we forgot how to draw people (and everything else)

-everything in between those years is so impressive it's almost baffling