We had the in-laws over for a three hour discussion about their horrible daughter. It was basically "we aren't going to hunker down so you can preserve your neutrality any longer" which basically led to we will tell her to call you so that we don't have to take any position." That phone call was this morning and was basically two hours of "gaslight gaslight false equivalency disappointment." My wife, of course, keeps her receipts so the email directly contradicting everything her sister lied about for two and a half hours was forwarded without comment. It's fucking exhausting. On the plus side, I had a conversation with my father about radioactive waste (a friend has a pad printer that was used for rrrrrrrrrrrrrrradium and she's wondering if she needs to worry). While we didn't discuss my father's collection we did have an interesting discussion about a friend of his who ended up in possession of his father's collection, which included a mason jar of yellowcake. Said friend asked my father what to do with this... curio. "Yeah, what did you tell him?" I asked. "I told him to wait until a dark moonless night and then dump it from the bridge into the Rio Grande," he said. "Yellowcake is natural and in the river it'll dissipate enough that nobody will be hurt by it." So there you go, son. When I die, throw my plutonium in the river. The fuck do you do with that.
I've got a close friend who is one of the last remaining original hippies from the Ken Kesey days. He has a box he wants to sell me. In the box are all the things you used to be able to buy mail order from chemical companies. And some of the more industrious hippies purchased a lot of this stuff mail order and set up ... umm ... businesses. Making ... consumables ... that people like the Grateful Dead highly praised ... Welp. This box is from them. Contains all that, and more. And has the name and address of someone that pretty much everyone alive today would recognize. This thing is a fucking national treasure ... if it weren't so goddamn hot and illegal and just possessing the contents would put you on every watchlist for every three-letter agency, who'd just assume throw you behind bars and take the stuff out and sample it to track strains and compositions that still circulate today. But man... I want that box.
I used to work at the Fisherman's Terminal. I used to walk around while I ate my lunch. Ethiopian dude walked up to me once. "Merchant marine?" "Excuse me?" "Do you know to the merchant marine?" "Directions? No I'm sorry - " "Do you like to party?" Dude holds up a rag. Opens it up. hockey puck of black tar heroin, Arabic stamp on the side. I aver that I don't like to party that much and the dude moves on. I don't even like weed and I still wish I bought that fuckin' horse-chokin' slab of horse from time to time.
One day you should bundle these updates of yours and package them into a book. Call it Journal of a Plague Year, or something like that. I would buy it.