Making the decision to kill yourself, is a reaction to overwhelming pain, where a person has no idea how to overcome the pain. People who decide to kill themselves, perceive suicide as a relief from pain, and they get tunnel vision where they are unable to use their creativity or skills for problem solving.
Please understand that, in what I’m about to say, I don’t mean to disrespect suicide hotlines and mental health care and all those very valuable things. I’ve been down that path before, and I’m sure that without that help, I would already be dead. So all that stuff is incredibly valuable and important.
All I want to say is, once you make the decision to kill yourself for real… If you manage to survive that somehow, either through friends or dumb luck, you gain a sort of freedom from your previous cares.
So much of everyday life, for most people, is spent on immediate personal concerns. Where am I going to sleep? Am I going to have enough to eat? Will I be taken care of, when I am helpless? How can I keep my job? How can I keep from getting bullied or killed?
Once you actually decide to kill yourself, issues of self-preservation seem small somehow. The implicit threats in life — that the bad man will come and kill you, that you will be fired, that you won’t be liked or loved anymore — seem petty and irrelevant.
In a really important way, deciding to kill yourself by your own hand, makes you bulletproof. What’s the worst that you can do to me? Kill me? Fire me? Beat me up? LOL, I was going to die anyway; you’ll just save me the inconvenience of doing it myself.
More critically: when you finally make this decision, if you survive making this decision, then you truly gain superpowers to do good. Or, technically, evil, if that is your sort of thing. But, once you realize you can do good without reference to society’s implicit judgement or limitations, you start truly thinking about how to use your remaining time to improve the lives of others.
Particularly, you start realizing that you can tell the Truth. That includes telling the Truth to power; it also includes telling the truth to bullies, and evil people, and narcissistic people. The Truth does as much damage to evil people as does hitting them with your fists — even more so, in some cases.
I don’t intend to paint myself as a good or great man. The nonexistent God knows that I have made many terrible mistakes in my life. But, for the first time in my life, I feel free to be honest about myself and my identity in the world; I feel free to say literally anything I believe, to anyone in the entire universe; and I feel free to do good, without worrying about trivial consequences about whether I am “popular” or “normal” or “going along with everyone else”. I don’t have to fit in anymore.
I don’t just have to make good trouble, in the words of John Lewis; I can be the good trouble. I have become the most terrifying thing in the world. I am accountable to no one. I can just live my life, with all my experience and all my skills, in what I personally consider to be the most moral way possible.
I don’t have to wear any more masks. I can try to be good, finally, without fear.
And either the narcissists, or abandonment, or my own arrogance, or evil, or my own health, will get to me someday, and take me out.
Memory: 2 x G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo 64 GB (2 x 32 GB) DDR5-6000 CL30 Memory
Storage: 4 x Samsung 990 Pro 4 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive ($320.19 @ Amazon)
Storage: 4 x Toshiba MG10 512e 20 TB 3.5″ 7200 RPM Internal Hard Drive ($354.99 @ Amazon)
Video Card: Gigabyte GAMING OC GeForce RTX 4090 24 GB Video Card ($1895.00 @ Amazon)
Case: Corsair 7000D AIRFLOW Full-Tower ATX PC Case — Black
Power Supply: be quiet! Dark Power Pro 13 1600 W 80+ Titanium Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply ($448.72 @ Amazon)
This particular rig, when updated to the latest Proxmox with GPU passthrough as documented at https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/PCI_Passthrough , showed a behavior where the system would randomly reboot under load, with no indications as to why it was rebooting. Nothing in the Proxmox system log indicated that a hard reboot was about to occur; it merely occurred, and the system would come back up immediately, and attempt to recover the filesystem.
At first I suspected the PCI Passthrough of the video card, which seems to be the source of a lot of crashes for a lot of users. But the crashes were replicable even without using the video card.
After an embarrassing amount of bisection and testing, it turned out that for this particular motherboard (ASRock X670E Taichi Carrarra), there exists a setting Advanced\AMD CBS\CPU Common Options\Core Watchdog\Core Watchdog Timer Enable in the BIOS, whose default setting (Auto) seems to be to ENABLE the Core Watchdog Timer, hence causing sudden reboots to occur at unpredictable intervals on Debian, and hence Proxmox as well.
The workaround is to set the Core Watchdog Timer Enable setting to Disable. In my case, that caused the system to become stable under load.
Because of these types of misbehaviors, I now only use zfs as a root file system for Proxmox. zfs played like a champ through all these random reboots, and never corrupted filesystem data once.
In closing, I’d like to send shame to ASRock for sticking this particular footgun into the default settings in the BIOS for its X670E motherboards. Additionally, I’d like to warn all motherboard manufacturers against enabling core watchdog timers by default in their respective BIOSes.
Greetings, fellow gringo traveler! In this article, I’m going to tell you everything you know you need to know to get your whitebread self, to and from Easter Island; and you will not only come home safe, but happy and entertained, from your vacation.
Critically, I’m not going to tell you anything that you can’t read elsewhere. Easter Island, and Chile in general, will reward every single minute that you spend researching your destination, before you travel. I did read every single travel manual and guide before travelling, and I read every single hotel and attraction review as well, though it was thirsty work. So, if you are lazy, I will save you the trouble of reading those. Reading is hard, and it may be dangerous, so delegate the task whenever possible.
Background
Basics first. The history of Easter Island, is a history of exploitation. Polynesians, with their fantastic ocean orienteering, got here first, over a millennium ago. Polynesians consistently tried to outdo one another by building larger and more bodacious moai. They then began knocking one another’s moai down, because it’s just rude to have any moai standing that are taller than your own moai. The Spanish arrived after them, promptly infecting the Polynesians, enslaving them, and deporting them from the island. The Spaniards then tried to infest the island with sheep, but the sheep didn’t like it. So instead, they infested the island with tourists, but the tourists were evil and threw too much trash everywhere, destroying the island for a third time. Then Pinochet came, and said the island was to be owned by the natives, but nearly all the natives have been sold as slaves some centuries earlier. And lo, it came to pass that Easter Island was a stunningly beautiful bastion, with money and poverty and a thousand conflicting origin stories, all living right on top one another.
Anyway, that’s enough history for now, let’s get to travel details.
Before you travel
Before you leave on your trip, you’ll need to print out details of your hotel reservation on the island, because those details will be checked by customs, before you’re allowed to board the flight from Santiago to Easter Island. Yes, it’s much easier to print this out before you leave home.
Also, while you’re at home, choose and reserve a tour guide for the island. You’re not allowed to simply wander into any of the National Park areas without a local, licensed guide. After going back and forth with a few Rapa Nui tour companies, we finally settled on Rapa Nui Dream, which seems to have an excellent relationship with its local guides. Remember that anytime you’re hiring a tour company, they’re actually farming out the work to a local, so you want to work with the tour company that has great respect for those locals and for the sanctity of the moai. Rapa Nui Dream was also able to hook us up with some gentle spelunking and horseriding experiences. We loved our guides and they did a fantastic job taking care of us – highest recommendation for Rapa Nui Dream.
Also also, while you’re at home, buy your tickets to the Rapa Nui National Park online. If it’s a moai and it’s somewhere on the island, then it’s almost certainly within the Rapa Nui National Park system, and you will need a licensed guide to take you there. Make sure you enter your passport information perfectly into the National Park form. My girlfriend messed up one measly digit on the passport number in this form, and one of the park rangers got pissy about it.
Make sure that your cell phone, and your service, works in Chile. I use Google Fi, and it worked fine, in Santiago at least — but see below for more advice on Google Fi on Easter Island. Oh, and your stateside power plugs won’t work here: Chile uses types C and L power plugs, so be sure to get some plug type converters, ideally ones that have USB charging compatibility built in; and make sure your electrical devices are cool with 220V at 50 Hz.
Anytime you travel anywhere in the world, it’s always polite to know some of the local language, for getting directions, buying things, and making new friends. I used the Duolingo app to refresh my Spanish, and once I was in immersion mode in Chile, I was pleased to find that I could carry on extended conversations with patient locals. Only a tiny minority of people in Chile speak English, so you should at least learn a few survival phrases before you go there.
For most places in the northern hemisphere, Easter Island is at least an 11-hour flight from wherever you are to Santiago, and then an additional 5-hour flight from Santiago to Easter Island. Now if you are broke or insane or both, you will probably try to fly through this Santiago connection to Easter Island. Don’t do this, if you can help it. An 11-hour flight is unpleasant enough, and you will need a little break before that additional flight and the additional customs difficulties required. Instead, have the wisdom to break up your flight into multiple pieces, with one round trip to Santiago, and an additional embedded round trip from Santiago to Easter Island. This will give you a chance to experience Santiago, which is absolutely worth a visit in its own right, and which will also permit you to get more or less adjusted to the time zone.
Santiago
So, we will take a short detour to Santiago for a long stopover. Santiago is the most advanced city in South America, and the nicer parts are just as witty and urbane as the best of San Francisco or Los Angeles. Santiago is a big city though, and it has many of the problems that every other big city on the planet has. If you’re a jet-lagged gringo coming into Santiago for the first time, you’ll want to stay towards the safer northeastern zone of Santiago, which are the pricey and touristy bits that you see in all the travel magazines.
If you do decide to stay in Santiago, I can’t say enough good things about the Hotel Boutique Le Reve as a base of operations in the city. Staff members are multilingual, friendly, and fantastically helpful – they are the ace in the hole of this small but elegant hotel. The rooms are small but exquisite.
Other cards in this winning hand include the hotel’s facade, which is a great place to get your profile picture taken if you’re a local:
Also wonderful is the hotel’s location, which is smack in the middle of the nicest part of Santiago, and offers lots of pleasant and safe walking exploration in all directions from its central point.
Getting from the Santiago airport to your hotel can be tricky. When you get out of a passport control at the airport, there’s a very small area where you can rent “oficial” taxi and rideshare services to your Santiago destination. Don’t use them; just go to the Transvip counter in this secure area, which you can see in this helpful video. You can rent a shared bus or a private one to get you where you’re going. Be aware that there are multiple other taxi companies in Santiago that refer to themselves as “oficial”; I don’t trust any of them. If you wander out into the main terminal and oficial-looking people demand that you get in their taxi, you’re about to oficialy get swindled. Nothing you’ve never seen before, if you’ve ever been through LaGuardia. If you were smart and went with Transvip, look for their particular orange vests. Although it’s tempting to try to use Uber from the airport, I don’t recommend it — there’s no official Uber pickup point at the airport, and Uber is not technically legal here, though everyone uses it.
Don’t rent a car in Santiago. There’s an incredibly complicated system of paying off the locals, in order to get preferred spots, and you’re not ready for that yet. Moreover, even the locals don’t trust the official taxis of Santiago; the taxis like to cadge extra money off those who are unfamiliar with the area. By all means, use the Uber app to get from place to place, once you’re established in Santiago.
In Santiago, we happened randomly on Giratorio, which is a Seattle Space-Needle style rotating restaurant near the Boutique Le Reve. I was expecting tourist quality food from a restaurant that spins, but the seafood dishes were brilliant. Another solid base hit was Bocanariz, another restaurant focusing on Chilean seafood and Chilean wines. As a general rule, Chileans themselves don’t give a shit about wine; they prefer the hard stuff, and the vast majority of Chile and wine is grown, made, and shipped overseas to the gringos. And that’s a damn shame, because there is a beautiful winery in the eastern part of Santiago called Cousiño Macul that is absolutely worth a few of your hours. You’ll need reservations for that winery, but the high-end tasting tour is worth its price:
A standard touristy thing to do in Santiago is to go to the top of the Sky Costanera, the tallest building in South America, from which you can see the snowcapped Andes:
At some point, you’ll be offered the opportunity to eat a completo, which is the Chilean national dish. This is basically a hot dog with horrifying quantities of avocado and mayonnaise slathered all over it. The locals swear by it, but I tried to eat one and almost died in the attempt. I had a much better experience with the pisco sour, which the Chileans and the Peruvians both claim as their own national cocktail, and happily fight with each other over. French fries are also considered to be a vegetable here, and available in mass quantities at meals. Chile is not a place for vegans, or for people of slight or fading constitutions generally:
Tipping in Chile is a straight 10%, automatically added by the credit card machine at the end of the meal. The credit card machine will be brought to your table; if the card ever leaves your sight, it’s generally because the cardholder wants to put a few extralegal charges onto it, so keep an eye open. American style tipping of higher amounts is appreciated, if the service warrants it, but is not required.
While you’re in Santiago, stop into one of the many pharmacy or technology stores, and pick up an Entel SIM card for your trip to Easter Island. You can’t get these without being in Chile, so don’t bother trying in advance. On my trip, Entel was selling a SIM card with a one-week subscription and 1 GB of data, for 300 CLP, which is dirt cheap. When you get to the island, you will discover that the two major carriers working there are Entel, which is the big huge Chilean cellular carrier, and Movistar, which is the smaller startup with fewer cellular towers and poorer quality service. Activate the card, the day before you leave for the island. In the States, I have cellular service with Google Fi, which has a deal with Movistar, and thus Fi has occasional service in Hanga Roa; but you’ll find that Entel has much better service in more places on the island. Still, keep in mind that the great majority of the island has no cellular service. In Hanga Roa, you’re covered, but if your car breaks down on the far side of the island, you ain’t calling for help.
Valparaiso
Santiago doesn’t actually sit on the coast; it’s about an hour inland. However, its equivalent coastal city, Valparaiso, is an hour drive away by a tour bus or car. And Valparaiso is absolutely worth a single day of touring, if you can afford the time.
Chile’s association with street art is a long and complicated one. It was the preferred method of rebellion against a militaristic government in the 1960s and ’70s, and the method of expression stuck, especially in Valparaiso, where the quality of the art is jaw-dropping:
Rather than driving out to Valparaiso yourself, you’ll get more bang for your buck if you hop one of the Viator tour buses, and let someone else ferry you about to see the sights.
Some massive, exceptionally local, South American sea lions in Valparaiso:
Easter Island
Easter Island subsists entirely on tourist money. I chose to spread my money liberally around the island, giving out lots of tips to the locals. Please do similarly, whenever warranted; the locals depend on you, as much as you depend on them.
Only native Rapa Nui people are permitted to own land here. This is one of the few positive legacies of Pinochet, whose influence can still be felt throughout Chile. The roads and many of the houses are in rough shape. Practically everything that you live in, or eat here, needs to be brought from the mainland, at considerable cost.
Once you board the flight to Easter Island, you’ll need to make a couple mental adjustments. All of Chile exists on the same time zone, but on the island, time moves at a vague and unpredictable pace; so you must get out of thinking of time in the Western sense. Tour buses and guides will show up when they show up, and you’ll be served or helped when they get around to it, and rather than get all scrofulated about it, you had best realize that that’s the pace of things on Rapa Nui.
A gorgeous base of operations for Easter Island, if you can foot the bill, is Hotel Ohana. They’ll get you started in your day with coffee and an omellette or other Continental type breakfasts. If you’re feeling like hiding at the end of the day, they’ll make you a dinner with pizza or something like. The rooms are not huge, but they’re pretty, and they’re the biggest on the island.
If you have free minutes at night, download a free astronomy app like Stellarium, and wander out into the hotel’s large yard to explore the new stars. Here are many galaxies that you have never explored before; and, depending on the time you go out, you may be able to see the Southern Cross with your own eyes.
You could probably survive on Rapa Nui without a car, but renting one is recommended. There’s no such thing as Uber on the island, and the taxi services are practically non-existent. Renting a car on Easter Island will be a small adventure in and of itself. You’re not familiar with any of the car rental companies, and none of them have great reviews. Eventually, I held my nose and went with Oceanic. Toki, on the other end of the WhatsApp conversation for Oceanic, was extremely friendly and polite, but he didn’t send any written quote or confirmation of the exact amount I pay, other than saying I would spend 120 USD per day. Everything on the island is extremely informal, so I went with it. When I got to the island, I was picked up by Oceanic and brought to their main office. My particular car – a Grand Vitara – looked fine and was in good condition, though many of the cars were in rough shape. It wasn’t until the credit card came out, that I deduced the scam. The company quoted me at a rate of 120 USD per day. They then converted that amount to Chilean pesos, at a rate of 1 USD equals 100 CLP, which is an absurdly expensive conversion rate. That, in turn, jacked up my rate to about 160 USD per day. Perhaps I should have fought it on the spot, but I didn’t feel like it after the flight, and you won’t feel like it either. I get the sense that the car rental companies are used to being yelled at a lot, around Easter Island. To avoid this particular scam, negotiate all rates with car rental companies in Chilean pesos, and make sure that they accept your particular credit card, before you agree to the rental.
To make things even more exciting, there’s no such thing as car rental insurance anywhere on the island, and the car insurance you currently own doesn’t work here. Don’t crash into anything or anyone while you’re here.
Anyway, you’re probably on Easter Island to see the moai, and you definitely should, but as mentioned above, you are legally required to have a local guide and a park ticket in order to see those moai. If park rangers catch you trying to sneak in, they will generally find you and chase you off.
The moai are incredible and wonderful, but rather than rewrite their history here, I’ll summarize the important bits for your guided tour. Bring hiking boots. It rains at odd times on the island, and there’s plenty of mud and unstable ground everywhere. Don’t listen if your tour agency tells you that tennis shoes are fine. It’s difficult to convey the size of the moai in a photograph, so try to get human beings in the frame with moai as well, to establish size. Bring a bottle of water and sunblock along with you. It can get fantastically windy or rainy on the island at a moment’s notice, so be ready for any type of weather.
If you have some time when you’re not on a guided tour, head over to Plaza Hotu Matu’a, and witness the scintillating blue harbor. It’s a great place to chat with the local sea turtles:
Sea turtle, Plaza Hotu Matu’a, Easter Island
Stop into the Sernatur office there, ask if there’s anything fun going on, and get your passport stamped with an adorable stamp. Your lawful neutral girlfriend may be concerned that it is not an official passport stamp, and that miserable countries like Niger and Chad may reject your entry upon seeing your adorable unofficial Rapa Nui stamp in your passport, but generally you can bribe your girlfriend off with more pisco sour. You may purchase said pisco sour at Oheho Surf Cafe, a few steps from Sernatur. Oheho is an ideal place to get drunk and watch the brilliant ocean with the other gringos. The seafood is excellent, but they offer gringo burgers as well. If you do order a gringo burger, do not order french fries separately; just take the default fries that go with the meal. If you order additional fries, they will provide you with approximately 80 kg of fried potatoes, and you will have to carry them all out yourself, and you will probably break something.
At some point on the island, you’ll be encouraged to go see a local theatrical show, which will be billed to you as a truly authentic Rapa Nui experience. The biggest show is Te Ra’ai, which will serve you plenty of indifferently seasoned seafood, anesthetic drinks, Hispanic musicians playing Western instruments, and a high energy, low clothing dance show. Like so many other things on the island, this particular style of music and dance was imported by Hispanic migrants, who brought their own musical stylings and their own fevered imaginations of what native dance might have been like. It’s merely happy bullshit, just a good old fashioned bikini cheesecake show, of a style that became politically incorrect in the United States about 40 years ago. But it’s still running strong here, and it’s suckering in the wide-eyed rubes by the busload. My Gen-X ironic self absolutely loved every single instant of it:
Te Ra’ai musical performance, Easter Island
Many of the mercados on Easter Island are a little rough around the edges. If you need snacks or drinks for the room, stop by Henua Market, which is an entirely cute market that caters to well heeled tourists like yourself. Plenty of fancy chocolate, nice bread, and pisco sour mix.
Do not bring your dog to Easter Island. There are plenty of dogs on Easter Island, and you will be supplied with one wherever you go:
Generally, said dogs are friendly and good at convincing you to pet them and give them food. Chile believes in the viability of communal dogs, who are simultaneously owned and unowned by everyone. Do not attempt to take communal dogs home from Easter Island in your luggage or carryon. Actually, don’t attempt to bring anything at all home from Easter Island, including those pretty volcanic rocks. Customs will find them when they search your luggage at the airport, and they will take those rocks back from you. Tourist stuff is fine to buy, of course; just don’t steal rocks, or dogs:
And there’s horseys, my girlfriend reminds me; did you forget about the horseys? Yes, there are plenty of wild horseys about on Rapa Nui; approach them only if you speak horsey fluently.
The wild horses of Rapa Nui
And there are chickens too, did you forget about those? Well, yes, I did forget about them. Nevertheless, the advice against bringing them home in luggage, applies doubly for horsies and trebly for chickens.
Thesis
Since I cannot come up with a proper thesis for this article, and I am lazy, I asked my girlfriend to do so. The thesis for this article is, therefore, that Easter Island is “topknots up“. She conveyed the phrase simultaneously with raising both thumbs.
The last line of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, as Chief Bromden escapes the hospital
After Amanda (now Andie) left, my world disintegrated. I screamed through that empty house, looking for her, but of course she had vanished instantly, never to be seen again. I was locked down for a week, until I was no longer deemed a threat to myself. A job fell into my lap, so I took it, and did it mostly on autopilot.
I stopped playing music, and I stopped writing. I retreated into myself.
It took me years to realize what I fundamentally had been doing wrong, all this time.
I was lying, in order to protect my wife’s feelings.
So, I stopped lying, completely and totally. I adopted a worldwide policy of 100% radical honesty, consequences be damned.
The consequences of that honesty have been far-reaching and profound. Apparently, the “real” me is incredibly intolerant of abuse, at work and elsewhere. I’m also apparently much more extravagant in speech, and much more emotional, than I believed myself to be. I also tell anyone who’s interested in dating me, that I’m polyamorous.
I’ve stopped slowing my brain down, for the comfort of those around me. For the first time in my life, I simply allow myself to say, what previously could not be said.
Nothing hits quite like the truth. I’ve lost a few friends, and made a few as well.
But — thank Jebus — I’ve started writing and I’ve started making music again. I shut up like a scared dove when Amanda left, and it’s been years, but finally, after much terror and much healing, I am making music and I am writing again.
I am not whole, and maybe I’m never going to be whole, but finally, I can feel my creativity in me again, the best part of me, the part of me I thought was dead. I hurt, and maybe I’ll never not hurt, but dammit I can breathe, and I feel that pulse in my heart again.
To those who abandoned: I am utterly bulletproof, and I don’t keep secrets anymore. Especially not your secrets.
To those who stayed: Thank you. I love you. Yes, I should have been smarter sooner, but at least I eventually got smart.
They say that when Carl Friedrich Gauss was eight, he discovered a secret for quickly adding all the numbers from 1 to 100.
Now, I’m going to teach you a trick I discovered, for adding up all the numbers from 1 to a number, where said number starts with 1, followed by one or more zeros.
So, for example, this cute trick only works for 10, or 1000, or 1000000000000, but not 13040.
Here’s how to do it.
Start with the number that you want to add up to. We’ll call it N.
Count the number of trailing zeros in it.
Subtract one from that number.
Let’s call that result K.
Now, to start writing the answer, write down a 5.
Write K zeros after it.
Now, write down a 5.
Now, write K zeros after it.
You’re done!
Let’s do an example with 10000.
Start with the number that you want to add up to. We’ll call it N. (N is 10000)
Count the number of trailing zeros in it. (4)
Subtract one from that number. (3)
Let’s call that result K. (K = 3)
Now, to start writing the answer, write down a 5. (5)
Write K zeros after it. (5000)
Now, write down a 5. (50005)
Now, write K zeros after it. (50005000)
You’re done! (Adding all the numbers from 1 to 10000 gives you 50005000.)
I want a spicy short story that includes floor wax, dessert toppings, skunks, pantaloons, chickens, and puffy porcupines, and reading, and more chickens.
“Pantaloons and Porcupines: A Spicy Tale of Skunks, Chicken, and Desires”
Mary was a quiet and shy girl who loved nothing more than curling up with a good book. She spent most of her days reading in her small cabin in the woods, surrounded by her beloved pets – a flock of free-range chickens, a curious skunk, and a puffy porcupine that liked to nestle in her lap as she read.
One day, while Mary was waxing the floors of her cabin, a handsome stranger named Jack came knocking at her door. He was dressed in a pair of pantaloons that hugged his muscular thighs and a tight-fitting shirt that accentuated his chiseled chest. Mary felt her heart skip a beat as she gazed into his dark eyes.
Jack had come to Mary’s cabin to ask for her help in making a special dessert for his mother’s birthday party. He had heard that Mary was a master at creating delectable desserts and wanted to impress his family with something truly unique.
Mary was flattered by Jack’s request and agreed to help him. They spent the next few hours in Mary’s kitchen, mixing together various dessert toppings and flavors until they came up with a scrumptious and beautiful cake.
As they were finishing up the cake, Jack noticed the skunk playing around with the puffy porcupine on Mary’s lap. He couldn’t help but laugh at the sight of the two unlikely friends.
Mary blushed and smiled, feeling grateful for Jack’s company and his easy laughter. She realized that she had been missing out on the joys of life by reading alone in her cabin all the time.
Feeling emboldened by Jack’s presence, Mary suggested they take a break from the kitchen and go for a walk in the woods. They wandered around, talking and laughing, until they came across a group of chickens that had escaped from Mary’s coop.
Jack and Mary quickly rounded up the chickens and returned them to their rightful place. As they were walking back to Mary’s cabin, Jack leaned in and whispered into Mary’s ear, “You know, Mary, there’s another type of ‘bundling’ that’s not just for chickens.”
Mary felt a shiver run down her spine as Jack pulled out a set of handcuffs and chains from his pocket. She had never felt such excitement before as Jack led her back to her cabin, ready to explore the depths of her desires.
As the night wore on and the candles burned low, Mary realized that she had never felt more alive than she did in that moment, tangled up in the chains and surrounded by the sweet smells of dessert and floor wax. She was grateful for the unexpected joys that life had brought her and for the handsome stranger who had opened her eyes to them.
The divorce was the hardest thing I’ve ever been through.
I miss her terribly. She wanted the divorce, I didn’t. I came home stupidly, still expecting that she would be there, and of course she wasn’t.
I should have been wiser and more honest. All that’s broken now, and it will never be reassembled, and it’s up to me to try to figure out what this new life looks like.
There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t miss her in some way. But she’s not talking to me anymore, and there’s nothing I can do.
It’s only very recently that I’ve started looking for ways to have fun on weekends. I’m doing a show again. Dating here and there. Little driving trips.
I stayed in the house, probably longer than I should have, because I kept hoping that she might come home. Seems silly now.
I’ve been broken a long time. Trying not to be broken now. Takes a lot of energy. Radical honesty, that sort of thing.
Originalism is an innocent-sounding concept: the meanings of laws should be understood, using the language and context in which the authors wrote it. A perfectly sensible proposition, no?
It’s no coincidence that originalists tend to be Christians. The originalist argument is exactly the same that every pastor uses, who gets up behind the lectern to quote out of context from Romans 13. You may have a copy of the Bible on your bookshelf at home, but you can’t merely up and read the thing by yourself; goodness sakes it is a lot of onionskin pages to paw through. So the helpful pastor will tell us what the intent of the chapter was: the Bible commands us to obey the law, and illegal immigration is against the law, so illegal immigration is against God.
There’s always a second, unspoken half of originalism.
First, the spoken bit: we should interpret the Constitution as the Framers intended.
But the authors of said Constitution are dead, just as much as whoever wrote Romans 13; they are all just as dead as Marcus Aurelius said they would be.
Second, the unspoken bit of originalism: we have just the right person to perform said interpretation.
And there’s the crafty little heart of originalism. They are ready — at this very moment no less! — to expose their detailed understanding of the authors’ intents. And only their interpretation of the original text is valid. Because only they truly understand the Second Amendment, or Jesus, or whatever thing must be reanimated from the grave. Only they can provide fair legal representation to the dead.
Do you know how a Ouija board works? You place your hands on the edge of this plastic tray and slide it around a board, to get messages from the other world. You may then proceed to get rich quick, as your beloved dead Granny will send you today’s Mega Millions numbers. Granny was always trustworthy in such matters.
It’s the easiest thing in the world to elect yourself, consciously or no, as the One True Vessel of an entity who isn’t around to fend for themselves.
Most liberals I know, roll their eyes and continue doomscrolling when confronted with a calm-sounding originalist interpretation. But the correct moral and legal response to originalism, which liberal-minded folks are for some reason afraid to do, is to simply yank the reins out of the driver’s hands and yell No! Jesus and the Bible specifically orders you to love all immigrants! The Second Amendment is conditional to a well-regulated militia! Granny was morally opposed to gambling! Ouija is a trademark of the Hasbro Corporation! And only I understand the intent of the original authors, not you!
At this point, the discussion will likely devolve into a musical round of No you don’t understand it no you don’t understand it. But conservative jurists are limited, by definition, to thinking only what others have previously thought. That lack of creativity, will give pause to any conservative, before they consider puppeteering the dead again.
First, install the WireGuard quick configuration file as an administrator. (The user won’t be able to create or delete new tunnels, just start or stop existing ones.)
Then, you’ll need to run RegEdit as an administrator (type in regedit.msc into the Run window, right click, and select Run as administrator), and then create a DWORD key in the HKLM\Software\WireGuard\LimitedOperatorUI registry key. Set that DWORD to 1.
Then, you’ll need to provide new permissions to the user who you want to be able to connect and disconnect from your VPN.
To do this, run Local Users and Groups as an administrator (type in lusrmgr.msc into the Run window, right click, and select Run as administrator), select the Users folder, right click the user you want to give permissions to, and then click Properties.
Select the Member Of tab.
Then, click Add… at the bottom of the screen.
In the “Enter the object names to select” text box, type in Network Configuration Operators and click Check Names.
You’ll have the option to select the Network Configuration Operators group. Do so and click OK.
Click OK on the Select Groups window, and click OK on the Properties window.
Now, your non-administrative user can connect to, or disconnect from, any existing WireGuard tunnel, without being able to add or delete existing tunnels.
You’ll still need to add or delete new WireGuard connections as an administrator, but using this technique, a non-administrator can turn on or off VPN connections on Windows.
Bluegrass. It’s a totally American music. Born around the same time as rock and roll, it developed in a parallel path, touching other musics and being touched by them.
I’m choosing bluegrass for you because it is what I remember. It was an old music already, when I was growing up in Sissonville, West Virginia. It always seemed to be back in the corner of consciousness — the only thing the radio would receive, on those long car trips to the trailer at Franklin.
Like all musics, we have to choose a starting place for bluegrass, and if we were to be fair, we’d have to go back through bluegrass’s Scotch-Irish roots, to the country dances of the Old World and to the rich ballad tradition there. And we’d have to include work songs and the banjo as an instrument of purely African heritage.
But I’m going to lie to you, and say that bluegrass started in Dallas of 1927, and we’ll listen to a recording that Blind Lemon Jefferson had to travel all the way to Chicago to lay down:
A sparse recording of a modified blues progression. Not much there, really, until you notice the fingerpicking and the blues singing that turned into several different kinds of American musics in the decades to come.
Let’s move to Bristol, Tennessee. It’s 1927. That guitar is being picked on by one Maybelle Carter:
Yet again, that fingerpicking, with the melody in the bass line. Totally unlike the Dixieland frailing sound that you get when you strum the guitar. Here and as above, the guitar serves as its own rhythm instrument. This is a novel sound, and it’s transmitted out of Maces Spring, Virginia, and Ceredo, West Virginia, and anyplace else big enough to set up an antenna and a phonograph player.
Bluegrass and radio are deeply intermixed. In the Appalachian hills, the presence of one meant the presence of the other. My grandfather did tap dancing shows on a local radio station when he was young. The shows always featured local talent playing local songs, and there was never any music that was cheaper than bluegrass. Here’s Jimmie Rodgers, out of Mississippi, laying down “Blue Yodel #9.” By this point, everyone with a radio has heard how to fingerpick a guitar.
Now before the 1940s, the banjo was generally strummed. You could stroke the strings with the backs of your nails, and pick out a melody with your thumb, much like Mother Maybelle did on the guitar above. That playing method was called frailing, and it was “the way a banjo sounded” for decades.
Until The Grand Ole Opry, broadcast out of Nashville since 1927, discovered Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs in the 1940s. These important early radio broadcasts, seeded the signature metal fingerpick sound, that you probably already associate with banjos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtMdqh3HFBo
Technical precision was always a key part of the bluegrass sound. Flatt and Scruggs proved that you didn’t have to play perfectly, as long as you played fast and loud. But at the same time, important bluegrass guitarists like Chet Atkins paved the way for diamond-cutter exactitude from guitarists like Don Felder and Mark Knopfler and Brian May. Rock and roll was popping when Atkins recorded this stately piece in 1954:
Bluegrass took its storytelling roots from Scotch-Irish tradition. And one of the most fascinating vestiges of that tradition, is the murder ballad. The basic idea, is that you’re singing a cloyingly sweet song, about the fact that you beat your girlfriend with a stick and drowned her, for some inadequately explained reason. Murder ballads are weird and spooky as hell, but they come from a long and honorable line of storytelling. Before the Knoxville Girl was the Knoxville Girl, she was the Wexford girl, from Irish ballads of the 1800s; and before she was the Wexford girl, she was the victim in a popular broadside that Samuel Pepys wrote about in his diary. Like I said earlier, I lied when I told you when bluegrass got started. Here’s the Louvin Brothers, from 1954; but really, the story is from 1683 or thereabouts.
So there was never any particular Knoxville girl or boy, but there was Cas Walker of Knoxville, and he was just as bad or worse than any murderer. The Cas Walker Farm and Home Show was a popular variety show broadcast out of Knoxville, from 1929 on, hosted by this particular owner of a chain of local supermarkets. Cas Walker was a legendarily ornery son of a bitch, and is probably worth several books in and of himself:
Anyway, the Knoxville locals that managed to get on the program, got play across Tennessee. A few of those locals managed to make some good of themselves:
By 1970, both country music and bluegrass were more or less in final form. Here’s Cherryholmes playing a crossover hit from 2005. There’s nothing in this song that wasn’t in the genre forty years earlier:
From 1970 onward, technical production ability began to trump creative performance ability in country and rock music. The Phil Spector wall-of-sound production technique made popular rock and country into Wagnerian-sized orchestral fireworks.
That’s the opposite of the bluegrass I remember. I choose to give you bluegrass, for the same reason that I would prefer to make you a meal with my own hands. Bluegrass is human. Bluegrass doesn’t come out of machines or recording studios. It comes out of amateur musicians with cheap, out-of-tune voices and cheap, out of tune instruments. It comes out of driveways and trailers and little white churches in the valley. Bluegrass has never, ever been formal. When musicians play the good stuff, the real stuff, they tear instruments apart. Like all things from the heart, bluegrass is full of disorder and complexity and passion and immediacy and love.
