It's been an awful couple of months health-wise for people I know. So:
- If you can't laugh at serious illness, your chances of recovery are a lot less. A colostomy bag dressed up as Boris Johnson is both really funny and disturbingly appropriate. Perhaps, during election season six years ago, I should have painted mine orangeish and given it a combover wig, in mockery of the breadbasket of deplorables that had been there before.
- "Trauma" isn't nearly serious enough to describe a move-enforced downsizing of one's personal library. Frankly, both the colostomy itself and what required it hurt less…
- To which inherently racist and bigoted housing appraisals contributed. I can see that in my current neighborhood, and especially in the bizarrely off "estimated values" appearing on Certain Algorithm-Based Websites.
Of course, the financial-services industry will punish anyone who takes steps against its procedures; sort of like The Gecko punished virtually every driver in Washington during the pandemic, when the state's insurance commissioner prohibited insurers from using credit scores (which are at least as institutionally racist as property appraisals in Baltimore) to set auto insurance rates. So I've degeckoed. Forever.
- From the fantasy of home ownership (one wonders what Modern Portfolio Theory says about putting that much of one's asset base in a single investment… actually, one needn't wonder at all, as "adequate diversification" in investment is the one time that entitled trust-fund yobbos think "diversification" is a good thing) to the rewritten fantasy view of medieval Europe (and, all too often, other parts of the world at the same period). Some of the art I've seen over the years — especially, but not only, book covers — makes William Morris seem an exponent of hard-core naturalistic realism.
- Whether one should no longer tinker with the machinery of death, or focus on somewhat lesser harshness as a form of vengeance, is not a question with a clear and obvious answer with no easily-imaginable — all too often clear and historical — exceptions to whatever rule one adopts. Which may be a good thing for the orangish individual referenced in the first sausage: Those with relevant experience can infer, in our darkest fears (and maybe not even all that dark), serious problems at 1100 S Ocean Blvd — especially from the narrative flow into and out of the redactions on pages 9–11 and 26–29 of the affidavit supporting search of THE PREMISES. Which, in turn, opens another question about vengeance… vengeance flowing both ways, in fact.