Blood and guts

Today, I went to see my father at the hospital. The intervention went well: everything that had to be removed is supposed to be so. Of course, we are still waiting for the biopsy results...
He was quite well for a few hours, then they had to inject some isotopes solution in his bladder to make sure that everything that shouldn't be there is killed, think of it as baby chemo.
It didn't went well.

I am hardly a qualified medic. My last "first aid" lesson was in SERE and ended by "... and if there are too much guts outside, just put it back in and make sure not to make any knots or twists, then glue the whole thing. It is bad, but your buddy's insides are supposed to be sceptic. If they aren't, you are in a deeper kind of shit." (sic). I have never had any trouble with these lessons. I have never had any trouble with blood, spilled guts or other gory conditions. The only thing is that I have always felt bad when seeing my own blood, especially when I am not in pain. Other people's blood was supposed to be a manageable situation.
Well, I have learned something today: seeing your own father slowly emptying his blood in a sterile pocket *is* troubling.

Smoke and mirrors

Yesterday, my dad was diagnosed with cancer. All things being considered, the situation is far less dramatic than I may have thought. He fainted twice a few weeks ago, and given the family history of neurological diseases and cancers, I was thinking of a brain tumour at worst, Parkinson at best ; if you can call it best...
So the hospital rounds started, and his neurological status came up just a little bit off in places but normal. What was discovered is what may very possibly be cancerous tumours in the bladder and kidneys. So he is scheduled for surgery later today. Then we will see.
I was hoping for a partial anaesthesia, but it will have to be general.

I do not have a good track record in dealing with the death of people close to me. In fact, it is a pretty bad one. This may be why I have never, to that day, really envisioned his death, except in a very abstract manner.
Professionally speaking it will be a life changing event to me. Which is not really the point actually, as I feel confident that I will be up to the tasks at hand if need be. I won't say that I will enjoy this new situation, but I know that I will be able to manage it.
No, what is worrying me most is to have to deal with the event itself: having to face my loss while caring for my mother, dealing with my brother, the family, the friends. It took us eighteen hours to put the final touch to an already set up legal procedure. Following up on it while grieving will not be easy to me. I am a bad griever. I do not quit. I do not forget. I am still missing people dead for more than twenty years. And I take the initial loss very badly. I know that I should not be a mess, but I also know that I will be.

Very egoistically, I just hope that everything will turn out to be OK, that we are on time for a cure to be possible, that everything is fine and always will be. That my dad will always be there for me, that he will still be there to see how what he has done is progressing, provide his own insight on things that matter to us, be there as he is.

Pickly feelings

Sorry for letting you loose one precious year of your life when you needed it most.
Really.

Thank you Apple

Now I can run Oracle on Trusted Solaris on Parallels on my 27 inches quad-procs TV, run a real time back-up database while watching In Treatment.
A lifetime achievement :-)

A pity iTunes synch is such a mess though...

Picky Pickle

Still another pleasant evening with the Pickle.

She is a true friend, gives me perspective and insight I wouldn't get on my own on personal matters. She offers me advice, doesn't judge me, is even better than I initially thought.

With her I am like this guy banging his head on a wall who, when asked why he is acting like that, answers: "I feel so good when I stop!". Except that nobody is asking me that and I never get to the punchline. I am no longer hurting, just numb. And the best part is that I am the only one responsible for it.
As usual ;-)

Impulse

- Can't you just say or do something on impulse?
- Sure. Regretting not to have said or done something on impulse comes to mind ;-)

I don't like sex

Shocking, but true.
Well, not exactly true, but true enough for what I want to say ;-)

Once upon a time, a long ago, I had this undergrad philosophy lecture by some paedocommiescumtard, the kind to give you a D when you dared to bring Marcus Aurelius and Berkeley, with an ounce of Clausewitz and Bradley just for the humoristic touch to his Tom Wolfe dissertation. Yes, I do have the humour gene too. I mean, Tom f*cking Wolfe, what can you say to that? The guy must have thought something along the lines of "Weeeell, given this audience I will start it slow and looow.".
The guy was a moron, probably still is. He should be giving lectures on José Bové or Nicolas Hulot now.
But, anyway, he got one thing right. He had this metaphor he called "the window shopping effect". It went like this: "You are a child a few days before Christmas. You are in town with your parents and you walk along a toy store. In the window, displayed for all to see, you see the most wonderful toy ever, but you cannot touch it, you can only look and gape in wonder. So the next few days you go on pestering your parents for that toy. You really want it, but you believe you will never have it: it is too great a toy to be ever given, it belongs to the window. Then comes Christmas, and you finally get it. You play with it for a few moments, and it looses most of its appeal.".

I must be a child at heart: for me lust is still the better part of sex ;-)

Skydiving

Almost three years since I have jumped out of a plane, and suddenly it hit me.
Why do I like it?
I mean, there are better ways to prove yourself. I guess that, for many years, I was kind of blinded by what brought me to it: a bet between friends. So it must have been a question of dare, of showing, of practically demonstrating your worth to your peers.
Right. It may have been so for the first jump, but what kept me coming?
And I finally found out. What I liked most are those two or three seconds where you have absolutely no control, when you are being played by the wind, when you are in something bigger and stronger than yourself. Of course, the whole point is to get control back, I wouldn't be here to talk about it if it weren't for that. There is a huge sense on accomplishment there.
But still, the best part is losing control, allowing yourself to be at risk. Being alone, responsible for you alone, and letting yourself be blown away.
Survival is just a technical matter, the important part is to be willing to risk it ;-)

Generation ZX

Even though my education has been quite socially permissible, I am forced to admit that it conveyed extremely conservative values. Imparting this teaching must come naturally I guess when you are sincerely convinced that you are the best there is and that nothing comes to prove you wrong. Still, I wonder.
I wonder how it came to be. Surely, my grand-parents social outlook was progressive, for their own time. And my own parents had their own rebellious streak. Me, I do not have much care for social issues per se. Current global issues, like climate change or globalisation have little to no appeal to me. Maybe it is because I understand fully that there is a system that will take care of them, as long as there is someone to have faith in it. For me, they are merely management issues, not political choices ; purely tactical or operational questions, not a matter of strategy: we already know that the battle is taking place, where, when and how ; the only questions that remain are "implementation details", where the Devil lays ;-)
No, me, I am a generation ZX man. To exaggerate a bit, I would say that at nine I knew more processors intimately than people. That at twelve I spoke more machine languages than human ones. So it is no wonder if my very own rebellion takes place where "purely managerial" issues are encroaching on basic human dignities. Of course, giving everyone a single unique ID is a great facilitator of administrative matters. But still, the potential for abuse is huge, and we are not talking about just potential now. Yes, the Internet is wonderful media, but its commercial uses are increasingly threatening the freedom and anonymity that are making it appealing in the first place. I can go on for hours on these matters.
So, yes, I am a generation ZX man, the product of my time and education. My Geraderichtung, so to speak, may not be yours but I know fully well where my path is and how to tread it ;-)

Respect

- "Don't you have any respect?"
- "Respect is such a strong word. Let's say that I grant you the benefit of the doubt, and credit you with some consideration, as I would do to anyone. Be careful though: you are burning it at an alarming rate."

Proximity killed the video shop

I do not watch TV. I do not even have a TV for that matter. But I love watching movies. I used to go to small theatres, follow retrospectives, see new things. Then time got sparse, DVDs ubiquitous and I went to a DVD rental shop. I picked them randomly to watch on my laptop, what did I have to loose? At worst I go still go on working or browsing in another screen, do some callisthenics or whatever took my fancy if the film was not to my liking and still be able to pause, rewind or play back if an half seen image or some dialogue seemed to warrant my attention.
I started to skip the trailers on old DVDs, then on recent ones too. Soon, I was out of touch. So I asked the clerk for advice. Rental shops clerks are usually knowledgeable: what do you think they do between collects, except watching movies, lots and lots of them? It doesn't grant them taste, but you soon learn to know them, and quickly find someone whose advice you can trust. At first, I was reluctant to rent series. It all changed when I was made to discover the Sopranos. Then the Wire, then Dead like Me. Then 6 feet under and a few others. Things I wouldn't even have considered worth seeing. I even discovered Grey's Anatomy, the best gym track ever ;-)
Now the shop nearby is closing, forced out of business by a supermarket: they sell at rental prices. I guess that I will have to find some other place to go for advice.

16. Forever. Nooo ;-)

This time, our annual sea food frenzy ended up quite well, all things being considered.

No near fatal miss, no indignities, no puking, just happy being there. Then I let my guard slide a few minutes and the next thing I know is that we avoid being thrown out of a bar. Well, I should know that the Archi trigger pull becomes quite light when he is heavily loaded ;-)
Not that I was in pristine condition myself ;-)
Buuut, when compared with past editions, we are progressing ;-)
Practice makes perfect, as they say ;-)

The Pickle

I have a few entries in my backlog about the Pickle.
Lengthy ones.
And more than a few actually.
I won't post them.

The best part of them is "Definitely, our best dates are our worst evenings. Or the other way around ;-)". I won't publish the rest because I have been yoyoing for more than a year now, and it doesn't get any better.

Let's just stay that, for someone who has breached the three months barrier only thrice in his life, who usually does not go past the three days barrier, feeling such a deep and enduring infatuation is, well, hard, for lack of a better word. It is hard because I do not understand what I am feeling and why. It is hard because I do not do what I should do, what I am expected to do, I am driving myself nuts second guessing.
"Never give up on someone you can't go a day without thinking about." as they say. I don't deal in half measures, even with my own patheticness.

I am a nazi.

It is official: the local ecotard comrades say so.

Nothing infuriates me so much as cretinous nekulturnies with a taste for political irresponsibility. Sooo they are against nuclear energy because, well, it is bad you know. In fact they are against progress or anything that is not co2 neutral, except for themselves, of course, the farting idiots.

Well, I had the perfect solution for them: proven technologies, existing and easy to replenish resources, easy to understand and implement, existing roadmap, complete reliability, effectiveness that may be favourably estimated by any current model, just a bad name: genocide.
Ok, we the people, I mean, the people who really matter, may start by nuking, say the Middle East and southern Mediterranean areas. South American urban areas too. Let nature take care of Africa and South Asia. You will need ready to irradiate slaves in the Middle East anyway to sustain your lifestyle.
And bingo, we are teh winzorz.
And Gaia, she loves us.
Less humans = less ecological pressure.
QED.
Morons.

Ok, ok, I shouldn't have pushed them so hard. I should have kept it at "Given your goals, it leaves you with two non mutually exclusive solutions: repression or genocide." and refrain from elaborating.
Well, I guess that I won't change, me bad :-)

The good thing was the laugh I had seeing their faces. The bad one is the cute little thing who brought me there.

"Meet new people, talk to them, rub their noses in their own shit": my new motto for social exploration :-)

A few evenings with Miss J

Miss J contacted me on this social cum tests site where I keep an infamous profile.

This profile has no pic, a lot of chaff and just shouts "Dangerous psycho inside, keep out!". I am obviously quite proud of it. It is truly a monument dedicated to bad taste, tongue in cheek and the fact that, "on the Internet, nobody knows you are a dog".

So, when I get a hit, usually once every year or so, I ready myself for either a good laugh or a really good surprise, like Miss Q two years ago. Well, this time I was in for the Clown Academy. Karma is a bitch ;-)

Not that I have anything against dumb little tarts. Dumb psycho little tarts with delusion of grandeur and an utter inability to get their stories straight is where I put the limit.
The first thing that went wrong was when she insisted on following a "straight online dating course", meaning, emails, chats, phone conversations then meetings. If emails are ok, mediated real time communications at a somewhat intimate level with someone I do not know are not. I am not that good with intimacy in the first place, and pretending to build a virtual one is beyond me. The trouble is that I am good at pretending and very curious too. The more inconsistencies I get, the curiouser I become.

So, in the end, I had a few good evenings, I laughed quite a bit, and my ignore list got incremented.

Getting what you...

So, Super Dumb is demoted and got assigned to some other hole in the earth, I do not wish to know where, I am just satisfied knowing it is far and away from here.

It made me happy for, say, a day.
Then I had to face the consequences, meaning finding someone to work his shift. With the holidays, "prophylactic reserve restrictions" and other circumstantial shit, I had no one available, so, I am stuck doing the moron's shi(f)t, stuff I had not been doing for years and never wanted to go back to, just when I do not have time for it. As usual, I am stuck doing what I must.

Somehow I cannot escape the feeling that I deserve this...

Backlog

Long time no see, he ;-)

Time to purge my backlog I guess.

I may have been a tad overworked these last weeks, but I have had the time to write on my phone, sometimes because I just had to, some other times while waiting, usually in a restaurant. Most of these are unfinished, and quite raw. However, if I do not do this now, I will let this blog die, so here it goes.