Category Archives: Wondering - Page 6

Florida, The Bakery

Posted by on April 24, 2018 No comments

I’ve been seeing a lot of billboards lately with a new slogan: “Drive Baked, Get Busted”.  It just kind of appeared out of nowhere and suddenly, it was everywhere.  Ok, yeah, police want (stupid) people to know that driving after getting high is a bad thing. 

I looked this promo campaign up and yes, it is new this year.  Supposedly, it’s because of the new medical pot law in Florida.  If we’re going to have medical pot, we need to let people know that you can’t take your “medication” and go for a drive.  Here’s the funny part.  The ad campaign is primarily targeted to 18-34 year olds.  Exactly the ones that would need medical stoning plants.  Secondarily, the ads target 55-74 year olds.  You know, the ones that smoked pot all the time when they were… 18-34.  But anyway, fuck yeah, Gen-X!  You’re not targeted as pot smokers.  And I find that really dumb, because everyone I knew growing up was perpetually high.

It kind of got me thinking about the whole PSA campaigns for any sort of impaired driving.  First of all, what idiot doesn’t know that driving under the influence of anything is bad? (Anything but driving under the influence of Jesus)  Second, if the person doesn’t know naturally that it’s bad, is a billboard really going to educate them?  Sometimes, I see messages on the traffic warning signs that say, “DUI – Decide before you drive” and I think a lot of people are like, “Already done.”

You just wouldn’t believe the frequency I see impaired drivers on the highways.  If it’s not some drug, then it’s probably tiredness.  Tiredness is an impairment that doesn’t get enough attention.  Maybe a billboard or two would help: “WAKE UP, MOTHERFUCKER!”

The 80’s Synth Invasion

Posted by on April 19, 2018 No comments

As my music collection grows exponentially, I find it doesn’t grow in any sort of order.  It grows opportunistically.  For example, I don’t particularly buy what I want, I buy what’s available.  And that’s fine, because my tastes are broad enough (and always growing) that there’s always something I’m willing to buy.

It was a little while ago that I picked up my first album by Survivor.  You know, Eye Of The Tiger and all that.  Actually, that was the album I got.  When you’re familiar with a band’s hits and you want to become invested in them, you can take the easy route and buy the greatest hits album, or you can be a man and just buy an album.  At thrift store CD prices, being a man doesn’t cost a whole lot, so that’s where I went.  And I liked it.  They had a good sound and I put Survivor on the list for future album purchases.

That day came a bit later when I picked up another of their albums.  It was my morning commute CD today.  And my experience with the album really led me to thinking deeper about music in the 80s.  Eye of the Tiger was released in 1982 and the album I was listening to came out in 1986.  My thoughts led me to create a shitastic “comic” to express my thoughts.

The80sInstruments

The initial point I was trying to make is that the ‘86 album had 10 songs, and 9 of those songs were all keyboard, with the guitar relegated to chunking out 8th notes for rhythm.  The closing track was guitar-driven and really felt out of place with the rest of the album.

Something clicked with me when I listened to each song as it started out with synthesizer chords.  I felt really sorry for the guitar player – well, main guitar player.  The keyboardist also played some guitar.  I suddenly understood the huge pushback against synths from rock acts, which, being a keyboard player myself, I never really appreciated.

Survivor isn’t the only recent instance I noticed this, although it was the most visceral.  I had recently picked up Europe’s album Wings of Tomorrow.  Everyone knows The Final Countdown, sure.  And if you heard the rest of The Final Countdown album, it is also very synth heavy, but it is also well-balanced with guitar work.  But on Wings of Tomorrow, which is the album just before The Final Countdown, there are hardly any synths at all.  The change is remarkable.  Also from the 80’s is the band GTR, a band that was formed by two guitarists who wanted a guitar-driven album.  That’s how bad it was back then.  I didn’t grasp how much of a statement they were making.

Then the Linn drum machine came along and it started to put the pressure on drummers.  Now they could be replaced with rock-solid precision that could be edited at will.  Gina Schock had to fight with the producer to play on The Go-Go’s Talk Show album.  And Mutt Lange, I love his sound, but his reliance on drum machines really grates on me.  I still remember when my innocence was broken when I realized the ZZ Top album I loved so much had no real drums on it.  And then it began a real-or-not hunt on every album I had, which is not how music is supposed to be. 

But there is an infinite palette of music out there for consumption.  I can lament Survivor softening up into a synth ballad band or I can just put on any hair metal from the same era and hear guitar.  There is always something on offer from some band, even if it’s not the band you want to hear it from.  Guitar songs never really went away, they just spread out.  And with my ever-expanding collection, I still find them.

Light Music, Heavy Music, Light Words, Heavy Words

Posted by on April 13, 2018 No comments

With 1,200 CDs in my collection, it’s probably an understatement to say I have a broad taste in music.  Yes, I do have concentrations of genres and time periods, but I can wander pretty far away from center.  And because of that, I feel sorry for people who are stuck on the same band or the same type of music, or who only know things that are on the radio.

Some music is challenging to me, that which I call avant-garde.  The Residents fall into this group, because I typically hear their music as a bunch of noise, or as music constructed so simplistically I can’t take it seriously.  And because of that difficultly to connect with the music, I consider that music to be heavy – even if they’re playing three notes over and over on a toy piano.  I say it’s heavy because it takes effort to listen to it. 

I also have a liking for death metal.  but not all death metal.  Death is one of my favorites because I find the whole thing hilarious.  Like there’s no way you can take the idea of someone vomiting up their own internal organs seriously.  It’s the audio equivalent of watching a horror movie.  But then there’s Sepultura, which is a Brazilian death metal band.  English isn’t their primary language, but they try.  And when I hear the broken English about the topics they write about, I just get the feeling they mean it a little more, because after all, they did try and translate it.  And that bugs me.

But then on the other end of the scale, I do like Indigo Girls.  But Indigo Girls, to me, is heavy, too.  I suppose you’re probably thinking: your evaluation of music is so fucked up.  But hear me out.  Indigo Girls isn’t heavy music, it’s heavy lyrics.  And I don’t mean heavy as in they make you go, “Whoa, man, that’s deep.” (Yes will do that well enough, thank you.)  I mean that their lyrics are SO weighted with metaphor it becomes unbearable to listen to for a long time.  I mean, I can handle a few metaphors in a song, but when you have to squeeze one in every verse, or god forbid, every stanza, well, it’s gonna wear me down.

Indigo Girls is nothing like Sammy Hagar, who I don’t think would ever get kudos for being a deep lyricist.  That’s not entirely fair, because there’s some of Hagar’s stuff that actually has some potential emotion in it.  But I consider his lyrics to be light and breezy.  Don’t think about them too much and just go with the vibe – usually partying and sex.  It doesn’t take a large vocabulary to express that stuff.

I was once talking with a woman about music and she told me that words were everything to her.  Well, that was kind of a problem because I really like instrumental music.  She was really, really into 38 Special, which isn’t bad, but it’s pretty light on both music and lyrics.  And there’s definitely a place for it.  I like 38 Special when driving because I don’t have to think much about it.

But my point was going to be that words themselves aren’t “everything” to me.  A lot of times, I can listen to a song for years and never know the lyrics.  I’ll know the important ones, but I may miss out on whole concepts in the verses.  I recall one time, I looked up the lyrics for a song I loved and the story wasn’t anything like I thought it was.  It ruined the song for me.

Because of my non-reliance on the lyrics, I shouldn’t really have a problem with foreign music, and in many cases I don’t.  I have some German punk rock and you can probably guess, you don’t need to know what they’re saying.  It’s just aggression from start to end.  And that works for the song.

I suspect for some people, the thresholds of light and heavy, whether musically or lyrically are much lower, so their breadth of music consumption is more limited.  On rare occasions, I daydream about being a teacher in school teaching Music Appreciation.  My experience in high school for Music Appreciation class was kind of a joke.  It was people bringing in tapes of songs they like, we all listen to it, then the teacher makes some commentary on it.  One time, we were listening to Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ On A Prayer”.  We all knew the song well enough since it was playing everywhere at the time, and just when the chorus changed key, the teacher jumped up and stopped the tape.  “You hear that!  That’s a key modulation and it’s used to generate more excitement in the song.”  Yeah thanks, you just killed the excitement we all just got from the key modulation.  Me, being one of the few musicians in the class, did the outrageous.  I brought in Rush’s La Villa Strangiato and drew out all the themes on the blackboard and pointed out how the themes entered and reprised throughout the nine minute song.

My approach to music appreciation would literally be a class on how to listen to music.  Start with rhythm – learn how to count a beat, learn odd time signatures. Learn how songs are structured, so you can say things like, intro, verse, chorus, bridge, and coda with confidence.  Learn about instrumentation, so you understand the application of sparse arrangement and dense arrangement.  Probably some other stuff as well (like minor/major keys), but after the foundations are laid, then start with genres, and break the songs down based on past lessons.  That’s how music appreciation should be, teaching you how to appreciate a wide variety of music.

Music Transcends Spirituality, Or Does It?

Posted by on April 11, 2018 No comments

On my recent mega-thrift run, I picked up a particular CD from a thrift shop.  The thrift shop had one of those CD sections where everything was religious music.  The CD caught my eye because the title was “Portraits in Synthesis” and the cover was very new-agey, although the back design was a little chaotic.  The CD seemed like it would be a nice new-age synthesizer instrumental album, so I spent a couple bucks and got it.

When I got home, with my 19 other CDs, I took a better look at the back and saw the tracks were named all… uncomfortable names.  Things like, “Fairest Lord Jesus”, and “Lord Be Glorified / Spirit Song”, and the rest were similar.  Of course my reaction was, “Goddamn it.  This is a religious album.”  And I left it on the kitchen table while I cleaned up and cataloged my other finds.

The next day, I saw the disc sitting on the counter and picked up it again.  I read more of the back and realized, yes, it was a synth album.  It just had weird song titles.  I looked inside the booklet and there were no lyrics, so, yes, it’s instrumental.  What’s the deal with these titles?

I researched the label the album was published under and learned that it was a subsidiary of a religious music label.  This new child label was made to take advantage of the growing “new age” music popularity of the 80’s.  How weird.  When I think new-age, I actually think of “anti-religion”, not in any evil way, but you know, new-age spirituality. 

Think of the issues that come up when Christian music lovers can’t listen to new-age music because it conflicts with their personal beliefs.  “I can’t listen to this because it’s new-age, and that involves crystals and tantra and whatever a chakra is!”  Well, music finds a way, right?  We’ll publish the same kind of music, but we’ll use religious titles that invoke the names Lord and Jesus and then there’s no moral conflict!  What a genius idea!  It’s genius, but it’s sad, too.  Music doesn’t have any religious affiliation.  It’s agnostic.  And the sad part is that agnosticism isn’t good enough for devout believers.  If it doesn’t fully walk the walk and talk the talk, it’s evil.

I was testing out my car stereo after doing some work on it and the only radio station I could pick up was the local religious station.  Go figure, huh?  And some woman had called in to talk to the radio host and explain how she loved the station and how it gave her whole house a worshipping feel all the time.  That’s what you want your whole life to be?  Like you’re in church all day?

But I try to keep in mind the lyrics from NOFX’s Happy Guy, from Punk In Drublic (Something the devout would never hear anyway):

Don’t try to judge him, his theologian ideal
His hopes may be false but his happiness is real
Don’t try to judge him, he’s just a man

Ooo, You’re So Slow and Tasty

Posted by on April 10, 2018 No comments

Provocative title aside, this is just a post bitching about upscaling at eating places.  You know, where the normal menu, which has existed forever, just isn’t good enough anymore, so the place has to try new, fancy shit and to hell with what we had before.  I’ve said before that I’m a fan of the standards, the basics.  When I go to a place to eat, I usually know what I’m getting, so all this new and better stuff doesn’t really appeal to me.  Yeah, I suck.  Deal with it.

I have read numerous times in articles about how McDonalds keeps trying to attract new customers by making new things.  There’s plenty wrong with this.  First off, as all American investor-driven companies, McDonalds is not allowed to just be.  They must forever be growing.  There is no satisfaction in being good.  You have to be better, quarter after quarter.  So, to that end, McD’s tries to grow their customer base by selling different things.  The problem is, these different things are more complex.  They take time.  They fuck up all the efficiencies that made the McD’s of olden times great.  You want a plain old quarter pounder?  Well, it’s going to be a bit because the party in front of you ordered Flapacheetos and McDonkles and we have to specially prepare each of those.

The exact same thing has happened the last couple of times I’ve been to Dunkin Donuts.  The party in front of me doesn’t want donuts or coffee.  They want, “An everything bagel, toasted, with butter, and bacon and cheese.  And then another one just like that, but a plain bagel.  And what do you want?  Ok, a croissant, no wait, another bagel.  What kind?  They’re all right there.  What’s that one?  Never mind, just make it plain.  And what do you want on it?  Bacon?  No.  No bacon.  Cheese?  Sausage?  You like sausage.  Yes, you do like it.  Just sausage and cheese.  And I’m going to have a coffee, with half and half and two sugars.  And what do you want to drink?  I don’t know if they have that…”  And 15 fucking minutes later, because they can’t take my order until they finish the order before me (FUUUUUUCCCK!), I order my two donuts.

Dunkin Donuts used to be a donut shop.  There used to be a time, and it wasn’t really all that long ago, you could get in and get out.  Now it’s a goddamn café.  It doesn’t need to be one.  In fact, McDonalds also has what they call McCafe.  That’s the trap.  McDonalds also used to be fast food.  There’s nothing fast about it anymore.  The same articles that talk about McDonalds adding new menu items to attract new business also say the restaurant owners hate it because it slows down their service times, which just backs everything up and irritates the customers, like me.

I say fairly often that I have pity for people growing up today because they have no idea that fast food used to be good and tasty and now it’s just processed bullshit.  And now the service has gone to shit right along with the food quality.  You know, Chipotle had something pretty good going for a while, until that whole poisoning thing happened.  That’s another company that is probably going to get desperate and start introducing new items.  You’ll know it when a new menu item has to be built off the conveyer line.  And that will be the next nail in the coffin because it will reduce the efficiency of their service.  Let’s see if they survive long enough to kick themselves in the teeth.

The Definitive Article On Bands

Posted by on April 4, 2018 No comments

What a misleading title!  Too bad, you’re here now.  I have been puzzling a bit today over the use of “The” in band names when it is not officially part of the band’s name.  The best example of this is “The Eagles”, whom I happened to listen to on my morning commute.  The band is really “Eagles”, but most everyone says, “The Eagles”.  You know.  This oddity was best summed up on a post on a forum that said something like,

If I say, “I love Eagles!”, someone might think that I liked large birds of prey that symbolize freedom in America.  But if I say, “Man, I fucking hate The Eagles!”, everybody knows exactly what I mean.

I thought I had found the answer in an article dealing with this specific topic, but I was unsatisfied with its conclusion.  I delved into my own music library for examples to see if I could make any sense of this.  Here’s a list of candidates from A through C:

  • Acoustic Alchemy
  • Alpha Rev
  • Art Of Noise
  • Blind Melon
  • Blue Man Group
  • Carpenters
  • Cheap Trick
  • Chicago
  • Creedence Clearwater Revival
  • Crowded House
  • Curved Air

This is actually a very good cross-sample, because there are a couple bands in here that are definitely preceded by “the” regularly: Art of Noise and Carpenters.  There’s some you would never consider preceding with “the”, like The Crowded House.  And there’s some that could go either way, like The Blue Man Group.

I thought I was onto something when I made my first hypothesis that you cannot use a definitive article if the first word of the band name is a modifier, like an adjective – Cheap Trick, Crowded House, Curved Air.  So, what kind of guideline is there for say, Art of Noise or Blue Man Group?  I got a hint from the band name Art of Noise – the “of”.  The Blue Man Group is The Group of Blue Man.  The Art of Noise is, well, The Art of Noise.  You couldn’t say The Air of Curved or The House of Crowded, right? 

Let’s find some more examples that may fit this “of” guideline.

  • Dixie Dregs
  • Electric Light Orchestra
  • Hearts of Space
  • Jefferson Airplane (mentioned in the article)
  • Little River Band

And some examples of the initial guideline where an adjective is the first word:

  • Daft Punk
  • Damn Yankees
  • Deep Purple
  • Diesel Boy
  • Dire Straits (also mentioned in the article)
  • Dream Theater
  • Fine Young Cannibals
  • Flying Colors

In this second list, you cannot interject “of”, where in the first list, you can.  Ok, the hypothesis is holding up reasonably well.  That leaves single-word band names like:  Buggles, Carpenters, Chicago, Devo, Dokken.  And also, we have to consider bands that do formally use “the” in their name like: The Cars, The Doors, The Outfield, The Police.

The article I found proposes that if the band name is a plural or collective term, “the” is used or is assumed.  That explains why we force ourselves to say “The Carpenters”, but not “The Chicago”.  However, it doesn’t account for cases like “The Nice” or “The Who” except to potentially argue that excluding the article results in a shitty, confusing name.  “I have tickets to Who tomorrow.  Nice is opening for them.”

So, I think I’ve satisfied myself as to when I can realistically prepend “the” to a band name even when the band does not explicitly do so themselves.  The exceptions to those guidelines, I’ll just have to chalk up to the bullshit of the English language.

Back To The 90’s

Posted by on February 26, 2018 No comments

In the 90’s, the meteoric rise of the Internet and mobile technology ushered in the age of communication.  This caused a massive increase in the ways we were able to communicate.  We had mobile phone calls and texting for offline communications, then online, we had email, IRC, IM, Usenet, message boards, and some others.  Every single one of these had their best use cases.  Some endured, and some faded out.

20-some odd years later, what does the landscape look like?  Texting has endured offline, and online, it seems like things have coalesced around FB Messenger, Snapchat, and WhatsApp.  The individual messenger apps of old, like AIM, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo! Messenger had faded away.  The new breed of messenger is part of a larger social platform, where your friends and other contacts gather.

It’s no big revelation that there are some privacy concerns with joining a social media platform, which is one reason I ditched them en masse many years ago.  And each time I hear something come up about Facebook, I am just grateful I left when I did.  But that also means that I am cut off from any social communication – well, cut off from any on that particular platform.  Snapchat is a little closer to a peer-to-peer communication client, but still has this concept of a “wall”, where you blast out your life to the world.  That’s not what I’m looking for.

In a parallel world, there has been a growing concern over our IM client at work.  We all understood that all our chats were logged and could be reviewed at any time, but as time went on, it felt like it was a growing liability.  A transition to a new chat client sort of increased that paranoia.

In my personal, parallel word, the GF and I were growing weary of Skype.  The application was unreliable and felt like it was constantly doing updates.  One time, I answered an incoming call, and Skype decided to do an update right then, hanging up the call and shutting down to update itself.  That’s some bullshit, there.

So, with a desire to have simple person-to-person chats, a IM client external to work, and something more stable, led me to revisit an old, old, old IM client: ICQ.  I found my original login information from an old backup and correctly guessed my password from 20 years ago.

It’s hard to believe how the chat landscape has changed.  Windows/Live/MSN Messenger is completely gone.  AIM is gone as well.  Yahoo messenger is still around, but… Yahoo.  ugh.  Staying away from FB, because it’s just a big ad server.  There’s not much left.  It seems the big chat client independent of a social media site is Jabber, which isn’t really a chat platform, it’s a chat client for the XMPP chat protocol.  I did enough research into it to determine it’s just a step too far into geekdom.  I was looking for a plug and play solution, and ICQ fit the bill.

For my work needs, that is, to chat without the company logging our conversations, ICQ was as simple as it could get and although the interface is a little bulky, it accomplishes its goals.  Its simplicity meant it was quickly adopted and used.

For my personal needs – getting rid of Skype – it is actually superior.  The one thing that the GF and I do regularly is video call on Skype.  And I just want to say that a single great feature on one client can completely eliminate the other option.  In this case, during a brief video chat test, I found ICQ’s split screen view.  Skype always keeps your video in a tiny window tucked in the corner of your caller’s video screen.  And if the Skype client isn’t focused, your caller’s video is shrunk down to a tiny window and stuck in the corner of your monitor.

Maybe that works for most people, but when I experienced the split screen view, it was a game changer.  That is the view that I always thought should be used, but I’d never experienced it before.

Misunderstood

Posted by on February 16, 2018 No comments

I don’t know why I have this little hangup about posts where I feel if I don’t have at least a certain wordcount, it’s not really worth posting at all.  I’m pretty sure I’ve talked about how different social platforms are optimized for different message lengths, but blogging is supposed to be for the longest form of writing.  Well, not today.  Story time!

HH

I’m out at lunch at Hungry Howies, enjoying my usual small pizza with light sauce and pepperoni, when I notice a wasp out of the corner of my eye in the window.  I can immediately tell the wasp is agitated, but that is sort of a moot observation because wasps have no chill and are always agitated. 

Without trying to cause too much alarm and make myself a target, I visually confirm which side of the glass the wasp is on.  It’s my side, the worse of the two available sides.  I watch the wasp carefully, without making direct eye contact.  I want to know what his plans are, maybe to continue pushing against the glass or maybe to go elsewhere, like my face.

After a while of watching, less than a minute for sure, I decided the wasp must be killed so I may eat in peace.  So I get up from my booth and go up to the counter to get a killing implement.  A woman meets me at the counter and I ask, “Do you have a fly swatter?”  She says sure and disappears.  The woman took longer than I would expect, but eventually comes back with a paper cup and a lid.  I’m thinking to myself, “What the fuck.  You want me to trap this thing in a cup?”

She holds the cup and lid out to me and says, “That’s the best I could do.”  I make no move to take the items from her and I must’ve had the strangest expression on my face, because she pulled back and asked, “You said you wanted an ice water?”

No.  That isn’t what I wanted.

The Eye in The Sky

Posted by on February 8, 2018 No comments

There’s a lot of people that are really paranoid, scared, and angry about “the police state”, government surveillance, and loss of privacy.  I’m sort of in that group, but not really at the level some people are at.  There are other people who just sit back, point their finger and say, “Hey, you asked for it.”  These people are referring to technology like GPS, cookie tracking, integrated Facebook everywhere (that goddamn Like button on every web page that tells FB you’ve been on that page without you doing anything), and more recently, bullshit always-on microphones like on Alexa, Google Home, and Apple Home.

Those are all personal privacy invasions, and they are all opt-in.  You have to buy the devices that snoop on you.  You have to visit the websites that track you.  The other level of privacy invasion is at the societal level.  Things like security cameras, traffic cams, EZ Pass in your car, GPS on your phone.  Things that monitor and track you while you are in public.  At no point did anyone really opt-in to being monitored while in public.

Advocates will argue that these systems provide a great improvement in public safety (albeit reactive and not really proactive).  Detractors will say it’s not worth it to be watched all the time for the rare case something bad happens.  And the finger-pointing starts – If you’re not doing anything wrong, why are you opposed to it.  So, security by this means is naturally controversial.

And with that lead-in and disclaimer that I understand what I’m going to get into, I’m going to propose more surveillance.  And it’s for a very specific police use that would piss off some people.  But you know what?  I don’t fucking care, because you people need to be shut the fuck down.

Have you ever seen a video of a car fleeing the police on a highway, flying through traffic, weaving in and out of the other cars?  Of course you have.  That is what it is like driving to and from work every day for me.  That is every fucking day.  Every day, there are people who drive 15-20+ miles an hour faster than others and cut in and out between 3 and 4 lanes of traffic.  I am sick to fucking death of these people.  This needs to fucking stop.

These assholes cause trouble for everyone else in multiple ways.  The most obvious is that they could wreck into someone and kill themselves (boo hoo) or others.  And when wrecks happen, we all lose.  Traffic comes to a crawl or a standstill.  Do the goddamn math sometime you are in a traffic jam.  Count how many cars you see, measure how much time you are losing on your drive and multiply that by an average wage to see how much money is being lost sitting in traffic that didn’t need to happen at all if people didn’t drive like fuckasses.

There are not enough officers on the road to enforce better driving practices and even when they do enforce them, the fuckasses still ruin it for everyone, because we all have to slow down for emergency vehicles.  An asshole gets pulled over and we all pay for it.  But another issue is that an officer on the side of the road monitoring traffic may not be able to spot a fuckass.  The officers only have a limited view and even if they are running radar, they may or may not catch the driver when they are embedded somewhere in 3-4 lanes of traffic.  So this leads me to my solution.  Aerial surveillance.

Leave some quadcoptors hovering over the highway where they can monitor traffic at a greater level.  You can spot drivers that are weaving through traffic and generally being unsafe.  This is something you can’t do at ground level.  Once a car is spotted behaving erratically or unsafely, a trooper can be dispatched to intercept.  Or it could be handled later.  Record the video and address it in person at their house.

It doesn’t even have to be speeding.  I came up with a formula to calculate a driver’s assholosity based on speed and number of lanes changes per mile.  This targeting could almost be completely automated with machine learning (formerly known as AI).

Does this sound invasive?  I don’t fucking care if you think it is.  This is a problem that affects all highways drivers in both safety and financial aspects.  And while the problem is chronic, it isn’t widespread.  The few are ruining it for the many, and we shouldn’t have to live that way.  There’s a lot of that shit going on right now and I’m pretty well sick of it.

How I Do Love Thee

Posted by on February 1, 2018 No comments

Welcome to February, the month of lovers, where survivors and castaways of Dump Month find new hope.  Also, half home to Aquarius, despite whatever the fuck those people that think they can change the astrological calendar think.  In the spirit of this month, I wanted to do something a little XKCD-y, which was predicated on my wandering thoughts on the simple question, “Do you love me?”

“Do you love me?”  This question is more polarizing than say, “Are you a Trump supporter?”  Whereas an answer to the latter will give you a pretty good indication of how well your relationship is going to work out, the former simply brings up more questions.

First, let’s list through some context scenarios.  In no case is any answer a safe answer.  Consider if any of the following came up to to and asked you, “Do you love me?”

  1. Friend
  2. Co-worker/colleague/superior
  3. Significant other
  4. Family member/pet
  5. Stranger

I say that there is no correct answer in any case.  That is because yes and no are absolutes, while love is not an absolute.  There are limitless types of love.  Here is another helpful list of potential love types:

  1. as a fellow human
  2. as someone whose company you enjoy
  3. as a friend
  4. as someone you want to see happy
  5. as someone you want to see naked
  6. as someone you only want to love you in return

For the sake of brevity, I kept this list short, but I did order the list in least to most creepy.  And when you map these simplified types of love to the context of the requester, things get a little tricky.  Please note that “yes” could mean “as a fellow human” as well as “I want to own you exclusively”.

  1 2 3 4 5 6
1 Good Good Good Good Weird Bad
2 Good Good Good Weird Bad Bad
3 Bad Good Bad Good Good Bad
4 Bad Good Good Weird Bad Bad
5 Good Bad Bad Weird Weird Bad

And even that mapping doesn’t tell the whole story.  And part of that is because the list of love types is not exclusive.  Multiple types can be valid at once.  When you get into that, you have to start assigning points for goodness/badness/weirdness and sum them all together to determine if the end result is good, bad, or just weird.

And after all that analysis, maybe that’s the only types of love there are.  Good love, bad love, and weird love.  But, the asking of the simple question, “Do you love me,” can result in the exposure of which of those three types your relationship is then based.  Unless you lie.

Where does lying get you?  Let’s go back to a simple yes/no answer for this, because if your answer is, “In what way?” you’re immediately in the weird zone.  Unfortunately, the most logical response, “Why do you ask?” puts you in the bad zone.  The most rational response, “Yes, of course!” is also the most risky.  To which I repeat, there is no safe answer.  Ok, maybe answering a stranger, “No” might be valid, but who ever wants to heard they aren’t loved, especially when they asked the question?