Tuesday, Tuesday, no good to me...

Someone recently suggested that perhaps I would feel better if I kept a journal. OK, why not. I have a blog, and no one reads it, so why not?

First topic: Nightmares/Night Terrors/Bad Dreams... Been having alot of them lately, and they are making it very hard to sleep. I won't go into sleep deprivation, it's the internet, look it up if you care.

WARNING!!! The following is a graphic description of my most disturbing, and most common dream. If you are squeamish, do not read it. Yes, I'm serious.

I find myself with my left hand wrapped around a persons throat. I have big hands, and they are capable of immobilizing many people by gripping the throat. While standing over them, I am repeatedly punching them in the face. I seem to be summoning strength I don't normally have, as not only can they not escape my left hand grip, every blow to the face causes significant trauma. Not a black eye, not a broken teeth, but I can feel and hear facial bones shattering. Each blow not only causes trauma to the persons face, but I can also feel my own fingers crack and break. each blow brings more pain, and more trauma until the person I am hitting no longer looks like a person. The bone shards beneath have shredded the skin, and the skull has collapsed to the point I am now punching the relatively soft brain tissue beneath the shards. My left hand retains a iron grip on the throat, but there is no struggle anymore, and my right hand is a lump of shattered metacarpal bones and connective tissue. It somehow retains a fist-like shape, and keeps landing blows. Blows that are orders of magnitude more powerful that I can deliver, but the damage doesn't lie. A few more punches, and the body goes limp. The computer has shut down, and I am hitting what amounts to a flesh punch bowl filled with blood, brains, and bone shards, yet I still don't stop. I slowly become aware of screaming, but the person no longer has a face, let alone a mouth to scream out of. The I realize the screaming is me.

I usually wake up at that point.

If there is anyone left reading, I feel compelled to mention that this scene is no more gruesome than some of the more extreme gore/horror films I have seen, but it's not the visual that is the most bothersome. Since this is a dream, my awareness seems to be greatly heightened. I can feel every bone in my hand break. I can feel every snap of the facial bones. I can feel the twitch of the body beneath me as the life is ripped from it. I smell the blood...I TASTE the blood. When I wake up, my right hand is tense and sore. And I sit on the side of my bed, and slowly come back to reality. Slowly. While in the shower, I check my hands for blood, and injury. There isn't any, thankfully, but I feel compelled to check. Some mornings, I'm halfway to work before I begin to feel normal, and it's lunch time before I have settled into my day.

Then comes the inevitable. Darkness falls, and it's time to go back to bed.

I don't want to do this anymore. More when I am ready.

It's beginning to look alot like...

Procrastination, anyone?

Yeah, so I'm sitting here in the local coffee shop, talking to a friend about his computer. He needs to clean off some crap-ware that showed up a few weeks ago. I told him that it should be easy, and not take very long. We then started to talk about the pros and cons of tablets when a mutual friend came in, sat down, and hijacked the entire conversation. Now normally, I wouldn't give a shit, but a few things about this bothered me today...

1. They both work in a branch of health care, and they started talking about experiences at work that were frankly, disgusting. Washing people who don't have the ability to do it themselves, etc. I'll spare you.

2. This person in infamous for her desire to be the constant center of attention. She has been this way for as long as I have known her, and I have never, repeat never seen her just sit and listen. Sometimes she presents the appearance of such, but it's always because she's pissed that she's not the center of attention, and she's moping. Fucking tedious doesn't even come close to an accurate description.

3. He let her hijack the conversation we were having. Didn't politely ask her to wait a few while we finished our topic, he just turned to her, and started talking like I had just been beamed back to the Enterprise...

All of this is not unheard of in this generation, they can be more than a little self centered sometimes, but it doesn't end there.

Two more friends walk in a few minutes later, and came over to say hi. I had something I wanted to show them on my computer, and they said they wanted to see it, (A short video piece) but they wanted to get their coffee. They left, and never came back. The walked over to another table, sat down, and have been ignoring me for the last 45 minutes....Sure wish I knew what I said or did to make myself effectively invisible. It could come in handy in certain circumstances.

Family tedium continues, for anyone following. Nothing changes, and nothing is going to change.

More to follow later, but I have to run and pick up the boy.

What a long, strange trip it's been...

Wow, what a lazy jackass I have been! Almost a full year since my last post! and so much to share.

Lemme make a list of posts to come...

1. My Wife is more or less healthy, but still has chronic illness.

2. My son has just finished his first basketball season in fifth grade.

3. I have begun to experiment with fermented beverages.

4. My mental health has not really improved, but has not degraded either.

But what shall we talk about now? Work. No way I can piss off anyone with that topic, right?

Lets talk funding. First off, some of my friends who may be reading this are very conservative, and I'm ok with that. However, please do not listen to people in other states who are trying to convince you that people who hold state jobs are overpaid. We are not. The examples they are giving you regarding wealthy state employees are hand picked to give you an altered perspective. Are there overpaid state employees? You bet. The highest paid people on campus where I work are not the high level administrators, but the sports team coaches. I don't have actual numbers in front of me, but there are some coaches in the State of Illinois who make over a million dollars per year. I don't care how good of a coach you are, you are not worth that much money. Let's also talk about how much money the politicians themselves are making. Again, no numbers, but when was the last time you saw a politician wearing ratty old jeans and a t-shirt as a press conference... Most of us in the service of the state are significantly under the salary levels of our contemporaries in the private sector. Don't buy the bullshit.

When I was a kid, the phrase I heard on a lot of lips was "You can't solve problems by throwing money at them". And this is true, Unless the problem is You Don't Have Enough Money! 

Now, we can argue about wasteful spending, pork projects, and pointless grants to study nonsensical bullshit, but all that was gone years ago. We are now down to cutting entire programs, departments, and degree paths. Several years ago, the department my wife was working in was running low on basic office supplies. Pencils, pens, notepads, etc... The department chair was told that there was no money left in the budget, and the next year's budget was not going to be available for 3 months. This department chair went to an office supply store, and bought supplies out of her own pocket!

That was several years ago, and things have gotten worse. No I have no idea why our current state and federal leaders want us to not have the funding we need, but that is the only explication I have left. Now, I live in Illinois, so it is a massively difficult and verbose to explain accurately how we got into this mess, but I will say that every politician who has served in Illinois in the last 10 years bears some responsibility for this, including our current President. 

It's pointless to argue about it, as while they all share responsibility, no one is more responsible than any other. You could point a finger at any of our past Governors who are currently serving time, but they are all responsible while also not being wholly responsible at the same time. 

How do you fix a system that is built on massive systemic problems? How do you remove the influence of big money? How do you keep politicians honest? How do you balance the need for adequate spending with the desire for lower taxes? 

Beats me, but I do know that we have tried all the old ideas that the Tea-publicans have brought to the table, and they didn't work for Reagan, Bush, Bush Jr. or any other outspoken conservative. And on the other side of the coin, we can't spend money we don't have. Do we need Health Care Reform. I think we do, but in order to pay for it, we need to give up something else. How about the massive no-bid contracts for military contractors? Perhaps we could make do with the Air Force, Navy, Armor, and troop technology we have for a while...Do we need new M1 Tanks, or could we refurbish the ones we have? Do we need 3 more Aircraft Carriers? Do we need to be the playground monitors of the middle east? Bring our boys home, and let them defend themselves.

On a final note...I did not write this to start an argument. Don't bother to email me and tell me how wrong I am, and how I'm a dumbass liberal who should be taken out and shot. Our world has changed a lot in the last decade, and mid century battle tactics and equipment won't do on a modern battlefield. Having more tanks, ships, planes, or guns would have done nothing to stop the terrorists in 2001, and the Western approach to war-fighting has left us in a massive quagmire in the Middle East.

I'll try to post again in a few weeks, but that all depends on what kind of free time I can scrape up.