Tag: Me Myself I

Personal stuff

Interesting Thought

Drive Time, Old Fartism

Couple nights back I had dinner with Tech Support II, who was in town for some geek convention or other, and in the course of our (long) evening together, I asked him what car he was currently driving, and was not really surprised when he said “Tesla SUV”.

Of course he would drive a Tesla (because he’s a techie), and of course an SUV (because he has a family).

But along the way something really interesting came up.  He’d recently driven the Tesla (with the family) from Florida to Houston (because he’s also a space geek, duh).  The interesting part is that by his estimation, he didn’t drive about 90-95% of the 1,600-mile drive at all;  he simply left it to the Tesla’s auto-drive program.

When I asked why, he said simply, “Because the Tesla is a better driver than I am.”

The thing about the Tesla self-drive function is that every trip made by every Tesla is recorded and uploaded to their system at headquarters (or wherever they store it).  What that means is that Tesla can not only combine all that data into a global “behavioral” database, but they can also create subsets of that to, say, a “Florida-Houston” drive, with all the characteristics of said trip — choke points, places where accidents frequently occur, speed data and so on — all combined to make the next Florida-Houston drive trip all the safer for any Tesla driver because those characteristics are then folded into the Tesla self-drive computer in the car.

All very interesting, especially for an old retired data geek like myself.

But what TS said next is what stopped me in my tracks.  When I asked him why he’d elected for the self-drive, he admitted quite simply, “Because the Tesla is a better driver than I am.”

He’s not a bad driver, just so you know;  in fact, he’s an excellent driver.

I myself have admitted on these very pages that at age 70, I’m no longer as good a driver as I once was when I was, say, 30 or even when I was 50.

And it makes me think:  would I not be better off by delegating the driving to someone (or something) else?

Of course, this isn’t limited to owning a Tesla (because #Duracell car), and in any event in my case this is purely a hypothetical “If I won the lottery dream” because I could afford neither a driver nor a Tesla.

Nevertheless, it’s a different and quite disturbing thought for me, because it goes against a whole bunch of personal philosophies, viz.  distrust of electric cars, not being in control of my driving, losing my independence of action, being spied on as I drive — to name but some.

And make no mistake:  this would not be an action born of conveeenience, but of safety concerns.

As I said, it’s an interesting thought, even if nothing ever comes of it.

Bygone Times

History

Reader Old Texan sent me an email with this enclosed:

…and purely coincidentally, The Divine Sarah published Long Ago, It Must Be, which starts with the hypothesis (not hers) that time stopped in 1999, and everything that’s happened since then has been just a dream.  In that piece, Sarah talks wistfully about how 1999 was a time when some of her friends were still sane, and of other friends since passed away.

Well, 1999 was an okay year for me, I think:  living on the lakefront in Chicago with Connie, doing consultant work and traveling to Britishland occasionally:


(that’s the Bath Weir in the background)

It was a good year, no doubt about it.  But if I look back to my favorite years pre-2000, I’d have to choose 1981.

Oh man, 1981…. I had a job I loved — imagine that — which also involved travel (only all over South Africa, not the UK) and which earned me a decent salary:


(Cape Town)


(just north of Durban:  Umhlanga Rocks, where my Mom lived)


(Port Elizabeth “PE”)


(Kimberly, with its “Big Hole” diamond mine)

In 1981, I was still playing in the Atlantic Show Band — we’d pretty much given up playing clubs and were doing gigs at proms, wedding receptions and office parties etc. — and that, believe me, was a blast.  The music we were playing?  Bette Davis Eyes, Fire, Angel Of The Morning, Stop Dragging My Heart Around, Another Brick In The Wall, Crazy Little Thing Called Love, Heartache Tonight, You May Be Right… aaah, kill me now.

I was driving a very nippy little Opel Kadett (company car, ergo free), and I was still single, with a very active Little Black Book.

I was twenty-seven years old, and I ruled my world.  If I could choose a year to relive, then 1981 beats all the others, in spades.

Feel free to tell me in Comments which year you’d like to go back to, with reasons.  (Email if Comments are still screwed up for you, and I’ll post it.)

No Joy In Mudville

The Gun Thing

I’ve always loved guns.  Some of my best childhood memories are of taking the Diana .177 pellet rifle out to the backyard, setting up a host of tin cans, and blasting away at them until I ran out of pellets.  At a rough guess, I was shooting about 500 pellets per week.

It was my first gun, and shooting it gave me a wonderful solitary activity that was only rivaled by my love of reading.

Later, when I was about 14, I graduated to shooting my dad’s Winchester 63 .22:

Compared to .177 pellets, .22 ammo was really spendy for a boy’s allowance (even back then), so I probably only shot off a hundred-odd rounds a week.  I did that for the next five or so years, until I bought my first centerfire rifle.

Here, my memory fails me;  it was either an Oviedo Mauser in 7x57mm, or else an Israeli Mauser (the K98k, rechambered to 7.62x51mm/.308 Win in the late 1950s).

Whatever, I had both, and used them in my first forays into hunting, which only really began in my mid-twenties — although I would shoot off a few boxes for practice each month (rifle ammo was really expensive in Seffrica, even though by then I was earning a salary).

Then I moved to the U.S., and after I could buy them legally, my love of guns and shooting went stratospheric, and my gun ownership ditto.

Of course, occasional periods of poverty followed, meaning that during those times I was forced to sell a few, and at one time almost all.  And that hurt, it really did;  but I consoled myself with the thought that when my finances recovered, I could always buy replacements… which I did.

Then quite recently, my desire to own guns kinda tailed off.  Most probably, this came from getting to age 70 and the concomitant realization that whereas in the past my appetite for shooting was boundless, now it was more circumspect.  Was I ever going to go hunting again?  (no, probably not.)  Was I going to take up clay shooting?  (also, probably not.)  I’d long since quit any kind of competitive shooting as my eyesight started its decline, and even the occasional trip to Boomershoot suddenly became less appealing — maybe because of the distance involved, but that had never stopped me before.

So as you all know, when my financial circumstances recently demanded some remedial action, I started selling off my guns to anyone who was interested, keeping pretty much only the ones I could foresee myself using at least quite often (.22 rifles and handguns, etc.) or ones that I might need in certain “social” occasions, if you get my drift.

I at least contented myself with weekly range visits because their senior citizen discount made it affordable, but even those have tailed off, for no real reason.  I don’t know why that is;  I still love my guns — the few I’ve kept, anyway — but the urge to shoot them, other than for practice, has more or less disappeared.

And I’m certainly never going to restock the larder, so to speak.  Those days are definitely gone.

I’ve had many invitations to go shooting with various friends and Readers, and when I’ve taken them up, I’ve enjoyed the range time, but enjoyed still more the after-shoot coffees and so on:  the socializing part of the event more so than the shooting, which is a complete inversion of my enjoyment in times gone by.

So something that has been a huge part of my life has gone, maybe forever, and I mourn its passing dreadfully.

Maybe it will come back — I hope it does — but until then, I’m left with this hollow feeling at the disappearance of something that has been part of my entire life.

So now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to read a book.

The Elephant In The Room

Housekeeping

Folks, it’s time to approach this topic head-on.

I refer here to the issues that several Readers have had with the Comments on this website — i.e. email addresses blocked, unable to re-register, etc. all with the end result that you are unable to post comments.

The problem appears to be with WordPress (hic delenda est), and neither I nor Tech Support II have been able to fix it.

I can only surmise that this is being caused by the old version of WordPress that I currently have installed, but I have to confess that I’m really nervous about upgrading because the last time I did so, all sorts of things changed and it took me about a week to fix it all up.

Nevertheless, I’m going to do the upgrade sometime over the next weekend in the hope that this will fix Comments, but I’m not too sanguine that it will.  If everything gets fucked up as a result, please be patient with me.

In the meantime, if you absolutely want your comment published but your access has been nuked, please email it to me and I’ll pop it under the relevant post.  Just put in the Subject line:  Comment for post [title] and I’ll get to it as soon as I can.

I really miss my old website, but that software was compiled from scratch and maintained by Connie, and there’s absolutely no chance that it can ever be resurrected, more’s the pity.

Anyway… wish me luck.

 

Secret Fears

Health

I am surprisingly sympathetic to this story from writer Bryony Gordon:

What if I had done something awful to someone on the Tube the evening before and blanked it out because I was secretly a psychopath? Had I accidentally sent my child to school with a water bottle full of bleach? Had I emailed a terrible, abusive message to her teacher and deleted it from my sent items to hide the evidence? 

The “blanked out” thing is what caught my attention.

Many years ago, I was afflicted with terrible PTSD dreams.  I mean the kind of dreams where you wake up shaking in terror — all horribly violent, all involving death (my own) — and they happened often, sometimes three times a week.  And they were also repetitive, revolving around being attacked by lions, and getting into a street fight being two examples.

But they weren’t the worst.  I actually learned to cope with those dreams after a while, by simply recognizing them as they began to unfold, and forcing myself to wake up before they got any worse.  Now, I only get them maybe once a year, and they’re easily overcome.

The worst of my dreams, however, is where I become two characters in a murder mystery:  a cop or investigator of some kind on the track of a serial killer, a killer whose murders are gruesome and revolting.  And part of the investigation is my seeming ability to visualize the murders as they’re taking place — as portrayed in the movie The Eyes Of Laura Mars. 

After a while (in the dream), the realization would begin to dawn that the reason I could visualize the gruesome murders was that I was the murderer, and this manifested itself in the dreadful fear of discovery.

I would wake up, and so realistic were the dreams that in process of awakening I would ask myself if I actually was a murderer in real life and had somehow managed to get away with the killing.  The feeling of horror (at being that kind of person and of being discovered) was as strong in my semi-wakened state as it had been in the dream.

It would take me a long time, as much as an hour of rational thinking, to dispel those fears.

Fortunately, I haven’t had one of those dreams in a couple of years.  Maybe they’re gone — I certainly hope so.

I cannot imagine that feeling of dread happening to me in an awakened state.  It must be awful, just terrible;  and that’s why I’m sympathetic towards Bryony Gordon.

Nobody deserves to have the mind play such foul tricks on them.

An afterthought:  many times, these kinds of dreams and hallucinations are caused by psychotropic drugs, taken to suppress things like feelings of panic or depression.  Mine weren’t, because I’ve never taken such drugs;  that’s why they’re all the more terrifying.

I’ve tried to analyze why I get them.  The most plausible explanation is that when writing fiction, writers have to envision the plot from both sides of the mystery so that the plot doesn’t have holes in it.  And even if I’m not in the process of writing a book, I’m always developing plots and storylines in my head.  I haven’t done any such writing for a while, now, and maybe that’s why I haven’t had those dreams recently.

I just hope that writing about them today doesn’t cause a re-occurrence.

So Much For That

Food & Drink, Health

For a while now — about five months — I’ve not been taking Ozempic because I cannot in all conscience afford the (rip-off) price of $250 a month for the rest of my life.  As my old buddy Patterson puts it so succinctly:  “Fuck that for a tale.”

And he’s right.

Anyway, I had my semi-annual physical yesterday, and got weighed with a certain degree of trepidation because there are all sorts of stories extant that say categorically that if you quit taking your weekly stomach-jab, the weight comes screaming back on.  To recap (for those unfamiliar with my tale of woe):  I weighed about 275 lbs. before I started taking Ozempic;  several months later I was down to 230 lbs. (n.b. my Army weight after boot camp was 225 lbs.), and at my annual checkup last November I was back up slightly (still on Ozempic), to 235 lbs.

So I got weighed yesterday, fearing for the worst:  236 lbs.

When I told the doctor that I had quit taking Ozempic, therefore, he just shrugged and said, “No big deal.  Your weight seems to have stabilized.”

Then he said that I was one of his healthiest patients, and for my 70 years of decrepitude, the healthiest he’d seen in years.  Then (as usual), he told me to fuck off and stop wasting his time because he had sick people to look after.

The interesting thing that happened to me with Ozempic was that my appetite disappeared completely:  three meals a day plus much snacking dwindled away to one meal a day, with maybe a snack every few days.  And what’s still more interesting is that the smaller food intake has become habitual;  I haven’t gone back to gorging myself on a daily basis. (The day before yesterday, for instance, I had a couple pieces of biltong at lunchtime followed by an egg and bacon sandwich for dinner — that’s one egg and two strips of bacon on a piece of French baguette.)

And if I feel really hungry during the day, the biltong (with maybe a piece of Jarlsberg cheese) takes care of it.

As to why I have my main meal in the evening:  I seldom feel like food first thing in the morning at the best of times;  I take my meds at night (because they work better that way) and it’s best if I take them on a full stomach than an empty one;  and finally, I enjoy having dinner with New Wife because marriage.

Sorry about all that personal stuff, I know: “TMI shuddup Kim.”  But the takeaway from all this is that for some people — for me, at any rate — taking Ozempic doesn’t have to be a life sentence as they warn it will be.

So fukkem all:  the drug company who makes Ozempic (apparently from diamond dust and gold flakes), and the doomsayers and all the worrywarts who infest our lives.

I’m doing fine, thank you, and that’s all there is to say about it.

And now, if you’ll excuse me… I’m off to a happy place.