ICE and Them

January 26, 2026

A month ago, Renee Good and Alex Pretti were two anonymous names of living breathing people. Whose names now we all know as they are no longer living and breathing because some ICE dipshits executed them in broad daylight, in cold blood, caught on multiple videos.

They’re both white US citizens. Their crime was being in the general vicinity as said ICE dipshits hassled those who are neither.

A crime that apparently carries the death penalty, according to the Orange Thing as well as to the dog-killing piece of shit running DHS and to the bald Nazi ghoul that is deputy chief of staff and to the couch fucker, among others.

In response, we all know the names Renee Good and Alex Pretti, saying their names and affirming their humanity in protest all over the country.

Because fuck everything about this shit.

There’s detention camps in our country, in 2026. Those not sent there go to ones abroad where they’ll never be seen again.

There’s a secret police force whisking people away to these places without trial or anything resembling due process, and murdering people in the streets for trying to keep their neighbors from being abducted, for trying to record what’s happening to make sure the world knows.

And Congress? The legislative branch who’s supposed to counter nonsense like this as part of that whole checks and balances thing?

The House voted to keep funding DHS… this past fucking week!

They saw the snuff film that was Renee Good’s murder and thought “awesome, let’s have more of that”. And more of that they got, in the form of federal agents proudly counting Alex Pretti’s bullet wounds.

Support for all this among the general population is in the tank. But some approval for ICE’s bullshit remains, even now. Why? Is it they believe the lies that these two were attacking the ICE thugs? Do they get all their information from those spouting these lies and that those saying otherwise are just brainwashed woke liberals or whatever? Do they have some stake in these operations? Are they afraid of what will happen if they don’t support them?

I think it’s all of that to some degree. I think also it speaks a little bit to how we got here.

For anyone to support ICE’s brutal tactics, they must be completely utterly convinced that simply being present in the country without proper authorization is in itself a mortal sin, deserving of the harshest retribution. Something you would only give the slightest shit about, let alone express this rabid hatred, because someone wanted you to because it was convenient for them. As I said before, immigrants are not the problem; the ones trying so hard to convince you of this are the actual problem.

It goes beyond immigration. We’ve been fed decades and decades of local news breathlessly peddling fear of crime, particularly that committed by non-white youth, skillfully tapping into the general public’s contempt for teenagers and for people of color. All for the ratings. All convincing the public that, despite all data indicating crime is way down in recent decades, we’re under siege and need beefed up law enforcement to protect us, to be tough on crime.

They’re basically this line from Mr. Burns in Season 3 “Bart the Murderer”.

So anything remotely resembling law enforcement gets more and more funding, with elected officials petrified of doing otherwise and getting pegged “soft on crime”. Such that our cities have militarized police forces rather than better funding for schools and vital social services so to more easily kill innocent unarmed black people and pretend they’re heroic for it.

But it’s okay. They’re just targeting… them.

A lot of support for beefed up police and border enforcement comes from the idea that, even if they just use the Constitution as a napkin, at least those on the receiving end are “those” people, not “us”. These goons are on “our” side.

Until they aren’t.

That’s the simple fact about bullies. They are never your allies. They might convince you of that, so you look the other way when they torment others, that those they torment deserve it and should have acted better. But sooner or later, you’re in their sights. And you’re the one who should have acted better. Because all along, you were their victim just as anyone else, only you were also a useful idiot.

A useful idiot who disastrously undermined our vital national document enshrining our rights just because a couple of Spanish-speaking 20-year-olds outside the grocery store made you uncomfortable.

The saying “land of the free because of the brave” is usually referring to the military, but it applies too to those with the courage to swallow any irrational prejudices and understand that our rights and freedoms apply to everyone, even those you’ve been conditioned to distrust and exclude. Because no one is free unless we are all free.

A courage displayed by the great people of Minneapolis these days.

A courage sorely needed in our legislative and judicial branches, as we’re sure as shit not seeing it in the executive.

A courage required for anyone entertaining any ideas about running for or staying in office this year. Because if you’re just going to spout mealy-mouthed concerns about ICE “needing better training” or even praise them, even after all goddamn this, no one needs you, get the fuck out.

Subject 2025

December 31, 2025

So ends another one. Let’s get to it…

January: Pass Interference

– My poor country
– Holy crap, the Commanders are in the NFC Championship game! Superbowl perhaps?
– Oooh, no, nope, got squished by Eagles.
– It’s official. The Orange Thing once again occupies the White House. With a vengeance.
– Also, Nazi salute
– Remembering
– Gulf of what now?!

February: Inventory Check

– Everything right now is just so… stupid
– Let’s all point and laugh at anyone who actually thought the Skipping Dipshit who bought Twitter was some sort of free speech warrior
– He’s sending in goons to tear apart vital government agencies…
– …and what everyone is most offended about is that these goons are young. Oy.
– The entities that are supposed to protect or counter all this are just… letting it happen.
– Chiefs fell apart this time in Man Bowl.
– Sometimes we all miss red flags. That’s life. It’s okay.

March: Cloture

– Holy shit, that’s three years in a row now Disney/Pixar didn’t win Best Animated Feature!
– WTF?! Let Mahmoud Khalil go, you fucking shitbags!
– Lunar eclipse
– Are Schumer and Dems going to stand up in the slightest to Orange Thing admin?
– Maybe…?
– Can we at the very least step back from the brink…?
– Nope. They caved again.

April: Lemon Cake

– SHINY BAG
– Ovechkin’s 895th goal!
– Not even penguins are spared from tariffs.
– More college students snatched away for speaking up for Palestine.
– Suspected “illegal immmigrants” getting whisked to concentration camp in El Salvador
– Hey, that’s my Senator going to El Salvador personally to see about a captive Marylander
– Glad someone is being brave

May: Carbonated Fruit

– Stop acting like your transphobic bullshit is about protecting kids
– I’m the meaning of life!
– Oh, shit, do I have a pinched nerve again?
– I can still bring what I usually bring
– Final Fantasy 12

June: Five Judges

– No Kings!
– Just say NO to the Orange Thing!
– No one is coming to your birthday parade, Orange Thing. We’re all protesting everywhere else!
– You did good, New York.
– Supreme Court: “Birthright citizenship? Children’s academic freedom? Haha, fuck all that!”

July: Single Point of Contact

– Don’t cede American identity to MAGA
– What do you mean Colbert is cancelled?!
– Yeah… do it, South Park…

August: Traceable

– Got some new responsibilities.
– Oh, shit, I fucked up.
– Get out of DC, National Guard!
– Shouldn’t have to worry about the event being safe.

September: Least

– I got it in one! Wordle is my starting word!
– The Right: “How dare you say Kirk was anything less than a saint!”
– Also the Right: “Let’s kill the homeless.”
– Kimmel gets cancelled because he so much as mentioned the whole mess.
– Backlash brings him right back.
– Hey, take note, backlash gets shit done.
– See You Later, Bob Carpenter!

October: Debts

– Oh, Dems aren’t caving this time on shutdown.
– Hmm, Commanders aren’t as good this time. Too many injuries.
– The revolution will be ribbited.
– No Kings!
– Oh, swell, now he’s tearing down parts of the White House. For a ballroom.
– It’s about goddamn time.

November: Reprieve

– Apples
– Oh, God. Poor Blue Jays.
– Blue wave! Mamdani! Spanberger!
– Okay, now they’ve caved.
– His already abundantly clear close relationship with Epstein is still more abundantly clear.
– Oven trouble

December: Snow Monarch

– Fancy party is fancy
– A lot to do before holiday break…
– Done!
– I guess I wasn’t invited to participate this time.
– Brownies, cookies, and gingerbread cake
– Isn’t a standing rib roast supposed to… stand?
– Twenty years!
– Zootopia 2

Ugh. Just… ugh. Whether what’s happening to this country or my own personal life getting in the way of doing more interesting things so I’m not straining my brain to remember anything good to add to this recap… ugh.

Alright, ball in Times Square, hovering over the unlit 2026. It has every indication of being out of the frying pan and into the fire, but I guess there’s no other way out of the frying pan. Bring it on.

This Is Eight Mine Fortress – 20 Years Later

December 28, 2025

“Welcome. This is Eight Mine Fortress. I’m Katrina, and I wrote every single thing on this happy little website. I like it. Serves as a nice depository for my old written gems, my new ones, and whatever the hell else I stick on here. Look around. You’ll figure it out.”

With those words, twenty years ago today, this site launched. A long-planned project, as well as, with Sure, Why Not? here, wanting to join in the 2005 blog craze at the time.

Followed by two decades of my ranting and rambling. Regular features like Mmmm Candy Hearts and the New Years Eve recaps. NYRA happenings. Travel. Holiday gripes. Philosophical questions.

And, of course, these three:

I talked already about how it feels to have a blog that’s been running so long, the habits and inspirations, the capturing of past events in real time, the self-consciousness and cringe of old posts.

So for today, I’ve selected twenty posts from over the past twenty years to highlight, some that I consider favorites and/or classics. Let’s just go oldest to newest. Let’s begin with…

Moving – January 18, 2006
Not quite a month into this thing. Flanked by numerous other posts of varying degrees of mediocre, I wrote this one about my experience of assisting the staffing agency I was with in moving offices, between assignments. This involved desk after desk, shelf after shelf, of fitting things that probably mostly could have been thrown away into the exponentially increasing number of boxes all labeled Random Crap. You know. You’ve likely moved somewhere before. And, of course, reading back on this after other harrowing moving experiences now like “you don’t know the half of it yet”.

The Little Caterpillar – May 25, 2006
It’s the fascinating tale of… that time I was waiting at a bus stop watching and attempting to rescue a caterpillar hellbent on trying to cross the street.

A Tale of Two Newarks – March 11, 2008
My earliest detailed travel story. About the day I drove up to New York City for a NYRA event, passing through Newark, DE on the way and seeing the Thermo Fisher distribution center building because I’m a dork, and later on the way home, getting turned around on the New Jersey Turnpike just outside Newark airport.

Final Boss Defeated – June 27, 2011
Another one about a NYRA event. Or, actually, the end result of one. That previous November, on 2010 midterm election day, we rallied in front of the Supreme Court during the oral arguments of Brown v EMA, a case attempting to ban video games for under-18s (and when I first met Kathleen). This post is when the verdict came in, 7-2 against the ban, listing some notable reactions I’d found to it that day. In rereading it, my gaze lingered on the words “Scalia’s great majority opinion”. Weird.

Oddities – August 23, 2011
What I thought, at my Rockville, MD workplace at the time, was just something heavy being wheeled down the hallway turned out to be a 5.8 earthquake. The ensuing mockery from Californians brought up other less common natural phenomena in this area about which regions where it is common also mock us.

About Last Night – May 14, 2013
Another NYRA/youth rights victory, the biggest one of all. The initial hearing and then two readings later, Takoma Park, MD officially lowered the voting age to 16, the first in the US to do so. Followed later by others. The events are recounted in this post.

How to Be Religious – June 6, 2013
I’ve always been annoyed from both sides, from the ultra religious pushing their bullshit onto everyone else, to the anti-religious reducing every global issue to the existence of theists. I have a number of posts on this topic, but for the list, I’ll go with this one, a nice clear list of what is good and bad when religion inspires someone. The more you know. I revisited this after the Charlie Hebdo attack in January 2015.

Offend the Offensive – July 28, 2014
“I’m offended by people who get offended.” Well, then, sounds to me like you’re still offended, jackass. You know the ones. They claim some emotional and social superiority because racial slurs (or any other slights against anyone who isn’t a cis-het white male) don’t bother them. What losers. This post was about just that.

Death by Paper Cut – April 28, 2015
The eternal shame in life and afterlife should a paper cut be the cause of death.

The Actual Innocence – December 14, 2017
On how our society has a gross and warped view of “childhood innocence”. It actually means how children just got here in the world and thus haven’t had much opportunity to be guilty of any real wrongdoing, but it gets twisted into “cute ignorance that adults find pleasing”.

False Alarm – January 31, 2018
Remember in 2018 when there was all this concern that North Korea was going to launch missiles at us? Then there was some systems malfunction in Hawaii, triggering alarms that missiles were actually incoming, causing a whole panic. It was fine, but I happened to spot an article about how the FCC was giving Hawaii shit about it happening. So I laid out in this piece just that happening, and then how the other states responded… when Hawaii finally snapped.

Nothing but a Number and a Distraction – March 21, 2018
Age restrictions aren’t a solution to social problems. They are in themselves a social problem. This post is about just that, how creating or strengthening enforcement of an age restriction in response to a societal problem is at best a cop out, a useless change so to pretend you’ve accomplished something, while leaving any true root causes untouched. I went over it again more specifically about school shootings a couple weeks later after the March for Our Lives.

This Is Not Who We Are – July 4, 2018
With the Orange Thing occupying the White House after promoting the most hateful ideas, what does that say about the country that elected him? Perhaps feeds a lot of stereotypes. Perhaps erases the rest of us. So I made this declaration, that “This is NOT who we are!”, to those who saw him and thought this is fine and cool. With an acknowledgement of the reactionary backlash to this statement. A less optimistic sequel to this piece appeared earlier this year.

Midterminated – November 30, 2018
This post about the 2018 midterms was so much fun to make, with all the graphics and reactions, even if many of the results detailed were frustrating. I wish I’d been able to make something like it for 2020 and 2022, whereas the 2024 one took a different approach. This was when, halfway through the Orange Thing’s first term, we were to “grab him by the midterms”. And now we’re facing the same situation in a little over ten months from now.

Imperfect and Incomplete – April 21, 2019
This entry on this list is for this Easter Sunday post but also kind of for the ones earlier that same week, for which this one was a culmination. There were posts earlier that week on various topics, such as deadly locations around the world, extraordinary animals, and some weird trees. I concluded Holy Week with this optimistic post about the wonders of the universe and, well, of Brookside Gardens on that lovely spring day.

One Pursued – October 31, 2019
A play off the slogan “One Pursuit” they had been using a couple years earlier, my timeline in tweets of the Washington Nationals’ 2019 season, beginning with them playing like shit and then suddenly getting really good, complete with dugout dances and Baby Shark, right up through a World Series Game 7 win at 11:50pm Eastern on October 30, 2019. A year and a half after the Caps won the Stanley Cup.

Core Values – January 25, 2020
This post came about when sometime before I’d been tasked with writing about my experience with NYRA, for its own 20th anniversary in 2018. It never got posted, and it took me a while to write, and a lot I cut out as being extraneous and perhaps suited for its own piece. That piece did end up getting posted, and I called it Core Values. And it was cross posted to the NYRA blog. I’d made attempts before to square the need for a cause to be pragmatic with remaining loyal to the underlying philosophy that drives it, the ridiculous “moderate versus radical” dichotomy, a source of many fights back in my days with the organization. Thinking back on my time for the original piece I was writing, some of those feelings were brought up again, so I wrote about it in this one.

A Big Sphere – January 1, 2024
This one was originally a Facebook status that I expanded into an optimistic New Year’s Day post, similar perhaps to Imperfect and Incomplete above. How we are living in an age where, thanks to technology and other advances, our once scattered species has come back together again.

Easter: The Final Battle – March 31, 2024
Another Easter post on this list, this time rethinking the story of Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection, suggesting there’s more to the story than is known/told. And tying it in with my own celebration of Easter as about freedom from religious restriction, from the very concept of sin itself.

Pride and Groom – May 4, 2025
And finally, from this past year, my long-awaited defense of LGBTQ+ youth and blasting the ridiculous “grooming” accusations leveled at those who support them. And how anti-youth bigotry allows for the persecution of LGBTQ+ youth.

Who Are We?

July 4, 2025

Don’t cede American identity to MAGA.

In the past few months of this administration, we’ve watched our institutions compromised and dismantled, our fellow residents abducted for being on the “wrong” side of an imaginary line, the programs relied on as the difference between life and death at home and abroad torn apart. They want the United States of America broken down and remade in their image, where those who don’t fit that image do not belong.

Don’t let them.

I’m American. The United States of America is where I am from, where I was born, where I live and work. Where I intend to stay. Sure, it’s an Evil Empire, built on white supremacy and slavery and indigenous genocide, etc. But it’s my home. To me and 360 million others.

The Orange Thing and his MAGA ilk don’t get to decide who does and does not count as “American”. Their racism, xenophobia, and all-around sadistic cruelty does not define us.

I said this already seven years ago, when I declared that “this is not who we are”. And I stand by it. But, yikes, given the current situation, it’s rather bittersweet now.

That was during the first term, attained through some electoral college fuckery despite popular vote loss. The will of the people prevailed in 2020 and the Orange Thing was out. Then he came back, with the popular vote win this time.

If this is not who we are, so many sure did choose it. We protest what’s happening as a defense of democracy, but, let’s be real here, a free and fair election got us here. It was less informed voters who carried him right back into the White House, probably going on name recognition and having gotten stuck listening to Fox News while in a waiting room. People we’ve been encouraging to cast their ballot, to make their voice heard, only for them to see what their vote has wrought. So why should they bother? How can democracy survive that, when our fellow voters are either actively choosing fascism or don’t even know what that word means and just wanted cheaper eggs or, God help us, believed his claims of being anti-war?

Maybe there’s some hope in a widespread “oh shit, we fucked up” among the electorate, that subsequent elections this year have shown a sharp turn away from the Orange Thing and his right wing goons. If it holds. If established officials don’t kneecap it with “opposition” candidates who don’t actually inspire anyone or promise any real positive change or correction to course while inhibiting those who do. Zohran Mamdani just demolished Andrew Cuomo in the New York City mayoral primary, so that’s delicious and promising. But even many elected officials in his same party who should be getting behind him have instead hesitated or outright blasted him with the exact racist and Islamophobic garbage you get from the Orange Thing and his MAGA dipshits. So maybe that’s who they are.

Maybe this is the true test of who we are. The Orange Thing has the Republican Party wrapped around his finger, and, it seems, plenty of Democrats haven’t shown to be much better or at all potent at countering it other than measly words wedged in a donation request text message. So regardless of how informed the voters may be, how informative the mainstream news, sometimes these are just the choices we’re stuck with: a Republican candidate whose mouth spends the better part of the day somewhere below the Orange Thing’s waist, or a Democrat who raises their fist in defiance while breathlessly assuring voters of agreement with the Republican candidate’s bigotries. Democrats like that got the nomination in the first place after dumping a truckload of money into the primary to wipe out any challengers, presenting themselves as the only sensible candidate as others are frozen out from getting their messages out there. This failed spectacularly for Andrew Cuomo. It must fail for all others like him. That is our test.

Our test before came in the 2018 midterms, which saw a major change in the balance of power but disappointing failures to do so in other areas, where voters should have known better given what was happening. It may be similar next year.

So who are we, that we elected these current leaders and all those before who set the stage for where we are now? They put ridiculous idiots on the Supreme Court, who then overturn Roe v Wade among a load of other bullshit decisions, all of which is shown to be wildly unpopular. Yet those who made it happen keep winning elections.

I guess I don’t have an answer for that, nothing beyond again pointing out we’re a big diverse country beyond the Orange Thing’s favored white conservatives. The people too many think of when they think of a “typical” American, erasing all the rest of us.

Maybe I just have more of what we aren’t. Our national identity is not defined by the White House occupant, whoever it is at any given time. Hell, maybe, for all the words spilled above, we aren’t our election results. We’re a few hundred million people who call these states and territories home. Who want to be seen and counted as part of this place.

United by the Constitution.

Emboldened by the Declaration of Independence.

We enter the 250th year under the greatest threat ever from within, with the desperate hope that this nation of the people, by the people, for the people, won’t soon perish from the earth.

Pride and Groom

May 4, 2025

Throughout human history, LGBTQ+ people have been existing and minding their business. They’re told they must love and partner with someone of the opposite sex, and they’re like “nah, I’ll take a same sex one”. They’re told they are the gender assigned at birth, and they’re like “nah, I’m a different one”. They’re like “I’m into same and different gender” or “I’m into no one of any gender“. Breaking the confines of the imaginary social construct that is gender. Badass.

And a wedge issue.

A library might host a drag queen reading a story to children. Then that library gets death threats.

JK Rowling was once a beloved author with a massive fandom and goodwill that most would give all of their limbs for. Then she decided to throw all that away because she’d rather be a transphobic piece of shit.

Are schoolchildren subjected to gender reassignment procedures at the school nurse’s office? Of course not, that’s absurd. So absurd that the Orange Thing sure enough spouted that claim on the campaign trail last year.

And we push back on all that. The lies. The hate. The idea that whether someone’s pronouns “match” what’s in their pants is anyone’s business, let alone a reason to exclude or vilify someone.

But what about the children, they say? Surely we can’t have children finding out about this stuff and getting any ideas that they might not be the gender assigned at birth.

After all, doesn’t all this homophobic and transphobic garbage become totally fine and acceptable as long as they pretend the real goal is to protect children, that they focus on children, on protecting them from “sexualization”, from “grooming”?

What is grooming?

Grooming refers to the practice of gaining a child’s trust and undermining their trust in others for the purpose of abusing them. They are manipulated into trusting someone who seeks to take advantage of them, and they are left with lasting mental health issues, among other things being made to feel it was their own fault and having lost their ability to trust others at all.

So, naturally, reactionary dipshits are weaponizing this concept as a means of curtailing youth and LGBTQ+ rights, by claiming that affirming a trans child’s identity is somehow in itself an act of sexual abuse, of “grooming”, rather than genuine support.

Which, I don’t know, kind of feels a bit manipulative and like a form of grooming in and of itself?

Oh, but it’s out of concern, right? There’s no such thing as a trans child, they say. If a child is trans, it’s only because their parents or other adults have made them to be. Really they’re the ones protecting the child’s rights then, from this “gender ideology” being “forced” upon them.

That’s funny. Even if we pretend for a moment any of that nonsense is true, where the hell are any of these people literally any other time parents or other adults are forcing a child into something?

And that’s obviously not what they believe. In fact, if the parents in these cases were forcing this on their children, I doubt these people would have much problem with it. With a trans adult, yeah, these people are still shitty about it, but at the end of the day, they might have to concede that as an adult it’s their own life and business. But a child coming out as trans, freely, confidently, with support from loved ones? That’s what’s terrifying.

What about the grooming? What about children being manipulated and coerced by a malevolent adult who seeks to take advantage of them to satisfy their own questionable intentions? Or at the very least being primed to be more vulnerable to such a predator?

Well…
Continue reading “Pride and Groom”

Mmmm, Candy Hearts 19

February 14, 2025

“XOXO”

Tic-tac-toe?

“CUTIE”

Aw thanks… oh, wait, you were talking about yourself, little candy heart? Awkward.

Another Valentine’s Day is upon us. The romantically involved make sure to be especially involved today, in order to maintain said involvement. And why not? Doesn’t hurt to do nice things for each other.

What does hurt are the, well, not-nice things.

Sometimes relationships (romantic and otherwise) turn bad, or maybe they were bad from the start. It might not have been obvious at first, or perhaps obvious to everyone except the one involved in it, but it became clear before long… this person you’re with is treating you like shit and you don’t deserve it.

So you get out. And you look back and wonder… how on earth did you not see it? How could you have been so clueless? Of course this person was terrible. There were so many red flags, and you missed them all.

Maybe you have others in your life who saw those red flags and tried to warn you. Maybe if you had listened to them earlier you’d have saved yourself so much grief, so much hurt, so much lost time. Maybe they are thinking this. While they might seem sympathetic to you now, they are secretly (or openly) wondering “if you’d just listened to me, you idiot…”. And you feel more and more ashamed.

How could you have let this happen? How didn’t you see it? Are you just not that bright?

I’ve got three words for you.

Fuck. That. Shit.

Interesting how the abusive partner is out of the picture at this point but the shame and anguish remain.

It may be tricky to advise people on how to spot relationship toxicity in such a way that doesn’t imply “and if you stay despite this, you’re a dumbass”. We want to believe we have more control than we do, that we can avoid pitfalls if we just make all the right moves and not make mistakes, if we know the signs and act accordingly.

But that is not real life. While for sure there are things one can watch out for and avoid, all in all there is no immunity to this. These things happen. Being in love can make those red flags invisible.

In fact, if anyone is in fact getting on their high horse like “I told you they were bad news but you didn’t leave!”, this too is abusive behavior. They’re more interested in elevating themself than being supportive.

They deserve to get whacked a few times with a tire iron, right there alongside the abusive partner and anyone who decides to frame all this as some sort of life learning experience.

You know who would never shame you for not leaving a bad relationship sooner?

That’s right…

“LOVE U”

What is it about the letter U that I should love?

“HUG ME”

Will do. With my teeth.

Arguments and Failed Attempts to Fly

January 24, 2025

Two years ago today, my dad died.

The days that followed I was reeling with anger and approximately 37 other indescribable feelings and traits, such that I voluntarily went back to work after only two days of bereavement leave mostly just for something else to pay attention to, shocking my coworkers with my unexpectedly early return and with occasional remarks like “yeah, I’d have taken care of that sooner but my stupid dad had to go and die”, leading to me getting self-conscious that I wasn’t “performing grief” correctly.

In the time since, as events personal and global unfolded, there was getting used to that he wasn’t around anymore to offer whatever probably-terrible take he had about things. I might think to remark to him about something, perhaps to gripe about the Nationals (in fact, my very last text message to him was bemoaning that Trea Turner went to the Phillies), and then remember. That time is over. Other than standing over his grave and saying “so anyway Juan Soto went to the Yankees because of course he did”.

Among all that, one thought has kept coming back to me. I’ve thought back, over all the years of my life, all the things he’d ever said he wanted to do someday. Much of it he gave up on long ago. Others he would still have liked but circumstances caused him to give up much hope of it.

But now. None of it would ever happen. He reached his end.

Along with the huge loss itself, that a major piece of life is suddenly just… not there anymore, comes that even greater awareness of mortality.

So much he had wanted to do, and so little of it ever happened. Of what I knew about anyway.

How much can any of us hope to accomplish all we hope to someday, regardless of circumstances or feasibility?

The common saying is that one must “live life to the fullest”. Which is of course a bullshit sentiment. And the ghosts agree.

My dad did not “live life to the fullest” or “cherish every moment” or “make every day count”, whatever the hell any of that even means. He had goals over the years, and some of them he achieved, many he did not. What was he doing instead? Nothing special. Just… life. Daily routine, just like everyone else. But it’s one often filled with guilt and shame, because it’s just routine, nothing special. We create impossible standards for a Life Well Lived, which is a surefire way to make sure no one feels they’ve amounted to anything.

Even so, we like to feel like there’s some purpose to our lives, that our brief time in this universe made some sort of difference. Beyond what’s already necessarily the case anyway, like all of our interactions with others throughout that life, all the biological and chemical processes our bodies contained and performed.

We feel like there has to be more. We go about our lives and run into trouble and obstacles. Our relationships sour. Our dreams go unfulfilled or, if they are fulfilled, aren’t as great as we thought. There must be something better. There must be a reason. Because if not, why bother with anything? If whatever hard won joy or success is so fleeting or ultimately overrated?

Kind of makes you want to just stay in bed all day eating cookies.

Maybe the surest way to waste one’s life is to worry about wasting it.

I don’t want to say “it’s the little things that matter” or anything to that effect, since that’s ridiculous, too. As is any nonsense about being “happy”. Maybe it’s just a matter of claiming the good stuff when and where you can, since life, for all its precious brevity, will make even that a challenge.

My dad did often list a handful of things he was always proud of, including:

1. He was able to quit smoking.

2. He correctly guessed that it was Maggie who shot Mr. Burns.

I guess it’s something.