The Beginning

Well it's July and I'm getting ready to head back to Iowa to wrap up a bunch of business, so I figured I'd better get this narrative back on track.  I've spent the time recovering, along with clearing underbrush (endless blackberry), maintaining the woodpile, cleaning and repairing the roof, doing house maintenance, tending the vegetable gardens, and performing household chores while Frau works.

As I said in the prior entry, in April LL Spurge and  PM 3D gave me notice in April, three months earlier than I'd intended to give them for an end-of-August departure.  The June deadline stole two months from us, so Boy and I were scrambling.  Spurge and 3D had been planning this since last year.  The routine for 10 years had been that 3D sent me a new lease in August, and I ignored it.  We spent the vast bulk of our time there as a monthly rental.  This time, though, instead of the lease running through the following August, 3D inserted a March termination date.  When she gave me the notice in April, she noted the lease had already expired and they were being generous by allowing us to stay through June.  I quickly added Spurge and 3D to the list of assholes who will meet untimely ends should I ever be diagnosed with an unfortunate condition, and I started working the problem.

First I moved a bunch of stuff back into the storage units, which was disappointing but freed up most of two rooms for staging items for what I knew would be a multi-destination move.  Then I got on the issue of what to do with Boy.  Fortunately, a problem arose that allowed me to solve two in one stroke.  Li'l Sis informed me it was no longer possible to insure the farmhouse without someone living there.  I ran it past Boy, and he agreed to move there.  I knew I would have to get there and clean it out first as I knew it was a mess.  That proved a gross understatement.

I left 7 May and drove straight through (Yes, straight through.  Until I had the farmhouse ready and was out of Rottenwood Depths, I knew I did not have the leisure for overnight travel.) and arrived at the farm on 8 May.  For a lesser mortal, what I found there would have been soul-destroying.  The outbuildings were all gone, except for the metal bones of the boxcar and the rubble pile of the old garage lying on its former contents.  Antique implements were standing around, and everything was decaying from exposure.

Inside the house was worse, much worse.  The place was stuffed full of stuff, piles of nonsense everywhere, with little pathways through it all in the dining room, living room, and parlor.  Grandma's desk was buried in piles of financial and medical records.  Everything in the basement was rotting.  The main bedroom upstairs that Sperm Donor had used reeked of piss because he had become incontinent and regularly soaked the mattress.  He'd wrecked Mom's mattress in the parlor in a similar fashion.  And there were dead mice (deados) everywhere.  Li'l Sis had simply had the exterminators put poison stations everywhere, and there were desiccated carcasses practically carpeting the place.  Hells, there were two in the washing machine.

We had a 20-yard Dumpster scheduled, but it wasn't there yet, so I went to work on what I could.  I cleared a small space in the living room to set up a cot, then I cleaned the kitchen so there was a place to store and prepare food.  I cleared out the office area and other spaces by dragging all the papers out west of the house to where the chicken coop once was and burning them.  Several yards of it.  The Dumpster arrived, and I filled it rapidly.  The refrigerator hadn't been cleaned since it was moved in, so I cleared all the ancient food out of it and disinfected it.  I dumped the smelly mattresses so I could start airing the place out.  Hauled a carload of clothes to Mom's nursing home in Wellman (At least they had treated her nicely, which was more than you could say for the fucking asylum in Lone Tree.).  And everywhere there were deados and poison stations that had to go.  I filled the Dumpster, wrapped up a couple of other things, and on 22 May headed back.  Again I drove straight through and arrived on 23 May.

Then things got complicated.

The Long and Winding Road

Well here it is, 13 December, Friday the 13th, and I'm just about to the end of this mess of a year.  25,000 miles on the box truck I picked up in June, thousands more on the car, and another 1,000+ by air.

It started in April.  I'd been planning on ditching out this year and rejoining Frau in Washington State.  Target date was August since that was the month we'd moved in and that was what had been the "annual date" even though we'd been on a month-to-month for years.  But Landlord Spurge and Property Manager Debby Does Deseret had apparently been plotting, and in April 3D told me I had until the end of June.  So I had to scramble and find places for Boy and Le Crap and then get myself hauled the 1,000 miles to Frau.

And I did it.  Nearly turned myself into a crater, but I did it.  Now I'm sitting in Salt Lake City wrapping up some business, Then I'll run the leg to Washington one more time.  Then I'll settle in for a long, Winter's nap.  And I'll tell this story serially over the next few months.  Buckle up, it's been a bumpy ride.

Back To The Actual Road

Well this has been a year from Hell, a substantial percentage of it spent on the road.  In April I was informed we had to be out of the Cottonwood Heights place by the end of June.  I started arranging moving Boy to the Iowa farm and me to Washington to finally rejoin the wife.  This resulted in seven, cross-country road trips between Utah and Iowa and two between Utah and Washington, with the ultimate monster, Washington to Iowa and back, coming up some time in November.  It's been a real bite in the pills, and I have many tales to tell that I shall spin out in the dark, wet Winter to come.

The Religious-Hate-Ure of the Theocratic Republic of Utardistan Strikes Again

Back in January, the Utah Bar offered an online CLE for that pesky and farcical "professionalism and civility" credit.  Since I didn't have to go anywhere, and since it was free, I signed up.  The program was our glorious governor Spencer Cox (aka Spence Buddy and Dick With Ears) and another governor bemoaning the incivility in current political discourse and solemnly advising us to be nicer.  What it really amounted to was a big promo for the status quo.  "Be nice.  Don't get angry.  Keep things safe and sedate."  That works well enough for those at the top of the hill and they treat each other more or less civilly because they don't want to mess up their cushy sinecures.  How they treat those down the hill though is another matter.  As I've pointed out with law firms, the tower firms treat the rest of us like something they just stepped in, and they do so with impudence because no one will enforce any behavioral rules against them.  That's the way it is across the entire system.  So if you want the people at the top of the hill to stop pissing on you and calling it rain, civility is not going to get you there.  You're going to have kick in some doors and then kick in some heads.  Sorry Friends of Gandhi (FOG, because that's what you're walking around in), but Stokely Carmichael was right: For nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience, and the US and the rest of the crapitalist plutocracies have none.

And this last week Governor DWE demonstrated yet again just how easy it is to control a flock of sheep.   At the request of the Fools on the Hill (which, like the RethugliKKKon Party in this this state, is really just an arm of the LDS Church), he signed into law a ban on all alcohol over 80 proof.  Say goodbye to all whiskey and a lot of other things.  This of course is religious legislation aimed straight at all of us who aren't delightsome.  It's part of Larry H. Christ's Parent's Empowered program, which I got to see up close and personal at its inception as a member of the study group at Dan Jones Research (Which is another arm of LDS fascism.  Dan Jones was at Utah State when I was there, a geography professor whose specialty was finding new and interesting ways to lie with statistics.  It got to be too much even for the goose-steppers running the university, they told him he couldn't do partisan politics on company time, and he left to make a mint ginning up bogus numbers to "support" LDS and RethugliKKKon shit-shoveling.).  It was a deliberate attack on everyone who wasn't ortho-Morm, and this is just an extension.  And they'll get away with it until the Hill-Top Temple is brought low.

 CORRECTION: Finally got my hands on the law, and it's 80%, not 80 proof.  Whiskey is safe.  Governor DWE is still a douche.

More Rubbish From My Alma Maters

As if I needed another Dunning Kruger case to make me question the value of my Utah State diploma, in waltzes (in the Spring 2022 edition of Utah State Magazine) Bliss W. Tew, Class of '78 (majoring in gods know what, probably remedial bugger eating) bitching about USU trying to increase diversity and wondering (Tucker says, "People are asking!") if there isn't a conspiracy because Why Be You (which he apparently also has some abomination of a degree from) is doing something similar, and concluding it must all be the result of Critical Race Theory (even though he knows no more about CRT than any other shrieking, fascist broflake).

Tew is a climate change denier.  And an anti-vaxxer.  And an ammosexual.  And on top of that, he's a John Bircher, which means he's a fascist and a racist (Since my father has been a Bircher for over a half-century, I have some knowledge of the topic.).  So his opinion can't be considered surprising.  But it is disappointing he's walking around with a degree from an institution one of my degrees is from.  And it's even more disappointing that institution platforms mouth-breathing knuckle-draggers whose primary goal is the destruction of American education and democracy.

Then there is the news I got last week.  I attend the Episcopal Church, but I was confirmed Presbyterian (as in what is now Presbyterian Church (USA)) and I keep track of what is going on over there.  A few years ago they revised the Canons to amend the definition of marriage from "the union of a man and a woman" to "the union of two people", basically green-lighting same-sex marriage.  In spite of that I am in no way considering returning for the simple reason the PC(USA) seems to be doing a shitty job of policing the Canons.  For example even in a liberal place like Seattle, University Presbyterian is apparently allowed to have only a limited and questionable adherence to same-sex marriage (It apparently has only a limited and questionable adherence to prima scriptura over sola scriptura as well, but I'll leave that for another day.).

Reich Wingers have been fleeing the PC(USA) for decades, the biggest schism being when the Presbyterian Church in America split to become a major player in the Reformed, Religio-Fascist TULIP Patch.  About 10 years ago another group split over LGBTQ+ rights and formed the Evangelical Covenant Order of Presbyterians (ECO, since renamed Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians but retaining the acronym because why not, I guess).  I guess I have to give these folks some credit for packing their bigotry off elsewhere rather than being crypto-bigots in a denomination they shouldn't be in.

Anyway, I learned last week an old friend jumped that fence.  He was a classmate at Michigan Law, nice guy, Grateful Dead/Rolling Stones fanatic, very liberal.  Practiced law here and then in Seattle, and then a few years ago dumped that and went to seminary, becoming a Presbyterian minister.  Came back here and was assistant pastor at First Presbyterian.  Then earlier this year PC(USA) released him, and he went over to ECO.  Makes me wonder just what he was preaching at First Pres since he'd already bought ECO theology while he was there.  It also makes me wonder if my alma maters were actually engaged in education or just in the planting of philosophical time bombs.  Or perhaps they were just miserably inept at identifying and defusing the time bombs that were already there.  While not bothering to do much education either.

More "Progress" At USU

 I see they're tearing down Reeder, Greaves, and Moen Halls.  Back in my day they were the "women's cooking dorms", i.e. they were women-only and had kitchens instead of relying on a cafeteria.  It's bad enough they had to go, but the replacement is obscene: expansion of the Business School.  Oh yes, let's expand that shrine to unfettered crapitalism and outright fascism.  They might as well put a 50-foot statue of Ayn Rand on top.  And as if that weren't bad enough, it's going to be yet another monument to the megalomania of Kem C. Gardner, who is treated as yet another business genius when all he did was the standard move of starting with a lot and then piling up a lot more by grifting his way through an endless parade of "real estate developments".

Choir

For those who don't know, I sing in the choir of the Episcopal Cathedral Church of St. Mark here in SLC.  Tenor.  We had our usual two-service gig for Christmas Eve, with the second being the more musically intense.  We finished at 12:30, and I had long since descended into a very bad mood.  Hells I was writing dirty, alternative lyrics to carols in the program from the beginning of the second service.

I felt burned out at the end of the last liturgical calendar in June, but everyone was.  We'd reactivated in May 2021 after the COVID lockdown, then we went straight through the Summer and the entire 2021-22 liturgical year.  13 months straight.  We were all ready for a break.  This time is different.  I've felt this way toward music just once before: late 1989.

Back in the 80s I was very involved in music.  In college because it was my first chance to play regularly with really good musicians.  In law school because I could play with even better musicians, and because music was the only thing that kept me from going up in Rackham with a sniper rifle.  In Salt Lake after law school because it was fun and I wanted to avoid dealing with being on a career path to nowhere.  Things didn't last, though.  First both Connie Brannock and Alta Dustin got screwed by the record companies, and the local rock scene kind of dissolved, leaving only a punk scene still wrapped up in "authenticity" arguments and a pop scene suitable only for ortho-Morms.  The instrumental groups I was in dissolved as well.  I was left with First Unitarian Choir and the Ad Hoc Singers, a Renaissance and Reformation group.  And I was getting tired of both.

The Unitarian choir was decent enough, but we weren't doing anything as exciting as what we'd been doing in the Unitarian choir in Ann Arbor.  More importantly, though, I was tired of the church's namby pamby, middle of the road message.  There were a lot of things that needed calling out, and the entire denomination was disinterested in doing any calling.  With a new wife who wasn't Unitarian and one toddler and a baby on the way, I didn't have time for such things.  I had one foot out the door by the end of 1989.

The Ad Hocs tore themselves apart.  Part of the group wanted to perform more seriously.  Another part had no time for that.  On top of that, my wife joined the group, replacing a soprano who had left, and two of the members decided to be totally toxic toward her and also target me.  And I doubly didn't have time for that shit.  We'd have been gone, but the Ad Hocs broke up first.  And so I found myself outside of any musical group for the first time in over 20 years.  And I thought to myself, "You know, I don't care.  This has stopped being fun."  I did a jam session in April 1990 at the long-gone Blind Pig in Lincoln Park, and that was my last public gig.

For over 27 years.  Until wife talked me into joining the St. Mark's choir for Advent 2017.  It's been pretty good, even with wife off to Washington, and even with the COVID lockdown.  But Christmas Eve the old feeling crept back: This isn't fun anymore.

Part of it is physical.  I probably have a hiatal hernia, although since there's nothing simple that can be done about it, and since this is the United States and we can't have nice things like affordable health care, I'm not going to have it diagnosed until I'm on Medicare.  Let's just say it negatively affects my diaphragm.  But there's also a social aspect.  I've always generally gotten along with everyone, but there's always been something off between me and the tenor and bass sections heads, and that offness is getting offer.  And I have a lot less time for that shit than I did 33 years ago.