My grandfather was one of those angry Baptists. You probably know the type. The kind whose dogmas were concocted long ago in a cauldron of accumulated rage, secreted by a people bitterly resentful over the fact that they lost the war and can no longer legally own Black people as slaves. A brain seemingly composed of Chick Tract papier-mâché. With the characteristic (and obligatory) personal shitlist longer than the King James Bible, and a Jesus of unsullied Germanic European descent who spoke with rural Tennessee drawl and carried a Glock in one hand and a Chick-fil-A sandwich in the other.
In other words, he was one of these.
Over the Thanksgiving weekend, I learned that his former home and property on Vancouver Island had recently been purchased by some Catholic religious order, to be repurposed as a monastery. Catholics were not número uno on Grandpa’s shitlist (it doesn’t take much imagination to correctly guess who was), but they were definitely in the top ten somewhere. I found something instantly gratifying about the fact that a demographic he denounced as the Spawn of Satan are soon going to living at his old house and praying there. Serves him right for his lifetime of shameless over-the-top bigotry. The only thing that would top that was if the building was going to be converted to a Turkish bathhouse, or if the Catholic order that purchased it was this one…
Droids that no one will have the hots for. Except maybe a few fetishistic machinosexual types. There is little doubt in my mind such people exist. I’ve seen some pretty weird shit.
I formerly worked in the Internet business in addition to spending the last two years doing everything under the sun online because of that microscopic Ghatanothoa. Coding React modules was my stress-baking. One would think attending a lecture in a classroom where the instructor is two hours away in another city shouldn’t feel weird. Yet it does. Just a tad. For some reason.
I shall be returning to school this fall to formally train in the medical sciences. The scope of what I’ve been doing these last couple of years has revolved around this line of work, so it seems like a natural fit. At first I appreciated the fact that I still had a job to do regardless of whether or not a provincewide COVID-19 lockdown was in effect, but along the way I had the pleasure of working with some actual professionals in the field, finding myself greatly admiring the fact that their culture values things like compassion and lovingkindness. A complete about-face from the vicious cutthroat slash-and-burn world of information technology.
My former boss in Toronto had an original A.Y. Jackson as part of her office décor, but an entire canoe soundly owns that shit.
Don’t get me wrong, I love building web apps. But to me, building an app has always been more of an endeavour than a job. Something one willfully devotes a great deal of time and elbow grease to simply because doing so provides joy and contentment, like a vintage Harley Davidson being restored in the garage. The presence of a corporate manager constantly breathing down my neck about how the Harley must be street-legal by a particular date always killed the joy for me. It felt like being told I have only three minutes to get my rocks off during a sexual encounter.
Are we men or are we rabbits?
Unfortunately, our health care system is in shambles. A lot of essential medical personnel have either retired early or entered a different line of work. Not just because of the stress of dealing with the pandemic (which is taxing enough on its own), but also because of the psychotic behaviour of certain misguided souls who get all their medical information from Karen from Facebook and react to any request to get vaccinated as if it’s a demand that they cut off their penis. We all know the type…
However, I’m certainly no stranger to people exhibiting abnormal ways of thinking driven by fetishized superstitions and old wives’ tales. The formative years of my childhood were spent listening to my grandfather proclaim young-earth creationism the Truth with a capital T, denouncing those geologists who have actually studied the earth and heartily beg to differ as harlots of Satan (his arguably disturbing obsession with what consenting gay men choose to do with their own genitals warrants a separate blog post). A decade or so later, my mother found instant validation for her hatred of my teenage self’s favourite bands in then-current conspiracy theories about satanic backmasking, and would hear nothing of her validation being built on a pile of sensationalist horseshit that was designed to exploit the ignorance of white suburban mothers and scare them into giving more money to the church. This is to say nothing of the fact that I used to work for somebody who eventually went insane and stabbed a guy. In part because she fell for that silly old li(n)e about God having a plan for her life. Thus I’m pretty sure I can handle whatever the cultists throw at me. I’ve been told (recently) that I have the patience of a saint.
Five and ¾ Senses 