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never learning when not to do weird stuff
Friday, May 31 2019
I brought my good camera with me to work today in hopes I would see something worthy of photography in the back field. Unfortunately, the damn butterfly I eventually saw would not hold still and the blue jay on the telephone wire was too fucking far away.
I arrived at work before 7:00am this morning, which was definitely a record. The plan was to be able to leave at 3:00pm, but I hadn't counted on it being the last day of May and there might be a need for me to stick around to support my Electron app as it was used to process some last-minute data arriving before the June 1st deadline. I was eventually able to leave at 4:00pm, and made my customary Friday afternoon visit to the Tibetan Center thrift store on the drive home. (I also stopped at Barnyard Feeds to get a tray of 12 cans of Triumph cat wetfood, this time in beef instead of some sort of customary salmon or ocean fish. A friend had suggested this might help Clarence with absorption and digestion (and it's a crime against veganism in any case).
A little after 6:00pm Alex (the guy I report to at work) called me at home from an otherwise-empty office because he was having touble doing a data import with my Electron app. By then I was two Lagunitas Super Clusters into my Friday night, but I managed to walk him through a successful outcome that didn't require me driving back across the Hudson Fjord. Overall, my Electron app is proving even more reliable than I expected it to. It routinely calculates monetary sums using complicated criteria and gets them correct to the penny. And when someone disagrees with the sums, it's now almost always the case that he and not my app was the one doing something wrong.
One of my favorite YouTube channels is True Crime Loser, and today it clued me in about the crazy case of John Dupont, which I'd somehow missed out on when it actually happened (it coincided with the events of Big Fun, with the actual murder happening shortly after the epic snowstorm of January 1996). But I'm getting ahead of myself. John Dupont was an heir to the Dupont fortune, and so there was never a need for him to do anything himself to maintain a life of absurd luxury. This situation kept him isolated from the people who could've been his peers, and so he never managed to develop basic social skills. As the host of True Crime Loser pointed out, without anyone to tell you "you're a weirdo," you never learn when not to do weird stuff. In the end, all John had was his money, and he substituted it for charm and a winning personality. At first the object of his money-fueled charm offensive was the local police force, which he showered with funding for new toys while allowing the officers to shoot any creatures they wanted to on his sprawling estate. Later he set up a training center for Olympic wrestlers, hoping to be accepted into their world (and become an honorary wrestler, much like he'd become an honorary police officer). That all went well for awhile, but eventually the drinking and cocaine made John into a paranoid old man, which the sycophants around him did nothing to improve. Soon he was digging up the grounds looking for secret tunnels and tearing out the walls looking for passageways. It all culminated with Dupont shooting David Schultz, America's best Olympic wrestler. To me, it's all a cautionary tale about what extreme wealth does to people who don't have any skills. It's a poison, and it harms more than just the rich scion whose soul it never allows to take root. We see it in Donald Trump, whose desperate search for approval and something simulating success has led him to surround himself with grifters who are now working at breakneck speed to hollow out the greatest nation on Planet Earth. I've heard that Donald Trump's father actually was concerned about this eventuality and tried to get young Donald to learn the basics of grit and hard work by making him take up a paper route. Comically, though, the next scene in that story had young Donald flinging newspapers out the back window of a chauffeured limousine. So, yeah, fail.
pictures I managed to take today behind my workplace
A blue jay with wires and tree of heaven.
A fake owl to scare away pigeons.
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