You Get What You Vote For

To the people on my timeline still supporting Trump (yeah I see you):

Here’s your guy calling for his very own Kristallnacht. It’s filthy. If you’re still supporting this worthless thug, you should be deeply ashamed of what you’ve allowed yourself to become. If you’re not a complete goose-stepping nazi yet, you should be very concerned with what he’s actually threatening here.

Know this much:

In the end, it won’t matter who you are. You are no safer from these fascists than an immigrant is, or a gay person, or a woman with an ectopic pregnancy. It’s the nature of fascism that sooner or later, for one reason or another, they will come for you, too. It’s what they do.

All the warning signs are there for the world to plainly see. When it happens, blame yourself. You voted for it.

Have a nice day.

Cool Beads

Awhile back I went through my ancient Roman glass phase. I was crazed with it, and I moved a LOT of old glass through this house. Well, that was then. Fast forward to African glass. I've gone through Krobo crazes before -- I just love their big, juicy, hand-painted colors -- but lately I've been out of control. 

I posted these modern pink & greens awhile ago, and have worn them in public twice. It's amazing how many comments I get on these -- but then again, they're rather huge. You really can't miss 'em. 

Anyway, I was hooked. I quickly moved on to some nice antique Krobos I had been hanging on to. I went ahead and put some of those together, and some of them are already listed in the shop. I'll be adding more of these bigger, "standard size" African powder glass beads.

 

But what I've gone completely bonkers over are these smaller krobos. Most of them are big and chunky, but these are much smaller. and they're ADORABLE. 

Anyway, all this stuff is listed in the shop and explained in more detail, origin of the beads, what they are, how old, etc. You can find my stuff here.

It's OK to be OK

I'm averaging 12-15 miles on the bike each night lately, and there have been some nights when I'm hitting 17-20 mile territory. The weather has turned cooler and the sun goes down a little earlier each evening. It's still too hot during the day to ride (for me, anyway), and even though I'm usually awake by 4AM each morning with the dogs (old dogs, old habits, etc) the morning already has its own routine. So, night rides it is, at least for now.

I usually start around dusk and get home well after dark. The other night I was out for nearly two hours, and by the time I got back to my neighborhood, the streets were quiet.

It's hard to square this with the guy I was just a few years ago. As I've said here before, this ain't no recovery blog -- not because I don't value being sober, but because I'm not willing to be a spokesperson for recovery. I've gone down that path before, enough to know that it's a thankless and precarious place to be. I write about it more in the book, and I'm trying to be as candid as possible about all this -- including the fact that I'm not out here posing as some kind of model of successful recovery. I'm doing well right now, and I'll just leave it at that. 

But here are two thing I can rightly point to as accomplishments I'm proud of: 

For four years I've been committed to quitting alcohol for good, and for the last two of those years I've lived a life free of alcohol. I don't think about it much anymore. That's something I would never have thought impossible just a few years ago.  

And I now get regular daily exercise. When I started riding my bike again, it changed how I think about exercise, that it wasn't about achieving some random goal for me, some target weight or miles per hour, but about fun. Now I miss it if I can't hop on my ride and fly somewhere. 

I'm not exactly a poster child for healthy living, lulz, even with the tai chi and the meditation and the visualization and the group therapy, and the bike. Far from it. I still have plenty of other filthy habits, and hopefully I'll get around to ending those before they get around to ending me.  

But in the meantime, I can honestly say just those two factors -- quitting the booze, and riding the bike -- have changed my life in profound ways. I've never been more mentally stable at any point in my life. I lost 34 lbs and it never came back. My BP stabilized. My bloodwork started coming back normal. I slept through the night again. 

I guess my point is that I don't have to be perfect. It's okay that I'm still a work in progress, and that I have a spotty record, it's okay to still have warts. I can have huge areas of my life that need improvement, and still be really happy and relieved that at least, by gawd, I'm not drunk today.

It's enough to just be okay with being okay. 

It's Complicated.

So, I've probably got about 60-70,000 words down on the book (have I mentioned I'm writing a book???) A lot of it is drivel and won't make the final cut, and there are still some big gaps in the narrative, and cosmic leaps that need more explanation in the telling. 

These remaining gaps are the hard parts, and I've been slow about it. But there are reasons those parts haven't been filled in. They're painful. They bring me shame. 

In some cases, it's describing scenes that are just painful to relive -- and trying to do that in a way that conveys why I was feeling what I was feeling in the moment. So much of it was in my own haunted little head. 

In other cases, let's face it, I'm confessing some fairly shameful things about myself. About driving drunk. About drinking on the job. About my family, and things that happened when I was a kid, and that I've never talked about.  

I'm being pretty tough on all of us, it's true, but I'm also trying to be fair in the telling of it. Somewhere in all of this, I'm trying to find the love that must be there, somewhere, surely. We made mistakes, did dumb things, did horrible things. But we had our triumphs, too. We did a few things right, too. 

I like to think we found redemption in our time, and in our way. But the telling of it is... well, it's complicated.

    

The only downside to having a blog...

 

...is that somebody has to write the goddamn thing. 

In Which My Bead Business Booms.

 I've been stringing beads for three years, and NOW suddenly I've been discovered. A bunch of sales the last few weeks, which is great, don't get me wrong, WE LOVE SALES. But it's always a little hard to part with something I made, like I made this, so it's my baby or something. 

But then I remember that beads are expensive, at least the ones I buy, and unless I want to sink my own personal fortune into the exotic bead trade, I'd better actually... well, trade a few. My own personal fortune can't afford them without regular infusions of seed-bead money. 

Off they go then, to another nice lady in California. Apparently I'm single-handedly launching the "baby krobo" craze that's currently gripping the West coast.

There's more in the shop! 

  

Letting Go of My Emotional Support Beads

There’s often a bittersweet moment when some of my old beads find a buyer. By “old beads” I mean not just actual antiquities, but also strands that I’ve always really liked, but which hadn’t immediately sailed off the shelves ten minutes after I listed them with shouts for more, MORE! (Tho this has actually happened.)  

No, I’m talking about pieces that have been with me awhile. 

Once I list an item for sale, I typically put it away and forget about it until it’s summoned through the magic of Etsy.  Sometimes it’s a week. Sometimes it’s a five hundred billion years.

 

But every so often I’ll encounter a piece I haven’t seen in a year or longer, and it’s always like bumping into an old friend. I’ll inspect the connections, make sure the crimps haven’t slipped, that sort of thing. Every so often one of them will see daylight if I wear it somewhere. I figure it never hurts to advertise, and I’m surprised at the number of people who will comment on some of it — sometimes even favorably, lulz. 

This 3-strand set is one such item. 

From the Catalog: 

"This beautiful strand of antique mixed clay Aja Chevron beads are rare and hard to find, as distinguished from Venetian glass, and still very structurally durable at their current age and prior use. These beads were made sometime in the 1700s in Venice, Italy and traded in Wes Africa. These are 4 layers of glass that were hand cut and polished to create the beautiful chevron design. Some beads have minor pitting and small chips, but this only adds to the beauty of their very old vintage age." 

Such is my madness that I concur. 

These were among my first forays into old beads. They were a bit outside my comfort zone price wise for the time, but I just had to have them. Something about the colors and the history and the oldee-age-y-antique feel of them just captivated me. This was during Covid, in that surreal and nightmarish period after my parents died, when it felt putting beads on a string was the only thing carrying me through the hours of the day: one bead, one minute at a time. .

I was smitten with these beads from the minute they arrived, and I’ve loved them ever since. I have no idea why beads, and some beads in particular, affect me this way, and I’ve stopped asking. My therapist mumbled something once about random associations and dopamine triggers, but whatever. 

Now, happy-sadly, these lovelies are off to their next home, to a discerning buyer with not only excellent taste in craftsmanship and design (ahem), but also a discerning eye for the insanely collectable bead market (who knew!?) I’ll just add, they got them for a steal. 

Off then my darlings, off with my authentic and wonderfully age-patina’d antique clay Aja Chevron beads! May you bring much joy.

 

 

Today's Cool Beads: Tiny Trades & Antique Chevrons

I haven't had a bead post in awhile. Here are a few things I've been working on. First up are these very cool small trade beads, including antique Venetian glass chevron beads and African sand cast painted glass. 

 

These small kobo-style sand cast beads from Ghana are hard to find in this size. I like the fruity (ahem) pastel colors, so I made a whole separate strand with just those. The necklace below sold on Etsy within a matter of hours, so I may get some more of these while they last. 

Beads like this were made in Italy, Africa and elsewhere and were traded as currency along the major trade routes of Europe for hundreds of years. 

These aren't that old, but the Venetian chevron beads included in the first piece are vintage, most likely from mid-20th century. 

My Wild and Completely Uninformed Speculations on the Trump Shooting

I'm not prone to conspiracy theories, and not inclined to repeat them. But I can't quite shake this idea that's been nagging at the back of my mind for awhile now. I'm not sure why the thought popped into my head, exactly, as it isn't anything I've specifically read, or that I've seen put to words in just so many words. 

But here's a question: 

What if the Trump shooting was organized by parties in his camp who knew he wasn't competent to finish the campaign much less be president, but also knew he wouldn't be able to step down because without the presidency he's very possibly looking at prison time?  

It's outlandish. Crazy talk, I know. But it would explain a few things, like why the shooter had a history at least nominal Trump supporter, and whose family I believe may have had Trump flags and guns and paraphernalia everywhere. It can be presumed that they were, at some point at least, Trump supporters.  

Most likely this has already been covered extensively elsewhere, and I'm revealing just how insular I've become. 

But given that Trump can't really even string two cogent sentences together anymore, and that more and more "respectable people" (including a growing number of Republicans) are starting to notice. It could be that the big money propping up his campaign are having a wee bit of buyer's remorse. And by "wee bit" I mean pissing their pants, and pissed off about it. 

At the same time, Trump has very few options now but to see this thing to the bitter end and pray to Orange Jeezus that he can pull it out of the nose dive.  Not only is he possibly looking at prison, but his circle of enablers is shrinking. He has few friends left now. Rudy is bankrupt and hounding him for money. Half his former entourage have either done jail time, or turned for the prosecution. Even his own daughter is trying to gracefully keep daylight between them, at least publicly.

They can't just dump him and embrace, say, a Desantis. Trump's cult won't stand for it. They're stuck with him. But if something tragic were to happen to Trump, the party could get on with killing off abortion for good and siphoning off money to the 1%. Trump would be their martyr. 

I'm just saying it doesn't sound entirely crazy to me that someone, somewhere in his camp may have decided to cut their losses and welcome in whomever would fill the sudden, and convenient, power vacuum. The Heritage Foundation could still push through their Project 2025 class project. 

And, not to put too fine a point on it, but there's precious little new information or reporting coming out on this attempt on a former president's life, even one as feckless as Trump's. 

I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing that they've tamped it down. I don't know the circumstances for why they feel silence is the most prudent option. 

I'm just saying that it's... weird. 

Blog Update: Now with TAGS!

Not these tags.

Just a quick housekeeping update. In response to your relentless griping, I have finally updated tags for this dumb blog.  

This means if you're here mainly for the beads, Dear Reader, you can simply click on "Cool Beads" from the menu on the right under "What I Blog About" and it will bring up only those posts involving my cool beads. 

Or, if you're just here for my witty and insightful political commentary, just hit "Shitty Politics," and it will likewise take you there. 

"Current View" is a compendium of my deep thoughts on wherever or whatever I am at the moment -- even if my fat ass is nowhere and doing nothing. 

"Retired" is where I'm chronicling my retirement journey, lulz, such as it is, and on the flip side of that is "Worst Job EVER," which is where I'm storing my bile and PTSD from worst -- and happily LAST job I'll ever have. 

Anyway, look around and let me know if I've missed anything.