NOTE: Comments fubared again. There is an emergency comments link, here.
There was something by the back fence that kept the dog’s attention. Since there’s a slightly loose board I kept calling him back, lest he go into the neighbor’s yard - which he never does, really. He’s not a runner. But your attitude towards your dog’s tendency to stray is always directly influenced by your experience with your previous dog.
At the end of the night he left the area reluctantly, making canine calculations: well, there might be some really good squirrel shite here, but there is warmth and kibble and a soft bed inside. A toss-up, really.
The next day my wife asked me if I could use AI to identify a flower in her garden. What? Don’t you now the Latin name of everything you planted? But she hadn’t planted it. It had announced itself at first as a weed, but later blossomed in a lovely fashion, identical to many plants you find in the woods by the creek, or in people’s yards. I went over, bent down, took a picture, and found a possum the size of a wildebeest.
It was playing dead, and let me just say it was born for the role. Magnificent performance, top-notch greasepaint. Rictus sneer, ripped side, matted with blood - if you’d rewritten Julius Caesar so he gets up in the last act to deliver a soliloquy, you’d hire this guy’s make-up artist.
Sigh. Well. I hate handling dead things when they are pliable. We had a big rabbit on the front area a few weeks ago, and it was heavy. Droopy. Sodden with death. Revolting. The good news here: stiff as a brick. I used the shovel to put it in a grocery bag, then used the handles to put the bag in a trash bag. This somehow minimizes the whole handling-dead-things sensations, and he went into the trash so he can be cremated in a few days. I don’t know if he just died of old age back there, or was quietly dispatched by Birch in an opportune thrill-kill moment.
That was one highlight of the day. The other was spending no money at all. When you’re retired you note such things: how about that, didn’t part with a penny. We were taken out to lunch by our financial advisors. They wanted to celebrate my retirement, and show us where things were for the future, now that I was no longer, you know, getting a paycheck - one of those small details that affects your cash flow. So, retiree, how does it feel?
I described the two phases I think all retirees go through - and I should note that I don’t consider myself retired. I consider myself having quit an untenable job position and trusted the rest of my life to the various vagaries of the market, and things I can create to pay the bills. I told the self-dramatizing story of the Pencils, and how I hit the road in a mood of high emotion, and to my surprise I got seriously verklempt and couldn’t speak for a while.
Odd. But not. The first phase is feeling freedom and release, and the second phase, for some, is missing an attachment. Unless you really hated your old life down to the pith of your marrow, of course. It was the sense of having a place to go, of belonging to downtown and a building and the people there, and my long long tenure with an institution that had been my objective since I was in high school. I had managed to shed all that going into the severance, but many connections in your life have an organic nature, and the tendrils find each other through the gap and grow together again. Not as strong or as thick. But the bond renews. Nothing you can do with it, though, or about it. It’s just there.
My favorite part of the meal was when one of the FinPlan folk asked the waitress to hold the bacon, and I said “but give it to me.” The waitress said absolutely and brought a small metal bowl of chopped bacon. When we got to the part of the conversation about selling the house I turned all my attention to the bowl, and thought “I am stress-eating bacon. That cannot be good. On the other hand it is excellent bacon.” And it was.
Rain. Cold. Bleak. Two walks with Birch in the woods between showers. He drank three times from the creek, that cold delicious pure water. I wonder if next year he will ever think of it and realize it has been a long time since he drank from that stream, or, if he will just be a dog and never think about it until he finds himself there again, and remembers: this is good. I’m happy I am here again.
He’s on the chair next to me now, sleeping, curled up against the cold.
We are where we are and it is what it is. And so the day concludes.
More of the motel-postcard animations. The first one sets up the scenario, and the AI's confusion. If you ask it to make the lady dive in the water, it does so, but it ignores what she's standing upon.
Her pose seems to minic not real life, but neon motel signs that show a woman diving.
Well, let's try that again, give it some more time, and OH MY GOD WHAT HAPPENED TO HER
This Howard Johnson tableau, an attempt to animate a postcard, turned out nice. I found this on a retro subreddit, where the comments were all saying "yeah dad is calling his bookie to assure him he can cover the bet and mom's on anti-depressants and one of the kids is gay" because you just can't have a happy family without conjuring a raft of pathologies. Granted, your host has made many of the bones in his professional skeleton having sport with the old idealized image, but my natural reaction to these things is not to convince myself everyone is really miserable and lying to everyone. I'm more inclined to think that everyone is actually okay and the kids feel loved and safe.
I was trying to add a little breeze and perhaps a pedestrian to this shot for a Curtis Hotel "Small Things" video, hit "Auto Enhance," and hoooo boy
Tried to add sunset and neon lights to this restaurant postcard, but it just put a guy outside who walks indoors.
That's enough of that for a while.
Ok, Gerter, let's see if you can incriminate yourself within 10 seconds of Lance opening the interview:
There's a lot going on here, and I really, really want to know more about Penguin Fraud. Solution here.
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Oh, why not. Helps pad out the day. I lost enthusiasm for this project when the songs just seemed so banal, but perhaps I can find one among the bottom 50 that stands out.
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Bohannon was a devout Christian and dedicated his album Dance Your Ass Off to "God, my master, savior and Jesus Christ". The album also included a disclaimer that "Dance Your Ass Off is not used in the sense of profanity."
Glad we settled that.
That'll do! Cuban money awaits, and there's a full column at the Substack for people who've paid, and once again I thank you. I am working on many ways to make it even better in 2026. See you Monday.
