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Cake day: June 13th, 2024

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  • Things you can do yourself. Select those that are right for you:

    • Most trips are <3 miles. Use a bike or e-bike where it makes sense, or public transportation if it’s built out.
    • Take steps to avoid the consumer-for-the sake-of-consuming mindset. Get things secondhand or from buy nothing groups.
    • Eat less meat. Vegetarian dishes can be flavorful. Even a grilled cheese and some soup is delicious. Miso also has that essential umami kick. As a reformed “need meat with every meal” type person, it’s doable, you just have to rewire your mind and gut. It’s a thing you can do to both save you and your environment.
    • Donate to climate advocacy groups and call your political representatives.
    • Recycle - it’s oddly getting a bad rap these days, because we’re the downstream consumer to the folks designing and making crap, but we still also have responsibility in the chain.
    • Avoid things like fast fashion - buy things with sustainability built in and leave intense shipping logistics out.
    • compost and grow your own food if you have the space and time. Less transport and typically better for you. At the very least, you’ll know what you’re eating.
    • purchase personal carbon offsets from reputable organizations
    • consider investing in a heat pump and insulated glass windows when it’s time to switch the older ones out if you have a home.
    • Avoid buying items that are simply packaged water. Try to buy concentrated items and then add water at the point of use. Soaps, detergents, bottled water, flavored drinks are easy ones.
    • Use a smart thermostat and set it between recommended standards for your region. You can always wear slippers / more layers to warm up when slightly cold, or run fans, hydrate and wear light clothes when a little warm.
    • Procure preventive maintenance on big ticket items and use your built in paid warranties. So many pieces of equipment fail due to some minor thing that could have been addressed earlier.
    • encourage others, evangelize sustainability. Political movements need to meet certain thresholds to turn into action.






  • 4/5 - coming of age film about a scrawny, scrappy poor kid. Opening shot is a fight against other kids in a trailer park to level up in status. Or maybe even earlier to my mom standing there pregnant, and then her mom punching her in the stomach upon finding out her teen daughter, though as much as she had tried to shut her away, had somehow gotten herself knocked up. And then following the resulting trail of blood. Regardless, it starts out by getting the shit kicked out of me a few times.

    Sprinkle in the multiple times I almost died, slipping on wet cement that had just been coated with muriatic acid, that time a demented kid tightened a noose around my neck, the countless nights I’d wake gasping for air with my chest heaving because we had a cat urine and roach problem and couldn’t afford an inhaler. That one time two girls thought it would be funny to see how long they could hold me underwater, at a pool, of course unsupervised, and only stopping just so as things faded to black and all I heard was this saint of a kid saying to them “Stop! He’s dying!” Nary a parent in sight.

    The sex, the drugs the drinking all at 13.

    The divorce, the handoffs from family member to family member moving each year. Finally settling into a mountain town in rural Appalachia. Having a town general store purveyor of goods taking me under his wing. Learning a passion for the outdoors and skiing.

    Going mudding in a Honda Accord with a bunch of other delinquents. Going streaking after we got stuck. Flash forward to a court house and nearly going to jail for vandalism and other stupid teenage mistakes.

    Going back to the area I was raised and finding that everyone had 2 kids and a drinking problem…or worse.

    Flash forward to the struggles of leaving my past behind. Failing out of university after 9/11. Constantly watching those two planes smash onto the twin towers in a dark dormitory until it was etched into mind.

    And then more struggle to leave my past behind as I sought out a soulmate. Dropping out of the Peace Corps due to it.

    Quitting my job and finding a love for cycling. Being given a dog who hated wheels, but even she eventually fell in love with cycling. The smartest, best damn dog in the world.

    Nearly dying another handful of times. Motorcycle in the mountain roads of Tennessee, more motorcycle, sliding in the snow with a big rig behind, that time wrecking it the one dumbass time I went for a joyride after drinks. Being on the 3rd floor of a house as it collapsed on a rainy day in high winds and walking out mostly unscathed.

    Discovering a love for travel. Still trying to escape my past, but working on it, like really really working on it. I try not to die anymore.

    Could call it something like “The dirtbag’s field guide to survival, part one.”




    1. Amendment to get rid of gerrymandering. Districts will be drawn up by statistical models that emphasize culture, values, demographics of the district. Every citizen also gets a vote by mail ballot.
    2. Amendment to implement sensible gun control. Not ban guns, as people need some way to fight back against a tyrannical government. And some people truly do need to keep themselves safe from wildlife, crime, etc.
    3. Amendment to bring in Puerto Rico and Washington DC as states in the union. If Texas wants to split into East TX and West TX, I’m fine with that too.
    4. Law to require 2 years voluntary service. Meals, food, housing, recreational stipend will be provided. Similar to CCC, you’ll learn a trade and build up a camaraderie that will last a lifetime. As a citizen in a country, you should have skin in the game, it gives you a sense of ownership . Bonus is infrastructure gets kept up and senior citizens are cared for. Volunteer groups can be unionized.
    5. Gas tax goes up significantly. Seriously, Europe pays $8/gallon. Why the hell do we need to keep it at $3? Tax will pay to build out much needed public transportation and sustainable energy grid infrastructure. We need trains people. If China can do it in a country much more mountainous than ours, we can do it.
    6. Wealth tax. Anything over $100 million earnings is taxed progressively at 70% anything above $1B is taxed at 90%. Tax on unrealized gains, but can be balanced by unrealized losses.
    7. Abolish tax exempt status for churches. You can be nonprofit, but you will still be taxed. No more slave owning mega-pastors.
    8. Amendment to overturn Citizens United. Political contributions will be limited. You want your money to be speech? Sure, do it the old fashioned way and convince enough people to align with your cause.
    9. Federal Healthcare for everyone damnit! What the hell is wrong with us!?
    10. Give more power back to the states. There will be some cohesive things that we all agree upon that keep the tether of our society together, but New York is not Oklahoma is not Colorado is not Alabama. States should have more power to govern themselves. Think of it like Catalonia in Spain or Scotland in UK. States are the test beds of democracy.

    Would I get a second term? Hell no. I’m a change agent technocrat. People like a showman. There’s a reason city planners are divorced from mayors at the municipal level. I come in like a four mile freight train then I go home. Some populist demagogue would probably replace me.


  • South US, but in the mountains where it is much cooler. SO is vegetarian and I am an omnivore but skew vegetarian, especially at home. I leave heated things out to cool from hot to warm before putting in the fridge. About an hour, maybe 2 when I am being forgetful. Anything over that is taking risk. I’ve had a few nasty bouts of food poisoning before so I skew on the safe side.

    My mom on the other hand grew up very differently. Lives by the beach in a much warmer more humid climate. She’ll leave moist dump cakes unrefrigerated for days. She’s more homeopathic than me, says the spices have been used for ages to preserve food. She’s not wrong, but you have to throw in a lot more cinnamon than what our Americanized palate is accustomed to. We are very careful about what we eat when we visit, and even then, small bites to try first.








    • cut off the top and bottom
    • on the bottom, look for the pith lines, usually 5 of them. Cut down from there all the way to the bottom, so that you have 5 slices. Remember your affirmations, you don’t have to be perfect even if everyone wants you to be. If you’re a pro you can not cut all the way through to the top and simply starfish it out
    • Take a slice and a wooden spoon. Beat the ever living daylights out of the back of the slice, the delicious rubies will go flying everywhere…hopefully into the bowl you put underneath where you’re thwacking. Or, if you don’t have an anger management disorder, just tap the backs gently, ymmv.

  • Here’s what I think I know, some may be wrong:

    • It’s in the land of the Stans
    • It has steppes, high mountains and high mountain deserts
    • it has a bit of the Fergana valley, one of the fertile and most contentious valleys in the world
    • the president is a dictator, but not as bad as Uzbekistan
    • y’all make a giant dish that you all share and scoop with your hands
    • you have a fermented sheep or goat milk drink
    • you’re on the Silk Road and had one of the most populated cities in the world at one point
    • some if the Turkic people moved to Turkey and Hungary, which is why those countries exist
    • you really weren’t organized as a country before the USSR rolled in, more of loose group of regional leaders (I hate the term warlord)
    • y’all are known for your horses