Surprise!

Family can be a pain in the ass, but it is the best thing in the world. Whichever way your family is constructed, I hope it’s filled with people you love and have a connection with.

We (my family) took a trip up to Washington to surprise my mom for her 70th birthday. It was our son’s first time flying, which has its own set of specific complications, but all of that went smoothly. It turns out that I did a lot of unnecessary worrying in the lead up to the trip. Our little dude is autistic, and you don’t know how he’ll react to new a situation or experience until he goes through it. Not knowing how he would react once he got inside that giant flying tube started to give me a bit of anxiety as we closed in on our travel date. When it came down to it and he had to park his skinny butt in that Southwest airlines’ economy seat, he was cool as a cucumber.  

My brother and sister-in-law played hosts to our clan of four. There are six of them, plus a cat and two dogs, so it’s no small task to add four more people to the house, but they were marvelous. We had some laughs and made some memories. Kicking it with them and seeing our kids hang out together was the highlight of this trip. Hats off to them for doing all the heavy lifting for the surprise party and opening up their home to us and my mom’s Baby Boomer party crew.

The party went off without a hitch. My mom was beside herself with shock when she saw us there among her friends and my brother’s family. The boomers arrived on time and left early, but we kept the party rolling deep into the night.

Family can be a pain in the ass, and the pain in the ass with my family is that I live so far away from them.  We don’t get to see each other often enough, once a year maybe, so the time that we got to spend together for this life event is the stuff of core memories and lifelong joy. These things are the best things in life.

Deregulation + Corporate Greed = A Toxic Disaster

February 2023 hit society with some heavy shit: The one-year anniversary of the war in Ukraine, a couple of massive earthquakes in Turkey that killed forty-one thousand people, a train derailment in Ohio that led to one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history, and a couple of mass shootings here to keep a bad thing going. Lives at various stages of living upended and ruined.

I’m stuck on this Norfolk Southern train derailment in Ohio. It’s like the dirty lovechild of the Flint water crisis and the Love Canal toxic waste disaster. Erin Brockovich is even on the case. The government let the people of East Palestine down twofold. First, under the Trump administration, it was bought out by lobbyists who wanted deregulation on safety measures specific to railway transportation so that they could save money. Then, Congress, at Biden’s behest, passed an eleventh-hour bill last December that made it illegal for rail workers to strike. No paid sick leave for some of the hardest working blue-collar folk in the country.

Let’s run this down real quick; remove safety regulations for transportation companies, like Norfolk Southern, so the trains they put on tracks that sometimes carry toxic chemicals, like vinyl chloride, are less safe; staff your trains with overworked and dissatisfied employees. What could go wrong?

I guess around 1,000 train derailments occur every year, and ones that involve toxic chemicals are rare, blah, blah, blah. There were several more this month after East Palestine, including one that involved another Norfolk Southern train. The issue with even one out of every thousand annual train derailments occurring with toxic chemicals is that the ramifications of this shit last for generations. We don’t know the entire spectrum of negative physical effects these disasters have on people until years later, and what about the psychological effects?

Weather Balloons and Other UFOs

With all of the heartbreaking and stressful shit going on in the world, it makes sense that the U.S. government was quick to kill any notions that it had fighter jets shoot down alien aircraft. They claim that these previously unidentified flying objects were eventually identified to be types of recreational weather balloons. However, I have my doubts.

Remember, we can’t trust the government. Under no circumstances can they reveal that those balloons they shot down earlier this month were extraterrestrial. Not now, at least, and probably not ever, except, unless, they feel the need to act preemptively because they believe that the public is going to find out anyway.  

Is full disclosure on its way? It would be the most incredible thing we’ve all ever experienced. I’ve seen a lot of shit in my humble 41 years of living, but nothing that would shred the fabric of society’s spiritual corners quite like this.

“Beware the ides of March,” right?