Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

By lunchtime I was thinking: it feels like I'm getting a migraine...and the massive sudden change in weather would back that up...but... I can't have a migraine! I just had one on Friday!

Yeah that's not how it works. I do feel like it's "not my turn yet," though. Hmph.

And yet here I am to tell you that my favorite musician is being threatened by the administrator of the country he and I are both from, for what Springsteen said in the city where I am now.

I refuse to read any more about this but D, who sent me this link, has been updating me since on it. The Boss keeps saying the government of his country is a threat to life and liberty every night on stage and Trump keeps insulting him on Truth Social: apparently now his skin is like a wrinkly prune.

Today D told me that Springsteen and the E Street Band have released an EP of what Bruce said and a few relevant songs from that first gig outside the U.S.

I listened to (most of) it while I was trying to work this afternoon. I'm just so delighted that it was in Manchester, which prides itself on being a city of rebellious and momentous music. (If only the gig had been at the Free Trade Hall instead of Coop Live! but it still makes me think of Bob Dylan and the Sex Pistols...)

I listened to the introduction, some of the lines I'd read about, and then the song and it struck me that "Land of Hope and Dreams" is a song closely connected to Clarence Clemons's death. It couldn't be as good a song as it without stemming from a profound lifelong love that Springsteen talks so movingly about in his autobiography and in Springsteen on Broadway, and that love existed between a Black man and a white man, about whom a Springsteen biographer said "They were these two guys who imagined that if they acted free, then other people would understand better that it was possible to be free."

I thought about the intense and unashamed love between these two men -- a pinnacle of what platonic love between men can be like -- and how annoying that is gonna be to the people who've suddenly realized that Springsteen is "political."

And the song has taken on this whole new life, which I'm glad of even if I'd rather The Big Man got to live a longer life.

I listened to the intro for the other song, I was trying to eat my lunch and I ended up with my eyes closed, unable to do more than listen and breathe. And after talking for a few minutes, he quotes James Baldwin -- "There isn't as much humanity in the world as I'd like. But there's enough" -- and then says "Let's pray." And for some reason, the next track didn't start. And that was the end of that one. So I just sat there, over my bowl of leftovers, imagining this happening a few miles down the road and a few days ago, I felt like I was there.

But suspended in this weird silence that went on for a long time before I realized that something technological had gone wrong.

I read all about his Catholic childhood in his autobiography and recognized a lot of it myself, but neither of us have retained it. Silent prayer isn't his style. Going right in to the next song is. And that's what he did.

I know that D has been reading an internet thread that includes references to "The Cask of Amantillado," so I wasn't that surprised when, as we ate our lunches in companionable quiet, he asked me all of a sudden "What would get you bricked up in a cellar?"

I was like, "My entire personality?"

He had to explain that he meant like what would lure me in there. I was thinking "What about me would make someone want to brick me up in their cellar."

"Oh, lots of things," I said matter-of-factly. Like there's no suspense about this.

The first thing that came to mind is "I have a stack of boxes of all the Lego NASA stuff and you can have them all if you get them out of the basement," like that'd do it. (You can open the payload doors on the space shuttle and there's stuff inside!)

Just that and the ISS and the Saturn V would be enough probably. I'm a simple man.

I'm also a ball of want, I want so many things.

D is like "You know you can just buy the Lego ISS, right."

Around the last mouthful of my food I replied indignantly "Fortunato coulda just bought the amantillado!"

Anyway apparently you can't even buy the Lego Discovery any more. Aww. See, I'd have to just get it from someone's basement! (D helpfully pointed out that Artemis is just a click away.)

I asked my fedi friends this question and I'm so happy I am surrounded by my people.

• my firend who's obsessed with laserdiscs and wants to start a laserdisc museum says "if someone said anything related to laserdiscs and all 'hey i got some cool laserdiscs in the basement yeah keep going back', i am so there. doesn't even have to be 'here's a rare laserdisc' it's just 'hey would you like to see my very common laserdisc' i'd be all YEAH LET'S GO!"
• "oh no, that one would catch me, too. Lego of any kind with 'you can look through it and put it together' would get me, honestly"
• "Listen, I'd do it if they said there was food down there. Like not even fancy food."
• "i think 'do you want to see my cool cellar' might work on me"
• "rocks, plants, weird collections of stuff, a problem to be solved, black raspberries… I feel like it’s a long list and I’m surprised I haven’t been trapped in a wall yet"

One of the things we ask of baseball is, not to dissociate us from the real world or spare us from it, but to give us a break from the otherwise unrelenting awareness of the gap between how the world is and how we want it to be.

So begins what is possibly my favorite piece of baseball writing this year.

Like a lot of us probably, I've been ruminating a lot lately -- as the U.S. election nears, as the days grow darker and colder, as big and small stresses loom -- on the gap between how the world is and how I want it to be.

Baseball is never worse, though, than when it's shoving that gap right into our faces, making it even more stark and obvious and excruciating than it is while we navigate the rest of our day. Right now, Twins baseball is baseball at its very worst.

So in March I said, about cancelling my autorenewal on the MLB TV subscription, "I'm sure I'll go back to it. I don't think a year without watching or listening to baseball will do my (currently already shitty) mental health any good. But I just need to have a lot of feelings first." But after a half-hearted attempt in May had met with the slightest resistance, I never even regretted it again.

It wasn't quite the dreary year of MLB that I'd predicted -- I worried about the superteams, the boringest kind of teams, coming back in the Dodgers and the Yankees, and while the Yankees were certainly way less fun than last year (when they were briefly below .500 for the first time this millennium and their fans acted like the world was ending), the Dodgers are continuing their inability to keep pitchers healthy and there will be no 100-win teams this season. Of course I'd like to think that with no team winning that many, there's no team that needs to lose that many either -- but the poor White Sox had to show me how far from true that is by being literally the worst team in anything we'd recognize as baseball as she is played today. (That they lost to the Tigers, who went from having barely-more-likelihood of going to the playoffs than those pale hose a month ago, to clinching on that night they beat the White Sox for that record number of losses, is a hell of a thing; it's wild having the Twins be the most boring team in the AL Central this year!).

If that last paragraph didn't make any sense to you, don't worry. The tl;dr is that I ended up feeling pretty justified in saving $150 on not paying for a depressing subscription I wouldn't have gotten much use out of.

Hey I was just showing solidarity with the Twins fans in Minnesota who also couldn't watch the games on TV! That was another really dreary part of this baseball season. The most recent episode of Twins podcast Gleeman and the Geek that I listened to this morning featured the eponymous host saying that they'd had a lot of e-mails from people telling them that this podcast was the only way they'd followed the Twins all year, and I am, no exaggeration, among those. And actually that's felt okay, that has been enough.

Back to the perfect baseball article:

In a way, the Twins are already in the playoffs. You can rebel against the impulse toward despair and rage and resentment, if you want, and embrace the fact that everything we really want out of the postseason is already coming to Target Field over the next few days--at bargain-basement prices, to boot.

What makes the playoffs worth pursuing? Why are they the objective of every fan base and every player? ...It's the raising of the stakes of the game that changes it. It's the brightness of the lights and the national attention and the desperation that makes its way onto the field.... Everything matters. In life, hardly anything feels better than knowing you're doing or witnessing something authentically important, and whereas regular-season baseball is always of negotiable importance, the playoffs matter.

All that vividity and nerve-jangling danger is here. The Twins are a daily story everywhere that baseball is discussed, and they'll play on national TV this Saturday against the Orioles. All that's missing is the bunting on the railings.

(This is where my heart breaks, because this was written on Wednesday and this is Saturday and the Twins already lost that first game against the Orioles which means they are officially out of playoff contention. That takes all the sparkle out of the weekend's games, I probably wouldn't watch them if I could, because it's like watching the last month of Obama being president: our guy(s) can't do much and things are only going to get worse from here.)

But the point still stands! What makes the playoffs fun is that they're meaningful, tense, higher-stakes and widely witnessed. I think this phenomenon will be if anything more familiar to my friends who are soccer-football fans, of teams in leagues that have promotion and relegation. Because people don't just talk about and care about who wins; there is due concern given to the bottom of the league table in a way they wouldn't without relegation.

Last winter, Netflix announced they were doing a documentary following the Boston Red Sox during this season, and hosts of the MLB podcast I listen to were a little bit scornful of this: the Red Sox aren't even that good! Whereas I was intrigued and -- they've had an interesting year, just missing the postseason themselves but even if they hadn't -- I'm more likely to watch that than about, I dunno, the Dodgers season this year.

Success gives worse advice than failure because success doesn't know what worked and doesn't have to think about it that much. Maybe another way of saying this is that happy teams are alike -- (almost) everything is gong like it should! -- but each unhappy team is unhappy in its own way. I can't wait to hear about how the Red Sox are unhappy because I do not know!

Back to the article, which does such a great job of articulating who I think is most at fault with the Twins' 2024 season.

The Pohlad family [owners of the Minnesota Twins] has so methodically demoralized their customer base, there's one other vital, joyous ingredient of playoff baseball missing: the crowd.... In the world I want, we could all melt together into this moment, and Target Field [their home ballpark in Minneapolis] would be full all week, because the Twins have earned this quintet of de facto playoff games--for worse, with this month-plus of harrowing collapse, but also for better, with a summer of tremendous baseball.

The untouchable, disinterested owners of the team have set up everyone below them in the chain of command to fail, and as a result, watching even this quasi-playoff week of baseball isn't off to a fun start. In the world I want, the Pohlads would realize that this is all their fault and try hard to ameliorate the problem in the future. In the world we have, a lot of irrevocable damage is already done, and the mountainous beds of money on which that family luxuriates make them partially unaware of and wholly indifferent to the ways they're making the world worse--including this way.

The list of MLB owners who need to sell their teams into public ownership may encompass all of them if you ask me, but there's no doubt that first on that list is John Fisher who has ripped a team away from Oakland to an uncertain future and no fixed address just because he, inheritor of the Gap fortune, thinks his underpants-gnome level plan will make him some more money.

This has been known and remarked upon for the years that Fisher has been indicating that he doesn't care about Oakland and was happy to move the team even with no idea about what that move would actually entail. So for a long time now, people have been reading him for filth. I'm still thinking about something Joe Sheehan said most of a year ago:

The thing about great wealth is that it allows you to define your own life. The destitute, the poor, the great mass in the middle, even people of moderate or considerable success are all, to one degree or another, dependent upon others. I’ve made a nice little career, and the list of people to whom I’m indebted runs deep into three figures. I’ve been knocked around by industry trends and bad luck and outright malice. I have not had complete control, and I doubt very many of you reading this have, either.

The wealthy, though, the .01%, they can chart their path as they wish, their deep reserves serving as both a battering ram to success and a cushion against failure.

As the final season at the Oakland Coliseum drew to a close this Thursday afternoon (note that the writer starts one paragraph: Thursday felt like a playoff game at 1.5x strength; it's not the standings that make a playoff game, it's the vibe!), if MLB fans have learned anything from Oakland in the past few years, it's that owners add nothing to a team and the teams belong to their fans and their cities (or in the case of the Twins a 4- or 5-state area that falls in to the gravity well of Minneapolis/St. Paul) and we deserve better.

I love how V does descriptions for me of wildlife that I can't see.

One of the first things they said to me this morning (and it was a fucking miserable day at work for me so this was particularly welcome) was that there was a flock of long-tailed tits outside, moving so quickly that they couldn't even see what color the little birds were. They said they'd seen long-tailed tits before but never a whole flock of them. So they'd just been standing at the kitchen window watching them zoom around our backyard.

And Saturday, when we were sitting on the patio enjoying the return of sunshine and summery weather (it might have hit 70°F!), they told me there was a hoverfly investigating my shoe to check if it was a flower. Those shoes have lime green trim which we decided might look very vivid and interesting to an insect sensorium.

First thing in the morning, D and I went to the "design consultation" for our phodography from the other week.

Design consultation is the fancy name they give to "we'll actually let you see the photos." I tried hard to get them to do it over Zoom or something so we could all participate because I didn't think MB would be up to another trip and we ended up taking advantage of a cancellation that was so early she wasn't able to get out of bed yet. But they absolutely refused, they're like "oh the experience is part of it..." and I'm like stares in blind but whatever. So D drove us to this random place again and we sat in a room with a big projector and a sofa and cups of tea and watched a slideshow of photos of us and our dog, with the kind of sentimental piano music I associate with these kinds of photo slideshows at funerals. So that was odd, but made me all the happier Gary is still with us.

The photos were, of course, great because Gary is so photogenic he has his own international fan club on social media. And it was lovely to see not just him but all three of us -- individually with him and then all together -- as well.

I'm exactly the kind of mark that people who do dog photography should be on the lookout for: I have an adorable dog, he's old and he nearly died and I'm extremely sentimental about him, and I finally in middle age have the disposable income to spend a silly amount of it on photos of us and our dog. But it wouldn't be a family portrait without him, and when else would we get such a thing?

This was such a part of my upbringing -- I have the most recent one of my parents in my bedroom, a few feet away as I type this -- and I haven't been part of one since the last one we did before my brother died so that was either 19 or 20 years ago. I have a copy of the family photo from that too but I don't have it out.

( my mom being my mom )

Anyway I haven't set foot in a professional photo studio since and I never missed it. If it wasn't for Gary and this silly thing I won on Facebook, I probably never would have again because I didn't want to, I don't have any good associations with it.

But this has made me extra glad to have had this chance to be with my other family, Gary the Wonder Dog and the humans barakta started calling the WonderHouse. So of course I spent ridiculous money on the fancy photos. I'm so happy we're here.

When I asked for nice things the other day, a local person who randomly found me on Mastodon and knew D very slightly for the most random reason sent me a photo of a sign for a local "queer club" that happens once a month.

Also it's in a community centre, not a pub/bar so it doesn't cost anything for attendees and it isn't based around alcohol like so many queer events are. And you don't even have to go In To Town! (Though it's east of my house, and east-west routes are so poorly served by public transport here that I walked to and from, which my ankle did not thank me for last night or this morning!) It wasn't even all white or all people under 35, which is a big deal for queer stuff.

There was an activity, making fabric or paper flags to save at our local pride in August, but there was no compulsion to do it: people could just chat and have tea or biscuits if they wanted.

I made a lot of flags. I can't draw and I like words (see evidence passim), which was quicker work than people painstakingly making art, working on their progress pride flags (there was only one brown and one light blue/gray sharpie, so there was some marker-stealing between the tables), and so on.

Slogans I enflagged:

• give us meds but give us roses too (stolen from a friend's report of a trans protest in London last year); I actually tried to draw some pink roses and some blue bottles of testosterone gel like mine undermeath that

• goblin pride (D calls me a goblin all the time so I feel like I did this on his behalf)

• short king himbo pride (this partly based on a recent conversation where I'd described myself as the himbo garden worker; MB has the knowledge/skills/eyesight, I literally do the heavy lifting, and suchlike chores that are too demanding for her)

• trans disability immigrant solidarity (all written inside a heart), with "no body is illegal" on the other side of that flag; this is a repeat of something I chalked on the ground while protesting a TERF event last year)

After that, a friend of my Mastodon acquaintance called my name as I was leaving, asking if I wanted to go to the pub. I didn't really; it was already late and I'd had a long day and people had been nice (someone said to me at one point, "You have an infectious laugh, has anyone ever told you that?" and I could honestly say that no one has! wild!) but I didn't really know anybody...

But then they said "I've never been to [Erik's old local] before" and I brightened right up. I absolutely wanted to go to the pub. Half a dozen of us did, and we had a very silly fun time. The landlord came out and was his usual warm, charming endearing self. When I said I used to go to the pub quiz all the time, he remembered me, which is pretty impressive considering me and the shifting group of friends I went with were never exactly regulars and weren't the most memorable people. He's getting on -- he told us they've just celebrated 18 years of running this pub. He and his wife are retirement age now but I can't imagine it without him.

Wild to think I was going to the pub quiz in the first half of their time here. It felt very weird to pay with a card there -- I don't know if I'd ever done that before! And now I never do anything else...

My three flags and I got home late enough that it disrupted Gary's routine, oops. But it was such a fun night and I'm so glad to be making a little progress on the seemingly-hopeless goal of meeting new people and replacing the queer community that ghosted me in the last four years.

An empty plastic watering can just fell off the top of the fridge, when no one was in that room, hadn't been for a while, and we hadn't been near the fridge anyway.

I like to make a note of these things in case I ever get a poltergeist.

The last time a mysterious object suddenly appeared - a wristband from an event I hadn't gone to was neatly resting on top of my bedside table - I think it must've just been found under something by the cleaners who I'd forgotten had been here earlier that day.

(I still didn't recognize the discarded wristband, which felt a little weird but not actually inexplicable, considering that my bedroom had had four other relative-strangers living in it at different times since D and MB have had this house...and I do try to keep the room reasonably tidy, I wouldn't be surprised if something like a wristband could remain undetected. Once I lost my headphones for a long time and never did find out where they'd been, they're just something else I discovered on the bedside table when our cleaner had done his excellent work.)

The more I think about it, the more I think a poltergeist would actually have a really terrible time making themselves known in a house that contains a blind person, a dyspraxic hard-of-hearing person, someone with untreated ADHD, and a blind cognitively-impaired dog. Like, anything weird that happens in the house, anything that's in a place it shouldn't be or isn't where it should be, I think we're just going to assume that's because of us and all our shit rather than anything supernatural.

I can't remember if I even said here but D's Christmas present for me was finding out about and arranging for us to go to a Bruce Springsteen concert in Sunderland at the end of this month.

When he told me about this, it felt like a million years away but now that it's May, it's "the end of this month."

Wow.

I'm the one who's been a Springsteen fan since I was three and D has very little idea about what his music is like. So I've been saying I'd educate him, but I hadn't started yet. Finally tonight we commenced, with what I always new was going to be the first lesson: Springsteen on Broadway.

When I first saw that, I described the effect it has on me afterwards: "I cried a lot and by the end of it I felt like my soul had been wrung out, washed clean and replaced better than new."

Being solo and acoustic, Springsteen on Broadway doesn't give you a good idea of what Springsteen's songs famously sound like, but I think it should give a person a pretty good idea of what Springsteen is like and I wanted to start there.

We got two-thirds of the way through it before we wanted to call it a night, it's past my bedtime and after "Born in the U.S.A." I was feeling such heavy feelings and then he starts playing "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out" and I'm like oof... To translate: you're going straight from a song about the misery Vietnam veterans and their loved ones experienced in the aftermath of their time in the war, to a song about a dear friend who died and who Springsteen loves in a way that displays the most wholesome masculinity.

Yeah I need either sleep or more beer after that one-two punch. And it is a school night.

But before I left to have a pee and recycle my empty beer bottle, D wanted to show me what he'd written on Discord:

Fuck, I'm watching "Springsteen on Broadway" on Netflix, and he's just such a good storyteller. He's doing "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out" and telling the story of how he met Clarence Clemons, and there are tears in my eyes.

I knew basically fuck all about Springsteen before I watched this and I think I'm in love with him.

I beamed and gave him a double thumbs-up after I'd read this. I told him is the best reaction I could've hoped for. Exactly this.

I've been in love with D for what feels like a long time but I've thought I was in love with Bruce Springsteen even longer, so I'm delighted to see this connection being made.

The other day, the neighbor girl and her friend were drawing outside with their sidewalk chalk, and MB asked if they could do some rainbows outside our house. One girl said "Yeah, we can do you some rainbows," in exactly the way a builder/handyman would say they can do something you've asked. "And maybe some smiley faces? And maybe stars like on your jacket?" The perfect earnestness of kids that age.

This evening, MB reported after walking Gary that they wry wantedwere out there with new chalk which was enormous. Soon they rang our doorbell to say they've got new chalk and can they draw in front of our house again.

MB went outside for the initial consultation, and ended up running back in to get some watercolor pencils she's not using any more to give to them. She'd talked to them about artists' commissions and what would they like for their labor, so now we're commissioning art in the barter system. They were delighted with the pencils, apparently saying "We can make posters with these!" I already have a poster idea for them.

They've done some amazing rainbows, a big one and a bunch of little ones, and they solemnly told me the next time Gary wanted to go out (he actually didn't, he just stood in the open door learning the source of the (adorable to us, concerning to him) kid noises we'd been hearing) that they had done some and they'd finish the rest later. At that point they had to go inside to have their dinner.

The other day I was interested to read that, at least in the U.S., self-checkout machines may actually get less common in stores.

While self-checkout technology has its theoretical selling points for both consumers and businesses, it mostly isn't living up to expectations. Customers are still queueing. They need store employees to help clear kiosk errors or check their identifications for age-restricted items. Stores still need to have workers on-hand to help them, and to service the machines.

The technology is, in some cases, more trouble than it's worth...

Retailers may continue to rely on the technology, but many aren't putting all their farm-fresh eggs in the self-checkout basket. Instead, they're increasingly giving customers the option to choose between human and machine.

For the customers that do choose to do the labour themselves, there's one thing Andrews believes won't change. However ubiquitous the technology is, and however much consumers get used to using the kiosks, shoppers are likely to find themselves disappointed and frustrated most of the time.

"It was part of a larger experiment in retail in trying to socialise people into using it," he says. Simply, "customers hate it".

I am glad to hear that a mix of human and machines is likely to remain available at checkout because I know some of the customers who not only don't hate it but prefer it: Andrew was always delighted when he could get through a trip to Asda without having to interact with another person at all. The touchscreens and practically-hidden bar code scanners on those self-checkout machines mean I avoid them whenever possible, but the best accessibility comes from having options, because whatever's a nightmare for one person is going to be essential for another.

Almost as soon as I'd read this, I was reading takes on how this phenomenon could apply in other areas. Of course I was thinking about accessibility; people who work in tech were thinking about tech.

Some of those takes overlap; like number one here is "The user is always inexperienced." People who just buy groceries have never scanned groceries as much as someone who's done that job. Also, independence is a myth. They word it differently; this is how I am wording it because some disabled people and groups speaking for them emphasize "independence" and it drives me up a wall, because none of us are independent.

If you scan an item twice, select the wrong payment method, accidentally get charged for a bag when you brought your own, forget to scan your discount card at the right time, or make any other trivial mistake, you are now at the mercy of someone else. When a problem does occur, a staff member has to notice it, come to your aid, figure out what happened, and correct it. You were promised self-service when, in fact, you are so disempowered that you can't troubleshoot or correct a single thing that might go wrong.

This makes me think about the campaigning against closing almost all the train station ticket offices in England. Apart from all the ways those machines are inaccessible, machines contribute to the unnecessary expense of train fares, already a particularly complex racket that is expensive at the best of times and ensures people pay too much when they buy the tickets themselves. You have to be an expert to understand how to buy appropriate, never mind cheapest, fares, sometimes even making an journey regularly doesn't leave people confident in their ability to get the best price and not get treated like an illegal immigrant by the train guards.

The particular disempowerment of waiting for someone who looks sixteen to determine that I'm old enough to buy ibuprofen is something that occurred to me recently. The need for humans to intervene every time the machine thinks you've scanned an item twice when you haven't, doesn't think you've put it in the bagging area when you have, and vice versa means the few staff who are employed expect to be called over for false positives as much as any actual needs. I've been age-verified by people who didn't even seem to glance at me. Trying to split the checkout tasks into those that can be done by shoppers and those that must be done by staff hasn't really proven to be very effective or fun for either group, in tasks that mostly weren't all that fun to begin with at least there's a smooth process when the person who's processing the rest of my groceries is also making one extra gesture when they get to the beer.