Category: whatever

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Aikido, Covid, Cons, Etc

As a follow-up to the Covid post, I am supposed to participate in an Aikido seminar in 3 weekends. I question whether I will really be up to it. In Aikido, once you are of the “dan” ranks (black belts) you are expected to attend two seminars per year. This is a big thing in the art. You go somewhere, usually another dojo, and a high-ranking teacher from somewhere else leads class for a weekend. Usually it is a full day of practice on Saturday and then Sunday morning. It is exhausting but fun. It is important to expose yourself to other ideas in the art, as well as create and maintain relationships as part of the greater Aikido community.

The last few years there have been very few seminars, due mostly to dojo closings resulting from the pandemic.

Anyway, I honestly don’t know if I will have enough fuel in the tank to do this. It seems like a lot of time, but it will be here before I know it. Right now I am about 55% well. I did not have any of the drastic respiratory problems that can come with Covid, but the fatigue is real. I’d say the same if I was recovering from the flu.

I had been feeling almost…normal…about going to events. For example, gaming conventions. Cons are well known as great places to get sick. I have a badge for the next North Texas RPG Con. Now I am rethinking whether I even want to go. I will have lost a week of health and fun activity do this particular illness. I don’t know that I really want to roll the dice a gaming con. Or, if I go to this Aikido seminar, what am I likely to pick up there? Flu? Some other Covid variant? Who knows.

Now, I can’t live my life in fear of getting sick. I understand that. But it is something to consider.

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Covid

Well, after all this time we finally ended up with Covid.

I was going to write a lost about it, but honestly I just don’t really care right now. I just want to get well, and for my wife to get well, and move forward. Fuck this shit.

 

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Oddities

A few months ago we ventured down to the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in Dallas to check out the Oddities & Curiosities Expo.

I’ll start by saying this is not really my “tribe.” I knew that going in. I prefer the nerd stuff. Happening simultaneously, and unknown to us,  was Fan Expo Dallas in another of the huge areas at the convention center, which is closer but still not really a direct hit on my nerd/fandom target.

When we got down to the convention center is was early in the day and already the place was getting packed. No biggie. I just chilled and found us some parking.

As we walked over the the venue the variety of humans was impressive. For the Oddities Expo you had the weirdoes with all the piercings, lots of tats, black clothing, etc. I say “weirdos” only in the positive sense. I appreciate a harmless weirdo enjoying their thing. Side by side with what I can only call pseudo-goth-horror-weirdos were the cosplayers there for the Fan Expo. Looking for a dude with a beard dressed up as Little Bo Peep or whatever the current anime trend is? We got you covered.

Cosplay is fine by me. People create amazing things.

I support it when people get together to share their interests. I had a good time. I was kinda hoping the Oddities and Curiosities might be a bit more varied.  It is mostly stuff like taxidermy (seriously), horror-inspired gruesome art and knick-knacks, etc. Again, just not my thing. It’s like the New Jim Rose Circus blew up in there. Body horror, mutilation, whatever. I feel like a lot of the vendors were just selling shit they ordered from a Chinese factory. However, a lot were in fact selling stuff they had made themselves, and that’s cool. We found on vendor who was selling her own art, which featured some very beautiful colors and really stood out in the sea of disturbing stuff. We bought a small print which is, in fact, quite beautiful.

But again, people should 100% follow their instincts on this stuff, because I’d rather have a neighbor with a house full of stuffed raccoons and a bone through their nose than a conservative republican who hates everyone that has a personality or any joy in their lives.

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Alabama Trip

We just got back from a week-long road trip. First to Louisiana to see an uncle and cousins, the over to Dothan, Alabama, to see my dads’s twin brother. I hadn’t seen that brother in 16 years. Last saw him at my dad’s funeral. A lot has happened in those 16 years to keep everyone busy, but that’s still way too long to go without seeing someone. From my observation I’d say he’s in the early stages of dementia right now. Not too bad, but I’ve seen this before and I think I know what is coming.

It’s weird the things you think about as you get older and the previous generations are almost all gone. A lot of wishful thinking. Being there with my uncle and my two cousins, I couldn’t help but think that my grandmother would be very happy that we were all together, even for a short time. I would love to believe that my dad somehow knows I went to see his brother.

It sucks that families are so spread out. Maybe it was better when people didn’t move far from home and continued to live, suffocated (haha), in small communities where there is some continuity of life and sense of connectedness. Sitting here in the Dallas area, with my parent both dead, my wife and I have no family life at all here.  We have each other. We have friends. This is where our life is, but for me there is a sense of aloneness now that my parents are gone.

I’d not been to Alabama since I was about 13 or 14, when we drove from Dallas to Florida on vacation. Beautiful land. I found the people there welcoming. On the way home we went through Selma, where we drove over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where cops beat the shit out of civil rights marchers in 1965. A good reminder of who the law actually works for.

Honestly, between Dallas and Dothan there isn’t really a lot to see along the I-20 route.

The trip made me appreciate Texas’s own Buc-ees, where you can stop and refuel, get a breakfast taco at any time of the day and some reasonably good coffee, and use a restroom clean enough to eat in. Traveling on a lot of roads most restrooms look like recent murder scenes. I always wonder how the employees can even stand to use them. They have to use them too, right?

Yeah, this is kind of a rambling post.

We rented a Ford Expedition for the trip. Our own cars would be considered small-ish SUVs. Mazda CX-5s.  The Expedition was really nice on the road. While it didn’t get very good gas milage, the massive tank allowed to go nearly 600 miles on one tank of gas. The seats were wide and comfortable. I wouldn’t want to own one. They are expensive, too big to really fit in our garage, and the insurance on one would be a lot more than I want to pay, but as a rental for vacation I liked it a lot.

It was good to get out of town for a few days and see my family. It is now Sunday, and I still have Monday and Tuesday off to chill and get refreshed.