Dog Ear
July 10, 2025
t’s a societal/sexual thing – we all really want some Japanese semi-dominatrix like Marie Kondo to force us to get rid of all our stuff. “No, mistress, please! Not my exorcise stuff in the garage!” “All of it! To the curb, worm!” Really, in a way, she is right. We tend to keep too much shit. And if the first use of the internet is porn, the second is consumerism. No longer do we have to walk to the market, buy something impractical, and carry it all the way back to our farm. Now it’s one simple click. Across our culture, […]
July 3, 2025
o you may not have noticed (or cared) that I have not been writing up any DOG EAR pieces for the last few weeks. I’ve been very busy with three distinct crises. One of them was termites; we had evidence that they’d swarmed in our garage and so we had to get barriers (i.e. poisons) injected into all our baseboards. This meant that all furniture along the walls had to be moved. And we have a lot of books. Shelves and stacks of them. For this, we’d ordered a pod placed out on our driveway to put all the books […]
June 12, 2025
ound out that our 1949 bungalow has termites. Not bad, but worrying. We’re not going to just tent and gas (that only is good for a few years). Rather, we’re going to treat, which means injecting shit into the baseboards to keep them at bay. Also, they’ll climb under the house and put poison barriers around all the supports. Fine and good, right? However, to get AT the baseboards, they need to get TO the baseboards. The problem there is that we read a lot of books and have bought a lot of DVDs (yes, I know, old school, right?). […]
June 5, 2025
never understood tattoos for years. I finally got a bit of insight following a Becky Chamber’s book (I don’t remember the title) where one of the characters is a tattoo artist. It was noted (and I’m going from memory here) that tattoos shouldn’t just be a cute picture or a Japanese letter you know nothing about; a tattoo should be something of meaning from your past, or something that guides you into the future. And that’s the thing I’d missed; meaning. While I don’t have a tattoo, I do have my own things like that. I keep items that have […]
May 29, 2025
We don’t need no education! -Pink Floyd (The Wall) Yes you do; you just used a double-negative! -Moss (The IT Crowd) here seems to be a discouraging trend in modern America, the idea that college and education is overrated, that plumbers own boats and liberal arts students own debt, that native intelligence is more than enough to get through life happy, wealthy and successful. I don’t know if this is a drive on some dark cabal of anti-intellectuals to dumb down the voting citizenry. After all, we recently elected the biggest idiot on the block and his base is cheering […]
May 15, 2025
f I know one thing about myself, it’s that I talk too much. I know that’s where my writing has all come from, the desire to get a story out, regardless of how long it takes, to share it with the world. The problem with this (and with the world) is that it really doesn’t care. The world has better things to do. And the older you get, the more things you experience, but the less people want to hear it. Young people have shorter attention spans. They don’t have time for a long story or joke to develop, to […]
April 2, 2025
ometime media and entertainment play a larger and unifying role in things. I had pretty important surgery today. There was 70% blockage of some of my blood passages in my heart. To make things worse, it’s called “The Widowmaker”. Happy thought, especially since in the week following the diagnosis, I suffered an episode of small but sharp pains right from that area. Of course, like your automobile, by the time I went back to the cardiologist’s urgent care it had stopped and I was fine. No sign of anything. That made me more than happy to follow the doc’s recommendation […]
March 27, 2025
o I got it bad. I’m kinda in a distracted point in my life. I have some critical surgery coming up, and the testing alone (with the various support activities) is really bugging me. And there is the continuing issue about the club trailer (a member put the title in his name and then died, and the DMV has been less than helpful). And then there is all the model railroading operations I do, often two to three times a week. And an older friend of mine who is having anti-social issues – that costs me time in the form […]
March 13, 2025
o I’ve been thinking about the divided nation we live in. People are so touchy now (and being a “people”, I suppose that extends to me). In my wife’s weekly coffee club, someone invited a clod who sat across from me and talked politics to the person next to him (in rude and belittling ways) until I silently got up and walked out. So I figured to try that reach-across-the-divide thing that people always tout. On one Facebook post, someone was claiming that it was right for the VA to be shuttered since there was supposedly massive fraud taking place. […]
February 27, 2025
ccording the media targeting senior citizens, I should have all my hair, be thin, and going off to play tennis (all day?) with my elf-princes wife. Sure, sure. As it is, I’ve got many life-injuries that ache a little more each day. And I’m missing my prostate, so I’m dealing with pelvic floor muscle exercises at every stop light. Getting up and bending under things gets harder and harder. Yes, it sucks. Getting older ain’t for sissies, right? While the physical is bad, the mental is worse. I’ve been dispatching our model railroad club (controlling trains) for over twenty years […]