Thieves!

I learned a new bit of information the other day: There's a thriving black market for catalytic converters from Prius. I also just learned that Prius is like Lego: It's its own plural.

So... We had a Prius. We just had a Prius. An older one. Actually, the oldest. It was a 2005. As of today (today being the day I'm writing this, which is a day last week, at least, from when you're reading this), we no longer have a Prius. Because of the catalytic converter.

Let's start over...

One morning, recently, my wife and I went to go somewhere in her car, the Prius being her car. I started it up, and the car roared to life! Oh, but, see, Prius aren't supposed to roar. Ever. We were, of course, alarmed. The roar, of course, was the muffler... the muffler missing its catalytic converter.

Which is how I found out that catalytic converter theft is a thing. There's a one word answer as to why: platinum.

I had no idea.

Before this, that is.

Fortunately, this kind of this is covered under our insurance, so we had it towed to a body shop to see about repairs. But here's the thing about thieves, they don't have any consideration about the people they're thieving from. I mean, if they did, they wouldn't be stealing from people to begin with, right? But it's not just the theft that's the issue; it's all the things that go along with the theft to enable it. Like broken windows or doors, threat of violence, or, as in this case, collateral destruction to get to the desired item.

There were pieces of my wife's car lying in the driveway after the towtruck took the car away. The thieves did so much damage to the car cutting the catalytic converter out that the entire exhaust system was going to have to be replaced. Remember that I said that it's an old car? Because 15 years is quite old for a car, especially these days. Effectively, the thieves totalled the car, because the new exhaust system was going to cost more than the value of the car.

Which brings us to the real problem, my wife had a lot of sentimental attachment to that car and, though she had been considering replacing it, the choice was taken away from her. As she said, "They murdered my car." Then there's the added problem of having someone else decide for you that this thing that you love isn't worth fixing and should just be scrapped.

The whole event was traumatic.

I was reminded strongly of the Republican response to the pandemic, because they have the same kind of view toward human lives as the insurance company does towards cars. Their evaluation said, "These lives aren't worth saving. It's cheaper to replace them than it is to save them."

And here's the problem with that way of thinking: It's really not. Not cheaper to replace them, that is, just like it's not cheaper for us to replace the car than it is to get it fixed. It's only cheaper for the insurance company. Their evaluation is one thing: Is it going to cost us more to fix the car than it is to pay them the value of the car? When they choose to not fix the car, the rest of those costs are passed onto us. Those costs can be many and varied, for us it's the cost of getting a new car, but for some people it can mean the loss of a job because they can't afford the cost of a new car and can no longer get to work reliably. Or the inabilty to get groceries. Costs.

Republicans have no problem with passing on the costs of people they don't value to other people they don't value, and the death toll means nothing to them. If it did, they would have forced McConnel to do something about it. But Mitch and gang have been happy as clams with how things have been working out, which tells me they're all lining their pockets in some way due to the pandemic.

And, sure, I know we have a new administration in there, now, and they are already taking steps to alleviate some the pandemic-related issues, but it's not soon enough to prevent the loss of half a million lives.

All of which takes us to universal health care and why we don't have it: Republicans. Because the money white men make off the insurance industry is of greater interest to them than the lives lost each year due to inadequate or non-existant health coverage.

Yep, you get all of this from someone cutting the catalytic converter out of my wife's car, because it's not too far off from Republicans cutting the soul out of America.

The Coffee Malfunction

Once upon a time, I did not like coffee. Then came the day when I did like coffee. The reasons are unimportant, for this post at any rate.

Before I liked coffee, I would enjoy the occasional mocha, because, that way, I could go to the cafe with my wife, something she very much enjoyed. It was usually a once a week thing, a Sunday morning treat.

But after I liked coffee...! After I liked coffee, the cafe started to become a "thing." Two days a week. Sometimes three or four days a week. Clearly, this was not a habit we could sustain.
So I did what anyone would do: I bought an espresso machine for my wife.

Yes, it was for my wife.
My wife had a strong desire for good morning coffee, something better than the instant coffee we had, so the espresso machine was so that I could make coffee, good coffee, for her every morning.
That was almost five years ago.

Of course, the best possible time for the machine to break is during a pandemic, right? And the best time during the pandemic for that to happen is when I'm sick with the pandemic disease. So that's what happened. I was making coffee -- because one must still have coffee when one is sick, unless one is unconscious -- and the machine made a popping sound and water started coming out of it from every place it could except the place it was supposed to come out.
Well, shit.

Fortunately, we did have some instant coffee on hand so coffee still happened. If you can call it coffee.

Look, I don't get a caffeine hit so, for me, it's all about the flavor, and instant just didn't... Well, it wasn't the same is all I can say. Replacing the espresso machine became a priority.

What we discovered is that espresso machines had gone up in price considerably. The machine that had so recently departed from us cost us only $150. It was a good machine, even if mostly manual, and I had come to love it. I made great coffee with it. But there was nothing comparable currently on the market. In trying to decide what kind of replacement to get and how much we should spend, we decided to figure out how much the dead machine had saved us: $30,000+!

Yeah, that was mind-blowing.

We decided that $500 wasn't too bad for a replacement.

So we have a new espresso machine.
I'm not entirely satisfied with the coffee it makes, but it's virtually automatic. I have to put beans and water in it, but I don't have to grind anything anymore, and clean up is incredibly easy.
And, well, even if I don't like the coffee as much as what the old machine made, it's still so much better than anything that we would get at a cafe. Yeah, we really never go to cafes anymore, because the coffee I make at home is so much better. It still is.
I suppose I can't ask for much more than that.

The Art of Scapegoating and of Being Scapegoated

Image by Heidelbergerin from Pixabay

I'm assuming most of you know what a scapegoat is, even if you don't know the origin of the term. That's not really important, and you can look it up if you want to know.
Also, before I go on, I want to call your attention back to this post from something like six years. It's both relevant and important.
[If you went and read that old post, I'm sure you can see how it's relevant to our current political crisis. I want to reiterate that I wrote that well before 2016.]

Let's just assume that you didn't go back and read the post about "The Boss" (since I feel fairly certain that most of you did not) and I'll give a very brief introduction. Very.

There are certain personality types that want to be in charge, completely in charge, with no cost. By "no cost," I mean they don't want any of the responsibility that goes along with being the boss. They just want to be followed blindly and never carry the burden of any mistakes they make. In fact, they are so self-assured of their own "rightness" that they believe they cannot make mistakes and, therefore, if something goes wrong, it must be the fault of someone else. These people are in constant need of scapegoats.

But let me be clear, this is not because there is some conscious thought process that says, "I messed up, but I don't want anyone else to know, so I need to find someone else to blame." It's not like that at all because it never occurs to "the boss" that any mistake may have been his. He just looks for someone who must be at fault because, clearly, someone messed up.

I grew up with one of these types of people, my stepfather, so I am very familiar with how this works. I was, of course, the scapegoat in my house. It was even more fun because the blamelessness extended to my brother, who was his biological son, so any time my brother messed up it was somehow my fault. Here's my favorite story:

I had a mostly unsupervised childhood and I roamed pretty much freely all the time. As long as I was home by dark, no one really questioned where I was or what I was doing. However, on this particular day, I had been to a friend's house and, for whatever reason, I'd actually asked permission to go there. Possibly, it was farther away than I usually went; I don't know. But I had asked my mother if I could go and had permission to make the walk, because I walked everywhere or, later, when I had one, road my bike.

At any rate, when I arrived home, I found that I was in trouble, in trouble for somehow breaking a lamp while I wasn't home. I, of course, responded to the accusation from my father with, "I didn't break it. I wasn't even home." He then accused me of being gone without permission.

And this is where it gets tricky. See, my father knew that my brother had broken the lamp and, yet, he accused me of having done it as soon as I walked in the door. You have to try to follow the process of how this played out.

I said I did have permission because Mom had said I could go.
But that didn't matter because he hadn't said I could go so, therefore, I had not had permission.
It was my fault the lamp had been broken because, if I had been at home, I could have stopped my brother from doing it. Thus, I broke the lamp.
I want to point out that my "father" had been sitting in the chair next to the lamp when it happened.
But, see, it somehow was not my father's responsibility to be keeping an eye on my brother. That was, evidently, my job, a job I had failed to do because I wasn't home. I wasn't more than 10.

This was the way things were during my childhood, and there's not much you can do about it when you're in an insulated situation like that, which is what most households are, insulated little kingdoms.

Don't worry, it gets even more weird.

When I was a teenager, my dad was on of the van drivers at my church. He mostly didn't do any driving for the youth group but, on some trip or other, the guy who usually drove us wasn't available, so my dad was driving. It was a full van of middle and high schoolers all doing what teenagers do when they are in a group together, meaning they were being goofy and making a lot of noise.

Except me. Because that's not what I did. I had a book and was sitting against the window reading and ignoring what was going on. That was my normal.

Maybe this was why my dad never drove the teenagers; he didn't like the noise.
So we're driving along and I suddenly hear my name being yelled angrily. I look up to see my "dad" staring venom and hatred at me through the rear view mirror. Evidently, he had had to yell my name three or four times to get my attention and the only reason it had worked was because everyone else shut up after the second time. Look, I said I was reading, didn't I? And I was focusing really hard on it because of all of the noise and commotion. I don't remember the exact words my "father" used, but it amounted to "Shut the fuck up." No, he didn't curse. We were on a church van, but that's what came through.

Everyone stared at me.
Everyone knew that I hadn't been making any noise.
Not thinking clearly about what was happening, I opened my mouth, "I was rea..."
"I said shut up!"
Everyone looked at my "dad" then looked back at me.
I went back to my book.

Before that happened, everyone had liked my dad and wondered why I didn't care for him. Yeah, that's really about how I felt about him, like he was a type of cookie on a plate of cookies and my response was something like, "No, thank you, I don't care for that one." That's how disassociated I had become from him by the time I was in high school. I mostly just ignored his existence.
Except for those occasions, like this one on the van, where I was forced to acknowledge him in some way.

What I'm saying is that some people have to have someone to blame for their inability to handle situations, whatever those situations are. And I want to be explicitly clear, Trump (#fakepresident) is not ever thinking to himself, "Man, I screwed this up, but I can cover it up by blaming someone else." I think that's what people think about the way he deals with stuff, that his blaming of... whoever... is some sort of conscious deflection. It is not. He just knows that there must be someone to blame and has no concept whatsoever that that someone might be him.

And that, really, is the best way to scapegoat someone. Total belief that the person you are scapegoating must really be at fault. After all, when the Jews sent the scapegoat out into the wilderness, they believed that goat was carrying their sins with it.

When Trump blames WHO for the current state of affairs in regard to the pandemic, he believes WHO is at fault. They must be. Who else it could it be? Oh, China. It's also China. And the media.

These are not lies. Well, they are, but they are not the kind of lies someone makes up in order to change the narrative. It's all self-deception because Trump (#fakepresident) is incapable of looking at the truth. He's actually not smart enough to lie.
It's just like my dad believed it was my fault that my brother broke that lamp. With every fiber of his being, he believed that.

I don't want to say that the pandemic is a good thing in any way, because it's not. People are dying. Lots of people are dying. None of the numbers, especially in the United States, are accurate because there isn't enough testing being done (okay, South Korea's numbers are probably accurate). Why? Because the "president" has been a roadblock to any kind of appropriate response to what is happening. BUT!

But it is good that people -- governors, specifically -- are beginning to ignore Trump (#fakepresident) in order to do what needs to be done. Ignoring these kinds of people, these "bosses," is often the only way to accomplish anything. Or to live peacefully. Or whatever.

Shelter in Place

Well, here we all are, in the midst of a pandemic, something I'm sure none of us ever thought we'd see; after all, it has been a century since the last pandemic. I guess we were due.

Of course, it has all been made much, much worse due to the incompetence of our... I don't even know what to call him anymore. I think this iteration of the corona virus is the manifestation of the world being sick of Trump (#fakepresident) and his ilk. But, you know, let's not digress too much into how the current administration completely bungled its handling of, well, everything, mostly due to the fact that the idiot-in-chief wanted to bury his head in the sand and pretend that nothing was happening. The fact that he doesn't already have COVID-19 is proof that there is no god nor justice in the universe. I mean, fuck, Tom Hanks and Idris Elba have it! How is this okay?

Anyway...

Out here in the Bay Area in California, we are on "shelter in place" orders, which means don't leave your house except for essential reasons. Including work, unless you work in something that is considered an essential industry. So, yeah, stores, non-essential stores, are all closed. Or supposed to be. Schools are closed. Life is, effectively, on pause. Or something like that.

Watching the case numbers grow across the US, I expect more areas to follow suit.

So! Need something to do while you are supposed to be in self-imposed -- or government-imposed -- isolation? Here's a free book! It's wacky fun about an angry tea kettle and a flying cat! Read it yourself or read it to your kids. It's free! And, hey, I don't really do a lot of free! promotions these days, so take advantage of it!

Pick up your copy of What Time Is the Tea Kettle? today!

And, you know, pick up some of my other stuff, too. That would be awesome.
And don't forget to share!