Caveat: Links #105

Here are some links I found interesting- with minimal comment.

An illustration from the internet.

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A quote.

“we’re all on our own journeys and as you read these words you bring your unique self and have unique thoughts and feelings, really these words do little, what you’re experiencing is mostly a performance, a show that your brain puts on, just once, just for you, I hope you’re paying attention.” – blogger who goes by “dynomite”

Banalities.

We’re having a very traditional day-after-Thanksgiving, here at Juli and Keith’s. Keith is watching football. Juli and Karen are making pies. Wayne is … being Wayne. Watching videos on his iPad. Though he and I took a walk down to the river this morning. We saw some salmon. Wayne wished he had his fishing gear with him.

Blackberry pie:

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Caveat: So you’ve heard

We finished the last of Arthur’s various appointments with specialists at the VA hospital in Portland, this morning. This last appointment was with audiology. They admitted that their past efforts had fallen a bit short – which was reassuring. Nevertheless, we have had to schedule a follow-up appointment for February, back here in Portland. So we’ll have to travel at that time.

The diagnosis is not far off from what I expected. He’s “profoundly deaf” in the right ear, and “severely impaired” in the left. I’d actually already concluded that he must be deafer in the right than the left, given occasional unintentional experiments. Interestingly, Arthur lucidly commented that it made sense – he observed that the right ear was often “closer to the helicopter” – as a pilot, I guess the volume from the engines was stronger on the right side?

I’m moderately hopeful (but not extremely hopeful) that they have understood some of the behavioral issues that prevent Arthur from successfully using fancy, smartphone-connected hearing aids, due to his challenges in taking on new (unfamiliar), “fiddly” interfaces, etc. He can’t even activate his smartphone successfully. Basically, any technology newer than what he was comfortable with circa 2018 is going to be completely unlearnable. I’ve seen this with his efforts with his computer, with his banking websites, etc. “Updates” that alter the user experience render the new version unusable for him.

So despite the suffering and inconvenience, we’ll be traveling back to Portland in February.

Meanwhile, he’s without hearing aids (the repair I attempted to the ones we wrecked in the washing mashine last week didn’t stick, and both hearing aids were entirely nonfunctional as of two days ago). They will attempt a “repair” of the broken ones, which they’ll mail to us, but I’m not very optimistic on that front.

We now look forward to a couple Thanksgiving feasts, and return travel to Southeast Alaska next Monday.

As a postscript… one small lesson: never report the loss of just one hearing aid to a healthcare provider; always report both lost, that way you’ll get a proper pair as a replacement, instead of a mis-matched singleton.


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Caveat: Ramenesque

Staying here at Juli’s, the other night I made something ramenesque. I won’t say it was actual ramen – we used different noodles, and I was fairly interpretative with ingredients, but it came out pretty good and resembled the types of made-from-scratch ramen you get at little hole-in-the-wall shops in Japan or Korea.

I enjoyed it and Juli and Keith both liked it quite a bit. Arthur was more reticent – as is his character, especially these days. We had it again as leftovers last night.

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Caveat: Bonus Water

Yesterday Juli and I took a walk down to the Tualatin River, a few hundred meters below her house in this little valley in northwest Oregon’s coast range.

The river had a lot of water, swollen from recent rains, and rushed along, brown and white and foamy. Nevertheless I managed to see a salmon jump at the falls, though I was unable to take its picture in the fleeting moment.

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Caveat: What?

It’s been a difficult couple of days. Yesterday I took Arthur to the VA clinic to see the Neurology department. This was something we were supposed to have done last year, but they’d been unable to schedule an appointment during the window of our time down here in Portland, and after an extended back-and-forth over the telephone, it had been decided to just wait until this year and try again.

The challenge was that, for really the first time, the doctors were addressing Arthur directly while using the term dementia. Arthur couldn’t really engage in denial in the moment, which is his standard strategy. He flat out denies he ever had a stroke, still, for example. He often comically denies that he is going deaf: “I’m not going deaf! There’s just some problem with my ears!” is a literal quote.

In the moment, he’s too polite to directly or combatively deny that he has dementia, but I could tell he was deeply upset and afterward and since, he’s been exceptionally obstreperous.

I messed things up much further, this morning, because I did the mistake I’ve been successfully avoiding for more than 4 years: I ran his hearing aids through the laundry. The problem here is that Arthur often takes out his hearing aids and instead of putting them into the little case they’re supposed to live in, he puts them into a pocket. When I do laundry at home, I have a fixed habit of going through his pockets to make sure nothing is in them – I’ve intercepted his hearing aids many times, this way. But here at Juli’s, thrown off my regular routine, and responding to Arthur’s complaint about a lack of clean clothes, I failed in my pocket inspection. His hearing aids went through the wash. One of them was quite damaged – plastic parts broken off and one bit missing. And of course who knows what damage to the electronics inside.

As things stand, I did a MacGuyveresque repair on the broken one, using some scotch tape and super glue, and we’ve tested them. One of them seems to work, the other seems to be stuck in some kind of reboot cycle. Good thing we’re scheduled to see an audiologist in a week. But… I’m super frustrated with VA audiology support, and skeptical that they’ll offer anything truly useful. As I remarked to Juli in the wake of the washing machine incident, “It’s not like Arthur was really using the hearing aids effectively, anyway.” The problem is that in combination with his cognitive deficits, it’s very, very difficult for Arthur to build new habits or learn new, fiddly procedures related to the correct use and care of his hearing aids. The result is that he doesn’t ever reach a point where he’s using them the way the designers imagined: always in, with all kinds of “bells and whistles” around an app on the smartphone that can link it to audiobooks, music, the TV, whatever. None of that is anything we can ever expect Arthur to master, at this point. He can’t even figure out how to turn on his smartphone, much less use it. Anything that wasn’t in his technological repertoire before 2018 will NEVER be in his repertoire. Old dog, no new tricks.

I feel terrible that all this is happening – that I was insufficiently diligent in doing things I knew needed to be done (i.e. about inspecting pockets, about getting anything useful from VA audiology). A failure of care.


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Caveat: Noise

I have traveled to Oregon, for the next few weeks. Unlike previous stays at Juli and Keith’s house, I’m Arthur’s actual roommate here, this time – there are more limited options for one’s own space, these days, here (for those who are unfamiliar, Arthur is my elderly uncle, who has dementia and for whom I am a caretaker).

It’s noisy at night here, compared to at home. I had difficulty sleeping. Dogs bark all night, roosters start the day at 2 AM, neighbor people are talking outside of their houses and you can hear them, late at night. Being Arthur’s roommate is noisy too: he doesn’t actually snore, but he falls asleep with his audiobook playing into his ears at maximum volume (because he’s almost completely deaf at this point and somehow he derives some comfort from this cacaphony). It’s disconcerting to hear the story right on the edge of comprehensibility, like a television blaring in the next room. It’s probably just a soft background noise, for him. And he’s a restless sleeper (just as he’s often quite restless when awake, with all kinds of OCD-adjacent repetitive movements and tics). He noisily turns in the covers every few minutes. He farts and belches loudly in his sleep, too, and mutters softly to himself, things like ‘oh fuck’ and ‘shit!’ I feel like I’m rooming with Sancho Panza. I already knew all these things, but at home, with him being in his own room, I can somewhat dismiss it – it doesn’t effect me, he’s far enough away from where I’m sleeping that it doesn’t bother me, but I can still be tuned in if something goes wrong (eg one of his late night / early morning falls, as the most common example).


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Caveat: Boat outta water

An autumnal ritual, we got the boat out of the water.

A picture of the end of the boathouse (a metal shed, like a quonset) with a boat pulled up in front of it on the customized boat trolley (on a track); mid-background has dock and another boat; Alaskan sea inlet and opposite forested shoreline in distance

I work on cleaning it a bit, tomorrow, but the bottom is remarkably free of nefarious barnacles – probably a consequence of how late we put it in the water this year. I’m grateful for the neighbors’ help on pulling it out this morning – Arthur’s situational awareness is so minimal, these days, that he was in fact seemingly unaware of what we were doing. Some of that is his deafness, but he also just really tuned out of reality most of the time.

Despite his unawareness during the proceedings, Arthur nevertheless managed to find the gumption to go down after we’d “parked” the boat to inspect our work, and offer a few pointless criticisms. This is why it can be so draining caring for and interacting with him – the few times he exits his solipsistic bubble, it’s as often to criticize or complain as it is anything else.


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Caveat: Excursions

With my “other uncle” Alan (Arthur’s brother) and my cousin Dawn visiting, we went on some excursions over this weekend.

Yesterday we went to Kasaan – my favorite “cultural” attraction to take visitors to on the island.

We hiked the half-mile trail to the totems and longhouse, had a picnic lunch (the restaurant was closed).

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Alan and I posed with an orca.

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We drove around, saw Thorne Bay. It rained on and off.

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We saw a large and well-aged excavator in the forest.

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This morning, the sun put in a half-day appearance, and the sea was remarkably calm. We took out the boat for a little 2 hour jaunt. Much to our shock, Art was not interested in going (this is a weird, sad milestone for Art, for whom the boat and outings in the boat have been utterly central to his life and identity here – his whole house is about the boat!).

We saw some whales. A bit hard to see, but the whale-tail is there, right of center.

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We did a drive-by of the city of Craig on the way back, as seen from the water.

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Caveat: Venting on dementia vis-a-vis visitors

<venting>

With Arthur’s brother Alan and Alan’s daughter Dawn visiting here, Arthur has suddenly gotten very obsessed with the bed down in the boathouse (~basement), where he used to sleep. He imagines the possibility of moving back down there to sleep, as a matter of being hospitable to our guests by yielding the main bedroom upstairs, which has become his bedroom now.

So Arthur has finally noticed how I’d strategically disabled the kerosene heater down there, and how I’d stripped apart his old bed. Last night, after dinner, he wanted these things fixed and wouldn’t let go of the notion. Yet he’s also gotten more dependent. Consequently, instead of trying to fix them himself (which is a relief, especially with respect to the kerosene heater – recalling the incident several years ago when I found him standing in a puddle of kerosene at 2AM) he just waits around and pesters me, urgently, about when I’m going to fix them.

I understand that it’s good for Art’s “quality of life” to have people to interact with who care about him, as visitors, but frankly, it’s ruining mine.

I’m so, so dreading the need to travel to Portland with him in November.

I recognize this is more my problem than Arthur’s – I don’t deal well with “contingency” responsibilities, uncertainty, and disrupted routines. I’m going to be a truly horrible old person.

</venting>


An anecdote.

Art was stumbling around the kitchen opening cabinets and drawers.

“Watcha looking for?” I asked.

“What?”

I repeated myself, much more loudly.

“I don’t know what I’m looking for,” he answered.

“The oreos are in the upstairs cabinet, now. You put them there,” I guessed.

“Very good,” he said. “Now I know what I was looking for. I didn’t realize I was looking for oreos, but I was.”


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Caveat: The Worst Birthday Gift I Ever Gave Myself

Last year on this day, I wrote the check that made my purchase of the gift store a fact. It also happened to be my birthday. So today, one year on, on my 59th birthday, I take a moment to reflect on this decision to buy the gift store.

Overall, I have a lot of “buyer’s remorse.” I think it was unwise for me to take on this challenge. I won’t say that I’m failing – I think that actually, I’m doing pretty well. I’m keeping the business above water financially, and running a going concern. I’ve even think that I’ve been successful at restoring some of the community trust in the store as longstanding local institution, that had been a bit eroded by the previous owner’s efforts to gentrify the store – gentrification really isn’t something Craig, Alaska, is ready for.

No, I’m not failing at running the store. But I derive almost zero sense of personal accomplishment or satisfaction. It’s only a source of constant stress and neverending miniature crises that each has to be resolved. Being the manager means I’m the person who ultimately always has to say “no” and “I’m sorry” to each and every unhappy stakeholder (customer, employee, vendor, service provider). This is not a role I enjoy in the least. And unlike with teaching, I don’t feel a sufficient sense of reward in the occasional positive feedback to counterbalance that burden. This is difficult for me to parse – I think I am simply more capable of accepting negativity from children, and also somehow more capable of enjoying limited positive responses. With adults (and especially, elderly adults) I have less patience for shortcomings, frankly. I expect old people (which is at least half the gift store’s customer base) to be more considerate, or something. But it doesn’t really work that way, does it? Perhaps it has to do with my own stage of life, as caretaker for a cantankerous elderly adult. I don’t know.

All I know is that I’m mostly miserable with the day-to-day burden of the store, and I resent that it’s become a more-than-full-time job that robs me of my formerly enjoyable time at my various hobbies – my writing, my geofiction, my eccentric “follies” (e.g. the treehouse).

So happy birthday to me. Buying the store currently ranks in the “Top 5” of “Mistakes I’ve Made In My Life.” Disentangling myself, however… I accept it’s a long-term commitment, and even if buying the store was a mistake, I would be compounding the mistake to try to bail ungracefully. So. I’ll cope.


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Caveat: Apocalypse Heap

I bought a run-down 1994 jeep last fall.

Here is a picture of the jeep in the rainy shopping center parking lot, looking toward the entrance to our gift shop.

A 1994 jeep in well-used condition, with a canvas roof and improvised pieces of plywood making up the back window and upper door panels, in a rainy rural Alaskan strip-mall parking lot

I haven’t driven it much – I only intended it to be a reserve vehicle, and it also helped as a kind of reassurance to Arthur that I wasn’t “taking” his car away from him (which he nevertheless never drives). But, just these past two weeks, with our houseguest driving the “Blueberry” (Arthur’s 2011 Chevy Tahoe), I’m reduced to “slumming” in this back-up car.

Every time I drive this rattletrap, I am reminded of my father – who gravitates to broken down old rust-heap vehicles like a photon to a black hole.

I bought the car from coworker Jan’s husband, Richard. Jan calls the car the “Apocalypsemobile” – because of the Mad Max vibes it gives off with its plywood aftermarket accoutrements. In my own mind, I have always pronounced the name “jeep” in the Mexican way (with a j-as-h sound, as in San Jose, hence /hip/). This idiolectic pronunciation is homophonous with the English word “heap”, which in this jeep’s case, isn’t far from accurate. Thus, combining these two facts, the obvious name for this car is “Apocalypse Heap”.

And so it is.


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Caveat: Fish after 3 days

There’s always going to be a trade-off. There can be a houseguest who thinks they are being helpful, but in fact they make more work for you. They cook a delicious meal for you, but leave little messes everywhere and never turn off any lights and even forget to turn off the oven, and leave swathes of chaos in the fridge. There are constant decisions that have to be made, when your houseguest has different standards of neatness and cleanliness than you do. Should you go around cleaning up after them, and resent it? Or should you just live with that different standard of neatness and cleanliness for a while, and resent that, instead? Inevitably, it’s some combination of those two, and a constant effort to avoid building up resentment.

Venting online into the void is super helpful, of course.


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Caveat: The true secret to privacy online

I sometimes realize that I can exploit the fact that my blog has so few regular readers to passive-aggressively rant about the world around me, up to and including my own family and neighbors (most of whom can’t be bothered to realize that the internet is bigger than facebook). I can be “open” and eerily transparent without actually having any reputational skin in the social-media game.

The fact that this blog is nominally public just lends certain frisson, a sensation of “living dangerously,” to the whole enterprise.

None of this is new to me, of course. I’ve gone off in this direction before, but then I go through other phases where I feel more cautious, and practice some self-restraint for a few years.

Anyway, I’m feeling inclined to experiment with allowing myself to be more open about my politics and general ideological eccentricities than I have been over the last few years. It’s not like I’m going to be running for political office or something, where having my beliefs and feelings out there in the public record actually matters.

And to the extent that the major social media and web search empires are so thoroughly “enshittifying” (as the contemporary parlance puts it), my blog’s “discoverability” isn’t what it used to be, five or ten years ago, either. When I was living in Korea, it wasn’t uncommon for strangers to find my blog and engage with it, with substantive comments on posts and such. That kind of thing never happens anymore – the search engines simply don’t see my blog, and don’t offer links to it.

It’s interesting. People are so worried about privacy online, but perhaps the best way to be private online is to self-host your own completely public blog, and refuse to play the SEO game – no one will see it, I can almost guarantee!

At the rate things are going, this blog is really not much more public than my going around and putting up ranty post-its on random trees in my rural Alaskan neighborhood. Which, come to think of it, might be an amusing thing to do.

Shouting into the abyss has never been easier.


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Caveat: Here, listen to this!

<rant>

I believe, with all my soul, that it is rude to subject other people to your private audio stream – whether music, news, stories (audiobooks), telephone conversations, or anything else. Now that we all have excellent speakers in our hands, it’s easier than ever to do. Though in fact, I think it’s always been an issue, even back in pre-technological eras when people would have loud, annoying conversations or play music around other people who had no interest in hearing it.

So this rant isn’t about “the kids these days” or some decay in social standards. Indeed, if anything, I feel the elderly are the most typical demographic to perpetrate this type of rudeness – I would link it to the seemingly inevitable narcissim of old age (and as an aside, is this really inevitable? my narcissism is bad enough… I hate to imagine what a horrible old person I’ll be…).

I suspect there have always been rude people. I’m just making the observation that these rude people do this thing that annoys me.

</rant>


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Caveat: Agonized abrogation

I had a horrible day.

Probably partly it was the result of not really feeling like I got any rest or “alone time” over the weekend, what with having a guest here and various stressful small “crises,” like the failed kitchen sink drain and the mold-infested barbecue. I have no moment of refuge, no place of retreat.

So I started the day stressed and annoyed, and it just got worse. Before I bought the store, working at the store was a sort of refuge – because mostly I could just concentrate on my specific responsibilities, and the “big picture” was up to someone else – the store’s owners. Now that I’m the store’s owner, all the really big problems rise up to me, and I have to deal with them. There’s no sense of refuge in the store. I face bills, annoying or dissatisfied customers, the competing preferences and requests of employees… it’s all on me to sort out, and delay doesn’t solve anything, so each of these demands my attention NOW.

But actually still, I wasn’t truly miserable till I got home. I guess I’m just burned out on cleaning up after other people. It’s true that Wayne had prepared dinner, which was nice. But I spent the hour and a half after dinner cleaning up: cleaning dishes, cleaning Wayne’s mess in the boat (which returned to our dock yesterday), dealing with a water shortage in our cistern (caused by someone leaving the hose at the dock on for a day straight). It just never stops. And no sense of personal space or refuge to retreat to for bed, since I yielded my bedroom to our guest.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was when I went down to look at the boat, and found some fish guts and bait in loose, non-waterproof bags in the transom storage area. It was stinky already, the boat having been in the sun all day. I came up to let Wayne know that this mess was there, and his response was: “You can throw it in the water.” Implicit in this was that he just assumed I was happy to clean up after him and Jeff. Now to be clear, I’m not really into fishing even under the best of conditions, but if there’s one aspect of fishing I like least, it’s dealing with fish guts. And here he just assumed I’d be happy to deal with it. So… I dealt with it. But I was quite angry. I even let him know – though I suspect he unable to understand why I was angry. But it made me feel like some kind of servant, rather than someone hosting a friend at my home.

In the end I was so grumpy I just ran away and have gone to bed my treehouse. I’m tired of responsibility. A lot.


It’s kind of primitive out here, and a bit chilly, but at least I have some solitude.


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Caveat: Life as it is

I’m really struggling lately. We have a visitor up – Art’s old friend Wayne – from Vancouver Island. He’s a dynamic and interesting person to have around, but it ends up just feeling like more pressure to get more things done that I just don’t have the energy for.

And I feel like small things keep going wrong, and maybe each in itself is not such a big thing, but collectively they’re digging in around the edges and my quality of life feels really overwhelmingly bad lately.

The drain in the kitchen downstairs broke yesterday. I had a flood in the kitchen which was a pain to clean up, and since the hardware store is closed Sunday and Monday, I can’t even shop for replacement pieces until Tuesday morning. Meanwhile, we are carrying dishes upstairs to wash them.

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Today, Wayne wanted to try smoking some salmon. I admit I probably planted the idea in his mind – but I regret it. It’s turned into an ordeal, as Art’s Traeger smoker/cooker thing turned out be in a state of barely-functional deshabille – it was filthy, full of ash and crap, and it had mold growing in it. Art’s always been the “sole person in charge” of the Traeger grill – so I’m only guilty of neglecting something that wasn’t important to me and that I just had sort of drifted to assuming we weren’t using anymore – like so many things. But anyway, I spent most of the day dinking around with it, running it “hot” to cook out the junk and mold and then repeatedly scrubbing it with a wire brush.

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I’m still not wholly comfortable with the thermostat control – it feels like it’s not behaving the way I would hope, as far as running in “smoker” mode. It seems to like to suddenly “take off” and suddenly the temperature zooms up to 400-500 degrees, before it “calms down” and settles at the appropriate temperature for smoking (around 160-180).


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Caveat: 초콜릿 맛 똥

Lately, one of the least enjoyable aspects of caretaking for my uncle Arthur, in his senescence, has been that he seems to struggle with wiping his ass. So far I haven’t had to actually do it for him – he’s too proud to ask for help and too forgetful to mention it as an issue except in the moment.

I’m kept aware of it largely because I frequently find shit smeared all over the toilet seat.

I suspect the issue is twofold: 1) a lack of upper body flexibility, related to the severe arthritis in his shoulders, preventing him from reliably reaching the area in question, and 2) an extreme lack of situational awareness, an ongoing issue ever since his stroke in 2018.

Anyway, I deal with by carefully inspecting the toilet seat on a regular basis, and keeping a sprayer of cleaner near the toilet to clean it off when necessary. I have long ago discovered that trying to confront him about it or to “retrain” him on the issue is counterproductive, so I’m sure if I mentioned to him that this issue is ongoing and impacts my quality of life, he’d spiral off in a posture of defensive denial. Once on a related issue of pissing on the floor in the bathroom, his response was: “How do you know you didn’t do it?” Better to just keep quiet and forebear on these questions.

On the more positive side, I will report, for the record, that apparently, Arthur eats so much chocolate that his shit often smells like chocolate.

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Caveat: I started my stupid blog 20 years ago today

My personal blog turns 20 years old today. Which is to say, 20 years ago, on this day, at this hour, I posted this: Caveat: Dumptruck.

The first few years were a bit sporadic. There was a whole elapsed year during which I failed to post to it at all.

But when I moved to South Korea for my first teaching job in September, 2007, I made a commitment to myself that I’d try to post at least once daily, and I’ve kept that commitment since then, without fail (as far as I can remember or figure out).

I’ve gone through some long periods, even years long, where I consistently posted twice daily. Other times, I’ve slacked off. I’ve even had a few stretches of a month or two where I was consistently posting three times a day. I’ve journaled the minutiae of some quite intense life experiences here – perhaps most notably, my battle with cancer in the summer and fall of 2013. I’m also proud of the way that I managed to blog a 10-day stay at a meditation retreat in December, 2009, despite the fact that phones and computers and internet and note-taking were banned. I did it by compiling the entries in my mind, a kind of temporary memory palace, and then writing it all down once I returned “to civilization,” back-dating the entries.

This blog has had some fairly dry spells, too, in terms of stimulating content. But there’s always been something. I’ve had a lot of luck with a few “daily features.” Since 2016, I’ve had my daily poems. And for my first 5 1/2 years here in Alaska, I was posting my daily tree pictures. Really, those enumerated trees were just pretexts to keep myself posting. More than anything else, this blog has become my own “aide-memoire“: a kind of public-facing version of the type of journals (diaries) that I had maintained with quite a bit of consistency throughout my life, since my teen years. In that sense, this blog’s primary target audience has become my own future self.

One probably unusual feature of my blog, compared to other personal blogs, is that I’ve made at least a small effort to “back-post” some entries to epochs prior to its founding, using the backdating feature of the blog-hosting software. So I have entries in the blog going back to the date of my birth, in 1965. I dubbed this effort “retroblogging.” These entries are either retrospective observations of my life at a given epoch, or else transcriptions from those once-upon-a-time paper journals. I still harbor ambitions to post a great deal more of this material, but it’s hard to find the motivation to do so, and there are many other important blog-maintenance tasks that end up taking higher priority. “Link rot” (that internet phenomenon where old links to websites, videos, etc., tend to stop working over time) is harsh taskmaster when you have more than 10,000 blog entries to maintain.

One seemingly never-ending blog-maintenance task provides a good illustration: I am STILL struggling (after nearly 6 years of self-hosting, now) with transitioning my 1000’s of pictures off my old, subscription-based blog-hosting software (typepad). So… I’m still paying that old blog-host’s annual fee. Even as I write this, I have “September, 2012” open in my browser, where I plod along, grabbing photos and images from the old site and transferring them over to my own self-hosted server, and manually editing each link, in turn.

Here’s something notable: this blog is older than facebook, as we know it. Zuck’s facebook existed as “thefacebook.com”, a social network limited to only college students, in 2004, but it didn’t become a worldwide phenomenon open to the general public until at least one or two years later. My blog is only one year younger than Tyler Cowen’s MarginalRevolution, one of the longest-running blogs on the internet – and which I have read on and off continuously since that era. Not that I’m comparing myself to Tyler Cowen – he’s a public intellectual with hundreds of thousands or even millions of readers.

My blog maxed out at about five regular readers, in the mid 2010’s, but is now back down to a much-more-manageable one or two regular readers. That’s definitely a comfortable and sustainable level of engagement.

In the celebratory spirit, I’ll break my facebook embargo and post this entry, in toto, to that platform. *waves hello to facebookland*

I enjoy getting those spam emails from website search optimization consultants: “we can improve your reader engagement!” I receive several every day. I want to write back, simply, “oh rly?”

It’s not worth the bother, though. Hope you’ve had an interesting 20 years. I have.

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Caveat: At the store, on a typical Thursday

Small anecdote from my life, today.

Arthur tried (stubbornly) to try to pay the previous customer’s groceries, at the checkout at the grocery store today. He simply wasn’t receiving the communication from me, from the previous customer, and from the cashier that it wasn’t his “turn” to pay – we were next in line, the previous customer was still finishing checking out of the store, but Arthur was ready to pay, now. He was left bewildered and confused when we told him to stop trying to pay. I had to take his credit card out of his hand.

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Caveat: Links #1

Contrary to appearances, I read quite a bit, even in these long-running slumps where almost nothing appears on this blog. Much of what I read is in the form of blogs online (often, these days, the blogs are on the Substack platform, which I abhor, but if that’s where the blogs are, then that’s where I’ll read them). For most of the last 20 years of this blog, I’ve even maintained a kind of “blotter” where I record the links to these blog posts and articles that I read. But I do nothing with them.

I have been poor on posting links I read and found interesting, because I’ve felt that I needed to comment on them in some way.

On the other hand, I really like blogs where the authors occasionally or regularly post links to things they’ve read, often with very little comment (there are many – Tyler Cowen’s daily “assorted links” on his MarginalRevolution blog is perhaps the archetype for this, where it’s been a recurring feature for 20 years or so).

So, with hopes of revitalizing this moribund blog thingy, I’ve decided to start posting two or three links to things I’ve read, every day. If I allow myself to do so “without comment” it shouldn’t be too stressful to come up with a few, drawing from my blotter. And it’ll give me something new to enumerate, like trees or poems.

Here are some links I found interesting – without comment.

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Caveat: On Pseudopolyglottism as a Means of Escape

This blog feels increasingly moribund, of late. I keep up with the daily poems, but even those small texts, when read between-the-lines, only serve as vague guideposts to my generalized anhedonia.

Life is frustrating. Arthur, my cantankerous uncle who suffers from dementia and his plethora of deep-seated denials, is mostly doing okay, but he’s not exactly pleasant company. Increasingly, dealing with him has the feel of caretaking a severely disabled but nevertheless overly proud and willful child.

Meanwhile, my mother (Arthur’s sister) gyres into her own sometimes conspiracy-addled anguish, in her antipodean hermitage deep in the Australian bush, and phone conversations with her are increasingly unpleasant and leave me feeling helpless and bitter (really just a transference of those feelings she’s having, to me, I suppose).

The store (which I purchased last fall, after half a decade working there) is mostly a source of frustration and anxiety. I am deeply stuck in a prolonged period of buyer’s remorse. I plod forward, but I derive zero sense of accomplishment or satisfaction with the project.

And my beloved hobby – the digital geofiction hosted on opengeofiction.net and ancillary sites, has felt unfulfilling, too.

I have discovered a new, less demanding pastime. I have embraced my pseudopolyglottism. I have been playing Duolingo.

Duolingo is an app downloaded to my android phone, which is for “language learning.” Really, that description deserves the scare quotes – I started using it when I was in Korea, hoping its gameified interface might help restore my dormant Korean language skills. It’s not bad, for that. Using it is like playing a game – one does language exercises, based on translation, vocabulary, listening (parsing, not really comprehension), and some AI-juiced speaking exercises that sometimes feel like a futile scream into the void, but that other times seem to sorta kinda work.

My review is only 3 stars out of 5. Given the manifold minor but noticeable lapses from natural English, I assume the other languages on offer might suffer similar shortcomings. Yet that doesn’t stop me from playing. It’s amusing, and I genuinely feel I’ve learned new Korean words and grammatical constructions, if only for recognition purposes.

However, I’ve fallen to the polyglot’s temptation, as I spend more and more time with the app (5 minutes here and there add up, over a day). I realized there were quite a few tempting and challenging languages that I could dip my brain into.

Over the last 50 days of play (since I left Korea after my whirlwind visit in May, basically), I have started lessons in Ukrainian, Vietnamese, and Welsh. And today, I took another bizarre step, as I began a program in Swedish – but with the added twist that I’m taking it as Swedish-for-Spanish-Speakers, since it was being offered that way. That might keep my rusty Spanish alert too, I reasoned. Anyway, it makes Swedish harder – since I don’t get to see the many obvious cognates between Swedish and English. I get bröd vs pan, and äpple vs manzana, instead of the more transparent bröd vs bread, and äpple vs apple.

It’s all fun and games. And kills time quite well. And better than agonizing over the deadening emotional tangle that I feel my life has become lately.

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Caveat: wallabye

Wallabies waving g’bye at the top of mom’s driveway as I depart back down to Cairns, to reverse my journey back to an island in Southeast Alaska, via Seoul, Seattle, Ketchikan.

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Caveat: the highest town

We were in the nearest town, stopped at library and to handle some in-home healthcare bureaucracy. This is the town visitor center, allegedly Ravenshoe is the highest elevation town in all Queensland. The library a more modern building is behind.

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Caveat: 3967 days cancer free

I decided to visit my favorite place in Korea. You might think I mean this ironically, but the 국립암센터 (National Cancer Center) saved my life 11 years ago. So I feel gratitude and amazement that it is here. Yes, it is possible to feel nostalgic for a hospital.

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