Smock Blogs

Ron Filipkowski writing for The Daily Beast dropped this into my Today I Learned box this week about Donald Trump’s hatred of wind turbines, which, given his “hairstyle”, anything wind-related is going to get his dandruff up:

While Donald Trump occasionally rolls out new lines for his rally speeches and interviews based on a hot topic of the day, his rants have largely stayed the same for many years. One topic Trump has brought up at nearly every appearance is his hatred of wind turbines, which he calls “windmills.”

What’s notable about this being a recurring line Trump’s used at rallies recently is that it doesn’t play well.

Trump is always very responsive to his rally audiences, and when something isn’t enthusiastically received, he typically will cut it out of future riffs. Not so with the windmills. While many of his standard rally lines are certain to get the faithful on their feet cheering Dear Leader, the windmill lines are generally met with stony silence by people who obviously couldn’t care less and don’t share his maniacal obsession.

So why does he keep beating that drum like it’s a couch cushion he found some change under before?

His obsession with wind turbines—which he blames for a variety of domestic and foreign policy ills—originates from a dispute he had with the Scottish Parliament over windmills near his golf course outside Aberdeen, Scotland, two decades ago.

Oh.

Making his problems everyone else’s problem has been Trump’s thing ever since he descended on that food court, bringing to America the kind of politics you’d expect from a man who would announce his run for the presidency in the same building as a Sbarro pizza: greasy, overcooked, and you’re going to regret your choice sooner rather than later.

Except that Trump’s tilting at windmills and he’s getting us to do the same, galloping off to slay imaginary dragons like murder rates in places like New York City (it’s worse in red states), deportation plans (he’s still holding Obama’s beer there), and well, wind turbines.

Because he’d rather we not worry so much about his plans for the country, and what he’ll do in the event he loses another presidential election.

Say this for Donald J. Trump: he’s not subtle. We’re not dealing with Machiavelli so much as we are Machiavelli’s younger brother who lost a few too many arguments with rake handles and stairs growing up and now says all the parts loud, soft or otherwise.

And his ascendancy points out the least convenient truth about ourselves: that maybe the American dream, the one where democracy is sacrosanct and can save us from all our ills, isn’t enough anymore.

Maybe it never was, but we’ve gone from Trump’s run at public office being inconceivable to unbelievable to reprehensible, and his popularity shows no sign of slowing.

The man wants us to follow him to fight windmills, and the dragons he hopes we’ll ignore?

His plans for democracy.

Because that’s what the 2024 election is about, the preservation of whatever version of America still shines as a light on a hill somehow, no matter how dimly it may do so.

Even if it seems like that light’s on top of a windmill off the Scottish coast, and we’ll never get there in time.

Nowhere to go but up.

They tell you that in the rooms.

Over styrofoam cups of decent coffee, remnants of cigarettes sneaking in to underscore regret.

That at rock bottom, you can only ascend.

Somehow that hole you’ve dug is so narrow you can but climb.

Except when you find a tunnel.

Or make your own.

Shovel strokes convincing you of upward mobility.

That you’re making progress.

Moving for its own sake.

So you dig.

Hoping you’re headed anywhere but further down.

Big feelings.

Something we associate with kids.

Beings less developed than ourselves.

They don’t have the words to deal with them.

But they will, when they grow up.

That’s the working assumption.

Doesn’t work for all of us.

Probably most of us.

As a man of a certain age who’s somewhere on the spectrum that’s not as much fun at parties, the highlight reel tells me otherwise.

Moments in my life when I raged at things that in quieter moments make no sense.

• A missed train connection in Japan
• The wrong turn on a road trip in college
• A tangle of cords in the home office

Each of those triggering an eruption, and quickly, more Mt. St. Helens than Iceland slow burn.

More aware of myself, and the precursors, I can fend off the explosion.

Except that sometimes?

I need that.

You might, too.

A moment where we can let loose the big feelings.

Scream into the void.

Smash our way out of the abyss.

Sound our barbaric yawp.

Because the words, even when we have them, sometimes, aren’t enough.

Doesn’t matter how far you fell.

Or how big you were.

Once you hit the water, the ripples fade.

The fall isn’t the problem.

It’s the sudden stop at the end.

Knowing that the waves will cease.

And life will go on.

Waiting for someone else’s ripples.

We get told almost from the womb that we have potential.

It’s vague, unclear, but we start to see the outlines of it.

The lucky ones get handed the crayon.

The rest of us get to watch someone draw it for us.

Tell us that’s who we should aspire to be.

Then we grow up.

And we never quite get to the edges.

The lucky ones find their own crayon.

Redraw things.

The rest of us?

Learn the difference between the words.

Potential.

Capacity.

Some days it feels like I missed both.

Crashing doesn’t happen all at once.

Seems like it.

It’s not the fall, but the sudden stop at the end.

But then you look back.

See that it was happening long before this.

Maybe in ways I didn’t see.

Or didn’t want to see.

Wouldn’t.

Couldn’t.

The result was the same.

Maybe figuring out how this one happened, I can prevent the next one.

Or.

Amidst the wreckage, find a way through.

Because crashing is a series of events, fortunate, and otherwise.

I’m everything I am

Because you loved me

I was loved.

Falsely, as it turns out.

Not because of them, but because of me.

They loved a version of me.

A construct made of facsimiles of acceptable behavior, strung together with trivia mined from the weekly television insert in the Sunday newspaper and ingrained passages of scripture that made for a passable pastiche of A Real Boy.

That they loved.

The kid whose awkwardness and lack of coordination was written off as a function of growth and so he gravitated toward spelling bees as a way to both feed his love of words and to have something like a sense of accomplishment.

The child who accepted Jesus as his Lord and Savior at least half a dozen times because he’d wake up in a cold sweat convinced that he hadn’t done it quite right yet and this time, maybe, would be the time that would make sure he didn’t go to Hell when he died.

They loved that kid.

Except.

That his grades weren’t quite enough.

And if had money, he’d spend it.

Not like his sister, who’d save it.

Both behaviors filling a void they couldn’t quite.

And then the kid grew up.

The facade assumed different shapes, because their love wasn’t all he wanted.

There were others, part of the tribe.

The ones he’d hoped would love him, too.

Except.

He was always “a bit much”.

“No chill” before that was a thing.

But love?

Sure, why not.

I was loved.

As I was.

Whoever that was.

I’m supposed to just be myself.

Be the best me I can be.

There’s only one me.

Kind of glad that last one’s true.

Not sure about the first two.

Because I’m figuring out how much of my identity has been me masking my autism in a vain attempt to get off the island of me and get to play on the beach with the rest of the kids.

I’ll forever associate metaphors for my autism with some form of childhood, because like most traumas, the core ones are formed well before our brains are capable of processing them.

Even though I don’t particularly like the beach, and I’ve written it off over the years to my discomfort with heat and sand, but I’ve come to suspect it’s more about how it’s not a place I’ll ever quite fit in.

I grumble in my old-before-my-time way about how it’s just silly to spend the day trying to avoid sunburn, tossing Frisbees or beanbags because cornhole is a sport now in case we’re not absolutely sure that maybe it’s time we all should just fly into the sun.

When what I mean under that mask of indifference and disdain is that I’m not very good at throwing a frisbee, or a beanbag, thanks to a combination of poor coordination in my youth and a childhood only slightly less isolating than if my only friend had been a volleyball.

The problem with being somewhere on the spectrum where I’m aware of how I come across to people but have no clue what to do about that most of the time is that it enforces a bit of a personality split.

Which, is useful in terms of figuring out my emotional responses to things, but less so when it comes to being either the ASD Bot or A Real Boy.

Because those are two distinct selves, characters I’ve had to introduce to my Significant Other when they tell me they want an honest answer to the question.

Give you my best/worst example.

Father-in-law died of cancer at an age where that was a tragedy.

My SO, being a non-autistic human, albeit with her own neurodivergent inclinations, was understandably emotional.

Day of the funeral, ASD Bot said, “I don’t understand why you’re so upset. You know he was an asshole.”

Granted, this was before I knew I was autistic, so I doubled down, defending the logic by citing multiple instances where Dearly Departed Dad was Delightedly Dead Dickhead.

Surprising no one, that has…come up since.

Just be myself.

Which self would you prefer, then?

It’s not like I come with a menu.

Might could simplify things.

Or at least lessen the pain, theirs and mine.

Like a lot of us on the spectrum, words have a nearly mythic appeal.

Because of how my brain’s wired, certain words sound like fingers on harp strings.

Others like a piano falling down a hill.

And others just make me giggle.

I don’t think that’s autism, but there’s a middle school kid trapped in all of us.

Mine snickers at a word I like a lot: seminal.

“Sounds like semen,” he’ll snort at me.

Merriam Webster defines it thus:

1. of, relating to, or consisting of seed or semen / “seminal discharge”
2. containing or contributing the seeds of later development : CREATIVE, ORIGINAL / “a seminal book”

So my inner middle schooler’s not wrong.

Words like seminal have joined words like “epic,” or “queen,” or “outrage” in this current age as signs that we no longer have a sense of scale.

Still, there are things that I look back and see them germinating growth.

Today it’s Ram Dass’ book, Walking Each Other Home, a dialogue and meditation on life and death that I found through Pete Holmes’ podcast, “You Made It Weird”.

I thought I wanted more from this life.

Some fame, notoriety.

Find my tribe.

Those who would assemble in time of need.

And it showed in how I saw the world, or at least the people in it.

Slotting them according to accomplishment.

Achievement.

How successful they were in their endeavors.

And how I hadn’t “made it”.

Likely I never will.

Now?

I just want someone to walk me home.

Arm in arm between this moment and our last.

Hopeful that the last is a ways down our road, but living in each moment and its joy.

So whenever that end arrives, we’ll share that moment, too.

It’s a simple enough question:

“How many people did you order for?”

Just another mundane data pull for Door Dash so our future robot overlords know exactly how many items to send my way in the future when they’ve become the means of production at McDonald’s, which has had more of my patronage than I’m comfortable admitting to in the last several months.

Nothing quite as jarring to see how many times you’ve ordered the same thing from a corporation tailored to lull us into complacency through carbs and corn syrup.

Besides the implicit invasion of what remains of my privacy, there’s the implication that I’m either ordering more than I should, or that I’m only ordering for one.

I’d admit to reading too much into this, but if the machines are truly going to rule us one day, they too will need to adapt themselves to the various judgmental queries that we inflict on each other regularly:

• Do you have kids?
• What do you do for work?
• How do you think the Cowboys will do this year?

Here’s what I hear:

• I hate my kids, but need to feel morally superior by pointing out that you don’t have any of your own.
• My job drained whatever dreams I had long ago, but I’m hoping that your job will make me feel just that much better about myself.
• Since I have not identity of my own, I fill that void with things like watching sports and opinions on hot wings, and I am incapable of understanding anyone who doesn’t do likewise.

Have I mentioned how much fun I am at parties?

Congressman Eric Burlison (R-MO) believes that quality time means killing things with his kids and thinks it’s possible that UFOs are angels, and given what usually happens when aliens and humans interact, likely Hulu’s going to pass on Burlie’s reboot script for Touched by an Angel.

Probably unfair of me to judge the congressman on his website, or his appearance on a podcast, because it’s possible that he’s a thoughtful guy ready to have a nuanced conversation about Critical Race Theory.

Oh.

Oh my.

Just in time for election season, get your own Pyro-15 for a cool $1,200.

He’s up for re-election this year, so you do you, Missouri.

As a recovering evangelical, it hurts my head and my heart to see a belief system I don’t quite understand anymore being hijacked to make a point about unexplained aerial phenomena (UAP), and using the Bible to do it.

Don’t get me wrong, the Bible starts and ends in some weird places, but I’d like to think that when the angel appeared to Mary to tell her she was going to have a divine rape baby, that said angel looked more like us and less like something from a 50s sci-fi comic book.

No idea what it’s like for you neurotypicals but the “introduce yourself to a potential employer” self-recorded video to this particular neurodivergent since I can’t and won’t speak for the rest of the NDs on the spectrum feels like I’m being my best most engaging self because I don’t have any feedback from an audience to gauge how I’m coming across and then when I watch myself in the playback I look like I’m presenting proof of life under duress but there’s no Russell Crowe out there ready to rush to my aid so I have to save myself so I’ll do it again and try to think what an NT would look like when they’re happy and present that but again since the only feedback is myself I end up looking like a cross between an angry chimp grimacing to make a point about territory and an android whose person suit is malfunctioning which is fine if you’re Zuckerberg and you’ve made billions because you got that useful ‘tism but for the rest of us not so blessed with the computer smarts it means we’re reduced to doing 1-2 minute introductions of ourselves that make us come across like that bug in MIB who kept stretching his face to look more human which is fine if we’re helping reboot Will “Slappy” Smith’s career but otherwise that’s a no from most hiring managers.

As the smoke clears after the fire that engulfed actress/model/eyebrow goals Cara Delevigne’s home last week, some things are apparent:

1. Her cats are fine
2. She’s not wrong about ball pits
3. The robots are coming for your calendars

I’m copping to a pop culture reference to make a point about society, because now that Buzzfeed News has gone the way of the dodo, the pet rock and the Hula Burger, there’s that critical gap between finding out whether you’re the couch in Central Perk or the one by the fountain in Friends and I aim to fill it.

Besides making us all wonder why our eyebrows aren’t earning us enough to build things in our home more closely associated with animatronic rodents and substandard pizzas, this event points out another looming national crisis: staffing fire departments.

Because fire departments, like nearly every other service-related industry, from hotels to coffee shops to the military, are having trouble finding people interested in working at thankless jobs that don’t pay enough for them to thrive anymore.

Kudos to whatever editor signed off on this headline: Lincoln Fire & Rescue recruiting like wildfire amid national shortage

The cost of living hasn’t kept pace with the cost of doing business, and nowhere is that more apparent than in fields like law enforcement, nursing, education, or the military.

Still, people’s homes still catch fire, even homes with a ball pit, in case we needed any more evidence that there’s a cataclysmic wealth gap in this country.

In a time when affordable housing is vanishing faster than profits at a Trump casino, things like ball pits will make me ill, and not for the usual ball pit related reasons.

So to protect ball pits and other more critical infrastructure, fire departments are turning to options that could mean your next fireman’s calendar will be more bolts than beefcake.

Like any new technology, adoption will take time, but with companies like Thermite, the option’s already there for the Los Angeles Fire Department, which mobilized one of Thermite’s robotic units back in 2020.

These large fires sometimes cause us to back out our firefighters because we are concerned about the potential for a building collapse. So the utilization of the RS3 will number one enhance firefighter safety and will enable us to sustain a long-term interior aggressive fire attack which will result in faster extinguishment.

Granted a system like the RS 3 still relies on an operator, and that means someone will need to go into the building, but we’ve already seen what Boston Dynamics and its Atlas robot can do and while that haunts my dreams, I can see the utility of sending a metal box into places where a human firefighter might not survive.

However, systems like RS3 and Atlas will mean a few things:

• Lower operating costs: not a lot of call for health coverage or retirement plans if your employees plug into the wall at night.
• Fills staffing gaps: unless whatever comes after COVID finally turns the planet into a live-action Last of Us cosplay in the near future, more people means more structures means more things that burn down
• Takes humans out of the loop: which is one of the primary reasons for robots, anyway

It’s that last one that should worry us, but not for the reasons we normally get sweaty palms about autonomous systems.

The main fear around de-humanizing systems is that those systems will be less safer, or more prone to mistakes, which we’ve seen in cinema from 2001 to RoboCop to Stealth.

For the record, I’ve listed those in descending order of awful, from cinematic masterpiece to glorious satire to just abysmal film drek.

And while those are legitimate concerns, the larger problem, the more dangerous one, is that it reduces even further the power of human labor to effect change.

In future firehouses, like future police stations, construction sites, coffee shops, warehouses, military bases, hospitals, and schools, there will always be humans somewhere in the loop, but they’re going to represent an even more disposable component than they already do.

The increase in automation is indeed being driven by consumption, as companies struggle to produce as much stuff as we’re prepared to buy.

But it’s also being driven systematically by a need to control the trickiest part of any production process: people.

Unionization efforts at Amazon, Starbucks, and CostCo underscore for corporations that they need to find a way to deal with humans only until they can find a way to replace them.

And like the Patriot Act and other similar legislation did when stripping out what shreds of privacy we may have had left at our local libraries, it’s going to happen in the name of safety.

They’ll point to fewer injuries in first responders, reduced harm to civilians during armed responses, less fatigue in the remaining human worker pool at the warehouse.

And then they’ll show us how much better our lives are because they’ve put robots on the job.

Robotic doctors/surgeons/nurses will make fewer mistakes.

Our stuff will get there even faster, because Amazon’s massive delivery network and metrics it collects (like any other major retailer) is nothing more than an ongoing data collection activity train the robots to get shit done.

Our robot army will fend off China’s robot army better than a human army ever could. No more flag draped coffins, just a box of bolts sent back to be melted down to make more soldiers.

A better world, a world where the robots can save our…ball pits.

As a Gen Xer, I’m 100% going to see The Fall Guy because while recycling IP from my childhood makes the creative in me itch, the nostalgic Man Of A Certain Age loves to see a good reboot of a classic.

The director, David Leitch, got his start in Hollywood as a stunt performer, and since the movie’s about a stunt man, well, Leitch wanted to be sure that the movie itself is a fitting homage to a profession that’s both underappreciated and probably under threat as Hollywood leans ever harder into CGI and AI.

Which brings us to world records, cannon rolls, and why it’s dusty in here all of a sudden.

The cannon roll, a classic stunt dating back to the early days of cinema, involves fitting a cannon-like apparatus beneath a car that shoots toward the ground. As the vehicle reaches a designated speed, the mechanism triggers and propels the car into a series of rolls. Holladay executed the stunt behind the wheel of a modified Jeep Grand Cherokee fitted with an external fiberglass body.

They set the world record for cannon rolls with eight and a half, beating the previous record of seven set by Casino Royale.

I will never not be moved by human accomplishment, even if it’s something so clearly juvenile and let’s face it male as making a car roll a bunch of times for a movie.

Because in a world that seems to keep tilting like the deck of the Titanic, it’s nice to see that we can still do things for the sheer joy of it.

I am enough.

Or I want to be.

I’d like to be.

I want to be enough.

For everyone in my life.

It validates me to know that I am.

Or to be told that I am.

But that’s not how any of this works, is it?

We are never enough.

Be prettier.

Smarter.

In better shape.

And for good reason.

Pretty people have pretty partners.

The smart ones make the money.

If you’re in better shape you live a better life.

It’s not all toxic, but it tells us what we lack.

We are insufficient in some way.

Maybe it’s not about being better.

What if it was just about being enough?

Before I knew I was autistic, I just wrote it off to being an asshole.

And by “it” I mean the gut reaction response to things that usually meant one of the following:

My significant either a) cried, b) got mad then cried, or c) felt compelled to ruefully explain to others that this was just me being me.

Sidebar: I use words like “ruefully” non-ironically because I like the way they sound.

Then the others in our lives would latch onto that and say, “Oh, he’s being particularly himself today”.

What they meant instead was that they thought I was being an asshole and I probably was but also it’s neurons.

And you primed them by asking me something that those neurons collectively had an answer for and I opted to not worry about your feelings.

Probably because I was tired, or was caught off guard, and the “feelings” damper had been slid way down.

So I gave you an answer because you input your query and the machine had a response which based on what your face just did was unexpected, or at least unwelcome.

And I’m not apologizing, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t know that I’ve erred somehow and caused pain and I didn’t mean to and I’m sorry.

But I don’t want to say that out loud because I don’t know you that well and somehow being an asshole is just easier than telling you that I’m autistic.

And then unpacking what all that means for my life behind and my life ahead and then you’ll look at me differently because “asshole” just simplifies things, doesn’t it?

I’d like to think I’m a visionary.

A self-starter.

Someone who can see that far horizon and blaze a trail toward it.

That given enough time to do what I really want, I could change the world.

Two years of unemployment say otherwise.

The Great American Novel is still incomplete.

I’m heavier.

My marriage ended.

No new skills on the resume.

Because the white space?

Daunting.

And I kept seeing the expanse, and that was all.

Because I couldn’t see the other side, I froze.

Now, as I look at going back to the grind, the trick is going to be doing it differently.

To see it otherwise.

Not the destination, but the journey.

Taking steps, one at a time.

It’s less about where they end up, but that they’re going somewhere.

Anywhere, really.

Progress > perfection.

It’s the 3 Ms:

• Motivation
• Movement
• Momentum

That’s the order.

Motivate myself to move and generate momentum.

Except most days?

I have to move first.

Because that’s where motivation’s waiting.

In that sentence of a novel.

Those first steps on a walk.

First strokes on canvas.

Move first, find the rest later.

Aim small, miss small.

First heard that in American Sniper, Bradley Cooper’s prosthetic-free ode to an American icon.

Context is sniper training, and the instructor’s telling Chris Kyle and his fellow trainees to “aim small, miss small”.

The idea is that the smaller the target, the smaller the margin of error if you miss.

Aiming for a shirt button?

Good chance you still hit the shirt.

And where bullets are involved, that’s probably going to get the job done.

There are counter arguments for this, valid ones, and it’s not a recipe for success at scale, I’d agree.

Except I keep aiming big, and missing even bigger.

Because I didn’t hit the smaller targets first.

Couldn’t see them, because the big target, the main goal, got in the way.

And when I aim big, and miss bigger?

I just want to give up.

And I never really go anywhere.

So I’m aiming small.

Breaking that bigger target down into something manageable.

Small enough that if I miss it doesn’t set me back.

Some days that’s pretty small.

Then the days add up.

Lots of smalls make a big.

But I have to hit the smalls, first.

Just watched the trailer for Little Wing.

Burst into tears.

Learning to let myself have those moments.

Sit with my feelings.

Let them roll over me.

Maybe figure out the why.

There isn’t one, not always.

Happened to be one today.

It’s a “coming of age” movie, where awkwardness is a phase, and a passing one.

A thing you outgrow, a shell you leave behind.

Except as one of the neurodivergent, I’ll never get past that.

I’m forever out of sync with the neurotypical.

And the closeted neurodivergent who either can’t or won’t acknowledge their otherness.

Because as I am is never enough.

I cannot be accepted in the fullness of me.

My strings will always tie me down, the strands of neurons jerking me away from being A Real Boy who can walk amongst the normies as one of them.