Who and what I am
I was born at the close of the Sixties on October 25 in upstate New York, use he/him pronouns primarily by default, have lived in St. Johns, Oregon, and environs for twenty-six years, and have been online since a dialup gopher server in 1993; and I am a straight, celibate, aromantic, agnostic, autistic, introverted, antifascist, aspirationally antiracist, middle-aged, cisgender white guy of Italian, Lithuanian, and Polish descent.
How I am impaired
Autism spectrum, generalized anxiety, obsessive-compulsive, sensory processing, persistent adjustment,and developmental coordination disorders; rejection sensitive dysphoria; pathological demand avoidance; aphantasia and severely deficient autobiographical memory; an unspecified, undiagnosed windedness and fatigue; and something my therapist and I refer to as “complex chronic stress”, which in some sense is akin to viewing daily life given the above through the lens of conservation of resources theory and arguably equates to the persistent adjustment disorder.
What’s happening
Had my first appointment with my new primary care physician, and a telephone appointment with a sleep doctor to discuss the mild sleep apnea diagnosis; switching up the daily exercise walk to afternoons now that evenings are dark and cold, and enjoying the data I now get from having a refurbished smartwatch but not enjoying the new back aches and pains; waiting to see if the new Social Security disability strategy does anything; stalled on the blog restoration project; stalled on putting that WW2-era shipyard workers zine and my research on it back online; my doctors still can’t explain my persistent low white blood cell counts or my fatigue or even whether they are related; needing to decide when to schedule robotic bladder surgery; realizing that my coping capacity has degenerated; and still being struck repeatedly by the ugly irony that of recent years 2020 for me was the easiest.
Recent books
I’m reading Abeni’s Song by P. Djèlí Clark for fiction and How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra for nonfiction; recently finished The Lover by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Jack O’Dander by Priya Sharma, and Mammoths at the Gates by Nghi Vo, and Unmasking AI by Joy Buolamwini; in the queue for fiction is We Are the Crisis by Cadwell Turnbull, then maybe Famous Men Who Never Lived by K Chess if the publisher fixes the justification bug in the Kindle edition; and for nonfiction Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond, then whatever library hold drops first; or you can buy me books and impact my choices
Current television
This week I’m watching Quantum Leap, Monarch, and For All Mankind; rewatching House (although I've reached first-watch territory), Moonlighting, and Remington Steele; still making my way through The Clone Wars; and still pausing the weekly Grimm rewatch because the podcast is on a break; I’m supporting the actors strike; and you should watch Mrs. Davis, Beef, and Hot Skull, three very different shows but among the best of the year.
Recent movies
Most recently I’ve seen The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (rewatch), Cradle Will Rock (rewatch), and The Martian (rewatch); Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Space Sweepers (rewatch), Ghostbusters: Afterlife; Godzilla (2014), Kong: Skull Island, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and Godzilla vs. Kong; and The Marvels; my plan to make my way chronologically through my watchlist has stalled out.
Current music
My rotation of late has included A Northern Chorus, An Horse, Evalyn, The Fallout (Original Motion Picture Soundrack), Ghost of Vroom, Juliana Hatfield, Kristin Hersh, Metric, Severance: Season One by Theodore Shaprio, Throwing Muses, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs; and I use LoFi Girl playlists to write, to read, and to get to sleep.
Current podcasts
I’ve been listening regularly to Wait, Wait… Don't Tell Me, Science Quickly, Quanta Science Podcast, and The Joy of Why; intermittently to Audio Research News, Spectrum Stories, and Synaptic; dipping into Our Opinions Are Correct; pausing The Grimmcast because it’s on a break, and hoping for more 1800 Seconds on Autism, Gates McFadden InvestiGates, and Star Trek: The Pod Directive.
Recent readings
I’ve been saving news articles and blog posts every morning to read over the course of the week, often falling way behind and slowly learning to comes to terms with that; and you can read my current top recommendation: D.L. Mayfield on how conversion therapy is all around us.
My baseball team
It’s no longer baseball season, which means as a born-and-raised, life-long if sometimes-lapsed Red Sox fan, I’m stuck in the long, seasonal doldrums waiting for Spring Training; wondering who in the world will replace Chaim Bloom; and hoping that in the off-season they realize that getting Rafael Devers back to self-regulating at the plate between pitches is the key to him being more consistent.
What I’ve been eating
My diet these days consists of cold cereal for breakfast, except for a weekly brunch out; an afternoon decaf almond-milk, coffeeshop latte over a book; brown rice, diced chiQin, broccoli, sweet corn, shredded iceberg lettuce, and Old Bay seasoning for lunch; turkey, provolone, olive oil mayo or spicy brown mustard, and shredded iceberg lettuce on sourdough for dinner; a cup of decaf coffee and a shortbread cookie for dessert; iced decaf coffee and a small salad after my walk; apple oatmeal crumble bars between meals; an Arnold Palmer and Cheez-It crackers for a snack; and keeping an eye out for when the food truck with the hot, fresh mini-donuts is in the neighborhood.
Exercise I’m getting
Every afternoon between lunch and dinner I get out for a walk that varies with my available resources between about a mile to just under a mile and a half, at a pace ranging anywhere from around a 17-minute mile to a 20-minute mile, sometimes heading straight west through downtown St. Johns and back, and sometimes heading in a loop to the east through the residential area and back; although starting in the past month or so I am experiencing back aches and pains during these walks.
My cat history
I grew up with a “mellow yellow”, domestic shorthair named Saffron and all too briefly with a gray tabby kitten named Pepper; in college I’d briefly lived with and then misplaced two black-and-white, domestic shorthairs named Peter and Petruchio; for my first seventeen years in Portland I lived with a stunted, grey-and-white domestic shorthair named Scully; since late 2014, I’ve lived with a gray-and-white, domestic shorthair named Meru (for the protagonist in Matt Kindt’s Mind MGMT), who thinks my singing is the sound of distress and on Friday afternoons insists that I pay attention to her instead of my therapist; and last year I lost to degenerative illness a dilute calico, domestic shorthair named Willow.
Where I spend my time
It’s exceedingly rare that I leave the vicinity of downtown St. Johns, frequenting its various coffee shops or my regular brunch spot, excepting a doctor’s appointment or an increasingly infrequent due to resource levels public transit trip all the way across town and back to visit to the zoo; but I’m skeptically trying to suss if it would be manageable to visit a different Portland neighborhood once per week, to help fill the time with no baseball to watch, although it’s unlikely given the increasing back aches and pains.
Things I’ve done
You might or might not know me from such former projects as a pioneering internet petition against government censorship; a worthwhile cybercafe failure; hosting a cruft-free edition of a Mark Twain short for two decades; several years of celebrated stand-alone journalism; the founding of a successful, annual fan-based fundraising campaign; the surprise uncovering of and research into a long-forgotten World War II shipyard workers zine; organizing video contest submissions for the DVD of a trailblazing web series; or project managing a resident herd of urban goats for five years; but not from my childhood dream of becoming an outer-space moving van driver.
What people have said
Rolling Stone emphasized my “long black eyelashes”, “face that sees very little sun”, and “quick wit”; Mike Doughty said that Soul Coughing was “playing it all” for me; Bruce Sterling referred to me as a “punk”; a Portland public relations professional called me a “sissy”; and a now-disgraced pop culture icon told people not to worship false versions of me and might have called me “twitchy, unreliable-looking”.
What I want to believe
That “if nothing we do matters, then the only thing that matters is what we do”; that cynicism is but frustrated optimism, resulting only from first believing that people are capable of better and then all too often being proved wrong; that this is why we should remember even the small, everyday courtesies; and that we should be building capacity, equity, mercy, and solidarity.
How this is made
Updated by hand in Markdown and served to you over the web by Carrd. Status comes from Status.LOL. Domain named for my Belly-inspired, mid-90s, first-ever internet handle. Random quotes inspired by one of my earliest websites. Status pane has an Atom feed. Other panes have an experimental RSS feed. Rules: no fear, no hate, no thoughtless bullshit, and no nazis. All rights reserved.