Well, as I mentioned in a previous post my 8-year-old 4K TCL smart television has been developing faults that are annoying, faint vertical lines that were apparent in some scenes and invisible in others. This past weekend, after several attempts at resetting the set in hopes that would clear up the trouble failed, I bit the bullet and ordered a new set.

Where the old set was an LED, the new one an OLED LG B5 smart TV is a technology that had been outside of comfortable financial resources in 2018. It also has better response times well suited for my casual Xbox gaming of playing Call of Duty on the weekends and getting my butt kicked by teenagers with mutant reaction times.  I ensured that the set also had a setting to display films as films and not as some unnaturally clear, motion-smoothed soap opera.

Thanks to a discount through my employer, Kaiser Permanente, and a spring sale code from LG itself, I managed to knock nearly $200 off the already discounted price. I am not sure, but I may have paid less for this far more capable television than I did for the set that will soon be recycled.

The original shipping date had it arriving this Thursday, May 7th, but that wasn’t going to work for me as I would be at the day job. I rescheduled the delivery for next Thursday, which just happens to be my birthday and part of a long weekend I had planned for celebrating the fact that I will have officially reached Medicare age. So that is when I will take down the old set, set-up the new one, and the next day have a company come out and pick up the discarded television for e-waste disposal and recycling.

OLED has superior black levels and ‘infinite’ contrast, so I will have to decide among my 4K discs, which one will christen the new set.

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Even as people fled the scene of this year’s White House Correspondents’ Association’s dinner, others safely at their keyboards asserted with the confidence of fools that the shooting had been manufactured as a ‘false flag’ to either generate sympathy for a historically unpopular president or distract the people from other massive troubles dogging this administration.

The WHCA shoot was not a false flag.

The Butler assassination attempt was not a false flag.

The Golf Course ambush attempt was not a false flag.

The Las Vegas mass shooting was not a false flag.

The Unite the Right March and killing was not a false flag.

Sandy Fucking Hook was not a false flag.

False flag attacks do in fact occur, but it is nearly always a state attacking another state, such as Nazi Germany claiming Poland attacked them in September of 1939 and as in that example they are also nearly always so terribly transparent as to fool no one. America is a nation of violent people with easy access to weaponry. It should shock no one that our political leaders face the threat of violence so often.

I have decried and denounced political violence repeatedly here on my blog, from the very deadly and serious attacks on any president or corporate officer to the street level assaults of ‘punch a Nazi.’ Political violence is a beast that, like cancer grows on itself, and once loosed is difficult to excise. I am glad that the assassination attempts against the idiotic, narcissistic, petty, vengeful, and cruel person have failed.  Should a major blood vessel in that rotting matter he calls a brain burst like an ancient bicycle tire, and he dropped dead, you would not find one portion of grief in me, but should you confess a plot to murder him, I would turn you in without a moment’s hesitation.

Murderers and would-be murderers must face the law in a court that resolves their matters without fear or favor, and the political troubles must be solved politically and not from high-speed projectiles.

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.April has been a chaotic month.  The most impactful event, so far, has been the bout of RSV that I managed to contract. Respiratory Syncytial Virus as the name suggests is a virus of the respiratory system, specifically the upper respiratory regions which in the very young, the aged, or the immunocompromised can be a very serious illness. A vaccine for RSV has been developed and two years ago, because I am not an idiot, I took that vaccination. Now, people often think of a vaccination as a perfectly protective shield, but that is not the case with all vaccines. In many cases what a vaccine will do if it doesn’t prevent infection and illness is reduce the severity of that illness when contracted, The fact that I contracted RSV and was ill is not evidence that the vaccine had no effect. In all probability the fact that I was vaccinated likely saved me from a hospitalization as I am no longer a spring chicken and the medication that keeps my arthritis in check compromises my immune system. Note that while I was home sick for a week, coughing my lungs out and having a terrible time, my sweetie-wife was exposed to the virus and has not, now more than a week later, shown any signs of catching the bug. For her the vaccination looks to have been that perfect shield.

It was a week and a couple of days ago that I returned to work and I am just now starting to really get back in something that feels normal health-wise. The coughing has subsided greatly and I am managing to reclaim much of my former energy.

Last night, April 16th, was the season finale for the second run of The Pitt, the medical drama that I never thought I’d get so totally sucked into. Season one turned the final few episodes into a massive dramatic sequence with a spree shooter at a local music festival and many fans, including myself, expected some major event to drive the second half or later of season two, but that was not the plan by the show’s creative team. Instead, with much of the focus on its central character of Dr. Robby, this season seemed to be much more focused on stress for the characters and just how much they erode under its corrosive pressure. A wise choice to avoid repeating the form of season one, keeping the writing fresh and the fans off balance.

I have little to say on the state of the world. The government of the USA is out of control, violating its and international laws with abandon as we suffer the whims of a malignant self-absorbed moron whose petty and greedy nature shatters the post war world order.

After the break in coherent thought brought on by RSV I have returned to my Cascade mountain set folk horror novel with the outlining process now under way.

My best to everyone, stay safe, stay hydrated, and remember don’t be mean.

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I have been missing from my online presence because I have been sick, and it was no fun at all.

During the last week of March, I noticed a scratch in the back of my throat and over that final weekend of March it grew worse. Since I already had an appointment to see one of my doctors on the 31st as part of my on-going treatment for a chronic cough I planned to bring the issues to her. By that date it had grown more painful and congestion had settled in. They took swabs from my upper nasal cavities and the test showed I had RSV.

I had been vaccinated against this very virus but vaccinations when they do not prevent infection at least reduce the severity of it. Given that I suspect that without the shot I may very well have ended up in the hospital. As it turned out, the doctor ordered me home for a week and I suffered terribly for several of those days, despite the mini-pharmacy of drugs I was taking.

During the illness I had only a limited capacity for rational thought with barely the focus for even simple mental tasks. Luckily, in addition to the precautions we took, my sweetie-wife’s vaccination appeared to bolster her immune system better than mine had done for me, and she showed no sign of RSV.

So, today I return to my day job and I hopefully return to work on my next novel.

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Yesterday, Tuesday March 10th, 2026, turned into quite a lazy day for me. After my doctors noted that I had some liver numbers that were out of an acceptable range (which have since returned to more normal values) she asked me to get an ultrasound scan to check the organ. That I scheduled for yesterday at 8:00 am as part of the procedure requires 8 hours of fasting ahead of the test and I know that doing it late in the day would prove challenging.

After skipping a breakfast, I turned up at the Kaiser Zion hospital and without much delay got taken back for my ultrasound. The procedure was fast, painless, and even the gel that they apply to ensure good conductivity of the sound waves was warm and not cold preventing that expected discomfort.

It is my usual habit, when I have a medical procedure of any kind to take the day off, even if like this ultrasound I know it’s going to be fast and without any medication. So, after a quick shopping trip for lunch materials that fit my newly engaged diet, I returned home and played vegetable for the rest of the day.

Today I return to work at my day job but then I have the rest of the week off to attend a cherry blossom festival in Balboa Park tomorrow and enjoy a long weekend after that.

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I am not talking about the production of art, though that also sometimes inflicts nasty emotional pain. No, what I am referencing is when the art you consume, in my case film & television, strikes you in a deep and emotional context that the creators may not have intended. Last night I watched the most recent episode of HBO’s hit series The Pitt about the disasters and triumphs in a fictional Pittsburg hospital’s emergency department. It’s a fantastic program with every aspect of production, writing, and performance absolutely stellar.

One of the multiple storylines going on in the episode unsettled me, leaving me to wonder in terror if what I watched could possibly be my fate. Panic attacks are not part of my emotional make-up. I learned this about myself 30 years ago. While working in a gas station on the night shift, people would come in bloodied from assaults and accidents, and I maintained my calm, but with this particular plot, my heart sped up, and my discomfort made me want to turn away. I am not going to reveal which storyline. It’s not really relevant to my mindless meanderings. This is about how art impacts us and sometimes in wholly unintentional manners and how that impact might even lead us to change the course of our lives. I certainly will be thinking long and hard about it for at least the next week and images from the episode continue to haunt me.

The last time something like this struck me so very personally was the summer of 1984. Ghostbusters, which gets a shout-out in my most recent novel, released that summer and along with my friends, we ventured to the multiplex for this comedy that essentially asked nothing of its audience save the suspension of disbelief. But it turned out to be a little painful for me, at least on a first viewing. My emotional trauma, slight as it was, lessened with repeated viewings.

And what was it that hurt me, personally, in that silly broad comedy?

Lewis Tulley, Central Park West.

When Lewis Tulley, perfectly performed by the terribly talented Rick Moranis, made his first appearance on the screen, chasing his doomed crush for Dana (Sigourney Weaver) I physically cringed. It seemed that all of my doubts and insecurities had been given form and portrayed for everyone to see and to have a good laugh at. Of course, no one else saw it that way. Not the strangers in the auditorium, not my friends sitting next to me. My reaction — a product of my own doubts and insecurities  –was just that, my own creation. It took a long time before I could watch that performance without a twinge of embarrassment, but it did eventually come.

The Pitt’s episode hit just as hard as Ghostbusters did, but on a totally different vector. And I must remind myself of a truth I uncovered many years ago: Self-perception is the least reliable human trait.