Band Review: The Zeros

The first thing I should tell you is that there are three bands that go by "The Zeros" and they are all punk. This is not the British one or the glam one. They are the Latino one, but that doesn't seem to get mentioned much in information about them.

It is easy to miss. They don't sing in Spanish or have obvious references. Being labeled as ethnic would probably have hurt sales, but that is also a shame. There can be room for anyone in any genre, and it might help if it were more obvious that inroads have already been made. I found them in a list of bands with Latinx roots in Celia C. Pérez's The First Rule of Punk.

For West Coast punk history, they are still important. According to NME, the police breaking up a Zeros show in 1979 heralded the arrival of punk riots to the US (something already familiar in Britain by then). It was The Zeros who played "Beat Your Heart Out" eight times in a row, and no other songs. That seems like the more obnoxious part of punk, but that is also a pretty good song. It could still have been a really good show.

Know your punk history.

We are in times that need people who can feel low, laugh about it, and come up swinging.

That crowd has always been more diverse than the cursory glance shows.

https://www.facebook.com/thezeros77/


ETA: I have heard back from a reader who saw them perform within the last two years, so that was interesting. Maybe something else will come up.

ETA 11/19/19: I just heard from Javier Escovedo, and here are some updates:

We have a new 7" single coming out on Munster records. We toured Europe earlier this year. We will be playing with the Adolescents on December 6th in orange county. Etc. We will be recording more in October.

Because of this, I am erasing the paragraph that indicated that they were not currently together. They clearly are. Orange County fans should check out the Garden Amp schedule. Tickets appear to be available through Ticket Web and Event Brite:

https://www.ticketweb.com/event/the-adolescents-w-the-zeros-garden-amphitheatre-tickets/9910315

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-adolescents-w-the-zeros-and-the-crowd-more-tba-tickets-73510669391

Album Review: 40 by Stray Cats

Most of the album reviews will be for bands I have already reviewed, and usually that I have seen in concert. I came across a new release from an old favorite, though, and wanted to write it up.

40 sees the Stray Cats returning to the studio after 26 years (40 years after first getting together), so it represents an incredible history. That includes the history of the band, but also much of the history of music.

One of the most interesting songs for that is "That's Messed Up". Musically it reminds me of "Ooh My Head" from Richie Valens, but the lyrics reference song titles from Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly. (It makes me wonder if I am missing a Big Bopper allusion somewhere.) That is cool, but mainly it is the guitar and the bass and the drums, still sounding great together.

I think it is a more mature sound now - more groove so maybe less popular appeal - but still so much fun. I especially like the energy on "When Nothing's Going Right", which should apply to plenty of days.

Obviously Stray Cats fans will want to check 40 out. They will probably find "Three Times A Charm" to sound the most typically feline. In addition, fans of Link Wray should really check out "Desperado". That guitar work underlies the entire album, but is most noticeable on this instrumental track. Then it immediately slides into the intro for "Mean Pickin' Mama", and it's just good stuff.

I already knew to be grateful that expanded media and opportunities can mean a market for so many of the older bands you loved, but I am starting to also be amazed that those musicians maintain energy and vigor and skills.

It's a wonderful thing.

There are non-music factors that make it impossible to say that this is a great time to be alive, but at least the music remains.

http://straycats.com/

https://www.facebook.com/Stray-Cats-1576129305971999/

https://www.youtube.com/user/StrayCatsVEVO

https://twitter.com/thestraycats/

Native American Heritage Month 2018: A side of paternalism

One reason I want to move my reading to focus more on Native authors for November and Black authors for February, et cetera, is that in some of the histories I keep noticing things that bug me just enough for it to be an issue.

It is not blatant racism, though the structural racism underpinning everything plays a role, I am sure. There is just this little hint of condescension here and there... some sense of the author knowing better than the subjects how they felt and what they should have thought and done.

Maybe it was always there and I didn't notice it before. Specialist in the history of slavery and Reconstruction Leon F. Litwack - who won a Pulitzer prize for his book that bothered me - is still the worst, where I am not even sure I trust his reading of the history.

The two I am thinking of for this section could have been much worse, but still, maybe I just don't need to read any white people for those four months. We still get the other eight. (Remember that for anyone who wants to object to the lack of a white history month.)

Anyway, there were two that bothered me. One was Joe Starita, author of A Warrior of the People: How Susan La Flesche Overcame Racial and Gender Inequality to Become America's First Indian Doctor.

First of all, if anyone gets frustrated with these long and awkward titles, in many cases there is an obvious title that has many other books with that name, so that part after the colon is crucial for differentiating between titles. However, it is still totally okay to criticize this one. The first part is unique enough; you could have a perfectly respectable but much less awkward continuation (like "Susan La Flesche, America's First Indian Doctor"). Finally, I think "A Warrior for her People" would be better before the colon.

Most of the book's flaws were things like too much repetition and using his own words for her thoughts when he could have quoted from the letters he was drawing from. That could be related to paternalism, but it could just be a need for better editing. What bothered me more were certain words that it's a little questionable to be using in 2016, and not in quotes, and yeah, that condescending attitude. Not terrible to read, but I bet he would take the criticism very badly.

That leads to the funny part.

I also read America Before the European Invasions by Alice Beck Kehoe. It wasn't bad. I thought her best chapter focused on Inuit technology and a relatively recent legal case, and that she made some good points. Also, there were just those little bits where you're not even sure that something is wrong, but it feels like there is.

Less than two weeks after I finished her book, Anthropology News published an article about resisting Indigenous erasure:

http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2019/04/08/resisting-indigenous-erasure-from-alcatraz-island-to-elizabeth-warren/#.XKuSd1vOtz8.twitter

Kehoe responded really rudely before it was even noon. I didn't even see that it criticized her work directly. There were multiple references to Vine Deloria Jr, and he criticized anthropologists pretty regularly (maybe her personally; but not that I know of), so maybe it felt personal in that way. I don't know, it just wasn't a surprise.

For the record, I thought article author Rick W. A. Smith responded well.

I can certainly see why Kehoe might not personally like Deloria, but if she is just going to discount him, that is maybe where I have to question her understanding, and therefore her work.

On a side note, one of the surprisingly fun things about The Book of the Hopi was that some of Frank Waters' footnotes on anthropologists were quite snarky. And yes, I do get a lot of my attitude toward anthropologists from Deloria, but others have backed it up.

Native American Heritage Month 2018: Children's books to break your heart

Last year's reading covered a lot regarding education and residential schools too, but this year was largely built upon one list:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/10-books-about-residential-schools-to-read-with-your-kids-1.3208021

(This is a CBC list so these are Canadian books, but the US has Carlisle and others, so we don't get to cast stones.)

I read all but Kookum's Red Shoes, because I could not find a copy. I also read an additional book by Christy Jordan-Fenton and Margaret Pokiak-Fenton, Not My Girl, a picture book version of A Stranger At Home. (It looks like there is a corresponding picture book for Fatty Legs as well.)

You may notices that Nicola Campbell has two books also, Shi-shi-etko and Shin-chi's Canoe. In both cases the books divide up the story. One book tells you more about home life, and one about school life. Putting both situations in the same book heightens the contrast, but breaking it down over two books allows more detail.

I'm not saying that I have a preference for one technique over the other, but having read the paired books earlier, I think I may have felt the contrast more. These children had loving homes, where they were valued as beloved children and able to contribute to their families as they learned their traditional ways of life. Then they were taken from those homes to far away where long, hard work that didn't teach them a lot was common, along with insufficient food and clothing, punishment for using their own names and language, and where there was frequently physical and sexual abuse.

(The sexual abuse is not treated in the picture books. It is in some of the chapter books, but not treated graphically. For an adult perspective on the schools, try The Education of Augie Merasty: A Residential School Memoir, by Joseph Auguste Merasty with David Carpenter.)

The part that cut me most was Margaret Pokiak-Fenton's homecoming, as told in both A Stranger At Home and Not My Girl. That's what her mother said to her. "Not my girl." Not after two years away, having forgotten most of her language, and having grown very thin and no longer being used to their food. Things got better, but the trauma was real.

None of the books this year spent a lot of time on illness, but from other reading I know there are children that never made it back.

One of the aspects that came up in studies last year was that there were parenting knowledge gaps. During important developmental times, parents and children were separated, and they were not learning good family patterns or discipline or even healthy expression of affection.

I have long been aware of issues that can happen when a child's primary language gets substituted for another.

The new thought this year was how not getting sufficient food during growth spurts would have long-lasting effects as well.

I have read about generational trauma being carried down genetically. I don't doubt the science of that, but there is so much else wrong there to affect physical and mental health.

So the thing that I couldn't help but think as I was reading was that they should have killed every single white person that came over. There should have been no trust, no benefit of the doubt. They should have killed us all.

I know there are impracticalities with that. I don't exactly wish I were dead (not for that, anyway). Also, with buffalo slaughter and infected blankets and Sand Creek, Maria's Massacre, and Wounded Knee, there were plenty of other reasons to kill us all, but the one I get stuck on is the children. It was wrong. It didn't need to be that way.

Maybe it stings more to know that we are caging brown children today and not giving them sufficient care. It's not even being condemned to repeat it because we didn't learn; the people making the decisions know what they are doing.

And that's as dark as I will get for this year's reading. There is horror every year, it isn't even completely new information, but I understand people who want to burn the whole place down. The only reason not to is because it causes so much more pain before any healing begins, and it doesn't put us in a particularly good place to start healing efforts either. That will require love instead of hate.

Native American Heritage Month 2018: Reading overview

I am forcing myself to get in a post today. Also, I am so close to the start of the 2019 reading...

And, okay, I am always late anyway, but I have been at this particular list for almost a year. I know because I read the first book, Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education: Mapping the Long View, in October, because it was available online for free in October, and if I wanted to be able to find a copy at all, I had to read it then. Some of the academic things can be hard to find.

That was a collection of work, with Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Eve Tuck, and K Wayne Yang acting as editors. Along with one other thing, it set the tone for this year's reading.

First of all, I also ended up reading Smith's Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous People. They covered different ground, but it was adjacent, and some of the inspiration flowed together.

Other books that went along well with other ways of thinking - for research and education and knowledge - included F. David Peat's Blackfoot Physics: A Journey Into the Native American Worldview, Paulette Regan and Taiaiake Alfred's Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada, and in its own way even Buffalo Bird Woman's Garden: Agriculture of the Hidatsa Indians by Gilbert Livingstone Wilson.

There were many more books related to the residential schools, and I think that needs to be another post. For now I think it is enough to say that the residential schools did terrible things, even though sometimes the children were excited for things like learning how to read. Certainly, there would be ways in which literacy would be helpful. Being bilingual or tri-lingual could be great too, although the frequently successful goal there was to stamp out the native language.

I love language and books and schooling, so that is a thing for me. I started thinking about ways in which you could get the good of education without the harm.

Obviously the first obstacle to that was that the harm was generally intentional. Even when there were some good intentions there was a lack of understanding or a lack of will the go against the harm. Beyond that, though, was thinking about other ways of sharing knowledge and other ways of learning. That is where Dr. Smith's work was so helpful. There have been innovations. There are ideas already out there.

One result of this is that I added an education reading list. This is a common issue for me that contributes to my always being several books behind of where I want to be.

The other shift is not only related to this particular vein of reading, but it is a combination of things.

It was partly the frustrating paternalism in at least a couple of the books. I think it was also influenced by recently making a point of viewing more movies by Black directors, but also this desire I have had lately to catch up, and get all of the history read; so many of these books have been on my reading list for so long.

I am still trying to catch up on the history portions of each of the groups who have specific history or heritage months that I observe. When I started having that interest, I thought it would just be so that each month could from then on be for reading new books. I would be caught up and then keep up. In retrospect, it doesn't sound that probable.

Now it feels more like I want each month to be for authors and creators from those groups. Maybe less of it will be history, and that's okay. I have read a lot of history, by the time I am done with the lists I have assembled I will have read a lot more, and I won't ever stop reading history. I may not need to read any more Leon Litwack, and I certainly don't need to read him in February.

I intend to blog some more about residential schools, paternalism, and maybe some coincidences and technology. I am always thinking about how to do better. But also life is busy (and hard) and I give myself a lot of homework, so I don't know how things will go.

For the curious, current intended reading lists and what is remaining (mainly books but sometimes including movies):

Post-election reading - 21
Gendered Violence/feminist reading - 8
Education - 6
Latinx Heritage month (frequently called Hispanic Heritage) - 13
Asian American Pacific Heritage - 41
Black History Month - 126

(I had finished all of the death/grief books that I had listed, but I am reading four more related. Big surprise.)


Terribly, after 36 books I still have at least 31 new books to read for Native American Heritage Month 2019, not including some articles recommending different authors and poets. So maybe being caught up can't really be a thing, but I am trying. A lot of the new inclusions are Indigenous and Latinx and Asian and Black, though, so I am moving in the intended direction.

It's all about the journey anyway, right?

Here are the 2018 Native American Heritage books - at least a few of which were actually read in 2018 - in the order read:


Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education: Mapping the Long View, Smith et. al.
Fatty Legs: A True Story, Margaret Pokiak-Fenton
Shi-shi-etko, Nicole Campbell and Kim LaFave
Shin'chi's Canoe, Nicole Campbell and Kim LaFave
As Long as the Rivers Flow, Larry Loyie and Heather Holmlund
Arctic Stories, Michael Kusugak
Not My Girl, Margaret Pokiak-Fenton
My Name is Seepeetza, Shirley Sterling
We Feel Good Out Here, Julie-Ann Andre
Red: A Haida Manga, Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas
Kagagi: The Raven, Jay Odjick
The Little Hummingbird, Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas
The Education of Augie Merasty, Joseph Auguste Merasty and David Carpenter
Halfbreed, Maria Campbell
Trickster, Matt Dembicki, ed
Buffalo Bird Woman's Garden, Gilbert L. Wilson
Yellow Woman and a Beauty of Spirit, Leslie Marmon Silko
Mission to Space, John Herrington
Black Bear Red Fox, Julie Flett
I am Dreaming of... Animals of the Native Northwest, Melaney Gleeson-Lyall
Fall in Line, Holden!, Daniel Vandever
Celluloid Indians: Native Americans and Film, Neva Kilpatrick
Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, Linda Tuhiwai Smith
Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada, Paulette Regan and Taiaiake Alfred
Blackfoot Physics: A Journey into the Native American Worldview, F. David Peat
A Stranger at Home, Margaret Pokiak-Fenton
America Before the European Invasions, Alice Beck Kehoe
No Time to Say Goodbye: Children's Stories of Kuper Island Residential School, Sylvia Olsen with Rita Morris and Ann Sam
Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims, Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins
Being Cowlitz, Christine Dupres
Harper's Anthology of 20 Century Native American Poetry, Duane Niatum
Thirteen Moons on Turtle's Back, Joseph Bruchac and Jonathan London
When the Shadbush Blooms, Carla Messinger, Susan Katzh, David Kanietakeron Fadden
Fools Crow, James Welch
Book of the Hopi, Frank Waters
A Warrior of the People, Joe Starita

Fall television thoughts

My return to blogging has been shaky, obviously.

That is a personal problem. I have come to learn the different ways that different kinds of writing help me, and blogging and fiction writing both fill important roles. They also take time that I don't have. I can't promise any kind of consistency. This would be a terrible time to try and create a reader base.

For now, I am just going to try and pump out some shallow material. Well, maybe it's not that shallow, but it won't go that deep.

We are starting a new fall television season! Jeopardy! is already back, and there are new episodes of Judge Judy. Because not everything runs on the same schedule, the season finale of Queen Sugar airs today. Also, we got into Beat Shazam this summer, and I don't know when we will see more of that, but we like it. Big Bang Theory has concluded, and there is only one year left of Modern Family. I was not sure if there would be more black~ish, but there is a surprise with that, that we will get to. Oh, and we have started recording Designing Women re-runs.

But these are all old shows; what has caught my eye for new shows?

The first thing I can easily see is that they are mostly CBS shows, because the network television I watch is mainly CBS. It isn't even that much time, but it makes a difference. They promote their shows pretty heavily, at least during the daytime. It does lead to getting noticed, but that isn't always positive.

All Rise

The first thing I realize is that I clearly don't pay that much attention, because catching the promos for All Rise out of the corner of my eye, I knew Gina Torres was getting a spinoff from Suits and thought it was that. Except, of course, a USA show is unlikely to spin off a CBS show, and then when you look a little closer it is not Gina Torres but Simone Missick, who is coming not off of Suits but from playing Misty Knight in the slew of Marvel series.

I'm sure she's delightful, but the series doesn't look very realistic. A strongly ethical and caring judge would be great, but I think there are limits to how much they would be able to interfere. This seems like another CBS bucking-authority authority figure. Despite production lead times, that CBS still keeps making the same kinds of shows after Les Moonves may make a larger point about how much little individual can change.

Bob Hearts Abishola

This raised all my hackles, seeing a man follow an uninterested woman from her workplace to her home, especially since it looks like he will win her over, because he is really a good guy despite boundary violations. It's 2019.

And, seeing expanded scenes it looks like it will not be quite that blatant, though I suspect it will also not examine the increased vulnerability for a Black woman and an immigrant. True consent requires true safety, you know? I have seen some excitement for Nigerian representation, and if they give Abishola a full family with well-developed personalities that could have some merit, but my initial impression is a resounding "No!"

Prodigal Son

This actually got Maria's eyes more because she thinks the lead actor - Tom Payne- is good looking. He's okay.

If I were going to be interested, it would be based more on the talents of Michael Sheen, who plays the criminal psychologist's serial killer father. There are worse things than a good looking guy and a talented guy (who is not bad-looking but they hiding it behind a big beard). However, I don't need to care about a serial killer, and be invested in his relationship with his son, and I don't need increasingly bizarre and shocking murders each week. If I wanted a procedural I would be more likely to go with Instinct, because it looks like Alan Cumming really brings the fun, but again, should increasingly bizarre and shocking murders be fun?

Let me also throw in a reminder that "prodigal" means wasteful, not rebellious.

The Unicorn 

Clearly I am really good at being interested in many shows without watching them, but every now and then one wins me over, and I think this one is going to do it. It looks reasonably funny, if I really do start dating in three years there may be some tips, but mainly I am drawn to the ineffable charm of Walton Goggins. I have seen him in a stupid movie and a fun movie, and he is just always appealing. A lot of his bigger roles have been pretty dark, but this looks fun.

Mixed-ish  

Not a CBS show! I saw previews while catching up on Season 2 of black~ish - which I love - but not enough to make me watch grown~ish, mainly because Zoey is kind of a jerk who skates on being pretty, and the spin-off episode looked like they would play into that instead of subverting it. Rainbow and her family are much more enjoyable, and that makes me more interested in this one.

Beyond that, I have also watched Nobodies, and one of the plot lines in the last season was a sitcom based on Larry's life, but then the network didn't have enough diversity so they made the wife, children, and in-laws Black, and then they needed to change everything because the race issues felt tacked on.

The lead in both Open Dorf Policy and Rob in the Hood was played by Mark-Paul Gosselaar (initially the best boyfriend for Rachel ever, and then not), and now he is the father in mixed~ish. Is life imitating art via art? Or was the show in the works and someone thought it would make a good arc so art imitated life? I want to know!

But yeah, I will at least try watching it. Killing Paul Johnson off on the parent show really hurt - though it did drive important family bonding - so I would love to revisit his early years, knowing that Mark-Paul will age into Beau Bridges and live in a bus powered by poop.

Deconstructing a riddle

I annoyed myself this weekend by participating in a Facebook think where you have to do something and try and get other people to do things.

I don't know why there has been so much of an effort to recreate chain letters on social media; maybe it feels like a way of getting people to engage beyond just posting and reading posts. I generally avoid them because I don't like taking dictation, and also there is usually a lot of guilt laid on: most people won't post this; will you?

This is what I responded to...

Soooo... I got the answer wrong. I am now keeping my word and posting this picture 😎 so I'm challenging my friends who are logical and smart thinkers, to have a crack at guessing the answer to the riddle below. When you think you know, private message me the answer via Facebook Messenger.

If you are not going to follow the instructions after you lose, don’t bother playing.

Your turn! Read the riddle. If your answer is incorrect, I can choose any of your photos and you have to post it along with the riddle. If you answer correctly, I'll write your name in the comments (with a trophy emoji).

Riddle: It's 7:00 AM. You are asleep and there is a sudden knock on the door. Behind the door are your parents who came to have breakfast. In your fridge are bread, milk (pasteurized), juice, and a jar of jam. To answer, what will you open first?

* Answer directly through Private message only please. Answers in the comment section will be deleted. **

Note: It’s not what you think. So far no one has got it. Read carefully!!!!

Standby for your photo! 😂😂
I'll choose one, from your fb page.

There is some guilt-mongering there, with the "don't bother" part. There are certainly some challenges to the ego.

This is not a riddle like the ones exchanged by Bilbo and Gollum in The Hobbit. This is more like a trick questions used for strengthening logic, similar to the ones used on The Brady Bunch when they were helping Cindy prep for the test to be on television (before her ego got the best of her). Remember that one that started "You are the bus driver" and then it is all about quantities of passengers getting on and off? You are trying to track arithmetic in your head, thinking that will be the question, and then they ask "What is the name of the bus driver?" It's not even that you have forgotten that you were the bus driver; you probably didn't take it literally enough for it to enter in. The trick then becomes looking beyond the obvious.

Anyway, I did this. I got the answer wrong, which was okay, except that I thought the answer was really stupid and I didn't want to propagate it. I told three people who DM'd me the answer but did not choose a photo, and I kind of hope the whole thing dies.

I am going to reveal the answer here. I have some guilt about that, but it was stupid and I resented it, so now I am lashing out at the answer. Also to do the full deconstruction - which is kind of my jam - it is necessary.

Trick questions are like magic tricks in that they focus on misdirection; we draw your eyes here while we do the trick part there. A flash of smoke is more likely to be distracting than concealing.

Here the questions is about opening. The logical place for the mind to go is to the most recent items, all of which can be opened: bread, milk, juice, and jam. The extraneous detail about the milk being pasteurized can make you wonder... is that important? Does that mean I should open it first?

That is misdirection, but it is fairly obvious misdirection. A little thinking gets you past that to where you know you have to open the fridge before any of them. A little thinking in a different direction will remind you that it would be rude to leave your parents standing at the door while you make their breakfast.

(Another mode of thinking will tell you that it is rude for your parents to show up expecting breakfast while you are still in bed, but maybe it was prearranged and you accidentally slept in. Even if your parents are rude, you are probably still letting them in first.)

Going back one step further, you are in bed; before you can do anything you need to open your eyes. That works back through three levels of digging past the obvious. Surely it should be the eyes! That subverts the tendency to look the most recent by going back to the very beginning.

(I answered eyes. The people who responded to me responded with fridge, door, and eyes. No one was fooled by the pasteurized milk.)

The answer was Messenger, justified by the phrasing "To answer, what will you open first", followed by the injunction to answer only through Private message.

I was once taught a card game whose clean name is "I Doubt It". It was somewhat like Go Fish, where you are trying to collect and discard cards, but you are supposed to cheat by lying about what cards you have in order to discard faster. Other players can challenge you by saying "I doubt it" or possibly some acronym indicating doubt.

Trying something, I put the card I had and claimed to have on top of another card, holding them together so it looked like only one card. I was challenged when I put the card down, but when I lifted that card only, and left the other on the pile, I got away with actual cheating, not the "cheating" that was within the rules. I still feel guilty about that. (For the record, I think I was eleven, I felt wrong about it, and I have not cheated in a game since then.)

Anyway, I didn't like this riddle because it felt like it was breaking its own rules. The clue is outside of the body of the riddle. If it had been really clever or interesting, that might have made up for it, but as it was I just felt kind of annoyed. I posted my picture, but I am ending it there. I mean, if one of my repliers had come back asking for me to choose a picture - if their honor demanded it - I would have, but no one did.

The bigger violation here is of course that I have revealed the answer, but you have to read a meandering blog post to get there, and maybe that is enough work for what isn't  - in my opinion -  a very good riddle.

Band Review: Mike Smith

Mike Smith is a musician and producer based in Nashville.

While he lists multiple genres and influences, the vibe I hear most is the music that was widely popular in the 70s - like the Doobie Brothers - with added funk, or at least added energy. I think that can be heard on songs like "Little Bit of Us" and "You're My Kind of Beautiful", but there is also some Leo Sayer-style crooning on "Pieces of My Soul".

Smith's producing work seems to include a lot more rap, which may have led to his role on competitive reality show One Shot.

https://www.facebook.com/mikesmithproducer/

https://www.youtube.com/user/michaelasmith72

https://twitter.com/MikeSmithInc

Album Review: Mixed Reality by Gin Blossoms

I have started blogging regularly again, but I still don't have the time that I would like, especially for music listening. My temporary solutions is that instead of reviewing two bands per week, for a while it will be one band and the other review will be new (that term used somewhat loosely) music from previously reviewed bands.

Mixed Reality by Gin Blossoms (2018) is the perfect starting point for three reasons.

1. I love them.
2. They were part of that exciting round of getting to see bands I had given up on seeing.
3. Discovering No Chocolate Cake was part of my realizing that new music hadn't stopped with the end of MTV. I just needed to find new ways of finding it.

I don't want to dwell too much on the past, but especially No Chocolate Cake's first track - "Don't Change For Me" - that intro went straight into me and the lyrics raised my spirits. That is why it is a good idea to check back in periodically with the bands you love. Even if your particular flavor of music geekdom (hypothetically) involves tracking down new bands and old bands and constantly pushing away from the familiar, you need to check back in with the ones already deep in your heart. This is both to support them and to feed your soul.

On to Mixed Reality.

There is a nice mix. The aching beauty of "Wonder" is quickly followed by the dynamite intro to "Shadow". My vote for favorite is split between "Angels Fly" - possibly the most interesting musically - and "Still Some Room in Heaven", which has that weary optimism that the Gin Blossoms do so well.

(The inclusion of "The Devil's Daughter" does make it impossible to construe any certain theological bent from the album.)

"Forever Is This Night" totally sounds like the Gin Blossoms. That could be disappointing for anyone wanting a reinvention, but I find it comforting. I remember finding No Chocolate Cake at a time when my life was very hard, and writing about that and wondering if maybe there would be another release in 2014 and how my life would be falling apart then. I could have found the album earlier for that, and it remains true now.

However, one of my favorite bands is still out there. Still touring. Still recording. Still good.

That is very comforting.

https://www.ginblossoms.net/

https://www.facebook.com/ginblossomsaz/

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCa_Ew__9kTlNeHXrzScH4vQ

https://twitter.com/ginblossoms


Previous Gin Blossoms posts:

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2013/01/concert-review-gin-blossoms.html

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-gin-blossoms-and-i.html

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2014/01/creating-set-list.html

Choosing to engage

I hadn't planned on bringing up the Nazi-leaning doting grandmother in this post, but I kept remembering her, and I guess it does relate.

In this case, I did not choose to unfriend her. I replied to one post of hers, and without another word she unfriended me and all of my relatives, include the conservative one who would probably agree with her.

In this case, when I got the friend request I suspected she would be terrible, but I love a lot of her extended family, so I tried it, and she immediately started replying to my posts with defenses of Trump. I did contradict her, continuously but respectfully. Then I saw a post of hers.

It did not exactly praise Trump - it admitted he was gross in a lot of ways - but it drew an analogy that if you are infested you want the guy who will get rid of the infestation, regardless of his personal qualities. It had a lot of stupidity and racism in it, but also, when your analogies are about vermin and extermination, that is Nazi talk, and that's what I told her, actually pretty gently.

Her reaction probably indicates that it didn't help, but if I stand by it because if I am becoming an accidental Nazi, I want to know! If you see me leaning toward fascism or eugenics, you tell me!

And I have in the past gotten warnings about my growing liberalism, and that's cool. I know, actually, but if you are concerned we can talk about that respectfully. Maybe you will still disagree with me, but you will feel better about my motivations or my thought processes. That can be caring.

But then, if you do warn kindly, and they continue to appall you, maybe you need to disconnect.

With the guy I blocked, it was partly to prevent me from being tempted to try again. I had answers for everything he said, but giving them wasn't doing anything.

It was also largely to shoo away his followers with their false equivalencies and drug references.

Ultimately, that is once again a way of avoiding stress, but one where I still have concerns. If I never saw the thoughts of someone who disagreed with me, that would take away a lot of stress. It would also give me a false picture of the world. It would make it very easy for me to start believing very twisted things without having any push back. That would not be good.

The issue I feel emotionally is that I have a strong tendency toward loving other people, and am pretty good about liking people in general. I feel bad when that doesn't work out.

The issue I worry about intellectually is that echo chambers are dangerous. If I cut off all of the people I think are wrong, it increases my isolation and reinforces theirs.

These are not good things.

Keeping contact is not necessarily good either. In the past few years there have been more times when I have paused before retweeting someone or saying things about where I live in the fear that it would expose someone vulnerable to abuse. In addition, seeing people who should know better saying really messed up things makes it really easy for me to just start hating life - mine and everybody else's - and that isn't good.

I don't have any easy answers, but I think it is important to make conscious choices about what we do and how we do it.

I remember a few years ago several school friends getting onto Facebook for the first time, being overwhelmed by all the requests, and backing off. They would often come back, but it was easy to be overwhelmed and not easy to know how to handle it. I often gave advice, and as much as it frequently focused on uses of blocking and muting, it was really more about choosing: what do you want from Facebook? Here are some options.

Personally, I can be a stressful person to follow. I post a lot of news about racism, sexism, and corruption. I think it's important, but I also know it can make me a downer. It can also make you better-informed, but that can be stressful. As strongly as I believe that we have responsibilities to each other, we also each have a responsibility to self.

I read once that the most informed people were those who watched Sunday morning news shows. My news intake correlated to the second-best informed group of people. I tried moving groups, but I found that watching certain politicians lie made my blood boil worse than reading about it. The extra edge in information was not worth the anger. (I get plenty angry as is.)

To helps us think on the topic, I just saw this today: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190827125559.htm

I find the emphasis odd on how the stress of the addiction causes the person to become more addicted, because I thought that was pretty normal, but yes, because social media has different ways of being engaged (chatting, scanning, posting), you can move on to a different part of it when perhaps you would be better off doing something else entirely.

All of which is to say, decide what works for you. There is a "hit" that comes with being on, but is it a good hit? Do you need to call friends instead of seeing them online? Do you need to mute people? Did you know Facebook will allow you to take a 30-day break from someone if you are not sure if you would be better off without them? There are a lot of options.

We can find the best match for us, but we will not automatically stumble onto that. Going by what's automatic means we will follow the algorithms that encourage the activity the social media companies have decided is best for them. You are worth more than that.

Related posts:

https://preparedspork.blogspot.com/2018/10/using-social-media.html

Deleting people

Picking up where we left off, even though I am trying to focus on staying connected to people, I ended two connections last week. I unfriended one person and I blocked another.

I don't take that lightly. I know people who go on unfollow/unfriend sprees, and I have never felt a need for that. However, if their reason for doing so is that they have realized that too many updates from people they don't care about makes them miss updates from the people that they do care about, that would make a lot of sense, except that I am not comfortable blithely deciding that I don't care about a bunch of people.

Looking back, I think something helped with the one unfriend that I didn't realize at first.

The engagement started with a status update she had about needing to round up all of the mentally ill and drug addicts and get them off the streets.

I initially assumed it was related to Trump's recent interest in locking up mentally ill people as a way of ending mass shootings. Even if that were not blatantly cruel, it wouldn't work for that problem; most of the shooters aren't mentally ill.

She said it had nothing to do with Trump, so that was probably just a big coincidence. Maybe her real concern was ending homelessness, but not by fixing economic inequality or housing shortages.

There are reasons it is not an effective plan for that either, but the blatant cruelty was what really bothered me. I mean, someone who thinks that rounding up all mentally ill and addicted people will get them treated and happier and healthier, they are wrong, but at least their heart is in a decent place. I could not feel that way about this poster, especially seeing how she was responding to someone who uses weed for PTSD.

I supported his replies, but we didn't really get anywhere. Here's the funny part; that guy was one of the two people who was really abusive to me about Bernie Sanders, and unfriended me then. Obviously he had only unfriended me and not blocked me.

That's all fine; we were not particularly close and I didn't really have hard feelings over it. I was more concerned that the person I regularly socialized with was so readily abusive to me. I did end up unfriending her not long after the second time she tore into me, and later I ended up being really glad that I had already done so. That was the thing that helped.

In that case, this one friend was an anti-vaxxer. She would not use that term; she just doesn't believe that parents should have to abide by the science-backed school schedule or have to get all of the vaccines. Also it is not about autism or mercury or any of the other well-debunked things. It was discussions about vaccines that made me less surprised when she raged at me about Sanders. There had been some other indications of judginess, hypocrisy, and self-absorption, but that was the big one.

Anyway, back when new measles cases were being discovered every day, I wondered if she had changed her stance at all. Instead she had added a profile sticker about vaccine choice.

I felt so much more relaxed not being her friend.

That didn't make her philosophy less damaging to the community. Us no longer being friends did not reduce her capacity for harm to others, but it did eliminate the amount of stress that she caused me. I don't need any more stress.

So this other person wanting to lock up people... that is a harmful attitude. It was not the first time she had posted something like that. I bet she is anti-immigrant too. However, based on how that conversation went, I am not going to influence her. She is also not going to influence me. We could potentially really annoy each other, but does that help anyone?

In this case it was easy for me to decide to unfriend her because we were not really friends. We went to the same high school, but when I first saw the friend request I initially thought she was from my mission because I don't remember her at all.

That doesn't have to be a deal-breaker; there are people I don't remember or barely remember from then that I really like now. I don't remember her, and I am not finding her likable, and that made it almost easy to decide to say goodbye. Almost.

There was less indifference with the person I blocked, so that will be another story, and another look at consciously and ethically curating your social media interactions.

Modifying social media

You know how every change to Facebook has made it worse? That recently happened with Twitter.

I guess I should specify what I mean by "worse". Obviously the platforms have their own opinion.

I use social media to keep track of people I care about and am interested in. My favorite defunct Facebook feature was a Friends feed where I could scroll down and see the most recent post from every friend. That was great. It's been gone for years.

The change on Twitter seemed like an ordinary feed adjustment, but it limits how many tweets you see and makes scrolling much more difficult, where you are likely to lose what you want to see. Also, most of what you do see is promoted ads, because those are much bigger and they take up most of the screen.

In addition, Twitter has started putting tweets in my feed from people followed by people I follow. Retweets are one thing, and I was irritated when I saw tweets there that had merely been liked by people I follow, but just because a few people I follow follow this person you think I care about their tweets that my tweeps have not even engaged with? I do not.

I do care that it does not load new tweets at the same rate, seriously diluting it's real-time flow. I get that adding tweets I did not ask for is a way of trying to get me to engage more, but ironically it means that I see the content that I want to see less.

I get that the platform providers want to make money, and ads are a way of doing that. Despite all the panicked rumors of Facebook starting to charge, that has never happened, and it wouldn't even make sense for it to happen. They make too much money already from selling ads and providing data. Sure, greed means they will always want more, but they would lose more in their ability to sell us than they would gain from charging us.

This is a separate question from whether I want to support the various social media companies at all. I have concerns about it, but I don't have any good alternatives so I continue to use them even knowing that these are not good people and that they tend to support more white supremacy and misogyny and harassment not as a bug, but as a feature.

No, this is about - since I remain - how do I make it serve my purposes?

Some of that is personal adjustment. I try and make more of a point of noticing who posted the things that interest me. That way if I lose them on the scroll I can find my way back to them. I also try and pay attention to whom I am seeing and who has been missing. Individual look-ups may be the key.

I am also thinking about checking Instagram more regularly. The first time I tried it, I did see things from people I don't normally see posts from. The second time I checked, it looked like it was all the same content, but I think some of it was actually new content that looked a lot like the old content. I haven't quite decided if Instagram is helpful or not.

The other thing, though, is I am really pushing back on the monetization.

On Facebook I have stopped liking suggested pages from friends. Yes, your business is a part of your life, but it's not the same. I have unliked a few previously liked pages, and may do more but here's a fun fact: I have over 400 liked pages, with almost no effort. It will take a while to get rid of all of those, and I am not sure how much it will help. Scrolling does still mostly work on Facebook, so I am trying to scroll down more and engage more with actual people.

On Twitter I am muting every promoted tweet. I am also not sure how much this helps. I clearly haven't muted enough to keep new ones from coming up. I occasionally mute people they seem to want me to follow, but that is not the person's fault so I focus more on promoted tweets.

I can't even say that Twitter doesn't value my time; they do, but not in the way I value it. They provide a service that has been very enriching, and they seem to be doing everything they can to devalue it for me. We'll see how that goes.

My point for now is that what I value is people. Ironically, in the last week I cast off two. What was I thinking?

More on that next time.

Band Review: All The Beautiful Skies

All The Beautiful Skies is a collaboration between singer Suzie Potts and guitarist Craig Gibson, who was previously reviewed as part of Manchester indie band Puppet Rebellion:

http://sporkful.blogspot.com/2013/07/band-review-puppet-rebellion.html

Back then it was looking to me like Manchester was the British equivalent of New Jersey, producing strong and meaningful rock. This is a different sound.

There is a softer sound to All The Beautiful Skies. It can be piercing and haunting, a bit reminiscent of Enya at times. The beats still know their rock roots, but the emotional impact is different. This can especially be felt on "Save Your Towns", a song that washes over you and then strikes you at the core.

There are not currently many songs available online, but the recordings are recent so there may be more coming.

https://www.allthebeautifulskies.com/

https://www.facebook.com/All-The-Beautiful-Skies-111201296254543/

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0XokeGOy6mfzfrMct3gSQg

https://soundcloud.com/allthebeautifulskies

https://twitter.com/atbskies

Band Review: Badger Cats

On Twitter I have been befriended by Rigby Cats and Badger Cats. When they sing together they are Badger Cats, and they are pretty fun.

It is not a highly professional system; currently mainly covers and possibly recorded somewhat spontaneously. I think better recording equipment would make a difference. A message from Rigby Cats referring to more songwriting and a web site indicates that could change.

For now, if you are into cats, homeless advocacy, and covers from a surprising variety of musicians, you may want to check them out.

https://twitter.com/BadgerCats

https://twitter.com/RigbyCats

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZbPkp5ibRVob9E4rBsHMJA/v

Making it up as I go along

Last night I wrote a whole post on how dementia care giving is like improv, and then it didn't feel right and I deleted it and started over.

Tonight I attended a class on caregiver stress, and the instructor talked about how it is like improv too. Perhaps I was just getting ahead of myself.

Possibly the most important thing said was a reminder that the patient can't change, so you have to. The sense in which that was said was true.

In a different sense, they change all the time. It's been quite a while now that our mother has not believed this is her house, or that there is not another set of her youngest, and that any of the different cats that she sees here belongs to her, though she does believe she has a cat and she worries about it. However, just today she asked about the dog, and said Adele wasn't her dog. One of the few assurances we have been able to give her has been showing her the dog so she can see that the dog is fine. Twice today she got confused about that. We were able to talk her down, but that will probably only get harder.

We will have to adjust. That will involve coming up with multiple responses, and figuring out which one is best at any given time. Sometimes you say something that has worked before, and then it just doesn't. That's when you need to change; saying the same thing louder will not force it to work.

A lot of the information on dementia was familiar; I have been at this for a while and I study hard.

It was also really about the stress the caregiver has, not the dementia itself.

They did an early scene (scripted, not improvised), where after having to repeat the same information multiple times the caregiver yelled at her mother, and the anger felt real. It was a little scary.

(I am relatively good at repeating the same thing multiple times.)

What was more applicable was the part about building teams of support - which I have not done - and the much higher percentage of hospitalizations for caregivers who were not in support groups.

Fun story: I know of a support group that meets nearby, but they meet at 10AM on Wednesdays. What caregiver has weekday mornings free? I can only assume it's to keep the attendance manageable. Or a sick joke.

And I don't want to end up in the hospital.

Recently I have felt illness coming on and been able to head it off, but then I got this image of me after all of this is over just throwing up everything in my body and being hospitalized with dehydration and wildly out of control blood sugar.

Delving into that image, it felt like it could signal that if I just kept stuffing all emotions - grief, fear, anger, stress, and everything else - down to keep myself functioning, then there could be a terrible recoil when taking care of my mother ends.

I can't rule out a physical somatic response, but that could all be metaphorical. I could just end up a raging crying mess too. There are a lot of possibilities for what reactions can happen, and what will happen between now and then. Don't take anything too literally, is what I am saying here.

My conclusion was that I needed to make sure that I was letting off steam and getting things out on a regular basis; that build up would not be healthy, regardless. Shortly after that I blew up at my sisters, which was totally not how I saw that going, and not a permanent solution anyway.

What I am saying here is that there are things to work on, and I continue to study.

I don't know if I will be writing about that next week, but I am thinking of it.

Preparing for Alzheimer's

Maybe this should have gone on the Provident Living blog.

I know I have blogged before about how all of my aunts watched The Bold and the Beautiful, but I don't think I mentioned that they and my uncles also all did the crossword every day. It took Mom's illness for me to realize that was probably at least partially a response to seeing their own mother succumb to dementia. That was their way of fighting it.

And one of them got it anyway. I don't know. Maybe two out of six siblings isn't bad.

My mother never did crosswords. She had never really enjoyed reading or puzzles or anything like that. Her thing was being a wife and mother. That involved a lot of cleaning that she was great at. When she started working it was at housekeeping and janitorial, so a natural extension of what was familiar.

I wish sometimes that it had been different. Back in the early 90s there had been some discussion about her training to become a CNA, after a friend did it. I wonder if that would have changed things or given her more time. If she had started doing the crossword, would that have helped? What if she had started reading romance novels like some of my friends' mothers? I'm not even saying the smutty ones. It's still reading.

Probably some changes wouldn't have hurt. There is a lot of information out there on keeping your brain young and avoiding brain fog. With her having it, though, there are some things that I especially wish.

I wish she'd had some kind of tactile hobby, like crocheting or drawing or playing the piano. I wish there was something with a lot of muscle memory involved that could keep her busy and bring her some satisfaction now. The cleaning was the biggest thing for a while, but a woman who could clean two houses plus her own every day and then offices at night, well one house isn't that much of a challenge for her, even before she started losing some of her abilities there. I wish we'd had something else.

I wish we had taken better care of her joints. For one, when she was cleaning houses by day and buildings by night, it beat up her body a lot. (Though the friend who became a CNA really messed up her back while attempting to help one patient, so there are always risks.) In addition, while Mom was resisting the surgery she held her knees stiffly a lot, and the knee replacement fixed a lot of the pain, but not the stiffness. Of course, we never could have afforded the surgery before she was on Medicare, but they had gotten really bad a few years before. Greater mobility could help with greater activity, and that is valuable on many levels.

There's one other thing that I know we could never have pulled off, but it would have helped.

I read a story about a couple who nicknamed the dementia when the husband started getting it but was still aware. It became a joke for them, and a way of being lighthearted about it.

That's why I don't think we could have done it; Mom hated her diagnosis too much to find any humor. However, I think there will be times for that couple when it is not just that he forgets something, but he is starting to believe something not true, and the reference to "Ollie" will help him believe her. Eventually that will stop helping too, but I would take any extra help we could get.

Music Therapy

After writing about diabetes for a week, I wanted to spend a week on dementia. It is getting a little late in the day.

I had been feeling pretty good about having had two weeks of consistent blogging, with posts on all three blogs on the appropriate days and new bands reviewed and all of that. I would like to keep it up, but I don't know if I can. Maybe this week will explain more why.

However, today I want to write about one thing that is going pretty well, only possibly not. That kind of ambiguity comes up all the time with dementia.

My mother has always enjoyed music, and songs she has strong relationships with elicit more of a response. I checked the Three Tenors concert DVD out from the library, thinking she would like it. She loved it.

Beyond that, she especially loved certain parts of it, and I started realizing that the music that resonates most for her are songs that her father sang and loved. He sang all the time, possibly with more spirit than skill, so family resemblances are a thing.

He loved opera, especially Verdi, but also other classic Italian songs and songs that were popular when my mother was young. I have played some opera that is pretty but wasn't so much his. She likes it, but the songs that he liked touch a certain chord. She connects to it in a special way.

That's good, right? Probably.

She often gets teary-eyed listening to it. That could be a concern, but I think they are happy tears. Also, it connects her more to Italy.

It has been a while now that she has not believed this is home, but she used to think her home was somewhere nearer. It is now more frequent that she is remembering the home she grew up in.

That could actually be an improvement. When she had a place in mind that didn't exist, we could never take her there; her childhood home still exists, and is inhabited by her nephew and his wife. It looks different now, and it would probably only feel like home for a minute, and it would take a lot to get there, but it exists. Mainly it matters now that she is remembering home is Italy because she frets over having ID, saying that they will ask her for it when she goes home. (The news may not help with that either.)

It would probably be better if I could make her feel more connected to this house and these people, but I still think it helps that there is some connection.

Therefore, I have printed out lyrics and we have started singing, as well as listening. We have mainly been working on "O Sole Mio". She often wakes up with it in her head, not knowing why, and then saying she doesn't know the words when I say we are going to sing it, but she is relying on the lyric sheet less.

Today I just added "Come Prima". I told her when we know ten songs we will throw a concert. She laughed, but it was something she was happy about, and then I knew what to do with her next, and those moments are little miracles.

Then I had to make dinner and she got very restless. I need to leave more little tasks available, I guess. It's hard to plan it all out.

Recently we had a really good music session, I thought, but immediately after wrapping up she said she should be getting home. That felt like a failure, but it's not as simple as that. It never is.

For now I believe it is good for her, so we will keep doing it. Dementia care giving is a lot like improv, except that you are the only one committed to saying "yes". So when there is a definite "yes", you take it.

Band Review: New Chums

New Chums is a Phoenix-based indie band.

Their newest release, this year's "I Won't Let You Go", has kind of classic emo vibe, or I might just be primed to think that based on some of my current listening.

From the 2017 EP See It for Myself, I also notice some similarities to Neon Trees, based largely on the vocal delivery of singer and guitar player Seth Boyack.

That may be most audible on my favorite track, "The Right Thing", but it is the instruments that really stand out. Guitars by turns grind and then lightly transport, allowing the music and emotion to carry you away.

New Chums also contains Ben Hedlund on drums, Cassandra Clark on bass, and Matt Lloyd on guitar. Oddly, they have a song called "Disposable Music", but this is worth hanging on to for a  while.

https://www.facebook.com/newchumsband/

https://www.instagram.com/newchums/

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6lRmzuFi7-hcccqeq7sIMg

https://twitter.com/newchumsband

Band Review: The Tattered Saints

The Tattered Saints are a rock band from Tampa Bay, Florida that takes more influences from New Jersey, a la Bruce Springsteen and the Gaslight Anthem. There is a gritty vibe, building off of three guitars and throaty vocals.

There is not a lot out right now. The We Started Young EP (available on Spotify) has three songs, including the title track. It appears that other music has been made, and you can hear two of the songs via their Youtube videos, but currently the concentration seems to be on what is new and what is coming next.

I guess that displays some optimism, despite the grittiness.

It looks like they will be playing with Dave Hause and the Mermaid in Tampa on September 5th, and that feels like a good match.

https://www.thetatteredsaints.com/

https://www.facebook.com/TatteredSaints/

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_IsA4un-3CniNvfYIEb0vQ

https://twitter.com/TatteredSaints

Affording insulin... and syringes!

This may be the most important post I ever write: ReliOn insulin at Wal-Mart costs $25 per vial.

No matter how many times I see conversations about insulin prices and I mention that, no one ever seems to know. It is a life-saving thing.

Better yet, it is not prescription. I don't know why that is, and I don't recommend random experimentation, but that does mean that if you have not seen a doctor for over a year and do not have a current prescription, you can still get it.

In my case, as I was losing my health insurance and worrying, my endocrinologist suggested it. She had been giving me free samples of Lantus and Humilog to help out, but availability was always going to be a concern. Yes, when money is tight coming up with $50 a month might be hard, but it is way easier than coming up with $1000 or more.

That was our last visit, so she suggested some doses. There are no pens, but you can mix the N and the R (the cloudy and the clear), and she offered to show me that. I thought it sounded overly complicated so I declined, but then I looked it up on the internet and it was in fact very easy. I do it without thinking about it now.

It is better with a doctor's care. Once I was insured again my new primary care physician had me work with a pharmacist to adjust the dosing, and that has helped. Guessing on your own is probably not a great idea, but it is still so much cheaper.

The N (also sometimes referenced as NPH) is not a direct substitute for Lantus. It is more of a medium-acting than a long-acting. I take it twice a day. The R is fast-acting, though you might not take it with meals like Humilog and Novolog. I was initially taking it twice a day, but we added a midday dose and that has been good. Experimenting could be dangerous, but so is rationing the regular insulin you can't afford.

There are no pens; it is all vials and syringes. That is another expense.

Generally syringes come in boxes of 100 with bags of 10 inside. I use three a day, so need about one box a month. If the pharmacist doesn't know you, it is common to be reminded that they are not sold individually, and once I was even asked for ID, because you could be an IV drug user. 

Before transferring to the Wal-Mart pharmacy, I was at Fred Meyer. If they had Kroger syringes a box was about $15, but they usually only had BD for around $30 (which actually were nicer, but not twice the price nicer). Of course pen needles were always around $50 a box after they took down all the eBay auctions, so even the $30 didn't seem terrible, but Wal-Mart has them for around $13. It made sense to just get the syringes with my prescriptions now, plus they recognize me and aren't eyeing me for signs of drug abuse.

I mention this because I was out of syringes one night when none of my prescriptions were due. The Wal-Mart isn't close to home, so I was just going to run in to Rite-Aid. $50! No other options.

I walked out, and got a $30 pack at Walgreens. I really try and plan ahead better now, only getting them at Wal-Mart or Costco. I know $15 isn't a lot of money for many people, but it is for me. It would also be very easy to not even realize the price range out there.

I have written before about avoiding shopping at Wal-Mart for a long time because of their business practices, and giving in because it means I get to live. My current insurance would let me go back to Lantus and Humilog, but in thinking about that I felt so much panic; what if I lose insurance again? I want to stay with something I can afford. I can easily avoid Chik-Fil-A and Home Depot, and there will probably be some pain in not getting New Balance if I can ever afford new shoes again but I will do it, but at this time my efforts require me staying alive. That means insulin at Wal-Mart.

Do what you need to do to stay alive too.

Recently I saw tweets about mortality coming up that were all related but with key differences. One was about how a lot of young people start dying after 26 because they lose their parents' insurance coverage, and another was about approaching 40 and all of the conditions that you have had to put off treating becoming issues, and one was about elderly people no longer being able to afford the care they need when they are on fixed incomes.

That last one may be the worst, because time was when if you could make it to 65 and Medicare you would have the best health care of your life, and probably be good into your 80s. We talk about average lifespans, but within that set there are clusters and danger areas. We just keep adding minefields.

I also recently saw a very eugenics-heavy tweet that called out diabetes specifically. Fine, I am not reproducing anyway, clearly, but that kind of hostility will pop up in other areas. I have health coverage for now.

Sometimes the most radical thing you can do is live. Do what you can.

Edited to add: I should have mentioned that ReliOn insulin is not meant for Type 1 diabetes. Obviously I am more familiar with Type 2 issues, and I don't know of any better options for Type 1. Better health care coverage and better price controls for life saving medications would be huge, and help everyone.