1. Do real people work for YouTube? I ask this because I had a video get pulled from my channel this week. The reason? Underage kids drinking. Were there kids drinking? Yes. Was it alcohol? Of course not. This video is from Christmas 1995, and in a few scenes, we kids are sharing a bottle of sparkling cider. I know scandalous. I would hope that if it’s a human reviewing this private video, oh yeah, it’s private, so nobody can see it without the link. Anyway, I would hope that if it were a human, they would see or hear us mentioning sparkling cider. I am guessing it’s some sort of AI bot programmed to find things it thinks violate the site. Oh, but even better when the video, or any video, gets removed, there is no option to chat or email anyone to plead your case. Absolutely ridiculous. I chose the option of appealing the decision. Knowing this site, it won’t matter. I’ll end up having to cut out the scene they highlighted. Whatever. It was a family celebrating a holiday in the 90s and jokingly drinking sparkling cider. With some of the stuff I see on YouTube, shockingly, this video got pulled, but we’ll see what happens.
2. Luckily, when dealing with stress like the garbage I just mentioned with YouTube, I have something I can do. At work, we have something called Truvaga. It is a vagus nerve stimulator. For those who don’t know, the vagus nerve controls the ‘fight or flight’ part of your body. Truvaga is a two-minute session, is totally safe, and has me feeling like sunshine and rainbows inside of 40 minutes. The only problem with that time frame comes when I do a session and then stop to run an errand. If my stress level drops into ‘everything is wonderful’ territory while out somewhere, it changes things. For example, a few months ago, I stopped at the supermarket on my way home from work after using Truvaga. While I was inside, the overwhelming peace and calm took over. Do you want to know how I realized that? My Fitbit buzzed and asked if I was out for a walk, and if I wanted it to start tracking it as exercise. That means I was wandering the store in such a euphoric state for so long that my Fitbit thought I was on a walk. Foolishness like that aside, I love the Truvaga, but it also costs nearly $500. That means I will use it when I can at work, but when it comes to buying my own, I’d probably need a separate Truvaga to help me after I saw the bill for it.
3. Most days, I don’t feel my age. There are some though where it becomes painfully clear that I was a teenager 30 years ago. This week, I was driving home from work and stopped at the supermarket for something quick. I pulled into the parking lot with Prodigy’s Firestarter blasting. A nice pounding techno gem from the 1990s. I parked next to a 70-something guy who was loading his bags into his trunk. He looked at me with annoyance. In an instant, I was 18 again and felt that sense of GenX rebellion I used to feel all the time. I wanted to sit there and let the song blast until he drove away, but I had my fun. I almost wanted to thank him for looking so upset with my music and then tell him the 60s called and were looking for his unnecessary moral outrage toward the youth.
4. If you haven’t seen the show Dark on Netflix, I cannot recommend it enough. It is 3 seasons and a total of 26 episodes. The show was on originally from 2017 to 2020, and in the simplest terms is about time-travel. It is so much more, though. It has such a layered and interesting plotline with loads of detailed characters. The show rewards you for paying attention. It’s not a show to watch in the background while scrolling your phone. You will probably become lost if you do that. I’m trying not to spoil anything. You get great acting, great characters, and great music. With the time-travel, there are a lot of classic 1980s songs. The highest compliment I can give this show is that I actually binged a lot of it over a weekend. Usually, I try to watch one episode of a show per night to fully digest it. Dark was so good that I needed to keep going to follow the story. If you can, definitely add Dark to your future watch list on Netflix.
5. Speaking of Netflix, I have had my subscription back for just over 6 months. I got it to watch the final season of Stranger Things. In that time, I have watched so many excellent shows. Having just finished Dark, it’s time for a new show, and Netflix seems to know my tastes now. I feel like I’ll find another winner. In the last 6 months, these are the shows I’ve watched: Stranger Things, Stranger Things: Tales from ‘85, Cobra Kai, 11.22.63, Yellowjackets, His & Hers, Untamed, The Burroughs, The Beast In Me, Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, Castle Rock, and Dark. Every one of them I found engaging and entertaining. I am sure that at some point I’ll start a show that I’ll not like as much and probably give up on, but as of right now, I’m on a hot streak, at least when it comes to my own entertainment.
6. Every now and then, the old me comes back out. I was spending a day recording podcasts and doing other content when I had a sudden urge to go to the gym. In the time before COVID, that was not unusual. I’d be at the gym 5 or more days a week. COVID got me used to sitting around, and it has been tough snapping out of it. It also doesn’t help that I am now in my late 40s. People’s energy levels naturally begin dropping with age. You have to work harder to do the same things. The fact that I had a desire to hit the gym was a great sign. I went and had maybe the best workout of the year. Nearly an hour, and my body was like pudding when I got home. I am not sure how often I can pull that off, but I think if I just get back to being consistent, those killer workouts won’t seem so out of the ordinary anymore.
7. One day this week, a coworker and I entered the office. We began smelling something off. We both looked at each other, confused, trying to figure out what it was. I said it smelled a bit like cat food. It turned out to be my boss’s breakfast burrito. No, it didn’t have cat food in it. I now forget what he said was in it, but I was a mix of feeling bad and wanting to laugh hysterically. I didn’t bring it up again. I mean, who wants to hear that their breakfast smells like cat food? Unless it actually is cat food, then you’ve got bigger issues.
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| A new flavor of burrito? |
8. This week, I recorded the 250th episode of my podcast. One of the GenX nostalgia topics that I covered was a hilariously poorly acted Kmart employee training video from 1992. I linked to it. An unexpected find when researching Kmart in general, though, was a series of their old muzak tapes that you’d hear when walking through the stores. I found an entire playlist at Archive.org with dozens of such tapes. It’s a lot of the soft rock music you’d expect, along with the voice-over person explaining current Kmart deals and thanking you for coming into the store. Each tape is between one and two hours long. I don’t suggest spending an entire night listening to them, but click the playlist and spend a few minutes listening. Maybe you will be transported back to the blue light special days of yore when Kmart ruled retail.
9. I am lucky enough to live fairly close to the Cape Cod Rail Trail. Unless the weather is terrible, I try to find a way to be on that trail for a walk at least once a week. You get to be close to nature. You get to see loads of people enjoying themselves and the scenery. Typically, you see solo people, maybe a few in a group. This week, while on the trail, I got to see two different huge groups in two different areas. One was a group of runners doing what I believe was a fun-run 5K on the trail. They were coming at me early in my walk. It was quite a crowd, probably around 50 runners. There were a lot of waves as I went by. Then on the way back, now probably more than 4 miles into my walk, I spotted one of the largest gatherings of bicycles I’ve seen. There had to be between 30 and 40 coming down a street. One by one, they entered the bike trail. I think some of the vehicles were losing their minds over the wait, but oh well, it is summer. I got ahead of the crowd as they all gathered, probably to go over the riding plans. I think they were from a nearby summer camp because there were a few adults and a lot of kids. When the line of bikes started passing me on the bike trail, I felt like it took a full 2 minutes for them to all go by.
10. The Summer Solstice happened this weekend. It is the longest day of the year in terms of actual light. On Cape Cod, we had 15 hours and 12 minutes of daylight. I tend to have delusions of grandeur on the longest day of the year. It’s as if I am going to spend an inordinate amount of time outside doing something simply because it’s the longest day of the year. That never ends up happening. The best was the year that I wanted to run one mile in each of the 15 towns on mainland Cape Cod. I figured I had plenty of time since the sunrise was a little after 5am and the sunset would be close to 8:30pm. I did run, but not in every town. I did a nice long run that, by coincidence, took me from one town to another. Once reality set in, I was toast. I would have run at least 15 miles, plus driving everywhere from Falmouth to Provincetown. On a good day, it takes about 1 hour and 45 minutes to go from Falmouth to Provincetown, so at the beginning of summer, it would be longer. In the end, it was an ‘eyes bigger than your stomach’ type of thing. This year, I sat around and didn’t do much, and loved every second of it.
11. Summer arrived, and all was calm to start. The weather was perfect, and because many schools don’t get out until early next week, the traffic wasn’t bad either. On Cape Cod, it is a condensed mad dash of a summer annually. From Memorial Day through Independence Day, the weekends grow gradually busier while the weekdays are pretty normal. Then Fourth of July hits, and it’s 6 weeks of insanity. Don’t even think about making a left turn until Labor Day. Sometime in July, the weather flips. The lower humidity of late spring vanishes and is replaced by sweltering temperatures routinely in the mid and upper 80s, and humidity that makes you feel like you took a shower in your clothes. Stock up on bug spray, too, as mosquitoes, ticks, and later greenhead flies dominate the landscape. It must sound like I don’t enjoy summer, and that’s not totally untrue. Summer is my 3rd favorite season, behind fall and spring. So yeah, the heat, humidity, and crowds don’t paint my ideal picture. I do enjoy everything being open. Winter on Cape Cod can be pretty solitary, so seeing everything busy is good. As I do every year, though, I will be counting down the days until the end of August when the crowds begin to disperse, and then we locals get our season to enjoy Cape Cod .
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| A sunset during last summer in Dennis, MA |
12. Father’s Day was this weekend. It is always a bittersweet day. I have trouble celebrating because my father was and still is a bad person. He is lazy, selfish, a professional victim, someone who only cares about his kids when they can give him money. I learned so much about what not to be as a man from my biological father. I come back to the good men that I have had in my life who picked up the slack of a bum. It makes the bitterness a little easier to swallow when I think of so many second fathers who helped me grow into a functioning adult. I feel bad because I see some good fathers, yes, but I also see way more terrible ones. Not being a father myself, I cannot say for sure if I’d be a good one. I’d like to think that common sense and common decency would make me an average father at least. The anger and resentment toward my biological father, I think, would inspire me to simply be better than him. I envy family and friends who have good fathers. I’d love to have had a dad who took me fishing, taught me how to fix cars, and gave me general life tips. I’d be grateful for the older I get. I didn’t get that. I got a guy who stood me up when making plans, constantly begged for money, quit jobs to avoid paying child support, and treated alcohol better than his children. So Happy Father’s Day to the good dads out there. To my biological father, you are the sum total of the terrible choices you made in life, and karma is showing you that now.
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