How to properly avoid an unpleasant conversation

OK, I am awake. In order to properly respond, I will need to take a little time to review and assess all of your statements, as well as those of Dr. Phil (a homework assignment I do not particularly relish, but which, in order to give  a more analytical, less emotional reply, I must do). 

I stand by my conviction that this will be helpful to me, as well as you, should you be open to hearing another narrative. I don't want to buy someone else's narrative wholesale, and so I am forced to forge my own out of the raw materials I may find, doing what I must refer to as "my own research." This has become a much maligned phrase of late, as it usually means, "I googled it and confirmed what I already believe." 

Confirmation bias is the crux of why this nation is at loggerheads these days, it seems. The internet is awash with readily available "proof" of just about anything from conspiracies about aliens, time-travel, moon landing/no moon landing, flat-earth, etc. to the more mainstream political fictions. (I believe this is by design, to muddy the waters and make it too exhausting to discern truth in an age of media manipulation.) But somewhere, in an unspun, unvarnished state, the truth is actually out there. Whether we'll agree on it or even recognize it when we find it is another story. But let's get there first. 

This reply is not my response to your immigration statement, about which I have some serious disagreements, but also, possibly, some areas of consensus.  This is more of a preamble from me while I grumble about my homework assignment. 

I will have to pull the weeds, while leaving the desired plants intact. Not an easy job, as you know if you have done much gardening. If I just indiscriminately make statements, without proper fact checking, I may wind up giving the impression of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, or burning down the garden in toto in order to eradicate the weeds. That wouldn't be a service to "my side," and I'd be guilty of doing what I accuse the media manipulators of doing. And it certainly wouldn't win anyone over. 

So, I'll have to do what I've spent years of my life avoiding: digging in and doing the work, and honestly, right now, I just want breakfast.

Talk more later. Have a great day, Miles!

 

Two burritos for Israel Kamakawiwoʻole

Great. Because I have the word Israel in my post, I'll get the usual rounds of NSA and other alphabet intelligence agencies snooping around doing threat assessment. Seconds after posting this, I'll have bomb-sniffing dogs up my digital butt crack, looking for some sleeper cell faithful to the Ayatollah. 

"I-a tole ya not to use trigger words, didn't I, son?" 

Yeah, you did. Regardless, I have to report on a dream I had the other night starring the deceased Hawaiian ukulele player, so I'm sorry to all of you affected operatives for the inconvenience. Sometimes a burrito is just a burrito.

Anyway, it wasn't much of a dream to speak of. Israel and I were lying around on his twin bed, and I got up to leave. There was a sense that we'd been intimate, but I'm not copping to that, since I don't have a recollection of any graphic events. But that didn't stop him from acting put out and hurt that I was leaving him there in his twin bed all alone.

"I'm sorry, Israel, but I just don't think it's going to work out," I told him. "I'm just not thinking of you in a relationship kind of way."

I put my clothes on and left the apartment, only to encounter him again down in the mess hall. Apartments don't usually have chow halls, but this one did. They were serving wet burritos, but they'd run out of flatware, so I had to have mine served to me on a piece of construction paper.

"Better make it two," I said, noting that Israel had crept up behind me.

Two sloppy burritos landed safely on my flimsy, makeshift paper rescue net despite being dropped from considerable height by the server. It was a heroic catch, but entirely unnecessary, as they could have just as easily placed them on there gently. 

I fashioned the paper into a cone and funneled one of the burritos off into a bowl for Israel. That ought to get him off my back for a while, I thought. 

I kinda felt bad for him, being all puppy-dog glommy on me like that, but really, I hadn't done anything to make him fall in love with me. He was just a sappy guy by nature, nothing I could do about that. Except to maybe give him my other burrito which he also seemed to be lusting after.

Nah. 

Despite his teary-eyed pleas, I held my ground. I felt that one burrito was more than sufficient, and besides, what's love got to do, got to do with it? 

Another word with Miles

Hello, Miles. Because I know you are a real person, and I believe you to be sincere, I will try my best to engage with you and have the rational conversation that this deserves. I said "try."

We may agree on terms in the abstract, like "common sense policies," the need for a balanced budget, or the idea that waste, fraud and abuse is bad. Sounds good on paper. But somehow, I think our definitions of terms or trusted sources of information might preclude any agreement as to what are facts and what are "lies told by the other side."

I'm not an apologist for Biden or the Democrats, but not because they are too woke, too liberal or left. On the contrary, I feel they've failed to represent their grassroots base and have basically become corporate enablers, profiting off of the middle and working class while paying lip service to liberal ideals.  You and I might not even agree that being "liberal" is a good thing, so there's a potential non-starter right out of the gate.

Because I spent most of my life ignoring what I assumed was going to be a self-sustaining framework (our democracy), I paid little attention to politics or its mechanisms. So I'm not promising to deliver any well thought-out manifesto backed by fact-checked statistics. I'm not sure that fact-checked statistics can even be found these days without a side helping of spin. 

And I am too old and tired to sort through the weeds of every policy, every action, misdeed and allegation with regard to Trump and his many (in my view) greatly objectionable policies. 
Based on your opening salvo, and where you might sense that I'm coming from, there appears to be a big gulf between the two places that our ideologies have settled. I don't claim to be a dispassionate, objective library of statistics, the arbiter of the ultimate truth. I listen to the narrative from news stories as told by "my side," and it appears, from your talking points, that you do likewise, in your own fashion. 

This is going to take time, and a longer conversation than this little Facebook chat. I think, in the long-term, maybe we can both learn to see things a bit differently than we do today. Maybe through a dialogue devoted to arriving at a common ground consensus of reality, in the process, each of us can shed some of our misconceived notions. 

But as much as I want to have the perfect words to convince you, or anyone, of what I truly believe is right, decent and important, I find that I just don't possess them. I have quick quips and knee-jerk responses, an occasional metaphor and a lot of my own baked in biases. My knowledge is surface level, and my ideas and conclusions, ill-formed, and only sometimes given the benefit of a cursory vetting for accuracy. 

See how, thus far, I have not really addressed any of the actual issues?  I'm reluctant to do so because it is a big can with lots of worms, and I'm not sure I'm up to the task of a debate. But if you pick one topic, or I can, maybe we can have a spirited discussion until someone rings a bell, or one of us cries "uncle." 

I'd like to believe that it is possible for good people to agree on all matters of importance, and specifically, those that relate to the beneficial governance of our country. But self-interest can easily skew what constitutes a person's idea of good, and as much as I'd like to believe I'm some Mother Theresa, I know I'm not. Self-interest abounds. 

One of the things that troubles me most, however, is the Trump administration's demonizing and scapegoating of immigrants, utilizing aggressive, militarized mass deportations without the due process of law. The whole tone of anger and intimidation, rather than humility, compassion and yes, gratitude, for the people who, for the most part, come here and work jobs that the average American thinks beneath them. The majority of these people are doing nothing nefarious and are guilty only of coming to this country to improve their lives, whereas our forefathers did quite a lot of unconscionable things to the indigenous inhabitants of this land in their quest for "manifest destiny."

Anyway, as I said, it's a long conversation, and I don't know how much time either of us have, with our busy lives and the imminent collapse of late stage capitalism and whatnot. See what I mean about the inflammatory rhetoric?

Anyway, perhaps a bit of a back and forth will be good for us both. Keep us on our game at least. But I have to have a structure, or I will just go on and on, not sticking to or making any points.

Have a good night, Miles! Til next time...

Cause Play

What's on my mind, you ask?

 

No, not you in particular. The generic you. The randomly assigned faceless Facebook prompt that appears and never sticks around for the answer. That you. I'd tell you, but I don't feel I know you well enough. I just wanted to post something, and right now I'm in the process of whittling down my readership by committing a series of Facebook faux pas.

 

1. No pic (immediate scroll past)

 

2. Multiple paragraphs (too long, didn't read)

 

3. Objectionable, opinionated content warning: I will say something political at some point, and this will drive some of you to scroll, eye-roll or tsk, because, sure, we've all become exhausted, and some will outright protest the idea with a quick flick of the finger.

 

4. I don't really have a fourth point, other than to ensure that this extends beyond the (more...) thingy, where you are forced to commit to looking at the rest of the text. I am making you complicit, so you can no longer blame me for something that you are forced to see because your algorithm has fed it to you. This is you taking the spoon into your own hands.

 

5. I just wanted to get to five because it sounds dramatic. Like George C. Scott in Dr. Strangelove.

 

OK. No more bullet points. For now.

 

So yesterday, I attended the No Kings protest in Marysville. It's not my town exactly, but it was the closest organized event in my area.

 

As I was getting ready to leave, putting on sunscreen, thinking about what snippy protest T-shirt I would wear, I had a thought that stopped me cold:

 

"Who am I protesting for? What is the purpose of me showing up and standing on a corner holding a sign?"

 

My answer to myself was this:

 

1. I'm unhappy with what I perceive to be a very disagreeable and dire state of affairs with regard to my government, and I wish to make my grievances known.

 

2. I want to connect with like-minded folks and validate their concerns, as well as having mine validated. "Am I the only one who thinks this shit is crazy? Oh, you do too? Oh, good!" There's some comfort in commiseration.

 

3. (This one is the one that stopped me from wearing the snarky T-shirt.) I want to convince some of the otherwise unconvinced that might pass by and see our little protest that we are not "the other guys," like some politically partisan football team comprised solely of radicals, leftists and lunatics. I may identify that way, but it doesn't mean I always have to dress the part.

 

OK, abandoning the numerical points again. Too restrictive.

 

So, my thinking was this: 

 

"If I can be the face of someone that the average person in my area can relate to rather than rage against, it might go a long way towards bridging the gap between us as humans."

 

With this in mind, I put on a plaid button down shirt and donned a white Justin cowboy hat. If someone is going to judge me by appearances, let me take advantage of the local bias towards a conservative, country look with some appropriate attire. (The hat also happened to be the best choice for sun protection, so maybe those country folk are onto something.) Nice, breathable straw, good shade coverage, no red neck here. I did not regret my choice.

As I stood there in the sun holding my sign, I would direct my message to the passing motorists. On one side, it read, "SILENCE IS CONSENT." (I wanted it to say, "Silence Is Complicity," but space was limited on the poster board by the size of the font.) The other side said, "Let's Build A Better World Together," written in red and blue stenciled letters filled in with stripes and circles and wavy patterns. I would alternate between the two messages depending on the amount of traffic and their responses.

 

I would say that a reaction was elicited in about 65-70% of the people driving by. Of those who honked or waved or yelled, about 90-95% expressed support or positivity. Occasionally, someone would honk and get our attention, only to flip us off at the last minute, like, "Haha, gotcha!" Those comprised only about 3-5% of the honks and hand gestures.

 

There were a number drivers of lifted diesel pickup trucks (the kind with big pipes and smoky black exhaust) that took delight in revving their engines and "coal-rolling" the crowd. One could almost predict which ones they would be by vehicle profile alone, although the presence of a Trump flag virtually assured it. I wasn't out there to persuade them, appeal to them or make them like me. But again, seeing me, someone who looked like a guy they might invite to to go bass fishing, may given them just the slightest pause.

 

The biggest pause came when I was sitting down on by the curb, the "SILENCE IS CONSENT" side of my sign facing a line of vehicles stopped at the traffic light. This was the moment for which I had prepared, and it is the reason I am even responding to the generic Facebook prompt today, just to get to this part:

 

In one of the stopped cars, a guy in the passenger seat -- mid 20s, short hair, wearing a baseball cap that had the Stetson logo on it -- was looking around at the various signs, and I could just tell he was trying to process everything. After a few dismissive glances down the row, he landed on me and my sign. We locked eyes. He looked down at my sign and then back up at me, and I could see him give just the slightest nod as he tightened his lip in affirmation.

 

I did it. I got through to him. I wasn't chanting a slogan or reading from the Declaration of Independence. He didn't give his heart to Jesus (or take it back, whatever the case may be) but he did see me.

 

As a human being. As someone like him.

 

And as someone who cared enough to come out and say, "Hey, we've got to do something about this, y'all."

 

That's what I did on Saturday. Not much, but also, more than I expected. I hope that you all had good Saturdays, whatever that entails, and to whatever extent that is possible depending on your individual circumstances. 

 

Bless you all, Friends!

 

 

**Facebook re-post from June 15, 2025 

As AI becomes more human, I become less so.

Another date with Shayla was about to end poorly. I was leaning my head on the dining room table, lamenting out loud to her helper, a day laborer with whom I would occasionally commiserate. 

“It’s probably not going to happen,” I said, referring to the oft anticipated goodnight kiss. “And I’m OK with that, really. She’s out of my league. Besides, I’ve really been a disappointment to her.”

Prior to this, I had spent some hours unsuccessfully cleaning the cat boxes. She was going to move, and it was my one responsibility to get this item in order. It had not gone very successfully, and I wound up stepping on a moist cat poop before finally giving up and hurling the entire contents of the cat boxes into some bushes across the street from the mini storage.

“I heard that,” Shayla said from the kitchen.

I didn’t bother to raise my head up when she came into the room and brought her face within an inch of mine. I could feel her warmth and the light brush of her eyelashes against my skin. Her lips were within millimeters of mine, and yet I remained motionless, even as she closed the gap, finally landing a kiss with the precision of a hummingbird and the softness of a butterfly.

I pursed my lips slightly to meet hers. It was all I could do. As much as I wanted the engine to come roaring to life, my battery had been dead for too long. We remained frozen in that configuration for a moment before each withdrawing a fraction of an inch for assessment. 

After a mutually agreeable number of seconds had elapsed, I weakly brought my face toward hers again and made awkward lip movements. They felt unnaturally scripted and poorly executed, like an out of sync robot, programmed by some nerd who has never experienced a real kiss. 

The worst part was that the nerd was me. Like an out of body observer, I was able to witness myself thinking the thoughts and making the motions happen mechanically, but without any of the spontaneous organic chemistry that occurs during a passionate exchange between two people. 

I woke up at this point, and try as I might to re-enter the dream to rectify the situation, it was not to be.