Friends of life

A little while ago, about a year ago, a friend came to me and said hi.  This is not unusual.  But he had been ducking me and more or less ignoring me for over a year.  I knew he had been doing that and I just let him be.  Him an his family.  I had stayed with him for a year, and was a flatmate with him for about seven before.  I gave him space and let him break the silence.  He broke the silence.  He never said why and I never asked.  Why he stopped talking.  He told me why he started talking.  He said:

"I have Cancer"

He said it with the big Capitol 'C', so I did too.  Cancer is one of the ways that people die.  It affects people of all ages.  Babes can have cancer and old people can have cancer.  When someone tells you that they have cancer, they always capitalize the 'c'.  My parent's did it too.  Last year I also found out that my father had cancer.  My father did not capitalize the 'c' he half capitalized it.  I had a long conversation with Natural20, the name she chose for herself on my blog, and she told me that I was not to say that I was destined for cancer too, as a red head.  She said don't talk that way, I only just found you and I don't want to think about giving you up.  You see I am her Natural20 too, her WMD, White Male Doppelgänger.  

My friend had stage four kidney cancer.  When he talked to me he did not know that.  It might have been a result of his diabetes.  It might not have been.  That does not matter, he has it.  It has him.

Let me tell you this: you definitely want to be in a country that has universal free healthcare if you get cancer.  It was weeks between diagnosis and surgery.  His family is fairly affluent, hi he had been in America, the surgery would have bankrupted him.  And the chemo and the radiation and the drugs, and the chemo.  It goes like this: Diagnosis, identify and look at options. 

Surgery, remove the affected organ if it won't kill the patient.

Administer drugs until they don't work.

Administer chemo until it does not work.

Administer radiation until that site cannot take any more radiation.

Administer last chemo last ditch effort

Death.

My friend is still alive, but radiation did not work.  

What I can do for him is treat him like he was before, be compassionate and try to make him happy.  I can't do the later but I can set him up.  I am have been trying to run a D&D campaign for him, one last kick at the can, home grown, because he has read all the modules and he is a DM like me, so it needs to be engaging and new a d that is what I can do.

The players are Natural20, her husband, her friend, my friend, and Jaguar.  I will run with three and create an NPC, maybe a cleric, yes a cleric of light.  He has 4-5 months left.

We all die.

Some of us from brain ailments.  Some by heart problems.  Some by accidents. Some by cancer.  We all hope when the time comes the people we care about will be there with us in the end, but what we hope that they will be with us for the journey.

I met him in September 1992 in university.  It is now May of 2018.  You meet people all through your life.  Some last longer than others.

Happy

You know what?  I think I am happy!  Really just happy.  I have a great girlfriend, Natural20, good friends who I roleplay with regularly, running the said games, I get enough exercise, I just changed jobs a few months ago and I really enjoy that, and I moved recently to a place that has a balcony, so I am getting back into growing flowers and stuff.  I would say that it is all her fault, my girlfriend, she is the root of everything good in my life recently.  Really.  She helped me find a job at a difficult juncture and a place to live and later she got on my butt to apply for this job and move to this place and I have been roleplaying with her too.  And the sex :)!  

Let me be clear.  I love you Natural20, I named you well.

I have been riding to work almost every day, the rest I have been taking a very short ride with transit.  I have been transporting soil with me on the way home and four plants per trip and when I was tracking transit, hanging baskets and window boxes to plant in.  They are pretty ugly, but we will see what they look like in a few weeks.  I have been Myking them up, fertilizing them, and watering them too.  Soon I will start to add fertilizer in the water.  I think of my uglies and I relax.  I need to clean up my balcony, leaves, cigarette butts, and coffee cups from before I was there, weeding the patio stones and more.  It would be nice if the Internet worked, but maybe I should take up reading on my patio surrounds by my plants!

The new job: I work in a garden centre.  The biggest one in all of the Big Smoke region.  I work on e Yard Crew, which is a branch of the Nursery.  We do the restocking, the maintaining of the site, unloading of the trucks, and many other things.  I get to work and I don't stop until after I am supposed to.  If someone doesn't tell me to go on break, I won't stop.  I don't like that it is minimum wage, but it is $14/hour so it is the best minimum wage since forever.  Still it is a loss of seniority in my mind.  On the other hand, there is a lot of independence and the position is has a lot of personal improvement potential.  My boss after two month wants me to be his foreman, but I have my sights on bigger fish: I want to be supervisor of the nursery.  And I had a brief argument with my leader.  He sees the supervisor position as a person breaker; there have been as many supervisors as there have years that he worked there, but he does not understand how I enjoy a challenge that is within my reach and capabilities.  He told me that he would quash my attempt by going to the manager of the store himself and at he would be my enemy if I did so.  I threw the first words he told me right back at him and it may have mollified him a bit, a tiny bit; I said that I would do the best work I could do for e company and that means I would do what needed to get done, including working with him to make the store the best store in the company.  

The other thing I like about the work place is the inculsivity of it.  There are people of all ages, genders, and outlooks.  There are gay and straight employees and there are a lot of young people; it feels like a school in so many ways.  The young people are half idiots and half girls… what does that say about the gender gap.  I was bullied for a bit by a coworker, but they got themselves into a some trouble and got fired, so no problems there.  The trouble I see with this place is that it feels like home.  The work is all very familiar and I have gotten comfortable too fast.  I feel that because I am so comfortable that I will let out my inner personality and that might be bad, for this workplace, because I am touchy/feely— not in a bad way, but in a way that can be interpreted as inappropriate.  So I try to be on guard, of myself.  

It has been a while since I have genuinely liked all of my employees.  I mean I like my crew from last year, but the rest could have gone to hell, and my boss!— he was a bigger asshole than me!  My crew last year was underpaid compared to the rest of the crew, hired before them, more experienced and he refused to give any of them a raise.  When customers came in to complain, they complained about every part of the company except our crew.  But in my new job I feel appreciated.  

Did I tell you I like me room better than almost any place I have lived in the past!  The room is about a third larger than my last room, it costs a third less and it has a balcony that adds another third to the room, private balcony.  The main problem with it is that I can put all my stuff away and I feel I have to have boxes in the room to make it fell up the space.  There is a screen door and a double sliding door.  I don't think I have had the double doors closed yet and truthfully usually they are both open.  Truthfully half the time the screen door is open, on account that city people don't know what bugs are really like and so one or two taking a tour of my room is mild loss for having air move freely.  There is a slight problem in that cigarette and cannabis smoke moves freely in too, but small price to see the sky and the sun with nothing blocking it.  I do occasional tours of the building.  There are about 90 apartments on each level and two levels, all in the space of a rural property or about ten suburban properties.  There is underground parking, where the recycling is located… took me a while to find out the recycling was there, because I don't have a car!  There is a gym and a pool in the basement, but I have not tried them out… I wonder if the pool is open after midnight?  

I want to spend time on my balcony this summer reading surrounded by my plants.  Life is great!

Incel terrorism?

There are theses things that have occurred in my home city, Big Smoke, aka Metropolis.  There was a terrorist attack.  Natural20 says that is was a mass murder and not a terrorist attack.  I say it was both.  She says that terrorist attacks involve a religious bent.  I respect her opinion and so I place her views as counterpoint.  I have a more simplistic view; any attack that is perpetrated to make people fear them is terrorism, moreover there must be a random element and people die.  Domestic assaults are terrifying, but are not terrorism.  Walking in to a school or a workplace with a gun and murdering people that you hold a grudge with is murder, but emptying ten clips into strangers is terrorism.  Putting a bomb on to an airplane to kill your wife is murder and terrorism.  Parking a van packed with explosives outside a building and blowing it up, is terrorism.  Driving down the sidewalk and running down pedestrians is murder and terrorism.  That is what happened, a couple weeks ago.  Some dickhead rented a van and killed ten people at random and injured eighteen others, who he did not know, because he was mad at people, but he was not mentally ill.  That is a distinction.  He was an Incel; Involuntarily Celebate.  He killed people because he couldn't get laid.  Okay I take that back, he HAD to be mentally ill; that is the most fucking stupid reason to kill people.

I know because for most of my life I was Incel, and I never thought about killing people because of it.  I am going to be brutally honest here, I lost my virginity late and I spent about seventeen years after that single and between three relationships.  I spent those seventeen years being "In Love" with friends and people I could not talk to.  I resorted to online dating agencies and I had no luck for decades.  If you are Incel, pay attention to this next paragraph, I will teach you how to do online dating correctly so that you can pick up and meet someone meaningful.

First if you are desperate, create two profiles on two different platforms.  One is the one that you use just to hit on as many women that you can because you feel desperate and you feel frustrated.  You have urges, but you can't forfill them.  You are not going to get laid be doing this.  But you will get your need to contact people left right and center.  The second platform is the one that you have to work to make a profile.  They have lots of questions or what you to fill out paragraphs of information.  Fill it all out.  Answer the questions., then go on the other site and troll for someone.  Then come back to the good one.  Never troll for hookups on this site.  At worst you can like people on this site, but never contact people.  They will read your excellent prose (use spellcheck) and because it is about you and not what you think they want, if they are like you they will contact you.  It may take a while.  You may burn through the population of eligible women on the other site three times over at this point, but you have set this site up to do just this.  The good site you talk to women who contact you first and you read their profile and talk about the things that are mutually interesting.  

Then you go out for coffee.

Then you go to the movies.  She might have a kid, this is okay.  Be nice.  Be pleasant.  You might have to go on a few first dates until you work out what you should not do, but eventually, you will get to close both of your profiles and never look back.

If I knew that seventeen years ago, I would be a different person.

Oh, by the way, killing people will not help you get laid.  In Canada, they will likely not shoot you and will arrest you and then you will spend a long time without any women.  

Just so you know, killing is never the answer.  I mean I litterally spent seventeen years out of twenty single and Incel, but I never thoug of killing people.  Listen I understand.  When I was Incel, it was the worst place in the world.  I wanted to die.  But I never wanted to kill people who would not date me.  Ever.  

I never wanted to terrorize people because I felt that they were at fault.  I never thought that women should be forced to have sex with me because they were always having sex.  I never thought that.  At worse, I bemoaned that there were millions of people having sex every week and none of it was with me.  I also hated friends who bemoaned that they could not find a man like me, but obviously not me.  It sucked.  But.  There were women out there that I was not attracted to who were also not having sex.  They are Incel too.  Which is why you need to get to know people for their inner person before you meet them, try it.  Get off 4Chan.  

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I want to be honest.  I know that stretch of side walk that was used to kill people.  I see it as terrorism.  I don't know what additional punishment can be mete out for terrorists.  I don't think it should be the death penalty, because so many people were accused of terrorism after 911, that were later found to be innocent.  Most of the jihadis that were part of 911, died on the airplanes that day, the rest were hunted down and killed over the next ten years.  Over one hundred thousand others, innocent of the attacks, were killed as a direct result of 911.  Men, women, and children.  The creation of Isis can be linked to those murders.  I would say that the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq by America to be an example of American terrorism at its worst; the defense that it was war and they attacked first was a very thin excuse in the end.  

Is that terrorism different than they guy in Big Smoke killing random people in the street?  Yes it is different.  Are they both terrorism?  If a man can rent a hotel room overlooking a music festival and start shooting down on them killing 49 and injuring countless others, just because, is that terrorism?  A boy enters a school and shoots random people with high powered rifles causing fear and terror in the halls is that murder or terrorism?  Is it less terrorism because it is not done in the name of religion?  What about the man that entered a Black church and killed black people because they were black, is that terrorism?  What about when a black man has a run in with the police and he is terrified to put his hand into his pocket to get ID because he is afraid that the cop will use it as a reason to shoot him and claim he was reaching for a gun.  Terrified because black people, brown people, are shot everyday reaching for phones and ID at the request of police.  Sure one police shooting is not terrorism, but a dozen, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand… sounds like terrorism, but it is not.  Is it?

It is tough to draw the line.  Maybe Natural20 is correct, the line is religious sponsored murder….