Precautions against local homelessness.

Like a month ago at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, I had noticed out the front window like mid-way through dinner shift that this (very tall) (erratically-loping) (young) (dark black) man was across the street in a parking lot there, like cutting through a part of the parking lot that no-one ever goes through, and just moving kind of funny, before he rounded the corner of the building and then went down the sidewalk and disappeared heading out west from town-center.

And, that's that, and I don't see him again for the rest of the shift, out of sight, out of mind.

And then, that night when we close, I leave before my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones and my one (newer) (taller) (Thai) coworker, and I cross the street and go on my way home, and as I'm like half a block away, who do I see but that same guy, rounding a curve on the opposite side of the street and walking up towards the restaurant.

So, I pause and turn and watch, and he goes past the entrance and is like half a block up past there, and then my one (newer) (taller) (Thai) coworker steps out and steps to the curb and looks at her phone, just oblivious, and luckily the guy keeps going, and then a moment later my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones steps out and joins my other (Thai) coworker, and then they walk across the street together to the parking lot that's there, probably to the one's car since she's giving our older coworker a ride home.

And, I just paused and watched up the street even though those two had stepped out of sight behind the building that was there between me and the parking lot, to make sure that the guy didn't stop and loop back and cross the street and go towards them or go after them or anything like that.

And, as I was waiting, a (middle-aged) (pear-shaped) (black) woman with shaved head-sides and a dreaded top was walking up towards me on the sidewalk, and she looked quizzical at why I was standing there turned back and watching like that, and so I said that I had just got off work and was walking home and had noticed a strange guy, and I was waiting and watching to make sure that my coworkers got to their cars, and that she should be careful since he was up there somewhere walking ahead.

"Thanks," she was like, and kept going.

And, I waited just ten or twenty seconds more, at which point it was clear enough that the guy was way away from my coworkers and they had had more than enough time to get to their car.

So, I went home, but I promised myself to talk to both of them to let them know about that guy, the next time that I worked with them, about how something maybe could have happened, and how they should be more careful when they leave the restaurant at night.

A comment of my mother from a couple of months ago...

...as we are talking on the phone and some topic comes up and she wants to go look something up about it right away, and she says she's going to go on the internet and do it right then, even while I sit there on the phone and wait for her to do it:

"I know you don't like doing this, but you have to, because I'm your mother."

 . . .

A dream...

...that I dreamnt last month:

The front neighbor from the first floor of the front house is out doing gardening, and I am out in that same yard while she works, and I am inside my cottage again, and I am thinking of asking her to weed the bush-beds besides my cottage, and I look up, and tall sunflowers with small blossoms are suddenly there outside my windows, transplanted among freshly-weeded bush-beds, and I go out into the yard, and large plants that she's been growing inside all winter are put in here and there on the lawn, and then we're standing by the backsteps that go up to the backdoor to the front house that leads to her first-floor apartment, and she is very angry about the mud there at the foot of the steps and how it's a mess and how nothing will grow there, and I raise the possibility, gingerly, that I gather pebbles from the alley and put them there in the dirt-patch that's the mud, and that will fill the space there and make it less messy, and she seems genuinely appreciative of my idea and my offer and affirms it, and then I'm back inside my cottage, and I hear from my bedroom the sound of someone like knocking on the glass door of a patio-door, and I walk into my bedroom and there's a large door there in the wall by where my bed was and it leads out onto a large flat cement-block porch with a straight simple roof but no railings and it all looks out across some fields and towards a distant house, and somehow I sense it's Kentucky, and a woman is there and she's the neighbor and she says that she walked over and that she's glad that she finally caught me at home since there's some nesting raccoons there that will cause me some problems and she wants to show them to me so that I know how bad the problem is...

 ...and then something wakes me up, and I come to too much to go back to sleep and slip into the same dream, to find out where the raccoons are and how bad the problem is.

. . .

(. . .)

More signs of increasing local homelessness.

1) A(n old) (black) (homeless) guy comes in the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now and approaches one table and then turns away when they apparently refuse his request for money and then he starts walking down the aisle, and me and my (Thai) coworkers notice, and right away I go up to him to ask him if I can help him and he asks for water and I say that that's for customers only, so he leaves, nicely, and just after he does that the (male) owner comes out of the back since someone had run back and gotten him from the back office, since I guess this same guy had come in twice recently on recent shifts and on one of the times that he came in, he really really messed up the restroom, and, anyhow, the second time that he came in, the (male) owner had told him that if he ever came in there again, they would call the cops on him.

2) A (younger) (black) (homeless) guy slips in the front door of the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now and sits down at a front-window table of a(n older) (white) woman whose husband had just gotten up at the end of the meal and gone to use the restroom, and he talks to her to ask her for money, which she apparently refuses, and when I go up as he gets up to go find another table, I ask him if I can help him, and he doesn't say much, and just heads out the front door.

3) At the one lake-park north of my house, as I jog one early evening when it's still light out, this (middle-aged) (light-skinned) (black) man wrapped up in a winter coat and wrapped up in a blanket on top of that is just sitting up on the fishing area of a bridge where a small platform flares out, sitting on the corner where two railings meet with his leg stuck up on the one railing, just staring off into space, while two (younger) (white) kids with fishing poles are creeping through some nearby woods trying to find a way down to a nearby creek that's there, since apparently the standard fishing space was taken up by this (homeless) guy.

A new workshoe strategy, and a problem that ensues.

I've now started rotating out workshoes between waiter shifts at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now -- taking one pair in for one shift and then another in for the next -- since I hear that that helps with the wear-and-tear, and that actually helps them to last longer, if they rest more in between usage, even though you think that that wouldn't matter all that much.

Only, I had been wearing the one pair constantly and keeping the second pair in reserve, so it's hard to get a sense of how they wear now, since the one was so worn when I first started doing this.

I'm not sure if I'll come out of this, knowing whether this really works or not.

Some random happenings, lately:

1) The one (local) (young) (white) (female) bartender at the local brewery, the one with the (knit) (pussy-hat) vibes, says that a lot of times when she's talking with people and the subject of the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now comes up, people out of nowhere are all like, "And I love that guy...!", and they then go on to describe me, and apparently there's all these people who are fans of me, as a server, which she says in part is from how so many people who go in there are (white) and they don't know sh*t about (Thai) food, and how I always explain things to everyone and point new stuff out on the menu and explain it, and how people are genuinely appreciative of that, in addition to me always being so nice.

She also says that she tells them that I'm a regular at that local brewery, and come in there sometimes.

(I didn't ask her then, but I should have, if anyone had said that I was good-looking.)

2) My new neighbors from upstairs at the front house have adopted a new cat, since I guess one morning they came out into the backyard and they saw a cat on the roof of my cottage and they lured it down with food and they took it in and then they went on Facebook and were able to find out that the cat does indeed have an owner but that owner was thinking of re-homing it, anyways, so now they have this new cat, and it all started from that cat being on my cottage's roof one morning and them luring it down etc., all of which was happening as I was in that cottage, asleep, with no idea that all that was going on around me.

3) My (newer) (female) (Guatemalan) coworker at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now shows me a Facebook post where her one (neighbor) in (Guatemala) just turned 104, and then she shows me a livestream where that same neighbor is in a (tasteful) (black) cocktail dress with a banner over her chest like a homecoming queen, as she sits in the back of a truck and is being driven around the streets of that town there in (Guatemala) as a celebration, while someone follows in a car or truck and films it from the rear, for the livestream.

A new philosophy of scholarship: "Running up the score."

With the one ancient language that I've been studying up on for a number of years, now, and have made myself quite the expert in, I've recently decided to adopt a new philosophy of scholarship --

From here on out, I'll be trying to "run up the score."

Basically, it's like when you're in a basketball game and you're creaming the other team, but you don't pull your strongest players and let the weak ones have some game-time, but rather you just keep going full force, and you just relentlessly drive the opposing team into the ground.

For one thing, although I have ways to claim ideas and I have some very marginal access to journals and conferences, it's become pretty clear to me that they'll never "let me in," or at least not on any predictable timeframe.

There's just not any jobs, and people horde any opportunities and exposure for their "own people" or to flatter those who are already plugged in, beyond any dynamics where the tenure system has produced that common malfunction where instead of being vetting *for* quality, it's become vetting *against* competition, and has effectively created cartels of enforced stupidity.

I mean, there's exceptions, like, there's some current scholars who seem nice enough and who do some good enough work, but overall, that area of research is a relatively collapsed one, which is both why I can do such good work, but also why I can't get any toeholds to launch further through acquisition of a paid research position or a slot at a plum paid international conference or the like.

Like, if people were truly appreciative with what I did, they would have let me in after my first two-and-a-half projects where I made notable progress, because those were on topics that were just peripheral enough that they wouldn't necessarily be automatically threatening to everyone since it didn't seem like I was rocking the boat of "established" findings all *that* much, for it was more like I was clarifying long-standing problems that were known problems or I was tidying up some unexpected stuff, but only around the edges of the linguistic system, not at its center.

Since then, though, I've gone straight to the heart of major analytic flaws that are just deeply, deeply embedded in the field, which now makes it much much much much harder for the people who are "there" to accept me, since not only did they not find those fundamental findings like I did, but I found those fundamental findings as a hobbyist outsider, with almost no connections whatsoever to their rigid and highly overestimated training and employment structures.

Furthermore, I'm increasingly realizing that some of my recent work opens up new vistas onto other major findings...  It's like a linguist friend who I consulted in late winter said, over time I should start noticing that I'm producing a set of interlocking hypotheses, where there's suddenly an unexpected explanation in a different area, or my positions or progress on some new and seemingly unrelated topic actually stems from or depends on what I've already done.

So, it's like I'm cracking open this tough nut where stuff has been f*cked and people have been floundering for a while -- over a century, to  be exact -- and I now have not only caught that field flat-footed on that first finding of a major analytic flaw, but there's work that logically follows upon that, that they're not even aware of yet, so it's like they're even more flat-footed than in the first case, if that's even possible.

So, given that I haven't been accepted yet and it's increasingly unlikely that that will happen now, why *wouldn't* I just try to plough ahead and sort through material and "get there first" and rack up major findings for posterity?

I somehow feel like me and this field are just locked in this death-grip, where I just keep doing better and better and better and it's just increasingly worse for them that they haven't let me in, but with each new finding of mine, it makes it harder for them to "swallow the crow" and do so.

It's all faintly ridiculous, but I really do wonder at what point people will have to start to reckon with what I'm doing.