Schlocky ancient writing translation.

Here and there, people occasionally ask me to translate schlocky uses of this one ancient writing system that I've been intensively studying, that people use on modern objects.

Like, my one lawyer friend from Missouri texted me this picture of a schlocky multi-colored enameled necklace pendant a friend found in her (dead) mother's things, and asked me what it said.

It didn't make much sense, and I said that at first, but then I thought better and slowly sounded out some foreign-sounding sounds and then slowly was like, "Drop... this necklace... Run... the other way....  Demons are rising."

"It doesn't say that!", she was like.

"Yes it does," I was like.  "You asked me to translate it, and that's what it says.  You have to tell your friend that."

"No I don't," she was like.

I am proud to announce...

 ...that I am now someone who has read all of the Dead Sea Scrolls, in translation!

#life #goal #accomplished

Honestly, how many people can say that?  And I've effectively read all of the Bible, too.

Some texted reflections on San Francisco...

 ...by my one art school colleague who wears women's clothes, who recently visited there for the first time for a friend's memorial service:

Well I'm already flummoxed by the architecture

The astounding juxtaposition of white corporate males and some of the most broken creatures I have ever ever seen

How it not like it has an identity crisis but that it more that it doesn't want you to know who or what it is--I can see why it was Hitchcock's city

. . .

He also noted that he can understand why so many homeless congregate right downtown, but because so much of the rest of the city just isn't navigable for handicapped people.

Covid curmudgeonliness.

The other week I went to the one weird lobby bakery near me for a pastry and a coffee, and they wouldn't fill up my thermos like they did last time using a metal pitcher to get the coffee from the big thermos and pour it into my little thermos, because this new (tattooed) (middle-aged) (white) guy stopped the (young) (tattoed) (white) guy, saying that they couldn't do it, but that they could give me a paper cup and I could do it. "But I don't want to waste the paper," I was like. "Sorry," the (tatooed) (middle-aged) (white) guy was like, "But that's what the health department says." And, as he says this, both of them are standing there without masks. Like, what sense in the heck does that make?! I felt like such a Covid curmudgeon, though I didn't say anything, and just took the paper cup and went to go sit outside.

Shaving nicks.

I hate this one razor that I use to shave, since it gives a really nice shave, but if you're not careful when you're finishing a stroke, it can inadvertently cut you, even if it just lightly touches whatever skin where it touches. Like, the other week I was shaving around my lips, and the next thing I know, I have a nick on my right nostril. And, the next time I shave after that, all of a sudden, my right nipple is bleeding. I feel like some weird saint, bleeding from these random places. Like, I should be up in a niche in a church somewhere, staring upwards with a blank look on my face, while I bleed from my nostril and my nipple, and pilgrims slouch around my feet and reach up and try to touch my wounds, eventually rubbing the paint off of both of them.

Confusing infestation:

Lately there's been ants around my bathroom wash basin, like not a ton, but every once in a while one or maybe two and sometimes even three. Like, why would they be there? The most that's there is soapy moisture and flecks of my stubble after I shave, it's not like it's a food source or anything, or even near any food source. So, I crush them with my finger when I find them, and once or twice I've washed out the basin with a moist rag.

A story of recreational drugs.

So, like a month ago I caught up on the phone with my one lawyer friend from (Missouri)'s one former neighbor who is also from (Missouri), who has worked corporate. She was saying that she and her husband finally fulfilled a dream of hers, and they both did ayahuasca in the Yucatan, which she was surprised is so close to the U.S. by air, "It's like you get on the plane in Florida and then you get right off it again and you're there." "So what was that like?", I was like, and she said that at a certain point her skin melted away and she could see all of her internal organs and they had all turned into gold, and that she couldn't stop laughing, and that after it was all over, you couldn't eat enough fruit and vegetables, it was like they were life, but meat just tasted so nasty. She also said that there was this (Portuguese) woman there, and the entire time she was curled up in the corner crying, and at one point her husband saw a shadow, but neither of them experienced it. Also also, during the debrief, she still wasn't quite out of it yet -- she didn't like that part of the way the host ran it, she wouldn't go with him again -- and she doesn't remember quite what the (Portuguese) woman said, but she knows that she was still laughing, and she just laughed the whole time, while this traumatized (Portuguese) woman who had been curled up in the corner crying was telling the group everything that she had experienced. "Wow," I was like. "Yeah," she was like. "I was so embarrassed, I apologized the next morning at breakfast." "What did she say?", I was like. "She actually she said that it was good to hear me laugh, to know that someone else was having a good time." "Wow," I was like. Towards the end of the conversation, too, she also said that at a different time in her life she's tried studying to be a shaman, and she offered to buy for me a book written by the guy that she's studied with, who also has a Ph.D. in psychology but has dropped out of society and doesn't even use the interent so that he can be more attuned to people.