I should be

 I should be thankful for Hollywood. Without movies there wouldn’t be film music.  Disclosure Day is coming out soon. It marks the 30th film collaboration between Steven Spielberg and John Williams. They’ve worked together more than 50 years. 

I’m thankful for their work because they synergize each other’s work. 

Disclosure Day may be the last John Williams score.  Saw a video of him conducting the orchestra during recording sessions. John Williams was in a wheelchair. My heart sank. Still hanging on but the prognosis doesn’t look like many years are left.  

What gets me is the publicity machines spin up for Hollywood. Hollywood is their own publicity machine. There are all these videos and interviews of the actors and actresses with Spielberg circulating of them celebrating the release of the movie. 

What a bunch of inflated blowhards. The smiles, the flash photography. The red carpet premiers.  The big dick suck for how great all of it is.  The smiles.  The runways. It’s all bullshit. 

With Toy Story 5 they’re still rolling out tom hanks and Tim Allen like they’re in the prime. The egos of these ass clowns is repulsive.  It’s obvious they’re always the smartest ones in every room they’re in.  Have you seen joan cusack?  Ugly plastic.

The publicity machine turns me off completely. If anything it has the complete opposite effect on me than it does for the rest of the population.  It repulses me. It makes me despise them, their movies and their entire industry.  They’re arrogant. Conceited. Inflated. Blow hards. Shut the fuck up. Stop playing make believe on film.  

I hate movie stars, celebrities, people making their living in front of or behind a camera.  I hate popular culture. 

One of my buddies has tom hanks at the top of his list for people he’d like to have dinner with. His love for and my disgust for the same thing stresses our friendship.  I don’t understand what tom hanks contributes to the world?  The fact he can fool you into believing what he’s doing is real?  His storytelling ability?  His ability to make bullshit believable?

Read a book instead. It’s better for you. Better for your mind, your spirituality and your understanding and interpretation of the story being told or documented.  The Hollywood shit is all fake. 

Statue

 Obama commissioned a sculpture of himself for his architectural eyesore of a library in Chicago.  It was important to B Hussein Obama that the artist be black.  Here is a photo:

 

 

I absolutely love what they've done here.   I absolutely love everything this statue represents.  Figuratively, literally and most importantly aspirationally.  It's a real statement piece.  It makes me smile when I see it.  Actually, I find humor in it.  It looks like an afro wearing Richie Cunningham with a michael jackson glove.  He Heeeeee...... Ow!  Beat it.  Just beat it.

 

This work represents equity in action. I wonder if the rendering below was the inspiration behind this magnificent sculpture:

 Did the big guy himself sign off on this?

 

The guy that makes these wooden park sculptures 

could have done a better job.

 

No one will criticize.  Everyone will kiss the ring and bow.  For some reason that's what the faithful do with all things Obama.  Don't stop 'til you get enough.  Come on.

 

Everybody Wang Chung tonight...

 

Jorge Lukis could have done it better:

 

 

 

 

Tales from the park side

 Visiting with my dad yesterday. We were doing a FaceTime.  His medication was off and he seemed tired.  Mentioned he wasn’t sleeping well and he can’t shut his mind off.   I informed him he has medication to assist such as melatonin and some valium derivative. 

Anyway, we had a brief conversation about my employment situation and was explaining an opportunity that may come together.  As I was talking to him drool came out of his mouth. Twice.  He didn’t even notice.   Then I asked him what he thought. He said ‘I don’t know. I’m not following what you’re saying.’  He's looking at me as the conversation passes by.  With Parkinon's masking it's hard to know if a face void of emotion is checked out or just a neuro muscular symptom that comes with the brain unable to initiate and control muscle movement.

He mentioned his physical therapy is going well his therapist says his balance in improving   I inquired about speech therapy.  She only comes once a week.  I understand they help you with exercises to do during the week.  Yeah.  Do you do them? No.  Okay - do you want to pause the speech therapy until your medication situation is stabilized?  No.  Are you maximizing the benefit if you’re not practicing between sessions?  No.  Okay?

My Dad is a prideful man and I’m sure the decline is harder on him than it is on him than it is on me.  Cognitive testing is going to scheduled.  Will the information be gleaned be useful in or merely serve as confirmation? 

The last cognitive test he underwent was hard emotionally on him. That’s when his relationships went off the rails with the starwood staff. He was raging in frustration and anger.  I don’t see how putting him through a 2-4 hour cognitive assessment is going to be beneficial. If anything it will be blow to his confidence in his abilities and confirmation there are cognitive gaps and he is on the decline. 

Our family moved  to Texas in 1975. My parents didn’t have to walk the aging journey with their parents.  My Aunt and Uncle took care of my maternal grand parents.  My paternal grandfather died in 1979 from cancer.  My paternal grandmother died in Austin from esophageal.  My dad moved her to Austin while Laurie and I were dating.  She died when we got back from our honeymoon.  I don't remember how long she was living her.  My sister walks my dads aging journey third person through me.  She is tremendous support. And it's not the same as dealing first hand with the challenges of seeing a parent on the skids.

 A once capable man being overcome by advancing Parkinson’s.  It's eroding his quality of life.  When we got on facetime, the first thing that struck me is he is losing more weight and his face is looking more skeletal and thinned out - losing tone and 'fleshiness.'  

Am I stuck in employment purgatory until his time on earth ends?  Is this the universe knowing something I don't?  Divine intervention?   

Soul Crushing

 Does anyone understand how soul crushing it is to receive an automated rejection letter stating I am not qualified for a job when my resume and experience matches their desired qualifications line for line? 

It's devastating.  

My career is worthless.  

I'm worthless.

Tales from the Park Side

 My dad started sending me message at 1237 last night.  He was completely off the rails because he was ringing his call button for a tylenol.  Then he called the owner of the company and said there was no one on duty.  There was someone on duty.  She was outside smoking a cigarette or something.  My dad then sends me all these messages how pissed he is and the facility isn't doing their job and the owner wasn't monitoring the call buttons and didn't come when we wanted his tylenol.

When the messages started coming I turned off my phone.  I'm not getting pulled into a temper tantrum about tylenol.  I wonder if they facility used their secret stash of medication for when he starts climbing the walls.  Like the time he accused a caregiver of throwing his mouse in the garbage.  Or the most recent time when he started acting like Mr Wilson from UP because he didn't remember the attendant came in to take his blood pressure.

Last time, I went over they and met with the staff for an hour.  I listen to them and talked to him.  Like all HR related BS, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.  

This time, I did not get involved.  I didn't return his call.  I didn't acknowledge his tantrum.  I didn't call the facility.  

If he can get out of bed and go into the kitchen wearing nothing but his underwear, why can't he do the same thing to go into the medicine cabinet and get himself a pain reliever??

Later in the day he sent me a message in facebook about the pastor from the childhood church on video taking communion and walking to his seat.  He called him a loser.  This usually gets a reaction out of me because i can't stand the guy.  He looks like a typical 80 plus year old elderly man.... he practically tripped going through the communion line and he was holding his wife's hand.  I wonder how bad her health is because she looks like a zombie every time i see her.  At any rate, I didn't respond to his outreach.

And again later in the day, he sent over a social media campaign the church is doing to attract new attendees.  A video of the organ and a video of a scene from the stained glass windows combined with a song and some biblical text.  I told him that was nice and asked who was doing it.  He didn't know.  He did share that the campaign was 10 years old.  The conversation didn't go any further.

I'm always there to advocate for his care and well being.  Being upset about a tylenol or the attendant smoking a cigarette?  SOmething bad could have happened.  Well.... it didn't.  

After the last melt down about the vital sign thing, it's not appropriate to gear up for battle.  Gotta pick wisely.  Especially knowing he is experiencing gaps in cognition.  Like when he can't operate his computer, hearing aids or phone.  Or when he can't count backwards from 20.  Or when he doesn't remember what he had for breakfast.  

When he was assessed for speech therapy, he told me he failed the cognitive assessment by one question and that it was no big deal.  That one question may have made him fail - but how many questions did he get wrong before the one question made his score a failure?  Like if there were 20 questions, a failing score could mean he got 8 wrong to bring his score down to 60.  So it wasn't one question that caused a failure on the assessment.  It was 9 questions causing a failure.  But... what do I know?

I don't know when I'll reach out to him again.  He has ANOTHER neurology appointment on the June 11.  I'll contact him and the facility for sure on the 10th.  Until then...  we'll see.  I'm not interested in dealing with escalation over pain killer or a chain smoking overnight attendant.  Not going to engage with mending strained relationships over trivialities.

5 years

 Based on my informal research it looks like the people excelling in their careers spend approximately 5 years in the same role or the same company.   They go on to bigger and better things.  

My experience has also shown that spending 20 years at the same company may as well be career suicide.

Loser. 

There’s no way

 There is no way all these Indians and Muslims popping up everywhere is organic.  There’s no way their New Driver please be patient stickers are organic.  There’s no way all these mosques and Indian businesses popping up all over the place are organic.  Now if it is organic.  It’s a broken immigration system with loop holes the Indians know how to exploit. 

Why don’t Muslims immigrate to other Muslim countries?  Why is every country they come from a shit hole?  Why do they degrade every country they come to?  Do they make anything better?  No.  They want to bring their Muslim bullshit wherever they go.  Their halal food.  Their mosques.  Their dress. Their culture.  Their religion. 

Look at mamdumi bringing prayer rigs into city hall.  Calls to prayer in time square.   They don’t like dogs. And they don’t like bacon.  How about I get a dog and name him bacon just to anger then?

I went to discount tire to have tires rotated and balanced.  There was some clown dressed like an Islamic cleric.  This pain in the ass was giving the sales person a hard time about the cost and getting a free tire that had 65000 miles on it. Listen asshole - the tire has been used its expected life span.  Shut the fuck up and pay the goddam bill or leave.  

It’s like friction is part of their culture  bargaining.  Haggling.  Whatever.   When I worked at the airline, theee people would rather argue then pay their extra bag fees either due to weight exceeded or too many pieces.  The only way to get them to shut up and go away was to throw down the gauntlet and be outright rude to them by our cultural standards.   Then they’d shake your hand.  Get out.  All these doctors, lawyers and skilled people.  Not even.  These people are cheap bastards.  

Stay in your own third world garbage dump.  We don’t you them accelerating our delicate into a third world shithole.