I hope this blog post finds you well

It’s baseball season again. Along with that, it’s playoff time for basketball and hockey, F1 is back, and soccer is on, so I've been spending a lot of time watching live sports—and, as a result, I’ve been spending a lot of time watching commercials. Despite my advanced education, I am fundamentally a stupid, stupid man who makes stupid, stupid choices and is constantly entranced by stupid, stupid things on the TV or the Instagram. The other day I saw something about Mountain Dew Legend, a flavor of Mountain Dew available only at Buffalo Wild Wings. Today, I gave in and got takeout from Buffalo Wild Wings—a shameful choice, since I live in a town with a great wings restaurant (520 Wings in Savannah) and where even the shady sports bars and the fancy gas station by the ports make better wings than Buffalo Wild Wings. But I can't do the special Dew at those places. So I must debase myself.

I got what I wanted: 20oz of the purple Mountain Dew Legend, which I hoped would be as good as the Grimace Shake from McDonald's—a delicious shake that proved purple can taste good. But Mountain Dew Legend tastes like watered-down black cherry soda, or like a Fanta flavor from a freestyle machine at a movie theater. In other words, it tasted kind of normal: no weird aftertaste, no extreme sugar or caffeine kick, just a normal soda.

But that's not what Mountain Dew should be. Mountain Dew is supposed to be a caffeinated self-flagellation—a punishment for the series of decisions in life that led you to want a Mountain Dew. It's supposed to be awful but delicious at the same time, a form of catharsis, an experience of pleasure through pain. But Mountain Dew Legend is just a drink. I don't feel weird for drinking it. I don't regret it. I don't have a weird taste in my mouth. My body isn't reacting strangely to the caffeine and sugar. I just drank a soda, and that's not what I want from Mountain Dew. This is a disappointment—a double disappointment—because now I also have to eat dinner from Buffalo Wild Wings. There's will be no joy in my house tonight, only sadness as I silently munch on lemon pepper boneless wings and way too many cold tots. It’s nights like this when I could really go for a Mountain Dew.

I went on a short hike the other day. Saw some cool butterflies. Maybe. Or were they moths? I find myself constantly hindered by my ignorance about bugs, birds, and other assorted critters. Am I supposed to be excited about what I see on the trail? Should I feel awe? Or am I just surrounded by stupid bugs?

Birds were everywhere. Are they any good? Should I be bringing binoculars for bird watching? Was the owl I heard one of the big badass owls or one of the little goofy ones?

Then there were the bugs. A cricket? Grasshopper? No idea. A giant bee-looking thing buzzed by my head— a honey bee? Bumblebee? Or is it a Humblebee? Is “humblebee” even a real word? It sounds like something my grandfather would make up. Should I even care what it was, or should I just be glad it didn’t sting me?

Here’s the thing: I want to care. I want to know if I should I be catching butterflies like my boy Vlad. Or am I just sweating through my shirt for the same basic bugs I’d find in my backyard?

I‘m a terrible photographer with shaky hands who only uses a 24mm lens on a camera that I think is broken. (Pictures from the hike were beyond my normal standard of unfocused.) I can never get the Merlin app out in time to catch a clear bird call. Technology cannot help me. I need a travel buddy who can point at a critter and say, “That’s a cool bug” or “You don‘t need to care about that bug.” And that’s all they would ever say. Otherwise they would blend into the wilderness until called upon again.

For now, I’m just a sweaty goon in the woods, equal parts curious and clueless. I just want to understand. Or get eaten by a gator. One or the other.

I've spent the last several months accomplishing nothing. It's not that I don't do anything; it's just that I spend all my time undoing what I did before. I tinker with keyboards, replacing red switches with yellow switches, only to go back to red the next day. I decide to build a home server, and flip back and forth between Unraid, Ubuntu Server, or Open Media Vault. Or maybe I should run it all on the cheap VPS I bought during one of my 3 a.m. insomnia shopping sprees. Or maybe I should just use the VPS to host a Pangolin tunnel.

I'm constantly reinstalling and uninstalling Linux distros on my laptop—Ubuntu, Bluefin, Aurora, Arch—and switching between GNOME, Hyprland, and KDE. I never make backups of anything, so I’m constantly typing docker compose up -d or nvim .config/hypr/hyprland.conf over and over again to recreate what was set up and working just fine the day before. And then the next day, I’ll delete everything and start all over.

Even reading books and watching movies, the two things that I used to love doing, the things that both relax me and help keep my mind sharp, have turned into a series of pointless decisions. Do I want to use the default Kobo reader, KOReader, Plato? Do I want to save articles on Pocket or Wallabag? What about Readeck or Hoarder? Do I want to save the articles from FreshRSS, Miniflux, or Inoreader? Maybe I need to buy an Android-based e-reader—or even a color e-ink Android reader? I've bought both options, only to return them to Amazon the next day. And when it comes to watching movies, do I want to watch on Kodi or use an Android TV app? Should I use the remote that came with the TV, or can I configure a $8.99 universal remote to more efficiently adjust the volume. Do I want my good soundbar on my good TV downstairs or do I want it in Movie Dungeon? Should I move the good TV to the Movie Dungeon, even though it would probably mean replacing the TV wall mount? These are the things I spend all day thinking about. I don’t exercise, I don’t cook, I don’t go to bed on time. I just eat half a box of wheat thins while I wait for a hard drive to reformat.

I keep tinkering and tweaking, undoing and redoing, fiddling and unfiddling, always working on something, but accomplishing nothing, constantly going back to where I was the day before. But today, something happened. Today, I actually finished something. I finished the book I started in August. I sat down in my gazebo at a campsite in the southern Georgia wilderness, near the edges of the Okefenokee Swamp, and read the final 30% of the book. It felt pretty good. Now I just have to see if I can keep in up when I’m back at home, surrounded by tempting Siren song of tiny keyboards waiting to be configured. But first, I think I’ll reinstall Bluefin on my laptop.

I went on a cruise. By myself, of course.

I signed up for three excursions. Two were canceled.

I got a mani-pedi and a facial for the first time. Manicure was overrated, but the pedicure? Your boy is all about that foot treatment now.

Food was okay. Like the good college dining hall. But they gatekeep the soda. Why must I be punished because others did not purchase a drink package? I don’t think I had a between-meal soda the entire trip because I didn’t want to have to wait at the bar. Once the line was so long at the bar, I drank water instead. Plain water. At a meal. Like a chump.

I wanted to go on a cruise because I’d never been on one. Now I’ve been on one. I’ll stick with camping.

So I'm driving with my grandfather and my sister and Duffy, even though my grandfather died before Duffy was born. We're driving through the streets of Atlanta, or the suburbs outside of Atlanta. I don't know why. I can remember in my the dream thinking maybe I should be driving and not Grandpa. He kept changing lanes without signaling and cutting people off and people were honking at him.

He asked about a road that had a gate on half the road blocking you from turning left. As he was looking at that, he drove off the side of the road, and we flew into open space, just spinning in the air. I could feel in the dream the gravity go away as the minivan floated in the air. But then somehow the minivan loops around, boomerangs back onto the road and rolls down the side of the hill and ends up at the bottom of the hill with people watching as we get out of the car.

I remember yelling at my sister to call the police and then a man, a man from the Kids in the Hall, comes up and steals our newspaper. We ask him for help, he runs away, across the street. I see him running, I see him pass people that he could be asking for help, I see him pass a phone booth that he could use to call the police. He keeps running towards a building in the far distance and in the dream I yell, “Mark McKinney is a coward!”

And of course, because with #ThePark, you act out your dreams sometimes, I woke up to myself screaming at the top of my lungs, “Mark McKinney is a coward!”

I doubt I have endeared myself to my neighbors on this cruise. Maybe I should get a little magnet for my cruise ship door that says, “I scream random things at night. Don't worry about it, it's just #ThePark.” Or maybe something like, “If you hear me shoutin’, don’t worry nothing ‘bout it.” I could be making this part of the whole wacky cruise ship door vibe.

Apologies to Mark McKinney.

Every other stupid website does this, so I get to do it too. Here it is, my highly anticipated 2024 list of my favorite things.

Favorite thing number one, crackers for dinner. You don't have anything for dinner? You don't want to cook? You got a box of Triscuits in the cupboard? Well, now you got yourself a dinner. You could have it with cheese, you could have it with summer sausage, or you could have the gentleman's dinner: Sit on the couch, watching sporting events you don't really care about, and just eat half a box of Triscuits and call it a night. It's the way to live.

Favorite thing number two, remembering to take all your drugs. Man, does it feel good when you're getting ready for bed and you realize that you actually remembered to take all of your pills. The three in the morning are easy, and so are the three at night, but it's easy to forget the two you're supposed to take at work. And even better is when you also take your vitamin, your fish oil pills, your probiotic, and your B vitamins, but that only happens once every 13 weeks.

Favorite thing number three, people liking old posts. Feels good, man. You know that someone's thinking about you, googling you, scrolling through your stupid posts, smashing that like button, plotting their revenge, watching you through binoculars. timing you, noticing your patterns, shadowing your every move throughout, pinpointing moments of vulnerability. It's the ultimate compliment.

Favorite thing number four, the Plaud AI voice recorder. If I had a nickel for every time I've been tricked by a seductive internet ad, I would probably not have that much money because I usually spend a lot more than a nickel on those t. Things like expensive single blade razors that don't really work very well. Expensive orthopedic dress shoes that aren't really very comfortable and shoelaces break. Expensive cat toys that the cats don't even like. But there's one thing that redeems my gullible internet shopping addiction, and that is the Plaud AI voice recorder thing, which I'm using right now to dictate this stupid blog post. You might be wary of something that has AI in the name, advertises on Instagram, and is a subscription service. Those are all huge red flags. But let me tell you something, people, this thing actually works. It's the size of a credit card, it records your voice, it transcribes it with AI, you copy and paste it into an email. It's fantastic. I can ramble incoherently and have it organized into more comprehensible thoughts. It's good stuff.

Favorite thing number five, attaching a hook to your bedroom ceiling. Not only is it great for hanging a Parkinson's boxing bag, it really adds to the confusing vibe of the house. Imagine this scenario: you ring the doorbell and I actually decide to answer it. You ask to use the bathroom. You walk through the foyer, with a Bob's Big Boy piggy bank and a pissing boy liqueur bottle. You enter the family room, where none of the clocks work. Then you make it to the bathroom, but you are creeped out by the framed 8x10 glossy of Ed McMahon staring at you. So you ask to use the real bathroom, which means you have to walk through my bedroom where you see a hook in the ceiling with a bungee cord hanging from it. I ask if you'd like to see my attic. You leave and never return. The hook hanging from the ceiling in the bedroom has done its job.

Favorite thing number six, magnets. If you go somewhere, you should get a magnet for your fridge. You should also buy an extra magnet and send it to me so I can put it on my fridge. I added fourteen magnets to my fridge this year. I regret buying a fridge with a glass door because I've lost so much magnet space. Imagine how many magnets I could have had I not been tricked into buying it. Maybe I should just buy a second fridge just for magnets.

My seventh and final favorite thing of 2024, little ceramic shaving bowl. Sometimes you get seduced into buying a single blade razor online and then you need to qualify for free shipping so you buy something else from the site and that something else is a little ceramic bowl for you to whip up a frothy shave. The razor is an overpriced dud made for people who do jawline exercises and not for those of use with adorable baby cheeks. But the little ceramic shaving bowl? Life changing. I feel like Cary Grant when I shave. And I suppose you don't even need a ceramic shaving bowl; any bowl will do. Just take your shaving brush and whip up that froth. It will change you.

I fell out of bed. Don't believe the rumors that I fell on the floor and bumped my head. Those are lies. Slanders. I fell out about halfway, just enough to wrench my back as my body twisted half in, half out of the bed. Now how could I, a man who has successfully slept for 12,000 nights at least, suddenly fall out of the bed? It actually has to do with #ThePark, and it’s one of the things that scares me the most about the disease.

To grossly and probably inaccurately oversimplify things, The Park is a miscommunication between the brain and body in a wide variety of ways. One of those is something I call vivid dreaming. I'm not sure if that's actually what it's called, but that's what I call it. It's where your brain, and again this is just my sort of googling-not-even-using-an-AI-search-enginge understanding of it, doesn't tell your body that you're asleep, so your body acts out your dreams because it thinks you're still awake.

This is a problem when dreams become violent or physical. Last night, I was having a dream where a pompous British man was accosting me, so I decided to kick him, as one does when accosted by a rude Briton. Apparently, it was some sort of Xtreme Chun-Li/Chuck Norris/Lorenzo Lamas massive roundhouse kick. My body, not realizing that I was dreaming, also kicked, a kick so hard, it kicked myself out of bed.

Normally, I use a 25-pound king-sized weighted blanket, which I think helps when these situations happen. It's tough to kick through 25 pounds of blanket. But last night I decided to wash my blanket, and it wasn't quite dry when I went to bed. So I slept without the blanket and suffered the consequences. Always sleep with your weighted blanket, folks. Always.

This goes back to one of my great fears of The Park: that through the disease, I'll end up hurting someone. I wonder what would happen if there were someone around me when one of these fits happens. What could happen if I'm in a hotel or traveling without access to a weighted blanket to restrain me? What would happen if I'm camping alone in the woods?

Even something as simple as sleep can end up hurting me or someone else because of this illness. I’m pretty sure I’ve kicked the boys in my sleep, but they bite/scratch me when I'm sleeping, so I think that evens out.

These vivid dreams are the one symptom of The Park that I faithfully keep track of. I don’t know how often I actually have these dreams (does the weighted blanket keep me from waking up and realizing what’s happening?), but I always write about this in my little journal whenever it happens because I think it's one of the scarier things about Parkinson's. It's the sort of Nightmare on Elm Street version of the illness. Your dreams coming to haunt you, to hurt you, and to hurt those who might be around you when you're sleeping.

It's a nightmare, but unlike a horror movie, there are no half-naked co-eds partying with you. Unlike a horror movie, there is no killing the villain. There's no sending Jason off into space (however he got there, I don't know. I assume he was exiled). There's nothing like that. This won't go away. This can't be stopped. There is no cure. No treatment other than piling heavier and heavier weighed blankets on me, pressing me into submission like a sleepy Giles Corey. This is my fate for the rest of my life: to go to bed each night wondering if I'll punt the lil goblin across the room while I'm sleeping.

I don’ know how many I’ve killed. On purpose, by accident, through neglect, through stupidity and incompetence. It must be in the dozens by now. Every year it seems I find a new victim. Someone new could take the old one's place. Every year it's a different plant, and every year it dies.

It started with the Mexican Firebush. I planted it in the back corner of my yard. I don't know if I can still have a picture of it. It was so long ago. My Facebook days. A dark time. I planted it because it looked colorful. It had a neat name, Firebush. And a Mexican plant in Arizona seemed appropriate. It went where a tree was supposed to go. It was supposed to be a tree planted there according to my HOA rules, but a tree got in the way of the pool, so the previous owners removed it, in blatant disregard of suburban norms. But I had to plant something there, it couldn't remain empty, so I planted a Mexican firebush. I watched it die, I watched it wither, I planted something new, it probably died, I planted something new, then I moved away. I wonder what's in the back corner of that lot in Anthem, Arizona. Probably a dead plant.

After the Mexican Fire Bush, it became potted plants. There was a hurricane coming, but I wasn't aware of it. I hadn't been watching the news. I didn't know anything about the prep. I just thought it was getting a little windy out. So I went to the hardware store to pick something up. People were buying cases of water, plastic wrap, things of that nature. I saw they had planters on sale, so I bought some planters. I bought some plants, just some flowers, just ordinary things, some dirt to put them in. And I planted them. They lasted a while. But then, as they always do, they wither and die. I replanted them. The same thing happened again. I left those planters there when I moved. I wonder if they're still there in that rental house. If so, I hope the new tenants have done more with them than I ever could.

And then I came to Georgia. When I bought the house there were two stone planters in front of my door, flower beds in front of the party patio, and there were holes in the ground where plants or trees probably had already been planted but died and been uprooted. I did nothing with the flower beds, at first. I planted some plants in the front, they died. I planted some poinsettias one winter, they lasted but they died, as they are not meant to last in this world. They are only meant for holiday festivities.

This year I planted some bulbs in the planters. One side of them grew, although I think it was just weeds, looked like onions, maybe leeks, perhaps a shallot of some sort.

This year I also bought planters for the flowerbeds. I had tried planting stuff in them before, again going to bulbs, but the soil is so tough. Nothing would grow there but weeds, so I bought planters, I planted flowers, then the storms came and they filled up with water and now it's just mud and weeds and the occasional plant that has survived.

Then there were the tree holes. I used to trip in them all the time when I mowed my lawn. One time I got so mad, I went straight to Lowe's to buy some dirt to fill the holes. Then I saw they had some plants on sale, $9.99, for little shrub things that were supposed to grow to be about six feet tall. So I planted them. I could make a nice little barrier between me and my dirtbag neighbors. They didn't grow. They didn't grow at all. For two years they just sat there, the same size, never really getting rooted, never really becoming part of the landscape. Three of them I tore out last year. The last one survived until just today when I noticed it was half dead. I yanked it out of the ground with my bare hands. So much for a tree, more like a stick piled in dirt. A symbol of my failure, my sad incompetence. My inability to cultivate life.

Despite my failures, when I look at my backyard, I want more. I'd like a fruit tree, a citrus, something I can make a cherry limeade with. I guess a cherry tree and a lime tree. I want to actually watch life grow in my yard, and not have to toss it in a pile behind the party patio every summer. A growing heap of failure and death.