[FRIAM] Rocky Mountain Tumwater (oysters?)

[steve smith]

> Excellent ideas. But I couldn't even bring myself to flip off the 
> cybertruck driver the other day. I suppose I've fully matured out of 
> my road rage days. So purposeful vandalism might be beyond me at this 
> point. (Of course, I'm fully on the rhetorical side of the vandals, 
> though ... assuming their targets are ethical ... i.e. small 
> businesses: no, their landlords: yes, banks: yes, credit unions: no, 
> etc.)
I've actually *never* been able to raise my self-righteousness beyond 
rhetoric beyond very focused and limited moments where I went "all in" 
and "won the day" through careful strategy and full commitment.    I 
don't even feel clever enough to actually do any of these imagined acts 
of creative resistance with sufficient cleverness to be worth the 
disruption caused.  Thanks for validating that at best it is valuable 
only as rhetorical ideation, as it were.
> It's similar to Trump&Vance's bullying of Zelenskyy. No good really 
> comes from literal vandalism. It's temporary self-indulgence. 
Yes, like that.  In my most institutional work-life I so ached sometimes 
to have studied "ventriliquism", "sleight of hand", etc. so that I could 
add disruptive levity to some of the absurdities everyone (virtually) in 
the room knew was afoot but weren't speaking to.  The best I could 
muster was during the famous 1-2 month shutdown was to acknowledge folks 
in a queue or an elevator with the bright phrase: "another day another 
million dollars!".
> Figurative vandalism is much more effective. E.g. commenting on the 
> predictive inferences one might make based on the size or type of some 
> rando's vehicle ... like Subarus and leftists, liberals, and lesbians 
> ... or the inverse relationship between one's vehicle and penis sizes.
So you are saying Musk has an Origami Styled Penis?  Or  is it his 
Starship which keeps blowing up that is the aspirational archetype for him?
>
> And since we have the universe at our fingertips, I assume you know 
> "tumwater" means "waterfall" ... or at least according to this site: 
> https://www.ci.tumwater.wa.us/visitors/our-history But we may as well 
> log it here, anyway.
I don't think I knew that... it *sounds good*.   I assumed something 
*like* "spring-fed mountainous brook".  I *do* prune by breadth/depth 
searches at some point, I had to resist it at "tumwater".   I haven't 
given over to setting up some kind of agentic mailtool to build a 
transcluded hyperlinked utterance from my mumbling maunderings here 
(beyond what one of my multiple homunculii do themselves when this one 
is not watching closely).
> Re: Coors - to be honest, it's the best of the macros. I tend to stick 
> to Ranier or PBR when I hang out with hipsters. But Coors (not Light) 
> is actually better. But I haven't consumed it in at least 5 years. 
> Your comment about the refineries for macros is spot-on. They *are* 
> refineries, which is why their product isn't actually beer. Beer is 
> *alive*, not pasteurized and filtered (dead) to export to the other 
> side of the planet or sit on the shelf (warm, even) for 10 years. 
> Brewer's yeast is nutrient dense. If your beverage doesn't have yeast 
> in it, you're missing out.
I've settled almost exclusively on a very few fermentation products, 
mostly for old-man-habit reasons (variants of laziness).  My regular 
go-to is a living batch of home-brewed (wild yeast/bacteria-scoby) 
kombucha which I secondary ferment in my old 1.5L Bulleit Rye Bottles.  
I spend about 20 minutes every week retopping the primary vessel with 
sugar-cane-sugar black tea, often a secondary product of my unsweet 
ice-tea cold brew and (summertime) hummingbird juice.  I don't buy beer 
at the market anymore... but drink whatever is offered when visiting 
someone, and let a brewpub pull me a pint when I get a chance.  I drink 
cheap wine out of the screwtop with cute animals on the label...  but 
not too much.   Once a week a few of us hold a Sunday Poetry Salon which 
is an excuse to fix a hot meal for folks and drink an ounce or two of 
Rye Whiskey.  If only I had some tumwater-ice-cubes!  And I'm a liberal 
user of nutritional yeast in my cooking.
> My doctor just this morning told me there's no health benefit to beer. 
> He's wrong in 2 ways: 1. Those of us with social disorders need 
> something ... kava, SSRIs, etc. in order to lead a healthy life. And 
> 2. real beer has dormant yeast in it. But I'd already told him I 
> prolly wouldn't take a cholesterol pill or statin even if he 
> recommended it. So I didn't argue about the beer. 8^(

I finally gave over to the AMA and medical insurance game after turning 
65 (a few years back).  Put my "money where my mouth is", by supporting 
the Medicare concept by paying into it and *selectively* withdrawing 
from it.   At the same moment, I found a "neighborhood Doc" within (a 
long) walking distance who even makes housecalls.   I pay *her* roughly 
1/2 what I pay Medicare (she accepts no insurance of any kind for any 
reason) on-retainer along with a motley crue of others who choose or 
have no choice not to play insurance games.   She is roughly my 
daughters' age (40s) and indulges me in similar ways as they do 
(refusing various types of interventional medicine on principle, talking 
me through the *logic* of why she recommends one thing over another, 
etc).   She doesn't argue against alcohol or caffeine specifically, just 
keeps the idea of "moderation" on the table at all times.

In a few days, I see her for the first time since the dougie-howzer 
sawbones cut my right hip-hinge out and put in a titanium and nylon one 
(my doc kinda talked me into it, convinced me all the Kombucha and Warm 
Water Walking in the world wasn't going to make up for bone-on-bone wear 
on both sides).  She will be hosting a freshly minted MD at my appt. who 
is hoping to mimic (but not join?) her practice?  I'm a fan of the 
Marcus Welby model if it can be practical for the practitioner.

FWIW I have monitored the billing of the surgeon/hospital/etc and the 
medicaid payments involved.  A 60k (total as billed) pair of hips only 
cost Medicare about 1/4 of that (negotiated prices) and my piece was not 
trivial but may settle out to be 1/4 of what Medicare paid.  Granted I 
did everything I could to underload the system, ( to try to make sure my 
grandchildren have some Medicare to draw on when they get old (in their 
second century of life?)). It is still under what it would take to 
itemize deductions... but being my first ever Tax-Protest year coming 
up, who knows?  I feel like I've got my lifetime benefits out of the 
system already... $200/month payoff of fresh hips over the next decade 
or two? Bargain!

Ramble,


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