More days of extreme mental illness, delusions, wildflowers, cow shit and criminal conduct 🌺 🐮 💩 🤪 🚨

So I guess, as I toss the plastic container in the trash, imagining by next weekend will it will melt and burn up to nothing but some smoke, dioxin and furans. Don’t you know it’s a crime to your burn garbage at least in New York? Pennsylvania rednecks be like, we go to dump once a year with a bag of unburnables and get paid for the tin cans. As I parked my “small by SuperDuty standards” F-350 SuperDuty between those little electrics at the Five Rivers Nature Center to get the free wi-fi and work remote. Vermont next Thursday? I can smell them chopping and packing the silage at Preska’s down the road. Soon enough to be milk and milk products like that delicious cottage cheese, yogurt, milk, packaged in plastic and soon enough to be fire and criminal conduct. But it’s gone and not sitting in a landfill and those giant smelly heaps on the outskirts of every city for the next 10 million years.

I am like fuck with the gas prices going up yet again, but I still like my F-350 SuperDuty and with the backup camera, it was pretty damn easy to park my ginormous truck between the two electrics at Five Rivers and still enjoy wildflowers, working like a dog until 6 PM. 🅿️ Then looking at wildflowers. 🌺 Auto adds and suppressions, please? 🤖 Goddamn it, the county board of elections in that county that really smell like cow shit, changed the file format yet again, renaming field names and changing the meaning of field values. Oh, but after all these years it’s not like I haven’t seen that format before. It’s just adjusting a few lines, typing |> many more times in R Studio. 👨‍💻And counting down those days until November 3rd, the last day to vote. Colder weather, god damn it how much will be my gas and electric bill for my tiny rundown apartment this year that I keep at 48 degrees and stay marginally warm under the heated blanket. And freeze my ass off riding the bike to work. ⛄ Still need to get some plumber’s putty and plaster repair to patch some of the holes and cracks in wall of my apartment to keep a bit more of those 48 degrees in when the temperature plunges below freezing to keep the pipes from freezing. ❄️

Rain is coming this evening into tomorrow, so this probably wouldn’t have been the weekend to go to Vermont to illegally burn plastic, smoke weed and drink beer, work remote out of the cab of my F-350 SuperDuty with gas prices pushing their way back up to $4.50 a gallon, ⛽ thank you Trump the asshole that doesn’t believe in global warming or international diplomacy in this year of extreme El Nino. 🌎 Maybe at least the snow won’t be so deep that I can get out all winter to places like Rennselearville State Forest, Donney Hollow, Charles Baker State Horse Camp and winter camp. 🏕 Assuming gas isn’t that insane. Have my fires, watch those labels melt and the bright yellow flames that quickly get the wet frozen wood turned into coals as a long winter’s night settles in. 🔥 Truth is maybe that’s all I need after being stuck at home last winter after Big Red was retired, finding roadside garbage bins and sending the plastic wrap to landfill through springtime. 🗑 I guess I don’t really care about global warming, after all I did buy the F-350 and I don’t recycle much except beer cans for the deposit and the occasional metal can. 🗑 Still I am very pro-renewables, because of all the money it brings to rural communities, how it does reduce emissions and global warming, and what a low-consumption hillbilly does out in the country, doesn’t really impact the planet like the millions who live in the endless cities and suburbs. 🐐 Still I worry, is it all just a delusion to be saving for this off-grid cabin? Are the goats, hogs, cattle, the trash burner out back, the house free of complicated technology with a simple outhouse and solar system impossible? Will all my investments become something useful, or are unrealized gains unrealizable? 🤑

Could it just be delusions speaking? 🤪 I just got to enjoy the final years of my parents life. 🧓 Going to visit them on Monday when I show the truck to save gas. ⛽ Truth is I know I will probably end up with my parents 5-acre grid-tied homestead in a few years as I know it’s end of their life and my sister has her house in Saratoga – their old house with it’s expensive oil burner fueling their leaky house, with neighbors nearby so I can’t burn much plastic garbage, but it agriculturally zoned, so I can have hogs and goats if I bring in enough feed – and cancel their garbage service in favor of hauling the things I don’t burn to transfer station. 🐮 And I can get an electric car and work remote, maybe keep their internet, if that’s what I end up doing until retirement to that cabin in a free state. I do want a home that smells like hay, livestock and manure, maybe even a bit like silage or the occasional whiff of whatever debris needs burning. And heat with wood. 👃Real rural life, not just a plastic house that smells like cow shit. At least their house doesn’t that much vinyl crap, but far more then I’d ever want. Maybe I hate vinyl because my neighbors growing up their burned the scraps when they got their double-wide delivered. At least it’s not in mound on outskirts of the city. ♻️

There’s always next weekend, and maybe as soon as Thursday after the meetings downtown I can descend on Vermont to set up camp for four days of remote work. Bennington Library is good for that, and there are trails and places to hike. 🏃 🎄 Fires each night, not really legal to bring pot across state lines, but neither is burning garbage. I compost, and the wet stuff will go to my parents house to feed their land. Of course this is just a blog post about delusions and things change especially with the weather and gas prices to feed the F-350 SuperDuty. Maybe I’m just a cheap son-of-a-bitch but it feels good every dollar saved and invested as I imagine the hogs grunting in my backyard, the rumble of ATV and flames flickering out of burn barrel as none of plastic trash goes to landfill. 🐐 Owning handguns and an AR-15, which I know the extreme mentally ill people aren’t supposed own, you know those who shop at Crossgates and stuff their plastics recycling bin full of garbage, waiting for the colored and poor to sift through it at the smelly old Garbage Recycling Plant off of South Pearl, that I ride by every day. Except when I’m up in woods smoking pot and burning shit. 🔥 I should go to the Town Park for the Wi-Fi, look and follow up on offers to buy Big Red, see if any of them are real, post this to the blog, and get on with my day. While I don’t love negotiating, in some ways I do, because you know it’s part of what I’ve done 20 years working on Capitol Hill. 🤝 And continue to run data jobs and set targets.

I don’t burn any more fuel in the SuperDuty as I need the gas tank to last until Thursday, so I plan later on to ride to the grocery store. And maybe catch the Nature Bus to Thacher Park. 🚌 Won’t bring my bike, but instead lock it up at trailhead or walk to bus stop, as who knows if the driver will let me bring the bike on bus. Maybe enjoy the views, read a bit. 📷Also need to get to the grocery store and get some more fruits and I am still thinking about swinging by Meads Farm Stand and getting more zucchini or summer squash if they still have that. 🛒 Probably see if I can put off visiting Mom and Dad until Monday, to further cut down on trips. I guess I don’t have to save that much money, but dang gas is expensive once again especially with my big SuperDuty. 😲 It’s all the delusions, those hours over the years staring stoned into the melting plastic bottles and labels as they get those funny shapes and break into bright yellow flames. But I have work to do, and these words are just a filibuster. 💽