I’ve been writing too much negative material lately, even for me. Instead of all that, let’s watch Samantha Fish “Shake ‘Em On Down.”

She out-ZZ Tops ZZ Top, and with a cigar box guitar, too.

An older woman at work who is used to lording her age and supposed greater experience over everyone gets flustered when she says things around me and to me like, “You’ve probably never heard of it – it was before you were born.”

And I say things like, “No, I’ve actually seen The Graduate twice. Did you know that Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft who played ‘the older woman’ actually only differed a few years in age?”

Pretty much she has learned to never do this around me anymore, as much as she obviously enjoys doing it.

But she slipped up and did it to me with the movie Brian’s Song. She said something about the “movie about the football player from the ‘60s who died. It was way before your time; I’m sure you’ve never heard of it.”

I said, “Oh you mean Brian’s Song? Brian Piccolo? Yeah, I saw that when I was 10 or 11.”

The funny thing is she didn’t even know about the 2001 remake.

I may be bad at many things, but in trivia no matter what era it is from few people can hang. I don’t really enjoy lording knowledge over people, but she is both so arrogant and dismissive that I enjoy flustering her when I can. Which I do pretty much every time she insists on demonstrating her superiority supposedly granted by being older than everyone else.

Because of a project I’ve been working on, I can now look at a GPS coordinate and tell where it is to within about 50 miles. And I mean something like this: 34.984, -106.35

That’s in New Mexico, near Albuquerque. You probably needed to plug that into Google Maps to realize that. I however did not.

I’ve looked at around 8,000 GPS coordinates in the past months is why. My brain is now a little GPS computer.

Perhaps tattoos wouldn’t bother me so much if 99% of people didn’t get such trite unremarkable schlock tattooed on their bodies.

Oh, a butterfly. No one ever thought of that.

Tribal tattoo and a gun. Very original. You stand out from all the million other dudebros with the exact damn tattoo.

Having tattoos is a good sign I probably don’t need to talk to you. Yes, I am a biased discriminatory bastard, but only relating to things people have chosen to inflict on themselves.

After I found out last night that Hugo Schwyzer had severely injured a woman on September 27, 2013, in a DUI after he should’ve known to cut such shit out I really finally lost all sympathy for the sociopathic idiot.

I am debating whether to submit this to RateMyProfessors.com.

Hugo really knows how to touch his students. Like, really touch them. And he knows how to reveal your most inner secrets, behind his locked office door. Also, I must say that no matter how much I strayed he always found a way to lay down the learning. The hot, sweaty learning. I enjoyed having Professor Schwyzer. Enjoyed it with all my being.

Petty? Yes. Pointless? Yes. Funny? Also yes.

I have no sympathy at all for drunk/intoxicated drivers. Just none. I don’t care what illness he has or doesn’t have, etc. He should be nowhere near a car ever again, or a student for that matter.

I stopped reading Hugo Schwyzer years ago after everything he wrote started to ring false to me.

Still, that doesn’t change the fact that he wrote some good things once upon a time. The speaker isn’t the message. Evolution is still true even if Hitler says it is.

I hate that now after Schwyzer any male who identifies as a feminist is automatically assumed to be doing so in an attempt to get laid. Yeah, no, that doesn’t really work except for people like Hugo who are likely sociopaths.

Where I grew up, identifying as a male feminist was likely to get your ass kicked is all. I’ve never even once been in a place where identifying as a male feminist makes you more attractive to anyone. That I know of, anyway.

I could tell what Hugo was – a sociopath – because I have some of the same tendencies. Perhaps even more so than he does. Who knows. I’ve tried and I think succeeding into channeling my shortcomings to good. Perhaps he tried too, but still he chose another path. I don’t buy the illness shtick. That’s a cop-out, in my opinion.

I don’t know Hugo, but I do know me. My ethics aren’t built on something I feel, unlike most people’s. Because it’s always been true that I don’t feel much emotion either way about things that most people do. My conscious and chosen morality and my life is built on the idea of maximizing happiness in the world, among the people that I care about and among those I don’t even know.

Because I was from a very young age smarter than most people, it was easy to see them as and to use them as instruments. To manipulate them if I chose to do so.

I chose another way, because I considered it and its possibilities and realized it was wrong. It’s more complicated than that, but that is the two-step chronology.

Who do you trust more, the person who does everything from feeling only, or the person who has realized there is a choice, and then made it?

I’m honest with my partners. There are no secrets. I simply do not have much capacity for mourning, for jealousy, for loneliness or for other similar things. Empathy I don’t possess to any great degree. I know people cannot believe it, but those parts just aren’t there. They aren’t and never have been.

My partner and I were talking one day and clowning around while making dinner. I don’t remember the exact exchange because it was very light, but one of us made a joke about accidental decapitation (that’s what passes for light banter around these parts!) and I observed that, “If your head falls off I’m stepping away from the blood and am going to finish my food before I call the coroner over.”

And she said, “I know.”

Because she does know.

As for Hugo, fuck that guy.

Just a reminder that the United States at this moment has more people in prison than Stalin did at the height of the gulags, both in absolute numbers and on a percentage of population basis.

Listening to a gaggle of people at work explain in knowing tones why you absolutely must treat your daughters far differently than your sons, restrict them far more, and prevent them from normal human interaction to keep them pure.

They didn’t actually use the word “pure,” but that was the implication.

Amazing how widespread idiotic views are. It always surprises me, no matter how many times it happens.

By the way, three of the four people discussing this were women, and most of the talk of how much daughters needed to be restricted and kept away from the world was from the three women.

Internalized misogyny strikes again.

Let’s watch Samantha Fish damn near steam the chrome off her guitar.

I don’t even like that song, but I like her performance of it. That solo is brilliant. I don’t like blues very much in general, but dirty-ass raw blues I do like quite a lot.

Something weird about me is that I don’t sweat very much. Hardly at all. If I’m sweating even a little, I’m on the verge of death. It’s a bit dangerous sometimes as I can and do overheat, but also useful as well. My clothes don’t get very dirty or stained.

My hands, feet and most other places don’t sweat at all. My head gets a little sheen of perspiration if I get very hot.

One time when I was in the army, I did a 20KM road march with 65 pounds of gear in NC summer weather without taking a single drink of water. I didn’t sweat a bit. I came in second place, against Rangers and other hardcore types.

Got accused of getting a ride, but a Ranger behind me said, “Nope, I saw him the whole way up ahead and I couldn’t catch him.”

I wasn’t even thirsty at the end, though people treated me like a minor god after it was revealed at the finish line that part of the 65 pounds making up my rucksack’s weight was a twelve-pack of Mt. Dew.

You can’t even make this shit up.

The right to keep and bear arms is granted by our Creator, and it was there before the Constitution and Bill of Rights was written.

That is not satire, by the way. At least, I am 99.9% certain looking at the person’s other posts quickly. Quite a good example of Poe’s Law, though.

What, they made this into a movie?

It was one of the better YA novels I’ve read in the past two years. Cool. Will be seeing this one.

Any time I read YouTube comments, it’s so depressing.

First, watch Orianthi Panagaris tear up Voodoo Chile. Then take a look at the comments. Note first that Orianthi was Michael Jackson’s band guitarist. She has more talent in her little finger than most of the commenters do in their entire familial lineage stretching back two million years.

Then some idiot claims, “Wow, she made a horrible version. Out of tune and doesn’t have any groove! Totally sucks and ugly tone. Wah+Hi-gain on a Hendrix tune? What the hell was she thinking?”

I like the wah-wah pedal and all the hi-gain on this one. She’s playing it in a more heavy metal style, and I’ve never seen it played that way before. She’s making it her own.

And out of tune?  Nothing is out of tune. She’s playing it in a different key than the original. This is more common than not in music. At 3:22 through 3:24 where she steps out of key it’s completely fucking obvious she’s doing it on purpose. And it works. Because she is a guitar goddess and can do things that normal mortals cannot.

And someone who can play the guitar like that while jogging…I have no words.

I don’t mind the vignetting in this video. It is supposed to be a dream, and it has that dream-like fuzziness that feels completely apropos. This song and video perhaps have the highest levels of Lisa Mitchell-osity ever recorded by any instrument known to humankind.

Carrie Rodriguez doin’ what she do.