Since my bank provides me with monthly FICO scores, i don’t bother to check the so-called credit bureaus, Experian, TransUnion, and whatever the hell the third one is called — Equifax.

But on a friends advice, I go on Experian to check — she wants me to maybe co-sign a loan for her, and that’s the bureau her mortgage service uses — and it gives me some score about 150 points lower than my own banks’s FICO score, and i figured that’s odd, but whatever. So i sign up for their free service, and i’ve been a “Member of Experian” now for like a month, and mysteriously my “credit score” there has slowly risen about 50 points — but at the same time it stayed exactly the same in my own bank (which is still a hundred-and-some points higher).

So now i get that Experian is just trying to sell me their stupid credit services, like credit monitoring or credit protection, blah blah blah. It’s a bunch of crap.

They are in business to help you “improve” your credit score — double-talk for paying them to artificially improve it. It’s just a pay-to-play scheme; the more of their services you sign up for, the more they raise the credit score they report in your name.

It’s a scam.

Experian is just another for-profit company that got in big with other banks. They reported making $7.5 billion in the last fiscal year. The difference is that they’re one of the big three who hold your “official” credit score hostage.

So if i want to borrow money, i do so from my own bank — and i don’t care what Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax say.

Turns out your credit score from one of the three for-profit “credit bureaus” means very little.

Fuck ‘em.

Arrange lending from your own bank.

Ignore the “Big Three.”

Wow, a lot of these posts are a little depressing. Or maybe it’s just that they’re thoughtful, and that comes across as depressing.

What brings me joy is watching the sunrise on Salisbury Beach. And what’s better, i don’t even have to go to Salisbury Beach to watch the sunrise — it’s available on YouTube from this channel called Salisbury Sunrises (@salisburysunrises).

https://youtube.com/@salisburysunrises

So after I go for my morning walk, I can come back and put on a Salisbury Beach sunrise and watch the sun come up over the ocean, while I have breakfast; it’s very reassuring. Even if i lived at the beach, i probably would not wake up in time to watch the sunrise anyway. This way I don’t have to!

What little things do you take advantage of to bring you joy? If you have any cool ones, please share with me — i would appreciate adding them to my repertoire.

Life?

Life is like a skating rink. Everyone shuffles in and awkwardly (or some less awkwardly) goes around in a big giant oval, over and over and over and over again until they leave. Very profound.

You wake up every day, and you’re alone, and you just go on like it’s all gonna be fine. You have no idea how it’s gonna turn out; you just do it because there’s nothing else to do.

“You don’t wanna be with me: i’m a mess.”

“Everybody here is a mess. I’m a mess. You’re a mess. That’s why we’re here.”

Moral? Be a mess; go ahead.

It’s different losing a spouse.

When Sandi and i got married, my father had already died; but my mother was still there to see the ceremony. My mother saw some fragment of how the relationship worked; and when she died five years later, Sandi was there for me.

By the time Sandi’s mother died, the rest of her family had become too toxic for Sandi to tolerate; and i was there for her as best i could.

Losing both parents, plus a brother … it was no preparation at all for losing Sandi. We may not have had the smoothest relationship at times — who does? — but we were there for each other when it counted. I can understand why some people don’t want another spouse after losing one; i’m finished in the relationship game. There’s not enough left of me to try again.

And family … good and bad. Regarding both hers and mine. I do best just thinking of bad family as having died already. Pay them no mind; they’re not worth it.

I’m happy just to have a couple of friends now — or even just one. I never thought it would be this difficult, losing someone. Maybe only thirteen years to go until i start to feel normal again. As if.

What a whiner i am, huh? I certainly don’t fault anyone for coming to that conclusion. Sometimes you don’t know what a part of life is about until it’s over — that’s the lesson, i guess.

Small consolation.

OK, so i went to start watching the show Seinfeld, and i can either watch the DVD set that I have sitting on the shelf, or I can download episodes from the dark net.

So I bring my laptop to a “safe place” (in other words, not my home ISP) and begin downloading this Seinfeld Complete torrent that I found. Now it’s a huge set of files, so I only download the first season because I wanna see what it’s like.

I get home. I play the first episode and the quality is kind of crappy — it’s 16 x 9 instead of 4 x 3 and I know they shot the series for regular TV back in the day; and I go to put on subtitles because sometimes I like to see the words and not just hear them. And what do you know, it doesn’t even have a subtitle track! Fuck that! It’s not Seinfeld Complete if it has no subtitles.

So I switched to my DVDs instead, and the quality is much better.

I mean, these piracy guys … why do they do such a crappy job? If you’re gonna break the law (and risk all the legal penalties), at least you should do it right!

Maybe there should be better training for these intellectual property wranglers. Since they cut funding for PBS, maybe we could divert it there. Piracy Training Initiative Takes Congress by Storm! — i can just see the headlines.

In 2005, i pirated every disk of what Star Trek existed at the time — Star Trek (Original Series), Next Generation, Deep Space 9, Voyager — all the classics (which i borrowed from legitimate sources). Now in 2025, i still have those discs i burned twenty years ago, and i’m using the video from each series for my own personal collection on the computer: the circle of piracy is complete! (I guess it’s a testament to the bit-rate, etc choices they made … that the video is still useful. And a further testament to the not-very-expensive DVD-Rs i used — Memorex, Fujifilm, etc. — because they still work fine!

Nothing like doing your own pirating; get it right from the source!

Life is never as easy as it looks on TV or you read in a novel. Life is always a pain in the ass. You just have to keep going, and it kind of sucks — but everybody else has to do it, so I guess it’s kind of a group immunity; people put up with it because everybody else puts up with it, and you don’t really have much of a choice.

Why do we not notice that life in fiction is so easy? (Or if not easy, so much simpler than real life.) And how are we able to still enjoy the fiction, despite its being so simple? Why doesn’t it seem so glaringly and obnoxiously different than real life that we can’t enjoy it?

Because we wish life was simple and meaningful.

We want to romanticize life … we want to see it as worthwhile and fulfilling and all that kind of after-school-TV-special kind of crap. I guess the same reason that religion is popular — it’s an idealization. We can never really be like that, but it’s pretty to think so sometimes. Something to wish for.

Some we watch or read fiction to escape from the crappy reality that we’re stuck living in. And some people like a particular fiction so much that they reread it or rewatch it over and over and over again, if it’s long enough to forget the details of what it’s about — maybe it’s 7 seasons, each with 25 episodes per season; or it’s 7 books long, and it can be a comfortable substitute for real life.

Is it healthy to depend on fiction? I guess it doesn’t really matter — that’s what human brains are good at doing: imagining and making up stories; putting ourselves implicitly in those stories, even if they’re completely unrealistic; good guys vs. bad guys, happy endings, sad endings, all that crap. And we share those stories; it gives us something to do.

We do the mundane things of life (make enough money to buy groceries and enough for gas in the car or electricity in the car as the case may be) because we have to. We do all those boring things so that we can divert ourselves with fiction — with TV shows, with books, with video games, whatever floats your boat … with fun. You do work so that you can have fun.

No, i’m not great at writing entertaining stories, because it’s a pretty grim process; but sometimes i can stand it. Other times i can write a fluff piece like this.

Or sometimes i can let it go. I have to sometimes, because the whole thing has gotten to be a little bit depressing.

You’d like to think that good fiction helps you appreciate real life more, and i suppose that’s true occasionally.

But mostly i think it’s about survival. We dwell on fiction because we have to, just to make it through the day.

It’s a living.

What do I want now that Ojo is gone?

And Sandi.

Maybe I don’t want another cat, just like maybe I don’t want another romantic relationship. Maybe I’m done with those now.

Sometimes, it’s difficult for me to decide … anything. Right now i’m still in the process of grieving, of course; and i don’t have to decide anything for a while.

I think that sometimes people jump right back into another relationship — whether romantic, or with a pet — just because it keeps them busy — it keeps them from thinking about things a lot. Most people seem to want to do and not to think about it.

I have had trouble making decisions for a long time, for various reasons. It feels like i have the traumatic-brain-injury version of multiple personalities.

It feels like my brain, because of the injuries, has been split into a few different parts. Whichever part is in control at a particular time determines what course of action i take. So if i have a long-term plan, i just have to keep repeating it to myself in my head and hope that the right part of my brain hears it and manages to make it happen (or at least to remember it for later). Because it seems like different parts of my brain want me to do different things.

I guess i’ll just see what happens.

I never wanted a .COM — and i can’t even end that sentence with a period, because “.COM.” looks stupid, so i added an emdash and just kept going.

No, seriously.

The previous URL for DSM32 was http://dsm32.blogspot.com/ (and i did not like it). The blogspot domain was created by Google in 2003 to house Blogger (founded in 1999 and acquired by Google in 2003). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogger_(service)

.COM at the end of a web address means commerce, and i never had any interest in commerce. Commerce is buying and selling and making money. No thanks. Not interested.

.ORG is for a lot more casual of an organization — and not about money. Anything but money. It could be academia, but more likely non-profit kinds of stuff. Education is .EDU — my favorite, but you don’t get a .EDU web address unless you’re a school. I’ll settle for a .EDU email address; that’s cool.

.ORG might look a little clunky, but i’ll take it. Back when i worked for Peace & Love, Incorporated (in a fictional version of 1993), we had a .ORG address for the limited number of computers hooked up to the very young internet, such as it was — still mostly universities. Then the numbers exploded.

Wikipedia describes .ORG as being intended for websites “for organizations that didn’t fit anywhere else”. Not fitting anywhere else; perfect for me.

Why would i want to fit in? (Except for the obvious reason: that most other people want to.) Well, typically i just don’t fit in. And that’s fine with me. (As it is for anybody who truly cares about me.)

Do you fit in?

The more that i think about it, the more i decide that i would not change the past — not one thing. Those past decisions, however foolish, … they made me who i am today.

I used to be a really cool guy. I was that hairy sexy funny guy in his 20s who wore tank tops and went running, you know, like ten miles a week. It was the 90s. It was a good thing. I really like who i was then, even if i didn’t like him so much at the time.

Why should i want to change the past? The past was fine.

Once upon a time, i wanted to be a writer. Why the hell can’t i just be one now? I’ve got the time.

I didn’t used to worry about stuff. I just did it, and it was fine.

What do i have to worry about anyway?

The Management have now asked me not to walk behind the Phase 2 apartments on the nice grassy walkway because it’s not covered with tarmac. They apparently only want people to walk where there are OFFICIAL walkways. No walking on the grass.

So i cut a pathway into the conservation land that surrounds Avalon so i can walk a slightly longer route through the woods, and that will make me happy because it gives me something to do for a while, cutting this path through the woods.

Eventually the new path will join up with an older one, and i’ll have a way to get to NARA Park the back way on foot through the woods and not disturb the precious Phase 2 residents by someone having the audacity to take a walk.

It gives me something to do, something harmless (but still vaguely productive) to worry about.

Maybe part of the reason i miss Ojo so much is that he was Sandi’s familiar. Lots of witches have cats as their familiars, so it makes sense that i became more attached to Sandi’s familiar after she died.

I don’t have to worry about scaring Ojo with the vacuum cleaner anymore.

I don’t have to worry about stepping on Ojo‘s tail when i walk around the apartment anymore.

Ojo will never show up in the bathroom in the middle of the night with me anymore.

I can open up a canister of whatever and not have Ojo scrambling to the kitchen in case it’s cat food (because he knew he could always wrangle a treat out of it from his old man, who was such a softy).

I don’t have to prepare meals ahead of time for Ojo, usually in batches of four, with essential fish oil, ground up steroid pills, and powder from gabapentin capsules added to each meal. But it was 100% worth it; after a while i didn’t give it a second thought.

And i miss it. I miss him.

Sandi & i were blessed to have Ojo in our lives, and Ojo benefited too. Lots of love all around.

“To everything, Turn! Turn! Turn!
There is a season, turn, turn, turn
And a time to every purpose, under heaven” [The Byrds, 1965, Pete Seeger 1959]

Just keep going; that’s all you can do, really. Turn!

(And i can finally pull the blinds down all the way on my porch door — Ojo doesn’t need a space to look out anymore.)