Development has continued on the firewood holder, weather permitting. And of course, my own physical health permitting. So it’s been slow, but still progressing.
Adding a roof was critical to the project. Keeping the wood off the ground and neatly stacked was the main goal, but keeping it dry and free of falling debris would negate the panicked run to restock the patio supply prior to a rain prediction. Plus, it’d look nicer. So, here I would learn how to build trusses.
I attached some 2x4s at a 10 degree angle – which seemed like a happy medium. It’s apparently the minimum grade for shingled roofs, and while I plan to attach leftover metal paneling from the house roof, it give me a little extra buffer.
Next, I added some decking planks as rafters to support the roof. Fairly straightforward:
Finally, some externally-rated OSB:
Unfortunately, the weather turned sour and halted work. I had hoped to get to the metal portion sooner rather than later, as the moisture is starting to warp the OSB. If that poses a problem, I might swap it out in favor of more deck boards. But that’s TBD.
In the meantime, it does conceptually work as intended. The wood, for the most part, is shielded from precipitation. Once I have a dry day I’ll get the metal on and finally be done with this.
White trash is a derogatory term in American English for poor white people, especially in the rural areas of the southern United States. The label signifies a social class within the white population, especially those perceived to have a degraded standard of living.[1] It is used as a way to separate the “good poor”, who are “noble and hardworking”, from the “bad poor”, who are deemed “lazy, undisciplined, ungrateful and disgusting”. The use of the term provides middle- and upper-class whites a means of distancing themselves from the social status of poor whites, who cannot enjoy the same class privileges, as well as a way to disown their perceived behavior.
-Courtesy of Wikipedia (Above emphasis mine)
Operative words to consider: distancing, disown. Indeed, poor social graces do not necessarily tie oneself to a socioeconomic class, and a “peer” within that class who exhibits such traits does not need to be accepted as an equal on those grounds, either. Nor being of the same race. “Redneck” is an inaccurate term to use in this story, but it was alliterative and therefore made for a catchier title. No – this story involves unarguably: white trash.
And the reason I believe trash tends to hate me so much is due to this distancing and disowning. If you’re not in my honor circle, then it’s impossible for you to take any action or make any comment that offends me. A child might target me with profane comments, but they’re ultimately empty. I can’t seriously consider a child’s words to have any merit. Against my character, they’re meaningless. There’s little point to engage in a duel of honor and wits with an inferior. Children and trash rank similarly on this ladder. They know it, and I know it. And they hate it.
But that doesn’t stop them from trying.
So it was that, some years following my last trash encounter, a different one would give it a go. No doubt emboldened by their idol of such behavior – our current president – this one made an attempt, apparently not realizing that our president is a billionaire, while he’s just a guy who cuts grass in an Ohio town with a population of 400. Not exactly a model for comparison.
On this particular day, the day after Thanksgiving, my father-in-law had invited my father and I out for some rabbit hunting on his property. With 8 acres, rising to a hill abutting a cow pasture, with neighbors on the sides, and the highway at the front, it does pose some limitations in safe shot placement. But with the hill, there are safe zones – all of which I explained to my father, not that he needed the warning. He’s been hunting since the 50s. I’ve been hunting for 20 years myself. We’ve got this.
What followed was a grand afternoon of flushing rabbits out of brush and trying to get them safely positioned. My old man might be slowing down a little, but he did snag a squirrel. I managed two rabbits myself. It was a great hunting day! Even the cows came out to check on the commotion – ultimately concluding our ventures as they blocked the ridge. I had nice conversation with #64. Mooo. It trotted away indignantly.
But somewhere in the midst of the excitement, I noticed a fog gathering. The fog turned out to be Trash Neighbor lighting his…trash. At that moment. On a windy day. He was, I assume, trying to smoke us out. A petty passive-aggressive attack, which I of course ignored and continued hunting.
And since being ignored reaffirms one’s lower social ranking (as previously mentioned), this enraged him. As I was retrieving my final rabbit from the brush, I heard yelling. But I was caught in blackberry thorns at the time, so whatever it was could wait. Of course, that gave me enough time to figure out the situation, so when I emerged triumphantly with my kill, I walked away and towards my dad to herald my prize. Ignoring the trash was also safety decision. I was overtly armed with my Remington 870, and I assumed Mr. Trash also had a gun.
I should also mention at this point that, some years back on an unsuccessful rabbit hunting expedition, he drove over to my in-laws to complain. There were no rabbits and I hadn’t fired, so his complaint was limited in nature: I was pointing my gun at his property and staring menacingly in his direction (I’m paraphrasing, since I wasn’t there to hear the accusation).
But now I had fired shots, and since I knew that he had lied before about trying to intimidate him with a weapon, I assumed any confrontation would lead to more lies, with the potential for a “defensive” need to pull a gun on me. There were a more than a few reasons to nope out of that situation. As a result, his initially neutrally-worded albeit aggressive hails turned into sputtering monologues of profanity. I had made the right call.
Unperturbed, I went about field dressing my rabbits, but first decided to call Liz and give her a heads up. Based on past events, I didn’t think Mr. Trash would let this go.
Two successful hunting runs this year, and one with my dad too!
He didn’t. He spammed my in-laws’ phone, prompting them to block his number. That’s some next-level dismissive ignoring there! Your own neighbors in the country won’t even acknowledge you now. Take a hint, trash.
But the shriveled remaining vestiges of his geriatric masculinity overpowered reason, though on some level he still retained a sense of self-preservation and, deciding against a second attempt at direct confrontation, decided to call the sheriff instead. Big man.
Turns out, he upgraded menacing waving of a gun to dodging my shotgun pellets which were apparently coming towards him. That’s one hell of a ricochet. #6 birdshot bouncing 90 degrees from their path of flight and arcing over the hill into his yard by his fire pit.
Is it possible that a direct line of sight shot would have hit him? Yes. Is is possible that an arcing shot into the air above the ridge line would have hit him? Yes. Did I do either of those? No. The only explanations, therefore, are either a shot that defies Newtonian physics, or a lie. And while I often jest about my guns in video game multiplayer matches having phasic rounds, I’ve never seen my Remington pull that off.
The authorities, it would turn out, either agreed, or at least didn’t pursue the issue out of lack of evidence. That or a trash resident with a local reputation didn’t hold much credibility against a family of educated and productive members of society. (Some Facebook comments from locals also insinuated he might be suffering from Angry White Man syndrome and has a drinking problem.) Oh, and neither my dad nor I have warrants on us! Go figure.
It was a memorable Thanksgiving week, worthy of the family archives.
But wait, there’s more!
Seeing a recurring pattern with potential for future encounters, I began a dossier. Upon asking, the Clark County Sheriff’s Department turned out to be very accommodating with their records. I mean, they have to be cooperative in theory, but it was still nice that they didn’t fight me on anything or make the process difficult. Sadly, there was no 911 call or official police report – only the initial dispatch record:
Still good to get the official details. And amusing. Note that Mr. Trash, in his last pathetic vestige to appear as alpha male, said that I “took off running the other way”. Again, he couldn’t handle being ignored, so he fabricated an image of his imposing and intimidating manliness. I’ll wager he even truly believes it, too.
On the other hand, note that he thinks I’m in my mid 30s. Aww, thanks, Mr. Trash. It must be all that not smoking and not eating spam that’s maintained my youthful complexion.
It also turned out that I could request a copy of the body cam footage. There’s a fee to do so, as personal info has to be redacted and there’s no doubt some administrative work to go along with the video extraction, but I certainly couldn’t pass up that opportunity! I was hoping for some footage of Mr. Trash, but I don’t think the responders ever spoke with him directly. But I do get some amusing still-frames I can extract and print off for family gifts.
My dad likes to preserve notable memories with shadow boxes, and this gives me a lot of material to work with. So not only did I get to go hunting and spend some time with Dad, but I gave him a good story, too. And I now have another gift in the making for him come Christmas. All in all – what a great holiday!
Now that the existential threat as outlined in Part 1 is completed, let’s have some fun. Actually, that’s debatable, as this second journey was somewhat unpalatable in its own right.
I say – would you like a cookie?
To summarize, a female specter visited me in a dream which would have inevitably led to my death (dream death (would that kill me physically too?)). I would normally assume that this was just a random machination from my subconscious. But on the other hand, such a vivid image of a person’s face that I had never met has never occurred before in my dreams. So I proceeded with concerned curiosity, rather than just move on.
To be fair, my mental stability has long been a source of question. At some point the internal monologue became external…in the form of hand puppets. Whippet hand puppets. So this event must surely be a transitioning point. Or perhaps transcendental!
Oi sir! Would bloody love me a good cookie!
But for now, it’s merely an opportunity for exploration. Here’s the question:
If my mind can create people that don’t exist, and Generative AI can create people that don’t exist, then can AI recreate the person in my head that doesn’t exist, which I originally created, into a visual facsimile?
You might think that this is a bizarre an uncanny path to go down. And you would be correct. Here goes!
I had never before used AI for this, and I started rather basic. I asked ChatGPT to generate an image of a redheaded woman in her mid 30s. That seemed like a good baseline. What it gave me was indeed a recognizable female with the proper hair color, which looked like a lawyer character from a 90s TV drama series. In other words, she did not look like someone who was about to kill me in a village ritual. She looked like a mother – someone you’d run into shopping at Target, buying slacks and unscented deodorant. Not that I generally shop at Target, but you get the idea. And that minor smile! It was like a business portrait one would put on their Teams profile. There was nothing scary about this at all. Yes, I will accept your meeting invite to discuss the potential fraud loss benefits and improved user experience if we implement authentication enhancements into your product.
VP, Credit Products Manager of Something
No quite. So what continued was a far too lengthy process of me feeding nebulous adjectives into AI, like I was an eyewitness trying to help an investigator sketch a suspect’s mugshot. “Darker eye shadow.” “Slightly younger”. “Redder lips.” “Fewer wrinkles.” “Messier hair.” “Shorter hair.” “Shorter face.” “Smoother neck.” The outputs ranged from Target Mom to Crack Junkie.
It then occurred to me that this would probably be the future of online dating: Generate some form of an idealized look, then let AI search profiles and line up matches. I felt something die inside me, doing this exercise. I was creating a person that didn’t exist based on designated parameters. And the results didn’t even fall into uncanny valley territory. One day, we as a lonely people, will build android girlfriends this way.
Fortunately for me, I won’t ever have to go through that. No – I was building a model of a memory of a nocturnal tormentor that my mind had created to kill me. That might not sound more well-adjusted, but I think it is.
In the end, the final directive was “Make the eyes more intense.” No really. And it worked. The smile disappeared and the stare turned into something half vacant/half soul-piercing, with just a hint of murderous intent behind a thinly-veiled welcoming interest.
The end result was almost spot on.
This was maybe a curiosity that should have been left unexplored. My own subconscious, which knows all my fears intimately, created a female alchemical homunculus as an object of death, the details of which I’ve now fed into the internet, and which AI was able to flawlessly replicate on demand.
This is what happens in the winter when I can’t go outside to garden, and the shortened days lead to too much introspection.
Most dreams are nightmares. Presumably, when central command shuts down for the night and the brain enters maintenance mode, it’s an opportunity to run disaster simulations and generate contingencies. The trouble is, my dreams rarely generate anything much grounded in reality, and tend to dwell on bad memories instead. All that accomplishes is aggravating my neural sympathetic responses and giving me a bad night’s sleep. I don’t need a reminder of prior bad jobs or states of anxiety.
Common themes include:
I have to go back to work at my college job.
I have to go back to work at my former call center job.
I’m taking the final exam for a college class that I’ve never attended.
I’m trying to find my way through an urban maze, towards some undefined objective, and timing is critical, and I’m lost.
I’m supposed to do something somewhere, and I don’t remember either.
Gone are the days of being hunted by some unearthly monster. At least those were entertaining to some degree. It would appear that once the individual adds life experience to their memory banks, terrors move from the abstract to the contextual.
Additionally, at least in my case, characters in dreams become either people I’ve known or nebulous humanoid entities. I don’t create identifiable people from scratch. If my dream needs a background extra, it’s just a bipedal form, all the while the main characters are past friends or current co-workers, usually delivering bad news in unlikely conditions.
But recently, for the first time that I can remember, a woman I’ve never met appeared in a dream. And she had striking features. I had created a mental image of a person I didn’t know.
The story is as follows:
Yeah, every time something good happens to me in a dream, either I wake up or the dream turns into a nightmare.
I received a notice from some organizational body that I’d inherited property from my late grandfather, in Pataskala. It would not turn out to be on the old family farm. It turned out to be a house – a variant of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater – on the rocky banks of a creek, in an unnamed hidden community in some invisible valley. Sounded kind of cool so far.
I spent some days fishing, but noted increasing hostility amongst the neighbors. Eventually, I was summoned to a town meeting at their community center. Once there, I was informed that ordinarily new initiates had to undergo a trial and rite of passage to join this village, but because my grandfather passed his citizenship to me upon his death, I was exempted. What this community was or what the right of passage involved was never clear. I was reluctant to join as a result of this, combined with the general bad vibes I was getting.
Then She appeared – and escorted me to a secluded corner of the building, and sat next to me.
[And now we take a break from this story.]
I jest often about having an infatuation with redheads. True, my earliest years with confusing romantic obsessions involved some of them, but they were hardly the majority. However, the most emotionally intense experiences in those formative times were, coincidentally or not, with redheads. Ergo, classical conditioning has made the permanent association, even though, objectively, those were not good times!
It would seem that as the individual ages and the power of daily emotions fade, the mind still refuses to let go of those moments when we were capable of powerful emotional responses, and it even lies about them having been good. Logic should have me recoil in terror when I see a redhead. Stupid amygdala.
There’s the necessary background for the rest of this story.
[And now back to the story.]
So what did my subconscious manifest for this powerfully strong female presence in what appeared to be turning into a version of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery? Yes, I knew I was going to die someway terrible, and yes – my courier to the eternal beyond by way of undoubtedly horrific violence would be…a redhead.
Then she put her leg on mine and her arm around me, leaned in close, and whispered comforting words. In a voice that said: “these aren’t comforting words”. Something about this being my place and they were welcoming me in and to give it a try. I protested, mentioning I lived elsewhere and that I had a wife – a very reasonable response rather well grounded in reality to a situation that was anything but. I appear to be boring even in my own delirious mental creations.
Unconcerned, she said that she knew, and to invite her up to the conversation. As in – not that she should drive in. She was already there. In the basement. And she was! Downstairs with some other unwitting victims, sitting on a couch, watching TV, and sipping tequila. Tequila?! Happily, Liz waved to me and pointed to the liquor. And she was wearing another man’s trenchcoat. They had gotten to her already!
Then I woke up.
Heart racing from that ordeal, I began my day in a somewhat rattled state of mind. Then the dream faded from thought, as they all do eventually.
The next day, I lounged on the basement loveseat for the day’s first conference call. It was a division meeting and was two hours, so while awaiting my direct team’s updates and the caffeine to kick in, I dozed off. An offscreen presence appeared directionally behind me somewhere, in the back of my head. She was back! She started to say something but I violently jolted awake.
There’s a Twilight Zone episode “Perchance to Dream”, wherein the protagonist episodically dreams of a phantom woman who lures him into exciting activities. As he has a heart condition, he knows that this repeated stress will kill him. So he attempts to stay awake. Things do not work out well for him.
