G.B.

GenX - IT guy - Songs with friends

[G.B. @gbmeyer]

Brain Freeze elevated

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

Stateside, a gas station. I drank a frozen blue beverage too quickly, and was struck down by a punishment this entire nation knows, and accepts, and has named.

The drink is called a slush. Ice, sweetness, and a blue that does not occur in nature. The day was hot. I was thirsty. I drank like a soldier at a river.

The pain arrived in my skull like a war horn.

Behind the eyes. Above everything. Total. I gripped the roof of my car. I may have made a sound.

"Brain freeze," said the cashier through the door, with no urgency whatsoever.

It has a NAME. The affliction is so common it has a household name, like a cousin.

"Tongue on the roof of your mouth," called a man at the pumps. He did not look over. He prescribed the remedy mid-pump, casually, the way one mentions weather.

I pressed my tongue to the roof of my mouth. The war horn faded. The healer nodded at his pump, finished, and was gone in a Chevrolet.

In my land, punishment follows crime by way of courts and seasons. Here, the sentence is instant. Drink with greed, and the ice strikes the mind directly. No trial. No appeal. Perfectly fair.

And here is what moves me. EVERYONE has felt it. The cashier. The healer. Children. Elders. An entire nation united by the same small lightning, all taught the same cure, all passing it on to strangers at gas stations, free of charge.

You cannot fully distrust a country once you know it shares one pain.

The freeze does not punish thirst. It punishes haste.

I finished the slush slowly, like a scholar. Blue tongue. Clear mind.

Then at the door I forgot everything, drank deeply, and was struck down again.

"Tongue, hon," said the cashier, without looking up.

Discipline is a journey.

[G.B. @gbmeyer]

@WSDAH Brown Eyed Women

[G.B. @gbmeyer]

@CaitlinPacific @ProfDBernstein Boomer please

[G.B. @gbmeyer]

@RachelBitecofer Trible didn’t deserve you.

[G.B. @gbmeyer]

@Lloyd_Cole @martinaburke I have held other thoughts but I am reconsidering a lot; looking forward to the next piece 👏

[Lloyd Cole @Lloyd_Cole]

I wrote a little something about Bowie in the 1970's for my Substack people. By no means definitive, just my thoughts most of a lifetime later. https://t.co/eMfUz0RGCp

[G.B. @gbmeyer]

@RachelBitecofer Your comment game has been on fire today 😂

[G.B. @gbmeyer]

@LasLabradas https://t.co/vXR4ArmWP9

[G.B. @gbmeyer]

@RachelBitecofer I think we are in a continuation of The Cousins War model that Kevin Phillips wrote about

[G.B. @gbmeyer]

“Verdades Beat” is album #7 (penultimate) of the Junk Ruse series, and it’s out now on all streaming platforms. This is a cross-border sonic novel collaboration and I’m genuinely excited about how this one turned out. More about the project at https://t.co/Za9STnet2h 🎵 😎

[CONSEQUENCE @consequence]

When Idiocracy was released 20 years ago, Mike Judge’s vision of America felt absurd.

Now, with a UFC arena being built on the White House lawn, corporations wielding unprecedented influence, and anti-intellectualism thriving, the cult comedy feels a little less like satire and a little more like prophecy.

https://t.co/57Ujp78Bld

[G.B. @gbmeyer]

@hicasamadim 72

[G.B. @gbmeyer]

Bruce was not mincing words tonight in DC #Springsteen 🔥

[G.B. @gbmeyer]

https://t.co/PMq39kblrb

[Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆 @RachelBitecofer]

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun?

Women helped win World War II, launch the space race, and built the computer age. So, where did the myth that girls are bad at math come from?

[G.B. @gbmeyer]

@RachelBitecofer Rock and Roll, Rachel.

[Llewellyn Sinclair @TheChrisKazama]

They went to a circle jerks show thinking it wasn't political phew

[G.B. @gbmeyer]

@JonahDispatch @crampell Now I understand everyone’s shit is emotional right now, but listen up.

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

If you're worried about ticks, put up an owl box.

The animal driving most Lyme disease in the eastern US is the white-footed mouse. Ticks that feed on them are far more likely to come away infected than ticks that feed on other animals. The bigger the local mouse population, the worse the next year's tick year.

A single barred owl pair raising chicks can take hundreds of rodents in a breeding season. Owls also don't carry Lyme. The bacterium can't survive their digestive tract, so an owl that eats an infected mouse is a dead end for the disease.

Researchers at the Cary Institute, the leading lab on Lyme ecology, have been explicit about this: "Landscapes that support predators have reduced Lyme disease risk."

One owl box on its own isn't going to fix a tick year. But a yard with owls, foxes, bobcats, and weasels in it has fewer mice, and a yard with fewer mice has fewer infected ticks.

If you have woods or fields nearby, a properly sized barn owl or screech owl box (different species, different boxes) is one of the most useful single things you can do for tick exposure at the landscape scale. Match the box to the owl that lives near you.

The mouse is the problem, owls are the solution.

[G.B. @gbmeyer]

@micyoung75 @ellorysmith Driving military enlistment, all stick, no carrot