Peter Welch

Kill it. Kill it with fire.

April 21, 2023

It was the briefest slice of light, a telltale shimmer, that revealed you. It glinted up your thread, running down from the ceiling to the lamp sitting incongruous in the middle of an unpacked living room. Did you stow away in that lamp, riding rough in the back of the moving van, those three long evening hours? I hope you did. You deserve this space as much as we do.

~ Peter Welch from, http://stilldrinking.org/to-the-tiny-spider-that-came-with-us-from-brooklyn

slip:4usito1.

I don’t want to say I aspire to write as well as Welch. (I do. Just don’t want to say it.) I stumbled on his stuff pretty late in his writing arc. This piece makes me happy. Go ahead, click, it’s not too long. Perambulate through it. The more you perambulate, the better will be the ending.

…unless you don’t like Welch’s writing. Then ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ move along. Nothing to see here.

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Did I mention I gave up coffee?

November 21, 2019

They even offered some decent life strategies: look at everything, pick up anything you can, avoid wizards, and always haggle for jetpacks.

~ Peter Welch from, http://stilldrinking.org/coffee-is-hard

slip:4usico1.

The quote has nothing to do with what I’m writing today. The only relation is the word coffee. That said, you should totally go read Welch’s piece. You should totally go read everything he’s written; it’s generally awesome and often downright alarming. I digress.

On a Sunday morning–June 23, 2019 to be exact–with a congratulatory high-five, I gave up my morning coffee. I’d been thinking about doing so for months. Truth be told, the catalyst that day was to support a particular lady’s efforts wrestling with migraine headaches. With a brave, “huzzah!” my fate was sealed.

There’s a song by Frank Sinatra, “Hallelujah, I lover her so,” which begins with a telling verse:

Let me tell ’bout a gal I know
She’s my baby and she lives next door
Every morning ‘fore the sun comes up
She brings my coffee in my favorite cup
That’s why I know, yes, I know
Hallelujah, I just love her so

Setting aside the completely wacked concept of your girlfriend living next door and bringing you coffee before dawn. (1969 America. amiright?) I want to just draw attention to the coffee being how he knows he loves her. That’s just wrooong.

Over a few decades we had settled into a morning routine that started with the coffee maker. As anyone everywhere will tell you, if you drink coffee every morning it just becomes the neutral baseline, and without it, things aren’t happy-land. Occasionally, obtaining the morning drug hit would be a challenge leading to un-happy-land.

But mostly, it just meant getting out of the freakin’ bed was rough. …and like the addict I was, I went to the drug quickly.

Is it easier to get up now? Absolutely.

Do I spring out of bed like a happy rabbit? Absolutely NOT. But it’s better. I still need a bit of time to wake up fully–which I do via some morning stretching and movement.

Do I still drink it? Absolutely. Anytime I go anywhere, and I find myself near a real coffee shop . . . hello darkness my old friend, I’ve come to talk with you again.

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Shut up about the universe

March 23, 2016

In one spot in the part of the universe we can see—and probably in an infinite number of spots in the part of the universe we can’t—there’s a small blue-green planet with thin film of bio-matter on it. Among other things, this film supports some bipedal mammals who like building things they can set on fire.

~ Peter Welch from, http://www.stilldrinking.org/shut-up-about-the-universe

slip:4usisu1.

Douglas Adams meets irreverent atheist. Many smiles. Much like.

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Programming sucks

December 20, 2014

Every friend I have with a job that involves picking up something heavier than a laptop more than twice a week eventually finds a way to slip something like this into conversation: “Bro,1 you don’t work hard. I just worked a 4700-hour week digging a tunnel under Mordor with a screwdriver.”

System administration sucks too:

… And if these people stop, the world burns. Most people don’t even know what sysadmins do, but trust me, if they all took a lunch break at the same time they wouldn’t make it to the deli before you ran out of bullets protecting your canned goods from roving bands of mutants.

~ Peter Welch from, http://stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks

slip:4usipo1.

hear! hear!

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