Come one, come all. We're gonna have a ball.

  I ate too much. I'm sure everyone wanted to know that, but it's true and I'm fighting off drowsiness because of it. Still, I want to get this knocked out, and, no, I don't have anything useful or interesting to add to the conversation.

 Though I brought it up with yesterday's News, Initiative 65 was supposed to go into operation this week. If it weren't for the greed and selfishness of certain Republican lawmakers around the Jackson area, I would've been able to swing by a dispensary in Tupelo yesterday afternoon after my therapy session and pick up a half-ounce. However, because of said greedy dirtbags, I could not. Indeed, it's doubtful any serious progress will be made on this, either this year or at all. I really don't see the current state government busting their ass to get this done regardless of how popular it was with the population.

 To expand a bit on that thought, the real problem with Mississippi politics isn't the Democratic versus Republican in most of the rest of the country. We've had rotten bastards running us for about as long as we've been a state. We were founded by plantation owners and, to be quite frank, that mentality still exists. Race is definitely part of it, but there's a huge class divide, as well, more so than most of us white folks want to admit. The reality that we're the rich's bulkhead against Black folks isn't one we want to own, much less admit that we're sort of enjoying the situation.

 This culture, this country, is full of mean-spirited, rule-crazy swine, people who worship the wealthy and powerful. It's why every time there's a video of a cop beating the shit out of someone with a broken taillight, some jackass says "well, you should follow orders." That's what they're saying, we deserve to be controlled and certain groups deserve to be in charge. If you ask them what they'd say if it happened to them or their loved ones? If they're honest - and they often are, surprisingly - they'd believe they'd deserve it.

 Crazy, I know. But that's the world we live in and that's the world these screwheads want. My running theory on such inexplicable behavior is that we're slaves to the Narrative. We believe in Stories. There has to be a start, a middle, and an ending, and it all has to make sense. There are Good Guys and Bad Guys, all easily and readily identifiable, and it must be unambiguous. It has to make sense. That's what the story says.

 And the universe just doesn't work like that. Nor, for that matter, do any of the major religions preach this. God may have a plan but we don't know it any more than we know Allah's will. The universe existed for billions of years before we came along and will most likely exist for billions of years afterward, with no evidence left behind that we stomped the terra.

 This infuriates us. It terrifies us. The anti-vaccination movement is based on this. It just isn't sexy enough that the Powers That Be push vaccinations because if they let us all die to an otherwise easy-to-prevent viral infection, it might be harder for the rich to become even richer. There has to be some sort of sinister reason. There must be a reason to go through this much effort to control a group of people who can easily be influenced by semi-clever beer commercials.

 That's enough for now. I've been digging into Pillars of Eternity 2 again and perhaps I'll actually finish it this time. We'll see.