Sick of Circus Monkeys

 

Okay, peeps. I'm not ready after all to use a cut throat razor. It's so much easier and quicker to resort to a two-blade disposable as I've done for 40 years.

The brown rice I cooked up to use for makgeolli isn't dry and cold yet. It's sitting in the unplugged rice cooker trying my patience. I could spread it out over a flat surface like a cookie sheet so it'll dry faster, or I could let it sit there to fester and maybe grow mold. Rice mold after all is what that nuruk stuff is. But then perhaps whatever wild molds float around the south side of Lexington, Kentucky might not be the kind you'd want for this, so when I get up again I will get the cookie sheet and do the right thing. Sometimes I do that. QED.

Speaking of which, yes, I know, I'm a horrible evil person. Supergeniuses often are. You should be taking that in stride by now. What else could you expect of me, who cares more for what makes sense than what people think. As usual in a conflict zone there are a lot of bloodthirsty morons, on both sides. Both sides. And those who agree with them, either of them, are just plain wrong. When one applies Reason to it, when one things and sees clearly instead of reacting in a sentimental blur, one sees that Paul was right: "For none are righteous. No, not one." It is impossible for either side to collude in the slaughter of innocence and be morally correct. War is about winning, and martyrdom needs dying, and in neither case can either side be doing what is best.

What's happening there is obvious: a whole lot of people are killing and dying over a tiny scrap of land that they just won't try to share. As the Noble Savage says, how can you own the Earth? When will they ever learn?

Dividing up the planet with borders and by treaties is not the proper course; dividing up our species into nations and races is not what we should do. Put down your guns, put down your signs, let's all hold hands and sing. Kumbayah will do, we all can learn the words. Put on those thinking caps, you people. Try out a bit of Reason.

If you won't do then for the sake of fucks pipe down and watch The Game. You're all to childish to be serious, you make the world a joke. Not a practical one either, unless you're making money at it. If you won't be sensible then sit down and eat your popcorn.

But you won't will you. You don't even want to try. Contention takes your minds off the bills you cannot pay, it blinds you to your future, it keeps the Bosses strong. That what they want you know. For you will not learn that "our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark realm." While we're fighting other the rich landlords are surely laughing until they piss their pants.

But I'm wasting my time here, as I always am. You'll never learn, oh no, you don't even want to try. So I wish for specific cleansing, the eradication of our genus. Because nobody's right, and everybody's wrong. Immanentize the eschaton already, get it over with. Take arms against a sea of troubles, in crowds or by yourselves. Turn the Earth into a living hell until we live no more.

Or you could take yourself out, quietly and calmly. Find a roof to dive headfirst from, kick the chair from under you. When a species is too stupid to continue there's nothing else to do.

Make sense or die. I'm sick of circus monkeys.

 

 

So It Shall Be Done

 

In re [URL at bottom]:

Hamas responds to ceasefire proposal, reiterates demands
By Nadine El-Bawab and Guy Davies, May 31, 2025, 3:00 PM

'Hamas' key demands are "to achieve a permanent ceasefire, a complete withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, and ensure the continuous flow of humanitarian aid," according to the group'.

 

So in other words they want Israel to surrender to them, clearly not a proposal they intend Israel to accept. No country in the world would, at a point like this. In other words, Hamas has decided that the genocide must continue. Israel won't be beaten until all the Arabs in Gaza are dead.

 

Then all y'all anti-Zionists can say "SEE? We TOLD you it was genocide!" There would be no arguing over definitions then: the total extirpation of a people from a place is, at least in that locality, genocide by definition. From here it looks like that's exactly what Hamas wants: the moral victory of having proven the TheJews(R) are the new Nazis. Nothing less will do.

 

Y'all might argue with my conclusion, I do tend to be a bit cynical and sarcastic sometimes, but at least admit the obvious: accepting Hamas' "proposal" would mean that Israel wreaked all that havoc and killed all those Palestinian children for nothing. A year and eight months of raining bombs for nothing. The "bayoneted babies" of October 7th would go unavenged.

You would have to be totally ignorant of human history, and a damn fool, to think Israel could possibly agree to that. That's not what havoc-wreakers do. Israel in this situation resembles ancient Rome, a wrathful conqueror who us determined to be feared. They're going to be hated anyway, that's what "from the river to the sea" means, so they might as well win big.

Once again, you might see what I mean when I say that I pity the Palestinians, not only because Israel is mean, but also because Hamas is stupid. Or maybe totally crazy, or high on something more fun than ketamine.

The Western countries, including the USA, are breathing down Israel's neck trying to get it to cease fire, then Hamas shows the world it cannot be serious. "Give up all your conquests, go home, say you're sorry, and make sure we get plenty of food, medical supplies, AK 47 ammo, and whatever else we might call humanitarian aid."

At this juncture we must ask ourselves What Would Caesar Do? It's obvious: Caesar would get angry, make the face of firm resolve, and say "Okay, that's it. No more Mister Nice Guy." If anybody ever wanted to give the Bibi Bunch an excuse for a final solution that would surely do. Caesar will NOT be made a fool of.

Israel has already lost in the court of public opinion: millions of well-intentioned people in the civilized world have all along been waving signs that say "Israelis Go Home." The current far-right regime has already been been damned by many many Israeli Jews who you'd expect to support it, including a few generals and a former head of Mossad, for going just a tad overboard. I cannot think of a Western head of government, except maybe Donald Trump (and/or Elon Musk?) who would not prefer that Israel quit while they're ahead.

If there was anything like a serious proposal then the big bosses of "the West" would be insisting Israel agree, or accept it as the basis for serious negotiation. And then Hamas comes out with a "demand" that no Big Boss in Israel's current position could possibly take seriously. Everybody knows that's not going to happen, including everybody who knowingly and explicitly sides with Hamas.

"You have to kill us all!" say the wise men of Hamas. "We insist on being martyred. Bombs away!"

So it is written. It shall be done. For the glory of Allah. Amin.

 

https://abcnews.go.com/International/hamas-responds-ceasefire-proposal-reiterates-demands/story?id=122382953

Musing On The Roaches In My Kitchen

 

I decided to make another batch of makgeolli (Korean rice-based alcoholic beverage), I even had the nuruk starter culture soaking to activate it beforehand, but I couldn't find the sweet rice I bought for it. So having already looked up how you'd do it with other kinds of rice that are "SNAP EBT eligible" and that I already have here I'm going to do that. Duckduckgo's AI even gave me a suggestion on how I'd make a fermented adult beverage with oatmeal and ordinary yeast (both SNAP EBT eligible) I started that before I went to bed, and the yeast and sugar are chugging right along in that old coffee canister.

So today, while I empty out my kitchen for a major cleaning in preparation for Thursday's genocide of cockroaches, I'll be soaking and steaming some brown rice to make makgeolli with. The just-add-water instant version I bought a few weeks ago that started me off on brewing the real stuff from scratch is made from brown rice, so it should turn out okay. As for the oatmeal and yeast stuff, well, it's okay if that doesn't work because I already had lots of oatmeal, more than enough yeast, and I'm not out of white sugar yet.

Another good thing about this hobby is there isn't much actual work to it. Soak and cook rice (or make it with oatmeal which doesn't even need cooking), put that in the container you're using (I have a couple old plastic canisters that coffee came in), add the starter culture to it, pour in some water (the instructions I found say if you use tap water it's better to boil it first to gas off some of the chlorine), and let it sit for a week or so. Making cider and kombucha take even less actual work, so I'm planning to try one or both of those soon.

My main hypothetical goal, teaching myself to write fiction so I can actually output output before I die of sheer frustration, requires as much time and effort as I could possibly give it, which I haven't really gotten around to yet. Maybe after the kitchen has been specifically* cleansed I can sit here sipping the results of my experiments in fermentation and finally put my brain to use in a form somebody might enjoy reading, as opposed to this crap.

- - -

* GPT-4o mini, Duckduckgo's AI, said the adjective form of the word "species" is "specific."

So getting a species out of a place is" specific cleansing." I like that. You can say that without anybody catching on that what you're talking about is the mass murder of a local population of a species called Blattella germanica that doesn't mean to harm anybody, they just happen to take up residence and do what they do where you don't want them, while unintentionally spreading germs and allergens all over the place. Some religions, like the Jains of India, would find killing those creatures (almost?) as blameworthy as murdering a human, so they'd be as horrified at me for specifically cleansing my kitchen as y'all are by Israel ridding Gaza of its allegedly aboriginal inhabitants.

One might even say that before Israel's mass murder the Muslim Arabs of Gaza were, like the cockroaches in my kitchen, just going about doing they do, which in their case involves praying five times a day, not eating pork, executing "sodomites," and wishing they could kill every Jew they see (even occasionally doing just that, which the Israeli government especially frowns on).

For some reason massively killing the inhabitants of Gaza for doing what Palestinians do horrifies Western ultraliberals far more than eradicating the insects in my kitchen, even though until 1945 that was regarded as a normal part of warfare and conquest: Julius Caesar publicly bragged about the hundreds of thousands of innocent Gauls he ordered murdered or enslaved, the British colonists of North America intentionally set out to practice their creed of "the only good Injun is a dead Injun" with horrific and almost total results, and so on.

Yet somehow a bunch of Germans following their Leader's directive to rid Europe of TheJews(R) ruined everybody's fun forever after. Nowadays you can't just cleanse away an ethnos without some distant strangers, who've got nothing to do with anything, getting their bloomers all bunched up. They call it "genocide", which technically means the murder of an entire genus (such as Homo, which is a good idea), and they wave their signs of slogans at TV cameras in your honor while vehemently chanting the most impolite things.

What might the avant le letter Americans of the 17th, 18th, and 19 centuries say about such "protests"? Some Israeli soldiers even maintain they're merely following Divine commands, as the colonists did to the "redskins" they found here. Becoming outraged at the eradication of a few hundred thousand "innocent" people is an entirely modern invention, tha wasn't really a thing until the "Judeo-Bolsheviks" (literally the Soviet government and their erstwhile allies among the Yiddim) insisted that the "United Nations" throw themselves one humongous show trial for all the world to see.

And then the Zionist leaders of certain factions among TheJews(R) used that "genocide" and the subsequent proceedings as an excuse to settler-colonialize a small section of the Levantine desert, doing to the Palestinians they found there exactly what the English did for several hundred years to the native inhabitants of the island of Ireland. You see, you come, you conquer, that's just how things go. Or it did, until a party of "Communists" and a sect among TheJews(R) convinced the world that after al, it is not the right thing to do. (There's a bit of cognitive dissonance in the dream of Zionism.)

So what am I to make of this? Well, for these and a brazilian other reasons I myself advocate for radical measures, the specific cleansing of the Planet Earth, indeed the murder of the entire genus of Homo (as some people argue that for example Germans and Rwandans are of different species), All I want for Xmas, and for my birthday, and for every other commemorable anniversary such as that of my wedding, all I really want in the world, is the extinction of humans from it. Everything we do, everything that comes naturally, such fucking and killing and gambling and waving signs, is bound to annoy some people, who the go on to annoy the rest of us with their annoyance.

Marrying people of the same sex, chopping down the Amazon forest, sacrificing beeves to an idol named Ronald, enacting cognitive dissonance on a province of Queer-killers, everything that anybody might think is fun, someone will somehow get all upset about. Very excitedly, often noisily, and when they can in awfully large crowds.

These categories of actions, certain people doing what they do and certain people loudly disliking it, impose unwelcome distractions on sensitive mentalities such as mine. What would Stalin do?

To hell with you all, I say. Get rid of genus Homo. Let "everybody dies" go from caustic quip to categorical imperative. What we really ought to do is to finally solve every problem we have, to put an end to everything we object to, to extirpate thus genus from Gaia. It's about time. It has been for millennia.

Humans OUT of this whole Earth.

From pole to pole NO human soul.

"Save the planet, kill yourself."

A Matter of Definition

What the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians *in Gaza* might be genocide, depending on which part of which definition you want to emphasize. (The same as the Second Amendment, really.) I'll agree that from here it doesn't look like they're very picky about who they kill subject to mistreatment, and that Israel might not be very unhappy to eventually discover they have killed them all. For the sake of not splitting hairs, I'll agree at this point that "genocide" does seem to apply. I wish it didn't.

The final verdict, like all historical controversies, will probably be hashed out in future conferences of academic historians and UN employees. Historians are still arguing about the "fall of Rome," and people who do such things for a living are still trying to pinpoint exactly what a "war crime" is and to elucidate examples of what is and what isn't, so let's preemptively roll our eyes at all that. I do doubt Israel will ever be dragged in front of a big court like at Nuremberg, though maybe it should; lot of our current concepts and definitions of terms developed out of that, but the fact that people can argue about whether Israel is committing genocide shows that the concepts and definitions need updating to fit the 21st century.

What Israel doing to the Palestinians in the rest of what was the British Mandate is settler-colonialism, which is bad enough, but they haven't begun to kill off all of them yet. It's basically the same as the "Americans" did to the Natives, except that they're not killing them off or driving them away. Maybe Israel will get to that later, their governments have been known to be deficient in kindness & gentleness.

Let me emphasize again that I support the Jewish people, including those in Israel, which is not the same as supporting the government of Israel, or the current ruling clique, or whoever sets the policies in the IDF. Again, I'd prefer a peaceful Israel within the pre-1967 borders, and find the lack of peace is due to the evils and idiocies of the "authorities" on both sides. Personally I think they should all learn to SHARE.

If that's not good enough, if you expect me to "sieg heil" you and agree 100% with whatever you say right off the bat, because of course your intellect us so superior to mine, feel free to go fuck yourself. As far as I can be I am a free person with a free mind. And ain't nobody done anything for me that would make me so grateful that I'll put my independence aside, nor do I need anybody's approval and/or affection that much.

For example, when my niece married a woman I decided to support same-sex marriage out of fairness, because if anybody must get married there's no reason to keep gay people from it, but I still find the institution of marriage inherently oppressively bound up with capitalism, religion, government control control of the private sphere, and of course heteropatriarchy, and I hope someday people will be able to form close bonds without needing a fucking license or even wanting one.

I support the Israeli Jews in the same spirit: that situation is so incredibly fucked up. but as long as TheJews(R) feel they need a nation-state to protect themselves they're as entitled to that as the Serbs, the Swedes, the Japanese, the Tibetans (who don;'t have one but probably should), and so on. That's not saying much, because I hate the Statism and find nationalism rather fucking misguided if not just plain wrong, but again, if the French deserve a national home so do TheJews. I wish it hadn't happened the way it did, but when people like me tried to give contrary advice to either side or both it didn't do any good.

Basically speaking "the world" sucks, and to be human is to be morally compromised in some way to some degree. Your average American is probably more objectively evil than any member of an "uncontacted people" in the Amazon forest, because our actions have much more effect on the rest of the world than theirs do; if you want to be intellectual I'll suggest that the degree of harmfulness depends on the complexity of the political/economic organization and the power it wields in global affairs.

If you want to argue that the government of the USA is wonderful and the best in the world and so on I'll roll my eyes at you and decide you must be stupid, and if you claim that neither you nor I am morally complicit in this government's crimes I'll respond that if you have a job, and/or live inside, and/or spend money, and/or pay taxes, and/or vote, and/or obey the law more often than not, then you cannot avoid being tainted by what "our" government does.

If you want to be perfect you'll have to sell all that you have and give the money to the poor, or just give it all away, and go off into the wilderness to live on whatever you find there. If you take benefit from this Order you are part of it.

That does not mean that any given anti-Imperialist has the right to blow you up while you're in line at Walmart, unless you're the kind of person with the kind of position in society that the only reason you'd be reading my rants on Facebook is because it's part of your job to spy on me. Ordinary Americans are by and large morally complicit despite themselves: if we know any better there ain't much we can do about it, yet. But it's that acknowledgement that we have been splattered with the filth of the mighty that gives us the moral obligation to make them stop that shit; it's the desire to be free of dirt that we don't deserve that should inspire us to make revolution. (But then I've been saying that since 1975, and look where it got me.)

Again, I've come to the conclusion that this world is so fucked up by pour species that the only real solution is human extinction. In accordance with that, as part of my basically anarchist morality, I shall be committing suicide sometime in the foreseeable future, most likely well before Trump's current term comes to its constitutional end; the longest I can see sticking around is to see how the 2028 federal elections go, if they happen at all. But because I am a free person, and because I'm prone to getting fed up rather suddenly, none of you has any legitimate right to expect me to be here this time tomorrow. I can see being surprised, I've been making plans for trying to improve my life over the course of this summer, but you never know.

As far as I'm concerned "the world" will end when I do, at least for me. That's good enough for me. But I seriously doubt that the personal extinction of David Fucking Perry will solve all the problems even in this neighborhood, so it's my opinion that anybody who is so fed up that they can't see a way to make the future better will join me in becoming nonexistent. One thing you can say about being unalive is that not only can you come to no further harm but no further harm can be done by you: the dead are almost as innocent as the never-born. "Count no one fortunate until s/he is dead."

[I'll post this to my blog and post a link to that here to give the AI bots something to chew on; I'm always kind of amazed when anybody reads this output of mine, and even more actually thinks about it, so those statistics at Blogger are probably not recording anything done by any of you.]

P.S. Again, if you expect me to go "yes dear, whatever you say dear," and mean it, you may feel free to go soak your head, as my father would advise me. I can live without any of you, but I can't live without me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_definitions

What I Might Have To Say

 

 

I write because I have to, just to get it out. It's a manic logorrhea, something like Tourette's. The pressure builds and builds until I just can't hold it in. It's horrible, I know, this fevered flow of drivel. To spew without compunction  whatever's on my mind. But it could be worse, do understand, I could be on the phone: you'd have to hang up on me, or tell me I'm deranged. 

I'm not writing for an audience, that's too delusional for me. Besides to ease the pressure, I entertain myself. Some say it's only noise, but I swear I think it's funny. It might be better maybe if I had some kind of message, some content to communicate, some brilliance you could suck on and maybe chew a little. Nothing much, I know, I know, but there's a lot of that. An awful lot of nothing much. I can almost hear you gag.

I parody myself, that's what, I am a joke to me. I can't take me seriously either, the world has taught me that. I'm not sure which is better, to aim for comedy and fail or to find I'm comical despite my best intention. (Should there be a comma there? Insert one if it's needed.) I used to aim for literature, to be serious and wise, to show with my philosophy that I might have half a brain. So that someone might appreciate this thing I've made of me. Of course I failed. Alas, I say. What worthy thing could come from me?

So I type to entertain myself, to hear the words escape. I play word games I can't explain, make puns I won't explain,  and allude to other people's words I can't do better than. This style I cobble up from things that could not get away. It's the sound of one hand wanking, gripping only air. 

What else could I do, really? In this way at least I do express myself somehow. I beat around the bush so I don't get beaten up. I say next to nothing, because nobody's listening. There's nothing else to do with this  mess I've made of me.  

I've been alone too long, I think. I've forgotten what I mean. Or I've forgotten how to mean, perhaps that's more the thing. That brought me only pain, all the times I ventured that: I can't hate myself enough to be a proper masochist. But the urge to write, the need to say, surpasses understanding. And so I cannot but.

But if I had something to say what might I have to tell you? To confide, to confess how alone out here I am? 'I'm miles above you. Soon I'll splat.' Would that be good enough? Could you ever understand? Oh but if you did you would refuse me, you'd leave my hand ungrasped. I now better than to stick anything  out that way. So I'll fall to earth and then some, make a mighty indentation, with lots of cracks that radiate to show the lack of meaning. But I will do no wobbling off, I have no strength for that. If my resilience weren't all spent I'd not be sharing this, to an imaginary reader I dare not summon forth. 

I am alone, and sad, and old, and ailing, and I see no future. I would ask for aid or comfort, if such were possible. If there was anybody to whom I might direct my plea. But I won't. I can't. There isn't one out there. But since I find myself compelled to write I might as well have fun with this. Then I could go to bed convinced I've just been clever. 

So there. Tah-dah. Shazam I say! Alas!

  

The Telephone Game

 

 

In my youth I had a phone. From 12 to 18 it occupied most of my free time when I was home, not running wild or incarcerated. I used it to call girls, usually interesting  and intelligent ones, who were easy to look at when they gave me a chance to. 

I used it to be stupid at them. Spouting my half-baked opinions, my exaggerated  knowledge, my plethora of psychiatric symptoms, my general hated of everything but them. For hours at a time; usually a girl would give me about an hour, then I'd call another one. 

Some of them I actually met, got them naked in my bed, and sometimes they'd still speak to me afterward. Sometimes they'd even come back, even repeatedly. That's what I lived for, skin-to-skin contact, the hit of feel-good hormones, the not being totally alone with myself. I could think of nothing worse than to have no one to touch me. 

Most of them were out of my league of course. Everybody's family had more money than mine, and most of their homes didn't have roaches or fleas; everybody was better educated, I'd been bullied out of 8th grade, and very few were any crazier. There were bulimics, self-cutters, closet lesbians (except for me), girls who like me read for pleasure and got good grades easily (though they'd keep on through high school while I was in juvie jail), lonely girls who shared my use for sex, and of course girls who'd rather date older boys with cars and drugs but made time for me because they felt sorry for me.  Some seemed to like me, most liked it that I liked them, and I wasn't very hard to understand if they were so inclined.  Some fit several categories, I'd really ate life when they ditched me.

When I wasn't on the phone, or with a girl, or in bed wanting to kill myself, I was getting as high as could as often as I could on whatever was going around. My father understood me well enough to let other boys come over to get me high when it was too cold to party outside, all they had to do was share with me and not be mean or messy. That passed for friendship. As with my nubile companions I took what I could get.

Everybody thought I was gay, or should admit it; only the girls I got naked knew what "bisexual" meant. I did have some gay experiences, either with boys I was locked up with or older men who could make themselves useful. 
Looking back all those decades I think I should have had boyfriends too,  if I'd only known how to go about it, or if I'd let some of those straight boys stick their dicks in me. (Supposedly straight anyway; very few of them knew what "bisexual" meant either.) Maybe if I'd sucked their cocks they'd have liked me better, but I wasn't too glad to be insulted about it. The problem with those boys was they couldn't be grateful: had they been kind and gentle I'd have been very busy. So it was left to the females to use me for sex. It came easier for them, they had nothing to be ashamed of.

Only when I was blitzed beyond reach or making an excuse to cuddle did I not hate my life. All I imagined of the future when my parents finally threw me out was being homeless and broke: I had no idea how anybody successfully functioned in the world. All I wanted to do when I wasn't high or naked was drink coffee and read. Maybe someday I'd have understood The Portable Nietzsche. Or had somebody to discuss it with who respected my intellect, such as it was, who could help me understand about the world beyond my skin.  But I was too crazy, and too sad, and too stupid to respond properly to the handful who tried. 

Hindsight is all I have now. I never achieved anything but living inside more often than not, and I decided not to kill myself because the women kept me from it. The most seductive thing about me was being sad and lonely. Looking back I can see mostly nothing: missed opportunities, chances I never took, choices I never knew I had.

I'm 62 years old and almost through with life. My spine is out of whack, my hips are arthritic, and my brain is still broken. And the more I've learned of the world the more I despised, and the deeper my despair. 

But for the past 30-odd years I've avoided talking on the damn telephone. Put it in writing, if not in person, if you can make it past the barriers the world puts up around me.
   

 

 

An Old Man's Monday Morning

 

I dreamed I was kind of looking after a couple dozen homeless high school students, seniors mostly, who were living in an underground ruin, like an old basement, made into a dormitory with makeshift beds lined up in little rows. Till I played my music too loud one morning  and we got found out and evicted. It was horrible, all the guilt & shame. Those poor kids. 

Then I dreamed that my left knee was really bad and I was having a hard time getting to the free clinic to have it looked at. Till I got a ride from some young guys, including a crusty blond guy who was telling me about the troubles his bulimic transsexual friend was having. But my knee 

hurt so bad it was hard to absorb what he was saying. And then I had to piss, so I woke up. To find my knee was as bad as in my dream.

After aspirin & a couple rub-ons I can walk okay but it still hurts. As does my neck, my back, my hips, and my head. But at least I'm not constipated, and I'm around no young people whose lives I can ruin. 

I took naltrexone this morning so I ain't drinking away the pain, and I'm almost out anyway. I had a couple shots late  last night after everything wore off to put myself to sleep but then woke up a couple hours later hung over. Being buzzed all the time would make life hurt less but that as you know has its own problems. I'll probably have to stock up on muscle rub and capsaicin cream, and use my heating pad for my back. If only they made heating pads you could fasten to your neck. I'll want to finally get around to doing push ups again later, and maybe planks, once I'm able, that always makes me feel better when I do it. One good thing is this scale weighed me as just under 159#, and my pants still fit, and I can still walk and I'm still continent. Sometimes I think maybe I should look around thrift stores for a magic lamp.

Lottery tickets. When I can get out I might buy one, maybe MegaMillions, or maybe a cheap-ass scratch-off. That's about the only kind of hope I can consider at the moment.