So 2026 is proving to be quite the fucking year, is it not? We aren’t even two months in and I can’t help but to marvel at the new level of chaos of and insanity that is apparently becoming our new normal. So those of you who follow along with the blog, probably aren’t surprised by the lack of output given what I had to say about my vision for this year in my New Years Day post.

Thus far this year we’ve been dealing with lots of unexpected winter weather. Somewhere in the midst of that, my wife totalled her car when somebody decided to make a left turn in front of her while she was going through an intersection. In addition, I’ve been forced to come to terms with the consequences of a habit I developed over the last few years which turns to not have been a very good idea at all.

Oh and then there’s that pesky tech shortage which seems to be getting worse with each passing day. This shortage inspired me to order a Framework desktop (my second one, first one is my steam console, this one will become my office pc) as prices on everything are starting to skyrocket and prices on that were still in the realm of “relative” sanity. Note: your definition of relative is going to vary here as opinions on this machine are all over the map. That translates to mean that the 64GB base model has only increased by $300 in cost from when it was originally released.

Of course, when I ordered it last week, the Chinese Lunar New Year was kicking off, so despite the fact I paid for it, it hasn’t actually shipped yet. Hopefully it will ship this week. However given the tariff related drama that has occurred over the last few days, I’m becoming nervous that it won’t actually ship at all. Or that Framework will be forced to demand the remittance of additional funds before they can ship it.

So yeah as always, fuck Donald Trump. Fuck MAGA. Fuck Christian Nationalists. This is mostly their fault. The rest of us get to shoulder some of the blame too, because we let this shit happen. How pathetic.

On the topic of my wife’s car accident, well of course that was rife with drama. I’ll spare you most of that story however and focus on the small part of it that is relevant to this blog and its handful of readers. We bought a much newer car (2022 Toyota) to replace her older car (2011 Toyota). The difference that 11 years has made is frankly astounding. And by astounding I mean, absolutely horrifying. At least on some level.

Ignoring all the smaller tech changes like push button starters and the fact that every car is equipped with a massive touchscreen now, what I’d like to focus on today is the whole key fob thing. Why am I focusing on that? Well as it so happens her new Toyota came with one key fob. We wanted to get an additional one as a backup in case one of us managed to lock ourselves out of the car or the key fob stopped working.

So I called the dealership. They quoted me a price of around $550 for a new key fob. I was horrified. So I called some locksmith services and I managed to find one who would come out to my house and do it for $300. Still a rip off, but at least I managed to avoid rewarding Toyota for being pieces of shit. As it turns out, things didn’t quite go that way.

Dude shows up yesterday and immediately quotes a new price that is double the one they gave me over the phone. $600. I pointed this out to him and said, “the dealership is literally a five minute drive from here, so you gotta at least beat their price”. So he then re-quotes a price of $375 and says it’ll cost another $100 if he has to “buy a PIN” to activate the new FOB.

At this point I was literally like “what the fuck” but went with it. After all, only a sucker goes to the dealership, right? Well in our case the local dealership are known scamsters and every time you go down there for some little thing, they supply you with thousands of dollars in additional estimates of work they want / need to do. And since I didn’t buy this car from them, I knew it was going to be really bad because that’s just how they are. I didn’t want to do that. So I went with it.

This dude fucked around trying to program this new fob for two freaking hours in my driveway. He of course needed to “buy” a PIN (yeah only an idiot couldn’t see that one coming) and eventually after spending hours on the phone getting help from his boss (presumably, they were speaking a different language that wasn’t English or Spanish, so I am only guessing) he presented me with an 80% functional key fob. Lock and Unlock buttons work. Proximity functions work (which means I can just touch the truck to open it or get near the drivers door to have it automatically unlock in addition to just being able to start the stupid car as there is no traditional key) but the button that allows us to open and close the trunk didn’t work.

I pointed this out to him during testing, and he gave making it work a go but then told me that I would need to drive down to their place of business on Monday and get his boss to fix it. That’s a 30 minute drive each way. I have to take time off work. I also have to deny my wife the use of her new car that day to make this happen as I need to bring the original key fob, the new key fob and the car with me. But hey I just spent $513 on this stupid fucking key fob so I guess I’m going to drive down there. For that price this key ought to be my butler or something.

So yeah not that any of my regular readers need to hear this, but shit like this is why I hate proprietary tech and why I avoid it as much as possible in my own life. Proprietary tech will, on a long enough timeline, always be used against you. It is the foundation of vendor lock-in and toxic rent-seeking behaviors that are beginning to dominate every industry on the planet. This is one of the consequences of the late stage capitalism world we are living in.

As for the habit, well I’ve been grappling with what to say on this topic here, and ultimately I’ve decided to do the only thing that my ape-like brain is wired to do: Be transparent and let the chips fall where they may. As it so happens, a couple years ago I discovered Kratom in the form of seltzers and established a regular habit of drinking them. This started off as a monthly thing and eventually became a weekly thing. It is, as of a month ago, now a “endeavoring to never touch this shit again” thing.

For those of you not in the know, Kratom is a plant grown in east asia that has a lot in common with opioids… except its chemical composition. Which is the primary loophole that allows it to remain legal in most of the United States. However while its chemical composition is different its effects are quite similar. So are the symptoms of withdrawal. The part that I didn’t realize at the time was that the risk of addiction was also similar.

So how did this start? Well a few years ago I had some impromptu unexpected surgery for an ailment and prior to that surgery I received quite a cocktail of opioids. I wasn’t in a lot of pain, but they gave me some anyway. Then they sent me home with some more. I ended up tossing the bottle because the constipation was worse than the pain, but I maintained a fond memory of the euphoria I experienced, especially during that initial dose of fentanyl.

Well a few months down the road, I stumbled on some reddit thread about Kratom and thought to myself, “Hey I wonder if it actually has similar effects - I’m actually in a position to know that if I wanted to try it.” So I did. Some local liquor, beer and wine chain was selling Kratom seltzers at the time, so I bought one and tried it. It absolutely hit just like an opioid. I got the euphoria and I ended up being constipated.

Well as I said this was something I started doing once a month and I eventually made it a weekly thing. There it stayed for the last 18 months. I believed that by only doing in once a week (still the totally respectable “off the shelf” seltzers mind you) I could mitigate the risk of experiencing withdrawals and becoming addicted. I thought I knew enough to partake but still avoid the inherent trap of it. But of course I was wrong.

Up until about six months ago, things were mostly fine here. But I think six months ago is when this cycle finally devolved from manageable to debilitating. Of course I didn’t realize it. Like the proverbial frog that resides within the boiling pot, I didn’t realize how bad things had gotten. But things had gotten bad. Mostly because I was effectively hijacking the dopamine reward system in my brain once a week with a dose of Kratom. At first this was fine. It didn’t effect the other days of the week. But in time this began to change. In time I began to experience less joy at the little things in life and thus stress began to effect me more and more. That’s because my dopamine system wasn’t working correctly anymore.

My body was becoming used to waiting on that weekly dose. That dose was the best part of the week. Everything else was just the in-between. Not only that, but when I look back now, I realize the the time between weekly doses was basically me experiencing a mini-cycle of withdrawal from Kratom. My sleep got worse. I started sweating at night. My mood was worse. I became very touchy and the slightest thing would cause me to become very irritable. I was becoming harder to live with. I didn’t even like to play video games anymore.

I was completely oblivious to this. So how did I figure this out? Well my wife’s car accident kicked off a series of events that led to me missing my weekly dose. So a few days later after mostly just forgetting about it and being grateful that this chapter of post accident drama was over, I was sitting on the couch playing the Dragon Quest I remake and just having fun. It was the first time in quite awhile that I had experienced this. About three hours into the game play session (mind you, my attention span hadn’t allowed for this in awhile) I thought to myself:

Hey you haven’t had your weekly seltzer yet? Why don’t you fire up the ice maker and have it?

So I called out to Siri and asked her to fire up the ice maker. Which she did (results in terms of her effectiveness vary wildly, so this was nice). But suddenly it hit me like a bag of bricks:

Why am I doing this? I’m having a heck of a good time. Do I need to drink this?

I struggled with this for about 30 minutes and went back and forth. Finally I settled on the following conclusion:

I’m having more fun than I’ve had in awhile. I should skip this week. If only to prove that I’m not addicted.

Challenge accepted. Thank goodness, because by the time I got to the end of the next week, I was feeling a lot better in general. I was dealing with stronger withdrawal symptoms however, but at least now I was conscious of what they were. By this time yy sleep had gotten even worse and when I did sleep I was sweating through my clothes and sheets at a rate I’d never experienced before.

But a month into sobriety and those symptoms have gone away. The color has begun to return to life. Kratom had stolen that from me, bit by bit, piece by piece. Everything had begun to seem so drab because my system was incapable of providing me with little hits of dopamine that come with the little things. So I stopped being able to appreciate them. This negatively impacted me in ways that I wasn’t capable of understanding until I experienced it.

So here is some parting advice: If you ever get a chance to try Kratom or some other opioid like substance, just don’t. Stay the hell away from this shit. Of course I say that knowing full well that most people have to learn lessons the hard way and for once in my life, I’m forced to admit to you all that I am in fact one of those people. I had to learn the hard way that Kratom isn’t a casual substance that allows for casual use.

Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here

– Dante, The Divine Comedy

I say that in jest of course. There is always hope. That’s because it’s never too late to make a better choice. But while you are within the maelstrom of your own creation that you don’t really understand, it is exceedingly easy to lose hope because the very universe seems to be against you at every twist and turn.

Here are some resources that I have found to be quite helpful:

So if anybody out there finds themselves in the same position I found myself a month ago. You can make a better choice. You can start escaping from the trap today. All you need to do is to take that first step, and then another. Each day you gotta make a choice and each subsequent day makes the better choice a bit easier to choose.

If I can do it, so can you.