Empty Space Void of Physical Matter


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I came across an empty space that trembled and exploded and left a void in its place.  The bus came by and I got on, that’s when it all began.  I worked on (well I spent a few hours thinking about) the Riemann hypothesis which still is an unsolved mathematical conjecture stating that all non-trivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function lie on a specific vertical line with a real part of ⁠1/2⁠, which tightly controlled how regularly prime numbers are distributed.  I figured it was related to the determinant collapse of a dimension derived by the eigenvalue equation where the transformation flattens space.  I started actively seeking the exact scaling factors (the lambda λ value) that would cause that dimensional collapse, and I built a Jacobian matrix, organizing all the first-order partial derivatives of a vector-valued function into a grid where each row corresponded to an output function and each column corresponded to an input variable.  By concentrating on the real part of ⁠1/2⁠, and Euler’s rotation theorem, I worked on finding a single, straight line or unit vector running through the fixed point around which the entire rotation occurs.  When this didn’t yield the results that I was looking for, I went with an augmented affine transformation that used a bigger matrix and an extra coordinate to combine rotation, scaling, shearing, and shifting (translation) into a single multiplication.  An AI bot was in the news the other day for making some technical progress on a related part of this 167-year-old math puzzle.  Now I will need to get off of the bus to focus on the complex zeros of polynomial functions, navigating a minefield while hoping that I don’t run into any irreducible quadratics.  I would like to be adorned with a medal for solving this problem, but they are only offering a $1 million prize for solving this, and blogging is taking up all of my time.

Written for FOWC with Fandango – Adorned.

Every Night

When the Beatles broke up, Paul McCartney was devastated, he hit the bottle, and took substances, because this was a very difficult period for him.  He didn’t want to go out, so he stayed in bed, waiting for a spark that was already inside of him.  He spent days away from the public eye on his Scottish farm trying to cope with the shock and grief of the band ending.  Paul slowly found his way back by recording his self-titled debut solo album, McCartney, entirely by himself at home.  Linda provided a stable, grounding presence that helped pull him out of that dark period, allowing him to cope with the emotional fallout, depression, and loss of identity he felt.  Paul released a second solo/duo album Ram with his wife Linda McCartney in May 1971.  Linda treated Paul like a normal person unlike how the rest of the world viewed him and she helped him regain his confidence.  She encouraged him to keep writing music and famously joined him in forming the band Wings, giving him a fresh artistic outlet and a new chapter in his career.

Written for Missy’s MAD Challenge #110, where she gave us the sentence. “I kept waiting for the light, not realizing I was the spark.”

Yoni Imagery

Human brains are naturally wired for pareidolia, the psychological phenomenon where we see recognizable shapes, faces, or biological forms in everyday, abstract objects.  My psychiatrist says that I don’t necessarily have a dirty mind because I see the shape of the cliff alcove surrounding the waterfall which features vertical rock folds, a deep central crevice, and a narrow opening where the water flows, sharing a visual resemblance to a stylized representation of a vagina.  Because anatomical structures like the yoni (vulva) are made of organic curves, symmetry, and folds, they frequently mirror patterns found throughout the natural world.  So, there is nothing wrong with me when my brain starts scanning for familiar shapes, outlines, and symmetrical forms in nature, art, and random objects everywhere, making it feel like it appears constantly.  My wife called me a filthy pig when I told her my thoughts about Horsetail Fall on the eastern edge of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, but she doesn’t have a degree or a medical license in psychiatry.  I thought I was seeing vaginas everywhere I looked, but my psychiatrist told me that this is actually a very common quirk for me to make unnecessary subconscious associations to objects that resemble them ever so slightly or have a similar shape.  The cavernous waterfall is brightly lit up, so it draws my attention and then my mind starts to wonder.

Written for Melissa’s Flash Fiction Challenge #394.

Sitting in a Railway Station

This picture is a classic film photography composition captured in monochrome light.  The black-and-white photograph shows a person sitting in profile on a wooden slatted bench.  The bench sits on an elevated metal platform, as the ventilation grate is raised up above the walkway to prevent water from entering the system, and this ensures that air, heat, or exhaust can escape freely.  This bench is located in front of a curving wall, and it is next to a round column or pillar that is lined with bricks on the bottom of it.  The bricks on the walkway are arranged in a classic running bond pattern, where each rectangular block is offset by exactly half its length from the rows above and below it.  This is one of the most structurally stable and traditional configurations for horizontal surfaces.  The long, straight joint lines run parallel to the direction of the pathway, creating a sense of forward motion and length that visually elongates the walkway.

She appears to be a young adult, likely in her late teens or early 20s sitting on the bench with a shopping bag to her left.  She is wearing a classic blue jean jacket with metal front button closures or maybe snaps, and it has chest and side pockets.  She is wearing a long maxi dress or a long skirt featuring a subtle patterned or floral print.  The soft, continuous fold over her knee and the way the fabric pools down toward her low, comfortable heel boots combined with the denim jacket creates a very classic, timeless casual look.  She looks a lot like the American musician Liz Harris who works under the stage name Grouper.  The fine flyaway strands of her hair which are visible around her face and crown indicate the wind is blowing.  She is looking straight ahead with a slightly set jaw and closed lips, so it is difficult to tell what is on her mind.  She may be absorbed in her own thoughts, portraying a sense of quiet reflection or serious concentration, or focused on something in front of her, or she may be in a melancholy mood since she is not smiling, but I think she misses her boyfriend and she is going back home to see him.

The multi-level concrete building structure visible behind the bench mimics the look of a modern elevated pedestrian plaza or a train platform.  This looks like it could be an example of Brutalist architecture which features curved, textured concrete walls and massive cylindrical pillars.  She is sitting outside the railway station and feels gusts of warm wind and displaced air that are blowing up through the metal ventilation grates on to the bench where she is sitting on.  She starts thinking about Marilyn Monroe’s iconic pleated white halter dress-blowing up where she giggles while trying to hold it down.  As a train passes below her and blows her white dress upward Marilyn says, “Ooh, do you feel the breeze from the subway?  Isn’t it delicious?”  This brought a smile to the girl’s face, but she wished that she was homeward bound, where her thoughts were escaping, where her love was waiting silently for her to return.

Written for Sadje at Keep It Alive What Do You See #358.

When the Summer’s Gone

The two songs by Journey ‘Feeling That Way’ and ‘Anytime’ were always played together because they were designed to seamlessly flow into one another.  They were recorded on the band’s 1978 fourth studio album Infinity, which was their first album with vocalist Steve Perry and the last to feature drummer Aynsley Dunbar.  They ran together with no pause on the album, so classic rock radio stations and at their live shows these songs were typically treated as a single, continuous track.  These songs showcase the vocal chemistry between keyboardist Gregg Rolie and newly-joined singer Steve Perry.  ‘Feeling That Way’ starts with Rolie taking the first verse, then Perry sings the chorus.  They share lead on both songs, which features a great back-and-forth duet between them.

‘Feeling That Way was written by lead singer Perry, keyboardist Rolie, and drummer Dunbar, while ‘Anytime’ was written by Rolie, guitarist Neal Schon, bassist Ross Valory, San Francisco lyricist Roger Silver, and Robert Fleischman who was their former lead vocalist before Perry joined the band and thereafter he occasionally worked as a songwriting collaborator.  ‘Feeling That Way’ started out as an unreleased, early instrumental demo track called ‘Velvet Curtain’, which was reworked by Gregg Rolie and called ‘Let Me Stay’, and it was pulled before it could have made it onto their 1977 third album Next.  When Steve Perry joined the band, he rebuilt the song structure, added a new chorus, and shared lead vocals with Rolie to create the final version, renamed ‘Feeling That Way’.

Journey was formed in San Francisco in 1973 by former members of Santana, Steve Miller Band, and the psychedelic rock band Frumious Bandersnatch that was managed by Herbie Herbert.  Rhythm guitarist and songwriter George Tickner left Frumious Bandersnatch to be an original member of Journey, but he left the band in the mid-1970s to pursue a career in medicine.  Neal Schon and Gregg Rolie are also a co-founders of Journey which was initially called the Golden Gate Rhythm Section, and they formed the band to provide backup to other Bay Area artists.  Former Santana manager Herbie Herbert wanted to put together an elite backing group to play behind various artists passing through the San Francisco, but that idea was quickly abandoned.  Ross Valory began his career playing with the band Frumious Bandersnatch before joining the Steve Miller Band in the early 1970 and becoming a co-founding member of Journey.  Prairie Prince was a founding member of the San Francisco art-rock band The Tubes before he became the drummer and co-founding member of Journey.  In 1974, Aynsley Dunbar replaced Prairie Prince as the drummer, and he appeared on all of their early recordings.

‘Feeling That Way’ explores the vulnerability, excitement, and insecurity of a new romance.  The lyrics balance the hope of mutual love with the nagging fear of unreciprocated feelings, capturing the emotional transition into a new chapter of life.  ‘Anytime’ does not have a deep meaning in its lyrics, as according to their 1992 three-CD compilation box set Time3 compilation, Schon wrote the chorus lyrics when Rolie was doing a Bing Crosby “ooh, ooh” signature scat-singing vocalization, and having been influenced by lots of Beatles records, he said, “Anytime that you want me”, so this came out of a rehearsal.

Feeling That Way Lyrics

Opened my eyes to a new kind of way
All of the good times that you saved
Are you feelin’, you feelin’ that way too
Or am I just
Am I just your fool?

When the summer’s gone
She’ll be there standing by the light
Once she’s been to where she’s gone to
She should know wrong from right
Is she feelin’
Are you feelin’, you feelin’ that way too
Or am I just
Am I just your fool?

A new road’s waiting, you judged my life, whoa
Soft and warm on a summer’s night
You’re the only one, I told you, the only one I love
The lovely one (the lovely one) I’m thinking of

When the summer’s gone
She’ll be there standing by the light
Once she’s been to where she’s gone to
She should know wrong from right
Is she feeling
Are you feelin’, you feelin’ that way too (Whoa)
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah
You’re feelin’ that way

When the summer’s gone
She’ll be there standing by the light
Once she’s been to where she’s gone to
She should know wrong from right
Is she feelin’

Whoa, is she feelin’ (Feelin’ that way)
Oh my, my, oh-ooh-oh-oh (Feelin’ that way)
Oh-ooh-oh-oh, oh-ooh-oh-oh, whoa-oh-ooh-oh
My, my, my-my, my, my, my, my
My, my whoa-oh (Feelin’ that way)
Whoa-oh, ooh-oh, ooh-oh (Feelin’ that way)
Whoa-oh, ooh-oh, ooh-oh
(Feelin’ that way)

Anytime Lyrics

Ooh, ooh anytime that you want me
Ooh, ooh anytime that you need me
Ooh, ooh anytime that you want me to
Ooh, ooh anytime that you need me

I’m standing here with my arms a mile wide
Hoping and praying for you
Listen to me and enlighten me
I hope that you need me too, ’cause,

Ooh, ooh anytime that you want me
Ooh, ooh anytime that you want me
Ooh, ooh anytime that you want me to
Ooh, ooh anytime that you need me

Give me all of your sunshine
A spark is all I need
To take away, all of the shadows
Well what more can I say.

Anytime at all
Anytime at all
Anytime at all

Written for Song Lyric Sunday where the theme is to find a song that was written explicitly as a segue.

The Transition Follows What Was Built Before It


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Some songs are specifically written as segues to create a seamless, uninterrupted flow of music, usually on an album.  Instead of having a hard pause between tracks, a segue blends the end of one song directly into the beginning of the next.  New methods, designs, or technologies are not always built from scratch, as they evolve an existing foundation, thus we don’t reinvent the wheel, but we do tweak what we have and try to improve it.  There is no need to start from scratch, when you can build on what you already have.  In music, a direction to “segue” means to proceed directly on to the next thing without stopping the music, or to perform the next piece of music without breaking.  Composers may write the word segue directly into the score above the staff where the transition should happen.  A conductor may give a visual cue (such as a distinct hand gesture or baton movement) to signal the orchestra or choir to start the next section without stopping.  A segue is a continuous, uninterrupted transition cohesively flowing from one song into the next is a hallmark of concept albums and rock operas.  Many people might think they are one song, but they are actually two separate songs.  It is often built right into the music through a transitional passage, a repeated chord, or a drum beat that bridges the gap between the two pieces.  During improvisational jams, musicians develop cues, like altering a bassline or playing a familiar riff, to signal to each other that they were changing directions.  The segue from one song to another required musicians to pay attention to each other so they could stay on the same track, adjusting what they are playing in real-time to match the new song.

Last week we had Calendar (New Style) Act 1750 where the theme was to find a song that was written or performed by someone who was born in the month of September.  This week the theme is to find a song that was written explicitly as a segue.  Take some time to read the posts of other bloggers who respond to this music challenge, and even better, read as many of them as you can as you will probably find many enjoyable songs and it is quite possible that you will learn a thing or two.  Share your music with others and post a video, try do some research and let everyone know something about the song that you post.  Tell everyone why you like the song, whether it was a hit, or what you think the song is about.  Show the lyrics, let’s all listen to our favorite songs and explore some new music.  Try to find a song that fits the theme, then write your post and create a pingback, or you can just place your link in the comments section.

Suggestions
• If the song you select does not meet the criteria, then please explain why you chose this song.
• It would be good if you could post the lyrics to the song of your choice, as this is helpful for the people that want to follow along with the music.  Warning: Bloggers make posts at their own risk, and since song lyrics are copyrighted, you may be asked to take them down from your post if you don’t have permission.  It is highly unlikely estates or artists will sue regular people (although it has happened) especially if the bloggers that do this are not making money from their site, but an artist or a publisher can ask you to remove the lyrics from your post.  I am not a lawyer and there are no rules for Song Lyric Sunday, as we are all here to have fun and hopefully get to listen to some good music.
• Please try to include the songwriter(s) – it’s a good idea to give credit where credit is due. It would also be a good idea to give credit to the singer and the band associated with your song.
• Your post can be as long or as short as you want it to be, but please try not to include too many videos as that just makes it take longer for me to look at all of the other posts.
• Link to the YouTube video, or you can pull it into your post, so others can listen to the song.
• Read at least one other person’s blog, so we can all share new and fantastic music and create amazing new blogging friends in the process.
• Feel free to suggest future prompts.  Have fun and enjoy the music.

This week I will be writing about the Journey segue ‘Feeling that Way’ into ‘Anytime’, and next week, I will be writing about the song ‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You’ by Led Zeppelin.  The upcoming prompts will be:
September 20, 2026 – Song that mentions abandoning, departing, deserting, exiting, leaving, resigning, or retiring
September 27, 2026 – Song that relates to civil rights, oppression, protest, revolution or social change
October 4, 2026 – Song written or performed by someone who was born in the month of October
October 11, 2026 – Song that mentions girls

Bane of His Existence

This story may be longer than necessary, but the incident happened 70 years ago, so I felt I needed to explain some things first.  The mid-to-late 1950s was a completely different world when it comes to personal safety.  It was a lot like the Wild West as nobody wore seatbelts in cars and kids never wore helmets.  Parents in the mid-to-late 1950s were deeply concerned with child safety, but their anxieties focused on different threats than those that worry parents today.  Children enjoyed greater freedom to roam outside unsupervised, while parents faced massive, uncontrollable public health crises and emerging social anxieties.  The greatest terror for mid-century parents was the poliovirus.  Every summer, rising temperatures brought panic, leading parents to keep children away from public swimming pools, movie theaters, and neighborhood crowds out of fear of paralysis or death.  This widespread fear largely subsided only after Jonas Salk’s vaccine became widely available in 1955.  At this time, society was deeply worried about the moral safety and behavior of youth.  Most parents were not worried about their children being safe when they were playing in the neighborhood and many families didn’t lock their doors.  The mid-1950s saw congressional hearings investigating comic books and television as corrupting influences that supposedly incited violence and juvenile delinquency.

Products started featuring safety caps in 1967 following the invention of the first child-resistant closure, with widespread mandatory use beginning after the passage of the Poison Prevention Packaging Act in 1970.  Canadian pediatrician Dr. Henri Breault invented the “Palm ‘n Turn” cap, which was the first modern push-and-turn child-resistant closure, after he saw high rates of accidental child poisonings from medications.  The United States Congress passed the Poison Prevention Packaging Act (PPPA), signed by President Richard Nixon in 1970, requiring special child-safe packaging for prescription drugs, over-the-counter medications, and hazardous household chemicals.  The newly formed Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) took over enforcing these rules, making safety caps standard and dropping child poisoning rates dramatically.  Child safety locks for cabinets were invented and patented as early as the late 1950s (such as a 1959 patent filing), but they did not become widely used or mass-marketed until the broader child safety movement took off in the 1970s and 1980s.

Household ammonia was extremely common in mid-to-late 1950s homes, serving as one of the primary go-to options for heavy-duty household cleaning.  During this post-World War II era, the cleaning landscape was shifting toward commercialized, chemically formulated products. In the 1950s households utilized ammonia as a glass cleaner, because it evaporates incredibly fast without leaving streaks behind, it was the absolute standard for washing windows, mirrors, and glass surfaces.  It was also used on linoleum floors, vinyl tiles, and Formica countertops, as a grease cleaner.  Housekeepers regularly relied on diluted jugs of pure household ammonia to strip old floor wax and cut through stubborn kitchen grease.

When my younger brother was an infant, he was crying on the kitchen floor next to a spilt bottle of ammonia after he got into the cabinet where my mom stored her cleaning supplies.  You can’t ask an infant what happened, so you need to assume the worst.  He was laying on the floor crying and my parents took him to the emergency room where his stomach was pumped out in case he swallowed any of it and his eyes were also washed out.  Ammonia reacts with moisture in the eye to form ammonium hydroxide.  This chemical destroys cell membranes quickly through a process called liquefactive necrosis.  Alkali chemicals penetrate eye tissues in seconds.  The limbus holds the stem cells that repair the surface of the eye, his cornea.  The limbus is the border area where the cornea (the clear front window of the eye) meets the white sclera (the outer wall of the eye).  He did heal completely because he got immediate treatment and proper medical care that included antibiotic drops, and lubricants and if he did have a chemical burn on his eyes, it was moderate not severe.  He was lucky that his limbus contained vital stem cells that repaired the surface of.

My brother developed a deep, lasting fear of going anywhere near ammonia as an adult, due to his distressing childhood injury.  Ammonia has become an everyday annoyance and a persistent problem that ruins my brother’s peace of mind and frustrates him on a regular basis.  The brain is highly efficient at linking intense physical pain or panic with the specific environmental triggers present at the time.  When a child experiences an ammonia spill like my brother did, their brain registers the distinctive, sharp scent and sight of the chemical bottle as an immediate threat to survival.  As an adult, encountering that same smell can instantly trigger an automatic, involuntary “fight-or-flight” survival response.

Written for the Great Minds Think’s Friday Challenge, which is hosted by Rohini and Sarah and this week we are given a high-magnification photograph of a human iris along with the phrase Bête Noire which is a French term literally translating to “black beast”, which is defined as a person or thing strongly detested, avoided, or feared.

Reblog Medical Warnings

In 2023, the U.S. spent more than $4.5 trillion on healthcare and more than $4 trillion of that spending was on chronic disease.  This amounts to roughly one-third of our federal tax dollars being used for healthcare.  Robert F. Kennedy Jr.  known by his initials RFK Jr. does not have a background, degree, or formal training in medicine or healthcare and many people feel that his tenure as the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has severely harmed the U.S. public health infrastructure through major budget cuts, workforce reductions, and controversial changes to vaccine and disease-prevention policies.  This administration cut roughly 25% of the HHS workforce and reduced funding for key scientific agencies in an attempt to eliminate bureaucratic bloat.  Billions of dollars in research funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have been frozen or canceled, as well as various scientific research grants and contracts that have been eliminated related to conditions like diabetes, obesity, and dementia.  Funding for vital programs targeting chronic diseases, tobacco use, and violence prevention has been blocked or redirected.  Kennedy altered guidance on COVID-19 shots and attempted to scale back parts of the routine childhood immunization schedule, triggering legal battles with medical groups over public safety.

Public health officials, medical organizations, and political critics argue that Kennedy’s decades-long history of vaccine skepticism has directly contributed to the decline in MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccination rates.  Kennedy spent years promoting debunked claims about vaccine safety while spreading misinformation about vaccine safety.  Over the years, Kennedy has downplayed the severity of measles, famously calling it “chicken soup and vitamin A”, and he has periodically promoted unorthodox, unproven treatments like cod liver oil or aerosolized budesonide instead of focusing on preventative vaccination.  His anti-vaccine views have bolstered activists right before a devastating measles outbreak in Samoa that sickened more than 5,700 people and killed 83 people, which were mostly children.  Samoan health officials and international public health bodies noted that his rhetoric heavily depressed vaccination rates (dropping below 33% for eligible 1-year-olds), leaving the population vulnerable and culminating in the devastating 2019 epidemic.

Trump selected RFK Jr. to reward his political loyalty and leverage his voter base.  Trump viewed Kennedy as a key political ally and promised to let him “go wild” on health care reform.  Trump empowered Kennedy to target nutrition and drug regulations at federal agencies.  Kennedy built a large following around his MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) movement, which criticizes ultra-processed foods, chemicals, and pharmaceutical companies.  Trump told Kenedy that he wanted him to end the chronic disease epidemic with measurable impacts on a diminishment of chronic disease within two years, and as of late 2026, roughly 18 months into his tenure as Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has not produced verified, population-level data showing a measurable national diminishment or reversal of chronic disease rates.  The MAHA Commission appears to be both ideologically driven and scientifically unsound, and as a consequence, its prospects of proposing policies that meaningfully address chronic disease are exceedingly low.  Instead of adopting an evidence‐based approach, in his actions and comments to date, Secretary Kennedy has undermined established science, particularly on vaccines; gutted U.S. science and public health infrastructure, including segments responsible for addressing chronic disease; and prioritized concerns that have little basis in science.

Critics argue that parallel federal funding cuts to scientific research, Medicaid, and nutritional support programs counteract chronic disease prevention efforts.  Kennedy has criticized GLP-1 weight-loss medications, including Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, and Zepbound.  While physicians acknowledge these medications are not appropriate for everyone and carry potential side effects, medical organizations say they are safe and effective for many patients with obesity or Type 2 diabetes when prescribed appropriately.  Despite any of Kenedy’s efforts, chronic disease rates have not declined with him serving as Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary, and public health data shows no measurable reduction in national illness levels.  Leading medical journals have published editorials stating that the policy reversals and attacks on institutional science under Kennedy will take generations to repair.  In the early 1900s, the leading causes of death were infectious diseases, but as we developed antibiotics and vaccines, infectious diseases became less of a threat, and chronic diseases are now America’s leading health concern.

 

Medical Warnings

King Herod Antipasto

1. What is a strimmer?
This is a very skinny stripper.

2. What is a Mexican Wave?
This is when everyone at a sporting event stands up and sings, “Jose, can you see?”

3. What is hogwash?
A place where you take your pig after it has a roll in the mud.

4. What is poppycock?
This is the egg-shaped seed pod on an opium plant, the part that gets you high.

5. What is a doodlebug?
This is the offspring of an ant lion that mated with a love bug.

6. What is a pecan?
This is a portable pee bag for people that are going on a long trip.

7. What is a molar?
This has something to do with making a mountain out of a molehill.

8. What is an epiphany?
This is a question asking if you had any flash of sudden insight just before a full realization hits.

9. What is goulash?
This is a Russian prison in Siberia.

10. What is a parameter?
This is a term used in linear algebra to describe an eigenvalue problem.

Written for Di’s Fibbing Friday.

Alex in Chains

The ideology of being a rockstar is a cultural belief system centered on radical individualism, creative freedom, and living life entirely on your own terms.  If rock music has a defining characteristic, it’s the refusal to behave. Alex was repenting for his sins, as he decided that he would keep his eyes shut so that he would see no evil, wears earplugs so he would hear no evil, and have his mouth padlocked so that he would be unable to speak evil.  After reading the teaching of Confucius while he was incarcerated, he thought it would be best not to look at, listen to, or speak anything that goes against propriety (performing an action or behavior that breaks accepted rules of politeness, good manners, or moral standards).  He had lived the life of a rock star where he had done many things that were considered rude, improper, or that were in poor taste, like the drunken rants he went into onstage, his misguided political statements, and his many moments of unchecked ego.  He was a xenophobic, racist bigot who often spoke out about immigration policies claiming that native-born populations are being deliberately replaced by immigrants to alter the political or cultural landscape of the country.  He was an anti-vaxxer who said the MMR vaccine made children sick and caused autism, and he tried to discourage everyone from getting vaccinated.

He gave a cocaine-fueled interview where he said that he was more popular than Jesus and that Hitler was the first rock star, just before he shouted out “white power”.  He bit off the head of an armadillo which a fan tossed on stage, which drew condemnation from animal-rights groups.  At a show in Miami, he exposed himself on stage which caused moral outrage and the rest of his shows there were cancelled.  He had a tantrum on stage when he spotted a fan filming the band.  He leapt into the crowd, and he punched the culprit in his face spilling blood all over the place when the guy’s nose started bleeding.  His erratic behavior going off the rails with excessive LSD experimentation and his general unreliability made him a serious liability to the rest of the band.  He spent many concerts strumming a single chord, slowly detuning his guitar until the strings went slack, or merely staring out of the crowd.

His undoing came when he was caught on camera in a hotel beating, dragging and hurling an object at his wife, which became the darkest moments in his public career.  He spent seven years in prison for this brutal attack where he grabbed her by the back of her neck and slammed her down to the floor, but he said that prison made him a better man.  He claims to be sorry for all of his physically aggressive behavior that he showed toward his wife, and he hopes people will overlook all of those bad things he did now that he has repented.  He said that he is no longer an alcoholic, an absent father or a wife beater and all he wants is a second chance.  He feels that he deserves credit for owning up to his mistakes and now that he is a better person, and his arrogance of being blissfully unaware would like to have his past swept under the rug.  His wife said that she would forgive the once-beloved icon when pigs fly.

Written for Reena’s Xploration Challenge #447 where today she gave us an AI generated this image to match the quote by Albert Camus, “Communication is impossible with slaves.”