So, my blogging habits have been chugging along now for damn near 25 years—started in 2003, so call it 24 if you want to be a pedant about it. But my problem in these last few years has been this nagging sense of a paradigm shift. What I mean is, shit just ain’t the same anymore. You could pin it on the advent of Covid—or the Covidiocy, as I call it—and tag it right there. But I actually trace it back a bit further. I think the real tide change kicked off with Brexit in 2015, followed by Trump’s uncanny victory in 2016. That shit sent the leftists absolutely batshit crazy. It made them… well, it just made them different. Let’s put it that way. Their whole approach flipped, and they’re going to lose. This was a seismic shift, and they’re just going to fucking lose it all. Every last one of them is going to lose everything. I don’t need to characterize it any further—I know it deep in my bones. They’re going to lose because it’s basic human evolution: the raw drive for survival and prosperity that always wins out in the end.

With that, my blogging and writing have shifted gradually over the years. I cranked out 99 posts during the Covid bullshit, but I was still stuck in that mindset of “this is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong.” Finally, though, I realized: no, this is just a massive paradigm shift, a widening of the Overton window. But I don’t see much evidence that other people get it—they’re still locked in their same tired paradigms, bless their little hearts or whatever. I’ve always thought differently, and it takes me a while sometimes to crack the code and jump onto a new track. But that’s been slow in coming. It’s because I liked being the blogger I was for so many years, but then I look around and see so many people doing the exact same goddamn thing. They’re just regurgitating narratives. Everyone’s saying the same shit about everything, and I’m like, how the hell can I be part of that? I don’t want to. Okay, let me put it this way: I want to be useful, but it’s taking me a while to figure out how.

For example, yesterday I blogged about a film—The Rip, with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. It was a great flick; Joe Rogan did a podcast with them, so I thought, wow, I’ve never blogged specifically about a film before, but this was interesting enough to dive into. Bam, bam, bam, bam—I get like four unsubscribes from members, all in a deluge. I’ve never seen that kind of flood; every once in a while I get one, but why? I don’t really know if it’s related, but it made me think. Of my few hundred subscribers, there are people who want me to blog like I used to, and that’s just not gonna happen anymore. There’s nothing there. There’s nothing in it for me to say the same thing that thousands of other people are saying. Nothing that stupid. But I’m not calling these people stupid—I’m saying, all right, they don’t like me anymore, or they’re just tired of paying money for something they don’t really want, and I’m not giving them what they want. Okay, no harm, no foul, no problem.

Now here’s a different story. Sometime today, a 33-year-old Englishman is arriving in Thailand—his first time here—and he’s coming straight to Pattaya. I’m gonna meet up with him. Thirty-three years old, and he tells me he’s been reading my blog since 2008. That means he’s been reading FreeTheAnimal.com since he was 15 years old. Let that sink in. Let that fucking sink in. Do you think for a minute I’m worried about some old folks whining, “Oh, I’m unsubscribing”? Do you think that for a second?

A Tale of Two Water Stories (Part 1: The Holiday Bolt-Cutter Saga)

So, let’s get to the tale of two water stories—or two stories about water fuckups, depending on how you look at it. The first one goes back about 15 or more years ago, up at our place on Highway 4 in Arnold, California. We called it “the cabin,” but in reality, it was more like a goddamn chalet—three stories, all knotty pine inside, rebuilt after a fire around 2001. It was our custom for years that the whole family would descend for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

For Christmas, my wife and I would hole up there not just for the day, but the whole week, ringing in the New Year before hauling ass back to the Bay Area to resume the grind. This particular year, we rolled in around December 23, geared up to host the invasion on the 24th and Christmas Day. We’re talking a dozen or more people—mother, father, all the brothers with their broods, the whole chaotic mess.

Snow’s on the ground, we fire up the heat to thaw the place out, and I hit the water spigot. Nothing. Zip. Huh? Okay, maybe I shut it off last time we left. I trek outside, dig out the snow from the access point, pop the cover, and there it is: the valve’s closed off at the meter with a fucking padlock on it. What the fuck? What the actual fuck?

I poke around and figure it out—I’d forgotten to pay the damn water bill. Of course, these bureaucratic assholes pick the most inconvenient time to shut you down, just to maximize the distress and teach you a lesson. It’s still early evening, so I call the water company. Voicemail. Basically, “Oh, fuck off until next year”—they’re taking the whole holiday stretch off. No shot at resolution until after January 1, and here I am on December 23 with the family horde arriving en masse the next day.

First things first, I grab a 5-gallon bucket and head to the neighbors, Lynn and her husband. Fill it from their outside spigot and lug it back so we can at least flush the toilet and keep things civilized for the night. These days, after years living in Thailand—out in the boonies, deep rural sticks—I’m used to this shit. Every bathroom has one of those 50-gallon trash cans filled with water; you top it off while showering, so if the water cuts out, you’ve got a backup. Use a one-gallon or half-gallon bucket with a handle to flush—no worries, no drama.

Come morning, I know the local Ace Hardware opens at 6:30 a.m.—rural hardware stores like that are a godsend. I’m there at the crack, buy a bolt cutter, head back, and snip that padlock right off. Holiday with the family goes off without a hitch. After all, their voicemail said they weren’t lifting a finger for the next 10 days, so fuck ’em.

Once I’m back in San Jose and back at work, I call up the water office in Calaveras County. “Hey, we had a problem—it was my fault, forgot to pay the bill. I’m ready to square it now, but yeah, I cut the lock.” I brace for the shitstorm: “Oh, you cut the lock?” But surprise, no big deal. She says, “Okay, that’s $35 extra.” Fair enough. I pay the bill, add the fee, and everything’s fine as ever. Onward.

Part 2

Okay, onto the second and final water story that happened just a few days ago. I’m living here in a condo unit in Pattaya, Thailand, and I pay my water bill every month—it’s basically the equivalent of six bucks in US dollars. I wasn’t here at the first of the month this time around, when the electric bill and the water bill come due. That’s the only time I even look at my mailbox, those first two or three days of the month. When I got back on the 12th, I immediately went down, saw my electric bill and my water bill, and I promptly paid them the very next morning on the 13th, not thinking anything of it.

Then, just a few days ago—on the 23rd, a Friday, somewhere around late afternoon or early evening—about 7 o’clock at night, all of a sudden my water doesn’t work. Now, 7 o’clock is notable because that’s when all the staff goes home. Again, just like the previous story, when they do something like this, they want to inflict maximum discomfort and pain. That’s what they do—all of them. It’s why you do not want your life overrun by bureaucrats and government functionaries and all that shit, because they’re evil fucks at heart. They could’ve turned it off at noon, when I would’ve noticed and gone down and fixed the whole thing easy. No, they want to inflict maximum damage on you, and it’s worldwide. It’s all people like this, because it’s the low-IQ, stupid fucking people who inhabit these jobs—they’re frustrated assholes anyway.

When I noticed the water was out, I’m like, oh shit. Now, this is not like a rural home in Thailand, where you have a big bucket of water with a pail and a handle, and you can keep the toilet clean. No, you’re in for a massive pain in the ass. Anyway, I look at it and say, okay, I have a water shutoff here, but I paid the bill back on the 13th, and I have proof—I have absolute proof.

So here’s the rest of the story. I waited all night and into the morning. I told my agent about it; she did nothing. She says okay, but she did nothing. In the morning, I get up—still no water. The office opens at about 9 a.m., so I say, okay, I’ll wait till 9:15, see if anything happens. I sent them messages online, but they still showed up as not read. I go down there at 9:15, and I see behind the front desk one young 20-something male, another young 20-something female, and what are they doing? Both of them have their stupid fucking faces buried in their phones. What are they looking at? I don’t know, but what they weren’t looking at is the LINE account—the corporate official LINE account—where I had sent them messages about this, with proof that I paid the bill: “Why did you shut off my water?”

So I go down there and bark at them: “Get off your phones and look at your LINE account.” I walk away. By the time—three to five minutes later—that I get back up to my room, the LINE account shows that my messages were read, and there’s a follow-up message. It says: “Next time when you pay, make sure that we know that you paid.” So the message is, it’s not enough to pay the bill; you have to make sure that they know you paid the bill. This is the current life shittification of everything—shittification, shittification, and bullshit, and young fucking stupid people that we’re having to live with. I never got an apology for them turning off the water after I paid the bill. I never got an apology. I got an admonition: next time, make sure that they know I paid the bill.