Politics and Quagmires

I don’t write about politics much because it’s a quagmire that isn’t worth getting caught up in. I also find that most thoughts or ideas I have are being shared elsewhere by people who have a large following, so I take solace in that.

Into A New Year

Is every year getting worse? Sometimes it feels like saying good riddance to the last year is the evil twin of having high hopes for the new year. It’s like there’s a law of inverse proportions; the worse the last year, the better the next year must be to make up for it. 2025 was loathsome, empty, the lowest of lows. 2026 needs to make up for that.

What the Heck Happened to Facebook?

I watched a news spot out of the UK about how people are turning away from social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram because they rarely interact with real friends anymore. So I decided to start looking through my Facebook feed and counting the number of advertisements, agenda driven posts, and personal “friends” posts.

How Does The Song Go?

Come hear Uncle John’s Band by the riverside
Got some things to talk about here beside the rising tide
Uncle John’s Band — Lyrics By Robert Hunter

I’m not much for resolutions, but this new year is about remembering how the song of life goes.

Echoes of an Unlived Life

For almost a year I’ve been bouncing around to different locations hoping a ‘new life’ might take hold. Mostly, though, in my mind I’ve been trying to make peace with an unlived life — a life I never got to live because it got sabotaged. It’s territory that comes with aging — not really regrets, but looking back and wondering where the path untaken or the turn that dead ended might have led.

Musings on Post-Pandemic Technical Writing

It’s been three months now of looking for a new life beyond the Pandemic. I’ve bounced from Tucson to Oregon, through Yellowstone just before the floods, back to Tucson and now to Southern California in San Diego County. All the while I’ve been applying for new work and trying to move beyond the pandemic. 

Gone to Oregon

Gone to Oregon for the summer, seeking what lies beyond the pandemic. The world has certainly changed, and it doesn’t feel like there’s a place for ‘writers’ and ‘thinkers’ anymore. Tucson stopped feeling that way or perhaps just robbed whatever I brought there. I stumbled upon fraud more often than not when looking for work, and I even got accused of fraud by the unemployment office. People latched onto an idea of me as their Uber driver not knowing it was only a side gig. Tucson just wasn’t working.

The Ironic COVID Vex

I finally got COVID during this Omicron surge. It’s much like a cold with a strange sore throat and now a little chest pain, not too bad so far which might be expected as I’m vaccinated. The irony here is that I know someone who had a close contact on Christmas Day. They weren’t wearing a mask and weren’t vaccinated, but they apparently never got sick.

2021 Passed

2021 passed. In a lot of ways this year was so much harder than the behemoth that was 2020. I’ve had this sneaking suspicion that this pandemic will take me, not by illness, but by shooting or some other stress-related condition, cancer or anemia or life blood illness or some such shit.

The InBetween Summer

Autumn has arrived in Arizona. I didn’t write a blog post the whole summer. I had a few abandoned ideas, but nothing came to fruition. Maybe it’s because I didn’t have much of a working life due to the pandemic. I was living off Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA), and the staffing agencies that usually give me contract or temp work were amazingly quiet. Now PUA has ended, and I’m still looking for work. The staffing agencies are still quiet, and there are few other prospects, so it’s looking more and more like I’ll need a seasonal job of some kind for the holidays.