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.

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.

Star Trek Discovery Finds the Future

This is a review of Season 3 of Star Trek Discovery (DSC), and believe it or not it’s mostly positive. I guess I like this show because I’ve kept following it since the beginning, albeit complaining that it could be better. If you want to take a journey back into my writing about Discovery in this blog follow this Star Trek tag. The posts that have “Discovery” in the title contain my thoughts going back to Season 1.

Purdue effing University Global

Strange experience yesterday. I have been considering getting some kind of online graduate certificate to enhance my resume and get some new contacts in an educational field where I could work from home. I found a certificate program associated with Purdue University, and I clicked the link to get more information.

Revisiting Star Trek Picard

Remember the hype? There was such anticipation and buildup for Star Trek Picard last year; it was touted as both a groundbreaking ten episodes of new television and a continuation of an old character. It seems so long ago because it first dropped around the time the Covid-19 pandemic hit America. I had high hopes for Picard myself, and I planned to review it but never got around to it. Maybe that alone speaks volumes, but the show is still on my mind along with many ideas about where Star Trek has gone these days, so I thought I’d finally make good on my promise to write a review here. 

In Defense of the Colour Orange

This isn’t about politics, it’s simply as the title says In Defense of the Colour Orange. A little creative writing that came out of a recent hike in the desert….