Random Thoughts on the First Day of the Second Half

My last post was my 666th. Not that I’m superstitious, just uncomfortable. And I really do have stuff on my mind.

NOTES ON THE CURRENT CRISIS: It’s interesting how much the events of this year have made so many of us appreciate the changing of the months. It’s as if we’re all hoping that this will be the month everything gets back to normal. Naturally, they don’t. Things seem to loosen up on one side, then things get stupid-weird on the other.

As far as this Panicky-Demic Lockdown mania goes, the people making these stupid and arbitrary rules aren’t giving up their power. Fourth of July is canceled and so is the rest of the summer. If you think the snickering-smug authoritarians are going to let you have your Christmas shopping and parties this year, I advise you to think smarter, not harder. Thanksgiving family dinners will be discouraged, if not outright prohibited before that. Whatever happens in the November U.S. federal elections will only serve as further excuse for tightening the screws “for public safety.”

For those sniffing about for Socially Unacceptable Political Thought on my part, I remind you that the will to power uses ideology as fig-leaf, a beard to distract from its primary purpose, i.e., acquiring and exercising more power. It was the Big Lesson of George Orwell’s 1984, that the power to be able to spout any kind of nonsense unchallenged — say, “2 + 2 = 5” — is the ultimate goal. 

Everyone seems to have missed that point, but I’ll say it anyway, if only to be able to say “I told you so,” and if only from beyond the grave. Despite repeated proofs of inflated infection and death statistics, despite empirical, see-for-yourself proof that the big scary virus has turned out to be a nothingburger used as a boogeyman to frighten and intimidate and control, people are still playing along with this second wave thing. 

As I say, I don’t make human nature. It is what it is. Whaddya gonna do?

That no one on the Internet believes the official 9/11 narrative, that most even suspect an inside job, says much for lost public trust over the years. That said, the Internet is not the world. The fact that so many people are going along with this is discouraging.

“CAN WE PLEASE COMPLAIN ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE?” DEPT.: I’ve managed to find workarounds for the increasingly unworkable Google Blogger. So far I can still switch easily between “Legacy Blogger” and “that mess they’re forcing on us now” so I can make the smart quotes work. 

However, I am unable to load my photos directly from my computer onto a blogpost in either version. The workaround for this is to upload the photos to the Google Photos app — yes, it took ‘em from my PC folder just fine — and “Insert” the photos from there. I suspect this was something done on purpose by way of forcing people to use that app, but that’s just me, and so what? Nothing’s changing until it does.

There is one bright note to all of this. It used to be that I had to go into HTML to fix how any word I italicized became twice as large as the text around it. This bug endured for years. Someone finally thought to step on it.

That said, New Blogger still doesn’t get its own font sizing commands. Large text becomes medium-sized text and captions are illegibly small, however many times you highlight and hit the “Normal” button. As always, it’s fixed in HTML or not at all, and you still can’t count on what you saved to stick. You’ll come back to an already published post and see all kinds of haywire formatting. Why? How? I don’t know, I don’t care. I just wish it would stop. 

It won’t, of course. This is on me for not following through with my Wordpress account. Moving along, then....

Like I don’t have enough on my desk already.

TEN YEARS GONE: This morning as I fed the cats I was impressed by the autumnal quality of the air, and on the first of July, at that. Then I remembered walking out from my house in Colorado Springs on the first of July ten years ago. It was sunny and hot, the clear blue sky of another world because this was the first day in 20 years we were not getting paid and taken care of by the Department of the Navy.

My wife had officially retired the day before, just in time for the Great Recession to hollow out the IT industry I was hoping to break into with my MCSA and CompTIA certs. We had both hoped to land GS jobs on the Air Force Academy but abused wage-slave NAF was the best we could do. 

All that, and I was Class II obese. I was still two years from figuring out how to write a novel, and three years from being published. It would be five years before I finally gave up on temporary work, as the gigs were only getting worse on top of so few and far between that I might as well not bother.

So I wrote and published two novels, lost 50 pounds, then another 30, moved 200 miles from where I’d been living for nearly ten years, got cancer, got over it, and here we are now, 308 pages deep into the last novel of my series.

What a ride, is all I have to say. Hands down, my 50s have been the most inspirational and productive decade of my life. I thought I should say something about it.

It really is like this, For me, it describes mid-2012 until now, so, whoa. Eight years.