2020, eh?

For quite awhile now, there’s been too much to say, to say anything.

But in the fifth month of This Particular Thing, the fifth month of being in this house virtually every hour of every day, I thought I would sit down and compose some words anyway, rather than for instance just going entirely mad.

Donald Trump is the President of the United States. Until it happened, this was a thing that people in SF novels would say to reveal that they were from a crazy alternate universe.

He’s the worst President of the United States in living memory, certainly, and perhaps in all of history. He’s evil and corrupt, and while there may have been prior Presidents just as evil and corrupt, he does it in a way simultaneously so blatant and so bungling that it becomes an entirely new kind of thing: exposing countless people to harm, of course, but also normalizing it, and normalizing being unapologetic about it, and calling into question whether fairness and integrity and truth and competence even exist.

And somehow, he has supporters. Enough that he might even be re-elected, at least given the amount of voter suppression and outright fraud that his party has shown themselves willing to do. To their eternal shame.

It is going to take us so long to recover from this obscenity.

Then there is the virus. Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, or “SARS-CoV-2”, or “the virus that causes COVID-19” (for reasons). And the disease, COVID-19, not because there were 18 previous ones, but because it’s a Coronavirus-caused disease discovered in 2019. Probably.

I last went to work in Manhattan on the last Thursday in February. I worked from home the next day, because I would generally work from home on Fridays, because commuting to the city five days every week was a bit tiring. The weekend, as far as I can recall, was normalish. But I woke up on Monday morning feeling sick, and didn’t go to work.

(In retrospect, given the relative lack of respiratory symptoms and also that I’ve had a negative antibody test since, it was probably just my usual sort of change-of-seasons virus, not The Virus.)

I slept pretty much straight through the next three days, and felt a bit better on Wednesday. A bit more better on Thursday, but worked from home just to be safe. And worked from home on that Friday also.

By Monday, March 9th, 2020, there were significant stories in the news about this new virus, and people were starting to work from home. So I did, too, and I haven’t been back to work in Manhattan since.

I’ve barely been out of the house. To the grocery and back a few times, to pick up the groceries that they nicely put into bags for us to pick up. To pick up food a few times, although we almost always have it delivered. Quite a few walks just around the local neighborhood, with a mask of one kind or another, when it’s not storming or too hot. Not enough walks, really, I should do that more.

I did get into Manhattan once, by car, with the little boy, to pick up the little daughter. It was a nice day, and good to see a few different things, the City still there, looking almost normal (too normal?).

So now we are all four in the house, just like the old days except the kids are older (and so are we how about that haha) and it is 2020 so everything is somewhat crazy.

We cook HelloFresh dinners (for four) four days out of seven now, which is

I’ve been playing WoW a bit, but I’m sort of tired of it and the new expansion isn’t out yet. I have a bunch of max level (120) characters, and leveling more (there’s a 110 and a 100 that I’m working on) isn’t very interesting.

I’ve been playing Borderlands 2 at the little boy’s suggestion, and that was fun for awhile, but having leveled a Gunzerker to level 24 and an Assassin to level 15, I’m kind of tired of that now also.

I’ve started playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons, also at the kids’ suggestion, and that’s kind of fun (swimming!), but (I think by design) for only a limited amount of time per day.

I’ve been reading. Some. I re(rere?)read Hesse’s Journey to the East the other day. It’s real short, of course. The various bits of anachronistic chauvinism were a bit jarring, and I thought about what a modern retelling of the story might be like. Maybe I’ll try writing that some time.

I’m reading Mark Bray’s “Antifa Handbook”. It’s good, if a bit dry and historical.

I’m meditating (sitting, zazen, shikantaza, the practice of the Buddha ancestors), also not as often as I could.

I’m on Twitter a lot (speaking of antifa), being all snarky and Leftist and #acab and “trans women are woman” and “sex work is work”, and getting into more or less snarky and more or less respectful discussions or disputes with people of other points of view.

Also there are massive protests, various Autonomous Zones, the murder hornets, Epstein and Maxwell, all the specific individual insane and stupid and evil things that the aforementioned Trump is doing, the giant dust-cloud, the worrying new swine flu strain, the signals from space, the fires in Australia (I hope those are out by now), the whole Brexit thing (I guess they are still doing that?), and a few dozen other things that would have been The Major Story of the Year in any sensible year.

But it’s still 2020.

I don’t know why I’m writing this, really. To get some practice in putting words down, maybe. To help organize the vast mass of impressions coming out of this crazy year.

2020, eh?