Goodbye, 2020! We Knew Ye Well!

 

So here we are, watching one of the weirdest years on record crawl out the back door.  It’s odd to write “weird”   about a year that’s not just personally weird.  It has been a globally weird year. Hardly a soul on the planet has been unaffected by the pandemic—the hype, the fear, the sadness, the illness, the death, the economic disaster.

And here in the US, we have had to pile Trump and MAGAts and all their antics on top of the pandemic shit heap.  And the way those antics have multiplied the disaster of the pandemic a hundredfold.

Yep. 2020 has been a shit sandwich.  And all that shit has piled up and sat on top of my brain and my fingers and my keyboard, and made it impossible to write more than flurries of 280-character tweets.

Looking over 17 years of “Coming to Terms,” I noticed that my all-time low of posting seems to have occurred  in 2014.  Thirty-seven posts in an entire year.  No idea what happened in 2014 that was so much more interesting than writing.  Or that might have been so heavy and horrid…or “weird”…that made it so I couldn’t write.   I’m never happy with all-time lows when it comes to writing.

And, lookie here! Only 36 entries for all of 2020!  I could do it!  I could hit a new all-time low!  And there would be no year more deserving than this shit sandwich of a pandemic, MAGAt, Trump-ridden, rotten-ass year.

But, no.   

I’m going to write a post.  This post.  And I’m going to stick it out there.

Because, in spite of all the shit that is 2020, I have things to be grateful for.  A lot of things.

We still have a roof over our heads, food to eat, vehicles to drive.

We have stayed healthy.

We have our  “children”—even though we’ve lost 3 in the space of a year.

We have family, who also have roofs over their heads, food to eat, vehicles to drive.

We have rejected, as a nation, a sick old snake oil salesman and his mob of criminals.

There is much to be thankful for.

So here are a few paragraphs, just to let the Universe know that I appreciate that 2020 could have been a lot worse.  And I am forever grateful that it wasn’t.

Goodbye, 2020.  You weren’t the worst.  But still…don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

 

Brighter Days Ahead

 

Thoughts on a Pandemic Holiday

 

 

What will I miss about this year’s non-holidays?

I don’t know. 

The past several years, my holiday observance has mostly consisted of decorating the crap out of the house (for my own enjoyment only, since we have no friends and I don’t entertain); buying a few presents for family (who don’t really need or want anything); attending holiday concerts or plays or some other entertainment (though these have become more rare, as time has gone by and tickets to such things have become prohibitively expensive.) 

At least the decorating has gone on anyway.  It’s not like I have to go out and GET decorations.  And I will say, decorating for the holidays has been the first time since March that I have actually felt NORMAL.  It’s the one thing the pandemic hasn’t tarnished, spoiled, or taken away.

Gift shopping has become more of a chore than a joy, so I won’t miss that.

 Concerts and such are so expensive, and the ones we can afford kind of…suck.  So I can take a pass on those this year without too much remorse.

Still, the holidays are a bit…flat.  We passed on Thanksgiving entirely—cooked up hamburgers and fries for the holiday feast for the two of us.  And we won’t be gathering with the family for Christmas, either.  We text, we Zoom; but I’m not comfortable with spending many hours in close quarters indoors with…well, anybody.  So that’s not going to happen.

But I got to thinking the other day:  There is one thing…a thing that actually disappeared more than a decade ago…that I will particularly miss this holiday season.   Because a pandemicly challenged Christmas would have been the perfect time for it.

And that is…

AOL j-land.

 

I remember those days, particularly the holidays of 2004 and 2005, when Journal-land was in its heyday.  We had such a lovely community, and we had a mostly good time getting to know each other and sharing traditions, pictures, games, stories, memories, and sometimes gifts, with people all over the country or even across the world.

I remember being so stoked about instant messaging with a journal friend who lived in the UK on New Years’ Eve 2004.  It seemed like such a miracle of technology…the very best this newfangled “internet” had to offer.

Social media in its infancy.

What a glorious couple of years!

And then social media grew up.  And became…well, we all know what it became.  Hardly bears thinking about, how quickly the human race turned what seemed such a bright and hopeful gift into a shithole.

I had to wade out of the Facebook cesspool over a year ago, mostly leaving behind the few friends I had left from the original AOL J-land.  I keep banging away here on Coming to Terms, but the old friends don’t come around much.  Or if they do, they choose to leave no trace…  And to add insult to injury, recent shifts in the blog continuum have erased the names from the comments on posts transferred here from AOL and rendered them all “anonymous,” so when I go back to visit the old neighborhood, it’s peopled with nameless ghosts.

But…yeah.  I thought about AOL J-Land the other day, and how its comfort and wonder and innocence would have been perfect during what promises to be a strangely detached and lonely holiday season.  Those connections were a treasure and a lifeline 15 years ago.  What a nurturing miracle they would be now!

Anyway…

Happy Holidays to any of my old Journal-land friends who may stop by.

Stay safe, stay healthy.  Get the shot when it gets around to you.

I miss you.

One Too Many Goodbyes

 

It’s been more than a week since we sent our sweet Alvin back to the Spirit.  It was his time, I know.  And I know we’ll meet again, his spirit and my own…because we’re really just fragments of the same spirit.

But…I miss him SO MUCH.  Probably moreso because he was the last of our three orange boys—the two brothers who came to us as tiny babies in 2004, and the moon-faced foundling who adopted us in 2009.  All gone from us, now, within less than a year of each other.   

I try to express my gratitude to the Universe every morning—for keeping us safe and well and more or less financially solvent during these strange, difficult times.  For blessing me with a good, solid partner. For planting the urgency in us that drove us to downsize in time to meet this crisis. 

 But I can’t help but feel that the loss of our three boys in such a short period of time has been...perhaps, unnecessarily brutal.

Alvin.  The soft, round, roly-poly orange-and-white.  He and his brother were so tiny when we brought them home…barely five weeks old. 

  

 

They bonded with us so completely that we used to joke that they were “hand-tamed parakeets.”  They loved us, they loved everybody.  Guests or family, any hand was good for petting.   Alvin was so happy to be carried around that, when you tried to put him down, you had to make sure his feet were under him and would be the first thing to hit the ground.  He was so sure that you would carry him around forever, he never learned to “lower his landing gear.” If you just carelessly dropped him—like you might with any other cat—he was likely to fall on his butt or his back, then look up at you like, “Why did you do that?”

  

Alvin loved water.  He was the guardian of the water dish—any water dish.  He would climb up in the sinks—bathroom or kitchen—and suckle on the faucets as if they provided golden drops of life's most precious elixir. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He was good at consuming things that were not food.  All his life, we had to keep him away from toilet paper and paper towels. He didn't just unroll them and make a mess, he actually ATE the paper.  And ribbon!  One Christmas, he got under the tree and ate every piece of ribbon he could get his teeth into. He ate so much that I thought he might have killed himself.  Luckily, what didn't come back up as technicolor barf made its way out the other end eventually. But from then on, we watched him like a hawk on Christmas, birthdays, anniversaries...an day there might be presents around.

And, Alvin was always good for pitching in on home improvement projects.  

But most of all, I think, Al loved his brother Theo.  They were two halves of a whole for their entire lives.  When Theo died in June, I wondered how much longer we would be able to keep Alvin going.  As it turned, out, it wasn’t very long.

 

Sleep well, my boys!  Then romp among the stars until we’re together again!

Ow Goes to Join His Brother

 

The Fateful Day

Four years ago, I went out on a wildlife photography expedition to get away from the election day hype.  I was 85% confident that the American people were not stupid enough to elect an idiot snake oil salesman to the highest office in the land.  I went to Sauvie Island for the afternoon...it was a beautiful bright blue autumn day, and I was enchanted by an amazing up close and personal encounter with a very accommodating barred owl.

I only wish the owl encounter was the sole reason that day will be forever branded in my memory.   

Because, of course, I returned home that evening to witness the horrifying debacle of Trump's victory.

In that turbulent time, after the initial shock had worn off...as much as it was EVER going to wear off, we at least had the slimmest of hopes that it wouldn't be as bad as we thought it was going to be.  That Trump might actually rise to the occasion, and become, at best, a mediocre chief executive, rather than the dumpster fire his campaign performance indicated he would be. 

That hope was stubborn, and raised its demented head every time Trump faced a challenge that needed to be met with the temperament of an adult human being.  After about the sixth or seventh such incident within the first few months of his "reign," we all realized he was exactly who and what he displayed during the entire 2016 presidential campaign, and he was not going to miraculously change or learn or step up.  Quite the opposite, in fact.

And, we watched, horrified, as the rank and file GOP lined up and endorsed the Dumpster Fire President. The dumpster fire has raged unchecked ever since.

Now, it's four years later.  After a year from hell, an entirely fitting preamble to tonight's proceedings,  the moral fate of the United States of America will again be up for grabs.  And despite all the polls and all the hype and all the "resistance," I can't think there is one human being in the entire country who believes the result of the election is sure...in either direction.  We all saw what happened last time.  We have all witnessed the ever-increasing insanity of THIS campaign season. The only thing of which we can be absolutely certain is that shit is going to hit the fan tonight.  We don't know which way the shit is ultimately going to blow.  My guess is that a fair amount is going to fall upon both sides.

In contrast to Election Day 2016, I creaked out of bed late this morning.  Rose later than I have in, I think, years...because I spent two hours in the middle of the night tossing and turning and stressing about today's events.

The day is cloudy and still...like it's holding its breath against the events of the evening.

I won't be going out to the wilderness to seek solace and distraction.  I don't think I could do that if you held a gun to my head.

Instead, we are slated to be releasing the spirit of one of our sweet feline companions to join his lately-departed brother to soar among the stars.

I can only beg the Universe to let this horrible year, this horrible day, usher in a result that is also as completely opposite of that day four years ago.  

 

 

 

You Go, Lady Liberty...!

 I’m just gonna leave this here, to let y’all know I’m still  alive.  I finally have a seed of an idea for the next “Ten Things About COVID” post, which I’ll hopefully get up before the end of the month. Meanwhile, enjoy this, and cross your fingers that Lady Liberty can shoot very, very far...

"She Was Just Seventeen...!"

 I have been SO disinclined to compose...anything. 

The election, Mango Mussolini, COVID, wildfires...

It's all I can do just to get up in the morning and keep myself busy and distracted for 16 hours, so I can go back to bed and slip into blessed separation from all the crap that's going on in the world.

And I distracted myself SO much, I missed my own Blog-a-versary.

Happy, Seventeenth, Coming To Terms!

I still love ya!

Ain't This The Truth...

 

 

What EVERYONE Is Thinking Right Now...

Ten Things About COVID-19 Number 7: Trump's Re-election Strategy

Rampant pandemic. Economy in the crapper. Double-digit unemployment. Epidemic of police brutalizing black citizens, resulting in riots. Americans pointing guns at Americans. THIS is MAGA America, @realDonaldTrump. YOUR dumpster fire. 

Own it. 

And prepare to go down for it.

Ten Things About COVID-19: Number Six

6.) School’s Out...Forever?

We’re half a year into a pandemic that arguably half the global population does not want to acknowledge.  Humans world-wide refuse to change their behavior in order to protect themselves from a positively identified danger.  They go so far as to create elaborate tales explaining why the scientific community has “invented” this pandemic so some not quite identified dastardly entity can take over the world.  Of course, the simple explanation is, “There is a nasty illness spreading across the globe. It could kill you. It more likely will kill your mother and dad or your friend undergoing cancer treatment. You must do these things to protect yourself/them from it.”

WHY IS THAT SO HARD?????

As we approach school season in the US, pandemic-deniers are clamoring to send the children back to school. Get them out from underfoot so their parents can go back to the crappy service jobs that replaced their REAL jobs after the 2008 crash, and our shitty “consumer economy” can get rolling in full force again.   And Trump and his amazingly far-reaching cabal can claim victory and solidify their stranglehold on the US for four more years.

I understand that in 21^st-century America, sending one’s kids off to state-funded daycare, umm…I mean school, was part of the package deal of procreation.  You only have to care for them 24/7 for the first 5 or 6 years of their lives, then you ship them off to school.  Get them out from under your feet for 8 hours a day and let someone else take the burden for awhile.  It’s a pretty attractive deal, really; and in the 2020 US economy, also an economic necessity.  Likely, both Mom and Dad need to have an income in order to maintain the somewhere-between-rich-and-poor lifestyle that has been rapidly eroding over the past 50 years.  Especially now that living-wage blue-collar jobs are a thing of the distant past.

So when people in the top levels of leadership start spouting bullshit like, “Kids don’t catch COVID-19” or “The science says that children can’t be carriers of the virus,” frazzled, worn-down, desperate parents are going to cling to that crap like shipwrecked sailors clinging to bits of floating debris.  If they thought about this at all, they would recall that children are and always have been little germ farms, and schools are and always have been giant petrie dishes where kids get, share, and bring home every bacterium, bug and virus known to mankind.  So why would THIS virus, which has been proven extremely transmittable, especially in indoor environments where humans are packed together for several hours at a time, NOT act the same as every other illness children get and bring home from school?

It doesn’t make sense, does it?  But right now, people are SO done with staying home and adhering (or not) to pandemic protocol, they are more than willing to let someone tell them what they want to hear, rather than use their own powers of reason…which might tell them that the folks saying school will be “safe” are full of shit.  

I don’t have kids.  I don’t have grandkids, or nephews or nieces of school age, so on a certain level, I don’t have a dog in this particular fight.  And I can muster up a modicum of sympathy for the parents whose lives have been upended and are desperate to get their lives back to “normal.”  Reality is a bitch, here. 

But the sooner we realize that “normal” is never coming back, the sooner we’ll get a leg up on this thing and be able to move forward again.  We have to embrace a new normal that is going to involve systems and procedures that are very different from what we’ve become accustomed to.  We are humans.  We are (theoretically) adaptable.  If we can’t/won’t adapt, we will end up where every species that has reached the limits of its adaptability has gone since the beginning of life on the planet: Extinct.  Dead as the dinosaurs. 

Is that what we want?  Because that is where we seem determined to allow ourselves to be led.    

Ten Things about COVID-19: Number Five

5.) Masking the Issue

The global medical community has been all over the map with advice to us poor contagious peons on how to slow the spread of COVID-19, and keep ourselves from catching it. 

It started out with, “Wash your hands and don’t touch your face.”  From there, it quickly jumped to “Shut everything down, stay home, don’t go out in public unless absolutely necessary.”  Early on, the mask question came up, and the experts scoffed and told us wearing masks would not be beneficial, so don’t bother. 

As time went on and infection raged, it turned out societies that were masking up were actually having success controlling spread.  So…uh-oh. We were wrong.  Masks are good.  Masks are great.  Wear a mask.

Now, I understand that dealing with a new contagion is a learn-on-the-fly sort of thing.  As time goes by and we learn more about the virus, its action and how it spreads, advice to the public on how to stay safe is going to change.  Unfortunately, this process is corrupted by our 21^st-century. instantaneous-but-not-necessarily-vetted-or-true method of broadcasting “news.”  Every entity on the planet charged with passing information on to the public is more interested in clicks and “views” than in getting the info straight.  The goal is to get eyes on THEIR medium.  Not to make sure the information sent out is good or useful or even safe.  And if it produces controversy, even better.  More clicks.

So, in the space of five months, we’ve gone from, “No need for masks” to “You HAVE to wear a mask” coming from the “expert” scientific community. Very fertile ground for the modern American “choose your own reality” crowd.   

And you have a POTUS whose policy on this nasty virus (that China sent over by way of the Democrats, to sabotage his reelection chances) amounts to “It will disappear.”  And, as such, refuses to wear a mask, and even goes so far as to say on camera that people wear masks to show their opposition to HIM. 

Now we have solidly politicized the wearing of masks; as even the smallest, least significant issue in this country has been politicized since the rise of the Tea Party and the Evangelical Right. There’s no such thing as quiet opposition.  Every god damn thing has to be a reason for us to hate and bully and smear each other.  It has to be loud and rude and ugly.

So Americans are beating the crap out of each other for wearing/not wearing masks.

And since mask-wearing has to be close to universal for it to really be effective… Case numbers, hospitalizations and deaths are experiencing a meteoric rise in the USA as we ignore any scientific advice we don't like and indulge in our ill-advised “re-opening” to save our crappy consumer economy and make sure we can keep the flow of $$$ into the pockets and off-shore bank accounts of the rich.  While we peons grovel in the trenches, intent on butchering each other, using the virus or any other means available.  No matter.  As long as those cash registers start to ring again.

Which leads me to wonder...how many ways can one pandemic kill us?