Wednesday, December 29, 2021

Pretty as a Picture

Social media is beating the crap out of me lately.  I'm not just a little fish in a big pond, I'm a microbe in the ocean.  I keep hanging around Twitter and Instagram because...well, I really don't know why.  

I thought Instagram would be a good place for me to post some of my favorite pictures...as pictures are what got the most (positive) attention when I was on Facebook, anyway.  But, no.  They go up and get lost in all the noise, I guess.

So, anyway...  Here is a picture of which I am quite proud, got 4 "likes."  Meh.  

So I've decided to post it here.  In fact, I have an idea to fill the rest of the days of this year (all 2 of them) with my favorite bird pictures of 2021.  Let's see if I can actually make that happen... 


 


Sunday, December 26, 2021

Pandemic Christmas Take 2

 


The holidays of 2020 were a non-event.  We spent the traditionally most hyper-social weeks of the year hiding in our homes and avoiding other human beings like the plague they were.  And, here we are, stumbling through yet another holiday season overshadowed by a pandemic that has been playing havoc with the familiar pattern of the global status quo for almost two full years.  What gives?

Last New Years, despite warnings from an over-stretched and largely ignored scientific community, the world decided that the pandemic would fade into history before the end of 2021.  The virus would recede, if only because we demanded it do so, and things would get back to “normal.” Because we were not going to settle for anything less than full restoration of our pre-pandemic lives.  And we all know how that has worked out. 

On social media, there has been strident lamentation that the promise we water-boarded out of Baby New Year 2021 has been criminally welshed upon.

I’ve run up against a tidal wave of wailing and gnashing of teeth because 2021 has turned out to be as much an aggressive bust as 2020.  Family, friends, 95% of the internet is grousing and grumbling that they are sick of this pandemic shit, SO over the restrictions, and convinced, after 24 months of  “deprivation,” that life is not going to ever get better.  Our bra-less, sweat-panted bodies, remote in one dessicated hand, phone in the other, will molder to dust in our empty homes, never again to occupy our favorite table at Applebees or gleefully dig through the after-holiday sales counters at Macy’s.

Oh, waaah!  

Seriously, do I have to write a “ten things” list about why 2021 was such an exponential improvement over 2020?

Apparently, I do.  So here it is:

1.)Donald Trump is no longer president of the United States.

2.)We learned that the virus is not easily transmitted by surface contact, and therefore we don’t have to bleach/sanitize our groceries or anything else that comes through the front door.

3.)Trump was banned from social media.  No more getting up in the morning and cringing in fear of what the asshole-in-chief had blasted out over Twitter while we were sleeping.

4.) Shortages of basic necessities like toilet paper, paper towels, hand sanitizer, disinfectants and N95 masks have eased.  Apparently, “enterprising” Americans grew bored of buying up these commodities and then selling them on ebay for thousands of $$$ in profits. Ah…capitalism!

5.) Donald Trump is no longer president of the United States.

6.) Vaccines and new treatments have given us some confidence that if we DO catch this thing, we might not actually die from it.

7.) Melania Trump was not in charge of the White House Christmas decorations this year.

8.) The creation of our family “pod” allowed the eight of us to get together on Thanksgiving AND Christmas with reasonable expectations of safety.

9.) I have become proficient at navigating “curbside pick-up” sites and apps.

10.) Donald Trump is no longer president of the United States.  This cannot be celebrated enough.

Things ARE looking up, if not quite as far up as we demanded they would by now.  It might be said that things would have been hard pressed to get any lower, so there was no place to go BUT up.  Still, it doesn’t do not to acknowledge the good things just because you’re determined to continue to wallow in the bad.

There’s an essential lesson to be gleaned from our first modern experience of a global pandemic:  We need to quit wishing, hoping, expecting, demanding things get back to “normal.”  That which we perceived as “normal” 24 months ago is as gone as the last dinosaurs.  And if we don’t resolve to make use of the great brains and opposable thumbs that separate us from all other terrestrial creatures, past and present, we will be the next species to trudge into the mists of extinction. 

Because we have two options if we want to continue to live here on earth: “Adapt or die.”  Those are our choices.  There is no “Wrestle the earth and make it adapt to us.”  We’ve been trying to do that for centuries.  And it has only served to hurry us along on the road to our own destruction.

Economically speaking, businesses and industries that adapt to commerce in a post-pandemic world are the ones that will survive and thrive.  Old business models that gained dominance through abusive employment practices will suffer.  After all, who wants to risk their lives for wages that have to be government subsidized to even keep a roof over ones head?  And how about bringing manufacturing back to this side of the ocean, so our supply chains become less dependent upon trans-oceanic transportation and how other countries conduct production in a pandemic?

Can’t get people to come work for you?  Putting up signs blaming the government is not going to save your ass.  Declaring an entire class of people “expendable” in the name of shoring up a rotten economic structure that needed little more than a nudge to send it crashing down, won’t carry you into the future, either.  We’re looking at a future where humans who are cautious, thoughtful and less frivolously social are more likely to survive than those who wish the pandemic away and crash ahead exactly as they always have because they refuse to “live in fear.”

And, by the way, a corollary to adapting is to just…adapt.  Move forward.  The ways of the past are exactly that.  Past.  And certainly no part of anyone’s personal, uncontestable, self-serving “rights.” 

Get over it and move on.  The future will be enjoyed by those of us who do.  And meanwhile, we’ll do our best to appreciate what there is to enjoy right now, as well.  Because…why wallow?      

Tuesday, December 21, 2021

No Regrets...Just Disbelief


 

When I first started this blog, eighteen years ago, I named it “Coming to Terms With Middle Age.”

I don’t remember exactly when I changed the name.  But it seems to me the “middle age” boat sailed away a long time ago.  Every time I think about something from my past, these days, it comes as a fresh shock that so much of my past was very long ago.

My memories of school are barely accessible across the chasm of the fifty-plus years that separates them from today.

The nineties, which I tend to think of as the more recent past, are hardly more accessible.  That old saw—“Where did the time go?”—invades my consciousness at least once a day.

         In 1991, my 68-year-old mother tripped over an extension cord in her bedroom and broke her femur just above her knee.  Because of encroaching osteoporosis, the break never healed properly, and she used a walker or a wheelchair for the rest of her life.  But the family took this more or less in stride.  After all…she was old.

Last Saturday, we bought a walker at a resale shop for my 68-year-old SISTER.  Decades of chronic back inflammation, inner ear/balance issues and never having decent health insurance have put her in a place where she needs the support/security of a walker to remain acceptably active and mobile.

Thank providence my dad never lost his mental faculties.  He slowed down some, and began to have heart problems in his early 70’s.  But he was dead of cancer before he made it to 80.  It was sad; we were heartbroken.  But he was old.

My older sister’s husband, in his mid-seventies, is declining daily from a dementia that has been creeping up on him for awhile, but seems to have exploded over the last three or four years.  He hallucinates; he inhabits elaborate delusions starring all manner of people and animals only he can see.  She can’t leave him alone for more than about a half hour at a time.  This will surely kill him…he may not see 80 any more than my dad did.  But this will happen within the next couple of years.    

What the actual fuck??!?

Thirty years seemed terribly long in the context of how much older our parents were than us. And now? Three decades have flown by, propelled by the ever-rising winds of time, whisking us to the place where we could never imagine ourselves thirty years ago:

The land of Old. We are old people.  We literally ARE our parents…our parents as we knew them just a very short time ago—old, enfeebled, so much closer to the end of life than the beginning. 

Middle age came and went in a snap.  I never did actually come to terms with it.

And now, I’m face to face with something new.

No. Not new.  Old.     

I can’t even begin to think of coming to terms with it yet.  Because first I have to believe I’m really here, looking it square in the face.  And foolish, deluded me… I am just not there yet.       

    

Sunday, December 19, 2021