Assessing Risk to Reward Ratio

 Three counties in the state of Oregon have been designated areas of high spread of COVID.  Douglas (Roseburg), Jackson (Medford)—with population centers in the reddest of red areas of the state.  And…Lane.  That’s   right.  Good old Eugene-Springfield.  My own back yard. 

Here in Lane County, we combine deep red with indigo blue. Here reside some of the most rabid, anti-mask, anti-vax Trumpers in the state--irritated to such radicalism, one would suppose, by being forced to live in close proximity to the very, very blue community headed by the University of Oregon.  Yes, the state university...where they practice all that librul indoctrination stuff; and where they additionally entice countries from all over the globe to send their athletes, their money and their COVID to spread among the general population.  We are doubly cursed.

The Oregonian states that “People in those areas [of “high risk”] should wear masks in public indoor settings, according to the Centers for Disease Control.” 

I wear my mask.  I have never stopped wearing my mask.  I have laid in a supply of N95 masks, which I will probably continue to wear in public for the foreseeable future.  

But I am here to tell you that, regardless of CDC recommendations, the good citizens of Lane County are DONE with COVID in general, and wearing masks in particular.  

We went to a business meeting last week, and we were the ONLY folks in the room wearing masks.  When I walk into any store, I am usually the only person within my sight line so attired.  Yes, I HATE wearing the mask.  It is annoying, it’s uncomfortable, and the pressure on my jaw joints can sometimes trigger a jolly migraine.  But it’s not going to kill me to wear a mask…while I STILL don’t know what effect a COVID infection might have on my abused old body.  So…I’ll choose the mask, thank you very much.  

My supply of trusty N95’s has given me the confidence to venture out into public more than I have for over 2 years.  I’m almost to the point where I go out as much as I did pre-pandemic.  Though I still have no intention of eating indoors at a restaurant any time soon (maybe ever),  I’ve indulged in plenty of shopping—at garage sales, resale shops,  home centers and grocery stores.  For the most part, these have all been positive experiences…except for the grocery stores.   

Once upon a time, I would pull into the parking lot at Safeway, eye the prime parking spots designated for grocery pick-up, and scoff, “Who is so lazy that they even can’t go in and shop for their own groceries?”  After 2 years of pandemic protocol, I know with absolute certainty the answer to that question:  Me.   I am that customer. 

And it’s not so much that I’m lazy.  It’s that the entire experience of shopping for groceries is riddled with annoyances.  Track down a shopping cart that never seems to be present at the entrance you choose.  Navigate the obstacle course of oblivious, stupid, or downright rude other shoppers who don’t realize or don’t care that they’re not the only shoppers in the store.   

Try to unravel the mystery of what the actual prices are, dependent upon whether you do or do not possess the cherished membership card of whatever store you are in.  

Stand in a checkout line that never moves because the person in the front of the line is busy arguing with the checker about prices and coupons, or the checker is busy providing a chatty social experience for every customer.  Try the self-checkout line, only to have it freeze up at the slightest provocation, and then stand and twiddle your thumbs while “help is on the way.”   

I never realized how much I DETEST shopping for groceries until COVID-19 showed me that I could completely eliminate that arduous chore from my life and not starve to death.  And the idea that an N95 mask now magically enables me to indulge in an activity I clearly loathe holds no appeal whatsoever. 

So…you see that lady sitting in her car in one of those cherished close-in parking spots, waiting for someone to bring out  her groceries and load them in the back of her tiny SUV?  That is me.  And I don’t feel one iota of bad about it.  In fact, I’m giddy with delight.  I grin ear-to-ear all the way home. 

If nothing else, COVID has shown me what is worth risking for, and what is not.  Even if it’s not actually my health that I’m risking, but only my sanity.  So there is indeed a silver lining in every cloud, I guess.   

 

What We Really Need To Remember

 

 

Again

 

 

So...

 What's the story, social media?

Did the 4th graders not comply?

Did they bully the disaffected teenaged shooter?

Did 19 children die because there was no "good guy with a gun" in the school to shoot back?

Is the "right" to purchase multiple semi-auto weapons upon achieving the mature age of 18 a "mental health problem?" 

Though I was rattled to read of yet another mass shooting when I visited my news sites yesterday afternoon...shocked, dismayed, horrified...

I find myself relieved that I'm not really doing social media anymore.

Because I REALLY don't want to know how the gun lobby, the ammo-sexuals, the Russian bots and the crazy QAnon-ers are spinning this one.

But I guess I already DO know.  Because their arguments never change.

Loud.  Stupid.  MY rights. MY freedom.  Mine, mine, mine, mine, MINE!!!

Does ANYBODY still wonder where evil comes from?

Nostalgia

 Remember the Coke commercials from the 70's? 

"I'd like to teach the world to sing
In perfect harmony..."

Imagine…a time when a call for unity and love was actually the stuff of pop culture.

Lately, I find myself wading in a puddle of nostalgia...

One yearns for the times when people sought love

And light, and unity..

And consciously chose

NOT to do things they COULD do...

But shouldn't.

"Boring" Indeed!

 

I know.

I was going to keep  my blog positive, beautiful and affirming.

Then I made the mistake of clicking on an article on the Foxfire home screen that really pissed me off.  So, of course, I have to rant about it.  At least a little.

The article is titled "The Rise and Fall of the Star White House Reporter." It's an opinion piece based on the premise that the Biden press briefing room has become so boring that White House reporting has lost ratings (horror of horrors!) and newsrooms are going elsewhere for the kind of news that produces clicks, views, and ad revenue. Oh my fucking god!!!   

 

I'll confess, I didn't read the whole article.  I got so peeved I had to make it go away.  All I could think was, here is some idiot millennial who hasn't a clue what role news is supposed to play in a democratic republic, whining that the actual STUFF of government is too boring to make stars out of the folks who report it.  Because it's not selling soap, so "news"rooms are going elsewhere to get the good stuff.

This is everything--E.V.E.R.Y.T.H.I.N.G.--that is wrong with 21st-century "journalism."  

I wrote about this all the way back in 2005, after reading a book called "Bad News" by Tom Fenton, a former foreign news service reporter.  He bemoaned the fact that foreign news had become so "uninteresting" since the dawn of for-profit news, that major networks all but closed down their foreign offices in order to concentrate on the juicier soap operas happening right here on our own shores.  Here is a link to the piece I wrote back then: The News Is All Bad

My most succinct distillation of the issue facing the nation with the demand for "interesting" (read: sensational enough to capture the eyes of our hyper-consuming public) news was this:

With the advent of cable television, with its all-news formats creating the 24-hour news cycle, the Big Three networks—ABC, NBC, and CBS—suddenly found themselves competing for viewers in an arena where, obviously, there were big bucks to be made (after all, CNN seemed to be rolling in dough…) The news departments were designated "profit centers," where they had once been public service. Their mission changed from serving the public to entertaining it; and that, in one fell swoop, spelled the end of any meaningful news reaching the eyes of the American people.

That was seventeen years ago.  I think it can be said that, in the interim, Trump and his outrageous, evil antics multiplied exponentially the potential for disaster precipitated by this move to "for-profit news." 

This, more than even the explosion of social media, is what has led us down the path that we are on now:  The one to the ultimate destruction of our government and the American way of life.

How do we change direction--go back--especially if the journalism field is now dominated by youngsters like whoever wrote this ridiculous Politico opinion piece bemoaning the "boring" Biden Administration; "reporters" who have no idea that what they're doing has the potential to destroy the country?

We are in such big trouble.  

*Note: I did go back and try to read the rest of the article.  I'll confess once again, I didn't make it to the end.  But this time, it was more a case of  "TLDR"  (Too Long, Didn't Read)  While I don't like to look like I have the millennials' gnat-like attention span, the article could have done with some judicious "OK, that's enough" editing.  Seems like the author was trying to turn the tenor of the article back in the direction of "It's ok if the White House is 'boring,' it's not supposed to be the bad reality show it's been for the past several years... "  But he never actually got there.  So while I'm willing to concede that perhaps the writer wasn't the first tier idiot I thought he was at the outset, he didn't convincingly prove he wasn't, either.

   

A New “Subject”

It’s been a while since I’ve snapped a photo of a bird I have not photographed before.  I’ve been kind of uninspired for the past several months, camera-wise.  I’ve pretty much done the raptors, ducks and geese found in these parts.  I haven’t photographed a lot of songbirds, mostly because the little guys are so busy and quick that they’re gone before I can yank my camera out, pint it and shoot.  I’m lucky to get a recognizable image of one of the little guys; actually framing a pleasant composition with a songbird in it is rare indeed.

So…this is not that. But it is an acceptable image of a bird I’ve not had the pleasure to witness partaking at my feeder before.  Behold, the Western Tanager:

 

Bye Bye, Birdie!

 Every morning, I do a salutation to the four compass points.

When I face the East, I ask the Heart of the Universe to bathe us in its light, that we would reject our darkness.

Lately, the Universe has whispered that I should ditch the generic "we/us" and make my ask much more personal.

"Bathe ME in your light..."

And the Universe responded, "Something in your life is blocking the Light."

Twitter.  Twitter was blocking the light. 

The scales fell from my eyes, and I saw that swimming in the cesspool was not doing anything positive for anyone.  Not for any "contacts" I had on that platform.  Not for me.  Not for anyone.

So...I have ditched it.

It was surprisingly hard to make it happen...but I realized that what passes for "community" on twitter are connections that are sad, and loose, and entirely superficial.  And disposable.  

So I disposed of it.  

For now, my social media "connections" will be Instagram and this blog.  

I've abandoned the idea of online community, and even of online friendships.

But I'm going to try to keep "Coming to Terms" and my Instagram feed positive, beautiful and affirming.

I'm tired of being turned inside out by wading in negativity.

Time to drag myself out of the cesspool and into the light.

Now You See It, Now You Don't

 Yesterday morning, I woke up, opened my email, and got utterly blindsided by this:

All I could do was stare down at my ipad and breathe: "What? WHAT? WHAT?!?

It had to be a joke.  It had to be a vicious, unfunny hack from somewhere.  

There was no reason in the world that any reasonable human being could look at eighteen years of posts on "Coming to Terms" and decide it was "spam."

What the fuck IS a spam blog, anyway?

I went to my bookmarks, clicked on the one for my blogger dashboard.  Up came "Women On." 

"Coming to Terms" was, indeed, gone.

Eighteen and a half years of my life--my stories, my essays, by personal journal, my pictures--evaporated into the ether.

Just like that.  With no warning.  And for no discernible reason that I could possibly imagine. Spam, indeed! 

When I recovered my senses enough to take some kind of action, I clicked on their "unlock blog" link, and I was taken to one of those stupid "recaptcha" screens where I had to click on all the pictures containing palm trees.

That evaporated, and a little message box came up, saying something to the effect that obviously I'm not a robot, since only a real human being could perform their little hoop-jumping exercise.  So the "blogger team" would review my request to have my blog unlocked...and they were sorry for any inconvenience caused by their spam algorithms, which are not perfect, and they're still working on the bugs, and thank you and we're sorry...heh heh. They would let me know their answer in a couple of days.

And that was it.  "Coming to Terms" was gone.  I had fulfilled the only option available to me to get it back.  And now I needed to "wait."  My favorite thing in the whole wide world.

Given the chance to think about it a little more, I came to the conclusion that the source of the "report" was very probably someone I had pissed off with a comment on Twitter.  Like an idiot, I posted a link to my blog in my Twitter profile.  I had thought I was promoting myself...that perhaps I could lure a few more readers.  It never entered my mind that I had put a loaded weapon out there in the middle of the culture war battlefield, where anyone with bad intent and a rudimentary knowledge about how social media work, could pick it up and blow my head off with it. 

I was of two minds as to how to deal with this...unbelievable turn of random events.  

One side of me said, "Calm down.  This is ridiculous.  Of course they're going to give you back your blog.  They have no reason to destroy it."  

But I also knew there was no such thing as "the blogger team."  There are no human eyes examining the content of blogger blogs, any more than there are on Facebook or Twitter.  It's all about algorithms and machines that react to clicks.  Some asshole came to my blog and clicked "report," and some machine grabbed 18 years of my life and wiped it off the internet.  There's no reasoning with that.  There's no appeal process when you KNOW they are absolutely wrong.  There's just "click here and we'll let you know."  And hoping that it's the right click to get an algorithm to decide to let me have those 18 years back.

So I prepared myself for the worst.  I told myself that this might be the Universe telling me that my little blog "no longer served," and making the decision for me that it was time to let go of it.  I steeled myself to accept that and move on.  It was only a blog, not my life, that was ending.  I could go on without it.  I would go on without it.  I would survive.

But I would have to survive with a hole in my soul that you could drive a truck through.  Because that was how I felt.  

Through all the bullshit of the rise of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, through the process of social media becoming cesspools of political misinformation and central battlefields of America's ever-expanding culture war, I always thought of "Coming to Terms" as my safe place. It was mine.  My own little corner of the internet.  If only by virtue of the number of years I've kept it going...there had to at least be some kind of squatter's rights that apply to this lonely, crumbling little corner of ancient internet.  Right? 

Seriously?  Hah!  It was never mine.  It doesn't belong to me.  I only lease this little, tiny, unremarkable speck in a huge ethereal metropolis.  And the powers that be can and will kick my ass right out, on a whim, with no provocation.  AOL did it fourteen years ago.  What made me think Blogger was any different?  

So, last night, about 7:00 pm. I check my email, and am greeted by this:

Apparently my click had activated the proper algorithm to get the giant machines in the sky to give me back my blog.

Relieved?  Yes.

Ready to forgive, forget, and keep soldiering on as if this never happened?  Not hardly.

If anything, my perennial love/hate relationship with social media has advanced to hate/hate.  Seething, unrelenting hate/hate.

I don't see how I can continue relying on the internet at all, for anything.  Not for social interaction, not for information, not for an outlet for my brain meanderings.  Certainly not for a place to put things close to my heart so even my smallest audience of less than a dozen souls can read, and know me, and agree or disagree, or at least know I'm still alive.  

I always thought I knew that being on Twitter was like dancing with a poisonous snake, but I never imagined actually getting bitten, and what that would look like.

Now I know.

And now, I have to figure out what I want to do about this whole mess.

But I strongly suspect that my internet presence is going to shrink drastically...possibly to nothing.  

I'll have to see.   

In parting, this is what I have to say to Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, and all varieties and permutations of social media that have cropped up like deadly toadstools in the past 20 years:

    ...and the evil capitalist AI horse--the one dragging the world over the cliff into the abyss--that you rode in on.  

  

One For Biden

 If Joe Biden does nothing else during his administration, he did put in motion the process for this historic appointment to the SCOTUS. For that, we thank him.  Welcome to the court, Justice Jackson.

The One You Feed

 People need to get a clue about the nature of mankind and where evil resides.  Had this exchange with someone on Twitter...