A cat-heavy month of photos. Luna had her annual checkup this month. Taking her to the vet is always an adventure. But, other than a broken tooth that needed to be removed, she’s in great shape for her age (15). The glassy-eyed photo of her below is when she just got home and was still wobbly from the anesthesia.
The highlight of the month, as far as photos go, was a weekend spent dogsitting for our friends.
Another month with not many photos taken–although I did better in January than I did in December, when I took exactly ONE photo all month (hence, no post). I shall try to do better.
I started my first blog all the way back in 2004—January of 2004, in fact, so we’re closing in on 19 years ago. In those days, I had a pretty fair amount of time I could dedicate to writing, so I posted there a lot for about a year. Then circumstances changed, I had less time, and I posted there less and less. I wouldn’t say I ever entirely abandoned it, but if I ever had any regular readers, their opinions may differ. But it was always at least in the back of my mind.
Fast forward a few years. I’m not exactly how or when Twitter entered my consciousness, but when it did, I was intrigued, mostly because of its implications for my blog. Part of the reason I felt like I didn’t have time to write is because I tend to write long (see: this post). If I signed up for Twitter, I figured I could throw a widget up on my blog so I could post little micro updates in between my infrequent longer posts. So in January of 2009 I became a member of Twitter, hoping to use it primarily as a supplement to my blog.
Well, of course it didn’t exactly work out that way. Oh, I added the widget to my old blog, where it still resides to this day, and I’ve put out plenty of tweets, but not with the frequency I thought I would when I started. There’s too much nuance in most things for me to be satisfied with just a 140-character (later 280) thought, and while I was aware of the “Twitter thread,” it seemed to me to be less optimal than a blog post. So, you know, I did neither. But it was a great place to toss out cat pics, sports takes, and Wordle scores.
Which isn’t to say that I didn’t use Twitter very much. While I wasn’t much of a poster, I’ve always really liked hopping on to read it. As blogs fell off over the years, Twitter was a great way to read people’s thoughts on the goings-on of the day, more or less in real time. Probably the most prominent example I can think of was the night Osama Bin Laden was killed—I watched the news coming out as it unfolded on Twitter, and I woke Brandi up so we could watch President Obama’s address. That was a big deal, but it was also great for everyday news stories, sporting events, pop culture events (I couldn’t wait to hop onto Twitter after episodes of The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones), etc. And you never knew when you’d come across something random that would make you laugh hysterically or lead you into some rabbit hole. Just like blogs used to do! Twitter was definitely my social media addiction.
But then Elon Musk bought it. I wasn’t thrilled about his plans to allow “absolute free speech” that would permit misinformation and abuse to proliferate without consequence, so I was wary of what his leadership would bring. Then the whole thing blew up about charging users to be verified—the whole idea of verification was to help ensure users that information was coming from an account that was actually who it claimed to be. It wasn’t a status symbol; it was a public good. But that’s something that Musk and other billionaires don’t seem to understand. So he sought to commoditize it, right before an election no less…and that was kind of it for me. I haven’t been on Twitter in almost two weeks. And that was before he fired or lost almost his entire staff, putting the stability and the future of the entire platform in doubt.
I haven’t deleted my account or anything, and I’ll probably go back to it at some point. Maybe even today! For most things I use it for—sports, pop culture stuff—Musk being in charge and his approach don’t even matter (I was really tempted to hop on last night for ridiculous hot takes on a Cincinnati Reds trade, but I held off). But for news and anything remotely serious, I think we would all do well to take anything on there with a large grain of salt, until and unless the verification issue goes back to the way it was. I mean, it isn’t like misinformation wasn’t a problem before, and if anyone can pay for a blue checkmark and claim to be whoever…it’s a nightmare. And that’s assuming Twitter survives in the long term, which is by no means certain at this point.
All of this is to say, with the uncertainty surrounding Twitter, and all the people who have left whether it survives or not, I’m really hoping blogs will make a comeback. I can’t imagine they’ll ever return to the prevalence they once had, but you never know. As for myself, I’ve been playing around with this new one and trying for a while to get it off the ground, so I’m going to try to be on here more often. This format really does suit me better, anyway. I just need to remember that every post doesn’t have to be a full-on essay; just a paragraph (or even a line or two) is fine sometimes.
Call it a lockdown, a quarantine, a shelter-in-place, a stay-at-home order…what it comes down to is that we’re all going to be spending a lot more time at home for the foreseeable future. One of the things I like to do when I have a large chuck of time is to sit down with a good book. Now, I know that for many people, reading is a type of escape that works best when they avoid anything topical. If that’s you, I regret that the bulk of this blog post is not for you. If, on the other hand, a novel about a global pandemic sounds like just the thing right now, I have a handful of suggestions.
THE STAND, by Stephen King
King is the master of horror, and what’s more horrifying—especially right now—than a widespread and deadly disease? One of his best-known books, The Stand is about a plague that wipes out 99% of the world’s population. The first half of the book details the world’s descent from normalcy to cataclysm. It then moves onto the aftermath, in which survivors mystically divide into two new societies for an apocalyptic battle between good and evil, with all the toys of modern society (the 1990 version of it, at least) ripe for the picking.
This is one of my favorite books of all time, and as I think of all the things I want to say about it, I realize that it may merit a post of its own at some point, say after my next re-read. As it relates specifically to current events, King himself has tweeted that the coronavirus is nowhere near as serious as “Captain Trips” in The Stand, and the math bears that out (also, the plague in the novel was man-made, whereas this one is not).Still, some of the parallels are a little unnerving to someone who’s read the book as many times as I have.
The miniseries they made of the book in 1994 is cheesy, but I hold a fondness for it just the same. If nothing else, the music is haunting, including the score itself, as well as “Don’t Dream It’s Over” by Crowded House and “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” by Blue Oyster Cult, which I referenced yesterday. A new version is coming to CBS All Access, supposedly sometime this year. What timing! It’ll be interesting to see if that happens, and how people react to it if so.
THE FIREMAN, by Joe Hill
The obligatory intro: Yes, Joe Hill is Stephen King’s kid. He is possibly a better writer than his old man, which is high praise coming from me; I revere King’s books, but Joe’s prose tends to be just a little leaner, which appeals to me. The illness in this one isn’t a virus but a spore that causes the infected to develop gold and black markings on their skin, known as Dragonscale. If that were all, it wouldn’t be so bad, but it also has the unfortunate tendency to cause spontaneous combustion, particularly under high stress. The eponymous Fireman is an enigmatic character who has learned to control the Dragonscale and, as it turns out, sort of lean into it for his own purposes. That comes into play as the telltale markings make survivors easy targets for those among the non-infected that hate and fear them.
With books by father and son both about the apocalypse, it’s no surprise that there are some parallels between The Stand and The Fireman. Instead of shying away, Hill has some fun with it instead.
It may be tough to get your hands on books right now, so allow me to mention that The Fireman is available through hoopla in both eBook and audiobook format. If your local library offers hoopla, you can check either format (or both!) out for free and read or listen on your phone, tablet, or computer.
LOCK IN and HEAD ON, by John Scalzi
Unlike the other books mentioned here, which detail to varying extents the events of the pandemics themselves, in Lock In, we dive right into the aftermath (although there is a novella, Unlocked, which goes into the history of the disease). The long and short of it is an illness called Haden’s syndrome causes a small percentage of the population to be “locked into” their bodies, awake and aware but unable to respond or move in any way. A virtual world has been created for those locked in, as well as technology that allows them to transfer their minds into robotic “Threeps” or, in certain circumstances, human “Integrators” that give up control of their own bodies for a limited time. Lock In is a murder mystery in which the primary suspect is an Integrator and one of the investigators is a Haden. More sci-fi than the King and the Hill, and dealing with events following a pandemic rather than the pandemic itself, this might be your best bet if you’re looking for escape.
WANDERERS, by Chuck Wendig
And if escape is what you’re looking for, this one might be a tough read right now. It just came out last summer, and the echoes of today’s reality are kind of eerie. It seems innocuous at its core: a small group of people start sleepwalking (for want of a better term) across the United States and can’t be woken or stopped. Where it gets scary is everything that comes with it: an ineffective government response, social media spreading panic and conspiracy theories, fringe groups exploiting the situation to advance their own agendas, etc. This is a good book and I definitely recommend it, but if you feel like now isn’t the time, you won’t get any argument from me. Just remember to come back to it at some point later.
