I have scheduled a measles booster for Monday (after confirming with Mom that I had only a single measles vaccine in 1972). It would be so stupid to die or even be sickened by a 20th Century disease. It would be even more stupid to find next month that I can't get vaccines because health insurance no longer has to—or is forbidden from—cover  it. Or hospitals and their associated primary care clinics will have funding withheld if they offer them so they've stopped. Or that there simply are no vaccines available because their development manufacture has been suspended in the U.S. or decimated because there's no funding and everyone's been fired.

If you think those scenarios are impossible—or even unlikely—you lack necessary critical thinking skills or have completely buried your head in the sand.

I am so angry about this for several reasons. But I'm going to focus on just one of those reasons for a moment: the small-scale economic devastation of failing to control preventable illness through vaccines and public health investment.

In early March 2020, when the COVID pandemic was just a rumor, Spouse was already 100% remote at his job, and my job had no in-office requirement, except for meetings. Spouse and I  had flown home from Tahoe over the weekend and I was in my office for a staff meeting that Monday the 2nd. At the staff meeting, I told my boss that on the advice of my father-in-law, I was going to stay at home as much as possible for a little while and would not be coming into the office at all if he was okay with that. 

Friday that week, I was supposed to meet Mom & Sister at the Art Institute, but we canceled. I went to the LBTQ Giving Circle fundraiser at Beauty Bar that Friday anyway and stopped in at the Pop Up Karaoke show down the block. But I felt weird and went home early. That was the last time I went out for a long time.

 I don't know if it was Pop Up's last show, but it had to be close to it because Illinois closed bars and restaurants for dining-in on the 15th and closed schools on March 17. 

March 17th was the day Illinois recorded its first official death—although the first reported case in Chicago was in January. The first person-to-person transmission in the US was also in Chicago, on January 30. The first recorded death in the U.S. was on February 6 in San Jose, California (a death in Kirkland, Washington on February 29 was originally identified as the first U.S. COVID-related death).

At any rate, this was early March before people really began reacting with alarm.  But it was not a big deal for me to just stay home, work from my personal laptop, cut back on the social activities for a while. I had no idea how disconnected and devastating the next year would be, but the disruption to my income, to my career, to the work-a-day lives in my household was nearly imperceptible, starting from that first casual comment to my boss that I was going to work exclusively from home for a while.

My job has never returned to in-office work, except for occasional meetings or voluntary in-office days. 

So what does this have to do with the measles booster I'm getting on Monday? And with my anger at the right-wing lunatics running the government who have canceled planning for seasonal vaccines?

I have a lot of friends who are service industry and hospitality professionals. People who manage restaurants or bars; who handle events at hotels; who run or provide the entertainment at venues (the karaoke, the live lit, the cabaret); who tend bar; who emcee. When they can't go to work, they don't earn income. They lose clients. They lose their jobs. And when they can go back to work? Those clients are not still there.

When mass-scale illness prevents them from working, their present livelihoods, as well as their futures, disappear. Their careers suffer and they may never recover.

It's not just that the next pandemic, which is likely coming, will devastate them, ordinary flu season threatens them. If they can't vaccinate themselves, they are at risk. If their audiences and patrons can't vaccinate themselves. the patrons  either stay home, reducing incomes, or they come anyway and make everyone sick. Either way, the people who work to keep the venues open and interesting are the ones who suffer both immediate income loss and diminished income potential. Bars, restaurants, clubs are still broken from the last time. What will the next time do to them? 

And it's so unnecessary.

What is the intent of withholding ordinary effective seasonal vaccines from the general population? I have my opinions on that, but my opinions on intent are unimportant because where intent is unproven, impact is not. We have seen what uncontrolled, easily spread illness does to the livelihoods and lives of businesses and business people who can't just work from home. I have seen what it did to friends and colleagues.

More than merely unnecessary to expect them to bear those risks, it's immoral. It's cruel. But it's also profoundly stupid, It's policy designed by a person without any concept of how businesses work, much less how societies, economies and governments do. 

I am so angry at this.

So I'm getting a measles booster because I can control that. Just like I got a pneumonia vaccine last month. And my Covid and flu shots every year. As long as they remain available, I'll get them. And when my insurance company stops paying for them, I can probably afford to keep up with them.

And I will because the only truth I know is: none of us is responsible only for ourself.

.

Don’t be fooled by Lutheran intellectuals who nail inflammatory manifestos to the church doors about “freedom” and “equality” and “social justice” while their entire personal lifestyle management system depends totally on the patronage of the feudal noble classes. Unless you want your corpses hung up in cages from posts outside city hall, and replaced with sculptures of your corpses hanging in cages when the originals wear out and the example they set must be kept around for several more centuries. If that’s what you want, then good luck storming the castle, fellas.

I am grateful for the oppportunity to do trivia nights, and tonight was another fun one.  We had a guest emcee who played a pleasing (to me) playlist of Billy Joel and Simon & Garfunkel.  It didn't hurt that My Favorite Team has continued its winning ways!

On November 17, 1968 an NFL game between the Jets and the Raiders was interrupted by this scheduled made-for-TV movie.

This 1962 children's picture book by Ezra Jack Keats features an African-American boy enjoying wintry activities.

The franking privilege permits members of Congress to do what?

A major U.S. airport is named for this aviator who was the Navy's first fighter ace of World War II.

One of the moments in Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis where I had an epiphany was when he talks about how you can know you are talking to somebody whose brain has been captured completely by the cloud feudalists: they talk about things like Amazon, for example, like those platforms are The Market, and when you point out that Amazon is nothing like an actual market, and it is in fact the opposite of The Market, they get mad at you and refuse to consider it even possible that you’re not some kind of dangerous loon.

This is the cultural hegemony that we are pressed most urgently to overthrow.

After several auditions as a substitute, I was formally inducted into a trivia team tonight, and we won a runaway victory.  I'm sure the emcee was gratified to announce "My Favorite Team are the winners with 108 points."  Memorable questions included:

Better known by this pen name, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson​​​​​​​ published his most famous children's novel in 1865.

This desert covers parts of Namibia, Botswana, and South Africa.

After Pac-Man and Space Invaders, the second installment of this martial arts arcade game is the third highest-grossing arcade game of all time.

This Dallas-based department store chain founded in 1907 is known for its Christmas catalog with outlandish gifts.

Long story short: Last week, I had my first positive response to my job hunt efforts from a company called Aircall. They're looking for a tech support guy.

Today at 2:30pm I had my first interview with them. I was pleased to find that instead of someone in HR, the (Zoom) interview was with the guy who would be my boss if all goes well.

We chatted. It went generally well. It became clear to me that the thing I could use the most improvement on is my (never finished) CCNA studies that I mentioned on my resume.

CCNA certification, for those who don't know, is costly in both time/effort and financially for the testing. So I told him that I wouldn't register for the course until we had things a little more solidified (I should hear back in ~1 week according to him) but that I would get on refreshing myself via YouTube and other resources. He seemed to really like that.

So that's what I'm doing now. I found this CCNA Full Course on YouTube and dove in.

Wow. It's amazing how much of this is coming back to me and how quickly. I'm now actually a little worried that I undersold my networking prowess in the interview.

Sure, I'm only a couple videos into the playlist, but everything he's covered so far brought back very specific memories from my I.T. past.

I have to say - that feels really damn good.

Oh, and the starting pay is better than I hoped, and the job is fully remote, so I could work from anywhere! Please keep your fingers crossed for me. :)

My neighbors this year skipped the ER fireworks and went for the morgue fireworks instead. Good neighbors should not disturb the dust in others' houses. Here's hoping that the 4th won't bring war crime fireworks.

What’s that? More whiny self-deprecation, please? Your holiday wish is granted!

Just after Thanksgiving I was CC'd on an email with the subject "Re: Links for Writers". Not too surprising, considering my habits, except that the thread was fourteen years old and I had no recollection of it, the context, or the contributors. The new message:

What now? Who the? Is this coming from inside the house?

The thread was from a creative writing class offered by Main Line School Nights, a non-credit "lifelong learning" program out of Radnor/Wayne (MontCo, PA). That name rang a distant, misshapen bell. Couldn't tell you where it was held, nor identify a single name or face from the class. My only memory is of an in-class prompt to write an over-the-top "dark and stormy night" prologue, and doing something about a posh couple pulling up their blood-brown Bentley to the porte-cochère of the gloomy, fog-cowled Stabbington Estate or something. And...that's it. K*****a? I don't even k*****a!

Long/short: I agreed to help.

I’ve been part of five writers’ groups over the years. Few of the members were traditionally published. Most had no dedicated or accredited writing instruction. There were YA’s penning their epic Harry-Potter-but-with-Furries breakout novels, twenty-somethings developing their Hunger-Games-but-with-Furries breakout novels, thirty- and forty-somethings with their (requisite) epic Game-of-Thrones-but-with-Furries breakout novels, some dark fantasy with prose well into the ultraviolet (ahem), some “literary” superhero stuff well into the ultraviolet (ahem), expertise-specific hard sci-fi with the usual flat archetypes showing off said expertise, so many seniors with memoirs, some poetry with no verbs, a few folks just learning English...

And K*****a’s emailed draft ranks... It’s rough. An accounting of its problems isn’t necessary; assume that everything that can go wrong with English prose occurs at some point. But this is the dear, personal work of a seasoned, educated, multilingual professional who's just starting their journey as an author. Of course it’s raw, loose, flawed. Awful, as she feared. There’s no virtue in savaging a freshman effort; it’s not like she’s E. L. James or Dan Brown.

In later emails she asks after these bullet points (copy/pasted):

• Characters- fully fleshed out? strength, credibility, way they speak, actions, relationships with other characters

• Main character- all the above, plus do you get her, are you rooting for her?

• Narrative - overall story strength, relatability, interest?

• Plot- keeps your interest? Are you wondering/do you care what will happen? Too dramatic/not dramatic enough? Mundane? If you start daydreaming during a section- that means I need to improve it!

• Structure- it’s unusual, does it work?

• Chapters- number, organization, length, level of detail

• My writing style (author’s voice)- any irritating features or inconsistencies? Repetitive? Unclear?

• What’s missing? Are there any fatal flaws?

• What/How can it be improved?

It’s so much a “starter” project that it’s hard to know what feedback or depth of feedback would be most helpful. Some of what she’s concerned about is lost in the background noise. “What’s missing?” Shit if I know.

Were this my first work, what would I have needed to hear? At some point I was where she is; what feedback helped me level up? Actually, I don’t remember. It was quite a while ago.

Quite a while.

Her email shook me up. Fourteen years?! And MLSN wasn’t my first rodeo! I’ve been “at this” for...for how fucking long now?

My BFF is author River Adams (they/them). River and I attended some of the same nonsense writing classes back in the day. We traded drafts, critiqued one another. They came to the U.S. at age nineteen not knowing even basic conversational English; they now have an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson (among other degrees). Their 2023 literary debut novel, The Light of Seven Days, has been nominated for several awards, and rightly so. Highly recommend it. They’ve appeared in a number of literary journals, and their first book, published in 2014, years before the MFA, was a quirky biography and also well received.

How’s my journey going?

Since my ol’ undergrad days I’ve attended several (how many is “many”?) non-credit “adult ed” writing, uh, “classes”, and four for-credit college-level writing courses (only one dedicated to straight fiction). Let’s not count the how-to books and videos. Been a paying member of two writers’ guilds. I can occasionally write solid scenes. Individual lines of dialogue mostly ring as natural, but not so all exchanges between characters. I still abuse commas, em dashes, semicolons, and parentheses (obvs). I’m inclined to overwrite, aiming for “clever” and “erudite”, pushing my prose into purplish Gordian configurations, but I’m getting better at dialing it back. No, really! I’m not an astute observer of human nature, so my character building and development leave some readers cold or bemused. My story arcs are shaky; I know the various theories for satisfying storytelling (Freytag, Campbell/Vogler, Truby, Harmon, Snyder, Coyne, acts, rising tension, complications, beats, stakes, promises, all-is-losts [alls-are-lost?], false endings...), but effective implementation is still the next story away. What’s that? Theme? Are you kidding me right now?

Got 40k into a “literary” (har!) superhero novel but abandoned it when I realized it thoughtlessly depended on stale, tasteless tropes (refrigerating the lesbian pal, manic pixie dream girl, the “crazy homeless guy” that’s victim and antagonist, all that bullshit. Shameful.) Dozens of unfinished short stories, a bunch of barely-outlined novels, a few stabs at screenplays, a terrible, terrible play written for class, some other garbage (I am NOT a poet). One submission to an online sword & sorcery mag, rejected. I have earned money, kinda: < $500 USD over four pieces (a silly short story to open a [long defunct] TTRPG product, an essay in the local writers’ guild mag, and two flash pieces placing in local contests). That’s it. Decades. What the hell am I doing.

Sigh. Whine.

River is very smart, very talented, well and specifically educated, and dedicated to their craft and career. There’s no point comparing our journeys, considering the gulfs in our instruction and energies devoted to “making it”. But, dammit... Just dammit. It’s not even envy. It’s disappointment in myself, something approaching shame when I tally how much I’ve given up in this anemic pursuit. This...hobby.

I’m not evolved enough a writer to be authoritatively critiquing a piece which (a) exceeds the scope of anything I’ve finished to date and (2) is in need of such fundamental guidance. Had I known what to expect, I’d have deleted her mail. But I did my level best to answer her questions and offer whatever other honest thoughts arose while trying to be encouraging.

Reading this draft was a slog. Trying to be positive and constructive hurt my brain and heart. But reviewing my notes I found:

Subtle mixed POV mistakes. An unintended layer of detachment in some of the third person narration. Uneven tone in the prose. Melodrama for drama. The protagonist lacks agency. Unearned character development. Telling instead of showing. Page time on minutia while summarizing truly telling events...

...Things I wouldn’t have picked up on a few years ago.

River did a lot of guided reading and analysis at Emerson. Sounds amazing. But I think experiences like this are helpful, too. Refreshers on basics, building confidence knowing I’ve moved beyond the tutorial level, etc. This will certainly be on my mind when I next to put middle finger to backspace key. Which will be...

Yeah. When?

I can’t keep playing around with this bullshit.

I mean, I can.

It’s just you and me, 2025. Mano a año. Let’s see who blinks first.