Yet Another Yet Another

Well, I'm trying. Really. I am. I've been trying to put together some ideas for things to write here, but that hasn't been as easy as one might think. Which is kind of unusual for me. Anyone who knows me personally (God help them) know me as a person who has more than his fair share of opinions, rants, babblings, etc., all ready to spill out. Yet, when it comes time to get them down on paper (or tossed into electrons, or whatever), I begin to falter. I think a lot of the lethargy comes from the quarantine. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the quarantine is a bad thing. It has helped lower the number of infections and deaths. (Which is, in its own right a frightening statement, given the number of infections and deaths we are seeing with the social distancing, etc. I won't get into the whole "reopening" debate here...) What I think it is is a sense of almost divine lethargy. You do begin to lose track of days after a bit. I shouldn't complain. I have no sickness in my family. We are able to keep going as best we can. At least for the moment. But... There is that desire for "normality", whatever that may be. Or at least some sense of stability. Or, at the very least, some better sense of differentiation from one day to the next. This runs the risk of sounding like me whining. I'm most certainly not. Again, I'm lucky. I live in an area that is relatively free of the ravages of the virus. Though, for how long that goes on..? I keep trying to get my head a bit clear, and to do some creative stuff. But, all to often, I get lost in just gorging myself on the news of the day. The Internet does have both its blessings, and its curses. When the news of the world is laid out before me like a grand buffet, I tend to dive right in. That does tend to curtain me giving time to doing any of my own work. As does some of my hobbies. I haven't been buying computers, nor pens, these days. I do have several of both about to fiddling with, and fiddle I have. I've settled down in my Linux distro-hopping, but I at least try to keep up with things. And, since I've been at home quite a bit, I've been playing with pens a bit, too. (Sadly, my handwriting has not improved in the least...) Oh, and I occasionally play with old typewriters as well. Which sometimes makes me think about the wonderful world of "typecasting", typing an entry on a typewriter, the scanning said piece and posting it here. I used to do something silly like that with screen grabs from old Macintosh emulators. The latter also reminds me... Damn it. I better stop. All this is doing is giving me reasons not to even finish this quick note. I suddenly want to go and dig out an old Mac (which still has an emulator installed), and do something foolish... So much for anything creative for the night...

Thoughts in the Time of Terrible Things

Well, this is a bit different. I haven't put a post on this blog in five years, at least. It's sort of been a desert of technical babblings. Maybe I'll leave it as such. I don't know. It is, indeed, the Cabinet of UnNecessities.

The World, as We Know It

It's definitely a different world from when I last was in this cyberspace. I never thought I would see things as they are now.

I live in the U.S., and things have not been good here for the last 3+ years. Maybe you've noticed...

To be sure, I never thought that things could fall into the state they have. And the last few months have been sort of a microcosm of horror that's driven that point home with an unrelenting force.

How did we get to this point? What the hell happened? There's a LOT of answers to all that, for sure. As they say, it's complicated...

I'm not sure how the world is going to be when we come out of this. If we come out of it. We've never been through anything quite like this in the modern era, and I'm not really sure we're all equipped to deal with it. It makes me wonder...

The Way Things May Go

But I do hold onto hope. Despite the chaos, despite the lack of leadership, despite the sometimes overwhelming idiocy that seems to boil up in times like these, I still try to hold onto a little bit of hope. There are still good people out there. And we can only hope that they are still the majority now. Maybe they can keep the world going on.

That's the world we live in now.

So...

As I'm caught up in the quarantine, sheltering at home, taking care of family and trying to practice social distancing as much as possible, I'm probably going to have a lot of time on my hands. So, maybe, I might just start sticking stuff back here on this blog.

I don't really know what might show up. Maybe it'll be me ranting about world situation as a whole. Maybe it'll be me just babbling stuff about the computer I'm playing with at the moment. Or a book I'm trying to finally get around to read. Or maybe I'll just meditate on a particularly good fountain pen.

Maybe it'll just be me trying to keep my mind occupied, distracting myself, giving myself a slight rest from some of the things going on out there. I think we all need that.

Really, I don't know if it'll be interesting or not. Or even what it will be in general. This is, after all, the Cabinet of UnNecessities. Let's just see where things lead us. If anywhere...