Category: Life

2021 In Review

John Winkelman

Poe and Pepper, asleep on my lap

Oh, 2021 was a hell of a year. I don’t think there’s any argument there. It was certainly one of the most stressful and uncertain years in my life. The successive waves of COVID variants spreading through the world, accompanied by hundreds of thousands of deaths in the USA, and millions more in the rest of the world, made it difficult to concentrate on anything beyond getting from one day to the next. It wasn’t just that the news (as well as the “news”) was distracting; it was that in the context of a global pandemic, everything else seemed a little (or a lot) less important.

Relationship

The high point of 2021, no doubt about it, was my relationship with my partner Zyra, who I have been with for a little over four years, and with whom I have been cohabiting for a little over two. We continue to find comfort and joy in each others’ presence, and are good at working through moments of stress and friction and coming out the other side, closer and stronger.

In April, Zyra officially started her business Gallafe (pronounced “GALA-fey”), making Filipino food and selling it at the Fulton Street and Holland Farmer’s Markets. She also began holding popup dinner specials on alternating Fridays, as well as the occasional Sunday brunch offering and a regular delivery to the South East Market. She has made amazing progress in a short amount of time, and this in the second year of an ongoing pandemic. I have been assisting her where I can, primarily with massages and running errands. And as of the last day of the year, she can be found on DoorDash, if you are in Grand Rapids and search for Asian food or simply “Gallafe.”

Last Christmas we picked up a new cat, Pepper, from the same Upper Peninsula farm where we adopted Poe the year before. Being from the same colony as Poe, they are related in at least one way. They are certainly cousins, though Poe might also be Pepper’s aunt, at no more that two steps removed.

As Zyra recently pointed out, Pepper is Poe’s emotional support animal. The cats have been an absolute joy, providing Zyra and I with endless entertainment and affection, and offering a release valve of sorts for our relationship, giving us other living creatures to focus our attentions on, which was vital for the long days of us having no other human interaction than with each other. Having lived with cats for two years now, I can’t imagine ever going back to a pet-free household.

Martial Arts

Master Lee’s School of Tai Chi Praying Mantis Kung Fu and Tai Chi Jeung continued to meet throughout this past year, online from January through the middle of March, and outside at Wilcox Park in the Eastown neighborhood of Grand Rapids through the end of October. We are now holding hybrid classes, in person at From the Heart Yoga and Tai Chi Center, the studio senior instructor Rick Powell runs with his wife Behnje Masson. We have a camera set up so students who are not comfortable practicing in person can participate remotely.

I and our other assistant instructor Tracy also hold informal “office hours” over Zoom to assist students in the time between classes, which has been a big help for the remote-only students, as well as a morale booster for me, because it provides a little more human interaction, which has been sorely restricted for the past two years.

We are able to practice about 75% of our pre-COVID curriculum. Out of an abundance of caution we are forgoing most drills and exercises which involve more than incidental personal contact. We hope that this will change as we move into the new year, but with new COVID variants spreading through the country we are trying to be patient. Better to have to re-learn a few skills in a year than to be the vector for one of our students becoming seriously ill.

Reading

2021 was a good year for reading. I started the year with Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, which I have tried but failed to complete several times of the past three decades, but this time I made it through to the end. And I ended the year with Dostoevsky’s The Eternal Husband and Other Stories, as it seemed appropriate to book-end the year with classic Russian literature. In between I was all over the place, reading genre and literary fiction, a wide variety of nonfiction, and many books of poetry. The grand total for the year was 57 books and over 120 short stories read.

Writing

Much to my surprise, considering how 2020 sputtered and ground to a halt at the beginning of November, 2021 was an excellent year for writing. I completed drafts of two short stories and over 30 poems, and am over halfway done with the pre-first draft of my NaNoWriMo book Racing the Flood Down to the Sea.

Friends and Family

This is where 2021 was the worst. I lost four friends this year, and in early September my mother, Sharon Prine, passed away just after her 84th birthday. Surprisingly, none of them died of COVID, which shows that even in the middle of this pandemic, the mundane world is still taking its toll.

So I will go into 2022 with holes in my life in the shape of Simon, Bill, Caroline, Beth, and Mom.

Work

I am still employed at the same company, and plan to remain here until I either retire or am made redundant. For most of the year I have been on one project, which in other years would become boring and unsatisfying, but for this year, predictability and stability are very much a good thing. And I am learning many new skills.

To Sum Up

I am glad that 2021 is over. Though I had some small personal triumphs and accomplishments, overall it was a year full of hellish stress, and though I am resigned to the fact that whatever is going on now is likely the New Normal, I am tired of reacting to the slings and arrows, or waiting for them to find another target. If I have a  goal or resolution for the new year it is to begin digging myself out of the deep funky hole I have been in for most of the past two years.

52, or 2 x 2 x 13

John Winkelman

Me at 52

As of this morning, I have been out in the world for 52 years and a few hours. Actually I’m probably still asleep as this posts, as I usually schedule these things for the early hours of the morning, and this year my birthday falls on a Saturday. Of course I’m usually awake at 5:00, seven days a week thanks to the the two furry orange maniacs which have entered my life in the past year.

Poe and Pepper have been a constant source of attention and affection and stress relief in the COVID times. Zyra and I probably owe no small part of the health of our relationship to our cats, who have provided such entertainment while we endured the quarantine which is finally lifting.

Here at the beginning of June, most of the restrictions here in Michigan are lifted, and the remaining ones will likely be removed on July 1. One year and four months which changed the world in ways we will still be discovering a decade from now.

I have attempted in the past to write birthday posts, but being as close to my life as I am, it is difficult to form the necessary distance in order to write about it from the outside. The passage of time helps, but that means that I can only write about those events which have occurred between the bounding horizons of the moderately recent past, where subject slowly becomes object, and the event horizon of memory where I can no longer be sure the things I remember are the the things which happened, or things I invented to fill in the gaps. I am 52 years old. That’s a lot of lived experience, during much of which I wasn’t paying attention.

I have been with the same employer now for seven years. Ten, if you count my time at Cynergy before my current employer bought us, lock stock and barrel. Ten of my 22 years as a web developer. That is by far the longest I have been with a single employer. I have to say, as a middle-aged techie, stability is a Good Thing.

When I turned 51 I was nearing the middle of a crazy project which had me working second and third shift for two months, then a long and late first shift for two months. During springtime I was able to attend the martial arts class maybe twice. When we switched to first shift, which roughly coincided with the class moving to Wilcox Park after almost three months of meeting on Zoom, I felt my age. It has been a running theme among my tai chi classmates that, as we age, other people in our cohort seem so much older than we are. As I discovered, two months without regular sleep and regular exercise are all that stand between Us and Them.

With a more regular schedule I found more time to read and write and edit, and in October of 2020 one of my short stories was accepted for publication at Coffin Bell. The story was published in January 2021. This was a big deal for me, made even bigger by the fact that this was my first unsolicited piece of prose to be published. I have other publication credits, but they were solicited for specific publication. “Occupied Space” was the first to be rescued after being sent out into the wild.

I started my 51st year with profound sleep deprivation, an unemployed and injured girlfriend, extreme social anxiety, and a small orange cat. Here at the start of my 52nd year I am experiencing mild sleep deprivation, my girlfriend is busy starting her own company, I am vaccinated and therefore feel comfortable out in the world, and we have two small orange cats.

Oh: and in the past year Donald Trump, the conservative white supremacist sex predator, failed to be re-elected, like he has failed at everything else in his life except being a sexual predator and a white supremacist. I laugh out loud every time I pass a “Trump/Pence 2020” sign on my way to visit my parents. And since there is a lot of rural Michigan between here and there, I see a lot of those signs.

So 51 started low and improved steadily. If 52 continues the same trajectory the next year should be amazing.

Happy Year of the Metal Ox!

John Winkelman

Friday, February 12, 2021 is the first day of the Year of the Metal Ox. This past year, in all of its chaos, was the year of the Metal Rat. We can only hope that the Ox is more laid back than the Rat.

As an exercise of interest and curiosity, here is a not-at-all comprehensive list of what was going on in my life in the previous four (-ish) Ox years.

2009 (Earth Ox) – Age 39/40. Working at Peopledesign. Started the year by wrecking my car, a 2004 Subaru Outback. Bought a 2006 Subaru Forester to replace it, which I still drive. Dad died of lung (etc.) cancer. Spent some time in Covington, Louisiana with my brother and members of my step-family. I lost a lot of weight. Took a trip to the U.P. and camped at Tahquamenon Falls State Park. This was the last year I used Flash/Actionscript as part of my job.

1997 (Fire Ox) – Age 27/28 – Worked at Schuler Books and Music as special orders manager. Started helping the instructors in the kung fu and tai chi classes. Moved twice; once into one of six tiny apartments in a gigantic house, then into a room in an equally gigantic but undivided house. Involved with the renaissance festival scene. A little romance, but nothing which lasted. Wrote a lot. Experienced angst.

1985 (Wood Ox) – Age 15/16 – Lived at home in Springport. Was a sophomore/junior at Springport High School. Learned to drive. Was on the cross country, wrestling and track teams. Played trombone. I think this was the year I broke a rib in a wrestling meet. No romances, but lots of heartache. Spent a lot of time programming on my Commodore 64. Made money milking cows and stacking hay bales. Might have visited Dad in Louisiana.

1973 (Water Ox) – Age 3/4 – Lived in Jackson, Michigan. No job. Had to put away my toys now and again. Learned to read. Not yet allowed to drive, despite being obviously better suited to it than anyone else on the road.

1961 (Metal Ox) – In my previous incarnation I was a crow which lived primarily in the Appalachian mountains. I amused myself by imitating the sound of people arguing over personal hygiene habits, and dropping pine cones on small dogs.

Funk and Fugue

John Winkelman

With the inauguration now in the past the world exists in the consensual illusion of having returned to something like normal. That is absolutely not the case of course, and it will be a long time before we even have an idea of what normal looks like. It certainly won’t be what things looked like on this date four years ago, or even one year ago.

On this weekend in any other year I would be at ConFusion right now, hanging out with old friends, meeting new friends, talking about reading and writing and past cons and publishing and not getting published, and drinking and carousing and enjoying being in the company of good, smart, talented people.

Of course ConFusion is cancelled for this year, and I think ConFusion 2020 was the last normal thing I did before lockdowns began last March. I miss the experience terribly, but it is not as bad as it would be if it were going on and I was not there.

Right now I am sitting in the waiting area of a hospital, waiting on test results for a family member who is in poor health. This is part of a process which has been ongoing for some years now, so while it is not unexpected, it is also not a thing which could be predicted in any meaningful way.

Thus even though the exceptional chaos of the past four years is over, we are still awash in the ordinary chaos of daily life here in the cyberpunk hellscape that is the mid twenty-first century.

Anyway.

It’s been a quiet week for books here at the Library of Winkelman Abbey. One book arrived – War Stories, an anthology courtesy of my subscription to Apex Book Company.

I am almost done with Democracy, Incorporated, and am about 120 pages into The Brothers Karamazov. I plan to round out the month with short stories before I pick up another book to follow the Wolin.

Writing is still going nowhere, though I can feel the knots in my mind loosening up and the creative juices beginning to flow again.

In the absence of ConFusion for inspiration I will need to rely on the mundane chaos of the world.

Breaking Cat News!

John Winkelman

We have achieved cuddling! I repeat – we have achieved cuddling!

Poe and Pepper are getting along famously. Zyra and I started letting them interact under strict supervision about a week ago. Two days ago, after the usual running and tussling and what-not, they fell asleep near each other on the floor. Then last night while Z and I watched a movie, the Orange Ones climbed onto the sofa with us, piled up, and fell asleep. Then this morning, with the whole house and its innumerable nooks and crannies available, The two of them chose the same shelf and fell asleep.

2020 In Review

John Winkelman

Oh, what a year was 2020. This is a post I have planned to do annually for approximately the 20-year life of this blog, but I don’t think I have ever done a comprehensive year-in-review. Though all subsequent annual round-ups may seem boring by comparison to 2020, this is a good place to start.

The State of the World

While it may be tempting to call 2020 a “Black Swan”, there is nothing about 2020 which was unexpected. COVID-19 was recognized in late 2019 (thus the “-19” part of its name), and alarms were raised anywhere people would listen. Of course very few people listened, or they did and reacted stupidly, and thus the rest of 2020 turned out the way it did. As of the writing of this post (December 31, 2020) I know at least a dozen people who have contracted COVID, some of them severely, though none have (yet) died of it. The United States passed 343,000 dead in less than a year, and who knows how things will continue into 2021; though with the ominous groundwork laid here so far, I can only imagine that bad things will continue, and also get much worse before they get better.

I adjusted quite easily to social distancing and quarantining myself, mostly because I seek solitude, but also in part because my job does not require that I be any place in particular. Thus I spend the majority of each day in my office on a laptop, staring at JavaScript until it makes sense or goes away.

The 2020 general election was a colossal shitshow, as is everything which emasculated manbaby Donald Trump, patron saint of Daddy Issues, touches. The existential stress the past four years came to a head on election day as the American electorate turned out in unprecedented numbers to kick Trump to the curb. The fact that there was any doubt at all that this would be the case is a terrible indictment of the USA, even worse than that there are enough racist, misogynistic, gleefully ignorant voters to put Trump in office in the first place. But to attempt to do so a second time is absolutely mind-boggling.

Relationship

2020 was the first full year in which I lived with a significant other. Zyra moved in in mid-summer 2019, after spending most of her time here anyway, due to terrible weather and the fact that four or five of her tiny apartment could fit in my average-sized house.

What can I say? Things are going well so far. We work well together, and we are also respectful of each others’ space, which is so very important here in the plague years.

The biggest change for both of us (other than co-habitating) was the arrival of Poe, our small female ginger cat who arrived the day after Christmas 2019.

Thee second biggest change for us (other than co-habitating and the arrival of Poe) was the arrival of our new and incredibly fluffy ginger kitten Pepper. Pepper arrived fresh from the same farm in the upper peninsula which generated Poe. As near as we can tell they are cousins, but with isolated colonies of feral cats, the lineages tend toward brambles instead of trees.

Martial Arts

In past years, Master Lee’s school has held or participated in four events annually – a Chinese New Year dinner in early February; the Grand Rapids Festival of the Arts and the Grand Rapids Asian-Pacific Festival in June, and Sifu Day in late July or early August, depending on the specifics of the Lunar calendar. In 2020, due to COVID-19, every event after Chinese New Year was cancelled. This was certainly for the best, as our class, though overall much healthier than the average of the West Michigan populace, also skews toward the older end of the spectrum.

I wasn’t particularly upset about the cancelled performances, as we have participated in the Festival of the Arts every year it has been held since the late 1980s, and a break to reset the psyche can be welcome.

The cancellation of Sifu Day, where traditionally the entire extended class, as well as friends and family, gathered for a huge potluck, hurt. It is my favorite of the annual events and we were not even able to visit with Master Lee, though we did a drive-by visit of sorts and dropped off food and gifts for him and his wife.

The downtown YWCA closed, so our classes moved online, with senior instructor Rick Powell running Zoom sessions at our normal class times. This took some adjustment, as suddenly he was doing all the teaching himself, with no assistance from any of the other instructors. And Master Lee of course was not able to teach through zoom due to not having the technology available to do so.

But we persevered, and when the weather grew warm in June we moved classes to Wilcox Park in the Eastown neighborhood of Grand Rapids, where we practiced in the grass and under trees until the end of October, when due to the uptick in COVID-19 cases we returned to exclusively remote classes.

I expect that as weather permits we will move back outdoors, possibly as early as March. It all depends on the state of COVID.

I loved the outdoor classes. In past years I have spent most of every weekend at the Lake Michigan lakeshore or out and about in the various fields and forest and trails with my camera, enjoying the beauty of natural Michigan. With travel sharply curtailed by COVID, my girlfriend’s sprained ankle, and the existence and proliferation of violently stupid conservative anti-maskers in Michigan, we decided to stay around the house. And with the downtown office closed so I wasn’t walking the mile to and from work every day, the enforced outdoor slow-time was much appreciated.

Reading

This will be covered in more detail in other posts, but in spite of the shakeup to the schedule, this was a great year for reading. I completed something over 80 books, primarily thanks to a deep dive into R.A. Salvatore‘s Forgotten Realms novels in July and August, and to participating in the Sealey Challenge in October, where I read a book of poetry a day for a month. Those two reading events added up to over fifty books, and the rest were a scattering of fiction and nonfiction from March to December.

2020 was also the year where I focused my attention on short stories, and though I fell far short of my goal of reading at least one a day for the entire year, I did manage to read slightly over 100. Most were genre, though I did skip around in the literary fiction realm. For the first two months of the year I focused exclusively on short fiction (other than finishing a book I had started in December), and it wasn’t until mid March that I picked up longer works again. I read primarily fantasy, thanks to picking up a big old pile of books at ConFusion in January. Many of the books were self-published, and this prompted me to throw caution to the wind and write a fantasy book of my own.

It isn’t done yet.

Writing

I hit the ground running with writing this year, and though I did not meet a single self-imposed deadline I managed to complete a few short stories, multiple poems, and a little over 25,000 words of a new novel.

Then, somewhere around the beginning of October, I hit a wall and didn’t write anything other than journal entries for the rest of the year. So while I wrote quite a lot, at the moment I feel like I didn’t really accomplish much of anything.

This is, of course, inaccurate. In April Portage Magazine published my poems “Afternoon Traffic” and “Percussion”. In September I was notified that one of my short stories, “Occupied Space”, will be published in January 2021 by Coffin Bell.

These are my first non-solicited works to be published since 1999. In any other year this news would have increased by an order of magnitude my writing drive, but here at the end of 2020 my drive is at an all-time low.

The novel is one I was inspired to write after spending most of ConFusion 2020 hanging out with a group of authors who have found success self-publishing their work. They introduced me to the Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off (or “SPFBO”) which is currently in its sixth year. To cut to the chase, I am now completely sold on self-published books of any genre. The winners (and also most of the runners-up) of the SPFBO are every bit as good as any fantasy novels published traditionally, and in many cases are even better, with the added feature of not being hindered creatively by the need to satisfy a corporate bottom line. So if and when I complete this book I will go the route of the self-published authors, of whom I am now an avid fan.

Family

I don’t see much of my family anyway, so this year was no different. My nieces are growing like weeds, and my brother contracted COVID though his symptoms were mild and his recovery rapid. My mother and step-father are in their mid 80s and dealing a wide variety of health issues so I saw even less of them this year than usual. As for my extended family, I never see them anyway so this year was no different from any other.

Work

The downtown office closed on March 15, 2020, and I have not been back since. Working from home is not difficult for me, though when the weather is nice I do enjoy the walk downtown, and I do miss the mid-day walks along the river.

The year started with the last few weeks of a year-long project which was actually interesting and fun (for certain work-constrained values of ‘fun’), with an excellent team of folks.

Then I was on a month-long project in March in which I was cheerfully thrown under the bus by the project lead.

In early April I was assigned to a project which had me working third shift, 18:00 to 06:00, four nights a week for five weeks, then second shift, 14:00 to 00:00, five nights a week for five weeks, then first shift, 09:30 to 18:30, through the end of July. Let me just say that third shift was a whole lot easier when I was 21. And yes, on third shift those were twelve-hour days.

I spent much of August and September taking classes toward getting certified in one or more AWS Cloud specialties, and then I was assigned in rapid succession two projects, one of which is currently underway.

All of which is to say, work in 2020 was eventful.

To Sum Up

2020 was difficult. Not as difficult for us as for many, but not easy by any means.  My brain is still in a fog and I find it difficult to focus on anything for more than a few minutes at a time. This makes reading and writing especially difficult, but helps when dealing with a new kitten.

I am glad 2020 is over. Though arbitrary temporal divisions have no physical impact on life, being in tune with the zeitgeist means that midnight tonight is a good time to let go of a lot of psychic baggage and try to regain, cautiously, some sense of optimism that, if 2021 will not necessarily be appreciably better right away, it will stop getting worse at such a rapid pace.

And it that leaves a lot of room for things to still be pretty bad, it also opens the door to hope, which is the thing with feathers, beautiful and delicate and always in danger of being eaten by feral cats.

Introducing Pepper

John Winkelman

On December 27, 2020, a year and a day after returning from the Upper Peninsula with Poe, we returned from the Upper Peninsula with our new three-month-old ginger kitten. World, meet Pepper. Pepper, this is the world. Or the parts of it with access to the internet, anyway.

Right now Pepper is in internal quarantine in an enclosure in my office while we wait to take her to the vet for a checkup and shots. We should be able to allow them into the same space together starting in about ten days. She and Poe have exchanged chirps and growls under the door to my office, and already Poe seems to be getting used to the idea of no longer being the only cat in the house.

Pepper is Poe’s cousin, from the same colony in a farm in Rudyard. She is sweet and crazy and affectionate, thanks to attention from the various children and grandchildren who helped to socialize her over the past two months. She weighs about three pounds, though with her fur she occupies approximately the same volume as a Volkswagen Microbus. We gave her a bath the night we brought her home, and when soaked she was about the size of a chicken drumstick.

The English language is inadequate for accurately describing the floofiness of our new kitten.

Summer Done Gone

John Winkelman

This is a photo of Poe sunning herself in a west-facing window, atop a pile of curtains which coincidentally are the same color she is. Maybe she thinks I can’t see her. That would explain why she attacked my hand when I reached down to scritch her.

We had our first truly cold nights this week, with lows in the upper 30s, Fahrenheit. We have managed to not yet turn on the furnace, but those days are coming to an end. Fortunately the rest of the month looks to be bright and sunny during the days which means my big old house will store enough heat to last us through the longer nights.

No new books arrived this week, which is happening more regularly as I regulate my book-buying habits, what with a global pandemic and employment uncertainty bringing to the forefront of my attention the necessity of frugal behavior.

In reading news I finished Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow which left me feeling rage, sadness, depression, despair, and a sullen bitterness about the entrenched sadism which is one of the keystones of the American psyche. TNJC, along with Jackie Wang’s Carceral Capitalism, and the first few essays from Captivating Technology, have me further convinced that complete prison abolition is the only equitable response to the overwhelmingly racist (by deliberate intent and design) carceral state which is one of the central, defining characteristic of American society here in the post-Civil War USA.

Anyway.

To cool my brain, I am reading Dyrk Ashton‘s magnificent Paternus: War of Gods, which brings to a close the Paternus trilogy which Ashton began with Paternus: Rise of Gods. I am a little over a third of the way through, an I am getting to the point where I may need to take half a day from work in order to get through the rest of the book, because I seriously don’t want to put it down. Ashton’s work is just that good!

On a related note, Dyrk has a Kickstarter running right now to print the second book of the series, Paternus: Wrath of Gods, in hardcover. In addition to being excellent reads, the artwork for the books is gorgeous and the books as physical artifacts are well worth owning.

In writing news, I ended the week just shy of 25,000 words in my work in progress. I have the current scene all sketched out and the first few hundred words written, but I hit a minor bout of writer’s block which, rather than trying to muscle through, I sat back and let it run its course and accepted that it might leave me a little shy of my goal for the month of 40,000. Better a blown deadline than burning myself out doing something I love. I can always make up the word count, and the schedule and deadline are mostly arbitrary, beyond that I would like to complete the first draft before November 1.

If you are curious, here are some of the things I am researching as I write my book:

labyrinths, memory palaces, traditional martial arts training techniques, phytoremediation, river ecologies, genetic engineering, mantras, mudras, mysticism, resonant frequencies, resource depletion, peak minerals, repressed memory, symbiosis, salvage, biomaterials, ceramics

With a little luck, when strung together by a narrative framework, it will make a good story.

It Is Done

John Winkelman

At long last, after ten weeks of second and third shift work, fifty hours a week, the project from hell is done. I got out of bed around noon today after shutting down my workstation at 11:00 last night. I don’t remember the last time I was this tired, or burned out, or otherwise completely done with the world. Early February 2013 maybe, or mid-May 2009. Something like that. The difference here is that, other than the crazy work hours, it was not a negative or traumatic experience; simply a lot of work across a lot of hours at a time of day when I am usually asleep.

In the last ten weeks I have lost around 10 pounds, most of that muscle mass as far as I can tell, from the complete disruption of my workout schedule as well as the lack of sleep, which is now well into the territory where if it were being inflicted upon me by a government agency it would count as cruel and unusual punishment. Since it is instead being inflicted upon me by capitalism it is considered being a good employee and contributing member of the team.

The part of my life I have missed most, and which I most look forward to, is waking up before the dawn, after a good night of sleep, and practicing tai chi on the front porch, then relaxing with a cup or two of coffee and reading and writing as the world wakes up around me. Three hours of quiet time before work is the bare minimum to keep my head on straight, and I have not had that since there was still snow on the ground.

So here we are in the last full week of spring, as the days are just about as long as they will get before the night starts creeping in again, and now I get to start enjoying the warm weather.

Being well-rested and healthy will also certainly be of benefit to my relationship in any number of ways, not the least of which will be that when Z proposes that we do anything at all, I will feel something other than depressed and tired at the idea of having one more goddamn thing to think about. I look forward to looking forward to things again.

Only one shipment of books this week, from Zombies Need Brains LLC, a small indie publisher which runs an annual Kickstarter where they fund and call for submissions for a trio of anthologies of varying themes. This is the second of their Kickstarters I have funded. I submitted a story to the previous round of books, and though it was not accepted for publication they sent an encouraging rejection letter. So I will try again, if and as as I have time to write.

Speaking of writing, I have a steadily growing pile of handwritten notes for the book I plan to write this summer. The plot is coming together, as well as a couple of the primary characters – protagonist and antagonist. I like the feel of it – secondary-ish world fantasy, post apocalyptic; though with enough history in the world, everywhere and everything is post- some apocalypse or other. Or mid-, or even pre-apocalypse. Kind of like right now here in the real world.

In reading I am partway through Derek Künsken‘s book The Quantum Magician, and really liking it so far! I met Künsken at ConFusion a few years back, and his book has been gathering dust on my shelves until last week. Like the other small press and self-published books I have read this year, it is really good! I look forward to snagging the sequel sometime later this year.

Now off to get caught up with the world, which seems to have moved on without me over these past two and a half months.

51

John Winkelman

As of today, I am no longer 50. I am now “in my fifties”. These things tend to sneak up on a person. This post is a reflection on the past year, a sort of “what I did when I was 50” instead of “what I did before I was 50”.

My fiftieth year started on June 5, 2019, with a surprise party at Riverside Park coordinated by my girlfriend. Over a dozen of my closest friends showed up, and there was much cake and beer and whisky. It was wonderful.

A few weeks later, in July, Z and I flew to San Francisco for a week of food, walking, food, exploration, food, City Lights Bookstore and food. It was glorious! We stayed in the Warwick San Francisco, where we stayed in 2018 as well, and walked everywhere we could, and when we couldn’t walk, we caught one of the ubiquitous ride shares which account for approximately 10% of San Francisco traffic.

In late July, Z moved in with me, which was a first for us both. Fortunately neither of us have a lot of stuff, and I have a lot of storage space in my house. Once she settled in we enjoyed a couple of peaceful weeks before she returned to teaching. After almost a year of living together, everything is still going great! Even with the enforced close proximity due to the CoronaVirus lockdown, we still welcome and treasure each others’ company.

In September, the members of Caffeinated Press decided after five years to close down the company, and in late October we released our last publication, the twelfth issue of The 3288 Review.

In November I participated in National Novel Writing Month for the seventh year in a row, and hit 55,000 words with over a week to spare. I have the bones of a good novel, and individual chapters can easily be turned into standalone short stories. So I have a pile to work from for the foreseeable future. One of the few good things about having a terrible neighbor is that I always have something to write about.

In December, Z and I drove to the Upper Peninsula to visit her family, and came home with a small orange kitten we named Poe. She is absolutely the love of our life, cute and affectionate and playful and cuddly and with an impressive vocabulary. After almost twenty years without a cat in my life, I suddenly wonder if I could ever go back to a life without one.

At the beginning of 2020 I decided to make a concerted effort to get something published. Every morning, after morning workouts, I sat for at least an hour and wrote, or edited, or submitted work to the many magazines on the list I had compiled over the past several months. This lasted until approximately the end of March, when the world became suddenly chaotic.

In January 2020 I attended the annual ConFusion science fiction convention, where I volunteered for setup, spoke on a couple of panels, saw many old friends and made many new friends, and generally had a fantastic time. ConFusion is one of my favorite events of the year, and I am more than a little worried about how it will survive the current state of the world.

In March, the statewide CoronaVirus lockdown began. I started working from home and have been since then. The downtown office may reopen later this year, but I likely won’t see the inside of it until at least September. That same month the downtown Grand Rapids YWCA, where we hold our kung fu and tai chi classes, closed for the duration of the quarantine period. We moved to online Zoom classes and those seem to be going as well as can be expected though of course nothing is as good as in-person classes.

In April, for the first time in twenty years, someone published some of my unsolicited writing. Portage Magazine graciously included two of my poems in their 2020 issue, and I have been floating on air ever since.

Also in April I began a project at work which had me working some insane hours – 6:00 pm to 6:00 am, Tuesday through Friday, for a 48 hour work week. After a month of this the project was extended, and we moved to second shift, 2:00 pm to midnight, Tuesday through Saturday, for a 50-hour week. This is projected to go on for two more weeks, which means I will return to something like a normal schedule right around the first official day of summer. Without going into too much detail, though the work is important, the schedule sucks and I want my life back.

To add to the chaos, not long after I started the crazy hours, Z and I were practicing and she sprained her ankle quite badly. She is recovering nicely, fortunately, and hopes to be back to full function by Autumn.

This past weekend Z and I spent a few hours in downtown Grand Rapids, helping to clean up after an absolutely chaotic night of riots and vandalism when a group of agitators moved in after the Black Lives Matter march and protest rally. Nationalist hate groups had been planning this disruption, and whoever the final actors were, they made a mess of the city.

So there, in a nutshell, was my fiftieth year. It started wonderfully, and became gradually more chaotic as the world became gradually more chaotic. I would wish for my 51st year a return to normalcy, but there is no telling what normalcy will look like after the past four months. It certainly won’t look like it did at this time last year.

For the first day of my 51st year I have spent my spare moments loving my girlfriend and our cat, and donating to the various businesses, groups, and artists who have been hurt by the quarantine and the riots. I will likely continue this as long as there is a need, and I have funds available to do so. I have a good life, and the best thing I can do with it is offer my support to the world.