Hello to every one of my three or four readers. Welcome to 2024!

Here at the Library of Winkelman Abbey, things are quiet so far. Our comfort watch for the past couple of years has been Doctor Who. We have just started series 10, the last season with Peter Capaldi.

I expected to write a lot more for this entry but instead found myself laid up with two cracked teeth, one of which became infected. So distracted by pain and sleep deprivation, instead I watched tv. Maybe better writing next week.

Reading

I am still working my way through Dostoevsky’s Demons, which I hope to complete by the end of the month. It is slow going.

Writing

Last week’s writing prompt was:
Subject: Robots, Undead
Setting: Bar
Genre: Weird Fiction

Weekly prompt

Interesting Links

• The 2024 State of the World conversation is currently taking place at The Well.
• “January 1, 2024 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1928 are open to all, as are sound recordings from 1923!” –  Loads of old creative works from 1923 are now part of the public domain. For a full list, see the Library of Congress Catalog of Copyright Entries 1923.
• “As Death Toll in Gaza Rises, Israeli Officials Fear Possible Genocide Charges at ICJ” (Common Dreams) – And an explainer article from Vox here.
• “How the ‘visionaries’ of Silicon Valley mean profits are prioritised over true technological progress” (The Conversation)
• “An Anti-Defense of Science Fiction” (Jake Casella Brookins, The Ancillary Review of Books) – Truly excellent essay on why, if we’re going to give SF credit for the good things it has inspired, we must also blame SF for all of the bad things which it has inspired.

And here we are at the end of another year. As far as years go, it wasn’t bad. For me, it seemed a sort of middling, cautious 52 weeks.

If I had to give a single word for the sense of 2023, it would be “maintenance.” 2023 was, for me, the first year since the COVID-19/Trump presidency shitshow that felt like something which could, with care, become the new normal. I say “new” normal, because things never go back to the way they were,  no matter how much bleating and mewling come out of the revanchist, reactionary, racist conservative mouthpieces. The “again” in “Make America Great Again” was always a lie, and intended only to bolster the otherwise-cowardly wingnuts into flying their fascist flags in public, where everyone could see them, mark them, and make sure that nobody ever, for the rest of time, will forget who decided to put on the white hoods and red hats. Which are really the same thing.

Anyway.

House and Home

The biggest change for my mundane life in 2023 was a major upgrade to the retaining walls and steps on my property. This was long overdue. I have been intending to get to work completed for about a decade, but the combination of time, money, attention, energy, etc., was never there. But this year my neighbor on the adjoining property sold his house and, with the retaining wall between them being part of my property, I decided that I had best get the work completed before new tenants moved in.

And the result is beautiful! Better than I had hoped for. All of the work was accomplished by Fransisco Garcia and his company La Sierra Landscape. I couldn’t have asked for a more professional, competent, attentive and friendly crew.

Family and Friends

2023 was much more gentle on my friends and family than were the previous several.  In 2023 I said farewell to Tanya, Randy, Ted, and Simu Lee. All were loved, and all will be missed.

Martial Arts

After several years of a COVID-induced slump, Master Lee’s School of Tai Chi and Kung Fu is picking up again. We have a few new students and several of our older students are returning. Now that we are back in the YWCA, which means room to practice, we can finally put right all of the things which slipped over the three years of Zoom classes, meeting in parks, and cramming ourselves into small spaces. For the class I feel optimistic and think good things are ahead in the upcoming Year of the Dragon.

Creativity

I went into 2023 writing regularly and feeling good about things. Then while attending ConFusion 2023 my partner and I contracted COVID and the enforced down-time allowed for some self-reflection, and in that moment all of the stress and burnout of the previous three years came crashing down and I barely wrote a single creative work until NaNoWriMo this past November.

Looking Forward

And what do I have in store for 2024? Good question! In times as chaotic as these, making plans more specific than “survive” is inviting disaster. I suppose “making things a little better” is a good goal.

But becoming less bad is not the same thing as things being good. Everything is more expensive now, thanks almost exclusively to corporate greed and the insatiable emptiness of the monied neo-feudalists. There is a far greater than zero change that Trump and his army of brownshirts will regain the presidency in November, and if that happens, things will immediately get much, much worse for everyone on the planet who isn’t a rich white straight Christian man.

Rounding out the last week of the year as well as the last break I will have for several months. I am working on my big year-end blog entry which will post late in the evening on December 31.

Returning to regular posts like this put me in mind of Dostoevsky‘s A Writer’s Diary, a two-volume collection (Vol. I, Vol. II) of his column and publications under that title from 1873 to 1881. Dostoevsky started the Diary when he was 52 and continued until his death at the age of 59.

Am I comparing myself to Dostoevsky? No. But I am using a losing Mega Millions ticket as a bookmark, which Dostoevsky scholars may consider appropriate.

***

Reading: Dostoevsky’s Demons and A Writer’s Diary, vol. I

Writing: blog posts, journal entries

This week’s writing prompt:
Subject: Robots, Undead
Setting: Bar
Genre: Weird Fiction

***

Interesting Links

• “Group Dynamics and Division of Labor Within the Anti-LGBTQ+ Pseudoscience Network” (Southern Poverty Law Center) – There is a lot to dig into here, which I will probably do in a future post.  For the moment I will say that all anti-LGBTQ+ bigots are garbage humans.
• “New York Times sues Microsoft and OpenAI for ‘billions’” (BBC) – I am way behind in updating my big list of ChatGPT/AI/LLM links, but I wanted to call this story out specifically because it is the New York Times doing the suing, rather than just reporting on the ongoing concern. That being said, this is al rearranging deck chairs, as any meaningful legislation would have had to be put into effect a decade ago at the earliest.
• “Nikki Haley declines to say slavery was cause of US civil war” (The Guardian) – Haley said the quiet part out loud by keeping quiet about the one true cause of the Civil War, which was slavery. The Confederate states put it directly in their documents, both their reasoning for splitting away, and in the Confederate constitution. Any person who disagrees that the Civil war was fought over slavery is a person whose opinions on any subject at all are not worthy of consideration. When clarifying her comments after the fact, Haley grudgingly admitted that slavery did play a role in the civil war, but it was really about containing government overreach. Like, you know, the federal government overstepping their bounds by saying the many and individual states couldn’t legally allow their citizens to own slaves. And that exchange tells us everything we will ever need to know about Nikki Haley. And it also says everything we need to know about conservative’s attacks on public education.

Happy birthday to me! I have made it to 54, which now officially places me in my mid-fifties, and also firmly in middle age. One more year and I will get to choose from the next tier in the “your age” dropdown menus when e.g. signing up for a new social media platform.

This past year felt like coming out of a long hibernation, and I expect the upcoming year will continue that trend as we continue to adjust to whatever the new normal is, assuming enough stability for any one narrative to assert itself as “normal”, which frankly is asking a lot of the world at this point in time.

The last book I read as a 53-year-old was Jim Harrison’s Returning to Earth, and the first book I am reading as a 54-year-old is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Collected Novellas. Thus do years end and start on high notes.

Not much else to report at this time. Life is busy, and enjoyable more often than not.

Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here to lay 2022 to rest. It was a decent year, as years go. Certainly it was better than 2020 and 2021. Here is a brief rundown of how the year went.

Life

This past November Zyra and I celebrated five years together, of which more than half has been during the COVID pandemic (which is still ongoing, by the way). This has been a big change for both of us but we are settling into the routine of it, which gives us the stability to start planning for the longer term. And we are both still very, very happy.

Last week included two important anniversaries – three years since we brought Poe into our house, and two since the arrival of her cousin/niece Pepper. They are nonstop sources of comfort, entertainment and joy, and now that we have them, I can’t imagine our household without our two little ginger maniacs.

But 2022 was also a rough year for the people in my life. During the past year I said a final farewell to Zort, Steve, Jessica, Neil, Bob, Sam, Ryan, De, and my cousin Teresa. Some of these folks were dear friends, others I had not seen or spoken to in decades. But even when pass the people we have relegated to the past, they are still part of our lives, and over time the loss of those small parts adds up. 2022 was not as terrible in this regard as was 2021, only because I lost no immediate family members, but I have resigned myself to being in the part of my life when my contemporaries begin to die of the things I once believed only took old people.

Martial Arts

The biggest news of the year was that, after 36 months of virtual classes, practicing at Wilcox Park, and crowding into the studio at From the Heart Yoga, Master Lee’s School of Tai Chi Praying Mantis Kung Fu and Tai Chi Jeung is back at the West Michigan YWCA in downtown Grand Rapids. Almost all of our students have returned (At least, the ones who did not move away), and we are making up for two and a half years of being unable to practice to the extent that we did pre-pandemic. We are back into our routine again, and me and the other instructors are figuring out what the next few years will look like.

Reading

2022 was a stellar year for reading. I made it through just over 120 books and literary journals, and over 250 pieces of short prose. I have not read at this pace in a very long time. Probably not since my first couple of years working at the bookstore. The combination of lockdown, a steady and predictable project, and a re-assertion of my daily morning routine made this possible. I don’t expect to keep up this pace in 2023, as I need some of that time for writing.

Writing

I didn’t accomplish much writing this year until NaNoWriMo in November, when I completed about 75% of a story which has been bouncing around in my head since November of 2021. As of this week i am still plugging away at the last few chapters, in the slight hope that I will have the first draft done by the time I head to ConFusion 2023.

Work

My job didn’t change much over the past year. For most of that time I was on a project which started in April of 2021, so it was steady and mostly predictable, and I picked up some significant new skills. And a brief, week-long project at the end of December gave me an overview of a new platform in which I will be working for almost all of 2023, so again, more predictable work. I got some very nice bonuses and a good raise which means I can now afford to do the work on my house and property which has been nagging at me for about the past decade.

Looking Forward

Immediate appearances aside, we are still in the middle of a pandemic, so outside of any black swan events I don’t see 2023 being radically different from 2022. Which means next year will probably be wild.