Am I still alive? Yes. Are things rather different now? Also yes. I live on a 10-acre ranch. As I type this, my neighbors are doing their regular Saturday target practice (pistol-calibre from the sound of it). I have a nearly 2.5 Year old Toyota Tundra, a tractor, a chainsaw, and two rabbits. I bought, raised, and sold (for a terrific tax-writeoff loss) 4 Aberdeen steers. I’m somehow still married with diagnosed mental-health issues that are okay with medication (more on that later).

I had a realization this weekend: I’m in “Bonus Time”. If I add up all the maladies/mishaps/accidents I’ve had in my life, I should be: Functionally blind Half-deaf Missing half my teeth Dying of Colon Cancer in 2019 Dying of Skin Cancer in 2012 Lying dead under a crashed car somewhere in Eastern Kentucky in 1996 or so. Decapitated by a drainpipe in a creekbed in 1984 That’s just off the top of my head.

I used to watch a lot of HBO. Now, I think you can well imagine why an 8 to 15 year old boy would want to watch HBO, but time and again there were some gritty, real stories on there that really stuck with me. One is this segment from Taxicab Confessions about the New York City rescue squad and this perfect New Yawker guy just telling about one horrific rescue he had to do.

The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed — would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper — the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. – George Orwell, 1984 I wondered how long it would take. Dateline 23 March 2021. Paraphrase: Please tell whoever is responsible for this to pick someone who’s NOT a mysogynist.

“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” - 1 Corinthians 13:11 (KVJ) I’ve had a subscription to some sort of car magazine, blog, etc. since I was ten years old. I used to covet and read car magazines like more well-adjusted boys used to secret Playboy magazines.

Poor sleep last night. So the Daylight Savings Time switch was this weekend, so everyone felt fully capable of staying up until midnight watching movies. This weekend we watched Raya and the Last Dragon on Friday, the final episode of Agent Carter and the first in the Hobbit trilogy on Sunday. I’m uneasy. I have my second (well, final) cataract surgery on Wednesday–as luck would have it St. Patrick’s Day. I went to bed before Whitney and Maria and when they went to bed I woke up with my mind swimming from flashbacks from the last cataract surgery: The immense anxiety.

Today (well, tomorrow) makes it a year. On 3/13 last year I left my office, picked up my kids from Grace Academy for Spring Break…and the great upside down world of CoViD 2020 happened. Example: WFH Day 2 I was a reliable journalist for awhile, then in June I just…stopped. Overwhelmed didn’t really cut it; I was paralyzed by how much the world was changing. The 2015-era computer I wrote those blogs on is gone, replaced by another coporate laptop from my employer after the battery decided to die.