Greetings from the murky vantage of December 2021! There’s just so much going on. Here’s a cute little time capsule for you:
- A pandemic nearly 3 years running
- The steady rise of authoritarianism
- The continuing churn of late-stage capitalism
- The planet steadily coming to a boil thanks to the above
- A growing movement of anti-intellectualism and willful ignorance serving to speed every other point along
Man. Zooming out to take all that in is rough, and that’s on top of everyone’s personal lives already. How am I going to explain this to my kid later on? It’s a hell of a tl;dr to make.
How have you been coping? I kind of…haven’t, really. I just stuck to work, living a day at a time, trying to keep the future out of mind. It comes regardless, though, and so we must move. We’re trying to migrate, away from where the list above is treated more like a game plan than a warning.
Reaching out from the fog, I find myself back to tinkering with my site. I’m glad I did; I felt a familiar rush, and I rode it all the way to this redesign. And so I’ve taken to just keeping at it, a totem to focus on and help keep me grounded somewhat.
As some of my web heroes have mentioned before, working on a website is a calming thing. I’ve done it for work for so long that I forgot that I used to do it for pleasure, too. I’ve long forgotten the romance of a blinking caret. To once again be tapping away late at night, then later sleep soundly thinking of nothing, is both nostalgic and nourishing.
Going forward, I hope to give this site attention more often. Not simply as self-advertisement, but as a vehicle for catharsis. Both the writing and the fidgeting have helped me tremendously. I also hope you, reading this now, could give it a shot yourself if you haven’t. Make a website to call your own, if only for the sheer novelty of it. It’s something to do while cooped up, at least.