Turns out the last post that went up was my 600th post. It feels very appropo that it was about trains and death metaphors, but I do wish I’d realized before it went up. I’m pretty sure I could have come up with something specific to 600 even as exhausted and foggy as I was last week, and then I’d have had an extra post and a smaller gap between blog posts.

The clusterfuck of the holidays and my incredibly busy work week left me unable (and unwilling) to write blog posts according to my usual schedule, so this post is coming at the tail-end of an almost week-long gap. I’m not scrambling to fill that gap in order to avoid “making up” for time I missed in a way that undoes all the rest I got over the weekend. I already ran one information-intensive D&D game (which I’ll write about in a separate post eventually) and spent all day prior to the late-afternoon session picking, uploading, and organizing music for it. And doing laundry because that’s just the weekends in my life. All laundry all the time.

Now, with all that work behind me, with an unwritten future ahead, I find myself a little more open to what this year might bring. As of the day I wrote this, I’ve had my current job for five years, which is the longest I’ve done anything. This year also includes the day that it will have been five years since the last major new Legend of Zelda game came out and it might be the year the next new entry in the franchise comes out (I’m hoping but not expecting). There’s a new, sorta interesting Pokemon game coming out soon (I’ve been avoiding the hype train, so I know very little about it and am fine to remain that way until I’ve played the game). Two of my friends are buying houses (though one technically bought it in 2021 and is moving in this month). And I’ve got a book to edit and then maybe shop around for an agent or publisher. Maybe both. And that’s just what I have on the horizon today. There’s a whole year of time for new stuff to happen.

Which can be a double-edged sword, given that what seems to be happening right now is the worst surge in the pandemic we’ve seen yet because people seem intent on pretending things are “fine” despite all evidence to the contrary. This whole thing is a failure of leadership, let’s be honest. To say the government has given up requires that they ever actually gave ending the pandemic an honest effort. Half-measures and lukewarm advocacy have only prolonged it. With the current surge in cases, it is conceivable that we will mark the 1,000,000th death before we mark two years since the US Government shut things down back in 2020.

That might be a bit pessimistic of me to anticipate, but I honestly can’t imagine any other future right now. I traveled for work, driving between two major cities in Wisconsin last week, and no one outside of those cities wore a mask. All signs of the pandemic other than the mask I wore despite the outright hositility from some of the people in those gas stations was gone. No hand washing signs, no marks on the floor for spacing out lines, not even the little trays of cheap masks for sale that used to be in every gas station next to the personal bottles of hand sanitizer and sun screen. I just can’t comprehend how people can live pretending the pandemic has ended. I can’t.

So while there is a lot of potentially great stuff on the horizon, it’s difficult to avoid focusing on all of the terrible stuff that is much, MUCH closer than the horizon. It takes a huge amount of effort to shift my focus away from it long enough to rest and even then I don’t rest well knowing that whatever terrible things are going on are going to be waiting for me when I shift my attention back to the world around me. It is exhausting all on its own. Makes it difficult to properly recuperate, you know?

Anyway. I have a lot of stuff to do and a lot of stuff I want to think about that ISN’T the never-ending garbage fire that is my country, so I’m gonna try to keep my attention on that as much as I can this year. We’ll see how that goes. I hope your year has been off to a decent start so far.