This past week work finally made tangible concessions to COVID-19, insofar as everyone now works every other day (scheduled skip days are covered financially), as there are very few kids coming in, it was the first week effectively combining two of the three centers, with today marking all three sharing the same building. So now I have some of that free time the pandemic has been promising.
There are a lot of parents out there who aren’t particularly happy about this state of affairs, and I’m not talking about the situation with my childcare center(s) specifically. They’re parents who don’t...really know how...to parent. I’m not talking about overt abuse, although neglect is emotional abuse, and it has obvious and at best unfortunate results all the same. Some of the kids coming in last week have behavioral issues stemming from parenting of this kind, and their parents have been the kind who don’t see all the new social restrictions as affecting the decisions they’re used to making. I truly hope that one effect of COVID-19 is to begin a process of awakening real responsibility in such parents, when they begin to run out of excuses to actually be present in the lives of their own children. On the one hand we suddenly don’t have to worry about school shootings, which to my mind is a direct result of this kind of systemic neglect, whether from parents boxed in by economic conditions or personal choice (I honestly can’t say which is worse). The thing about this situation is that summer vacation and other holidays are always sending kids home from school. The only real difference is that the parents have been sent home, too. Parenting is never easy. It demands an honest and complete surrender to someone else in ways that don’t exist in any other context, and if you choose to ignore this responsibility, the effects will resonate throughout many other lives, not just yours and theirs, but the many other lives that intersect over time...
Anyway, that’s the kind of thing I’m always thinking about anyway, regardless of pandemics causing massive disruptions to everyday life. Since I have no kids and rarely participate in social gatherings (the great irony in all this is that for some people, the few things they randomly had lined up in that regard were cancelled), my ordinary activities are much as they’ve always been. Since I don’t have internet at home outside of my phone, I used to go to the library on the weekend to catch up on blogging. Another of the ironies of this situation is that I had bumped up my data plan on the phone before the dominos started falling, and I’ve found out in recent days that...I have a lot of internet time available to me. I’m composing this post on my phone. I’d upgraded the data plan to ensure I could video chat with my niece undisrupted (heh), and here we are at the end of the month, and all the extra time I’ve had at home has seen me wasting time on the internet (nothing terribly new there), seeing how people are interpreting the pandemic, what Facebook has been up to (I’d say that chatter has been slowing; aside from the fact I myself stopped posting funny things, a lot of others have, too, perhaps because apparently you can only joke about toilet paper so many times, even on the internet, a phenomenon that culminated in toilet faces, which if you’re reading this in the future I apologize, because I am not going to elaborate).
I actually have been writing during all of this. I wrote “Just a Regular Joe,” which along with “If Sidekicks Never Existed” (a title based on a book I really wanted to like more) I was greatly looking forward to submitting to a comic book company whose submissions were supposed to open up again mid-month. But now comics have temporarily lost their main distributor, and most stores are either closing or desperately, gamely soldiering on, and I don’t think submissions are opening soon. So maybe I have a chance to write even more stories and have an even greater chance to get published. Unless the company changes its submission policy because of the pandemic, or actually ends up going out of business.
I also started work on “Falling Toward Oz.” I had a false start that didn’t feel right, so I started over again, and was immensely pleased with the results, and the words absolutely flowed, as they do when I’m truly engaged. I haven’t written, yet, during this extended weekend (see: first paragraph), but I swear I will a little later today.
Instead I’ve been catching up on my Obsolete Physical Media purchases, DVDs of TV shows, in this instance. I just watched the two seasons of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (great first season!) and the only season of Men with Brooms, the second-best Canadian sitcom I’ve watched recently, although it was always going to be tough competing with Letterkenny (suck it up, Pat; and yes, it was your garbage-fire review that made me interested). I watched the second season of Titans before those. Continues to be a great show, best when it’s focusing on particular elements of the plot, whether flashback material or the debut of Superboy. Deathstroke was handled particularly well. Really want to tackle reviews for some of the movies I watched earlier. I finally caught the Psycho remake. And of course I liked that, too. Still need to catch up on the final two episodes of Picard, which I had been avoiding before I got a better idea of what the new data plan could handle, or how plausible blogging on my phone was (maybe it works better on my new phone? because I tried this previously and was not at all satisfied).
This whole business is so curious. We’re locking everything down in order to limit the spread of a virus that kills in small numbers. People keep arguing that “flattening the curve” and “social distancing” are measures meant to limit the effect on limited medical facilities. That’s what they say in the States. But literally every country is getting around to this. You keep hearing meaningless sampling about countries that are handling it better, handling it worse. Another of the ironies is that when we talked about healthcare before the pandemic (antecovidian, perhaps), people would argue how barbaric and backwards the American system is compared to everyone else. The American pandemic statistics are beginning to take the world lead, but this is meaningless without considering population size and density (hardest hit is of course New York; there has been an argument for about the past month that Florida would be the next hotspot, given its prominent retirement population, and here we are headed into April and it hasn’t happened yet despite the rapid spread, which of course seems to contradict the rapid measures taken to combat the problem, with plenty of eagerness to suggest we somehow haven’t done enough soon enough; this is literally impossible in a truly unprecedented response).
I talked last time (or perhaps in the comments on someone else’s blog; my phone doesn’t like giving me the option to comment; please don’t be offended if I seem to be saying nothing, because I’m still reading) that I didn’t want to begin writing about the pandemic in my fiction. But you can be absolutely certain that in the years and decades to come that we’re going to see an endless flood of pandemic material. And it seems wrong to ignore it, other than these blog posts, in my own work. This shouldn’t become the only thing we care about (me, I’m still hoping, best case scenario, that this is what finally gives us The Snyder Cut), because life, or something like it, goes on, but it’s a thing, and it’s happening, and it may not be interesting (it’s very, very boring), but it’s impossible not to think about.
So I end this long entry with the hope that I can continue to use this time wisely. Or at least, with more refrigerator art. I don’t want to brag, but there was a kid on Friday who spontaneously drew my portrait.
Monday, March 30, 2020
Monday, March 23, 2020
COVID-19 Updates
Now that you've read my initial thoughts on COVID-19, a week (or so) later it's time for updates!
Everything's weird. There have been times in my life where COVID-19 would've been pretty disastrous, or would've affected me personally a lot more. I'm not in school, which I can't even imagine. These kids will be talking about this the rest of their lives! I've had jobs that might very well have left me stranded under these circumstances. To my mind the absolute worst thing, in the US, about COVID-19 is the economic havoc being caused, and as always I'm not as concerned about the big guys as I am the little guys. When I was on unemployment in Colorado I found it surprisingly easy. It was even easy to obtain, later, food assistance funding. Reports here in Florida are indicating that such smooth sailing may not have existed before, and the response now is only going to get worse.
My job has been relatively unaffected. "Relatively," but insofar as I've continued working, so far it is for all intents and purposes business as usual. I work in a childcare center at a military instillation. One of the moms works at the medical clinic, and her babies were the most consistent charges I had last week, and I've been talking with mom about COVID-19 for weeks. The biggest complaint she's had is mass access to testing. Obviously that's become the obsession for all those curve-flatteners. Everything we've seen happen in the US over the past week (and the things that were happening before that) has been an effort to flatten that curve, curb the spread of COVID-19.
I've been slow to accept the seriousness of the situation in large part because as far as I can tell, the US has been affected, by far, more by the curve-flattening measures than by COVID-19 itself. The response you'll no doubt have encountered in your own lives is the reaction to toilet paper hoarders. To a certain extent, some of this hoarding is because some people really don't spend that much time at home, usually, and thus don't really know how much they use, when they're the ones supplying it, rather than, say, the facilities at work or a restaurant (or, you callous moochers, your friend's house). And all those kids suddenly at home are requiring far more bread than normal (we now have a generation used to school lunches rather than packing their own; my own childhood was a mix of both, but I still vividly remember "bubble & squeak" in the cafeteria).
The libraries closed last week, and so I didn't get to hang out there this weekend. I more or less blew the last two days watching movies and reading comic books. I've been reading a really good book, but didn't want to spend too much time reading it (when you're reading a really good book, there are two ways of doing so: slowly, to savor it, or quickly, because you're insatiable). I didn't tackle my writing projects. I'm still waiting to see if we're going to get a "tactical pause," which will give me plenty of time. But then I also start different hours (again) this week, which translates to an additional hour in the morning (which I'm taking advantage of right now to do some blogging), and I intend to use that for as long as I have it to get back to writing.
I did spend time frantically tracking down old notes, which I'm happy to report I found, plus others I hadn't really been thinking of, and some I'd plum forgotten about. Some notes have faded from their original vivid visions, but that's an opportunity to discover them all over again. I'm always the optimist, even when I'm feeling cynical. Some day these ideas will bloom! Some day they will sit on a bookshelf, and not just mine!
The family put together a group call to our dad on his birthday. Grumpy as I've been, I decided to participate. But I receded into the background, because I was still grumpy, and I've never been good at asserting myself in groups, and less so when I'm even less in the mood. I called him, separately, yesterday, and had a good conversation. I talked with the Burrito the day before, and she's apparently begun to notice how women's lips look. I thought she was doing Fish Face, but she made herself clear later. Don't grow up too quickly, Burrito! (That's my beloved niece, remember.)
I've been posting a lot of nonsense on Facebook, and I'm not sure everyone's understood it as nonsense. For instance, I called Knives Out "fun for the whole family," which is ironic, if you’ve seen the movie. But if anyone actually watched it, based on my recommendation, I hope they ended up enjoying it. Good movie. COVID-19 is kind of like the hole in the donut for all of us at the moment, right?
Life goes on...
Everything's weird. There have been times in my life where COVID-19 would've been pretty disastrous, or would've affected me personally a lot more. I'm not in school, which I can't even imagine. These kids will be talking about this the rest of their lives! I've had jobs that might very well have left me stranded under these circumstances. To my mind the absolute worst thing, in the US, about COVID-19 is the economic havoc being caused, and as always I'm not as concerned about the big guys as I am the little guys. When I was on unemployment in Colorado I found it surprisingly easy. It was even easy to obtain, later, food assistance funding. Reports here in Florida are indicating that such smooth sailing may not have existed before, and the response now is only going to get worse.
My job has been relatively unaffected. "Relatively," but insofar as I've continued working, so far it is for all intents and purposes business as usual. I work in a childcare center at a military instillation. One of the moms works at the medical clinic, and her babies were the most consistent charges I had last week, and I've been talking with mom about COVID-19 for weeks. The biggest complaint she's had is mass access to testing. Obviously that's become the obsession for all those curve-flatteners. Everything we've seen happen in the US over the past week (and the things that were happening before that) has been an effort to flatten that curve, curb the spread of COVID-19.
I've been slow to accept the seriousness of the situation in large part because as far as I can tell, the US has been affected, by far, more by the curve-flattening measures than by COVID-19 itself. The response you'll no doubt have encountered in your own lives is the reaction to toilet paper hoarders. To a certain extent, some of this hoarding is because some people really don't spend that much time at home, usually, and thus don't really know how much they use, when they're the ones supplying it, rather than, say, the facilities at work or a restaurant (or, you callous moochers, your friend's house). And all those kids suddenly at home are requiring far more bread than normal (we now have a generation used to school lunches rather than packing their own; my own childhood was a mix of both, but I still vividly remember "bubble & squeak" in the cafeteria).
The libraries closed last week, and so I didn't get to hang out there this weekend. I more or less blew the last two days watching movies and reading comic books. I've been reading a really good book, but didn't want to spend too much time reading it (when you're reading a really good book, there are two ways of doing so: slowly, to savor it, or quickly, because you're insatiable). I didn't tackle my writing projects. I'm still waiting to see if we're going to get a "tactical pause," which will give me plenty of time. But then I also start different hours (again) this week, which translates to an additional hour in the morning (which I'm taking advantage of right now to do some blogging), and I intend to use that for as long as I have it to get back to writing.
I did spend time frantically tracking down old notes, which I'm happy to report I found, plus others I hadn't really been thinking of, and some I'd plum forgotten about. Some notes have faded from their original vivid visions, but that's an opportunity to discover them all over again. I'm always the optimist, even when I'm feeling cynical. Some day these ideas will bloom! Some day they will sit on a bookshelf, and not just mine!
The family put together a group call to our dad on his birthday. Grumpy as I've been, I decided to participate. But I receded into the background, because I was still grumpy, and I've never been good at asserting myself in groups, and less so when I'm even less in the mood. I called him, separately, yesterday, and had a good conversation. I talked with the Burrito the day before, and she's apparently begun to notice how women's lips look. I thought she was doing Fish Face, but she made herself clear later. Don't grow up too quickly, Burrito! (That's my beloved niece, remember.)
I've been posting a lot of nonsense on Facebook, and I'm not sure everyone's understood it as nonsense. For instance, I called Knives Out "fun for the whole family," which is ironic, if you’ve seen the movie. But if anyone actually watched it, based on my recommendation, I hope they ended up enjoying it. Good movie. COVID-19 is kind of like the hole in the donut for all of us at the moment, right?
Life goes on...
Sunday, March 15, 2020
COVID-19 Blues
I think the first time I heard of it (which is probably true for a lot of us) was during the cruise ship quarantine. I remember it vividly because there was an obnoxious kid doing karaoke outdoors, singing "Crazy Train" over and over again, and a colleague joked that we were at a terrible resort.
Then it got worse.
In just the past few days, it's gotten even worse. I'm still not sure most of the people talking about it are doing any real good, and it just goes to further prove that we live in an age of so much information that most of it is just plain...bad information. Human beings don't seem capable of demonstrating any real command over rational thought. You might even say that we're dominated by irrational thought. Animals know what they need to do, and they do it. Humans can think of a million brilliant thoughts, sure, and are capable of making the impossible happen. But we're also capable of epic stupidity. Half of what has been said in the history of humanity is probably a collective remark to exactly that. It doesn't even matter if any given remark is fair in that regard. It's absolutely true.
The family had a family reunion planned for the end of the month. It was going to be a surprise birthday party for our dad. The big selling point that was going to definitely get everyone to go was that it would be the first time everyone had been together since, well, our mom's funeral. The brother who had already been the first to back out of the last attempt, my sister's wedding back in December, was the first to back out of this one. He cited COVID-19 as justification this time. He always has very good reasons for making decisions, and he has also been living a life for the past few years that some would consider a living nightmare, including himself, with an inability to get a proper night's sleep, likely because of the incredible strain he keeps letting work put on him. But never mind that!
Information about COVID-19 has been trickling in based on the level of danger it poses. I was still calling it coronavirus, along with everyone else, just a few days ago. We had a case at work of a child being provisionally diagnosed with it, and to prevent the spread of hysteria (because I think that is actually the basic function of what is supposed to be called civilization because we're civil), the decision was made to omit the term on the sign that ended up posted outside the room. We had it explained to us that coronavirus itself is not horrible, but COVID-19 is. I don't even know, and I don't care at this point, if the persons making these decisions were aware of the distinction, or if it even mattered, since COVID-19 seems, like most of these things, to mostly concern the mortality risks of the elderly (my dad reports an unusual amount of funerals from a mild winter in Maine), and as far as I now understand, it's not "coronavirus" at all that's the problem, but COVID-19, which of course is the version that's running amok.
The situation escalated quickly late in the week. The term "social distancing" entered the lexicon. People started buying toilet paper. A lot. Other people pointed out how ridiculous that is. But people tend to hoard and hunker down for these things. When I worked at a video store (when those were still a thing), we always knew when bad weather was developing, because suddenly we were a popular destination. It happened without fail. I currently live in Florida, and here hurricanes are a problem. I experienced a hurricane scare. I know hurricanes are real, and that they cause real devastation, since one had just torn through when I arrived here, and another had torn up the last place I had been in Florida, which wrecked a dear friend's house. But bad information does no one any good, and I watched as the hurricane's path was projected...everywhere. Basically, to be safe, it was said to potentially hit...everywhere.
I've had a lot of bad things happen recently. Bad things that really happened. To me. There was the hemorrhaging event last fall. There was an active shooter event at work. I was struck by a car. I never talked about that with anyone. I didn't know what to say about it. I was pretty sure the response would be, "You should be more careful! Why don't you drive???" Anything that didn't really address the trauma of the event itself. The hemorrhaging thing had a response, that was sympathetic, and then petered out. The active shooter event was almost completely ignored. It was a real thing that I lived through, stuck in a closet, and the family was basically like, "Okay." So I didn't really care to say anything about the car incident. Why bother?
Then this. This thing that has everyone cancelling everything. Social distancing. I consider it a case of unusually active response (I almost wrote "proactive," which will need more years before it sounds anything less than stupid) mixed with mass hysteria. Once one thing was cancelled, it made it okay for another thing, and then another. The funny thing is, the thing everyone is trying to prevent, the jamming of hospital services due to people who don't have it, won't get it, going to a hospital anyway, that's going to happen anyway, and is guaranteed to happen if you keep talking loudly about it. Hospitals are always being visited by cranks. You can't stop that. All you can do is prevent real information from reaching people who really need it, because you're too busy trying to get on top of a story that you're making bigger than it really is by painting a big fat target on it. Which is what we do with everything today, which to my mind is what this is all really about. You tell people they can't go to a hospital to get themselves checked out because it's inconvenient, that's insane. That's literally what they're there for. But then you do have to screen between what's a common cold (because, of course, this is the season for that, and I had one, too, am still getting over it) and what's COVID-19. And they will still tell you that...you treat it...like a cold. Unless you're in the demographic for whom it's most likely lethal. Do we have people pointing that out? Is that the leading message? Of course not!
The party should have been affected, since our dad is turning 70. That's pretty close to elderly, and he hangs out with people who definitely are elderly. But it didn't need to be cancelled. Probably none of the stuff that's been cancelled needed to be cancelled. Unless you're prepared to argue that something that's supposed to be lethal to one demographic disproportionately can't be rationally kept at bay with rational precautions. But you can't tell old people, in an election year, to stay clear of everything. So you tell everyone to stay clear of everything. Obviously.
We could have had a gathering at our other brother's house, which is in Maine, like my dad. This would have been a rational, viable option, until Friday, when the military cancelled trips outside a two-car-hours radius. We could've compromised and did a video celebration with our dad. But decisions, in my own family, were already escalating past rationality, past any reasonable conversation.
On a selfish level, I wish I could get "quarantined" for a few weeks. I could get a lot of writing done. I mean, this whole thing is an introvert's dream, right? The only people really suffering are the extroverts.
Chances are, you're reading all this and some of you are wondering if my brother was right to say how badly misinformed I've been, how reckless I've been not to take all this more seriously. I'm here to argue that everything about COVID-19 demonstrates the good as much as the bad of modern society. We're so interconnected we have to deliberately disconnect in order to make sense of anything, or at least believe we are. We'll pat ourselves on the back if that curve flattens appreciably, and say our measures worked, that we were absolutely justified in our response. But that's like saying if I put a sock on my hand and didn't die from COVID-19, that it was the sock that saved me. I love that we're taking such an active interest in everyone for a change. It really does seem, sometimes, that we really couldn't care less about anyone else, especially if they have different beliefs. It's a very peculiar age. At this point it sort of feels like the COVID Age.
But all I can hear are the COVID-19 Blues...
Then it got worse.
In just the past few days, it's gotten even worse. I'm still not sure most of the people talking about it are doing any real good, and it just goes to further prove that we live in an age of so much information that most of it is just plain...bad information. Human beings don't seem capable of demonstrating any real command over rational thought. You might even say that we're dominated by irrational thought. Animals know what they need to do, and they do it. Humans can think of a million brilliant thoughts, sure, and are capable of making the impossible happen. But we're also capable of epic stupidity. Half of what has been said in the history of humanity is probably a collective remark to exactly that. It doesn't even matter if any given remark is fair in that regard. It's absolutely true.
The family had a family reunion planned for the end of the month. It was going to be a surprise birthday party for our dad. The big selling point that was going to definitely get everyone to go was that it would be the first time everyone had been together since, well, our mom's funeral. The brother who had already been the first to back out of the last attempt, my sister's wedding back in December, was the first to back out of this one. He cited COVID-19 as justification this time. He always has very good reasons for making decisions, and he has also been living a life for the past few years that some would consider a living nightmare, including himself, with an inability to get a proper night's sleep, likely because of the incredible strain he keeps letting work put on him. But never mind that!
Information about COVID-19 has been trickling in based on the level of danger it poses. I was still calling it coronavirus, along with everyone else, just a few days ago. We had a case at work of a child being provisionally diagnosed with it, and to prevent the spread of hysteria (because I think that is actually the basic function of what is supposed to be called civilization because we're civil), the decision was made to omit the term on the sign that ended up posted outside the room. We had it explained to us that coronavirus itself is not horrible, but COVID-19 is. I don't even know, and I don't care at this point, if the persons making these decisions were aware of the distinction, or if it even mattered, since COVID-19 seems, like most of these things, to mostly concern the mortality risks of the elderly (my dad reports an unusual amount of funerals from a mild winter in Maine), and as far as I now understand, it's not "coronavirus" at all that's the problem, but COVID-19, which of course is the version that's running amok.
The situation escalated quickly late in the week. The term "social distancing" entered the lexicon. People started buying toilet paper. A lot. Other people pointed out how ridiculous that is. But people tend to hoard and hunker down for these things. When I worked at a video store (when those were still a thing), we always knew when bad weather was developing, because suddenly we were a popular destination. It happened without fail. I currently live in Florida, and here hurricanes are a problem. I experienced a hurricane scare. I know hurricanes are real, and that they cause real devastation, since one had just torn through when I arrived here, and another had torn up the last place I had been in Florida, which wrecked a dear friend's house. But bad information does no one any good, and I watched as the hurricane's path was projected...everywhere. Basically, to be safe, it was said to potentially hit...everywhere.
I've had a lot of bad things happen recently. Bad things that really happened. To me. There was the hemorrhaging event last fall. There was an active shooter event at work. I was struck by a car. I never talked about that with anyone. I didn't know what to say about it. I was pretty sure the response would be, "You should be more careful! Why don't you drive???" Anything that didn't really address the trauma of the event itself. The hemorrhaging thing had a response, that was sympathetic, and then petered out. The active shooter event was almost completely ignored. It was a real thing that I lived through, stuck in a closet, and the family was basically like, "Okay." So I didn't really care to say anything about the car incident. Why bother?
Then this. This thing that has everyone cancelling everything. Social distancing. I consider it a case of unusually active response (I almost wrote "proactive," which will need more years before it sounds anything less than stupid) mixed with mass hysteria. Once one thing was cancelled, it made it okay for another thing, and then another. The funny thing is, the thing everyone is trying to prevent, the jamming of hospital services due to people who don't have it, won't get it, going to a hospital anyway, that's going to happen anyway, and is guaranteed to happen if you keep talking loudly about it. Hospitals are always being visited by cranks. You can't stop that. All you can do is prevent real information from reaching people who really need it, because you're too busy trying to get on top of a story that you're making bigger than it really is by painting a big fat target on it. Which is what we do with everything today, which to my mind is what this is all really about. You tell people they can't go to a hospital to get themselves checked out because it's inconvenient, that's insane. That's literally what they're there for. But then you do have to screen between what's a common cold (because, of course, this is the season for that, and I had one, too, am still getting over it) and what's COVID-19. And they will still tell you that...you treat it...like a cold. Unless you're in the demographic for whom it's most likely lethal. Do we have people pointing that out? Is that the leading message? Of course not!
The party should have been affected, since our dad is turning 70. That's pretty close to elderly, and he hangs out with people who definitely are elderly. But it didn't need to be cancelled. Probably none of the stuff that's been cancelled needed to be cancelled. Unless you're prepared to argue that something that's supposed to be lethal to one demographic disproportionately can't be rationally kept at bay with rational precautions. But you can't tell old people, in an election year, to stay clear of everything. So you tell everyone to stay clear of everything. Obviously.
We could have had a gathering at our other brother's house, which is in Maine, like my dad. This would have been a rational, viable option, until Friday, when the military cancelled trips outside a two-car-hours radius. We could've compromised and did a video celebration with our dad. But decisions, in my own family, were already escalating past rationality, past any reasonable conversation.
On a selfish level, I wish I could get "quarantined" for a few weeks. I could get a lot of writing done. I mean, this whole thing is an introvert's dream, right? The only people really suffering are the extroverts.
Chances are, you're reading all this and some of you are wondering if my brother was right to say how badly misinformed I've been, how reckless I've been not to take all this more seriously. I'm here to argue that everything about COVID-19 demonstrates the good as much as the bad of modern society. We're so interconnected we have to deliberately disconnect in order to make sense of anything, or at least believe we are. We'll pat ourselves on the back if that curve flattens appreciably, and say our measures worked, that we were absolutely justified in our response. But that's like saying if I put a sock on my hand and didn't die from COVID-19, that it was the sock that saved me. I love that we're taking such an active interest in everyone for a change. It really does seem, sometimes, that we really couldn't care less about anyone else, especially if they have different beliefs. It's a very peculiar age. At this point it sort of feels like the COVID Age.
But all I can hear are the COVID-19 Blues...
Saturday, March 7, 2020
Falling Toward Oz
Just a quick note:
This week I became glad I hadn't decided I was more or less done preparing A Squire's History of Oz, because it occurred to me that I could add one more thing to it: "Falling Toward Oz."
Which, by the way, I haven't written yet, but that's hardly a problem! "Falling Toward Oz" will be my version of Oz, which for a book celebrating Baum's Oz and the many versions that have followed, seemed about right for someone who thinks of himself first as a writer of fiction.
So that's hopefully something I'm going to write, or start writing, this week, and hopefully tackle some other stuff as well.
This week I became glad I hadn't decided I was more or less done preparing A Squire's History of Oz, because it occurred to me that I could add one more thing to it: "Falling Toward Oz."
Which, by the way, I haven't written yet, but that's hardly a problem! "Falling Toward Oz" will be my version of Oz, which for a book celebrating Baum's Oz and the many versions that have followed, seemed about right for someone who thinks of himself first as a writer of fiction.
So that's hopefully something I'm going to write, or start writing, this week, and hopefully tackle some other stuff as well.
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