What to say. It’s the third anniversary of my Last Normal Day, so I have to say something. I did go back to my barbershop for that haircut last year, but then the numbers went up and I haven’t been back since, it’s just clippers and enlisting my partner to help with the scissors whenever I can’t stand how shaggy I’m getting.
2022 was not a good year. A sudden loss in the family, topped off with a health crisis for one of our cats which has drastically shortened his life expectancy, and also no one with any power to improve anything about Covid has seemed the least bit interested in improving anything about Covid.
Oh yeah, also there’s the first major land war in Europe in generations, the fascists are still trying to take over the United States and do genocide to queer people, a bunch of people I had previously thought better of decided that participating in a doxing and harassment campaign fomented by the neonazis at KiwiFarms was just fine if the target was someone they already thought was “cringe”, and Brendan Fraser, whose comeback everyone was rooting for, destroyed all that goodwill by starring in a feature-length adaptation of Monty Python’s “Mr. Creosote” sketch, which I can only assume Darren Aronofsky and/or A24 straight-up bribed reviewers to call “sensitive” and “humanizing”.
Fraser, naturally, won an Oscar for being sad in a fat suit, less than two weeks after James Hong’s touching speech about how when he started out, white actors would tape their eyelids up and affect stereotyped accents to play Chinese characters. But the speech and the Oscar were this year, so I can’t leave them in the 2022 paragraph.
You know how sometimes when things are pretty bad, it’s not really clear that anything you, personally might have to say would be any use toward making them better?
As I write this, ultra-wealthy fascist techbros have also just openly engineered a bank run in order to hold the entire economy hostage, and thereby succeeded in getting the federal government to agree to the principle that ultra-wealthy fascist techbros have a fundamental right, which the state must protect at all costs, never to lose money. Plus, everyone’s either been hoodwinked by the mystification, or is just too starry-eyed a dreamer, or is in on the con, so we’re all pretending that glorified big-data-scale Markov chains are probably brand-new sentient beings, maybe, and anyway we’d better shove them into every software product whether or not there’s any clear reason to think it’d be an improvement. But at least no one’s talking about NFTs anymore.
There were a lot of headlines a little while back, when the administration made the announcement, to the effect of “Biden: Pandemic Emergency to End on May 11.” Of course that’s absolutely false, and (as is often the case) the patently disingenuous framing and credulous reporting drove me up the goddamn wall. What is ending on May 11th is the federal state-of-emergency declaration, and with it the last tattered shreds of a semblance of an effort to look like the government cares about controlling the spread of this highly contagious and potentially lethal virus which is known to cause serious long-term disability including damage to the lungs and brain. The actual emergency will, in fact, remain ongoing, and is all but guaranteed to worsen, and the White House saying “everything’s fine now!” will do nothing at all to dissuade SARS-CoV-2, which being a virus is even less sentient than ChatGPT and is unaffected by whether or not people are worried about it or are tired of the pandemic or whatever.
Finally, thanks to decades of sabotage largely, but not exclusively, by Republican governors, Boston’s MBTA transit system is in the worst shape it has pretty much ever been. Certainly the worst of my lifetime! Perhaps they’re simply trying to do their part to ease the housing crunch by driving property values down.
This one’s been kind of a bummer, friends! We’ve got a nor’easter coming through right now, and very loud rain pounding my bedroom windows all night did not a restful night make. That’s where I’m placing the blame. And hey, at least I finally managed to quit twitter for good. I gather they’ve fucked their API stuff all up over there now, so maybe WordPress won’t be able to auto-post on my account anymore, in which case I should probably just go ahead and delete it entirely.
Let’s try again next week, then.
(Oh yeah, I still miss my bar.)
You must be logged in to post a comment.