The Fire's Still Warm...

    ...They can't have gone far.

    So, the road to internet hell is paved with good internettentions. Basically I began this with what I thought was a couple of good ideas rattling around in the brain, slammed out a couple of blog posts I thought sounded pretty cool, showed it to some people, got some good, very gentle feedback that nevertheless triggered anxiety, got discouraged, and haven't returned to it. The URL is memorable enough that you can't UNshow it to anybody so I just sort of left it to rot. Nice.

    The guiding star of many a millennial underachiever is this: If you never sincerely attempt anything, you can never sincerely fail.

    But now I'm back, and ready to overuse stylization options like a 3rd grader left unsupervised with a copy of

    Because it honestly barely mattered before and it matters even less now. A huge swathe of the human paradigm has been wiped out by the pandemic - for some parts of the world it's already a tooth and nail fight for survival. In others, even the lucky ones are beginning to wonder just how much punishment The System can take before all this actually reaches "us" in the way history tells us it can reach anyone. 

    My cat is sleeping on his perch by the window, the sun is going down, everything is quiet, and I feel foolishly, childishly, wonderfully... safe. I am an animal that has grown up in a system so stable, so concrete, that for all its flaws has led me to believe that when the sun is shining, there's food in my bowl, and my cat is asleep, everything is going to be OK. 

    What a trip it always is in moments like this to be reminded that the only thing really keeping us "safe" from any of it is a few thousand kilometers of social convention.

     

    The thing is, we got so lucky on this one. Like, whew, in terms of global disasters that can happen, even if this one takes us out it's giving us a decent amount of time to at least struggle against and experience it. It could have been a gamma ray burst flashing off our atmosphere in minutes, or any mid-sized meteorite of the type that hits Earth all the time. A solar storm could have toasted a hemisphere's worth of electronic devices (and retinas), a nuclear reactor could have melted down, the magnetosphere could have shifted, Yellowstone could have gone up, the Large Hadron Collider could have crashed spacetime. 

    Humanity isn't on a sinking ship- we aren't that lucky. Humanity is in, at best, a soap bubble. We need to be a bit more careful with it than a 3rd grader.