This is getting posted technically on Sunday, but from my perspective, it’s still Saturday.

We’ve had hail, and rain, and sunshine the last couple of days. I’ve been cold and not feeling super awesome all day. Not feeling particularly sick, but I’ve had a headache and I’ve been tired all day. I tried napping and it didn’t work.

I wound up spending most of the day on my work laptop, thinking about work I need to do, but not really doing it. Without focus and energy, it’s hard for me to do anything, including writing these posts.

Still, here is something. I’ll post another on Sunday night. It’ll be… fine? I’m the arbiter of this contest, of which I’m the sole participant.

This is what writing is like, too. There are days where you wake up late, and you can’t put the words together, and you don’t achieve your goals. You have a choice on days like this, to either let it get to you, or take it in stride and keep going.

This is how you deal with rejection.

This is how you deal with unrealized dreams.

You figure out what happened, and then you keep going.

I’ll talk to you all again real soon.

It’s Friday night, and I’ve been feeling a little lazy for the last several hours. Unmotivated and low energy… how about I talk about something lighthearted and easy tonight?

The Topic: How Do We Fix the World?

So.

The first step in fixing a problem is admitting that a problem exists in the first place. The world is broken in some fundamental ways. How do we fix it?

What are some of the symptoms?

1. It’s extremely difficult for young people to get jobs that will sustain them.
2. It’s harder than it has ever been to buy homes, because it’s just so expensive. If people can’t buy homes, they can’t secure wealth, which means we’ll have an entire generation beholden to the previous, which is not sustainable.
3. We value money more than we value human life.
4. We have the means to feed, house, and educate everyone, but we don’t because of the previous point.
5. We have the greatest wealth gap we’ve ever had.
6. We have the greatest communication network we’ve ever had in history, giving access to the wealth of human knowledge and invention, yet we have a loud and motivated minority spreading anti-intellectualism and spawning things like anti-vaccination movements.
7. Racism, bigotry, ableism… all of the inequality that is still baked firmly into the infrastructure of our society.
8. The frailty of our political system. There’s a LOT more I can say on this subject, but that’s a rabbit hole for another day.

These are a handful of symptoms right off the top of my head. There is so much more. Goodness gracious. If you have a favorite flaw I failed to include in this list, let me know and maybe I’ll edit this and extend it.

So what do we do about it?

Individually? Almost nothing. We have to be the best versions of ourselves. We have to value people over substance. We have to lift each other up instead of tear each other down. We need to look at complicated issues with nuance and thought, rather than reduce it to bad/good.

Protest? Vote? Don’t vote? What does a person do?

It’s easy to get disillusioned with voting when there is gerrymandering, two-parties, and electoral colleges. The fascist party is unified behind their villain, even while he’s in court (poorly) defending himself for libeling his rape victim. The other party is feckless and mostly in support of their geriatric incumbent that was known for gaffes as a young man.

I think Biden is a good man. I also look at him and feel like it’s very difficult to ignore his age.

That’s enough on that subject from me tonight. I’m trying to succinctly state facts and be honest. We’re trying to fix the world, not alienate everyone.

I don’t have an answer for the political problems. I’m not sure I have an answer for the capitalist problems, either. We’re cool with pooling our resources to pay for police and firefighters. Police in some places are buying armored personnel carriers, body armor, and weapons of war, while firefighters can often be found once a year on the street, passing the boot in order to raise funds. Maybe we haven’t solved that problem, after all.

A lot of the solutions to some of our capitalism problems wind up looking like socialism. It’s very difficult to privatize socialism without being someone as wealthy as Elon Musk, but to get as rich as someone like Elon Musk, you have to value money more than people. It’s not going to happen.

That leads back to politics, and there are too many people that get in a twist over trivial matters at a football game. No kneeling. No Taylor Swift. The priorities of some of our population do not appear to be in alignment with the Christian values they proclaim to support.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I’m getting old and my perspective is skewing towards pessimism with age, but I don’t see how we untangle this knot. The 2020s have shown me a side of humanity I thought was much, much smaller. Problems I thought we, as a society, had fairly well solved are not solved at all.

So how do we fix the world?

There must be an answer.

Welcome to February 1st, and the 32nd blog post in a row.

Personal News

With this, I’m feeling accomplished and a little bit tired. I’ve done 31 posts in a row multiple times before, usually in October. Completing the challenge in January with very little prep time fills me with pride. I still wonder at the wisdom of this. But let’s re-evaluate at the end of February.

There’s a pile of Day Job work I still need to do tonight, not because I was overloaded, but because I lacked focus during the day. I’m going to put on some music, maybe louder than required, and see what I can get done.

Upcoming Events and Such

This time next week, Melissa and I will be in Boston. It will be our first Boskone and our second writing event this year. I expect my time will be taken with manning the table in the dealer’s room again. I’m not on any programming, and I probably won’t witness any of the programming because of my obligation to the table. I will have the opportunity to meet other writers and talk craft, though, which is what I enjoy the most at these events.

Some of the hard covers for One for the Road should be in transit now. We will have tons of soft covers of both it and The Repossessed Ghost available in Boston. It would be amazing if it sold well, but I’m going to keep my expectations low. From what I’m told, Boskone is smaller than Arisia.

The Topic: What Are You Not Doing?

We often define ourselves by what we do. I’m a writer. I’m a gamer. I’m a musician. We ask each other, “What do you do for a living?” when we’re trying to get to know each other.

In that context, what does it mean when we aren’t doing the things that define us?

I’m not gaming as much as I would like. I play video games with some of my friends on Wednesday evenings, but that’s not the same, and not the kind of gaming I am referring to. Roleplaying games. Tabletop, social games, where you and some people you get along with get together and play make believe, but with dice, character sheets, and some sort of rules to keep it from devolving into complete chaos. Ostensibly, I’ll be playing in a Pathfinder game this Sunday with Richard and friends, but that game has been canceled and postponed more times than we’ve actually gotten together, and I am not holding my breath it’ll happen Sunday.

Music. I haven’t played my sax in a long time, now. I don’t really have a place to play right now, and I’m not playing with any bands so the motivation to work on something is nonexistent. I’m always thinking it might be nice to work on some covers for a YouTube video or something, but all of that takes time. I also don’t have any reeds right now, but that’s a poor excuse. I could order more reeds. I just haven’t been moved to play.

Some of my friends know I like to build keyboards. There’s a split redox I started a while ago that is not done yet. I need to remove the controller boards and replace them, probably with Teensies. With Chris in the garage now, my space for that kind of tinkering doesn’t exist. I had plans to work on some RC planes and tinker with that, too, but with no builder space, I can’t see that activity taking off.

Finally, there’s writing. On that front, I’m trying to do something, though blogging doesn’t delight me the way writing and revising does. There is no story here. There’s just the topic of the night. Sometimes I try to dress up the words here so that they please me, but that’s not really what this space is about.

Soon, I’ll work on a story here. The more I think about it, the better an idea it seems. I like talking about writing. I like passing on what I’ve learned so far. Writing a story publicly might be one of the best things I can do with my time.

It beats playing solitaire, waiting for the clock to run out.

What are activities that you feel like you should be doing, but you don’t either because of time, money, or space?