I'll probably get around to finishing off the monthly poems, but man that May one is depressing. And things have been afoot that have kept me from posting again lately. The blog is still my home page for Chrome, so every time I fire up Chrome I see that depressing poem again.
So let's at least have a few pretty pictures until such time as I post something more substantial here. We had a very pretty sunrise on Halloween morning:
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January 2025
It is January.
It has always been January.
It will always be January.
Now is the January of our discontent.
Made wintry by soul devoid.
It is January and Los Angeles burns.
It is January and it snows in Pensacola.
It is January and the news is flailing.
It is January and the news is failing.
It is January and the news is ailing.
It is January and the news is news no
more.
Once more unto the ice, dear friends.
We close the month with our frozen
dead,
Buried in slush beneath a river of
lies.
It is January.
It has always been January.
It will always be January.
Even when February comes,
It will always be January.
We will always remember January 2025.
--John A. Magee
I have very few illusions about how the next four years are going to go. As a nation we are recklessly plunging towards disaster. I hope I'm wrong.
I've spent a fair bit of time over the last couple of months thinking about what I intend to do about it all. [Waves arms hopelessly in every direction.]
The first thing is I'm going to start giving myself a bit more credit about how hard I'm trying at my job. I don't write or talk about my job a lot -- yes, this is probably why I'm afraid to watch the show "Severance" -- but I work with a bunch of people to make it easier to find good, truthful, accurate information in online library databases. If I do my job well, it becomes easier for good information to crowd out misinformation, and good information needs all the help it can get these days.
Still, these days in the Age of Misinformation it feels as if I'm one of those Japanese soldiers defending his foxhole on a remote atoll while the war has swept past him. So I'll also spend some time looking for a better opportunity to help good information.
Second, I'm going to keep an eye out for opportunities to help where I can be my most effective. It's easy to despair when it seems all about us is burning. It's impossible to fight everything. So pick one thing that you can do, then do your best at it. Then when you're done, rest up, find another thing then do your best at that. No single one of us got us to this place. No single one of us can get us out of this mess. But if all of us do just one thing to move the ball in the right direction, things will improve.
Along those lines I picked a few groups I like that will be extra busy over the next four years and sent them a little donation today: the ACLU, the Sierra Club, and Amnesty International. It made me feel better about things. I recommend it.
Third, we're headed into four years of meanness for meanness sake and performative cruelty. I'm going to do my best to fight back with beauty and joy and humor. When I say that my plan is to fight fascism with pretty pictures, I mean it. Fascism feeds on hopelessness. Beauty feeds hope. I intend to do my little part to feed hope.
Over on Bluesky the artist Jay Bigam (@jayispainting.earthskyart.ca) -- who created the wonderful #ArtAdventCalendar movement -- recommended that today be a day to post #OnlyBeautifulThings online.
I like that notion. So I leave you with a pretty picture.
Hang in there, everybody. Try not to let hopelessness get the upper hand.
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Normally I put together a little year-end poem for my final out-of-office message at work. This year all I could muster up for 2024 was a haiku:
That seems a bit depressing, so we'll see if I come up with something else before 5 pm. What I'd like to remember of 2024 is that we welcomed Benny Beagle into our home, we saw a cool solar eclipse and several amazing nights of aurora, we built a new porch and deck, and that Monique and I have made it to the wrapup of this year a little the worse for wear, but still here and still in love with each other.
I live a blessed life and I'm keenly aware of it -- even in the midst of a day-by-day disaster like 2024.
I'm also a usually a pretty optimistic fellow, but it seems likely to me that we're all headed into rough waters in 2025. I'm going to give some more thought over the next couple of weeks to just what I want to do in 2025. I haven't felt very effective in recent years. I've mostly felt exhausted. But perhaps I can find a useful place to put my shoulder to the wheel and find an effective way make things a little better at some level in the world.
For now I'm trying to combat it all with pretty pictures. Here, have one of my favorites from 2024!
That might not seem very effective, but in an online world filled with possibly even more horror and anger than we see in the real world, some beauty to balance the scales can't hurt.
I've thought about dipping my toe back into politics. I've been pretty good at fixing things and building things in politics, but it seems to me that the next four years may call for constant full-volume screaming into the void. I could do that, but I'm not sure it would change anything and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't like who I'd become by the end of four years of that.
I might try going back to some writing in 2025. Time flies and it's been quite a while since I've written any fiction. The last sustained push was a couple of decades ago when I wrote a few short stories set in a near-future dystopia. I set it aside for a variety of reasons. One of those reasons was that it was a fairly depressing world to live in. Now that I find myself actually living in a near-future dystopia, maybe it's time to revisit it. (I wasn't entirely prescient. I thought it would take at least fifty more years to get to where we are now.) I'm not sure another run at science-fiction is in my future. But I might like to tackle something. We shall see. I fear it might devolve into what I mentioned above about politics: four years of shouting loudly into the void to no effect.
Hmmn ... time for another pretty picture:
Or I might try something else altogether. Whatever it is, I think my way of dealing with 2025 and beyond is going to be building something for the future, whatever it may be. For a long time now it has felt as if life has me on the run, ground down and trying to hold on to what I've got. That hasn't felt all that good lately. It's time to try something new.
Whatever you might be thinking of doing with your 2025, I wish you all the best with it!
Here, have another pretty picture:
