The Month That Was - January 2021

I have no actual New Year's resolutions.  If there are goals that need to be set, I hope I wouldn't wait for a specific date to set them.  Just start right away.  I do have what I refer to as New Year's resolutions, but they are really just life guidelines. 

1. Enhance the lives of the people I care about whenever possible.

2. Fight sloth (the Deadly Sin, not the adorable forest creature)

I have had the same ones for years and I see no reason to change. I continue to do pretty well on the first one, I think.  Less so on #2.

One thing that does have to change is that I wrote virtually zero fiction last year.  I found out how deeply entwined my writing was with my daily habits. It is entirely psychological.  Nothing stops me from grabbing my notebook and sitting down and writing, but I had a certain place and certain times when I did that, and I was unable to get beyond the disruption of losing that thanks to the lockdowns.  I am ashamed of this.  I see it as a severe weakness.  When I think about it I despair of ever finishing my current project which makes me dodge it even more.  I must break this cycle.

Per current forecasts, we are facing an especially cold, and probably snowy, February. Joy. I need to head south.

[Covid19, Rant] Coronatime, Month 11

[Rant] You Are Getting Sleepy

[TV]Toob Notes

[Rant, Covid19] Coronatime, Month 11

We'll start out with this assessment of herd immunity, suggesting that the end might actually be in sight. That's not from some agenda-driven crank, the guy behind it is legit.  The upshot is the expectation is that herd immunity will likely be achieved by July/August.  There are, of course, wild cards: his herd immunity target of 75% may be low, and there are new strains of the virus which may react differently to vaccines and such, but I'm comfortable with this as my working expectation.

More concerning to me is the abysmal process of getting vaccines and treatments approved and distributed. From the get-go our inability to alter our rigid thinking or resist our entrenched bureaucracy has cost way more lives than any lockdowns have saved.  Compared to the finger-pointing and righteous screeching about masks that I have seen all over social media, there seems to be little concern about this among everyday people. Now I shall get oblique.

I am fond of saying the world has gotten better in my lifetime and likely continues to do so, but it is a painful, chaotic process of ten steps forward and nine steps back.  Also, it's non-linear, non-sequential.  There is no one series of steps of which on average 10 are forward and 9 are back.  There are steps happening all the time, everywhere, often unseen.  This means the progress is happening in a world of constant upheaval.  Furthermore, if your mental time frame or event set happens to contain more steps back than steps forward, you can easily fall into the belief that the world is degrading. Once you have adopted a belief, as we all know, our cognitive biases burst into action to prevent it from changing at all costs.

Over the course of my lifetime, and probably starting well before, the world has gotten safer.  I'm not speaking of crime, but speaking of overall safety -- accident prevention, health concerns, etc. We have built up a huge set of guidelines and processes, often with the force of law, to do this. This includes consumer goods having an enormous number of safety tests to pass; drugs have gotten special scrutiny and control.  Behavioral guidelines have been installed and are increasingly enforced by technological innovation--the primary focus here being auto traffic. And when there isn't an institution to enforce a specific rule, liability and tort law has bent all our activities to be biased toward caution.  These things can spiral into absurdity and accusations of nanny-statism and fear-mongering follow on, often well-founded, but on balance, I am going to say this is a step forward.  As a rule of thumb, not being in peril is better than being in peril, especially mortal peril.

But then there's the step back.  When a situation came along and the very institutions and laws that we built to protect started working against us, we didn't know what to do.  Put it this way, can you imagine someone in 1918, with the flu epidemic raging, being told that there are great treatments and vaccines available that seem to work really well and that other countries have implemented them with good results, but we are going to have to wait months (or years) to try them because we can't change the rules, and even if they were available we still have to make sure that certain groups of people get them in a certain order, even if that means throwing some away?  1918-guy may have been a barbarian who kicked his children out the door in the morning to fend for themselves until dinner time, but I doubt he would have stood for that.  In fact, it would be so unimaginable to his time and place that it never would have happened to begin with.

We've gained a safer, more secure, less traumatic day-to-day life through lots of adaptation and innovation and struggle over the past decades, but this is what we've lost.  We are facing a horrible situation that 1918-guy couldn't even conceive of, and we just shrug at the blank-faced bureaucracy that's empowering it.  Thousands continue to die, while we are content to pat ourselves on the back for shaming a small percentage of people not wearing masks. 

This is one of those data sets where the steps back outweigh the steps forward.  Be careful of the beliefs it spawns.    

Important Note: I am in the Phase III trial for the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine.  I have received my vaccination, which is 66.67% likely to be a vaccine and 33.33% likely to be a placebo.  This vaccine has been approved for use in the UK, the EU, and India.  There is a factory in Baltimore that is cranked up and ready to produce this vaccine at a prodigious rate.  Yet as near as I can tell we are still weeks away from approval here. With millions of people getting the vaccine across the world, it's a pretty safe bet that nothing terrible is going to happen.  This is the perfect example of what I am talking about above. We cannot seem to set aside our dedication to bureaucratic processes even though people are dying by the thousands every day.

[Rant] You Are Getting Sleepy

I am not sleeping well.  This has happened periodically throughout my life, but with increasing frequency.  It usually takes the form of falling asleep at a reasonable hour, waking anywhere between 1:00 to 3:00AM, then being unable to return to sleep until shortly before my alarm is about to go off.  The end result is I am trying to get by on 2 or 3 hours of fitful sleep per night.  

I am fervently resisting any chemical assistance since I fear it will impede whatever natural adaptations my body or mind might make otherwise (this may be erroneous thinking on my part). The thing is, when you reach a certain age, you begin to experience what are irreversible degradations anyway.  The worry about impeding your body from adapting becomes less of a concern because in many cases, your body has given up adapting.  Ingesting various chemicals becomes a question of extending a good quality of life for as long as you can. 

But I'm not there with respect to sleep yet.  My current thinking is that while nothing particularly urgent is bothering me, there are big questions lingering in my near future as I barrel towards retirement and senior citizenship and, with nothing but my own thoughts to keep me company in bed, these are agitating my mind, mostly subconsciously.  At whatever point in the next few years I find those questions resolved, if I still have trouble sleeping then it's pills for me until the end of the line.  For now, I'll only take the softest of sleep aids and only in the direst of circumstances.

The related topic I wanted to touch on is my dreams.  I cannot tell you a single dream I have had in my life.  Not one.  Literally every dream I have ever had has vanished from my memory.  Oh, I remember that I had a dream; I sometimes remember a detail or two for a few seconds after I wake up but then any images simply vaporize. It's a very strange experience, but as far as I know it has had no deleterious effect on me.

Of late however, there has been a change.  I still can't recall any images or details of my dreams, but I can recall a theme.  This is even stranger.  So while any details still vaporize I'm left with an impression of the big picture plot. And, though the setting changes, that plot always involves me needing to complete some task or activity and never being able to. Maybe I'm trying to drive somewhere where someone is waiting and I keep running into traffic or have an engine failure -- every issue gets resolved and then another pops up with the result being I wake up with the task undone.

It is just the oddest thing.  I cannot recall any images or details, but I know the plot and theme.  I know it starts out with an innocuous task to complete and spirals into chaos and frustration, the tasks never being completed.  But I can't recall the specific tasks, the specific interruptions, or any people, places, or things.  It's like a weird form of mental illness.  There are people who can't remember faces -- they know who the people in their lives are, they see them every day, know their personal history with them, but for some bizarre reason of mental wiring, they can never recall their faces.  In a small way, I now know what that feels like.  I know what happens in my dreams, but I can't hold on to an image of it.

All this is apropos of nothing in particular and it's unlike me to share this sort of thing. I suppose if I ever find myself completely going off the rails into madness, this might be a clue to where it started.

[TV] Toob Notes

Chernobyl -- The cautionary tale of all cautionary tales.  A harrowing example of what happens when truth is subjugated to delusion in the extreme.  The first 2 episodes are absolutely riveting, even maddening.  It drifts into misery porn a bit in the later episodes (there are five total) in an effort to make a point that has already been made, but it is otherwise quite well done.  What's worse is that by most accounts it is extremely accurate.  That's good considering that it will likely become the eventual definition of the event in public consciousness.  

It is, simply put, the story of how delusion in the service of power and arrogance killed tens of thousands of people (although officially still only 31) and destroyed countless lives.  But it is also the story of how scores of men volunteered for suicide missions to prevent it.  In the Orwellian horror show that was the Soviet Union, where any hopes and dreams were thwarted outright, where depression and despair underlay everything, people still valued each other's lives enough to sacrifice like that.  

Excellent show.  Not something to cheer you up.

Aside:  In the interest of everything being a nail and Chernobyl the hammer, you have to wonder about what happened in Wuhan.

Tiger -- Every documentary has to follow a narrative.  (Perhaps the best ones track more than one possible narrative and let the viewer resolve the ambiguity themselves.)  The narrative of Tiger, the story of Tiger Woods, turns Tiger into Citizen Kane, and makes a compelling case.

We start with Tiger as a youth.  Yes, he is being groomed and monitored and controlled as we all know, but he also still has some attachment to normalcy.  He has a bunch of standard high school friends and they have silly and goofy times.  He even has a high school sweetheart.  He appears to be a proverbial "nice kid": friendly, a bit introverted, a bit innocent.  Then adulthood hits and any aspects of himself are crushed.  He is set up, not just by his father, but by the expectations of popular culture, as a figure of enormous responsibility.  A savior-lite, if you will.  One who, through his talent and popularity, will be a uniting force for all mankind.  That is not hyperbole.  That is how his father publicly described him and how Nike promoted him. Of course, we all know how it came crashing down.  But Tiger goes deeper into the psychological cause and effect, and does it very well.

Tiger's lack of self combined with the shadow of his father leads to trouble.  He takes to spending time training with Navy Seals -- his father was a green beret -- and fantasizes about joining them.  He also starts womanizing -- his father was an inveterate womanizer -- which leads to his ultimate crash.  All the while, injuries are keeping him in a fairly constant state of pain, which he must deny to meet expectations.  The death of his father rattles him.  Interestingly, it could have been a new beginning for him, but it just tightened his spiral.

We all now know the stories of the scores of women he had extra-marital relationships with, but in what is probably the key reveal of this documentary is that these were not quickies with club tramps or lurid trysts with Onlyfans whores. These were typically normal work-a-day women -- a diner waitress, an administrative assistant -- and a number of them declare their ongoing love for him to this day.  They report his vulnerability and desperation.  They were complicit in his subterfuge out of sympathy. It's really quite remarkable and unlike similar public scandals.  And it cements the image of Tiger as a tragic figure.  (It's also an interesting angle on the psychology of a certain aspect of womanhood and I do not mean that in a condescending or negative way.)

In the final sequence, as Tiger is pulled over by the Florida State troopers, intoxicated and completely disoriented.  They ask where he was coming from.   He says Orange County.  Sad that he didn't even realize what state he was in, but then we cut back to his high school sweetheart in Orange County and we replay a video of what were probably some of the last carefree moments in his life.  All we needed at this point was a voice-over of "Rosebud".

Exceptionally well done.  It's hard not to wish the best for Tiger.

Wandavision

I'll probably have more to say about this once the season concludes, but nicely done (so far) and very cool that Marvel is willing to take chances like this; doing something very much out of the ordinary.  It could have been Law and Order with superheroes -- which is probably what it would have been had network TV gotten involved or if it was made by Sony.  A lot of fun, but I would suggest waiting until the series is complete then binge the entire thing.  A half hour at a time has been frustrating.