Evening Pages: November 16th, 2020

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, I've been locking myself down until I think it's safe to go out again. To alleviate fear and stress, my writer's group has put together a daily "morning pages" get-together on Zoom in order to touch base before starting the day. Here's some of my brief thoughts.

When you're little and you can stretch like this:

catto

Man. Those were the days.

So apparently President Trump is withdrawing all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by Christmas. Hmm. Wonder why the guy who invited the Taliban to Camp David on the anniversary of 9/11 and who lied about having the tallest tower in NYC before the WTC dust even settled and who is threatening to withhold vaccines from New York might want a destabilized Afghanistan with the Taliban in power. Man, the 9/11 attacks next year will really suck. Like the Folsom Dam disaster, it will have been preventable.

Kind of reminds me of Honorius and Roman Brittania being kicked out of the Roman Empire because of one guy. I wish we at least had an Augustus before our Honorius (or maybe a Nerva, Nerva seemed pretty cool).

All jokes aside (and to be clear, we're laughing because otherwise we'd be crying), I did request more information about local emergency response organizations on a community level. Arlington County, site of the Pentagon attacks during 9/11, has this thing called an "Community Emergency Response Team" (CERT), where if first responders are overwhelmed, you're activated and thrown into the maelstrom. I think it speaks to a large truth: most governmental stuff happens at the local level, big-picture stuff is really abstract and people don't see it anyways. Not sure when I'd be hearing back from them though.

In other news, I think my investment (if you can call it that) into writing publicly is paying some amount of dividends. I'm getting a very very tiny trickle of people who want me to try out their latest software framework, or review a book, or other stuff. I'm mostly happy about free books, because it's like free money. Maybe one day I'll be big enough to get a free steak, though that probably won't happen unless cooking.yingw787.com takes off and doesn't suck.