Siesta

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“Lazy” isn’t an adjective that most people who know me would apply.  I tend to be fidgety and can’t really sit still at work.  I have a body and I want to move it.  I have an active mind and I need to keep it stimulated.  The recent heatwave over the long Fourth of July weekend, though, enforced laziness.  We don’t have central air conditioning.  Some kind family members bought us a couple floor units for our bedrooms so sleep is technically possible when our bedroom nears 100 degrees in the late afternoon.  But during such sweltering conditions, we spend the day trying to move as little as possible.  Even stepping into a cold shower is difficult when the pipes have warmed up so that tepid is the best you can hope for.  I’ve got a lot of writing projects going, but quality work is difficult to do when the air is so hot.

I see the wisdom of the siesta.  When I volunteered on the archaeological dig at Tel Dor back in 1987, the digging ceased around noon.  Afternoons were too hot for physical labor.  Most people napped.  In hot climates around the world the siesta is necessary as well as practical.  Late capitalism assumes everyone’s in air conditioned offices and has abolished the idea.  It’s the kind of enforced laziness, however, that descended on me during the heat wave.  I’d be reading my book or watching a movie when I’d wake up to find the story quite different from what’d been filtering through my mind.  Or the movie having something going on that seemed to have no precedent.  It was okay for a day or two, but I started to grow restless.  There’s still lots of stuff to get done.

Weather extremes, meteorologists tell us, will only continue because we refuse to curb carbon emissions.  I do remember hot summers from when I was a kid, but the thermometer climbing up into high fever range for days at a time never happened.  Given my age, one thought that recurred during life under the heat dome was that perhaps this is what retirement (not in the cards) must be like.  Retired friends tell me that they’re busier than when they worked, but I do have to wonder if the timing is a bit more open.  The 9-2-5 relaxed a bit more.  It’s not that I’m lazy, but sitting in front of a computer all day earning money for someone else means the siesta’s not permitted.  And when it’s so hot out, it should be.  Otherwise fevered decisions follow.

Photo by Florian Siedl on Unsplash

250 Years

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America doesn’t seem to be in a partying mood.  With more than the usual inanity coming from Foggy Bottom, and hot air being added to this heat dome, well, it might just be best to keep it simple.  Algae will grow, no matter what the self-appointed-divine say.  I remember a half century ago.  America seemed optimistic at its bicentennial.  Nixon was safely gone and Reagan hadn’t reared his fanged head yet.  It seemed like the country had a future.  These days, with more than regressive rhetoric, when emails from the Social Security Administration go out of their way to say how great Trump is, well, I think I’ll just stay home and watch a horror movie.  It’s less traumatic.

For me, as a kid, the Fourth of July was all about sparklers, black snakes, smoke bombs, and staying up late for fireworks.  Black snakes were these black discs about the size of a button coin battery that you lit with a match and the ash would fizz out the top into a “snake.”  It was an ephemeral thrill.  What we called “smoke bombs” were small colorful spheres that gushed colored smoke when you lit them.  We never played with anything explosive, but even the thought of these simple pleasures still brings a smile.  I haven’t seen anything like these trinkets (except sparklers) for many decades now.  I see from YouTube that they’re still being sold.  Almost as if the past fifty years never happened.  And staying up late to see fireworks only means being excessively sleepy at work on Monday morning.

I won’t be around for the tricentennial, presuming we survive what the Republican Party has up its sleeves.  I do hope things are more optimistic then.  I’ve been around long enough to notice the distinct difference in national outlook a mere fifty years can make.  I was born less than twenty years after the Second World War when everyone knew fascists were an evil to be avoided.  In just the last decade that has done a 180.  And we see what it’s like.  Our grocery bills are double what they were before our fearless leader took his post, claiming to make things better.  If I’m to believe the propaganda from the Social Security Administration things would be just rosy, could I afford to retire.  So our social experiment in democracy seems to have lasted only about two-hundred and fifty years.  Hopefully in another fifty what’s left of the United States will have come back to its senses or will have come up with something better than we have today.

Life’s Work

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It’s official.  I’ve now worked as an editor longer than I was a professor.  The latter was my chosen vocation, the former my fall-back.  I feel like I’ve tipped over a precipice.  As I’ve written before, I still think like a professor and would welcome back life in the classroom.  This came home to me in a major why when I realized that in my current position, in less than a month’s time, there will be only five people remaining in my starting department who were at my employer before I was.  At least twenty editors who were there when I started have left, most of them younger than me.  This was a world-rattling revelation.  You can’t choose your destiny.  You can do everything possible to make your plans happen, but change is constant and you have to make do.  None of this changes my mind, however.  A life has a calling, fulfilled or not.

I’m very grateful for all that I’ve learned about publishing, even if there’s still so much to learn.  As a young person I knew that writing would be part of my life.  I didn’t know what form it would take, and I guess I still don’t.  I’ve been getting positive signals from a publisher about a novel I completed thirteen years ago.  I’m doing my last set of edits on a very different novel that I finished initially last year.  I’ve made good progress on my seventh nonfiction book.  And there are many shorter projects in hand as well.

I was reading a book the other day where I was cited.  This got me to thinking about the concept of “life’s work.”  For some of us that’s measured in words.  I have no idea how many academic books cite me.  There’s software to measure such things, but it doesn’t capture every publication and I’m not that deluded that I’d spend much time checking on it.  Still, I do wonder if my life’s work (which is generally measured in written form) has made any difference at all.  I post thoughts here daily and they cover disparate topics.  (I had a record five “likes” recently for a post on the Bible.  Sometimes posts on monsters near that record.  Just sayin’.)  Academics tend not to cite blogs.  This one is, believe it or not, research-based.  That’s why I’m working on a bibliography.  When I’m dead and gone, and the auto-renew on this blog runs out, a good chunk of my life’s work will be archived away somewhere until electronic media cease to exist.  But one thing seems certain, most of the mentions I will have in print will be in the form of acknowledgements from having been an editor.

Forever Young

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It’s strange.  People my age (and younger) are retiring.  It’s strange because in my head I’m still a teenager.  The mirror lies to me when I glance at it.  I’m not a guy old enough to have colleagues I’ve known for thirty years retiring.  Not me.  This hit me kind of suddenly at work.  One of the things an editor has to do is arrange for peer reviews.  One of my usual sources for reviewers has been showing names I don’t recognize, as of late.  Look, I was never some super-professor, but I knew quite a few of those who worked in biblical studies.  The same names would come around year after year at conferences.  They would age, but I would not.  I was still the same guy, teaching at Nashotah House, publishing articles, chatting with friends.  Where have they gone?

I recently saw a survey to which some colleagues I know and trust had responded.  They listed themselves as “late career.”  How is that possible?  I still work 9-2-5 and likely will until I die.  Who are these young people taking their places at the table?  Our minds, it seems, are as Bob Dylan termed it, forever young.  We remember, however imperfectly, our younger selves as we discover our lives entangled in work and other complications, and our bodies aging.  Me, I’m still trying to get through each day, just like I was in college.  Just like I was in high school.  Awaiting some ill defined destination where I might be able to relax for a while.  Like I could when I was young.  Before capitalism got its hooks in me.  Before AI.

Consciousness is a strange thing.  Our thought processes are formed by early experiences in our lives and we spend most of the rest of our time on earth reacting to them.  Our brains evolved to help us survive.  We do this communally (which is why Trumpism, tearing communities apart, is so dangerous).  I couldn’t survive with my desk job if many people—most of them younger than me these days—didn’t contribute to this experiment we call society.  I sometimes see people born the same year that I was and think, “they’re old.”  Why doesn’t that apply to me?  It’s not that I want to feel old, but rather that I’m still looking for the things I was seeking as a young person.  Financial security, books, love and acceptance.  And trying to avoid tedious tasks—there do seem to be more and more of those as you age.  I’ll have to ask some people who are old if that’s true.

Shocking Development

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With life being lived on the internet, electricity is now as important as food and shelter.  We bought our house going on eight years ago.  The former owner claimed to be an electrician and, based on his mail that we’re still receiving, has his own electrical business.  First-time buyers, we didn’t know to be skeptical.  It didn’t help that the home inspector we’d hired bowed out a week in advance of closing and we had to hire someone with no recommendation on the fly.  He said nothing about the electrical box (and many other flaws that should’ve been spotted and reported).  We started having some electrical issues soon after moving in.  We found a local electrician (not the former owner) who was friendly and once saved us by returning to the house as night was falling and hooking up the power so we could have heat (this was in a November).

Before picture

When the power went out completely in April, and the electric company said there were no issues on their end, we decided we’d better have the whole system checked out.  We hired from a larger, regional company.  These guys were good.  After being here for only half an hour they’d found the problem, and it was a big one.  The mast, or conduit, on the side of the house hadn’t been properly installed.  Water had been seeping into the breaker box and several of the breakers had rusted.  The repair cost was mighty, but it would be done correctly.  This led to a chilly April day without heat, but they did supply a line that let us work by powering the router, and kept the fridge cold.  They were here for ten hours.  For the first time since moving in, we have an uncompromised electrical system.

What makes all of this so strange is that we had been trusting of the seller that he knew what he was doing electrically.  As laypeople, we had no way to assess this, and the inspector apparently didn’t as well.  The good electricians (the most recent) suggested that our former electrician was afraid to tell us the real cost of doing the job right, and had decided to cut corners.  He may have been acting out of kindness.  Or he may not have been able to see the problem from a larger view.  So we’re poorer, but wiser.  And we have power.  As long as the electric company can be trusted to keep up its end of the deal, we shouldn’t run into internet access problems.  And that’s life itself.

Things Lost

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Here’s an honest question, and if anyone can answer, please do. Why is it that software can’t keep track of the latest version of anything? Let me put some legs on that. I recently backed up my files to “the Cloud.” When I went to open one of them, the version that was backed up was several months old, not the one I’d worked on (and backed up) that very day.  I looked on my back-up hard drive, likewise backed up that day.  Both only showed files from several months ago.  This was for an app that doesn’t even have a “save” option because it saves automatically.  How can this happen?  I’m having trouble understanding.  Do I leave my files open too long?  (It takes quite some time to write a book.)

Then someone in my family used my laptop for a minute and closed my browser with all my tabs open.  No problem.  I went to “restore all tabs from last session.”  The tabs that appeared were over a month old.  No record anywhere of the tabs I’d kept open as reminders more recently.  What is it about software that makes this so very hard to do?  My laptop’s losing data like a sieve.  To make matters interesting, in a different context after all this, someone had moved and renamed a folder I’d created on a shared drive.  They didn’t bother telling me this, so to all appearances, the folder had been deleted.  I even did a windows search, and nothing showed up with the folder name at all.  I had to get IT involved.  While they were investigating someone finally (at my prompting) admitted that the file had been moved and renamed.  This, on top of my losing my own data at home was a lot for a single day.  (Of course, even bigger issues were about to show up that I had no idea were coming.  Expensive issues.)

Whatever my mental condition is (I don’t have an official label for it), I tend to get overwhelmed when I can’t find something.  My memory isn’t that of a thirty-year-old but I have excellent recall as to where I store important things (like my writing).  Not being able to find it drives me frantic.  I’m not wealthy and the only real asset I have is my mind and I write things down so that thoughts that mind has won’t get lost.  The Cloud seems pretty good at doing that for me.  I’m a believer in backing things up.  Data loss can be devastating.  I just wish I knew how to avoid it.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Medical Emergency

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Fire drills.  We’ve all been through them.  When an alarm goes off legitimately, people don’t know what to do.  At least not at first.  I was accompanying my wife for a routine colonoscopy.  We were in the recovery room, and she was still coming out of anesthesia when I thought I smelled something chemical-like, almost the caustic kind of petroleum-product smell with none of the sweet undertones.  Now, I have no idea what they use in facilities like that, so I said nothing.  About fifteen minutes later the fire alarm went off.  My wife had already gotten dressed, thank goodness.  The staff was all walking around, apologizing to everyone for the noise.  After about five minutes, the surgeon came over and said, “We have to go outside.  Let me go over this briefly.”  He did and I helped my wife down the stairs and outside.  Firetrucks came.

This was something new in my experience.  Hospitals and clinics are buildings, with all the usual limitations of physical structures with complex machinery in them.  I’d never been in one when an alarm went off before.  There’s always a period of disbelief among staff as well as patients.  I wondered what they did with those in the midst of a colonoscopy.  They’re in a somewhat delicate condition to be rolled outside (and it was none too warm that day).  I can imagine how I might’ve panicked had my wife not yet been in recovery.  As it was, we thought we were clear to leave, so we just came home as others less fortunate stood outside awaiting the all clear.

Image credit: Jason Lawrence,  Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license, via Wikimedia Commons

After a medical procedure we’re used to being able to ask questions.  Take your time.  Come out of anesthesia.  After we got home I could find nothing online about the incident.  It did seem to have “news story” written all over it.  Or “horror story.”  I’ve watched enough MASH to know that doctors sometimes work in less than ideal conditions.  And there must certainly be standard procedures for what to do when the unexpected happens.  Colonoscopies are one of those highly recommended procedures that compromise dignity like few others.  As such, being interrupted by a fire drill puts this particular procedure into a class of its own.  I never look forward to them (few do) but now it seems I have a new worry to add.  What was really missing was a sense of closure.  Too often these days transactions of all kinds are left open-ended.  As the firetrucks came we asked ourselves, is it okay to go?

Field Hockey

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Friends recommended We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry.  I’m glad they did.  A woman-empowering novel, it ties together so many important things: what it’s like to grow up as a girl, what it means to trust other people, and the importance of believing in yourself.  My experience of reading it as a man at times made me want to apologize for my sex.  So many guys have trouble reining it in and that leads many women to feeling uncomfortable, or even threatened.  The book’s also a great story of awakening to who you really are.  Set in Danvers, Massachusetts in the late 1980s, it’s the tale of the girl’s field hockey team and their “deal with the devil” to win the state championship after being a team having a reputation for losing.  The eleven players on the team are sketched so wonderfully that you get a good idea of that many distinct protagonists.

There is a tie-in with the Salem Witch Trials—much of which actually played out in Danvers.  Although the assumed implication is that the girls begin winning because they’ve made a pact with the darkness, the story doesn’t give it up that easily.  There’s a subtlety at play here and even if you’ve never been on a sports team, the sense of camaraderie is palpable.  The real magic comes in believing in yourself.  Barry is eloquent about such life and how it can change you during the difficult period of adolescence.  I’m always impressed with adult writers who can capture so well what coming-of-age feels like.  For many of us, I expect, there is a trauma associated with it.  Cultural expectations on young women are burdensome in so many ways.  At the same time this story is so well written that you hesitate to put it down.

While I never participated in high school or collegiate sports—I have no particular gifts in that regard—regular readers may find it difficult to believe that I played on the Nashotah House football team for a couple of years.  Lest you get the wrong idea, the seminary played one annual game of flag football against Seabury-Western Seminary in Chicago, styled as conservative vs. liberals.  I was younger, and in better physical shape than many of my students, so I made a team effort for a couple of years.  Still, the team spirit demonstrated in We Ride Upon Sticks is of an altogether different sort.  Fun and thoughtful at the same time.  It’s the kind of book I’m glad to have pointed out to me.

A Matter of Trust

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I used to write everything by hand.  We bought a used typewriter when I was in high school, and when I was in seminary I graduated to one of those strange devices that would print, like a typewriter, but had an LCD on the keyboard so that you could back up several characters before it printed.  This let you proofread while on the go.  I write a lot.  It may be a form of sickness, but I have hundreds of story ideas and little time to develop them.  Now I write on a computer but I’ve begun to lose trust.  It’s not just the whole AI debacle.  No, it’s that even with frequent backups, computers just lose things.  After having my hard drive wiped following a scam last year, I began work on some documents that I had to back up to the Cloud when the USB C ports on my laptop went bad.

After the repair was done I could download my files and pick up where I left off.  In theory.  I was working away on a new story and thought that I might be able to connect it to an earlier story I’d started.  Looking at the file, I remembered that the tale was much further along when I’d left off.  Where was it?  I looked on the Cloud version and it was the same as the one on my hard drive.  Then a larger project came along.  I went to start it again and discovered many, many pages missing.  Again, the Cloud shrugged its nebulus shoulders saying “I dunno…”. I pulled out my back-up disc.  (This was in April.)  I tried going back to January.  Same thing.  December.  Ditto.  Finally, my last backup in November had the full files.  Why these files didn’t backup to the Cloud, when done by a professional at the Apple Store, I can’t fathom.

What was especially disturbing is that one of the files (which I duplicated and put back on my hard drive, where they belong) showed that I’d completely reorganized things in a much clearer way.  After the laptop came home from the hospital, I’d forgotten (I’m not young and I’d been using a borrowed device for a few days).  I’d probably just picked up a story and, with my usual tunnel vision, began writing.  Not unrelatedly, I’ve been going through a spate of printing out any stories far enough along to warrant such treatment.  From what I’ve seen of the housekeeping on the Cloud, I’m glad I’ve been doing so.  I miss writing by hand.

Made In

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This blog, like drain clog remover, is something I do frequently and then move onto other things.  Once in a while you stop to think, “Hey, the water’s draining well today,” but most days you don’t.  It’s just one of those things.  Which is a long-winded way of saying I don’t pay much attention to stats on this blog.  I’ve accepted my place as a middling muddler, with a constantly shifting, but small number of followers.  But WordPress likes bloggers (paying customers such as yours truly) to feel good about their investment, so they send occasional notices when you reach milestones.  Recently I received such a notice telling me that I’d topped 150 countries for visitors (welcome all!).  Curious, I went to the stats page and soon found that my largest viewership is now China.  Hmm.  As in so many other areas China surpasses the United States.

I’m not sure what I’ve written that would be of much interest to Chinese readers.  I like to think they still have a kind of reverence for older individuals, but it’s probably some robotic, AI-ish thing, in reality.  When you write, you do so aware that your chances of a large readership are slim.  I’ve been told many times that nobody reads blogs anymore.  They prefer podcasts and videos.  But the form of post I attempt—the five-minute or less read—is intended, I suppose, for busy people like myself.  With things spinning all the time, when I finally do get a day off, such as today, I spend the first several waking minutes confused.  What do I do with so much time?  There’s been so much I’ve been neglecting because of work.  And other people probably have maybe five minutes to read a post.

I don’t know what things are like in China.  I’ve never been there, but I hear people—some academic specialists—reporting about it.  I fear authoritarian governments, but it seems we’ve got ourselves one of those too.  And I suspect most people in China, like most of us, are just trying to get by.  As with most things tech, however, there’s no peeking behind the curtain.  Besides, China’s all about big numbers.  I’m glad that they’ve chosen to share some of those with me.  I try not to focus too much on this blog itself in my posts (that’s too meta) but I think about the whole enterprise daily.  If you keep doing something long enough, someone might end up paying attention.  Why they do I haven’t a clue.  I pour it in and hope it works.

New York Scent

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I recently had to go into New York City for work.  Now, I haven’t been to Manhattan for at least six years.  It’s like riding a bike, though.  For seven years I commuted there daily and I know my part of Midtown tolerably well.  There were a few things I noticed after my absence.  Despite the rumors that the pandemic had depopulated the City, it was plenty crowded on a Wednesday in May.  And I noticed how much had changed.  Manhattan is so large and complex that nobody can know it all.  Still, as I walked through parts of it I’d been through many times before I found no stores that I remembered.  I’m sure there are some that have remained unchanged, but New York is a city that is constantly reinventing itself.  Change may take place slowly, but six years accumulate small things.  Overall, however, the experience remains the same.

Like many visitors to the Big Apple, I sometimes think it might be fun to live there.  At least for a bit.  I’m not the biggest NYC fan, but once in a while it seems like it’s worth spending unrushed time in the City.  It’s iconic.  Being at work and seeing the Empire State Building, or the Chrysler Building, out the window has its distractions.  Walking down streets you’ve seen in many movies.  Encountering many thousands of people in the same day.  Heady stuff.  This time I took the train and I emerged into a Penn Station I didn’t recognize and in which I got lost.  It’d changed so much that I wasn’t sure I’d be able to find my way back when it was time to go home.  The workings of New Jersey Transit were comforting in their familiarity.

The commuting life is something I never craved and which I don’t miss.  I can dedicate more time to my job as a remote worker.  I’m sure the culture of Manhattan has changed a bit in the years since it was a daily practice for me.  It’s a place that inspires stories, regardless.  On the way home, now beyond the end of the line, I did feel a little sad that I couldn’t spend a bit more time there.  New York is funny that way.  I arrived home in time for a late supper and bed, but I noticed that my clothes smelled like the Manhattan I remembered as I undressed.  It was a scent I’d almost forgotten.  Although much has changed since last I’d been there, it was pleasing to know that some things always stay the same in the midst of constant change.

Blog Reading

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I’ve been at this blog for about seventeen years now.  During those years of daily posts, WordPress still has trouble recognizing me.  I try not to take this personally, but when people I know (and follow) post on WordPress I don’t always get notifications.  When I want to comment on said posts, I have to sign in.  Sometimes twice.  All of which is to say that a recent post on a friend’s blog made me thoughtful.  I met Jeff Hora through my wife, so I’ve known about him for going on forty years now.  We’ve become friends in our own right, mostly online.  I want to reflect on one of Jeff’s recent posts, “Solid Ambiguity.”  Before I do, however, a brief lament.  I used to read a number of blogs daily, including that of the recently mentioned Dan McClellan.  I had a whole set of blog buddies.  Then blogs began to decline in popularity and, more to the point, I took uber-capitalist jobs in New York City, robbing me of time.  Now I only read them when I get email notices.

Okay, so solid ambiguity.  The basic idea is that we like to grasp onto the things we can count on.  Things that don’t change.  That’s the “solid” part.  At the same time we need to be aware that change is endemic to life.  In fact, the post mentions Buddhism.  Like Shakers, Buddhists have been part (long past) of my religious training.  I specialized in “western religions,” but I’ve recently been reflecting quite a lot on the fact that in East Asian thought, especially, change is the only thing that’s permanent.  I know I’ve posted about this before, but that was probably years ago as well.  We know that things constantly change.  In the few brief minutes it would take you to read this post, you have changed.  So has the world around you.

We want solidity most of the time.  A house we can reliably come back to.  People we love to always be there.  Keep the possessions we worked so hard to earn.  None of this is permanent.  We know that at some level.  For many of us it’s deeply troubling.  I’m no expert in Buddhism, but I do know that one of its basic tenets is not being attached to things as they are.  Life is full of ambiguity.  We don’t tend to like it, really, as Jeff points out.  But we do need to learn to live with it.  One of the changes with which I have to cope is the loss of time for reading friends’ blogs.  It’s good to be reminded that it is a rewarding experience when I finally do it.  Now, if only I had more time…

Equal Women

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It’s been so busy this year that Mother’s Day crept up on me.  We have a lot of spring birthdays in our extended family, and what with the weird weather this year and unexpected household expenses, it just kept slipping my mind.  I like to commemorate the day on this blog because I’ve considered myself a feminist for many years.  I’m very distraught that women still aren’t treated as equals to men.  This should’ve been a no-brainer over a century ago.  (Having an historian’s outlook, I realize that in the days when women tended to die young, in childbirth, it was difficult for many to rise to positions of social prominence.  Once we got to the stage that most women survived the experience, and then to the point that economics drove us to two-income families, the male-superiority charade should’ve been dropped.)  The fact is none of us would be here without our mothers.  Father’s day has never been a big deal for me, but Mother’s Day is important.

I did manage to remember to get my wife a card in advance, but this year the day itself kept slipping my mind.  Ironically, my wife and I had watched a biopic of Mother Ann Lee last night—I’ll post on that tomorrow—and it was only as I was preparing to write about it for today’s post that I thought, “Wait.  It’s Mother’s Day.”  (We do have plans for the day; I’m not a complete barbarian.)  My excuse is that we were set off yesterday by an early encounter with a brusque and condescending Verizon employee who would not help set up a new phone purchased elsewhere.  I hadn’t slept well the night before and it rained all day, none of which made for a productive Saturday.  The movie (tomorrow’s post) was longer than anticipated, keeping me up late.  Movies, strangely enough, are now starting to really influence my dreams.

My dream for today, however, is that women’s equality will become a reality rather than something we just keep talking about.  There can be little doubt that we’d be better off with a woman president than with the alternative.  A woman has traveled further from the earth than many billions of men have.  My doctor and dentist are both women.  They can do anything men in their professions can.  They are university presidents and CEOs.  Pilots, both civilian and military.  They are religious leaders.  And many of them do the job on top of being mothers.  I consider it a personal failing that it was only as I was about to post about Mother Ann Lee (tomorrow) that I finally realized today is a very important day.  Let’s make Mother’s Day count!

Million Air

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Life is strange.  While I was in Boston for the AAR/SBL Annual Meeting in November, something unusual happened.  For a few days back then this blog was getting a lot of traffic.  I mean, a lot.  For me.  In fact, I posted about when I finally shot past a million hits.  I couldn’t figure out why.  Well, things have settled back to their usual trickle and I figured it was just “one of those things.”  Pleased but not obsessed, I went back to my usual blend of observations about life, dark academia, and horror movies.  Then, and I can’t recollect exactly how I saw it, I noticed that my old blogging buddy Dan McClellan had, about that time given me a shoutout on his social media.  Then I remembered that I’d run into Dan at the conference and we’d had a brief chat.

The pieces began to fit together.  (Thanks, Dan!)  I’ve known a few fairly well-known people over the years.  Most of them are academics, and a few of them clergy.  Occasionally an author who has made a name for him or herself.  Some of them sometimes give me shoutouts but I’d never seen the numbers tick up like they had after this particular one.  I can’t figure out blog stats.  During the early years of this blog I had quite a bit of traffic.  I remember that in 2015 my views plummeted precipitously.  They’ve stayed at that low level ever since.  Until last year.  Now they’re headed back to normal, post 2015-levels.  I’ve tried some other platforms such as YouTube, but they take a lot more time and lead to limited hits.  Some influencers suggest I should try podcasting again.

I do have plans to bring the podcast back.  It takes several hours to make such an entry into internetdom.  I started podcasting when I began this blog (well, actually the blog was started by one of my nieces when a family member suggested I should podcast).  What happened?  I lost my job at Gorgias Press and I had to spend the next five years trying to find full-time employment in a stable environment.  By the time stability returned I figured podcasts were dead because everybody was watching videos.  I may have done a Mark Twain there.  Podcasts are still popular.  When I can get a chunk of time, and a nip of courage, I may rush back into the fray again.  At this point, I had my maybe fifteen days of fame in someone else’s shadow.  Life is strange.

Snowballs in Spring

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Things snowball sometimes, even in the spring.  Weekends are among the most sacred of times when you work a 9-2-5.  They do double-duty as recovery time as well as prep time for the coming week to do it all over again.  I’m a proponent of the three-day weekend; life has grown so complicated that two days hardly cover it any more.  So in April I had a Saturday that snowballed.  I awoke vaguely thinking I might have to cut the grass.  It’d actually been dry a few days and the sun was out.  Then things started to get out of hand.  A letter arrived from the IRS.  Now, this is seldom welcome, but although it wasn’t scary it involved having to go back to our tax preparer’s office and, since tax day was just a couple days off, scheduling that was tricky.

Photo by benjamin lehman on Unsplash

Then the power went out.  Under a clear blue sky.  Being the middle of the day, we couldn’t tell if neighbors were affected or not.  After leaving a message with PPL, I walked to a local store about a block away and they had power.  The owner and I chatted a little, then I went home to await the PPL call or visit.  Since the power was out I was keeping a close eye on my phone’s battery level.  It was our only means of communication with the outside world.  Meanwhile, all of what we’d planned to do that Saturday had to be put on hold.  The house was quiet with no fridge hum or any other sound.  Suddenly I heard a kind of airplane buzz, but it seemed to be coming from inside.  I followed my ears to the kitchen where a big old bumblebee was trying to get outside.  I grabbed one of our ubiquitous peanut butter jars and waited for it to land.  The phone rang.  PPL said everything was fine on their end and we had to call an electrician.  It was now 4 p.m. on a Saturday, I was being buzzed by a bee, and I had to find an emergency electrician with my phone charge dropping.

I called a company I’d used before.  After explaining everything they decided they no longer serviced our area.  I called a second 24/7 electrician.  They could get someone out to us on Friday.  This was Saturday.  My wife took the jar from my hand and went after the bee.  The third company, which I will gladly use again, said they could get someone out by 9 p.m., at the latest.  By now the entire afternoon was gone.  My wife let the bee go outdoors and when we came back into the kitchen she said, “Isn’t that the fridge?”  It was humming.  Lights were out elsewhere so I made my fifth trip to the breaker box in the basement, using a flashlight, and tripped all the switches again.  Power was back on.  The electricians were good about canceling but suggested a follow up visit, just to check things out.  The grass didn’t get cut.  It was a snowball in April.