The unsupported use case of Bix Frankonis’ disordered, surplus, mediocre midlife in St. Johns, Oregon.
No fear, no hate, no thoughtless bullshit, and no nazis.
Out of the 4257 posts across 16 sources in the 25 years since March 2000, these 30 posts were published on proseful.com.
Catching up on my very few podcasts, Monday’s edition of Social Distance from James Hamblin and Katherine Wells—“Will the Restaurants Come Back?”—is a conversation with fellow Atlantic writer Derek Thompson, who recently argued a fairly pessimistic answer to that question.
In this edition: dashed hopes, wolves, mental health, reopening the South, corporate liability, excess deaths, a new blue, power company wifi, pet distancing, autistic voices, a Colorado quarantine, muscular Christians, letting industries fail, canceling the rent, keeping cars out, and bias in testing.
My mind has some kind of viral malaise which prevents me from having anything worthwhile to say—or, really, even think about. That’s the truly unnerving part: I’m not really having thoughts. It’s entirely possible this blog-away-from-blog shortly will collapse further still, becoming nothing but daily Link Log Roundup posts. My inner life seems spent, my outer life mechanical. This maybe helps explain why lately I’m not anymore out of bed before noon; read some things, watch some things, listen to some things, eat some things, sleep, repeat. I see people expressing their way through this particular now and I wonder how, and I wonder how they aren’t just empty and listless.
In this edition: the bus, black women, anti-vaxxers, autistic kids, governors, FilAm nurses, television production, first responders, trick photography, protests, Lithuania, Parks and Recreation, nightmares, slow streets, nannies, and retail.
CJ Eller quotes Sajesh on the matter of blog comments: “I feel like the old style of blog comments just don’t quite cut it for the modern web stack and ways we interact.” The reality is I agree, but one of the reasons I’ve taken a vacation from my actual, vanity-domained blog is because, hosted as it was on an indieweb-facing service I found that my current need for simplicity kept bumping up against the fact that the sought-after interoperability of the indieweb is far, still, from being a simple matter. I guess that I needed to retreat to a space which arguably actually is underdeveloped even in traditional terms let alone the terms of indieweb strivings. I needed somewhere away from the noise, and away from the inherent invitation to tinker.
In this edition: the PennySaver, Oregon at one month, Oregon City, the unhoused, killing methods, beaches, the right to read, grocery workers, western states, Biden, vote-by-mail, and suffrage.
In this edition: frozen steaks, immunity passports, car culture, the future normal, and quarantine fatigue.
Max Sparrow noticed something interesting about a BBC story describing so-called “Zoom fatigue” (also noted by C. M. Condo about a similar National Geographic story): the strains and stresses people are experiencing as a result of all these video meetings is not unlike what actually-autistic people experience much of the time.
In this edition: Disinfectant, Soviet Russia, pseudoscience, hygge, Zoom fatigue, webcams in lockdown, architecture, strokes, email greetings, flu season, and March 11.
Today I read what I think was my first-ever Aeon post, and mostly I have to ask regular readers of the site if they’re all this terrible?
Then afterword comes the “hangover”. In the end I slept until almost one in the afternoon (after lurching awake at seven in the morning spitting up into my mouth), despite the construction noise next door on a Saturday or indeed probably because it’s easier to sleep through it than suffer awake through it. My entire body aches, as if I myself had worked construction yesterday and not, instead, dragged myself back from the cliff of an autistic meltdown for the second time in days. Breakfast was nothing but a bowl of cereal and warmed up leftover coffee, because that’s all I have the energy to make. Which itself then runs the risk of keeping my resources so low today that just about anything could set me off again.
In this edition: socially-distant Ramadan, African-American health, the fate of cities, reopening Georgia, Instagram influencers, your pets, working from home, public transit, occult politics, essential workers, Zoom and autism, cosplayers, and third places.
Joining the ongoing musical memory lane playlist this week (part of whatever we’re calling our collective flashbacks and throwbacks in these days) are The Crabs and The Minders. So, we’re talking late-90s to early-00s, again—which makes sense because that was my Portland music-following era. Whenever my personal musical retrospective goes local, it’s going to be from that period.
It’s official: wearing a face mask triggers so many sensory and other issues that after having barely avoided an autistic meltdown the other day, today I walked right up to the line and spit over the edge. Earlier this week, I was in convulsions trying to get the mask off my face the moment I walked in the door at home; today I didn’t make it out to the parking lot as I left the grocery store before the same. By the time I got home, I was so on edge that jamming my hand on a cabinet could only have resulted in slamming the cabinet shut and screaming the loudest “MOTHERFUCKER!” this neighborhood has ever heard. The sheer amount of energy it took to head off picking up anything and everything I could find in the kitchen and hurling it across the apartment itself only expended my resources further, adding pressure to the psychic mix because now my skin has thinned even more. I’m not sure where this goes on the list of comparative problems, but I guess I’m now precluded from being able to go grocery shopping. For those keeping score: yes, there also are loud rattling construction sounds coming from next door, from which I have no escape. I’m at a very profound loss.
Yesterday I just barely accomplished my goal of getting in some Gods of the Upper Air, finishing The Lesson, and starting The Overstory—although technically that last didn’t happen until just after midnight. I’ve read all of Richard Powers, and in the case of a couple of books re-read them several times, but every now and then it takes me awhile to get around to whatever is his latest. It took me awhile to get to The Time of Our Singing, too.
This hardly is meant as prescriptive. It’s just that I’ve noticed that changes already underway in my own news consumption have increased since the pandemic began, and I thought it would help to describe how it works for me these days.
It turns out that personal nostalgia during a global pandemic Officially Is A Thing, or at least this is my takeaway from Abby Ohlheiser and Tanya Basu’s look at archivists trying to record how people are dealing.
What was great to me about the Parks and Recreation series finale is that it left open two very different possibilities: that indeed we were being given glimpses into the future, or that we merely were being given glimpses of Leslie Knope’s vision of the future. (If you recall, the finale shows us each character’s purported future only when Leslie touches them; much of what we see arguably makes more sense as Leslie’s notions than as canon flash-forwards.) In this light, then, I find news of a quarantine revival—“Pawnee, Indiana’s most dedicated public servant, Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler), determined to stay connected with her friends and colleagues during a time of social distancing”—in the form of a thirty-minute special interesting, in that I wonder if they somehow will be able to maintain that indeterminacy.
Apparently it’s World Book Day—“also known as World Book and Copyright Day, or International Day of the Book”.
In this edition: disaster parks, armchair experts, freeways, restaurant normalcy, cats, librarians adapting, sneezing science, Twitter rules, and underlying conditions.
My biggest complaint about the series finale of Leverage always has been that Nate deliberately selects Parker as his successor and then the show cheats on the follow-through. The only time we get to see this new team in action is a scene referencing Nate’s conversation with a client at the end of the series’ pilot; here, Parker deliberately apes Nate’s inflections and mannerisms.
I am still re-reading Phil Agre’s marathon treatise about conservatism-as-aristocracy and was brought up short by this sudden, stand-alone, one-sentence paragraph.
I’ve already added this Anita Schillhorn van Veen edition of the Why is this interesting? newsletter to my link log but I feel like these two paragraphs comparing today with the era of the Spanish flu are worth specifically highlighting.
Sarah Weinman’s interview with David Dunning for InsideHook to discuss “the rise of the so-called ‘COVID influencer’ or armchair epidemiologist” has an interesting bit in its bottom half.
Linda Poon’s ode to urban balconies for CityLab reminds me that living in a mother-in-law cottage means I do have a small front landing, large enough for a chair, on which I can enjoy a coffee and a book, but the more social aspects of balconies during a global pandemic nonetheless are out of reach, being set back from the street to the point of being behind the main house. Which is not, of course, to say that I wish I could engage in cross-balcony sing-alongs or whatnot, but it would be nice maybe to hang encouraging signs or even just be able to see other people also taking their moments of quiet refuge just outside their living spaces but still apart from the viral milieu. That said, the property on which I live in fact faces the rough, blank wall of a storage unit warehouse; there’d be no neighbors with which to silently, passively commiserate anyway.
Someone at Eater appears not actually to have read their piece on the coffee landscape, as its hed suggests it’s about coffeeshops when it really says very little about the future of actual coffeeshops and cafes, let alone anything bullish, instead focusing almost exclusively upon a couple of small business coffee empires (e.g. Portland-born Stumptown) and a few entrepreneurial efforts at feeding coffee to frontline pandemic workers. There’s lots of talk about grocery products—Stumptown is chasing Costco, for crying out loud—and effectively zero talk about how, or indeed even whether, retail coffee is weathering the storm. How do you mention all those furloughed baristas, as the article does, without wondering, and writing about, what’s to become of them, and the third places they provide the rest of us?
While setting up my quixotic petition yesterday, I’d linked the earliest-archived version of one of my early blogs. Browsing through it, I ran across an item referencing Phil Agre of the late, great Red Rock Eater News Service which made me wonder whatever happened to him.
There’s a newsletter item by Alex Danco over in my link log today that I also need to address part of a little more directly over here because of…Kierkegaard?
The other thing about that Wired piece about the surreality of life during a global pandemic is the bit about what the wife of child psychiatrist Fredrick Matzner had said to him.
Matt Simon, writing for Wired, takes a look at why life during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic seems so surreal and hits upon an interesting comparison.