January 2025: Welcome To Hell

So of Course we have to lead with the laugh (classic Rowan Atkinson bit with updates) and hope it’s not all downhill from here. The last couple of weeks have been brutal but in the spirit of the above we’ll spare the details and just say three weeks into the new year and it’s been death , birth, death, towering infernos, more death and quite a few things in between. Also that issue wherein your okay pretty much but the people around you are really taking a beating. Getting in there and taking a few for the team seems like a natural gesture but of course the next bus might be the one with your name on it so you try not to stay in that pool for too long.

The Experimental Dashboard Page hosting the Mastodon feed has been our microblogging stand in while practicing avoidance of actual long form writing and waiting for the right opening to launch the YouTube channel. This will host all the the stuff going into the feed . That of course includes all the additions to the original course of music , band and performance…and yes , that means yet another podcast infinity plus one to add to what’s already out there. You’ll have a good idea of what’s coming if you’ve been scanning that.

I’m glad to have had a decent run at the journo , politics and activism thing in earlier decades and am looking now at an (only) slightly less ambitious set of priorities. The truth is I no longer have any idea what to make of our domestic politics. There is no peacemaking with fascism or inequality and democracy is still truly the only mediator of full on extinction but this last election just is what it is. Many of us are now too old to wake up angry for four more years and too young to ride off into the sunset. There is also still the potentially naive supposition that we shouldn’t lock our villains into just being villains without some shred of potential, like Saul on the road to Damascus , for awakening or redemption, hanging somewhere out there high in the air. Great comedy is made of this.

I do have high hopes for the channel as there will be a lot of ground to cover. The pre roll will not be a major military operation but just a way of getting parts moving without the inherent predation of retentive tendencies toward perfectionism. Those just seem to ruin travels that would otherwise be fun at the outset. See you soon