It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything here (insert no one being surprised about anything here) and the world has completely and utterly fallen apart over the past six months. My kid and I were talking about how odd it was to think about just walking into a restaurant, without any planning or forethought, to pick up something to eat. It seems like years have passed over this handful of months and I can still remember the conversation I had with my manager at work a few days before Denver basically shut all the way down for a few months. Both of us were a bit skeptical about how severe the impact of Covid-19 would actually be and verbally walked through a few different possibilities that largely ended up with everyone rolling back into the office in a month’s time. Sometimes I’m really, really wrong. As I go from the realm of ironically referring to myself as an old man to teetering on the precipice of actually being that point of reference, I’m more comfortable with admissions of ineptitude than I’ve ever been. It’s hardly upsetting any more.
If you are one of the zero or less people who actually read the old Team Murder that was active between 2002-2010 then you might detect a slight change in my perspective. This is not just years at work but over the past 2-3 years I’ve moved through a towering pile of changes and things are vastly improved and more stable these days, plague times withstanding and all. Since the last time I wrote anything on this domain with any earnest a healthy number of things that I felt were foundationally defining in my life sprouted legs (or wrote themselves a blank check with ‘Midlife crisis’ on the memo line) and Riverdanced the fuck off the map on into the great hereafter. While the majority of the more jarring changes were happening, I tried to make myself feel better by doing stupid yet outwardly invisible things that mostly didn’t stay with me. I used to try to ingest some variety of hallucinogen every few years because it would give my increasingly fixed perspective a necessary slap upside its metaphorical head and jolt me into cognizance of the narrowing circles I was pacing around in. I haven’t felt that need recently perhaps because it’s legal(-ish) in this state now and doesn’t have the urban legends of potentially losing your mind or whatever. The appeal is missing now, I think, because I was unstable for a couple of years. Of course, my idea of instability is pretty pedestrian and points to how much of a privileged wuss I am: I had a semi-amiable divorce, I moved into a very nice if depressing apartment, I discovered that being a part time parent makes me a much better and more engaged parent, I got married again and now I’m a step parent, and I bought yet another overly large house in the suburbs without feeling the slightest twinge of ex-urban angst while I post this over a 1G/1G fiber internet connection that costs less a month that the PPPoE aDSL internet connection that I had when I first started posting things on this domain.
What’s new with you?
