“Well, this project, begun in October 2020, has been completed!
Er, well, I finished one step in my 2020 project.
Ah, October 2020. What a terrible time that was. COVID was rampaging (although that’s now totally over with the exception of a couple hundred dorks every day in this country alone. I mean, what’s a couple hundred lives a day? Life isn’t worth living unless I can sit inside an Applebee’s), my partner had an infection IN HER SKULL, and Halloween was most certainly going to be destroyed by COVID.
On the plus, we got stimulus checks.
Remember that shit? Someone was like, “Bro, you’re getting like a couple thousand dollars this year.” And I thought it was a scam. I was pretty sure this was something cooked up by a “Nigerian Prince” to get my routing number or whatever.
Even when it turned out to be true, I didn’t think there was money for ME. What did I need that for? Surely this was going to people who needed the money, who lost their jobs or something. Nope! Yours truly got a check.
That first check, I sent half to a charity (Off the Street Club in West Garfield Park, Chicago! Look them up!) and spent some on a new phone. I was rocking an iPhone 4, and, well, to say I was “rocking” it is a bit of an oversell. I could only make calls, send texts, and sometimes, kind of, get voicemails. And for some reason, the game Desert Golf still worked. I was overdue.
Desert Golf does NOT work on my new phone. By the way, Apple.
The other thing I spent money on was books. Books from some bookstores that I’ve really enjoyed in my travels, Powell’s in Portland, OR and The Strand in NYC.
Both bookstores were got some backlash over the pandemic times, I think because their owners are rich and the people who work there are not rich. Is that the new standard? Everyone at the company gets the same pay? If that’s the only kind of place where I can shop, I’ll be dead within a week. And bored way before that.
I mean, I was genuinely afraid Amazon was going to kill the indie bookstore during the pandemic. I figured this was it. If indie bookstores couldn’t open up, which they couldn’t for a long time, they’d probably be dead and buried before long.
So I helped.
Not in a heroic way, let’s not get crazy. It was “help” that was also to my benefit. Heroic help is me fixing my mom’s printer. That does not benefit me at all.
What I did is search the oldest books on my to-read list and see if I could get them shipped to me. And wouldn’t you know, Smashed, the first book on my list, was available!
I was going to plow through my to-read list, oldest books first, support an indie bookstore, beat the pandemic (in a spiritual sense, not in an actual sense, that shit is still rocking my world in the literal sense), and then…
Well, here I am, 2 years later, one book into my pandemic reads.
But goddammnit, I made it this far.
And that’s the way to look at it: It took me a long time, but I’m still alive, still stepping in the right direction, and that’s really all a person can ask for.
Okay, I just did the math on my Hoopla favorites from the library, and I figured that at the rate of 6 checkouts per month, it’ll take me…like 4 and a half years to get through everything.
And yeah, okay, I made a spreadsheet with all the movies and TV shows I’ve got in my streaming queues. And there’s like…4 lifetimes of stuff there.
There are the video games I never finished, movies I purchased, albums I’ve never listened to…
I think the best way for me to address this is to get fired from my job and just spend my life trying to get through all the STUFF.
Can someone get me fired? What do I have to say to get fired? Is cancel culture not real, have we decided that? Could it be real this one time?”