Category: Uncategorized

Back in the 90s, while I was still on active duty, I joined a Compuserve online forum for active and veteran military members. I remember a post by an Air Force captain retelling an incident that happened in the skies over Iraq during Operation: Desert Storm.

This occurred during the initial combat missions while the Coalition Forces were establishing air supremacy. On one mission, the captain was flight commander for about half a dozen fighters. They were flying above the clouds when his wingman reported a radar contact underneath the clouds. The IFF (Identify Friend or Foe) transponders did not indicate that these were friendly planes, so his wingman recommended attacking (which, under the rules of engagement at that phase, was the correct response).

Something about the whole thing felt off to the captain. He instructed the flight to wait for visual confirmation.

I haven’t owned a television for the last fifteen years.

Call it an odd twist of fate, but I was gradually weaned off of television since college. A lot of people, especially in the younger generation, find the concept of life devoid of TV as inconceivable.

However, instead of television, I do watch a lot of YouTube, especially by independent content creators covering diverse fields such as pop culture, Slavic hardbass music, law, and cooking.  And since the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp trial, I’ve been watching a lot of livestreams about the entertainment industry.

And one metaphor that’s been popping up lately is the analogy of Schrödinger’s Cat.

At the lowest point in my life, I had less than twenty dollars to my name.

It was 2004, and I had been unemployed for nearly a year. Due to the circumstances under which I was terminated, I was denied unemployment insurance, forcing me to live on meager savings that ran out within a couple of months. I ended up selling almost all of my gaming and science fiction books and toys on eBay just to have money to pay the mortgage. As for food and gas, I did the dumbest thing you could ever do: max out my credit cards and play the balance juggling game to stay solvent.

It was so bad, I almost got arrested for bouncing a check on a speeding ticket.

For most people, 2021 will be remembered as 1 PC (post-COVID). Some people have spent this year resigning themselves to the New Normal. Others have been struggling to return to the Old Normal, life before social distancing, masks, and vaccines.

For me, however, 2021 was the watershed for the New Old Normal.

In this year that’s just ending, I left Kentucky, the place I had been living for half my lifetime, and moved back to New Hampshire, my childhood home. Since announcing my departure back in August, many people have asked what made me decide to leave. The answer I gave was simply, “After COVID, I decided it was time to come home.”

This works fine for small talk over cocktails. But much like the rest of 2021, the truth is much more complicated.