Joni Mitchell: "You don't know what you've got till it's gone."#

If you've lived much at all you know what Joni says is true. I got there when my grandmother died in 1977, when I was 22, my first close relative that I lost, and I tried to come to grips with the idea that I'd never see her again and found it impossible, but it was true nonetheless. No way to escape it. When my mother died, in 2018, I only thought after we cleared her house to be sold, the house I grew up in, that I didn't even take pictures of it before it was emptied. I was so used to it being a constant, I forgot to realize until it was too late, that I was saying goodbye to everything I knew for my entire life. Forever. It's why we're playing such a dangerous game of chicken with Biden's presidency, because the stakes are so incredibly high. A mathematical approach to this problem says imho that everyone should shut the fuck up about Biden's flaws and get us organized so we can handle any eventuality. The problem isn't that Biden might die, the problem is that even if he were to win, we'll be right back here in another four years, and at that time we will have to grapple with an even more dire situation. Whatever happens this year, what's waiting for us is for most of us to wake up from the dream that there are any constants in our lives. It's all falling apart, in every way. The only thing that matters is we start working together, intelligently, or else it's over. #

I admit that after the debate and the interminable attacks from the press on our democratic process that I'm pretty depressed about the future. I was talking with a friend over the weekend, a fellow NYer who moved up to the mountains as I did, about the political situation, and I asked if he would be prepared to sign a loyalty oath to Trump. He said he'd never do it. If they tried to force him, he'd get a gun and shoot them. This isn't the first time I've heard that, and I called bullshit. You're never going to do that. I know this guy, I know myself. I won't do it either. And I think I probably will have to sign the loyalty oath and so will you. There are so many ways to turn your life off, legally -- and without recourse. Think about what happens when you lose access to a social media account. Or when a credit rating agency doesn't believe you are who you are. Or when someone hijacks your phone and you can't get back control of it (and try to use anything without a working phone number). I've been through all these miserable processes. And none of them were legal, or controlled by the US government. A president who demands loyalty of you will get it. And that is certainly exactly where we're headed, again. #

I find the blogroll on the home page of my blog to be an incredible way to catch up on what people I follow are posting to their blogs and news sites. It's more like a feed reader than a blogroll because when a site updates it moves to the top of the list and when you click the wedge next to the title you get the five most recent posts with links to the full story. Maybe it was a mistake calling this a blogroll. I'm trying to come up with a better place to put it so more people would see it and use it and might think it would be nice to have a place like that for themselves. In any case I'm thinking about what to do next with FeedLand, which is what's behind the blogroll software. It hasn't lived up to my hopes, and I don't think it's likely to. I may be done writing software for others, I was writing only for myself for a few years, between 2017 and 2021, and I really liked that. The experiment of writing for others was not a success. So I'm thinking about how to wind down FeedLand, keep it available for the people who are already using it, but close it to new membership. Just thinking out loud here for a bit. It's that time, to consider what I want to do with the next few years, assuming, praise Murphy, I have them to play with. 😄#