Tag Archive: Trump


Project 2025 Down South

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January 30, 2025

A few years from now, this post will seem either really silly or prescient. Either way, I’ll leave it up – what’s the point of having a lifelong blog if you slash and burn the parts you no longer like?

Donald Trump got sworn in for the second time just nine days ago, and things are not going well. Looks like the Republicans’ Project 2025 playbook was, in fact, their game plan. They’re currently acting like gremlins in a super-computer: turning random things off and on, just to see what they can get away with. (For example, Medicaid payments got temporarily suspended.)

One of the wilder things, and one that (as far as I know) wasn’t part of their playbook, is Trump’s apparently sincere desire to annex Canada and Greenland. Google has already submitted and showed its belly: Google Maps users within the US see the Gulf of Mexico as “Gulf of America.” For the rest of the world, the original nomenclature remains. Ipso facto, Americans live in a bubble of their own making, with their collective reality separating from that of the rest of the world. That chasm will likely grow wider.

One other thing Trump wants to do is take over the Panama Canal… In political science, there’s the concept of the Overton Window: the acceptable range of public perception that shifts one way or another, and can be manipulated. For example, the first school shooting was a tragedy. Now, despite being just as tragic, they barely make headlines. The Overton Window at work.

Likewise here. If he succeeds at even one of his bizarre annexation schemes, it’ll become that much easier to orchestrate the rest of them: the window will have shifted. Just like Putin, with his limited military campaigns over the past couple of decades: attack Georgia, then gobble up half of Ukraine, then try to take over the other half. (I fear the resistance will end soon.)

And so… As a Russian-American-French-Canadian with three passports, having moved from Russia to the US to Canada (and specifically the French Canada), I just want some peace, y’all… It’s possible the next prodigious 19-year-old will use a hunting rifle instead of an automated rifle. (Seriously, who does that?) It’s just as possible Trump will live on for quite some time. It comes down to a binary choice: will he or will he not attempt to invade Canada? (Because it sure as hell won’t join voluntarily.) If yes, then will he succeed?

The very fact that we must entertain such an insane notion is disturbing. But if that does, in fact, happen… Canada is still part of the British Commonwealth: we have their royalty on our national currency and all that. Just spitballing here, but it’d be interesting to see if – in that worst-case scenario – the UK will allow its Canadian cousins to move in. Probably without any financial assistance, but with a fast-tracked path to citizenship as long as you can pay for your own ticket. Conversely, it’d be funny if France made the same offer to Quebec’s residents – partly due to the shared cultural heritage and the Quebec/France pipeline, and partly just to poke the UK.

As a Canadian citizen and a proud Quebecer, I’ll win in either of those scenarios, eh.

My big Continental Divide Trail thru-hike will start in less than three months, on April 28. This time, less than three months from today, I’ll be deep asleep somewhere in the New Mexico desert… There’s very little cell reception in the wilderness. Even when I do get it, during my five-month thru-hike, I’ll make a deliberate effort not to look at any news – nothing beyond what I’ll spot in newspaper headlines when I visit towns. (That was how I’d learned about Roe v Wade being overturned, back in 2022. Oof. Oof, I say.)

I look forward to that complete information blackout, and it can’t come soon enough… At the current rate of gremlins wrecking things, it’s entirely possible the US will break long-standing diplomatic rules even before I fly out to New Mexico. Likely, even.

A few years from now, this post will seem either really silly or prescient. If you’re reading this in the future (way beyond 2025), then you already know how this ended, you lucky bastard. Before you chuckle, I just want you to try and imagine what it was like to be stuck here, now, at this point in history, at this point in space, just north of an empire gone mad. I really, really don’t want to have to obtain my fourth passport, my fourth citizenship… But there’s a greater-than-zero chance that’ll happen whether I like it or not.

This will be one strange year.

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Year in review: 2024

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January 8, 2025

2025 isn’t getting any younger, and I suppose I should continue this little tradition I’ve started…

2024 was a weird year for me. It was the third full year of my early retirement – the fourth if you include the seven months of 2021. I’d thought it’d be a quiet sort of year: no thru-hiking, no full-time French classes, just helping my gf move all her stuff (so much stuff!) to her new place in the middle of the summer. I’d underestimated how wacky that year would be.

I haven’t blogged a whole lot, so this post will be a bit fragmented: a bit about everything.

The eclipse

In April, Quebecers got the unique opportunity to observe the total solar eclipse: it was almost next door to us. Here in Quebec City, folks would’ve caught just 97% of it, and would’ve missed the totality. It was rather disappointing to learn how many of my local friends chose to stay here rather than drive just two hours east to catch the full 100%. (Work was no excuse: no work was done at all on that day.) That was an unexpected sort of litmus test to see which of my compadres had the potential to become an adventurer. Oh well.

I joined a local group of hikers and carpooled with them: we drove to, and then hiked on top, Ham Mountain. There was no ham, though. Or ham-related puns. Shame, really – such a missed opportunity.

The totality itself was… Magical. It was simply magical. If you’ve never seen it, you wouldn’t believe me. You can look at all the pictures and videos in the world, but they will not prepare you for that magical, otherworldly moment where the sky turns black, the sun becomes safe to look at, becomes a solid black disk, and tendrils of white light whirl all around it. Even knowing all the physics of what was going on, I was shocked, stupefied – and, on some deep animal level, a little scared and more than a little awed. Natural wonders of that caliber used to inspire myths and religions in the olden days…

Citizenship

I became a Canadian citizen just a few days before the eclipse! That was a busy week, eh. I’d moved here in March 2019, and became a full-fledged citizen just over five years later. If I hadn’t left on my big PCT adventure, and if I’d done the math a little better, I would’ve gotten it even sooner than that. Canada’s immigration system isn’t perfect, but it’s so much faster than the American system.

The citizenship application itself was pricey: somewhere around $800 CAD, if I recall correctly. They sent me a free booklet with all the information about Canada’s history that might appear on the test. The citizenship test was done online, and it was pretty funny… You had to answer at least 15 out of the 20 questions, and you had 40 minutes to do so. I got 20 out of 20, and it took me exactly two minutes. Heh.

The citizenship swearing-in ceremony was done entirely online, which was disappointing, and didn’t feel quite real… My US citizenship ceremony, back in 2011, took place in a courthouse, and even though the judge kind of fumbled it, it still had that saccharine, Disney-ish, smiles-all-around feeling and good vibes. When you do the same thing over Zoom… Yeah, no, sorry, it’s just not the same. We have covid vaccines now, so there’s no logical reason for such precautions, but I suspect we won’t get real-life ceremonies back anytime soon.

There were about 160 of us, connected into one big video chat through our webcams at home. Some folks went all out with Canadian-themed decorations and balloon displays in the background. (I had my giant Canadian flag hanging behind me.) The ceremony would get disrupted all the time by folks forgetting to mute their microphones. After hours of speeches (in English as well as French), we all raised our right hand, recited the oath in English and then – very haltingly – in French, and sang the Canadian anthem, karaoke-style. (Or at least tried to. 160 people trying to sing in unison was pretty funny.)

The funniest, most Kafkaesque part of the ceremony was the picture-taking bit. It’s important for folks to have at least some sort of memento from such a huge event in their life, so the judge posed for pictures on her end of the video chat and told us we could take selfies with our computer screen. She then sat immobile for a solid minute, adopting several different grins and smiles. (But no thumbs up.) That was weeeeird, y’all.

Eventually, the ceremony was over, and we logged off, and I applied for my Canadian passport. The processing time is so much shorter… A couple of days if it’s an emergency, or just a couple of weeks otherwise. This is my third passport, in addition to my American one and the expired Russian one. It looks a whole lot less aggressive than the US passport: no pictures of angry eagles, no quotes about war or bloodshed. Instead, it has cute pictures of moose and beavers and other Canadian symbolism. Neat, eh.

Creative endeavours

In early 2024, I finally completed “Time Traveler’s Etiquette Guide” – my sci-fi novel I’d started wayyy back in 2015. Ironically, it took the soul-crushing full-time French classes at the local community college to spur me into action. I didn’t want to feel like I wasted even a day of my life, so each evening, I spent an hour studying genetics (a fascinating topic!) and another hour writing my novel. And it worked!

I gave it a few months, did a bunch of edits, trimmed the length down from 106K words to 103K and ultimately to 99K, and entered the query trenches to find myself a literary agent. That’s a whole different story…

Bad news: no luck yet. Good news: I have my full manuscript with five literary agents, and now I have my toes and fingers crossed. But even if the answer is a resounding “no,” that still won’t be the end: the next stage would be contacting small publishers. Someday, my novel will get published. It’s only the details that are vague and fuzzy.

Along the way, I prepared a full outline for my non-fiction book – a tell-all memoir about life at Amazon. (Currently sending out tentative queries.)

After one agent replied with a “schmaybe” to my full manuscript, they also gave me an idea for a Young Adult novel that deals with one of my areas of expertise… That secret project is almost done – 62,000 words in, and only six chapters left to go!

Also, a pro tip: don’t wait for a muse to come and find you. I tried that with my YA novel, and the result was equal parts hilarious and miserable. I’d sit down, write a bunch of new words (the first draft doesn’t need to be pretty; it just needs to exist), and then I’d walk away from the novel for several weeks. That resulted in very slow progress. A month ago, I sat down and outlined what I actually wanted to tell in the rest of the story, and how that would break down by chapter, with a quick synopsis thereof. It’s embarrassing how much that helped me: now all I need to do is sit down, consult the next chapter’s synopsis, and just write. I’ve been knocking out anywhere between 1,000-5,000 words per day, and it feels amaaaazing. The first draft will be finished quite soon. And then… And then we’ll see.

I need to get better and more organized about writing my sci-fi short stories: I have a few, and I feel like I’m getting better, but – yeah – the muse syndrome again. I did get one of them published, though! “How to Prepare for Time Travelers in the Workplace” appeared in Ruth and Ann’s Guide to Time Travel, Volume I. It was a 1,000-word flash fiction story, and the payout was $10, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that I am now a published author, huzzah! The anthology is out in print and on Kindle. It has been nominated for several awards, so we’ll see how that plays out. Meanwhile, I keep writing more stories and submitting them to online publications… Allegedly, there are far fewer short-story markets now than way back in the day. I like a challenge.

Along the way, while I was devouring all the advice on finding literary agents, I found one particularly interesting tip: branch out into other media to get more spotlight on your book. That meant writing editorials, or creating art, or making films… And so I asked myself, “Self, what exactly is stopping us from making a film?” Sure, there are lights and cameras and actors, but what if you could find a shortcut?..

That’s how I ended up using public-domain footage (including from NASA’s archives), public-domain music, and an incredibly talented British voice actress from Fiverr to make my debut short film, “Please Don’t Send Help.” I wrote the script (all 167 words of it), taught myself video editing (OpenShot is free and pretty great!), and spent a lot of time splicing it to make it perfect. The final budget was $15 USD: $10 for the voice talent and a 50% tip.

The end result is beautiful, even if it’s just 2.5 minutes long. I submitted it to the Brooklyn SciFi Film Festival, and made it all the way to the final round! I’m waiting to hear back from a few more film festivals, and I’ve completed (or almost completed) a few more films with public-domain footage, which will go to even more festivals later this year… Mwahahaha.

Travel

I didn’t get to go on a big thru-hike in 2024, but there was still a lot of traveling! In February, I went to hang out with my sister and her family in New York – and ended up in the audience of Stephen Colbert’s show along the way. (Great guy!)

A very fun and exclusive recurring party (which, unfortunately, went out of business a month ago) had me coming and going to Montreal quite a lot – huzzah for rideshare! One of those times, late at night, our driver was falling asleep at the wheel, squeezing a candy wrapper over and over to keep herself awake… I was even more tired than she was, or else I would’ve asked to take over the wheel. In some alternate universe, we probably crashed into the oncoming traffic.

July had the Montreal Comic Con. It was fun, but surprisingly more conservative than the Comic Cons I’d attended in the US. In particular, cosplay consisted almost entirely of online-bought costumes. How weird is that? The highlight of the event was Giancarlo Esposito, who gave us two hours of his time as he answered questions and participated in a celebrity panel.

September had a two-week trip to Seattle to catch up with my family and put my suburban condo on the market. That did not go well… It’s still on the market, and the whole thing is mighty ridiculous, as usual, but at some point this year, I just might free myself from that ridiculous source of stress in my life.

October had an unexpected trip back to New York, to attend the Brooklyn SciFi Film Festival in person. It was small but extremely welcoming and hospitable. My film was screened in front of a live audience, and it was beautiful… Afterwards, a professional actor approached me outside the movie theater. She spent the next 90 minutes telling me how much she loved my imagination, and that did dangerous things to my ego… (Her boyfriend – the director of her film – was chatting to his own fans right next to us, so no, it wasn’t that kind of admiration, you bunch of perverts.)

While in New York (crashing at my friend’s place in the Jamaica neighbourhood of New York City), I accidentally found out the annual New York Comic Con would take place the same weekend. I managed to snag one of the very last remaining Thursday tickets, and wow – that was one overwhelming day. I blogged about it earlier over yonder.

There was so much travel that month – including picking up gf from her flight in Montreal – that at one point, over the course of five days, I woke up in two different countries, in three different cities, and in five very different places. (Those places included someone’s carpet, as well as a parked car.) That was exhausting but so, sooo much fun.

Life weirdness

Weird and improbable things happen to me quite often, and I’ve made peace with it. Unless I’m forgetting anything…

There was a ridiculously incompetent French teacher at my community college… In 2024, she hired lawyers to send me a cease-and-desist letter in response to a long blog post I made in November 2023. Apparently, she saw it when she googled her name. Heh. The letter was 10 pages long, entirely in French, and demanded I delete the offending blog post. I did so, and replied with just “LOL OK.” I hope they hired a translator to decipher that, and billed her extra for that service.

In February, a cop tried to barge into my apartment at 4am while not following any official protocols – such as, say, identifying himself as a cop. In my sleep-deprived state, I assumed that was a burglar pretending to be a cop, especially when he took out the skeleton key and started trying to unlock my door… There are moments in life when you suddenly realize what kind of person you truly are. At that moment, I learned something about myself: I’m okay with the idea of using violence, at least in self-defense. As my lock rattled and turned, I stood in the door’s blind spot, holding my trusty ice axe in one hand and a sharp knife in the other… If he had actually managed to unlock that door, things would’ve gone very badly for him. (I was quiet. The lights were off. He expected an empty apartment.)

Afterwards, I learned that the cops responded to a domestic violence call, couldn’t find the exact apartment the noise was coming from, and kicked down at least one wrong door by mistake. I escalated to the local ethics commissioner, which resulted in a long process that led exactly nowhere. Ah well, at least I made that particular cop’s life a bit difficult. Incidentally, now I understand why so many people in Quebec City hate the police.

Last but not least – I was attacked by (and then fought off) a gang of feral teenagers. Gf is more optimistic about the human nature than I am: when someone replied to her Facebook Marketplace ad and offered to pay her more than she was asking for her old iPhone, that sounded odd. When they set the meeting place in a local park after sunset, that was strange. When they kept changing the meeting location, that was just a giant red flag. She sent me there in her car, holding her phone in my hand, on speakerphone, calling me paranoid when I said that was clearly a trap.

Reader, that was clearly a trap. They were expecting a short, slim woman. They got a tall, hairy, broad-shouldered guy. I stood there, underneath the single streetlight, yelling the name of the owner of that anonymous profile that set up the meeting. Finally, the teens loitering nearby said it was them, and they proceeded to waste an hour of everyone’s time as they tried – and failed – to trick me into surrendering the iPhone while pretending to ask about its settings, battery life, etc. Finally, the gf had enough of that, gave them a one-minute countdown, and told me to head home – the deal was over. I put her phone in my jeans pocket, and was just about to apologize to the teens, when one of them pushed the heaviest teen right at me…

There were five teens, all around 16 years old, and quite overweight, and that impact knocked the air out of me. I stumbled, but I didn’t fall.

…I go through life deliberately trying to appear harmless, non-creepy, and non-threatening. That involves body language, smiling much more than any Russian is comfortable with, etc. In that moment, all of that went out the window. I straightened up, extended my arms (imagine Frankenstein’s monster, but hairier), and shouted “PAS COOL! PAS COOL!!” (“Not cool”) at them. They jumped on their bicycles and fucked off into the darkness. The gf was mortified afterwards, and extremely apologetic. Ever since then, all her marketplace meet-ups happened in crowded public places, and in broad daylight.

Miscellaneous

This is getting a tad longer than I’d anticipated, so just a few more observations.

Trump won. Again. He’d gotten 63 million votes in 2016, 74 million votes in 2020, and 77 million votes in 2024. Looks like America has spoken… There are still 12 days until the inauguration, and his coalition is already falling apart, partly because of Elon Musk, partly because the architects of Project 2025 are openly gloating about their plans. Trump himself keeps not-quite-joking about annexing Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal – using the military if necessary. There’s a really good chance nothing will come of it. There’s a greater-than-zero chance this will shatter the NATO.

The AI bubble looks like it’s about to burst. OpenAI is trying to convince the UK government to let them feed all the copyrighted books into the maw of their plagiarism machine. The new iteration of ChatGPT seems to be especially useless, since they no longer have enough new data to feed it with. The internet is swarming with bots that use ChatGPT to generate the most banal platitudes imaginable, which they then post on social media, pretending to be humans. Goddamn creepy is what it is. All the earlier headlines praising the AI success were significantly overblown, and rightfully should’ve had gigantic asterisks. When the AI bubble pops, it’ll take the tech sector down quite a bit. Should be interesting.

Last but not least: it took a while, but the CEO hunting season has officially begun. On December 6, Luigi Mangione (allegedly) shot and killed Brian Thompson, the CEO of the biggest and most hated health insurance company. Luigi is a folk hero now: he’s being charged with terrorism, which is in stark contrast to all the school shooters who got taken alive and never got that charge. Priorities, eh?

Weird year, 2024. Weeeeird year. 2025 will have a lot more hiking, more film festivals, and maybe even a book deal! Here is to more adventures.

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Plague diaries, Day 206

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October 5, 2020

Monday night. Must Mondays be so morbidly mundane?..

The end-of-year shopping season is approaching, and that means things are getting busier at work. That’s one way to fast-forward through this pandemic: when there’s stuff to do and deadlines to meet, the workday mostly flies by.

I’m curious how this is affecting folks who lost their jobs but receive unemployment benefits. At least I have this work distraction: what about those who have enough money to pay their bills but no work in addition to not being able to go out and socialize? They must be having an entirely different experience… I’d like to get to that point in life myself, someday (infinite leisure!) but ideally without the world ending outside my window.

There are probably others out there who keep similar daily logs… A post on Reddit had inspired me to start this online diary, such as it is. There ought to be other chroniclers out there, if only a handful. I wonder if I’d be up to reliving this pandemic through someone else’s eyes, though: that would only highlight the sheer horror into which we’ve all slowly descended.

In covid news… Well, the absurdity continues. In the most basic terms: Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, tested positive for covid earlier today. She deliberately refused to wear a mask in the past, so there’s no telling how many journos she’s infected. (As far as I can tell, the White House strategy – such as it is – is to avoid masks and just do daily testing. That’s a reactive, not a proactive approach, and it’s no surprise that it failed.) Trump might have suffered the manic side effect from the steroid he’s taking: he posted a lot of ALL CAPS tweets in the morning, had his doctors lie for him some more (they refuse to tell when his last negative test was…), and then discharged himself from the hospital after just three days.

He then went back to the White House, dramatically removed his mask, and appeared to wheeze from that short walk. He really does seem to be on a mission to troll everyone as much as possible, because he posted a brief video where he implied he got covid on purpose, to be a leader, and told people not to be afraid of the virus. This is going to get people killed… Of course, he didn’t wear a mask, so he exposed everyone in the room as well.

Even though we don’t know when exactly he got infected, we do know that covid symptoms come and go: a bad stretch is followed by a good one and then a bad one again. He’s not out of the woods yet, and if he has to be rushed back to Walter Reed in a few days… Well, that’d be ironic, if nothing else.

And now I’m off to read the 17th book in Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series: I forgot that it got released last week, and it makes for a fine distraction from this horrific reality TV show taking place on every news outlet. Stay safe, folks.

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Plague diaries, Day 205

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October 4, 2020

Sunday evening. What a century this month has been.

Another uneventful day… But that’s another day where I learned a bit of French, another day of getting slightly closer to becoming a permanent resident here in Canada, another day of getting closer to all my goals, another day without having caught covid. So yay, here is to crossing yet another day off ye olde mental calendar.

Today was supposed to be open for hanging out with xgf and playing her favourite video game. (Borderlands-2 – she loves that turret special ability.) Alas, her parents stopped their Sunday trips to the local monastery, so hanging out with just her is no longer an option. Both of her parents practice hardly any covid precautions (and go shopping an awful lot), so merely being in the same house with them would increase my virus exposure risk by a huge percentage. Oh well, it was good while it lasted. She seems to be dating again, and good for her. I may try to find a likeminded penpal/romantic prospect here during the long winter, but then again, maybe not.

The weather was cold and shitty today. Winters here are long, and without so much as a chance to go to a random meetup and chat up some perfect strangers… Hobby inventory: I have dozens of books I’ve never actually read, three musical instruments I haven’t tried playing yet (ocarina, guitar, and harmonica), a zoom lens for my camera that I’ve yet to unpack, a “Cooking for dummies” book which has gotten mighty dusty over the past few years, a small (but incomplete) pile of art supplies in near-mint condition, and literal buckets of minerals I’ve yet to sort through and admire – leftovers from my July roadtrip vacation. Oh, and the exercise equipment, of course. And lots of video games I’ve bought on Steam over the years but haven’t played. And a DuoLingo subscription that will let me learn any language 24/7. Heh. So, yeah, I really shouldn’t be posting “boo hoo, poor me” updates if only because I’m fortunate enough to be safe from covid, economically stable, and in perfect health – and hell, all those hobbies will take years to master. It’s just the social isolation… Well, 205 days down (and 133 of those being all by myself), so what’s another couple hundred, am I right?

Random folks on social media are cheering each other up whenever someone asks “Please tell me I’m not the only one still staying in lockdown?” The frustration and fatigue I’m feeling is far from unique, but it helps to know that I am not alone.

In covid news, the shitshow is intensifying. Yesterday, the White House released two pictures of Trump supposedly working hard at Walter Reed Medical Center. He wore mildly different clothes in two different rooms, etc. One problem, though: the pictures were too high-tech. Online sleuths zoomed in and saw that he was literally signing blank pieces of paper in both pictures. The metadata on the pictures showed that they were taken just 10 minutes apart. That was literally a poorly staged photo opp. (And even a random Internet guy like me knows how to reset the metadata… Come on, people, you can do better than that.)

It got worse. This morning’s medical briefing mentioned that Trump is getting even more anti-covid drugs, and that his oxygen saturation levels dipped into the low 90s at least twice, which necessitated putting him on oxygen for several hours. The good doctor also waffled when journos asked why he lied the day before. When asked for specific results (such as Trump’s lung damage), he ran away. The only thing we know is that the official medical conferences cannot be trusted. There’s so much we don’t know – even the basic facts. It’s fairly obvious now that his first positive test was before Thursday, but when? No one even knows how long he’s been sick with covid, and that information is vital. Assuming his doctor told the truth about Trump’s treatment, he might be in fairly bad shape indeed. I won’t pretend to be any kind of medical expert – the details are way outside my competence level. This Politico article, however, has some great analysis of the press conference.

Later today, Trump went for a ride in his bulletproof, gas-proof SUV, waving at his supporters. He wore a mask for once, but an airproof SUV means all the Secret Service agents were likely exposed to his virus, even despite the protective gear they all wore. Like I wrote earlier, in the end this will be a binary choice: he’ll either die of covid or he won’t. But all this lying and obfuscation… This is what it must have felt like when JFK got shot, or when Reagan was in surgery after a failed assassination attempt. The one exception is that those events took days, not weeks. It’s hard to believe it’s been less than 72 hours since the news of Hope Hicks’s covid diagnosis. Folks online are making jokes about joining bears in their hibernation. (“I have some IPA and a can of cookie dough. Please vaccinate me while I’m asleep.” Heh.)

In non-self-inflicted-covid-news, Canada isn’t doing so well. In particular, Quebec has recorded over a thousand new cases. (1,107 to be precise.) A very basic google search suggested that maybe it’s because they have far more folks in retirement homes than any other place in the world. I have my own and selfish curiosity about Quebec, since I wouldn’t mind retiring there. (Ergo the French lessons.) I’d love to find out more about their situation. In other In non-self-inflicted-covid-news, there’s a spike in cases in Israel. Looks like the second lockdown (which, admittedly, had multiple loopholes) didn’t work after all…

Stay safe out there, folks. And hey, to make things a bit less gloomy, how about a 2020 meme, eh?

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Plague diaries, Day 204

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October 3, 2020

Saturday night. Do other planets ever get jealous that they don’t have a day named after them?

I finally ran out of bananas (the ones in the fridge started to look incredibly weird), so I risked another grocery-shopping expedition. Averaging about one every 10 days, and that ain’t bad. I took a fairly long drive on the permanently congested 401 highway to pick up extra weight plates for my dumbbell at a sporting goods store.

It’s so strange, experiencing the outside world in general and driving in particular after staying inside for so long. Watching fellow drivers stuck in traffic with you. Getting that old tingly sensation of controlling an entire automobile, a large construct of metal and rubber and glass that obeys your every move. (Do you remember your first time driving? It’s very much like that.) Even being trapped in traffic was a novel sensation because – for once – I was experiencing a tiny piece of the past, of life before the pandemic. Ye gods, I need to get out more often… But with the virus on the rise, nowhere is safe. Some places are objectively safer than others, and maybe I should try to go on a couple of hikes before the weather turns cold, but even so, there will be a long and boring winter shortly after. It doesn’t really get warm here till maybe April or May. Gotta keep popping that vitamin D, eh?

It says something about my life that the most exciting thing to happen this week was buying a new mask. Weeks ago, I bought 50 of those flimsy thin blue masks, but they’re really just the bare minimum. At the grocery store, I got something a bit more permanent, with an actual removable filter – and, dare I say, cooler-looking. (Scroll all the way down to see my pandemic business formal look.)

In covid news, things are getting decidedly Soviet in the US of A. Today’s updates: three Republican senators tested positive (Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Mike Lee of Utah, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina); former New Jersey governor Chris Christie (an obese asthmatic) is in a hospital, allegedly just for observation; Trump is awfully quiet on Twitter; mixed messages coming from the White House. This morning, a team of Trump’s doctors arrived 43 minutes late to their own press conference. (That’s an awfully long time to agree on the best way to say “he’s a-okay!”) Dr. Sean Conley waffled for 13 minutes while dodging questions and accidentally mentioning that Trump had started treatment 48 hours prior and had been diagnosed 72 hours prior, i.e. on Wednesday morning, not on Thursday night.

Throughout the day, there were multiple conflicting reports and reports opposing prior reports. Either Trump is doing just fine or he was in critical condition. Either Dr. Conley meant to say “two days ago” instead of “72 hours” or he has no concept of time. Trump posted a four-minute video sitting in some office and thanking his medical team. It’s rather sad that it’s reasonable to ask whether this video had been pre-recorded earlier… There seems to be utter panic and self-inflicted information vacuum at the White House: even if they know what’s going on, after all their lies over the past four years, there’s no trustworthy person who can speak to the American people and be taken seriously.

There’s been no sign of life from Melania – is she finally getting some alone time, or is she out but not critical? The single saddest sign that something is up is the simple fact that the president of the United States has not spent the entire day bullying people on Twitter or live-tweeting Fox News. If there’s one thing he adores, it’s high ratings, and he’s been on everyone’s mind this whole weekend.

In the end, it’s a binary choice: he’ll either live or die. We’ll know for sure in a few weeks, likely sooner. The worst part is the uncertainty – the blatant misinformation and keeping people in the dark. In the Soviet Union, whenever the General Secretary had a health emergency and/or died, they’d put the Swan Lake ballet on every TV channel – it’d play on infinite loop. This is pretty much what’s going on right now, or at least what it feels like. Those of you reading this in the future, those of you who didn’t live through this, likely can’t imagine the sheer surreal sensation of having a Schrodinger’s president.

In other, non-US covid news: Ontario is stopping its contact-tracing program due to a two-day test backlog and a growing number of cases. (653 new ones yesterday.) That is not a good sign… That’s the equivalent of a shruggie emoji from the public health system: going from the precise and efficient targeting to, well, sending your thoughts and prayers to everyone around you, and reminding them to follow the same guidelines they’d started ignoring weeks ago. The new wave is here: the only question is how long it’ll last.

…and India has just crossed 100,000 deaths. That news story got buried by all the Trump news, yet it’s far more grave. As with every official death count, this one is understated. Given India’s 1.4 billion population, 100,000 deaths is proportionally about eight times lower than the US death toll, but it’s still just as tragic. I won’t pretend to know anything about India’s situation: I just hope they manage to minimize further deaths by taking rapid action.

Earlier today, I had to look up today’s date. It’s amazing how much has happened in just the first three days of October. There’s one month left until the US election. How different will the world be by then?..

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Plague diaries, Day 203

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October 2, 2020

Friday night. There ought to be a way to take all the unused Friday nights where you stayed home, put them in a savings account, and use them up when you get bored. Now that’s a tech start-up I’d invest in.

Things have gotten relatively normal at work – a simple, quiet day. Coworkers are still amazed by my hair, just like they are by the fact that I’m perfectly okay with working from home and staying in one room. Goddamn extroverts. Heh. Well, more WFH for me if they don’t want it.

I resumed my workouts two days ago: this is the third week, and the routine has already begun to suffer. Nonetheless, some exercise is better than none. I might have to brave the increasingly infection-infested city to get a few more weight plates for ye olde dumbbells.

In covid news… Holy shit, there’s a lot of covid news. Normally, I have to go on Reddit to find an interesting piece of news. (I never would’ve found out about, say, Turkey without Reddit.) Today is not one of those days.

It began late last night. Some intrepid reporter found out that Hope Hicks, Trump’s closest adviser, tested positive for covid. In a few hours, Trump tweeted that he and Melania also tested positive. I was up until 3am, refreshing the news feeds and speculating about the potential outcomes with everyone else. It must’ve been so weird for most east coast folks (at least those who go to bed at a reasonable hour) to learn about the news this morning…

Throughout the day today, the White House kept providing increasingly panicky announcements. At first, they said Trump had mild symptoms. Then they said the symptoms were moderate. They produced a doctor’s note that said he was “good-natured” (yeah, right) and received an experimental antibody cocktail. When you get to the point of giving the president untested drugs, that’s probably not good. Later in the day, a helicopter picked him up and took him to Walter Reed Medical Center, where he’ll allegedly work for the next few days. (Once again – yeah, right.) Most disturbingly, Trump didn’t tweet all day (an unprecedented occurrence in and of itself) except for an 18-second video where he appeared alone (without Melania) and said he was okay. It says something about the United States when people have reasonable doubts whether the video was real or pre-recorded just in case months ago. (And where was Melania?) Trump walked to the helicopter right outside on his own, so at least they didn’t wheel him out on a gurney. His administration leaks like a sieve: some aides said he was running a fever.

Pence and his wife allegedly tested negative. Ditto for Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris. On the other hand, quite a few Republicans who attended the Saturday ceremony in the Rose Garden said they tested positive. The ceremony was to celebrate Trump’s nomination of ACB, aka Amy Coney Barrett, to the Supreme Court. (Never mind the fact that Justice Ginsburg hadn’t even been buried yet.) Videos of the event show dozens of people walking around without masks, hugging, kissing, wiping their noses and then shaking hands, etc. That’s starting to look like a super-spreader event: two Republicans senators have already tested positive, as well as a few other VIPs. Some wealthy Republican donors were present as well: they went back to their home states, and likely started their own little clusters there.

I hope Trump doesn’t die. After all his petty thievery and not-so-petty corruption, that’d be too easy: a relatively fast exit without consequences. At the same time, I don’t feel sorry for him or his anti-science, pro-suffering entourage. No sympathy for Nazi sympathizers. They knew about the pandemic, they deliberately disregarded every rule, and there they are. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes – the pandemic edition, eh?

I still find it incredibly hard to believe that I, a compete nobody, had a more secure anti-covid system than the goddamn president of the United States. All I have is a healthy sense of paranoia, a bit of disposable income, and working knowledge of epidemiology. (I was into it before it was cool.) I stayed the hell inside, didn’t attend any social events aside from a fully-masked socially distanced backyard birthday party in August (there were a total of five people), and didn’t leave the house without a mask, wraparound glasses, and a face shield. Oh, and my summer vacation consisted of a 2,500-mile roadtrip with extremely little social interaction.

Anyone could do what I did, or at least try to. (I know that’s hard if you have kids.) But the president of the United States, the guy with the best scientists at his disposal, didn’t even try. Just about the only thing he hadn’t done to deliberately catch covid was hanging out with covid patients the way Boris Johnson had done before he got sick. Short of that, and maybe licking random doorknobs, Trump did every single risky thing in the book: shaking hands with dozens of people at events and rallies, not socially distancing, not wearing a mask, etc… If anything, I’m surprised it had taken him seven months to catch covid.

This weekend will likely have even more explosive revelations, even more insane headlines. The four hours of sleep last night are making themselves known: I’ll likely pass out very soon. I can’t even imagine what headlines I’ll see when I wake up some 10-12 hours later. There’s a possibility that Pence will assume presidential duties (if only temporarily) by Monday. There’s a possibility that Nancy Pelosi, the third in the succession line, will take over later this month. There are so many possibilities… Anything is fair game now. Stay safe out there, folks – and if you haven’t caught covid by now, then congratulations on being more responsible than the US president. Heh.

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Plague diaries, Day 181

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September 10, 2020

Thirsty Thursday evening. Alcohol might not be healthy, but what is these days?

The world is still on fire. My best friend, who had just recently bought a house in Oregon, is about to evacuate with his wife. They’re packing up. All their relatives live even closer to the fire than they do, so the destination is a big question mark. The fires are getting closer to my mom’s place and my little brother in Washington too. I don’t get the sense that this is getting covered on national media.

Today at work, I gave an hour-long video lecture on an important subject. Four people joined. Heh. It’s odd to think who will watch those video recordings later, when 2020 finally ends. Will they just fast-forward past all the parts where I call out the covid-specific planning precautions? Will they care?

I found a local journo on twitter. He was looking for Americans who moved to Toronto. I answered some questions. His publication is more of a booklet, but it’ll still be interesting to see my story – if not in print, then online. I’ll post a link here if and when that happens.

In covid news… Trump spent the day retweeting dozens of posts praising him, then attacked Woodward at the press conference (asking why he didn’t immediately go public if what he’d said was so bad) and, as always, refused to take any responsibility. A few hours ago, Trump flew to Michigan to host another rally. Big crowds, virtually no masks… This will almost certainly end up killing more people. How many?

A bunch of international scientists published an open letter questioning the data behind Russia’s “Sputnik V” covid vaccine. Evidently, the alleged antibodies levels in the study’s participants are almost identical, and that’s not quite how that works. Heh. This reminds me… Back in Russia, one of my classmates was the son of our physics teacher. We were all doing an experiment to see how fast boiling water can cool in room temperature. My classmate faked his numbers: according to him, the temperature didn’t fall at all, and the laws of physics didn’t apply to his test tube. His mom gave him an A. This strikes me as the same sort of uninspired forgery. I’ll be very happy to be wrong, but… The country that got caught cheating in the Olympics, and in foreign affairs, and in human rights, and just about everything else – they probably don’t deserve the usual benefit of the doubt, eh?

Tomorrow is the 19th anniversary of 9/11. Here is hoping that’ll be the only ordinary day of 2020, and not some kind of call to action to yet another sick mind.

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Plague diaries, Day 180

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September 9, 2020

Wednesday evening. Statistically speaking, some conspiracy theories must be true, but which ones?

I took most of today off: even though it doesn’t feel like it, the year is coming to an end, and I’ve got a giant pile of personal time to use up. After what happened yesterday, that seemed like a fine idea. (I still logged on for two hours to help, but that’s just some background workaholism.)

I’ve finally caught up on my laundry, even though it took three loads. It’s been at least 37 days, and even my reuse/reduce/recycle attitude could only take me so far. Funny thing about a self-imposed lockdown: when you don’t have to go outside, you end up using a lot less clothing – or put much less wear and tear on your work clothes, in any case. The mere act of putting on socks to leave the house is a bit of a special occasion, an unusual sensation that once was common, a Pavlovian trigger followed by setting out into the potentially infected populace.

During the big grocery run yesterday, I finally acquired a pair of 3-volt batteries for my smart scale: so rare and hard to find and, I suspect, overpriced. Weighed myself for the first time in months… I might have been too stingy with ye olde caloric intake, because I’m down to just 157 lbs, which is a bit below average for a 6’2″ guy. No wonder doing daily pushups brought about a small change: literally anything would. Well, at least now I know the “before” stats for when I finish reading that fitness book.

In covid news: Bob Woodward’s new book is coming out soon. He has tapes: Trump had agreed to be recorded, so what follows is not hearsay. As early as February 7th, Trump told Woodward that covid was dangerous and deadly. In March, Trump said he’s intentionally downplaying the severity of the virus. That was six months ago. Hundreds of thousands died while he insisted the virus would magically disappear, while he mocked masks, while he pontificated on the efficiency of injecting yourself with cleaning products.

Bob Woodward is no angel, either: he sat on those revelations for months, saving them for his book. It’s hard to say how much would’ve changed if he’d released those tapes right after recording them, but surely at least someone would’ve been convinced. At least one town would’ve enacted stricter measures, at least one family would’ve started wearing masks. At least one life would’ve been saved. No profit is worth that. If Trump’s criminal negligence and deliberate withholding of vital information resulted in all those deaths, then Woodward is at the very least an accomplice.

And so there we have it, folks. The president of the United States of America spent months deliberately lying about a deadly virus, killing (by the official count) 190,000 Americans, with just as many deaths expected by the end of the year. If you tried going back in time and warning people about this exact scenario (even just a year ago, when we’d already normalized the idea of Donald Trump as president), you would’ve been called mad – and likely would’ve gotten institutionalized for good measure. Maybe that’s why we never encounter time travelers from the future. Maybe they’ve always been here, but their disturbing shouted warnings about bizarre catastrophes have always been dismissed as random detritus of damaged minds.

This is somewhat covid-related: the US west coast is on fire. There are apocalyptic-looking pictures and videos of hellish red sky, of dense and ash-filled air. The wildfires aren’t everywhere, but it seems like every area from Arizona and all the way to Washington is affected. My mom lives just south of Seattle. Some small towns to the east of her have already been evacuated. That’s the new future, with bigger wildfires and hotter summers every single year. It certainly doesn’t help that all the displaced people will likely be stuck together, and there’s high potential for even more covid clusters…

These types of natural disasters were among several reasons I moved to Canada – and to the east coast of Canada, at that. I wonder how different my life would’ve been if my work transfer to Australia had gone through in early 2018. If I hadn’t done so poorly on my interview, I would’ve been there when the entire continent caught on fire in early 2020. (I know, it seems strange that all of that happened just a few months ago.) If not for my failed speech check, I would’ve lived in the country that’ll be hit the hardest by the global warming, as opposed to the Great White North, which will also get hit, but not as soon, and hopefully not as hard…

I’m still asking my US relatives if they’d like to move to Canada and join me here. Who knows, if I keep asking, maybe someday they’ll make that mental leap and join me after all. One can only hope, eh?

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Plague diaries, Day 124

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July 15, 2020

Wednesday night. Almost weekend. Almost vacation.

Drove down to xgf right after work today to drop off my digital thermometer and oximeter. She feels better but still has weird symptoms (primarily nausea) that she rarely experiences. It’s still possible that this is just a very strange food poisoning. It’s likely that this is the good day/bad day cycle described by some covid sufferers…

On the way back home, I encountered a very poorly managed Walmart: stopped by to buy some roadtrip supplies and beer, only to discover that their self-checkout doesn’t allow one to buy beer. Oh, technology… When I got home, there were five police cars blocking the way: looks like the neighbour from across the street had a very bad fight with her husband. He didn’t get hauled away, but she got plenty of advice from cops taking her statement. There’s been a spike in domestic abuse and assault cases worldwide ever since lockdowns began… I hope everything ends well for her.

Anecdotally, my California sister (not the Trump-supporting one – that one is in New York) mentioned that a friend of her narrowly avoided getting infected. There was a funeral, and even though the priest felt under the weather, he assumed it was just toothache. There was much hugging and kissing… He tested positive for covid two days later. It’s unclear how many people he managed to infect. (My sister’s friend didn’t attend the funeral, and might end up being the only uninfected person in that entire social circle.)

Moderna announced that their trial vaccine has triggered immune response in every person who participated in the trial. They still need to do more testing, but that was great news. The stock market overall went up by a percentage point before settling slightly in the red for the day. However, cruise companies’ stocks went up by 20% – not so much because of the vaccine news, but because they had been very badly hit by shortsellers. Burn in hell, shortselling scum. 🙂

My company has announced that the WFH (work from home) policy has been extended through January 8th. That may or may not apply to my strange little tribe of warehouse financial analysts: we’ll find out where exactly we stand in two days. Should be interesting, one way or another.

Oh, and the President of the United States of America just had his picture taken with a bunch of Goya food products – it was posted on his official Twitter and Instagram. (The company’s CEO had praised Trump, got some social media backlash, and things escalated from there.) If anyone is reading this in the distant future – please google this. (Do y’all still have google? Heh.) I know this sounds made up, but it really happened. Instead of encouraging his fellow Americans to wear masks or be excellent to each other, the POTUS decided to troll the libs by staging a photo-opp to promote his supporter’s products. All of this is in blatant violation of the ethics rules, but it’s like the old saying goes – “how many divisions do the ethics rules have?”

Not for the first time, and definitely not for the last one, I am so very, very glad I have escaped that strange and violent country.

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Plague diaries, Day 80

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June 1, 2020

It’s Monday night, and the United States as we know it is ending. Trump got mocked heavily for hiding out in the White House bunker on Friday. In response, he went outside, and had peaceful protesters assaulted with flashbangs in the background as he posed in front of a church, held a Bible upside down, and promised to send federal troops to fight protesters…

That right there is fascism, pure and simple, set in front of the staged production of police brutality against peaceful protesters who were not violating the curfew. His message was sent loud and clear to all his trigger-happy supporters – civilians as well as those in the uniform. The Illinois governor has already stated that he would not allow federal troops in his state. Others will follow soon.

It’s all moving so fast now… Last night, another black man was shot and killed by the police: he was the owner of a BBQ restaurant that would feed them for free. (If this were a work of fiction, any sane editor would’ve cut this part for being too on the nose.) Tonight, somebody will get an itchy trigger finger, and that’ll make the Kent State massacre seem quaint in comparison. As always, I hope I’m wrong.

I’d never set out to make these plague diaries so political… If you’re reading this at some point in the future, please understand this: you can’t have the story of the pandemic without the United States, and you can’t have the US side of the story without all the political unrest, violence, and rapid descent into fascism that took place at the same time. Someday, all of this will make for a very condensed and confusing chapter in history books – the way the entire Revolutionary War is taught in just two weeks in US high schools. Everything that’s happening here and now may not make sense in the future unless you fully immerse yourself in the news and social media of this period, reading it day by day, hour by hour. Even then, it might not make sense at all.

I’m going to bed now. I don’t want to think what will have transpired by the time I wake up. Good night and good luck to all the yanks who didn’t get out in time…

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