There have been moments when I thought I needed to get out, that my routine might slip into the overbearingly mundane and lead me into boredom. This plague situation, that demanded I stay home, stopped my wandering, as it has for so many others on our planet. In this confinement, I’ve lamented how restricted I feel at times, like the proverbial hamster on the treadmill. If only I could return to wandering, I wouldn’t feel so constrained, goes my thinking.

I’m at the point where I can see that the freedom to go where I wanted was simply a kind of illusion. My perception had me believing that the larger breadth of where I moved about was key to my happiness and that being at home was to be loathed. The reality is that my typical exploits were essentially no different than the moments I’m now living through. So, what changed? I stopped driving various and alternating streets I relied on to mix up the routine and was easily able to choose different locations where I’d shop, have coffee, eat breakfast, go to lunch, and share dinner with Caroline.

Now that I look at it, I was using the car to vary my direction and destination to prevent myself from seeing just how routine those actions were. In reality, I was on a quite similar treadmill built on my own delusion. I still have breakfast, coffee, lunch, and dinner, and, with less frequency, I go shopping. Without all the driving to add variety to my routine. In this sense, I was trying to avoid what Blaise Pascal had famously written back in 1654: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Yet, it is me sitting alone that brings me some of my greatest joy when I’m writing.

If I’m honest with myself, I must admit that aside from vacations and weekend getaways, my life was operating on well-worn paths that were just as plied as the smaller boundary our legs limit us to these days. So I must reconcile that my life, in fact, is not restricted at all but profoundly enhanced, aside from the vacation thing, as I now have more quiet time to spend in a room exploring my thoughts.

How else is it better? Caroline and I have been eating healthier for the past five months than during the previous 30 years. We cook at home, and besides bottled pasta sauce on our spaghetti squash, use nearly no processed foods. I even make my own cereal and vanilla extract, while Caroline has taken to baking various types of bread using dark rye, whole wheat, and even rye chops. We are spending an inordinate amount of time together compared to any other moment in our long relationship, and I can honestly proclaim that we are both incredibly happy about this aspect of being at home. Oh, in addition to the diminished ability to travel, our face-to-face social life with others obviously took a big hit, which is certainly a negative.

All-in-all, though, there is a silver lining to us being dragged out of the rat race, and that is we have this opportunity to explore how and why we are doing what we are now doing, and we are asking ourselves if the way we were living before actually had an advantage over our current situation. The longer this goes on, I think others will start to explore these questions on deeper levels and may also come to the conclusion that our time with ourselves and immediate loved ones is a kind of luxury that, in a different age was the norm.

Of course, this is nothing new as the existentialists were addressing these issues for the past 160 years or so, but now the concept is moving further out of the halls of academia and into our living rooms as the average person finds greater time to reconsider the purpose of things. Kierkegaard started the conversation about the futility of existence back in the mid-19th century, which died in 1960 with Sartre, coinciding with our graduation out of the post-World War II enlightenment, where social issues and civil liberties moved to center stage. The decline of education started around that time, initiated by those who wanted to contain dissent by effectively changing the conversation away from asking how and why to one of quiet pacification and finding meaning through consumption instead of exploring knowledge.

For 50 years, we’ve put the evolution of the mind on hold while we chased the dream of the 1% that understood that collecting ten cents each from 5 billion consumers who needed a pair of shoes or a VCR to be happy was better than trying to corral 200 million people who thought they desired equality. Now we are face-to-face with the realization that we’ve neglected a social and civil society which also means a ruling class grew ever more distant from fair governance. Our sense of community was replaced with fierce individualism as greed became our god. In this environment, we are now poles apart and angry with each other.

I have to wonder how many others are in this boat and are uncertain about where their happiness is and if this new existence can deliver the quality of life, they thought they were experiencing before. Then, once this new routine has been normalized and we are accustomed to making the majority of our meals, working from home, having our children learn online, and coming to rely on more online shopping, will we face the way things had been with dread should they threaten a return? Even after adjusting to these life-changing conditions, we still have to reckon with our dysfunctional government and education system that, at least for now, takes a back seat to our survival.

So, I don’t know how life can go back, but then again, there are those who are not adapting at all and are insistent that they will not budge from the routines in which they’ve grown crusty. But just because there is a plurality of a population resistant to change and their angst is being exploited by a media hungry for drama and a government desiring a fixed status quo, this hopefully won’t mean they are able to put the breaks on our next giant leap forward. Regarding my own personal leap forward, I still cannot see a clear path ahead, so I’ll just continue to plod along on this road of discovery as I try to sit quietly in my room while the plague rages on outside.

I come here without much spleen and a skull that feels relatively empty, but I do need to get on with some writing.

Opening the editor with nothing to say and hoping that this cat skull that now sits in a hydrogen peroxide bath will spark something witty to fall from my imagination feels as futile as thinking this cat might say hello. As a reminder, this skull came to us when Caroline scooped it out of its roadside fur sarcophagus back on June 1st. It wasn’t good enough to just pick it up to get a closer look; she brought it home. After nearly two months of it sitting out on our balcony baking away more of the still decaying flesh clinging to its bones, the wife brought it into the kitchen to finish the task of cleaning things up. Now it sits in that mason jar, looking creepy.

I’m not going to be satisfied in writing about how ghoulish Caroline can be because she’s not really that, she’s just seriously curious. Yeah, I know there are other things to be interested in, but when an opportunity presents itself, she takes the bait. So I sit here waiting for the floodgates of inspiration to strike and instead find the spleen I’ve vented so often about this, that, and the other to be talking to my brain saying, “That shit’s gotten boring, write about something else, ANYTHING else.”

I know: “How about you watch some YouTube?” I can’t be the only person for whom streaming and social media are becoming boring. No, I must turn to this page with 450 words on it already and tie something together so I can be at peace with myself that my fingers are still able to talk for my brain. Speaking of brains, staring at the skull in the jar is radically different than looking at this photo. What I mean to say is that my brain knows the object in the photo, but when looking at the skull itself, there’s a kind of perception where the animal that was embodied can be understood as a living, moving entity and not just the subject frozen in pixels. I can look at the teeth and sense their use during the lifespan of however long this cat lived. The feline that relied upon its mouth to nourish itself could have never had the recognition that nine months after it died, someone would be gazing upon the place its mouth once was and consider how it would have chewed its food or extended its tongue beyond those fangs to help groom itself. While the animated pulse of life is gone, the ghost of its existence survives based on images of other cats I’ve known, as I had no contact with this animal prior to its demise.

Just like me, that cat rose up from the soil after having been birthed, following the encounter of its parents that produced a litter. Its bones, brain, fur, organs, nerves, and curiosity propelled it through a world where it sought out shelter, food, and social interactions with people and other animals. Now it’s silent. Was it a friendly house cat or a feral hissing thing? Did it purr a thousand times in its life or ten thousand times? Could it remember its mother? Are its offspring living in my neighborhood? How does this contrast to my fellow humans?

We are over 7 billion, and I know nearly none of them. They, too are going about lives unaware that someday someone else might be staring at their skulls and wondering what kind of life they had. But bones don’t tell very good stories beyond the obvious biological ones we’ve been able to figure out. We won’t know how they enjoyed music, food, night skies, the affection of others, or the color of their first car. It’s only from these words we attempt to leave for posterity that someone else might come to some greater insight into who inhabited the bones they are contemplating.

So I guess it doesn’t matter if I once again spill my guts of dissatisfaction regarding politics or the state of education, as who would begrudge me for eating pizza 100 times over a lifetime? Every time we return to something, we experience it a little differently, although the nuance of the encounter is typically lost in the repetition of what we accept as a kind of routine. Still, the pizza cannot be the same from maker to maker and what stage we are at in our lives. So, can thoughts and ideas be shared in an identical manner from year to year when we are no longer the person we were a year before?

Today, a train is burning on a bridge in Tempe, Arizona, after it derailed. We as a species and as individuals will not be known by this mechanical anomaly that is being featured with big drama on the news media, and yet that is what we are focused on right now. The U.S. Representative and civil-rights leader John Lewis died recently and while on one hand a common man, he was an extraordinary man that surpassed what many will be able to accomplish in a lifetime. He’ll be remembered as his story has been captured over and again during the nearly 60 years he was politically active. Mass murderers such as Stephen Paddock will find their place in the history of humanity even though he was responsible for the death of 59 people in Las Vegas one night. This is because, at our current stage of development we are still struck by the sideshow, celebrities, and tragedies far more than we are with someone who just goes about their life.

In a universe where no less than 7 billion minds might be able to contemplate their place in the cosmos, we can’t know if, in 50,000 years, anyone will wonder anything more about John Lewis or John Wise as by then, maybe we are just the lost bone fragments and ash from a side branch of evolution that came and went as the previous eight hominid species that walked the Earth in the past 300,000 years did before us.

Then, when I think about what the average Egyptian or Greek might have thought about particular circumstances during classical antiquity, could it possibly have any bearing on how we see anything today? I think the obvious answer is no, but then again, what if the lessons of early people had been codified and our minds had evolved to take from the best lessons and use those to guide ourselves? Some may say that is religion, but I’d disagree as I can’t see most Western religions being about the fundamentals of good living. Instead, they are guides to subservience to the powerful. That, though, is a whole other subject that risks taking this entry off the tiny rail it’s barely skating on. The bigger point was, do we care how somebody saw their world in 300 B.C. or even in 1930? Well, I do, and if I could peer over the shoulder of someone preparing dinner 2,000 years ago in Italy or read the diary of a person in western Africa after being raided by slave traders, I’d be up to be that fly on the wall.

Go back further, and I certainly would love to watch the people who were painting horses and other animals in Chauvet Cave 35,000 years ago, and if all that was available was a transcript, I’d take it. Share with me a real day in the life 130,000 years ago of one of the earliest Neanderthals and how they saw their world. I’d sign up for a front-row ticket. In this capacity, I write as someone who may as well be from the Homo erectus branch of archaic humans. Like them, I know how to use fire, tools, and desire to care for others, most notably Caroline. Unlike them, I have some limited mastery of abstract symbolic tools that only require gestures for me to extract knowledge from an electronic library and to communicate with others. But ask me if I believe that after 2 million years of hominin evolution, I believe we are on the cusp of enlightenment, and I’d have to say we are likely still hundreds of thousands of years away. Collectively, we are too primitive and enraged to qualify as truly smart and aware.

Ten thousand years from now, I think my quaint musings on whatever topic will appear primitive and nearly stone-age, and that’s if they are even retrievable. From a pair of eyes out of the future, might someone look upon my metaphoric skull wondering about what this creature was chewing on that they felt compelled to leave some hints about just one more anonymous life amongst the trillions that preceded it? How long will they stare at the word shell of John, trying to decipher what kind of Homo sapiens I was? I wonder what kind of voice the cat, I will never listen to, had. I can only wonder.

130 days and 80 blog entries ago, I wrote my first self-isolation post to chronicle our time staying at home. This was going to be a daily post about what promised to be an extraordinary moment in our lives. We made the decision to self-isolate before San Francisco committed to a lockdown and a full two weeks before our state of Arizona decided it was in our best interest to issue a stay-at-home order. After less than two weeks, the writing task grew burdensome, becoming a reflection of anxiety triggered by watching a country doing everything wrong to suppress the outbreak. Documenting the lunacy was going to make me crazy, so I diverted my attention. More than that, though, I never thought back then that things would be getting worse by the middle of summer, no matter how incompetently state and federal officials were acting.

But here we are, and I feel like some kind of update is in order. I’m in need of new shoes as I’ve put 581 miles on my current pair in less than 90 days. I’ve walked 903 total Covid-miles since we locked our door and threw away the key. At some point, our bodies seemed to be craving junk food,  but the In N Out we opted for wasn’t the greatest, which had me feeling I was losing the taste for fast food after all this home cooking. On another day, I picked up a pizza that did, in fact, hit the spot. So did the brisket from HEK Yeah Barbecue. And two stops out in Globe, Arizona, for Mexican food were both terrific, so I’m not fully against going out for dinner again. That’s pretty much our extent of eating out in 130 days, besides the obligatory visits to grocery stores. My trusty digital travel companion Marlene (my Surface Book) grows dusty as it sits on my right, aging without purpose. I think Caroline has been in our car maybe half a dozen times since mid-March. Our lives remain different and stuck in the loop of a virus.

While this new stage in life has become routine, it still feels temporary and that, somehow, things are going to change. I have some thoughts about that change.

Predictions:

I’ve never been in the driver’s seat when it comes to predictions, so this exercise in making them is nothing more than folly. For some background on my lack of ability to ordain the future, let me share the following: In 1977, I heard punk rock for the first time and thought it was the next big thing, but by 1979, I’d moved on to the next bigger thing, industrial music and, a year after that, power electronics or noise. Punk took off in 1991 with Nirvana, while industrial and noise still haven’t had their moments in the sun. In 1988, I installed Turbo Silver on my Amiga computer, and two years later, I clamored to get the very first copy of Imagine, another 3D software application, while I was in Germany. I just knew that everyone would be learning how to model and animate wrong. My internet cafe in 1995 didn’t have private terminals to view porn, so the draw didn’t quite work out. Then, in 1998, I was certain there’d be a revolution in clustered computing, giving kids the power of supercomputers – yeah, that never happened. Jump to 2014, and virtual reality was going to be explosive – nope, again. My career as a trendsetter has an abysmal record, and I can now see that those things I enjoy might actually suffer from finding popularity due to my interest. Jeez, I wonder how many authors I’ve hurt and how many musicians I’ve kept in poverty? Anyway, this entry is not a mea culpa of my personal cultural failures; it is about my predictions for our dystopian future so that my being wrong once again saves humanity from my skewed sense-certainty of what comes next.

There will not be a return to normal as we once knew it. Over the past few days, the news is trickling in that antibodies against COVID-19 only last about 90 days, and with that, it is likely that immunity from a vaccine will also only be good for about 90 days. So, if this trickle is destined to be a flood on confirmation that the best we can hope for is about 90 days of protection, that means this virus will continue to devastate humanity. As far as the vaccine is concerned, my money would be that people who are willing to travel by air will be one part of those on the priority list of who receive it. Law enforcement, health care workers, educators, food handlers, farmworkers, and the military will be the others at the top of the list.

I believe that sporting events, restaurants, concerts, and theaters are all going to be greatly altered and, in many cases, will just close up shop. For the anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, and flat-earthers, I’ll posit they will be marginalized from performing their economic consumption online and eating at home as they’ll be barred from entering establishments that will be barely hanging on. Travel as we knew it is over as how will communities know if those visiting aren’t carrying the virus with them? As tax and tourism revenue disappear, so will health services, which will drive a deeper wedge between locals and visitors.

The movies, theater, concerts, and other shared public gathering experiences will be too potentially harmful to return. One has to wonder how movies will be created unless they, too, become part of the critical workforce that will have access to a vaccine. Regarding that vaccine, if the average time for antibodies to be active is 90 days, then what about those people where antibodies are only active for a few weeks and the risk they will still pose in infecting others?

Without a demand of the American people to adapt and contribute to themselves, their communities, and an evolving workplace, we’ll wither in stagnation, which will fuel national despair that we may never dig out of. Malaise will be where the United States heads under our current lack of leadership. There are moments that are starting to feel like we could reach a tipping point that will flash over our country like a raging storm, and once that panic sets in, we’ll be hard-pressed to return to anything remotely normal.

If you are old or poor, America is done with you. If your children attend public school, your life is expendable. If you work in healthcare, you may die treating the old and poor, but if you work in an upscale facility that caters to the wealthy, you’ll have the supplies you need while you’ll be able to afford private online tutoring for your children.

Instead of declaring a national emergency and creating a new Manhattan Project where the objective is to educate our citizens, broaden our tolerance for the spectrum of cultures that live upon our lands,  and share the wealth and opportunity across the country, we will continue testing the limits of cruelty.

As the virus mutates and continues to take its toll, many people will question bringing children into the world, and subsequently, not feeling a serious purpose or hope for a positive future, we’ll see a surge in suicide. Despair will then give America exactly what it wants, a dystopian reality where the shit hit the fan, validating our fear of the future.

Over the past 12 months, I’ve posted 166 blog entries totaling 208,897 words for an average of 1,251 words per post. While this is factually accurate, it doesn’t take into account that I posted the book I wrote a decade ago about the Grand Canyon, and over those 19 days, there are 85,401 words belonging to it. So, of all my other 147 exercises in writing, those missives were a mere 840 words each on average. If you pick up an air of mild disappointment, you wouldn’t be wrong, though the fact that I wrote nearly every other day is nothing to be sad about.

Last year, for 37 days, from early May to nearly mid-June, I walked the streets from Berlin to Zagreb, and during that time, I wrote every day without fail. I was prolific and was able to pen 77,458 words in order to capture a thousand details that would have been lost in time had the effort not been spent organizing electrons on digital paper. That was 2,093 words per day, which, as far as I’m concerned, proves to me that I should travel a lot more.

Since January 1st, 2019, there have been 550 days; of those, I’ve made 278 blog posts totaling 328,205 words. Why do I know this and the above numbers? I’ve started a spreadsheet where each line entry is the title, date, and word count that will ultimately detail each of the 2,333 blog posts I’ve made public here at www.johnwise.com. Maybe this is a silly exercise, but I’m curious how many words I’ve written since started blogging back on January 1, 2005, when I was 41 years old. At this moment, I’m calculating that it will be somewhere near 2.2 million words, but maybe it’s closer to 2.7 million, which means I only need to write about another 280 blog entries to reach 3,000,000 words. That raises the question: what value will it have been to have written 3 million words? You know, I don’t have a really good answer, but when I reach that point, I can assure you that I’ll lament that I’ve not reached 5 million.

Trends that start to emerge that should have been obvious is that I like writing a lot more when we are traveling. In November 2019 we visited Oregon, and I found 20,089 words with which to write about our vacation, which is extraordinary when you consider how many times we’ve been up there. One year prior, we were again in Oregon at the same time of year, and all I could muster was 15,334 words for an equivalent amount of time. We had a 21-day vacation in Europe in 2018 that took us to Germany, Austria, France, Switzerland, Italy, and Hungary. I had 47,457 words that needed recording so our memories could be enhanced as time passed. Then, there was a trip to Alaska back in the summer of 2017 that started less than two weeks after I fired my entire company. As emotionally distraught as I was, I was still able to draw 18,057 words out of me, but this was one of the most difficult trips I’d been on due to the baggage I was carrying.

Back in 2014, I started a new company, and even before that, I was deeply immersed in all things virtual reality. To a degree, I thought I was a bit burned out on blogging as I’d lost sight of it being an exercise in writing and advancing those skills. To have written only six entries on my own site during 2014 and then another three that were posted on the VR site was certainly a low point. The year before, we were in Germany for the first time in 18 years, and I didn’t miss the opportunity to document every minute, so with 40,338 words and somewhere between 200 to 300 photos, we have some terrific memories to reflect on. At this point in counting words, I’m back on April 3, 2013, with 543 blog entries consisting of 539,616 words. I’m 25% of the way through, and my average word count has dropped to 994 words per entry.

While cataloging my word count from 2012, I just learned that from the two trips we’ve made to Alaska to raft the Alsek River, we’ve spent a total of 26 days in this remote corner of North America, and I’ve shared 41,000 words exactly about our experiences. But then I crawl further back into 2011 and the writing is on the wall. It seems like I could barely be bothered to blog very much, and when I did, it wasn’t as verbose as I appreciate now that I’m older. I’m happy that there is a loose record of things, and on many of our trips, there are extensive musings, but I certainly considered my photography as the more important aspect of what I was documenting.

This brings me to a point I believe I’ve made before somewhere here on this blog: writing should be an activity that is a matter of habit for everyone. Even if it were just once a week, though I’d insist that daily writing while traveling should be obligatory, I believe people would have a better perspective on how amazing their lives are and how important it is to fill their days with moments and activities that are worth remembering. I just relearned that Caroline finished her first big weaving project, where she made yellow and purple towels back on June 18, 2011. By July 10, 2013, I was immersed in playing with graphics software that was about to lead me to the Oculus Rift and virtual reality. On August 15, 2016, Caroline and I saw King Sunny Adé perform at the MIM. I still have 1,696 blog entries, of which I need to record the title, date, and word count; I’m sure I’ll be finding other surprises and also wishing that I’d filled in the gaps.

Midway through 2010, Caroline must be tired of my obsessive-compulsive disorder as she asks with only minor indignance, “Are you really going to go through all 2,339 blog entries to figure out how many words you’ve written?” My answer was something like, “Hey, I’m already through 701 of them, so yeah, that’s exactly what I’m gonna do.” Ten minutes later, she’s installed WP Word Count and shows me that I’ve published 1,127,519 words over the years or about half of what I thought I’d find. I immediately saw that my shortest blog entry was just two words, and the longest one, excluding my book, was about my journey into synthesizers, which is 5,298 words. My average blog entry is 474 words long. When I started blogging in 2005, I kept up a great pace until the spring of 2008, when I published my 1,000th entry. It was originally my intent to publish a “Photo Of The Day” with a blurb about the image for one year. After more than three years, I slowed down as I needed a break.

I’ve got to admit that I’m a bit disappointed that between 2008 and 2020 I’ve only added about 1,300 more blog entries. On the bright side, during 2005, my first year blogging, I was averaging 235 words per entry, while in 2019, I averaged 916 words per entry. Not that more words are better, but I think over the 15 years of writing here at johnwise.com, the craft has become easier, and at times, there are levels of details I could have never captured back then. Since January 1st, 2005, there have been 5,664 days between now and then, which means, on average, I’ve written 199 words per day. Ernest Hemingway recommended writing 500 a day and Jack London hammered out 1,500 a day, but I never aspired to be a writer. My inspiration was to compel myself to take more photos and have some intention behind them while practicing describing what I was seeing. So I shouldn’t be disappointed at all as I certainly progressed in the task I gave myself at the end of 2004.

Finally, I was looking at Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past,” which rings in as the Guinness World Record holder as the longest novel at 1,250,000 words well, I’m almost there, but if I want to reach 2,500,000 lifetime words in the next ten years, I’ll need to pen 376 words on average per day. That would allow my internet writing to compare to a book of over 6,000 pages. I can get this. As for the earlier note of maybe seeing 5 million words, well, that would require me to write more than 1,000 words every day between now and my 67th year. That sounds tough.