I’m nervous, and anxiety is drilling into my stomach. The reason for this rush into emotion is I’m about to go into battle with an unidentified number of people with whom I am in competition for buying entry into the Monterey Bay Aquarium. My browser has been open for weeks, so I don’t forget that this morning at 9:00 a.m., Pacific Time the aquarium starts offering members reservations starting May 1st. This members-only reopening runs through the 14th, and Caroline and I are booked for everything else surrounding the momentous event.

So here I am, 26 minutes before 9:00 a.m., logged into our account and ready to pounce, just as I imagine a thousand others are ready to do too.

The last time I was in this situation was a couple of years ago when a popular Eurorack synthesizer manufacturer was about to offer a new unit. The first bidder was going to be able to nab serial# 0001, and I was certain it had to be me. While I won that distinction, I later learned that there were 5 of us on it, but I was the one able to complete the transaction in under a few seconds. Expert Shopper Level achieved.

Twenty minutes remaining, and I’m feeling over-caffeinated. Our member number sits in another window should I need to grab it at the last second. My credit card is on the counter should auto-fill fail me at a pivotal moment. Two browser windows for the aquarium, one on the home page and the other on our member page. Caroline is talking to me in chat, wishing me luck; she wore her pendant from Newport, Oregon, to work today to carry the luck of the ocean with her in the hopes that we’ll do well in the high-tension stakes of scoring entry on one or more of these coveted days.

With only 12 minutes remaining, I am barely able to control the impulse to refresh the web pages. I’m anticipating that when they update the site, it might kick out those of us already logged in, allowing the system a full reset. My excitement spills into nausea, wrecking me as I worry if my fingers will perform the way they need to in 9 minutes from now. Then the thought occurs to me: how accurate is the time on my computer? Oh yeah, it’s synced to my phone, so I’m solid here. Eight minutes and my breathing feels shallow. Might I pass out?

Invisible enemies on a horizon we cannot see are poised to enter the arena in less than five minutes. Is the crowd going wild? I cannot hear to roar of those who are about to witness our fight to the death. My time as a gladiator seems to only affect me.

The site is timing out…is the crush so great? I’m also on the phone waiting for the next available service rep. My heart is rapidly sinking. It’s now 9:17 a.m., and not only am I trying to refresh the browser, but I’m on hold with the aquarium while minutes are ticking by.

Three or four calls later, after being disconnected, I finally get through, but by this time, I’ve already looked up our options for canceling the eight days of lodging reservations already made. It’s 9:40 when Nicole in member services answers the phone and reassures me that she can take care of my reservation requests. In less than a minute, we have our spots guaranteed for two consecutive days of entry to the aquarium. Thirty seconds later, the email pops into my inbox, and the tickets are here. We have won this round of gladiatorial battle in the area of information.

It must surely be the sign of a bored mind when, out for a moment of writing, I sit here at the coffee shop with nothing at all flowing through my head. I scan the itinerary of our upcoming trip and some of the details yet to be worked out, but find them all too boring to warrant capture. I look around me at the other 11 people here in the coffeeshop and realize I’m the only man here. Does that have any meaning? No. Caroline is at home talking with her mom, which typically induces me to nap, but I didn’t want to do that, so here I am. Then, I’m talking on Skype with an old friend who’s living rurally in the former East Germany. I’m asking about the level of belligerent racist ideology among the inhabitants, and I’m reassured that things are not hostile. This, though, is not the subject matter for any serious train of thought this morning.

Last night, on our walk around the neighborhood, we spent an hour talking with some neighbors we’d never met before. Nice enough couple, older, they both have a love of travel, at least one is addicted to reading, and we learned they love a wide variety of ethnic meals. Along the way, we were asked a question never heard by us before, “What church do you attend?” How do you tell this person, “We are atheists”? Sadly, it feels like we are telling someone we are Satanists when we admit that we do not believe in any God. I can only wonder if our contact with them can go any further.

Maybe a bit of COVID update should be thrown in here. Caroline and I are now fully vaccinated in that we are well past the two weeks after our second shot to achieve maximum antibody protection. While not worried about the virus killing me now, I still wear my mask into any business I enter and walk away from places that have removed the mandate our idiot Governor ended. While our brilliant Mayor Kate Gallego has insisted on continuing the practice, the people who found the entire process to be a sham are belligerently adamant that they are done with the sheep-like antics.

Meanwhile, in India, the wheels have finally come off the cart, well after the initial speculations that India would be hit hard. We hear nothing about China and the pandemic anymore, while Brazil is seeing its fascist leader threatening to bring the military to the streets. For exactly what purpose, I do not know. Europe is looking at more lockdowns, while America is mostly trying hard to return to normal.

Pantry progress: we are down to roughly 350 line items representing just over 500 individual foodstuffs in our inventory. Consolidation of cabinets has begun as we reclaim those for things like dishes. The goal is to take us down to nothing left in our cabinets other than staples needed for everyday cooking and to do so before anything expires or spoils. The two things that take us the longest to go through are dried beans and canned meat, but we are making steady progress with both.

Random theme of the past week has been our recognition of being so fortunate to plan for and be able to travel. Our diet is made primarily from whole foods and very few processed items aside from pasta, tomato sauce, and the canned meats we hoarded last year. If something interests us, we can indulge ourselves by bringing that item or idea into our lives. We pinch ourselves at the magnitude of luck that allows us these opportunities.

So, while I feel that I have nothing of any consequence to really share today, I can be happy that I was still able to write a little something or other. Now it’s time to go home; grill us a steak from the Cattle Exchange in Canadian, Texas, which we will share for lunch along with an avocado-tomato salad, and then set up our tent to be sure everything’s in order prior to us heading out on our upcoming vacation. Just another lazy Sunday.

There’s nothing like binge-watching an hour of Joey B. Toonz to head-kick you into reevaluating what stupid shit you are sharing on social media. While my blog isn’t promoted on social media per se, it is my version of social media for my wife and me along with whoever might accidentally stumble across some post here. So I scrolled down to find out how guilty I might be of posting narcissistic bullshit: GUILTY! Who cares how much dish soap we use or that we are cleaning out hoarded stuff and believe we are doing something altruistic by giving some of it to Goodwill? Guilty. Meanwhile, I’ve been doing some backfill entries that don’t appear in the current scroll meaning, based on old photos I scanned, I’m putting together some dusty old memories, embellished with the fog of time, about my escapades in the red light district of Frankfurt. Here I go again, bragging about a period of nearly 1000 days in which I would have gladly exchanged my parents for 20 minutes with some prostitute, and towards the end of my sojourn in carnal depravity, I was looking for a Thai Surprise, butch Italian woman with beefy dildos, or that woman whose boobs had to weigh in at 40lbs each (she was big and smelled funny, but that didn’t stop me).

Makes me consider that, at one time, my life was real or a different shade of grotesque. Have I really been reduced to filling the pages between travel photos with how much toothpaste I’ve used in my lifetime? Sure, I tell myself that this is all for some future anthropological study 200 or 300 years from now when people will want to study our current time more in-depth, and I’m supplying an aspect of that, but maybe I’m just providing more ammunition for others to reel in the pain of how profoundly stupid we all were. Even those of us who thought they had a clue. Then I think about the masses from 200 years ago or 2000 years ago, and I’m afraid that they were also as dumb as a box of rocks, and I’m simply carrying on the tradition. If it weren’t for my oversized ego still believing that I have something to share and it might yet turn out to be relevant, I’d have to stop this nonsense and realize that these missives into the ether are going right where they belong, into nothingness.

After reading this to my wife, she consoles me that at least I don’t include mukbang sounds in my blog entries about dishwashing, tooth brushing, or eating a whore’s ass.

Do you think free speech is what you find or deserve on Facebook? Are you outraged when Zuck censors you, thus stepping on your 1st Amendment rights? Well, please let me help inform you that there is NO social media site that owes you a place to share ideas, NOT A SINGLE ONE! Twitter, Instagram, Discord, Facebook, TikTok, or even Parler are companies, not government-sponsored platforms financed by taxpayer money, for the benefit of the people to vent whatever crazy idea they happen to be espousing.

Never in the history of the United States did a radio or TV station have to provide broadcast time for an individual to share their thoughts. No publisher of books, magazines, or newspapers has ever been obliged to print the opinions of someone. These businesses operate under the capitalist idea of needing to make money, end of story. Even public broadcasters like PBS and NPR operate under charters that demand they only distribute content that is in the best interest of the community and extends culture; they are not political platforms for sharing ideologies.

So why do people feel they are entitled to use a for-profit service on the internet to say or share whatever they strongly believe in? I’d guess that, in part, it has to do with them watching stupid cat videos and porn on the internet so that this idea seeps into their head:  if these people can distribute this stuff, why can’t I share what I want? They fail to understand that cat videos draw people in for entertainment, which pushes advertising, which makes a profit for those involved in the behind-the-scenes operations, and the same goes for porn. But somewhere along the lines that delineate a business and a public area such as a park or the front of a government building, individuals come to see social media as an extension of the public domain, and hence, they have the “right” to say what they please. They do not.

This rapidly changing online sphere is evolving at lightning speed, and when the general public fails to understand history, they are blinded by their insatiable desire to have things their way, or so people want to believe when they’ve grown up in America in a system of total freedom. They don’t understand boundaries or evolution. Take books and newspapers, the printing press was invented in 1440, but it took almost 560 years before the average person could print on demand a title they wrote. Television was invented in 1927, but it took more than 70 years before an individual could stream their own content to try to find an audience. The first social media site was created in 1997, but it wasn’t until 2004, when Facebook launched, that the social media craze began in earnest. We are now in the age of growing pains.

The first books did not have photos because it took almost four more centuries until photos were invented; color printing first happened about 100 years ago. Color television wouldn’t start broadcasting until 26 years after the TV was invented, and now people watch 4k images on 86-inch flat screens and take for granted that it’s always been this way. The internet is going to go through the exact same transformations, and the reality is that someone else’s company, no matter how large, is not your personal platform to say and show what you please. The platform you feel you deserve is up to you to create, pay for, maintain, and deal with any legal ramifications that it might run afoul of.

At the root of people’s desire to put themselves on a platform is a history of the individual being on the sidelines, existing in the realm of the anonymous. Then in the past 15 years, humanity has been witness to every type of character finding riches by some act or other that catapults them onto the public stage. The person watching this feels that they have something valuable to offer as well and start looking for their voice. Controversy seems like an easy stepping stone, and so the messenger races down the rabbit hole, hunting for topics that have the ability to incite others. Raising eyebrows is a profitable business, and everyone wants their fair share, their moment in the spotlight, so they too can be important.

Cultivating something worth sharing other than a constant outpouring of rage requires one to hone the ability to craft something. While some would argue that manufactured outrage is valuable to our discourse, since when has bludgeoning an enemy ever brought those persons to a new way of thinking or living? If you are on the edge of the spectrum where the mainstream resides, you might try art, indie film, philosophy, or wrap your message in music to find like-minded souls, but believing your anger deserves the highest platform is delusional at best. But what of recent politics, John? Populism is typically (and hopefully) a short-lived movement that doesn’t inflict too much damage on the masses, but it can be undeniably profitable to exploit that part of the population that typically exists without a voice. If we are lucky, populist movements disappear, allowing the march of science, logic, and reason to move forward.

After I embarked on my newest chore, Caroline sent me an article about Hyperfocus ADHD. She knows me well and knew that after I started on this bit of work, I wouldn’t come up for air for a while. So, what exactly am I doing? I’m running 2,568 blog entries through Grammarly to verify that things are okay among the 1.3 million words I’ve written over the past years.

This all started because of a prior Herculian task which involved putting together a page featuring a single photo from every day we traveled since the advent of the digital camera. At the 501st post, I grew weary and took a pause, which lasted months. This is tied in with today’s entry because it was something related to the photos I posted for a particular entry and a seemingly lost image I thought I included on the page titled Travels In The Digital Age. As I got to that post, I saw errors in the grammar and felt I needed to correct them. That took on a life of its own, and now I’ve finished validating the grammar of 940 blog posts and have 1,628 to go.

Obsessively, my hyperfocus drills deep into my sense of “I must finish this as soon as possible” so I can focus on something else. Two something elses are in line to take over my hyperfocus. The first is I have to expand the photos included with early blog posts as those often only include a single photo to represent an entire day of travel; this was due to bandwidth limitations on the internet back before 2015. I needed to be conservative with how many images I shared; now, I’d like to rectify those omissions.

I’m estimating I’ll be done with this aspect of quality control in about ten days, at which time I can turn to determine the exact blog entries I need to flag for adding more images and consider what I might be able to say about them so many years after the fact. In the past, when I’ve written to images where there were no notes to help in the exposition of what transpired, I’ve given a warning at the front of the entry that what I’m sharing is wrung from memories that might be over 15 years old. So it goes.

Now we get to the ultimate reason for this diligence: this blog will someday disappear. When it does, I would like to know that my favorite writings will continue on into the future and the best way I’ve identified for that to happen is in print. To get to the point I can take much of this into book form I really need the grammar and images I want to include to be the most representative of our time.

But John, why do you think there should be any interest in these missives 100 years from now? Two people ventured deep into the breadth of America, recording their adventures for decades. With over 250,000 digital photos taken during those years and hundreds of thousands of words that accompany the images, I tend to believe that few others armed with a camera and notebooks captured so much detail while exploring America and occasionally Europe. I’d posit that we are the first to extensively chronicle our travels and life in America in the history of the country as what are the odds of another couple traveling for the past 22 years armed with digital cameras on over 200 travels and countless experiences?

With that knowledge and knowing that the bits and bytes that comprise this endeavor are temporary in nature, I feel it’s imperative to push this history into the permanent record. So, on I go with running Grammarly over this labor of love before focusing on prepping photos to fill some gaps and then identifying which entries should be preserved. Once all of that is finished, I can go to work on preparing the images for print, which have different requirements than what I’ve done to share them electronically.

Now, back to the endless repairs.

Update April 13th: I’m up to about 300 posts a day, with only 970 awaiting repair.