The Current Situation

A couple of months ago, I noticed how clear the air was. It was unusual. I mentioned this observation to people, I believe I wrote about it in my journal, I know I included some words about it in my mood tracker.

I think I realized what it was today. China had shut down and the lack of emissions from there had had an effect all the way here.

Now we're shut down, too. Tomorrow is the inflection point, I think. Seventeen days after shutdown. The skies have been remarkably clear almost every day.

For the past few weeks I've been thinking it would be Wrong, somehow, to let this situation pass without making some sort of Post in this Blog about it. It's Historic; there should be a Record.

Anyway, this is that post. Perhaps there'll be more but there probably won't.

I'll leave this one untagged also, future Shaun is welcome to come through and add tags whenever he's got the free time and energy for it. But dude, go change all the "jealous"es to "envy"ies first. It's still bothering me.

Anyway to conclude, here's a poem that I didn't write:

The Second Coming
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Turning and turning in the widening gyre 
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere 
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst 
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand. 
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out 
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert 
A shape with lion body and the head of a man, 
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, 
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it 
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. 
The darkness drops again; but now I know 
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, 
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, 
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

First of February, Twenty Twenty

Dang, so today was a pretty great day. Saturdays usually are. Work from home, really chill. No need to commute to or from the office so that's an extra 40-ish minutes each day, and it means that 3pm (yeah sorry 25-year-old Shaun, I decided that using the 24-hour-clock all the time was not really conducive to clear communication so I've walked back on it a bit. A lot.) rolls around I can go right from work to a bunch of YouTube videos that have accumulated in my tabs and have been sitting there since before the shift.

Had a tweet go kinda big, there was a funny tweet about some new PETA nonsense, so gave the tweet a like then wrote a reply calling out the organization for killing animals, which linked to this article in The Atlantic.

Ate a tasty homemade lunch.

Really the only kinda not-great things about life is that I don't have a lot of money at the moment (I mean, I have an okay or almost okay amount in my savings and I've got some crypto investments doing fairly well, enough for a plane ticket to anywhere if I book far enough in advance), my glasses frame broke (but the tape holding them together is working fairly well and I've already got replacements ordered), and another Fairly Big Thing possibly looming as the result of a Very Big Thing that happened a few months ago. 17-year-old Shaun would've just outright said what those things were, but I guess I've learned some discretion in the intervening decade. Well, perhaps not enough. The Very Big Thing is that my dad died, but I don't want to write about it here since this is (was?) supposed to be a post about the good day I had.

Would've put this on my Tumblr, but I've just left and so according to the pattern of past behaviour it'll be another two years before I'm back. Could've put this in r/vent but, uh, meh. I wanted to update this blog outta nowhere anyway. I think it's kinda funny.

I have a website, I've owned the domain for a while but it doesn't work and hasn't for a while. Used to point to my Steam profile, not sure why it stopped working.

But yeah, good day. It's nice to stay home and just watch a lot of videos and read a lot of stuff and possibly check out a podcast after this. Just kinda wish I had more money. Perhaps I should get a more difficult job, or move to someplace where the currency is a lot stronger.

Am I gonna tag this post? Nah. Perhaps I'll come back to it and tag it someday instead of making a new post. Yeah, if I ever wanna interact with this blog again, that's how I'll do it.