I did this back in 2013, so maybe it’s time for an update.

• An Anthro desk, 60-inch wide, “fog” color. Anthro no longer exists, so I’m not sure if they still make them.
• 2020 MacBook Pro 16-inch (the last Intel one).
• Lenovo Thinkpad - I don’t remember the number, but about two years old (work machine).
• A KVM switch, all the assorted dongles, and the Lenovo’s docking station, hidden half-under the desk, but sticking half-out because I’ve given up on cable management.
• Regular-vision glasses (I wear a different pair for the computer.)
• Sony MDR-7506 headphones, but with the foam pads replaced with new perforated fake-leather ones. Great daily monitor-type headphones, but the pads disintegrate within a year.
• iPhone 11 Pro, in a battery case.
• Lightning-to-Thunderbolt cable.
• Lightning-to-USB B cable.
• 1/4-inch to 1/8-inch headphone adapter.
• Glasses case.
•  USB 3 hub.
• Vanatoo Transparent Zero monitors.
• iPad pro (the first generation, the smaller size). It’s in a wire stand meant for recipe books that I got for four bucks instead of paying $75 for some sculpted aluminum thing.
• A couple of bottles of vitamins.
• Kinesis Advantage keyboard.
• Two different Western Digital external backup drives (4TB?), and an external enclosure with an SSD (512 GB) full of different Windows VMs.
• A cheap TENS machine that’s currently plugged into my lower right back.
• A Kensington trackball.
• An Ergotron monitor arm.
• A crappy ViewSonic monitor, maybe 24-inch 1080p.
• A Manta TR-1 IR remote receiver.
• A Logitech C920 webcam.
• An Apple Pencil, probably with a dead battery.
• A couple of Japanese erasable pens (blue, red. Frixion Ball. Pilot makes a version in the US that’s garbage, the wrong shape.)
• A bunch of post-it notes.
• A bill for my license plates.
• A cheap Chinese LCD clock.
• A fingertip pulseox monitor.
• A three-toggle switch replica of the SCE switch in an Apollo command module.
• One of those stupid hand grip exercise things.
• Proventil inhaler.
• Wire pen/pencil basket, filled with various pens and pencils I almost never use, plus at least two Strat whammy bars. I also see a Palm Pilot stylus in there, to give you an idea of how often I clean it out.
• Two different travel-size bottles of hand sanitizer.
• A keyboard brush thing from Japan that stands up and has a creepy anthropomorphic face on it, as a Japanese desk accessory would.
• About a dozen bills or “important” papers from like 2014 stuffed between a speaker and the pen holder.
• A Verilux desktop light.
• A Verilux light box I never use.
• A Ghiradelli candy bar.
• Apple remote.
• Vanatoo remote.
• Cloth napkin.
• Apple earbuds.
• The paperwork satchel thing out of a MacBook Pro.
• Half a can of Coke Zero.

(None of this is probably of any interest, but it will be of interest to me in five or ten years, so that’s why it’s here.)

So, 2020. We can all go on forever talking about the horrors of the year: the pandemic, the economy, the job market, politics, and everything else. I don’t want to get into it. I can’t get into it.

Let me try to scrape together an update like I did last year and stick to my facts. I know that’s narcissistic, given everything going on. But, write what you know.

Good stuff:

• I published The Failure Cascade in December. It’s a little longer than the last few placeholder books, but it’s still not the Big Book I wanted to finish this year. Maybe next year.
• That book was 37,565 words, plus I wrote another 122,494 in my morgue project, and a hair over 100,000 in the book I couldn’t finish. So a little more than last year, maybe.
• 31 posts here for a hair over 30,000 words, which was better than last year.
• I edited and revisited all 1600-some posts here, which took me… a while.
• 2,010,005 steps, 2780 floors, 948.09 miles, which is lower than last year. Weight is 5.3 pounds more, but considering what I gained over the summer during lockdown, I’m about ten pounds lower than the peak, so I’ll take it. I also meditated every day of the year. Closed all three rings on the Apple Watch every day. Current move streak: 1791 days.
• No interviews, no podcasts, no stories published. Whatever.
• I wrote the intro and helped publish John’s book Latch Key Kids. Also helped Keith publish The Orphic Egg Caper.
• Only about a thousand pictures taken, which is amazingly low.
• Just took one trip to Vegas this year with Bill and Marc. Managed to go back to Area 51 again. Had vague “when this clears” up plans for travel, which obviously didn’t happen.
• I didn’t die.
• I didn’t catch COVID.
• I didn’t lose my job.

The not-so-good:

• My friend Joel died.
• My Aunt Eva died.
• Ray’s dad died.
• Two people at work died.
• Neil Peart died.
• I don’t even know how many people I know who caught COVID. My sister-in-law, two of my uncles, a few friends, and I can’t keep track of the rest.
• Because my job was locked down and my company is not doing stellar, everyone was working constantly. I started getting up early just to get caught up with a big project, and then that became a regular requirement. I started working weekends, started taking 6AM meetings, 9PM meetings, Saturday meetings.
• At some point (probably after my aunt died) my director told me I absolutely had to take time off, because I’d worked every day for like three months straight. I said okay, I’ll take next week off. An hour later, HR emailed me and told me I had to lay off 60% of my employees the week I was taking off.
• I actually ended up having to lay everyone off twice. They had a round of these “opt-in separations” and then none of the people took it (we’re in a pandemic) so I had to re-lay them off three months later.
• I didn’t know if I was getting laid off. I kept getting invited to these layoff meetings and wasn’t sure until they started if I was there to terminate people or if I was getting terminated.
• I’ve been working from home for ten years, so nothing new there. But it’s been a learning curve for having both of us here at home. And I usually go mall walking on weekends to break up the week, and that didn’t happen anymore.
• I had various health-related stuff of the cardiac sort happening, which is mostly from stress, an unhealthy relationship with caffeine, and whatnot. Nothing drastic, but lots of dumb tests, and I think my days as a carnivore are numbered.
• One of my crowns came off in May, when we were still in extreme lockdown, but my dentist was able to see me and fix it.
• The fires and the air quality were brutal this year.
• This was the first Christmas where me and Sarah were both home (i.e. our home) at the same time, ever. I’ll put this under the bad column because she was really bummed about not seeing her family. (It is the first time I didn’t catch the flu in December from air travel, though.)
• My iPhone 8 blew up (for a second time).
• My 2017 MacBook Pro blew up.
• Taco Bell discontinued the Mexican Pizza.

OK, that’s enough bad stuff. I don’t even want to get into what a cesspool Facebook and Twitter have been all year, or how the whole post-truth era has made about half of my relationships impossible. Let’s put all of that behind us. I don’t know if we can, and the 2021 memes are about to start, but whatever.

The first big thing that’s going to happen in about 21 days is that I will hit a very big birthday. And I won’t be able to do much about it. Maybe I’ll go off into the hills and hike all day.

No resolutions, though. The usual. Try to finish this book, try to stay employed and inch toward retirement, try to write here more and spend less time on FB. Try to get healthy. Try to stay sane. You?

I think I finished editing and republishing old entries yesterday. The grand total is that I have 1,362 posts, with a word count of 1,059,000 or so words. I’m finding that this is big enough that it cripples either of the main SEO plugins for WordPress. That would be a problem if I was trying to make money on real estate or vitamin sales, but I’m not, so I disabled it.

I still need to figure out this theme - it feels like the headings are too big and inefficient, and I do miss having the widgets on the side for the archives and such. And I need to have better integration with this and Facebook and/or Twitter. I would like to just blog here and spend a lot less time on social media sites.

Another thing I need to do is there are a ton of posts that have no title, which doesn’t work well with the various widgets at the bottom of the page. But the idea of going through a few hundred posts and adding dumb titles like “ate lunch” is a bit exhausting. I just did a big run of them, and I think I still have a few hundred more to go.

Now that this stuff is almost settled, I need to figure out what I’m doing with this thing. My only real goal is the same one I have every January 1: a new post every day. But I don’t know what to post about. After reading every post over the last week, I feel like I’ve already strip-mined any old stories of memories and nostalgia. There definitely won’t be any trip reports in the near future, and not a lot of day-to-day news except “sat in my home office for twelve hours and then watched four hours of Married at First Sight.” I guess I need to step up the reading and should do something more constructive with my boob tube time.

Definitely no current events or politics. The upside of all of this tedium is I spent a lot less time looking at the news. So there’s that. I should probably go back into my list of starred Wikipedia articles and write about each of them. I have a bad habit of falling down k-holes, starring articles, and then wondering why the hell I bookmarked comparative religion scholar Frithjof Schuon years ago. (Still trying to figure this out - only thing I can think of is he died in Bloomington. Maybe I helped him with his VAX mail at some point.)

Not a lot to report otherwise. It was a typical NYE, and I was asleep by about ten. We rented The King of Staten Island and I was very mixed on it. I should write a longer post on it, but it’s lunch time.

I mentioned a few days ago that I’d pulled every entry on here and was slowly adding them back. That’s basically all I’ve been doing for the last several days. I had close to 1600 entries before starting this crusade. I’m down to about 100 in the queue, although I wouldn’t mind doing some more general cleanup. I also need to do more work to get this site completely modernized. I am not entirely happy with this theme, and there’s some plugin changes that could be made to speed things up.

It’s really weird reading through 23 years of entries in one clip. A few observations:

• I really like the first few years, when I was in Seattle and the word “blog” hadn’t been invented yet, and this was more of a diary than anything else. It’s fun to read the old entries where I’m talking about what I ate for lunch or what happened that day on the drive to work. It was a lot easier to belt out short updates like that when there were no expectations and there was nothing else to compare this site with.
• In the years before I published my first two books, all of my writing about writing is extremely cringe-worthy. I’m glad I got past that.
• I always forget how bad my early system was for running this site. I reluctantly switched to Wordpress pretty late in the game. When I started, I had this crazy system where I had to telnet to the server machine, type everything in emacs, then run a C program to generate the table of contents on the left. The program broke every new year’s day, and required manual surgery to reset everything to January. I later half-fixed this with PHP, but it was still ugly for a long time.
• I also forget about how I had my own garbage system for hosting photos on this site. I would put all of the image files in a directory on the server, then run a shell script that used mogrify to resize them to web and thumbnail sizes, then build the index.html file. Brutal stuff.
• I think I owe a general apology or amends to anyone who read this journal from about 2002 to 2005. I was a real contrarian asshole about all things political. I’ve been scrubbing that stuff, because it’s so cringe and horrible.
• I don’t know how I got as far as I did in my writing career without knowing that commas and periods go inside the quotes. I can probably blame this on learning to program in C before I really got into writing.
• Speaking of punctuation, I sure did like using the f word as a piece of it. I should stop doing that.
• I was seriously on fire in the early 2010s. I think I’ve written 200 entries in the last six years, but I easily wrote 200 in just 2010-2011.
• I have a lot of stories that were on this blog and later collected into books. I’ve removed them from here. I think if you didn’t read it in a free book that came out in 2003, you aren’t going to read it.
• I also pared back a ton of posts announcing “see my story in…” that had a URL that points to a Chinese gambling site now.
• I don’t know how I ever survived seven years in New York. Reading the stories of my trials and tribulations back then are hilarious. I’ve unfortunately had to trim a few of them back for career-limiting-behavior reasons. But living in Astoria with no AC really can drive you to drink, eh?
• I think about 40% of the 1500-some entries here have to do with dental trauma or being sick. I am really glad I stopped drinking a case of full-sugar Coke every day, because that’s calmed down both problems somewhat.
• I used to have a separate section of the site with a bunch of long-form trip journals. Some of those got collected into my Vegas book, but may more were pulled from the site out of general apathy. I often wonder if I should put those back, or clean them up and put them in a book that nobody will buy. Something to think about later, I guess.
• Music reviews are a real waste of my time. Luckily nobody reads them anymore.
• I took all the links off the side (now bottom) of the page. I will probably put those back as I find more blogs worth following.
• I really need to pick up the blogging more. It’s a much better time-waster than Candy Crush or reading the news.

I really do think I need to spend more time here next year, and a lot less time on Facebook. I need better integration or whatever to drive people from FB to here, but of course all of that is a crapshoot, and when I post a link from here on there, only three people see it. I don’t know if a mailing list or the return of RSS feeds or something else will make this any better.

In that vein, I’ve reluctantly turned back on comments. They are all in “strict” mode and you need a login to use them. It uses Disqus, so it also uses Facebook, Twitter, or Google logins. I moderate all comments. Feel free to add to the discussion, but don’t be an ass.

Hopefully I’ll finish this quest by the end of the year, although that’s tomorrow, so I better hurry.

So, about this year’s dreams.

Before 2020 went completely sideways, my friend Joel died. After that, he started showing up in my dreams, a lot. Like, an unhealthy amount. The dreams were nothing abnormal or psychotic; it either involved running into him at a party, or the company we used to work for somehow got re-formed and I had to move back to New York and work for him again. The dreams completely fed into my nostalgia obsession/problem, and whenever I woke up, I would know — I would assume — he was still alive. And then I would remember he wasn’t, and think maybe that was an alternate reality or some mistake was made and he was alive. And then the dreams got even more weird, because in the dream he would explain to me that he wasn’t dead, and it was a big prank or for tax purposes or I misunderstood the email or something.

(I realize there’s an easy psychological explanation for this, given the total lack of closure in his death. And duh, I should be talking to a therapist about this. I think everyone’s got bigger fish to fry at this moment.)

---

I don’t know exactly when the COVID dreams started. But I started having these intense dreams where I was walking around, like in the context of a normal weird dream, and then I would realize I didn’t have a mask on and suddenly needed one. It was like the typical “naked in front of class” terror dream, and fed into the same fear/paranoia/shame nerve.

I also would frequently have these dreams where someone was giving me COVID. Like I had this bizarre dream where I was competing in some kind of eco-challenge race through the desert with Joe Rogan. And every time he talked to me, he would lean in really close and spit would fly everywhere. And I woke up in a panic, trying to think if there was something I was supposed to overdose on to prevent the virus from catching, like eating a whole bottle of vitamins or drinking a gallon of Listerine.

I haven’t had the same nightmares I had during the SARS epidemic, though. They were based on a nightmare I had as a child. When I was a young kid, maybe four or five, I had a bad pneumonia or something that completely laid me out, and I had these insane fever dreams that everyone but me was dying of a mystery plague. Like I was watching the news, and the anchorman dropped dead, and bodies were piling up outside the house. And finally I was the only person alive, and the earth looked like the surface of the moon, and some alien Vincent Price-like voice or being was laughing at me. It’s one of my earliest memories, and that dream went back into heavy rotation when the SARS boom hit.

---

I have always had a lot of dreams about dead malls. Those still happen constantly. (Another big one is being back at IU, or some bizarro version of IU that has all new buildings, which I guess is IU now, since they’ve expanded everything in the last twenty years.)

My usual dead mall dreams — and these happen pretty much every third night or so — involve a strange composite mall. Like in my mind, the mall will be just outside of Queens, but it will remind me partly of Hilltop Mall in Richmond, mixed with some Factoria Square outside of Seattle, and maybe a dash of University Park in South Bend. There will always be vivid dashes of heavy deja vu around a particular store or sense memory, but when I wake, I’ll realize that there’s no way that mall exists at all.

This is also some weird sense of mourning, because I really miss these places and they don’t even exist. I have spent very little time at malls this year (obviously) and a lot of them probably won’t survive the plague, so I’ll miss them forever. So it’s fitting that they end up the backdrop of my bizarre nightmares.

---

Similar to the malls, I have a lot of dreams about Wards. These end up being two varieties. One is that Wards never went bankrupt, and they just closed the stores I knew about, and they had locations that still survived. The other is that some vulture cap company bought the name (which actually happened, but for online catalog purposes) and were somehow kickstarting a new retail presence. I’ve had many dreams where the old store #2258 in Elkhart has reopened, the existing Hobby Lobby shut down and the store converted back to its old glory, except it looks like a Sears with virtually no stock on the shelves.

In many of those dreams, I have a permutation of the “I forgot I had one more class to take to graduate” thing, and I’m somehow obligated to go back and work some shifts. (John said he gets the same thing with the Army, that a recruiter shows up at his house and says he didn’t finish his time thirty years ago and has to come back and do more.) In some of those dreams, my original coworkers are still there, although I’m certain that thirty years later, most of them are all dead. Sometimes I go back and I’m the only person who worked at the old Wards and that’s supposed to hold some cachet over the new people. (I have the same thing going on at my day job now.)

In last night’s version of this dream, I was back at the paint department, but as a manager. A weird little fact popped up in the dream that I’d almost completely forgotten. To mix paint, we had this big turntable thing with various pumps of pigment on it, and you would shoot specific amounts of each primary color into a can of base paint. This was all manual, no computers. We had a binder of formulas for the 863 premium colors and 768 standard colors. Each formula was something like 3-B, 6-C, 2Y-F. So you’d turn to the B color on the turntable, pull back the plunger three notches, shoot in that paint. Turn to C, six notches, go. The Y was significant, because that meant you pulled back the lever to its fullest extension, and gave it a full shot. I don’t remember the exact nomenclature or what the primary colors were, but I totally remember that Y.

---

I’ll occasionally have a full-on dream of a real mall, and it usually leaves me horribly depressed, and it’s almost always Concord Mall. I’ll leave you with a dream from a few weeks ago:

I was back at Concord Mall for a visit, and there was some major construction going on, like the whole fountain area was completely redone as this giant Rainforest Cafe-looking food court with a waterfall and a ton of mask-less people in it. I was a bit bummed most of the mall was all Simon-ized and bland, but then I found a semi-hidden staircase that went to a second floor that I never knew existed. The upstairs was basically a mirror of the first floor, with a duplicate of the shops below, but they were all in the 70s livery and configuration, mothballed and untouched for 40 years. I wandered an old JC Penney and everything had signs on it like it was a museum exhibition. I was then in the food court and met up with Kurt Vonnegut, who was talking about how he found an article on Dresden right before he wrote Slaughterhouse Five, and it was like the magical key that unlocked the whole novel in his head. He then gave me a mall directory from 1980 and said that was my key.