February 2025 in Review
Hello Funny People.
Even without the extra day of a leap year, February has this bad habit of sticking around too long. And this February has been, for lack of a better way of encapudlating it and with no offense intended, the month of bipolar sunshine. Let me elaborate.
A Brief Recapitulation
February is typically an avalanche in my little corner of the world: it starts of slow and quickly picks up speed the further down the slope it gets. This year was no different. After the frenzy of 1099 madness at the little accounting firm I work at, we got to start processing returns of the tax season. It sounds like dull work to most people, but you'd be amazed what you can learn about people just by looking at documents covered in numbers.
As for other events, well, it seemed as though this February couldn't quite decide it it wanted to be early spring...or Winter 2025 2.0—THE REVENGE. Literally, every other week, we'd have several straight days of pleasant, if chilly, weather, the kind most from the Midwest would expect in between March and April. Lows in the 40s. Highs in the 50s and sometimes the 60s. And one day, it got all the way up to nearly 70. Then, the very next week, it was like we were all Dennis Quaid trekking across the frozen wasteland at the end of The Day After Tomorrow. Snow. Frigid temps with bone-chilling winds. Nothing quite like the first full week of January where we got half of what probably was once a glacier in the north pole dumped on us, but still...fucking cold 🥶.
On top of all this, for the first time in a while, I got knocked on my ass by some kind of flu. And I say "some kind of flu," because this wasn't some nasty respiratory bug. I've had that flu. Nor was it a cold; I know that pattern of symptoms too well to fail to recongize them. Nor too was it COVID; there was no loss of taste or smell. I have no idea where it come from, no clue how I contracted it. All I know is what symptoms knocked me out:
1. Fever (-5 🌟)
2. Body-wide muscle aches (-6 🌟)
3. Joint pain, especially hip and knee (-7 🌟)
4. Loss of appetite (which, fatass that I am, I could stand to lose more often, 3 🌟)
5. Lethargy (1 🌟)
6. Slight loss of balance and coordination (½🌟, especially when I needed to use a bathroom)
7. Slight sore throat (unpleasant, but not life threatening ½ 🌟)
8. Chills (-1 🌟)
First two nights I came down with the some-kind-of-flu, I literally could not sleep the night through. That's how bad the joint and muscle pain were. And I'm unpleasant enough in my daily life on a full night's sleep. However, after that second day, which basically consisted of me, lying in bed like a suntanned Snorelax, I actually began to feel better.
First sign: I slept through the night. After that, despite a bit of low energy that it took my a few days to recoup from, I was just about back to my normal self. I guess it was nature's way of telling me to ease up a bit. This new regime is long, and I plan to outlive it.
The Writing Life
My sole focus in February was to finish my 4-month stretch of revisions on my space opera novel. What with losing nearly a week at the end because of the some-kind-of-flu, I knew I wouldn't quite make my self-imposed deadline of the end of the month to finish it. And I was right...but not by much.
Sunday, March 2nd, this happened. 👇
Four months of intense revisions and the space opera novel is, not only about 30k words longer, but I'm pretty sure it's also better. Most importantly of all though: it's finished.
I will admit completing such a big chunk of work did leave me a little melancholy though. There's—what?—a 90% chance no one will ever read this book, right? Which means, I could very well have wasted 4 months of my life on a big chunk of fruitless effort. But that's the gambit, isn't it? When you're a writer, you don't produce work because you're guaranteed an audience, guaranteed publication, or anything like that. You write because you have to; because without it, you're not quite yourself. That may sound childishly naive and amateurish, but it's still true.
Still waiting to hear back on replies from my two stories out there. Whether or not either will come back positive is still out there. Maybe they'll come back as yeses, but maybe not. Who knows?
Miscellaneous
I'm going to do myself a favor and ignore the news of this last month. I'm so tired of seeing those two asshats on my news that, as I continue to refuse to comply, I'm going to pretend they're just a couple of attention-desperate babies who need to learn to be ignored.
Though, I must say, the diminish stock price of the ketamine-addict's primary company brings a smile to my face. As does the rolling series of protests and boycotts going on across the country. The American people are pissed. Prices are rising; we're becoming isolated from all our long-time allies; and people are waking up that their representatives care more about what makes their donors happy and not what's good for the American people.
I only hope this persists. The only thing that brings about change is pain. If the American people learn to live with the pain of this administration, then this country truly is finished. For now, at least, I hold out hope that won't be so. (Though, as usual, I'm not holding my breath.)
The Pitt, as well, has been startling surprising with its many twists and turns. The very last episode that aired in February, truly left a startling impact on the central cast, which in retrospect, seems sadly inevitable. But, the crew in the Pitt never the less continues onwards with their shift. Exactly how all the dangling threads will tie up, I haven't a clue...but knowing this show, I wouldn't put it past either the showrunners or the writers to end it all with a frightening bang.
Turning Pro by Steven Pressfield
Following on from Pressfield's The War of Art, in this brief book, he zeros in on one particular aspect he believed required further explanation: the concept of turning pro. In short, it's the idea of treating your artistic vocation like a job before it treats you like you have a job by bringing the same diligence, discipline, and dedication to it as you would a 9-to-5. This is the attitude I bring to my own work...although I have to admit, after last year's failures, I'm finding it hard at times to maintain the discipline. Nevertheless, I persist.
Going Infinite by Michael Lewis
Working my dayjob has given me a casual working understanding of crypto currency. I'd you want to understand crypto, he's a thumbnail sketch: it's basically a strange hybrid between a stock and actual currency. On the one hand, the person who devised the tech for crypto (identity still unknown), intended it to be a currency, an unregulated, non-centralized one not tied to any banking system. However, as time had passed and its become more normalized, crypto has actually become more like a stock—specifically a short-term stock—one investors put money into in the hopes that they will get more out of it than they put into it over a short period of time (in financial lingo, that's basically anything less than a year).
However, that wasn't the reason for me picking up Michael Lewis's latest. My interest was in the story of Sam Bankman-Fried. Was he a wunderkind in over his head and completely inept and unsuitable for running a massive business, or was he crypto's Bernie Madoff, as most media upon his downfall wanted him to be?
Well, Lewis doesn't come down on either side of that moral dichotomy. However, the picture he paints of SBF, to me at least, is one of the latter. If anything—if I may armchair psychoanalyize him—he strikes me as a person with ASD with low to moderate support needs and a strong strain of pathological demand avoidance (or PDA) running through his system. But what do I know? Maybe, as many reviewed believed, I too was suckered by SBF's brilliant con into seeing him that way after finishing this book.
The Android's Dream by John Scalzi
Another Scalzi I hadn't read, his second published novel. And, as usual with his non-military, non-space opera scifi, I definitely think this is one of his better books. Funny. Action-packed. The slightest hint of romance. And, most importantly, just plain fun.
Harry Creek is a diplomat by training and an army vertern, tasked with extracting Humankind out of a hairy diplomatic incident by doing one thing: finding a specimen of a special breed of sheep, known as the Android's Dream. Only, when Harry find this item of interest, it isn't exactly what he's expecting.
I do have to admit one thing. After having made a small study of Scalzi’s books, simply by reading so many of them, I've come to one major conclusion: he's definitely working to his strengths more when writing first person than third person. Android's Dream is another 3rd person novel for him, and while like his Collapsing Empire trilogy, it is enjoyable, his casual, chatty, and funny prose style (which often times requires info dumping for the sake of clarity and worldbuilding), to me, at least, works better when he writes in the voice of a single character rather than when he alternates from scene to scene between multiple characters. It feel more natural in that way. Still that small detraction aside, Android's Dream remains another quality read worth people's time.
Fire Season by Stephen Blackmoore
The life of hitman, PI, and Necromancer Eric Carter continues along its messy path. Once again, Carter finds himself on the wrong end of the wrath of an old Aztec God, the God of Wind and War, Quetzalcoatl. The feathered serpent is furious that Carter didn't burn the Aztec Land of the Dead while he had the chance. Now, with the help of the Wind Spirits of Santa Ana and California's natural disaster prone seasons, he plans to wipe out most of LA.
I have to say, reading this book in the wake of the Pacific Palisades fires (now thankfully contained), was a little "on the nose," and a bit morbid, but it remained a good read never the less. Blackmoore's vivid yet sparse Cain-esque prose carries one through to the end without fail.
What will follow on after this, I don't know. But I strongly suspect, Carter's luck won't hold out against these mounting threats. And now, with so many souls wandering the wastes of a charred LA, how is he going to cope with so many spirits haunting his hometown?
The winter of discontent is nearing its end, funny people. Let us hope it breaks into glorious spring of renewed hope.
— IMC 🙃
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