Just Start.

january 25th, 2020

Some personal news:

i have been ill every day of 2020 thus far. Currently i'm beating back a cough so persistent and violent that about once a day i am nauseous, sometimes to the point of vomiting. That's unusual for me! Historically i have a very strong stomach and an ace constitution.

The coronavirus has arrived in Chicago. Narratively this paragraph now suggests that i think i have the coronavirus, or that i compare my ongoing sickness to the coronavirus. i don't think i have the coronavirus; i don't get out enough to have gotten the coronavirus. i don't think i have a deadly upper respiratory infection; i'm just not prepared for my body to change (age).

. . .

Wikipedia articles that i read on a regular basis:

• List of common misconceptions
• Alien (1979 film)
• East Coast-West Coast hip hop rivalry as the page existed in 2010 when i first read it

. . .

i've made contact with three of my grandmother's half-siblings and one of her nieces. i sent all of them letters in my enthusiastic but unpracticed French. A few weeks later they each sent letters back to me: three in French, and one from my great-aunt in enthusiastic but unpracticed English. Two letters noted that my great-grandfather was also a poet.

It is unnerving to me that i know something of my grandparents' personalities and histories, but almost nothing about my great-grandparents. If i met my great-grandfather as a young man, would we become friends?

. . .

i am grateful every day this year to not be logged in to Tw/tter. This will be a rough year to be tuned in to political discourse.

i'm currently preparing for a near future in which the 100 companes responsible for 75% of climate-changing emissions are left free to destroy the ecosystem as we know it, and that twenty years from now the survivors are vegan subsistence farmers. Vlad and i talk sincerely about teaching our roommate how to build his own plow and dig a 600 foot well.

Speaking of, it's a very good time to become vegan. You're not gonna want to wait until news hits that the newly self-regulated meat and dairy industries produce beef that's regularly contaminated with strychnine and milk that's 10% pus by volume.