real life

I think I might be fresh out of general advice when it comes to blogging, at least for this first week of Blapril. Instead this morning you are going to get a brain dump of something I have been thinking about at length but have been uncertain of when or where exactly to throw it out for open discussion. I’ve been using the term Pandemia to refer to this time we are living in and I even probably shortsightedly named my Island in Animal Crossing after this. In my mind it made sense given that ACNH has been helping a lot to keep me calm in a time of crisis. However one of the things that I have been devoting a decent amount of my mental processing to is trying to think about what the world looks like after this.

The previous event for me that has had any relevance in explaining the changes that are rapidly happening in the world is that of 9/11 when airplanes were used as suicide bombs to attack key targets in the United States. After that event there were sweeping changes that rapidly went into place in a failed attempt to help us feel like we had some control in the world. Now this might not be true for everyone, but I live in flyover country and as a result we are pretty slow to adopt things and as a result of these events metal detectors were installed in pretty much every public building as well as a good number of retail stores. This is somewhat ironic given that we are also an open carry site and you don’t need a license to carry a firearm. However it was a noticeable change that sorta happened over night.

I am wondering if after the events of this pandemic if we are going to see Thermal Imaging like FLIR installed much like those metal detectors at the entrance of public buildings. Will we effectively begin screening individuals with higher than normal body temperatures as a sign of infection? How is this going to change sick leave policies across the board? Traditionally we have been a country that has frowned upon taking off time from work when you are feeling a little under the weather because we have to make sure productivity stays high. Where I work has some fairly draconian policies surrounding sick leave where you accrue it at a staggering rate but can only use a certain amount each year without getting into trouble. Will we see restrictions like that eased as an entire generation is reminded of the dangers of communal spread?

The other change I wonder about is how exactly the workplace is going to shift over time. In flyover country we are still very much traditionally a “butts in seats” economy. This is driven by the fact that most of the management are still in the baby boomer generation, and feel that they need to physically see a person sitting at their desk in order to feel like they are doing a good job. As managers go, I’ve always been a “judge progress on projects” type of person because I know LOTS of people who occupy space with perfect attendance but are otherwise useless. This event has rapidly proven that we can in fact keep the lights on and keep business moving forward with literally the entire office working remotely. Does that begin to shift what the office means as far as culture goes? Do see a shrinking of office space and a widespread shift away from the soulless cube farms? In theory there isn’t much of a reason for my team to ever return to the office because all of the systems we work on were remote in the first place. I feel like this also is going to be a huge boon for the disabled individuals that need to work from home in order to fit their schedule or medical requirements. For years employers have come up with excuses as to why this would not work, or invented reasons why someone had to be physically located in the office. The last month has proven without a doubt that we can keep carrying on business as usual through the use of technology that we have had access to for years. Those of us who were already savvy in such things have been using it for the better part of two decades. I just wish that business teleconferencing software was half as evolved as Discord or Teamspeak, because I am constantly frustrated by the fact that everyone has a damned open mic all of the time. Years of gaming and talking with strangers on voice chat have taught me an etiquette that I wish I could force upon the coworkers that are not directly in my team.

The other thing that I’ve been wondering about is how this shift in working conditions is going to effect the distribution of the population. Over the last several decades there has been a migration away from rural areas into larger cities, and even within that a sub trend of migration away from the suburbs back into the central core of the city. In the time of pandemic it feels inherently more dangerous to be in more populated areas. I know personally as much as I love QuikTrip we have been avoiding them because they are always busy, and instead seeking out those gas stations that never have anyone at them. Similarly we have been avoiding Walmart or Target and getting whatever we can at Dollar General which has significantly less volume than the bigger stores. However we live on the outskirts of a larger city because that is where the jobs require us to be. The biggest challenge is infrastructure, but I am wondering if a migration trend would drive investment in higher speed internet in rural america. I could see myself living out in the middle of nowhere because the main case against that used to be the lack of access to goods. Amazon however has acted for years as the great equalizer of access to material things for those who are isolated, because they seemingly ship to anywhere. With decent internet, I could absolutely see a case made for moving away from the big cities and buying cheap property in the more rural communities. Our 1800 home sq/ft in suburbia can be purchased in the tiny town of 2000 people that I grew up in for just a bit over half what it currently appraises for. So the question is will living in such close proximity of other people start to feel more dangerous than it did prior to Covid-19? Will we see a trend of moving away from these cities and repopulating the relatively neglected rural corridors of our states? Ultimately these are the questions that I have been pondering. I don’t know what the world looks like after this, but I doubt it looks the same. Things are going to change in weird and interesting ways. Some are going to be for the better and others are going to be likely problematic. However I don’t think we return to business as usual after having effectively shut down the world for several months. I am bracing for the financial impact of these events, which are likely to be extreme. I know this post is a bit of a divergence from the sort of thing that I normally write about in the mornings, but these are things that I have been pondering while sitting at home in isolation and social distancing mode. Once we go forth and can populate the earth once again… what is that earth going to look like? Tomorrow I am sure we will return to posts about the games I am playing or blogging advice as part of Blapril, but today I just wanted to dump all of these thoughts onto the digital page and walk away. You know the whole blogs as self therapy thing and all.

There are times that I feel like I need to warn my readers that they are about to go on a weird ride. This morning is one of those times because I have been in a strange head-space of late. Anytime I start plumbing the depths of my psyche you know something strange is going to come welling up from below. I’ve probably even written about this topic before, but when you have as many posts as I have it is bound to happen. Music used to be of the utmost importance to me and from the moment I got my first Walkman around 1983 until sometime circa 2008 I had music going almost 24/7.

I lived my life to my own personal soundtrack made up of whatever I happened to be listening to at the time. This was often times blaring out of a “boom box” into whatever room I happened to be in. I spent copious ours listening to music and drawing and at the same time thinking about all sorts of things. However at some point over the years I lost both of those things. I know exactly the moment when I stopped doing much in the way of artwork. It was our first year out of college and I had begrudgingly agreed to paint a mural in the activity center. We were supposed to be the only people in that area for the next two weekends and I decided to leave my paints, brushes and materials locked up under the bar area. When I came back a few days later it was all gone and I never quite recovered from the loss and pretty much shut down artistically.

The music thing however was more subtle. I don’t know exactly when I stopped actively listening to music but it is sometime over the last decade. I am not sure if I traded podcasts and youtube videos for music, or if I just stopped listening for other reasons. I do know that I am still pretty much constantly wearing headphones while seated at the computer, but often times there is nothing playing through them and I just sorta find the subtle pressure on either side of my head comforting. I was an early adopter of the MP3 and I remember in college setting up a script to rip new CDs I had bought to MP3 over night. However at some point I stopped caring about my archives of that as well and I just started streaming music first through Pandora and eventually through Google Music and now Amazon Music.

The problem with Google and Amazon is that they are not exactly great engines for showing me new things. I tend to go there when I want to listen to a specific song or album, whereas with Pandora I was constantly experiencing music that was effectively “new to me”. The algorithm that tried to gauge taste actually did a fairly good job of predicting the sort of music that I would normally want to listen to. I spent several years fine tuning it and even had a premium subscription back when those were like $20/30 a year instead of the monthly fee that exists now. I wonder if returning to Pandora would make the whole experience feel fresh again rather than just something I do when I specifically want to hear a song, because right now when I have one of those random moments I tend to just look something up on YouTube instead of a proper streaming service.

I know that sometime within the last ten years I started to struggle with listening to music with words while working on other things. More specifically I had trouble coding while listening to music with lyrics, and I ventured out into movie and video game soundtracks in a big way. The Destiny Soundtrack and the Tron Legacy Soundtrack have become my go to music for when I need to buckle down and concentrate on something. The only problem with that however is that soundtracks don’t make me think in quite the same way that lyrical music used to. While doodling away in my room I would explore the structure of songs and try and dissect all of the possible meanings that they could have. There are so many words and phrases that I use today that I first heard and stole from a song.

I grew up in the country without a steady flow of options when it came to music. So when someone got something new we used to make copies and pass it around and each time I got my hands on new music it was like a beam of light shining down on my otherwise dull existence. The same was true with movies and video games because they were all equally uncommon, and it wasn’t until I could drive that I regularly had access to get a fresh supply of those things. I was stuck in a small town that during my High School years didn’t even have a Walmart because it had closed during a consolidation when the Super Center opened one town over. So as a result things that are probably not important to anyone else are important to me, because when I did buy an album… I tended to listen to it until I had the transitions between songs memorized. Still to this day there are times when I hear a song and my brain expectantly waits after it finishes for the next song on the album to start playing.

The problem is… I am not quite sure how to get back to the place where music held the important role in my life that it once did. I’m almost not quite certain how to get over the mental block that has kept me from doing actual artwork for the last two decades. There are times when you have lost something and you are not even sure how it happened. I realize this has been a weird and lament filled post but it is what has been thrashing around in my brain. One of the things about daily blogging is that occasionally I feel like I have to be honest with my readers and just let these odd posts make their way onto the page. Instead of images I am going to perforate this post with some songs that have been kicking around in my head of late.