Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #549 - Welcome 2017

Evan Shaner of DC's Future Quest - Happy New Year

The image above may be somewhat whimsical, but then, maybe that's okay. There's been intense gravity lately but there's Gravity's Rainbow, so ... Or there's been much gravitas about 2016 and the beginning of 2017. But we should remember the good things, and this image depicts my favorite comic book of 2016. So that's a good thing.

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #549 - Welcome 2017

Hi Mom, So, I am still working on the huge book review part two, and I don't really want to split it in three or more parts. Thus, I have decided to delay posting it until Sunday.

I am so groggy this time of year. When I wake up, I seem to have to paw through layers of gauze.

I have trouble staying awake and reading too long once I go to bed.

Winter is strange, and it's effect on me a challenge to overcome. Coffee helps. I am about to do some cold brew of my own as a later morning or even early afternoon caffeine bomb to my system. Coffee to take with me to Calculus class, which starts Monday. Don't worry. I have been doing my homework. I feel more ready than ever for a class.

2016 was weird. Given that it was to be the first full year without you, Mom, that fact had me girded and guarded enough, but then early in the year, David Bowie died, and after that the hits just kept on coming. i have already written about this (see the death category), but it's a subject that seemed to culminate in the worst election of my life but then there was more death and calamity to end the year. Is fear and dread the new normal?

I don't know. I fight the good fight. I write. I am back to doodling on my satire featuring superheroes, and maybe I can make some actual progress this year. I am also starting to noodle the CyberSpell book some more. I need to make space and time for the writing. I say this every year and then work and chores take over and writing is the first thing to be sacrificed. I have to be more steadfast.

I also fight the good fight in the class room. I speak passionately and I try to inspire my young students.

And yet, I am afraid of what 2017 will bring. I am afraid of all the good things, the humane things we have in place that may soon be taken away, such as friends of mine who are married, who, before the year is out, may be told that legally speaking, they are not married any more. Thoughts like that make me sick.

It's time to re-read The Handmaid's Tale.

But for now, here's what one of my other favorite writers had to say about the New Year of 2017.

He expressed some hope. There will be joy, he shares. Thanks Warren. I needed that.


FROM - http://morning.computer/2017/01/2017/

MORNING, COMPUTER

WARREN ELLIS ON GREENWICH MEAN TIME

2017

As I’ve written before, New Year doesn’t feel like an arbitrary, notional event to me.  I hear the click as we roll over on to the new track.

Listening hard for the click, this year.

2016 was a hard year. It would be comforting to think we jump to a new track today, and pull clear of that shitbox of a year. That 2017 will be better.

It’ll be different.  It’ll be interesting in many fine and terrible ways.  It’ll be sad, if not in precisely the same way 2016 was.  I’d love to tell someone that it’ll be better.  But I think we were all fooling ourselves with that notion that years get better, just as we fool ourselves into thinking each year is starkly fenced off and the space ahead is virgin field.

It will be memorable. It will have beauty in it, and new things, and it will sing and light up skies.  There will be joy.

Will it be better?  No.  But I trust that it will be worth sticking around for, and that it will not be boring.  That’s enough for me.

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Reflect and connect.

Have someone give you a kiss, and tell you that I love you.

I miss you so very much, Mom.

Talk to you tomorrow, Mom.

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- Days ago = 551 days ago

- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1701.06 - 10:10

NOTE on time: When I post late, I had been posting at 7:10 a.m. because Google is on Pacific Time, and so this is really 10:10 EDT. However, it still shows up on the blog in Pacific time. So, I am going to start posting at 10:10 a.m. Pacific time, intending this to be 10:10 Eastern time. I know this only matters to me, and to you, Mom. But I am not going back and changing all the 7:10 a.m. times. But I will run this note for a while. Mom, you know that I am posting at 10:10 a.m. often because this is the time of your death.