Wind in the trees

Five things make a post.

1. I had COVID for half of January, all of February and a week or two in March. I'm over it.

2. Because of that, I'm wildly out of shape and have to start moving around more to remind muscles what to do.

3. But I have managed to continue posting Substack columns despite all this.

4. I chipped a tooth this week, but it turned out to be not something that needed intervention.

5. In season 2 of Dark Winds, there are a couple of older guys in the Navajo police station lockup playing chess. They are not credited. They are George R. R. Martin and Robert Redford, executive producers for the series.

Substack has more than 20,000,000 active accounts that produce columns or newsletters every month. More than 17,000 of these are paid accounts -- readers pay to read them. A very few make a great deal of money, more of them make less, and some, like me, make nothing.

It is a place where ideas are exchanged. In the current political climate, it would be extraordinary if there were not some fascists there. I have not seen any -- I subscribe to about 70 newsletters there, including ones about news, about paganism, about ecology, about surviving fires, etc. It is a marketplace of ideas. It is a large enough place that if you go looking you will find whatever you look for.

I am not leaving it over difficulties between another active account and the management. I will continue to write antifascist columns there, as opportunity arises.

Yeah, still recovering from COVID, at the point where I'm not coughing up crud all day but just some of the day. Brain fog has drifted away, but honestly I'm kind of glad to have gotten this mess on Jan. 20, so I had something else to deal with besides the government falling apart and Elon Musk leading a coup. There are times when having a MS in political science is not an advantage, because I keep thinking ahead to what might happen.

I'm reading Pat Barker's 3-book series on what happens to the women of Troy, and it's excellent but I'm glad I didn't read it before I wrote this year's Yuletide because too much of it would have leaked into what I wrote. Haven't yet seen The Return, which is also the homecoming of Odysseus -- who would have thought the wiry old guy would still be so popular?

Tomorrow is the SU's and my 33rd wedding anniversary, which we were going to celebrate with take-out from the good sushi place, but an ice storm is predicted so the sushi may be postponed to next week. Neither of us is up to eating at the restaurant; he's still got traces of COVID also, since he got it 3 days before me, and I am not up to coping with people. But the fish will still taste good next week.