It’s still hard to shelter in place. It’s still hard to remember to take your mask with you when you get out and go into a store. It’s getting harder to remember that back in January I had just retired and I’d made all these plans to just toodle around Florida with my wife and look at what we’d never seemed to have time to see before I retired.

On a broader scale, it’s hard to forget that once upon a time we had multiple book stores (Bookstop, Borders, Waldenbooks, and Barnes & Noble) that were filled to the brim with so many titles. Around 2000 every store had multiple shelves packed with technical books on computers, computer languages, and operating systems. They even carried one to two shelves just for Linux. O’Reilly’s books dominated, and there were many different publishers. Now there’s only a shadow of Barnes & Noble, and I have to hunt for what’s called the Technical section, buried off to one side. There’s hardly anything of note any longer. Even the ubiquitous Windows books (the OS, Office, etc) are almost gone. The problem there is the fluidity of the subject matter. By the time a book is published it’s already obsolete, as the subject, especially if it’s a language, has advanced with major new features that either aren’t documented, changed what’s been documented, or made documented features in the print version obsolete. And of course when you get into the book, you’re going to find errata, which means time to find and fix and publish, always to some obscure web page managed by the author(s).

Even my alternate favorite, science fiction, ain’t what it used to be. I’m 66, soon to be 67, and I’ve been reading science fiction since I was old enough to read. My first book was Isaac Asimov’s “Pebble in the Sky”, first published in 1950, a copy of which my dad gave me ten years later when I was seven. That started a life-long reading habit, especially in science fiction, and which still carries me today. Except I’m a lot more picky these days. I surely haven’t read everything, but I’ve read enough, and I’ve seen nearly all characters, tropes, and plots in many variations over the decades. For me, nothing will ever come close to the original Foundation Trilogy in scope or excitement, but hey, that’s me I guess.

And I certainly don’t need dystopian reading. All I have to do is look at the world-wide coronavirus pandemic, especially our handling of it, or the sadistic racism of many police departments around the US, and now it seems, around the world. But for sheer horror all I have to do is look at this year burning on the west coast of the US. I thought what Australia when through last year was horrific enough. But global warming has pushed the west into a fire season the likes it’s never seen before, complete with hell-red skies.

It’s still hard, but I will get through this, and when we come out the other side in January, Trump will be gone. Unfortunately (or fortunately), we’re going to have to really get busy and repair the tremendous damage done over the last four years by the Trump Administration. There’s the old saying “You can’t fix stupid”, but we’re going to have to fix what stupid has royally fucked up. We have no choice.