Life – Page 13 – Ecce Sigum

Weekly Round-up, December 9, 2023

2023-12-09 John Winkelman

Hello. This is me trying to get back into the habit of weekly blog posts about goings-on in my life. We will see how long it lasts, and how my intentions endure the slings and arrows of *gestures at everything*.

***

I have been thinking about Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety, and also about Frank Wilhoit’s quote about capitalism.

Ashby’s law states, more or less, that in any control system, the control apparatus must be able to account for (e.g. be as complex as) all possible variants in the system being controlled.

Wilhoit’s quote is as follows: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

There is some resonance between these ideas which I have been exploring in my (almost non-existent) downtime, and I will post updates to these thoughts as they crystalize.

***

Now that NaNoWriMo is over, and I have logged my eighth win out of eleven attempts, I feel like I have the energy to continue writing. In past years that has not been the case for many and varied reasons, but this year, though I am well into my mid fifties, I have energy reserves which were simply not there in years past. So I will take advantage of that.

Writing, be it creative, work-related, keeping a journal, or blogging, is a habit which requires practice and maintenance. And when pulling out of a slump, there are two parts to restarting the practice: getting out of the habit of not doing the thing, and getting into the habit of doing the thing.

***

Currently reading: Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, Fields of Castile by Antonio Machado, Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

***

The writing prompt for the past week was:

Subject: Undead, Addiction
Setting: Ship
Genre: Magic Realism

I didn’t do much with this one, other than to come up with a few interesting scenarios during my walks to and from work.

The writing prompt for the next week is:

Subject: Addiction, Artificial Intelligence
Setting: Border Town
Genre: War

***

Random links for the week:

Literary Fight Club: On the Great Poets’ Brawl of ‘68 (LitHub) – This would have been a fun party to attend.
Gulag Archipelago: Fifty Years After The ‘Bomb’ That Exploded Lies Of Soviet Rule, Solzhenitsyn’s Son Recalls Book’s Impact (Radio Free Europe) – I haven’t yet got far in The Gulag Archipelago, but I did read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and it has stuck with me for over 30 years.
The Bond villain compliance strategy (Bits About Money) – This is why financial crimes should be treated as violent crimes. De facto, the wealthier the criminal, the more severe the punishment should be.
The Etymologies of Capital, Capitalist, and Capitalism: A Brief Sketch (Naked Capitalism) – I like that “capitalist” and “decapitate” share the same etymological roots
Pressley, Welch introduce legislation to guarantee right to vote for people with felonies on record (Associated Press) – I’m all for this. All citizens should be allowed to vote in any election in any district of which they are constituents. This right must not be limited in any way. Not by photo ID requirements (which is to say, poll tax), gerrymandering, limited access to voting locations, limited location hours, or any of the other ridiculous barriers to democracy which conservatives have put in place, and continue to put in place, for decades. Even the slightest limit or restriction on the voting rights of any American citizen is nothing less than full-on, deliberate fascism.
Censoring Imagination: Why Prisons Ban Fantasy and Science Fiction (LitHub) – The simple answer is, of course, that the cruelty is the point. When it comes to book bans in prisons the goal, like banning books in schools and universities, is to create an under-educated underclass in a state of permanent precarity. This plus the decades and centuries of purposefully and openly racist carceral policies in the USA demonstrate that the American version of conservatism is nothing more than aristocracy and feudalism with the serial numbers filed off.
Pluralistic: “If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing” (Cory Doctorow) – Exactly what it says on the tin.

54, or 3x3x3x2

2023-06-05 John Winkelman

Happy birthday to me! I have made it to 54, which now officially places me in my mid-fifties, and also firmly in middle age. One more year and I will get to choose from the next tier in the “your age” dropdown menus when e.g. signing up for a new social media platform.

This past year felt like coming out of a long hibernation, and I expect the upcoming year will continue that trend as we continue to adjust to whatever the new normal is, assuming enough stability for any one narrative to assert itself as “normal”, which frankly is asking a lot of the world at this point in time.

The last book I read as a 53-year-old was Jim Harrison’s Returning to Earth, and the first book I am reading as a 54-year-old is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Collected Novellas. Thus do years end and start on high notes.

Not much else to report at this time. Life is busy, and enjoyable more often than not.

2022 In Review

2022-12-31 John Winkelman

Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here to lay 2022 to rest. It was a decent year, as years go. Certainly it was better than 2020 and 2021. Here is a brief rundown of how the year went.

Life

This past November Zyra and I celebrated five years together, of which more than half has been during the COVID pandemic (which is still ongoing, by the way). This has been a big change for both of us but we are settling into the routine of it, which gives us the stability to start planning for the longer term. And we are both still very, very happy.

Last week included two important anniversaries – three years since we brought Poe into our house, and two since the arrival of her cousin/niece Pepper. They are nonstop sources of comfort, entertainment and joy, and now that we have them, I can’t imagine our household without our two little ginger maniacs.

But 2022 was also a rough year for the people in my life. During the past year I said a final farewell to Zort, Steve, Jessica, Neil, Bob, Sam, Ryan, De, and my cousin Teresa. Some of these folks were dear friends, others I had not seen or spoken to in decades. But even when pass the people we have relegated to the past, they are still part of our lives, and over time the loss of those small parts adds up. 2022 was not as terrible in this regard as was 2021, only because I lost no immediate family members, but I have resigned myself to being in the part of my life when my contemporaries begin to die of the things I once believed only took old people.

Martial Arts

The biggest news of the year was that, after 36 months of virtual classes, practicing at Wilcox Park, and crowding into the studio at From the Heart Yoga, Master Lee’s School of Tai Chi Praying Mantis Kung Fu and Tai Chi Jeung is back at the West Michigan YWCA in downtown Grand Rapids. Almost all of our students have returned (At least, the ones who did not move away), and we are making up for two and a half years of being unable to practice to the extent that we did pre-pandemic. We are back into our routine again, and me and the other instructors are figuring out what the next few years will look like.

Reading

2022 was a stellar year for reading. I made it through just over 120 books and literary journals, and over 250 pieces of short prose. I have not read at this pace in a very long time. Probably not since my first couple of years working at the bookstore. The combination of lockdown, a steady and predictable project, and a re-assertion of my daily morning routine made this possible. I don’t expect to keep up this pace in 2023, as I need some of that time for writing.

Writing

I didn’t accomplish much writing this year until NaNoWriMo in November, when I completed about 75% of a story which has been bouncing around in my head since November of 2021. As of this week i am still plugging away at the last few chapters, in the slight hope that I will have the first draft done by the time I head to ConFusion 2023.

Work

My job didn’t change much over the past year. For most of that time I was on a project which started in April of 2021, so it was steady and mostly predictable, and I picked up some significant new skills. And a brief, week-long project at the end of December gave me an overview of a new platform in which I will be working for almost all of 2023, so again, more predictable work. I got some very nice bonuses and a good raise which means I can now afford to do the work on my house and property which has been nagging at me for about the past decade.

Looking Forward

Immediate appearances aside, we are still in the middle of a pandemic, so outside of any black swan events I don’t see 2023 being radically different from 2022. Which means next year will probably be wild.

53, or 1 x 53

2022-06-052025-11-11 John Winkelman

Oh, here it is, on the dawn of the first day of my 53rd year. I am still here to welcome you and receive the plaudits and hosannas which are my just due and proper.

Ha! I almost got through that with a straight face.

This is my third pandemic birthday, and so far life is as good as can be expected. The weather is beautiful and poetry events around town are starting to pick up. This past week, for the first time in years, I read at an open mic event, and it was wonderful! And yesterday I attended the reading by the winners of the 2022 Dyer-Ives poetry competition, for the first time since well before COVID.

Now that I am in my mid-fifties I can say that I am doing a lot better than many people my age. I am in a loving relationship with a beautiful partner. My health is good, though keeping the weight off is not as easy as it used to be. My career is stable, my mind is as active as it ever was, even if I am currently severely burned out and counting the seconds to my two weeks off in the first part of July.

There have been a few changes; I am now wearing bifocals (long, long overdue) and my hair has not been this long since, I think, 1998. Compare the selfie above to my birthday photo from 2021.

This weekend was the first Grand Rapids Festival of the Arts since 2019, and the city is full of celebrants. I plan to spend more time out in the world than in past years, though with proper precautions since we are still in the middle of a pandemic which has been exacerbated by some extremely reactionary interpretations of “freedom.” Still, most of what I like doing involves being outdoors, so I will have an easier time staying socially distanced.

I don’t really have any concrete plans for the upcoming year, other than to continue to read, write, practice, and love my partner, and enjoy the company of our two little orange maniacs. That’s enough for my middle-aged self.

The First Full Week of the New Year

2022-01-07 John Winkelman

About this time last year, when it became apparent that the COVID-19 pandemic would continue for the foreseeable future, I set about putting together a daily routine for the weekday mornings. This routine included working out, reading, writing, playing with the cats, and generally relaxing and preparing for the workday. I managed to stick with this routine until I received my first COVID vaccination shot at the beginning of April, at which point the stress and anxiety which had been powering my life to that point evaporated, and so did my routine. After my second shot at the end of April I tried to pick it up again, but other life stressors appeared and, while I managed to do some minimal workouts and writing, all of this went away at the beginning of September when my mother passed away. The writing picked up again in the beginning of November with NaNoWriMo, but I haven’t had a good steady week of morning workouts in almost a year.

So here I am at the start of 2022, with a renewed sense of purpose, if not exactly renewed energy. I am 52 (and a half!), and don’t have the deep well of mojo I had in my twenties, or even in my forties.

But a routine is a good framework around which to build a day, and mine looks something like this:

5:00: wake up, feed cats
5:10 – 6:30: calisthenics, chi kung, kung fu and tai chi forms practice
6:30 – 8:00: write
8:00 – 8:30: read or more writing
8:30 – 17:00: work prep, work
17:30 – 18:00: stationary bicycle, hand/arm/grip conditioning

For the rest of the day I relax with my girlfriend, read a little more, play with the cats, work on projects around the house, and maybe watch some TV. Repeat each day of the work week. Weekends are open time when Zyra and I do whatever suits our mood.

For writing I also planned a monthly routine, which involves setting aside the first full week of the month for editing and submitting, and using the rest of the month for writing. As this is the first full week of January, I am using my time in the mornings to catalog and sort all the poems I wrote in 2021, as well as reviewing the large pile of short stories, completed or otherwise, which await my attention.

2021 In Review

2021-12-312025-11-11 John Winkelman

Oh, 2021 was a hell of a year. I don’t think there’s any argument there. It was certainly one of the most stressful and uncertain years in my life. The successive waves of COVID variants spreading through the world, accompanied by hundreds of thousands of deaths in the USA, and millions more in the rest of the world, made it difficult to concentrate on anything beyond getting from one day to the next. It wasn’t just that the news (as well as the “news”) was distracting; it was that in the context of a global pandemic, everything else seemed a little (or a lot) less important.

Relationship

The high point of 2021, no doubt about it, was my relationship with my partner Zyra, who I have been with for a little over four years, and with whom I have been cohabiting for a little over two. We continue to find comfort and joy in each others’ presence, and are good at working through moments of stress and friction and coming out the other side, closer and stronger.

In April, Zyra officially started her business Gallafe (pronounced “GALA-fey”), making Filipino food and selling it at the Fulton Street and Holland Farmer’s Markets. She also began holding popup dinner specials on alternating Fridays, as well as the occasional Sunday brunch offering and a regular delivery to the South East Market. She has made amazing progress in a short amount of time, and this in the second year of an ongoing pandemic. I have been assisting her where I can, primarily with massages and running errands. And as of the last day of the year, she can be found on DoorDash, if you are in Grand Rapids and search for Asian food or simply “Gallafe.”

Last Christmas we picked up a new cat, Pepper, from the same Upper Peninsula farm where we adopted Poe the year before. Being from the same colony as Poe, they are related in at least one way. They are certainly cousins, though Poe might also be Pepper’s aunt, at no more that two steps removed.

As Zyra recently pointed out, Pepper is Poe’s emotional support animal. The cats have been an absolute joy, providing Zyra and I with endless entertainment and affection, and offering a release valve of sorts for our relationship, giving us other living creatures to focus our attentions on, which was vital for the long days of us having no other human interaction than with each other. Having lived with cats for two years now, I can’t imagine ever going back to a pet-free household.

Martial Arts

Master Lee’s School of Tai Chi Praying Mantis Kung Fu and Tai Chi Jeung continued to meet throughout this past year, online from January through the middle of March, and outside at Wilcox Park in the Eastown neighborhood of Grand Rapids through the end of October. We are now holding hybrid classes, in person at From the Heart Yoga and Tai Chi Center, the studio senior instructor Rick Powell runs with his wife Behnje Masson. We have a camera set up so students who are not comfortable practicing in person can participate remotely.

I and our other assistant instructor Tracy also hold informal “office hours” over Zoom to assist students in the time between classes, which has been a big help for the remote-only students, as well as a morale booster for me, because it provides a little more human interaction, which has been sorely restricted for the past two years.

We are able to practice about 75% of our pre-COVID curriculum. Out of an abundance of caution we are forgoing most drills and exercises which involve more than incidental personal contact. We hope that this will change as we move into the new year, but with new COVID variants spreading through the country we are trying to be patient. Better to have to re-learn a few skills in a year than to be the vector for one of our students becoming seriously ill.

Reading

2021 was a good year for reading. I started the year with Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, which I have tried but failed to complete several times of the past three decades, but this time I made it through to the end. And I ended the year with Dostoevsky’s The Eternal Husband and Other Stories, as it seemed appropriate to book-end the year with classic Russian literature. In between I was all over the place, reading genre and literary fiction, a wide variety of nonfiction, and many books of poetry. The grand total for the year was 57 books and over 120 short stories read.

Writing

Much to my surprise, considering how 2020 sputtered and ground to a halt at the beginning of November, 2021 was an excellent year for writing. I completed drafts of two short stories and over 30 poems, and am over halfway done with the pre-first draft of my NaNoWriMo book Racing the Flood Down to the Sea.

Friends and Family

This is where 2021 was the worst. I lost four friends this year, and in early September my mother, Sharon Prine, passed away just after her 84th birthday. Surprisingly, none of them died of COVID, which shows that even in the middle of this pandemic, the mundane world is still taking its toll.

So I will go into 2022 with holes in my life in the shape of Simon, Bill, Caroline, Beth, and Mom.

Work

I am still employed at the same company, and plan to remain here until I either retire or am made redundant. For most of the year I have been on one project, which in other years would become boring and unsatisfying, but for this year, predictability and stability are very much a good thing. And I am learning many new skills.

To Sum Up

I am glad that 2021 is over. Though I had some small personal triumphs and accomplishments, overall it was a year full of hellish stress, and though I am resigned to the fact that whatever is going on now is likely the New Normal, I am tired of reacting to the slings and arrows, or waiting for them to find another target. If I have a goal or resolution for the new year it is to begin digging myself out of the deep funky hole I have been in for most of the past two years.

52, or 2 x 2 x 13

2021-06-052025-11-12 John Winkelman

As of this morning, I have been out in the world for 52 years and a few hours. Actually I’m probably still asleep as this posts, as I usually schedule these things for the early hours of the morning, and this year my birthday falls on a Saturday. Of course I’m usually awake at 5:00, seven days a week thanks to the the two furry orange maniacs which have entered my life in the past year.

Poe and Pepper have been a constant source of attention and affection and stress relief in the COVID times. Zyra and I probably owe no small part of the health of our relationship to our cats, who have provided such entertainment while we endured the quarantine which is finally lifting.

Here at the beginning of June, most of the restrictions here in Michigan are lifted, and the remaining ones will likely be removed on July 1. One year and four months which changed the world in ways we will still be discovering a decade from now.

I have attempted in the past to write birthday posts, but being as close to my life as I am, it is difficult to form the necessary distance in order to write about it from the outside. The passage of time helps, but that means that I can only write about those events which have occurred between the bounding horizons of the moderately recent past, where subject slowly becomes object, and the event horizon of memory where I can no longer be sure the things I remember are the the things which happened, or things I invented to fill in the gaps. I am 52 years old. That’s a lot of lived experience, during much of which I wasn’t paying attention.

I have been with the same employer now for seven years. Ten, if you count my time at Cynergy before my current employer bought us, lock stock and barrel. Ten of my 22 years as a web developer. That is by far the longest I have been with a single employer. I have to say, as a middle-aged techie, stability is a Good Thing.

When I turned 51 I was nearing the middle of a crazy project which had me working second and third shift for two months, then a long and late first shift for two months. During springtime I was able to attend the martial arts class maybe twice. When we switched to first shift, which roughly coincided with the class moving to Wilcox Park after almost three months of meeting on Zoom, I felt my age. It has been a running theme among my tai chi classmates that, as we age, other people in our cohort seem so much older than we are. As I discovered, two months without regular sleep and regular exercise are all that stand between Us and Them.

With a more regular schedule I found more time to read and write and edit, and in October of 2020 one of my short stories was accepted for publication at Coffin Bell. The story was published in January 2021. This was a big deal for me, made even bigger by the fact that this was my first unsolicited piece of prose to be published. I have other publication credits, but they were solicited for specific publication. “Occupied Space” was the first to be rescued after being sent out into the wild.

I started my 51st year with profound sleep deprivation, an unemployed and injured girlfriend, extreme social anxiety, and a small orange cat. Here at the start of my 52nd year I am experiencing mild sleep deprivation, my girlfriend is busy starting her own company, I am vaccinated and therefore feel comfortable out in the world, and we have two small orange cats.

Oh: and in the past year Donald Trump, the conservative white supremacist sex predator, failed to be re-elected, like he has failed at everything else in his life except being a sexual predator and a white supremacist. I laugh out loud every time I pass a “Trump/Pence 2020” sign on my way to visit my parents. And since there is a lot of rural Michigan between here and there, I see a lot of those signs.

So 51 started low and improved steadily. If 52 continues the same trajectory the next year should be amazing.

Happy Year of the Metal Ox!

2021-02-12 John Winkelman

Friday, February 12, 2021 is the first day of the Year of the Metal Ox. This past year, in all of its chaos, was the year of the Metal Rat. We can only hope that the Ox is more laid back than the Rat.

As an exercise of interest and curiosity, here is a not-at-all comprehensive list of what was going on in my life in the previous four (-ish) Ox years.

2009 (Earth Ox) – Age 39/40. Working at Peopledesign. Started the year by wrecking my car, a 2004 Subaru Outback. Bought a 2006 Subaru Forester to replace it, which I still drive. Dad died of lung (etc.) cancer. Spent some time in Covington, Louisiana with my brother and members of my step-family. I lost a lot of weight. Took a trip to the U.P. and camped at Tahquamenon Falls State Park. This was the last year I used Flash/Actionscript as part of my job.

1997 (Fire Ox) – Age 27/28 – Worked at Schuler Books and Music as special orders manager. Started helping the instructors in the kung fu and tai chi classes. Moved twice; once into one of six tiny apartments in a gigantic house, then into a room in an equally gigantic but undivided house. Involved with the renaissance festival scene. A little romance, but nothing which lasted. Wrote a lot. Experienced angst.

1985 (Wood Ox) – Age 15/16 – Lived at home in Springport. Was a sophomore/junior at Springport High School. Learned to drive. Was on the cross country, wrestling and track teams. Played trombone. I think this was the year I broke a rib in a wrestling meet. No romances, but lots of heartache. Spent a lot of time programming on my Commodore 64. Made money milking cows and stacking hay bales. Might have visited Dad in Louisiana.

1973 (Water Ox) – Age 3/4 – Lived in Jackson, Michigan. No job. Had to put away my toys now and again. Learned to read. Not yet allowed to drive, despite being obviously better suited to it than anyone else on the road.

1961 (Metal Ox) – In my previous incarnation I was a crow which lived primarily in the Appalachian mountains. I amused myself by imitating the sound of people arguing over personal hygiene habits, and dropping pine cones on small dogs.

Funk and Fugue

2021-01-232025-11-12 John Winkelman

With the inauguration now in the past the world exists in the consensual illusion of having returned to something like normal. That is absolutely not the case of course, and it will be a long time before we even have an idea of what normal looks like. It certainly won’t be what things looked like on this date four years ago, or even one year ago.

On this weekend in any other year I would be at ConFusion right now, hanging out with old friends, meeting new friends, talking about reading and writing and past cons and publishing and not getting published, and drinking and carousing and enjoying being in the company of good, smart, talented people.

Of course ConFusion is cancelled for this year, and I think ConFusion 2020 was the last normal thing I did before lockdowns began last March. I miss the experience terribly, but it is not as bad as it would be if it were going on and I was not there.

Right now I am sitting in the waiting area of a hospital, waiting on test results for a family member who is in poor health. This is part of a process which has been ongoing for some years now, so while it is not unexpected, it is also not a thing which could be predicted in any meaningful way.

Thus even though the exceptional chaos of the past four years is over, we are still awash in the ordinary chaos of daily life here in the cyberpunk hellscape that is the mid twenty-first century.

Anyway.

It’s been a quiet week for books here at the Library of Winkelman Abbey. One book arrived – War Stories, an anthology courtesy of my subscription to Apex Book Company.

I am almost done with Democracy, Incorporated, and am about 120 pages into The Brothers Karamazov. I plan to round out the month with short stories before I pick up another book to follow the Wolin.

Writing is still going nowhere, though I can feel the knots in my mind loosening up and the creative juices beginning to flow again.

In the absence of ConFusion for inspiration I will need to rely on the mundane chaos of the world.

Breaking Cat News!

2021-01-192025-11-12 John Winkelman

We have achieved cuddling! I repeat – we have achieved cuddling!

Poe and Pepper are getting along famously. Zyra and I started letting them interact under strict supervision about a week ago. Two days ago, after the usual running and tussling and what-not, they fell asleep near each other on the floor. Then last night while Z and I watched a movie, the Orange Ones climbed onto the sofa with us, piled up, and fell asleep. Then this morning, with the whole house and its innumerable nooks and crannies available, The two of them chose the same shelf and fell asleep.