I am at the end of two weeks off from work. This is the first real break I have had in well over a year. I have had time off, certainly, but most of that in 2025 involved some intensive travel, either for vacation or family obligations. And while fun and worthwhile, such vacations are not restful and restorative.
This one was. I didn’t realize how exhausted I had become from the events, personal, national and global, of 2025, but instead of accomplishing the mountain of goals I had made for myself, I slept.
A lot.
Like, going to bed at 22:00 and waking up at 11:00. Repeatedly.
It’s good that I had this break because when I return to work in a couple of days I will be travelling for much of the week. I haven’t had to travel for work since before the COVID lockdowns. When I was younger, this would have been exciting. Now it is just exhausting.
Not that I won’t have the opportunity for a couple hours of fun here and there. Chicago is a city where Things Happen.
Reading
I started off the year by finishing A Fading Sun by Stephen Leigh, and now I am reading The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business, by David T. Courtwright. If I get nothing else out of this book, I am indebted to Courtwright for introducing to my lexicon the phrase “limbic capitalism.”
Writing
When I finally pulled myself out of bed for long enough to accomplish anything, I finished transcribing a large-ish pile of poetry from the last couple of my journals.
I am re-creating my writing-editing-submitting pipeline in my spare moments. Since I have been writing poetry off and on for over 30 years, I have a lot of old work to review and organize. Not that I really expect the world to still exist come this time next year, but it would be nice to release some more poetry into the wild.
Weekly Writing Prompt
Subject: Death, Mutants
Setting: Wasteland
Genre: Western
Listening
Sick Dick and the Volkwagens, “Flame Flows Down,” from their album Interference. Recorded somewhere around 1980. Yes, I just read The Crying of Lot 49.
Interesting Links
- “AI and systemic risk” (Stephen Cecchetti, Robin Lumsdaine, Tuomas Peltonen, Antonio Sánchez Serrano, VoxEU/CEPR)
- “How China’s Overinvestment Helped Produce Africa’s Deindustrialization” (Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism) – A long discussion of the article “Africa deindustrialises due to China’s overproduction and Trump’s tariffs” by Patrick Bond, in which Bond heavily references the book The Material Geographies of the Belt and Road Initiative: Infrastructures and Political Ecologies on the New Silk Road, edited by Elia Apostolopoulou, Han Cheng, Jonathan Silver, and Alan Wiig. The book can be read online at the link or downloaded as a PDF. There is a lot of information here, and it is all of interest for anyone following the shifting global power structures here in the mid-2020s.
- “Fascintern Media” (Robin Berjon)
- “The Post-American Internet” (Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic)