The World That's Coming

My laptop is dying. I know this because, roughly 18 months after my O key decided to detach itself from the keyboard on a flight to Brazil — the same flight that my phone decided to start off-gassing, as it happens, although I wouldn’t realize that was exactly what was happening for another few months — the S key has decided that it’ll only work roughly fifty percent of the time that I hit it. What’s that old saying…? “One key stops working, shame on me, two keys stop working, Apple’s keyboards are a pile of shit…?” Something like that.

The thing is, I planned on getting a new laptop for myself some time ago; I remember thinking before the end of last year that I would probably do it just after the holidays, when I (foolishly) believed that work would be settling down and I’d be building up something close to savings again. I knew it was only a matter of time before the other keys decided that they should follow the O into something approaching a state of disrepair, if not outright abandonment of the keyboard, and I wanted to get ahead of the curve. I just need to wait until I feel a little bit more solvent, I thought. We know how that worked out.

The thing is, there are so many words that require the S key, and the way I type — a way that more than a few people have pointed out is ludicrous and unnatural, like watching a particularly adept caveman at the keyboard — means that I don’t always realize what letters are missing before I’ve already moved on to the next word. The end result is that everything just takes longer to finish now, because I find myself having to go back and correct things, realizing that I didn’t really type “myhelf” in that last bit because I know there’s no such word, but who knows if and when the S key actually want to do what it’s told.

If things get much worse, maybe I can just handwrite everything and take photos. How bad could that be?

By the time you read this, I’ll have received my second shot of the COVID vaccine; I’m Team Moderna, and I love that people are so especially invested in which brand of vaccine everyone is getting, as if it’s a fandom or a sport. It’s been something that’s loomed large in my life for the last week or so, not for the obvious reasons — you know, that whole “actually being vaccinated against the virus at the heart of a terrifying global pandemic that has changed life across the globe for the last fifteen months” thing — but because I’ve been all too aware of the after effects that the second shot is meant to produce.

It’s not that I’m surprised by the idea that I’ll get a small case of COVID; I get how vaccines work, after all. No, what’s got me all anxious is the question of how small that case will be. I’ve heard enough anecdotal evidence to suggest that it’s basically a 24-hour return for your previous actual COVID experience, as mild or as strong as that was — and that’s not a particularly exciting prospect for someone who’s sure they had it pretty bad for a few days back when this all started.

The odd thing, though, is how this has weighed on me all week, the foreknowledge that I’ll probably be sick on Saturday. I’ve been consciously and subconsciously preparing for it, or at least trying to, the best I can — clearing my schedule, ensuring there are things to read and/or watch in case I’m bedbound, that kind of thing — and, all the time, thinking to myself about how strange it is to know you’re not going to be healthy for once. Short of surgery and it’s subsequent recovery, when do you get to do that, otherwise…?

I have, unintentionally, found myself unable to think past Saturday at this point, as if I’ll get sick and that’s it. I know there’s a next week that follows, and then another and another and another and so on, but right now, my internal timeline stretches as far as being in bed tomorrow and hoping I get better. See you on the other side.

At some point, I feel as if I stopped reading real books. I don’t mean that in the sense of, “I read comics now, and comics aren’t real books,” because… well, that’s ridiculous. No, I mean it in the sense of, I feel as if almost everything I read nowadays is digital, and I’m not sure how I feel about that.

Certainly, the majority of my comic reading these days is digital — the perks of having digital access to comps and preview copies, I can’t deny it — as is the majority of the prose I’m reading, which is almost entirely for research for the Secret Project That I Dare Not Name. (I should be reading more prose, I feel, but there’s something about the last year or so that’s made that feel especially difficult for me. Hopefully, my concentration will return when things are less apocalyptic.)

I can’t deny that digital reading is certainly easier on a regular basis, and there’s something to be said for having a significant library at your fingertips without ever having to get out of bed. (Laziness, it’s a wonderful thing.) It feels different, though; not just in the physical sense — there’s a beautifully tactile appeal of reading physical editions for me, right down to how each individual page can feel, depending on the paper stock; call it the pain of the former graphic design student, I confess — but in the sense of, in a strange way, the act of reading is almost a different thing.

I skim more when reading digitally, I think, and I lose concentration more easily when staring at a screen for long periods. Not having the physical indicator of just how far I am in a book means that I can be less patient with reading, as well.

I should (and could) make a point of buying more books, spending more time at the library, to fix this. In a post-pandemic world, I’m sure I will. For now, though, I simply find myself missing books as I swipe to another page on my iPad.

I had one of those old man yells at clouds moments the other day, when thinking about how easy it is to find media these days. When I discover a song in a TV show or movie or out in the real world — that last one, admittedly, being less likely these days for all kinds of reasons — it’s no big thing to find out what the song was, who recorded it, and buy it. All it takes is a Google search of some lyrics (assuming, of course, you can remember some of the lyrics at least close to correct), maybe a listen on Spotify or YouTube, and then a click to whatever music purchasing platform you prefer to use.

I like to think that I would’ve loved that a good 20 or so years ago — hell, make it 25 years — when my music buying was at its peak. At that point, it felt as if I was surrounded by music and still hungry for more, with a significant amount of my free time spent in record stores, rifling through the bins in the search for the next thing to get obsessed with.

Much of that rifling came from attempts to make connections between things, or search for the origins of particular sounds or elements. (I spent far, far too long trying to find if Badfinger really was the originator of the close harmonies of bands like Queen and Jellyfish, to my shame.) Much of the delay came from the fact that I’d think I’d have tracked down something I wanted to hear, but wasn’t willing to pay the money for a complete CD, or album, or whatever, if all I really wanted was one song, leading to a lot of back-and-forth while wondering if I could afford it, or wanted to.

What made this low level of obsession worthwhile, of course, were the mistakes and misfires, the things I bought by mistake and then realized that I loved even more than I could’ve expected, or the B-sides and album tracks that quickly became favorite songs. That, more than anything, is what I find myself missing today: The happy surprise that rewards the devoted search. Is there some way to recreate that these days, I wonder?

I’m paying half an eye’s worth of attention to the British election results as they roll in today, and thinking about how strange that country’s political landscape feels to me now, after nearly two decades living in the U.S.

It’s not just that there’s multiple political parties compared to the United States’ ridiculous, archaic two party system. (There’s an argument to be made, I think, that the U.S. doesn’t really have a two party system as much as a system that thinks it’s a dichotomy but is far more complicated in practice. But I’m sure that, if I made that argument, it would lead to being disagreed with at high volume by self-proclaimed experts, so maybe not.)

Even considering the many, many parties that hold some level of power, however — be they the Conservatives, Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Scottish National Party, UKIP, and so on — it probably should be noted that the political reality of the U.K. is far more complicated than it seems on the face of it. The Labour Party of the United Kingdom isn’t really the same as the Labour Party of Scotland, and Scottish Labour and “Labour” Labour are different again from Welsh Labour. The same with… well, every single different area in the country.

On paper, they’re the same parties, or at least affiliated with each other, but in practice… not so much. And so you end up with something that is unfolding today, where Labour Labour is losing seats while Welsh Labour is making big gains and Scottish Labour is less successful in a country predominantly left-leaning than the right wing Scottish Conservative Party, because the SNP has taken that demographic for themselves, and and and…

I feel as if things were simpler back when I lived there, but that might be a combination of nostalgia and fooling myself. Maybe I was just paying more attention and not an ocean away, trying to figure out if what was happening was a good thing or not and failing quite so hard.

There was a point, early in lockdown, where things were so locked down that there were almost no cars on the road; I remember taking a walk in the middle of the road one afternoon, and it being almost supernaturally quiet. In later weeks and months, things reasserted themselves and I can remember wistfully remembering the time when I didn’t have to worry about a speeding car cutting me off with almost no warning.

This comes to mind when I think about the fact that we’ve started going for early morning walks in the last few weeks, Chloe and I; it started when Spring started to sprung and things started to get sunny, and it very quickly and entirely unintentionally became a tradition from that point on.

It’s a particularly pleasant, gentle way to start the day. There’s something unique about the light as the sun rises for the first time — a way in which it catches the leaves in the trees surrounding us that feels particularly colorful and beautiful — and something about the stillness all around us as we walk through streets and a city that’s not quite awake just yet.

It’s not just that the roads are, for the most part, empty of moving vehicles, although that’s part of it. It feels as if we’re exploring something together, even as we move through areas that we’re all too familiar with because we walk them every few days. The lack of other people, of other motion, outside of the animals and the birds, feels as if we’re experiencing something particularly rare and somewhat special.

(And there are plenty of animals… or, at least, there are plenty of squirrels and cats, at least. Saying hello to the neighborhood cats, or even better, meeting brand new neighborhood cats, is a special thrill of each morning’s adventures.)

The feeling of quiet, of being alone in a good way, is such that, when other people start emerging from their houses to head to work or go for their own walks, we know it’s time for the walk to be over. It’s a transition point; a time when the world goes from ours to everybody’s. It’s the start of the day for everyone else, and we can go eat, knowing that we’ve laid claim to the best part already.

It’s not often that I think about my past life in a call center — and, honestly, on the rare occasions that I do, I tend to remember the period where I’d worked my way up the ladder and was writing the call scripts and meeting with clients. (It was very strange, looking back; I had an office to myself and everything. I wore ironed shirts with buttons and collars and everything every single day!) The time that I spent actually on the phone, making the calls, tends to fade into the background, for whatever reason.

That’s a shame, really, because I actually liked my time on the phones. Sure, I wasn’t entirely convinced about that at the time, and there were certainly days when it felt as if just the opposite was true, but… of course there were; it was a job, and there’s no such thing as a job that you don’t occasionally hate, because that’s literally how jobs work. (I’ve been doing what is pretty much my dream job for the last decade-plus and there are still times where I feel as if I’m dragging myself to the desk, so take from that what you will.)

Nonetheless, there was something genuinely great about talking to so many different people on a regular basis, even in such a regimented situation. Every now and then, you’d stumble upon a funny, or surprising, or educational, conversation that you never could have imagined, and your day would end up being significantly better as a result. It could be a slog, sure — we’d have hourly numbers to hit, in terms of dials and conversations — but, every so often, it could be a bit of a genuine joy, as well. Such things can happen.

All of this came to mind today when I had to deal with someone on the phone as part of a customer service thing — I was the customer, I should probably clarify, given the above — and I found myself quietly marveling at how well it was going, how wonderfully the person I was talking to was handling the entire thing. If there’s one thing that working in a call center does, it’s making you appreciative for people who work in call centers; this particular guy was so great, so helpful, that I almost asked to be transferred to his manager to demand that he gets a raise.

Instead, I wrote this. Look, there’s a reason I left call center work to become a writer.