Author: Jake

Reader, writer, designer, creative director. He does web work, print work, and dream work. Heavy advocate of self-care. Updates his blog much less often that he should.

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Micro

Ten Years Since Trayvon

NYT had a great article published this week, Ten Years Since Trayvon, and it’s wild to look at the past 10 years and see what really soured any progress that could have happened.

The day George Zimmerman was acquitted was the end of a very brief moment in which I gave America the benefit of the doubt. Six days later, Barack Obama, the man responsible for that temporary suspension of disbelief, gave a speech that drove home for me how foolish I had been.

The president acknowledged the pain many of us felt, but, ever the peddler of hope, he stressed that “as difficult and challenging as this whole episode has been for a lot of people, I don’t want us to lose sight that things are getting better.”

I didn’t believe it when he said it, and it sounds even sillier to me now so many years later.

Michael Arceneaux on The Day I Quit Believing

If there’s one thing I’m decidedly not full of for the future of our country or species, it’s hope. What an amazingly naive time in history those Obama years were, nothing but racism, elitism and social unrest just underneath that thin facade.

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Micro

The Audacity

Twitter, after summarily destroying society as we know it by allowing their platform to be the bully pulpit of a Nazi-sympathizing, twice-impeached, racist, misogynistic idiot blowhard, is going to be rolling out a paid subscription to their service.

I’d be more than okay with this if they separated their service into paid and unpaid and I never had to hear from anyone willing to throw any amount of money (even $3/mo) at that fucking monstrosity of a social media empire.

Charge for admission, and let people say whatever horrible, evil shit they can pinch off their brains, 160 characters at a time, on that paid section. So much media these days is behind paywalls, anyway, what’s one more?

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Personal

Intention

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.

Douglas Adams
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Personal

The Best and Worst of One Year of Quarantine

One year ago today, I was on my way back from picking up a used Toyota Corolla, fiddling with the radio, and I heard the news that the governor had declared a 2-week shelter in place.

Twenty minutes later I was standing in line at a local grocery store with a bandana on my face, a healthy supply of toilet paper, and the feeling that this would all blow over soon.

One year later, I sat down to think about the best and worst things about the past year in trying to continue living normally during a global health crisis.

Continue reading “The Best and Worst of One Year of Quarantine”
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Personal

How it’s going…

It feels like the last thing that happened was the election, followed by the massive rejection of the election results, followed by Christmas, New Year’s, and an frenzied assault on the Capitol.

Oh, and despite all our efforts to be safe when going out, we managed to catch COVID.

Continue reading “How it’s going…”
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Personal

Walk It Back

We’ve all seen them, starting around the middle of 2016 and slowly growing, at least around here in the middle of rural Pennsylvania. Those red hats. The large hand-painted Trump signs on the side of the highway. And those jacked-up coal-rolling trucks with like 8 flags bolted to the tailgate. And you think to yourself, how is this a thing?

Continue reading “Walk It Back”
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Personal

Vote

Everyone’s been saying the same thing. I’ve never seen a year like this. I’ve never seen the country so divided. This is so weird and stressful and I don’t know what’s going to happen.

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Micro

Final Command

The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command… and if all others accepted the lie, which the party imposed, if all records told the same tale, then the lie passed into history and became truth.

George Orwell, 1984
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Blue

Continue reading “Blue”
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Micro

Zoom.

You know, I think people are clinging to the idea that they can simply continue to work and block out all the shit that’s swirling around us daily. I think they want to forget about the pandemic, the systematic racial violence, the people who can’t go to work because they had to close or their job simply doesn’t exist anymore.

I see it on their faces during teleconferences. Tiny, grainy portraits that glitch out every few minutes and are back again, a four-by-three stack of rectangles filled with forced laughter and thinly-veiled fear.

It had been a hunch for years, now, but for the first time in my adult life, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that nobody, nobody, knows that the fuck to do about this, and we are all simply along for the ride.