In one of the newsfeeds I subscribe to, there was an article written by someone who was dissatisfied with his recent IPhone purchase. In fact, he used the word “hate.”

          Apparently, he couldn’t navigate the screen with one hand.

          For folks who depend on their technology to get them through the day and handle the tasks on their plates, this inconvenience may loom a lot larger than for the rest of us who might be ready to break out our air violins or offer a derisive, “Are you serious?”

          This critic returned to another current IPhone model for his smartphone needs, so hopefully he found happiness there. His parting shot for the folks at Apple included surprise and disappointment that the designers hadn’t anticipated this hiccup in form and function.

Turns out they apparently hadn’t thought of everything.

For some of us who will never invent anything or risk even the most modest of failures, critique of advanced pieces of technology like smartphones or a host of other items we’d like for Christmas might seem misplaced and somehow uncalled for. For some of us who just consume and use without any thought for how these wondrous things were developed or actually work, such critique may sound a lot like whining.

Maybe the folks at Apple- or any other company- feel the same way, but they say they appreciate the feedback and tweek their products, trying to keep the customer satisfied.

“He’s destroying his legacy.”

What legacy would that be? It’s laughable, if not for being so sad.

Eight hundred thousand and counting.

Health care systems and workers who keep having to tell the public that they can’t do what they do much longer. Attrition, exhaustion, retirement, anger, frustration, running on empty, a dissipation of empathy. When this scourge finally subsides, our doctors and nurses and EMTs and vaccine researchers should be up for a Congressional medal of some sort. And the Fox News crowd have to stop being mad at Fauci and Osterholm and the CDC and anyone else who’s trying to tell it like it is with regard to the pandemic.

I can’t imagine there are many of us on either side of the issues who want this thing to linger. But it is what it is. Covid-19 is doing what viruses do when there’s a robust supply of defenseless targets. It evolves, to the point of finding ways to go after the ones who think they’re protected! Between vaccine skepticism and misinformation and inequitable distribution of the vaccines worldwide, none of what’s happened and is happening should be remotely surprising. Disheartening and disappointing for sure, but not surprising.

We all know how to wear a mask and keep our distance and wash our hands. If more of us had actually done these things early on, we wouldn’t still be talking about this right now. And let’s not forget the three vaccines at our disposal.

Three of them. Readily available here in America.

Read most of an article in The Atlantic yesterday by someone who says that for him and his family, Covid has been over for a long time. That it has never really been an issue, in fact. He appeared to downplay the reaction by people on the left and people in the medical and infectious disease communities, and pretty much poked holes in the way this whole pandemic has been approached.

It struck me as just another dose of the smug, ignorant tone-deafness that has defined the laissez-faire and faux-patriotic attitude toward common sense precautions like masks and social distancing, and vaccines. Just a lot of words that don’t really say anything, as far as I’m concerned. There seems to be great difficulty simply acknowledging that a pandemic isn’t normal, and that people more knowledgeable on the subject are genuinely—and legitimately– concerned. It’s not just another flu season.

People of this mindset speak with unwarranted authority on a topic in which they are not well-versed. They have opinions. They wonder what all the fuss is about because thus far they and their immediate families have somehow been fortunate enough to avoid any effect of the virus.

This writer smugly wears his good fortune and twists the knife on those in the medical and public health fields who are trying to warn the public of the danger in not caring. He takes pot shots at the way we have proceeded—seemingly of the mind that the whole thing has been nothing to be concerned about, really. Almost like he, from his self-appointed lofty perch, could be doing a better job. This seems recklessly cavalier.

It has me thinking about karma, and hoping that he gets a dose. He sounds an awful lot like a smart ass, so maybe there’s a place for him somewhere in the DeSantis administration.

Sometimes it seems wrong that our attention as a nation isn’t riveted on certain events and situations unfolding around and among us. Like yesterday… the NFL Sunday games unfolded on schedule, millions tuned in, and all the while this massive tragedy was playing out in MO and KY and AR and elsewhere, as thousands of people walked around in a daze because their houses and towns and cities have been reduced to piles of rubble and so many have died, all as Christmas and winter approach and a god-forsaken pandemic continues. If the DJIA rises today, well, I don’t know what that means, other than being indicative of some giant disconnect.

Anyway, a supercell storm and one tornado that stayed on the ground for over 200 miles? At night? In December? Sounds like a slice of devilish hell to me. In one sense, it’s a grievously painful reminder that we are always living alongside and at the mercy of forces that are way beyond our capacity to control (unless this was exacerbated by climate change), but also it’s one more gigantic thing along with the fifty other gigantic things that people are dealing with right now. What are we all supposed to be learning from this? You’d think that many will not come back from it—emotionally, financially, and all other ways.

Note to insurance companies—have the chickens come home to roost yet? Pretty nice gig you have there, until the “acts of God” start piling up and you have to shell out all that premium money.

These are hard times. And fuck you, Vladimir P. Nothing like a war to inflate your diminutive stature, grease the wheels of commerce, and add to the darkness.

She said she had decided to get the booster after being encouraged by family members and her doctor. She had to consult with everyone first. I understand that I’m not her, I’m not nearly 90 years old. She may have concerns about side effects, given her age. But it was something else alongside her predictable concern that had me realizing she’s jumped on the freedom and rights bandwagon. That no one should be forced to get the vaccine.

She said it was hard to know what to do.

My immediate thought was, “No. It’s not hard at all!” It’s just that there is and has been a mystifying resistance to this readily available weapon in our embarrassingly feeble and unnecessarily prolonged fight against Covid-19. It’s not hard at all. You get the vaccine. You get the booster.

I talked things over with my doctor, too, but I wasn’t looking for reasons not to get it. I was hoping for—and got—what I’m thinking is the implied sentiment from many a GP across the nation—it’s a fucking no-brainer. Get the shot(s), get the booster, keep the god-awful virus at bay, do your part to keep food off its plate.

Your doctor will tell you if there is any actual reason not to get vaccinated. Just don’t let your final decision be based on what the anti-experts and pond scum at Fox News are spewing. It’s not hard. It’s never been hard, though it has been a matter of listening to people who actually know what they’re talking about.

Ah, freedom. To paraphrase Inigo Montoya, I don’t think that word means what you think it means. Think. You have a brain. Use your head for something besides a hat rack.

The latest school shooting, in Michigan—the 28^th of the year—really pissed me off, for some reason. I guess no more or less than any of the other TWENTY-SEVEN, but can’t enough be enough? Can’t this one serve as a catalyst of some sort, the precipitating event that gets the right peoples’ attention?

He used a gun his father had bought 3 days earlier. He is 15 years old. He walked into a school and killed 4 unsuspecting human beings with intent to kill more. There’s something ghastly and monstrous about that. Something that apparently we are too numb to react to anymore. Or maybe we’ve just stopped caring. There’s Christmas shopping to do, after all. And with the supply chain issues, well, it’s a zoo out there.

This is the America folks are OK with?

It’s fascinating, in a mind-numbing way, to watch how we’ve treated the pandemic. On the one hand, many are straining and always have been straining toward, pining for a return to pre-Covid ways and behavior. On the other hand, we’re STILL hearing about an uptick in cases, strained ERs and staffs, and the specter of another surge after the Thanksgiving travel and get-togethers.

Fascinating isn’t the right word. Frustrating isn’t a strong enough word. Maddening and infuriating get closer to where I’m at. It’s been a witch’s brew of behaviors and reactions, damned from the start by a POTUS who refused to acknowledge that we had a problem, that Covid-19 was even worth worrying about. We got off on the wrong foot and haven’t been able to recover.

And now a writer for The Atlantic suggests it’s up to politicians—not scientists and health officials—to declare when the pandemic is over. This, in my mind, is the perfect example of what we’ve been dealing with all along. People with contrary views offering advice that sounds and feels… ill-conceived, impatient, and just wrong-headed. Wouldn’t this be like waiting on the opinion of the local CPA to decide if you need heart surgery? Sadly, it seems like the scientific community is kow-towing to the politicians already, anyway. Recovery has never moved fast enough, so it’s been forced the whole way along. Human life and well-being have never really been the drivers here. It’s been all hands on deck to get the wheels of commerce out of the ditch and back on the road.

We end up with the blind leading the blind, and the ones who can really help are left sitting in the dust on the sidelines– ignored, marginalized, and maligned. Imagine that.

Nice going, Donald. Way to set the tone.

So, how to get someone to understand that they’re putting too much pressure on themselves, that they’re setting themselves up for failure? That they don’t have to be everything to everybody. That not nearly as many people as they might think are watching or noticing or caring at all that you aren’t fulfilling every dream and expectation, or living up to outsized, unrealistic, self-imposed standards.

I know that it’s necessary to tread lightly when people are having these troubles—you don’t want to make things worse. But there are times when it’s all I can do to refrain from just blurting out, “take a damn chill pill and stop the pity party!” We are, collectively, a bundle of neuroses stretched to a breaking point by the added stress of a pandemic. But we still suffer from self-inflicted wounds. We treat self-care as some holy grail, an elusive solution to every ill, something we have to succeed at like parenthood or vocation (sometimes one in the same).

I’ve never been able to fully grasp the apparent difficulty people (myself included) have of just letting things go. Depression to me isn’t necessarily something that warrants multiple visits to a therapist or can be treated with a pill. Sometimes it seems like what we need to do is take a walk, exercise, force a change of scenery, network. Some, sadly, are so incapacitated that they aren’t capable of doing that much. So they do need someone to help them, guide them.

We spend a lifetime living inside our own heads, and this isn’t necessarily the best place to be. We are the accumulation of formative childhood experiences and spoken words and actions and teaching moments and perceptions and misunderstandings. We keep score, we react or bury, we form opinions of ourselves sometimes based on bad information and other peoples’ insecurities, and the injurious self-talk starts eating away at our outlook and confidence and joy. We enter school, the work force, marriage, and other relationships having formed an opinion of ourselves over time based on how other people have treated us and spoken of us. And we process it all, for good or ill. Some call this “baggage.”

There’s a price to be paid for grabbing life by the balls, for feeling like every minute of every day needs to be momentous and utilized and purposeful. We’re so afraid of failure that we fail by default. My word! I’m getting pissed off and exhausted just writing these last few sentences.

What angers me is that we can be so unkind to ourselves, that we carry the weight of childhood trauma into adulthood, that the self-talk has way too much influence. And we don’t learn to process it all until it’s had a chance to do damage.

One way or another, it is necessary to confront the heaviness, at least keep it at bay. Manage it, if not get rid of it, move beyond it. So we can know what it feels like to have smooth sailing every now and then.

Sometimes it seems like defense lawyers are in the business of creating an alternate reality for their clients, like it’s a game of character development, image makeover, seeing if they can weave a web of deceit under the guise of a whole new set of “facts” that sound earnest and plausible and paint the client in a much improved light.

It’s about the sell. There are no hard and fast rules that can’t be rendered vulnerable to technicalities. It’s about loopholes and softening the edges, convoluted motives and intent, convincing a jury that your client was merely suffering from a forgivable brain fart and he actually has a heart of gold.

In the case of Kyle Rittenhouse, well, he was just being young and stupid. A misunderstood and misguided do-gooder. After all, he went there to “help.” With an AR-15.

Pretty nice having the presiding judge in your corner. That helps, too.