#in 2020 or was it 2021 my family went to visit a state park with a waterfall and the thing was about as strong as a normal shower head

[davidyonke]

Eulogy for a furry 13-pound bundle of love

Yesterday, we lost our beloved four-legged family member, Annie. At age 15 ½, her little body was just worn out. She had become disoriented, had trouble walking, and was essentially blind and deaf.

It was indescribably sad to let her go, but it was a peaceful process. I held Annie in my arms and Janet was sitting right next to us while the veterinarian injected the solution through a catheter in Annie’s leg.

She was calm and resting quietly in my arms even before the medications were injected. I think somehow she knew what was going to happen and was at peace with it.

I loved that Powderpuff Chinese Crested more than anything. My heart is so heavy today, but I have no regrets. The time had come when it just had to be done.

Annie lived a good life, was spoiled as heck, and brought so much love and joy into our lives. Anyone who met Annie fell in love with her.

She always sought to please us, even when she was just a pup. I’d open the door for her to go into the backyard and she would stop and look up at me, and not until I nodded would she cross the threshold.

She loved to tear up paper and would walk over to the wastebasket in my office to see if there was anything there she could shred. She would look at me to see if it was OK to proceed. If I said "no," she would walk away. But if I nodded my head yes, she would grab some paper and start tearing it up.

When she was a puppy, she used to pick up the baby Jesus figure from our Nativity scene with her mouth and then lie down in a corner with Jesus between her paws. She never took any of the other little statues, just the Jesus figure. Obviously she was a Christian dog.

Annie only barked a handful of times in her life, and never bit or nipped anyone despite being roughhoused by toddlers countless times. When we went on walks, she ignored the smaller dogs but would growl at the big ones, as if this 13-pound pup was trying to protect us.

She loved her doggie treats and also loved the scraps of people food I’d sneak her way -- despite Janet’s scolding me not to do so (for Annie’s own good). My grandkids always tattled to Janet when they caught me: “GiGi, Papa’s feeding Annie!”

She spent most of the day by my feet, underneath my desk, resting on a fluffy Michigan blanket I put there just for her. She’d lie on the couch by my side when we watched TV. At night she would climb into bed with us for a short visit and then jump down and go to her favorite spot -- a pile of clothes in the closet that were left there just for her.

Annie was a good traveler, going with us to Rockford, Illinois, many times to visit our daughter Lisa and family. She also made a trip to Knoxville, Tennessee, to see my sister Elaine and her family.

When she was younger, we used to take her camping with us. One time at Pokagon State Park we were walking on a boardwalk when she looked down into the water and suddenly jumped in – and was covered with a thick coating of black swamp sludge. Wow, did that smell bad! We wrapped her in a sheet, drove to our campsite, and hosed her down. I'll always wonder what made her jump into that black swampy water.

Annie had a heart murmur and was on medication, three pills twice a day since 2021. She survived being attacked by a neighborhood dog in 2020 who pounced on her while we were on a walk. I chased the big dog away and took Annie to the vet who shaved a swatch of hair off her back and gave her several stitches and a tetanus shot. She never cried or barked during the whole incident

As many of you know from social media posts, Annie wandered away from our house late at night on May 19. She never did that before but she must have been very disoriented. Janet and I searched all night for her with no luck.

Since Annie could not see or hear much, if anything, by then, it was a scary night. Janet and I split up and took flashlights to search for her. I walked over 20,000 steps that night and also drove through the area hoping to find her – alive. The Perrysburg police even helped, bless ‘em, driving slowly through the area with spotlights shining on each side of their SUV.

At one point my flashlight shined on a raccoon that looked bigger and meaner than any I had ever seen. I shivered thinking what would happen if that raccoon attacked little Annie.

Thank God, with your help through prayers and social media posts, a local construction worker found Annie around 8 am the next day and I got a FB message from his boss, Aaron Schoen: “I have your dog!” What a relief! Annie was found just a few blocks away in a construction site, covered with burrs, feet caked with dirt and mud, but all right.

As it turns out, Annie ended up living just one month longer, but finding her alive after that long dark night allowed us to have a peaceful parting and a sense of closure.

Our house feels so empty today. It’s amazing how big of a presence that little dog had. I know the grief will go on for a while but I am smiling through tears today thinking about the many happy times and pleasant memories, and how she’d reach up to lick my cheek in love.

That's what Annie was all about -- love. Pure love. That love lives on my heart. I am so thankful for how much love, peace, joy and happiness Annie brought into my life. I hope we'll meet up again someday in heaven above.

[thevoidscreamer]

Hailing 2024... with a farewell to the years before.

2009 was the year when everything changed.

2010 was the year I met my best friend.

2011 was the year I lost to NJROTC.

2012 was the year of my first, true summer love. Intermittent homelessness.

2013 was the year I graduated high school. Intermittent homelessness.

2014 was the year I left my church. Intermittent homelessness.

2015 was the year I almost died of malnourishment. Intermittent homelessness.

2016 was the year I left my parents.

2017 was the year I came out. Also the year I met one of my very best friends.

2018 was the year I made the most money. Also the year I met another one of my very best friends.

2019 was the year I left my pimp. Also the year I met my cat, who I adore. Also the year my cousin died, and the year my parents drove a rift between themselves and the rest of my family.

2020 was the year I went no contact with my parents, joined an open triad relationship, and greeted my child. It was also the year I had my NDE in the hospital. It was also the year my business died (though I did try to revive it throughout 2021 and 2022). So I gained perspective and a shit ton of trauma. It was also the year I met someone everyone told me I would hate but we've been best friends ever since and still talk all the time on fb messenger.

2021 was the year when, binderless at last, I could breathe -- and everything I did that year was focused on achieving that goal. It was also the year I traveled twice all on my own for the first time since leaving my pimp -- once to do photography for a really skeevy aspiring model in Maryland, and once to stay at my friend's queer commune in Colorado. It was also the year I published She's Not Here, 400-Year Frost, and Despite the Cold (the Anthology). This was also the year that a few of my friends died, and many others just dropped off and never resurfaced.

2022 was the year I went through the non-legal equivalent of two divorces -- one with a nesting partner with whom I now co-parent, and one with a queer-platonic life partner of ten years. It was also the year I heard from and saw my brother for the first time in three years. It was also the year I started on the right medication for my severe chronic migraines. It was also the year I lost my taste and smell due to covid (and things still aren't entirely back to normal). It was also the year I published Arachnapocalypse! The Anthology! and It Feeds!

2023.

2023 was the year I...

read 55 books (14,341 pages)

reconnected with my parents after almost three years of no contact

reconnected with my best friend (see 2010 bullet point) after some drama and maturing that needed done on both our parts

published The Wheel

did a 24-credit semester

got married with my partner of (now) almost four years, with whom it turns out I am incurably, deeply in love with

got attacked in a parking lot with my partner for being visibly queer

returned to therapy

finally moved out of the city that gave me so much anxiety

drove cross-country four times

fell in love with New Mexico

got to spend two months during summer living in and renovating a formerly-abandoned house with my partner

single-parented for one month

figured out the correct mix of melatonin and tylenol that lets me sleep through the night and feel rested

was forced to come to terms with my two most severe phobias, which I will not list here

got into the best shape of my life doing something I was surprised to enjoy -- cardio

sprained my ankle at a themed waterpark

moved cross-country, twice

got to visit one of my best friends for the first time in two years

drove through the most beautiful state I've ever encountered -- Idaho. I know, it surprised me, too.

started a job in a brand new career field -- and excelled

made my works available for free on my website

learned to write without my ex being a part of the creative process

established a consistent writing routine

learned that there is absolutely no good mexican food in Eastern Washington and that's a problem

published Desert Castle, a concept that first came to me in 2016

saw Moose (plural) for the first time in person (that's a bucket list item! I love me some meese!)

made a local writing-friend

shoveled snow

officially quit drinking starbuck's

think I finally grasped the concept of healthy forgiveness

organized and ran/am running the third and final anthology in the "VeryGood Collab Books" series I started working on in 2020

used points to buy a plane flight back home to help out my chosen family

started writing fanfiction

got halfway through the rewrite of a 90,000 word novel

reviewed the thousands-years-long storyline and universe build for a much bigger series I conceptualized in 2007 and fleshed out intermittently from 2011-2020

may have lost the person who has been like a mother to me since 2011. We don't know how things will go yet. She's in a coma.

Despite its more difficult moments, 2023 was the most fun and the most engaging challenge I've had in a long time. Aside from that last bullet-point and spraining my ankle, everything about this year -- even the hardships -- has been actively good. It's been a tremendously refreshing and healing year, and I attribute much of that to all of the novel experiences I had.

After 2020-2022 being so unbearably rough, I needed something new. This year was exactly that, and it gave me the space and energy I needed to allow myself to soften, to gain a real understanding of forgiveness, and to feel genuine hope and healing (possibly for the first time since COVID hit). I know my mostly-positive experience of 2023 seems to be relatively unique. I really hope 2024 can be for the rest of the world what 2023 was for me personally.

[srrl-sulha-pilot]

There it is. The song that captures my mood for Winter Break and the past seven years.

I’ve been going through lots of things since November 2021. It doesn’t help that I’m still seeking a therapist since the end of HS graduation in 2015. All I knew at the time was going to college to be an engineer. I was so wrong. Same with getting into Computer Science.

Who would have thought 18-year-old me would grow up to work three different jobs, switch majors twice, and go back to grad school immediately after getting a Bachelors? Hell, I didn’t think I’d survive college with a gradually deteriorating mental state of mind or stay longer than a year with the transportation office as a Parking Enforcement Officer.

A lot of people came and went at that workplace. I stayed longer than most office staff - 7 years. You know what the strangest part is? I almost didn’t get the job because of my anxiety. “Give him a couple days, then let him go if he’s not up for it,” an old coworker said. Those couple of days turned into a couple of years. That was my life: clock in, gear up, and go out to explore the university life with its half-warm, half-cold cars or last weekend’s intimate details. No one watching me but my friends - coworker or not. Damn, I miss the bar hopping. I’m not a drinker, but I enjoyed the moments when everyone else drank and I was there to support them and their not-so-conscious state. Or the time everyone went to the fair during the summer of 2017. Or a moment in late spring 2017 when we partied at one dorm and I stayed over because of a MAX shooting. Or one time I slept at a friend’s couch after a night out of sharing good times while I was far from home that summer in 2018 (and leaving a $20 tip the next morning for their kindness before riding the bus back home).

Now that I look at where I am at this moment, so much stuff has happened since 2019. My mom got cancer on my last undergrad year, I pushed back on my graduation to 2020, the damn COVID pandemic tore the world apart, I lost my grandpa in April 2021, I jumped back to grad school in the summer of 2020, I visited Utah (and my then-partner) a few times, my third family was with my graduate colleagues, my siblings got married to their wonderful partners, I nearly lost my position as a Student Teacher, my graduate program was finished, I had a breakup with the best partner anyone could ask for, I lost a great friend (they’re still alive), I finally had vacations my family dreamed about, I found a job as a teacher, and I had my tearful goodbye with the transportation office. So many things to talk about. So many moments to remember. I can’t find the words to express how grateful I am. It’s also hard to explain how scared I was for things I set my mind to.

It’s hard to accept those changes all at once. My brain can’t handle the overload. I’ll get better at it one day.

Thanks for reading my thoughts, friend. We should chat some time soon. I’d love to hear from you.

[arqueete]

New Year's Meme 2021

It's time for my annual New Year's Eve survey meme! As always, feel free to steal for yourself.

1. What did you do in 2021 that you’d never done before?

I got engaged! And ordered a wedding dress and all sorts of things like that.

I visited the Field Museum in Chicago which I've been meaning to do for a while

I went to Door County this year, which was my first time visiting that part of Wisconsin

Back on New Year's Day 2021, with the limited options for a safe activity to celebrate the holiday, we went to a kite festival and I flew a kite for the first time! We hope to make this a tradition now.

I entered something in a competition at the State Fair (which was actually a resolution of mine in 2020 that I didn't get to do because of the pandemic) and came in fourth place in my category!

2. Did you keep your New Years’ resolutions and will you make more for next year?

My resolutions last year included: getting a new job, finishing a knitting project, making more little web projects, host dinner parties, and take art classes.

I didn't really start making little web projects in the way I wanted to and I also didn't host dinner parties on the scale I wanted to (though we had some people over!), but otherwise I knocked all of those out of the park.

In 2022, I would like to pay a little more attention to being physically active, considering my job and hobbies keep me sitting at a desk a lot. If it's reasonable with the state of things with the pandemic, I'd like to take some sort of yoga or physical fitness (or maybe hoop dancing again--the classes keep filling up!) class. I'd like to attempt one of those 30 day YouTube yoga series or some other kind of fitness challenge.

In 2023 I'm supposed to be visiting Italy so in 2022 I want to make sure I keep up with learning Italian.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth? Not anyone close to me. 4. Did anyone close to you die? My grandmother passed away this October. She was 97, so she got a long life and her health was declining in her final years. She died at home in her bed which is what we hoped for.

5. What countries did you visit? I traveled 90 miles down to Chicago a couple times and that made me feel wary enough in these times. I plan to lay low in 2022 as well (unless maybe things are looking up by the end of the year and we want to do an international honeymoon?) but as previously mentioned I am hoping for Italy in 2023., 6. What would you like to have in 2022 that you lacked in 2021? Last year I said I wanted to be vaccinated and enjoy a normal holiday season with my family and we very nearly got that--I'm certainly vaccinated (and boostered now!) and that's one hell of a thing to be grateful for, and we had to cancel Christmas because of a possible Covid exposure, but I spent Thanksgiving and New Year's with family. But anyway, this question is about next year: I guess I'd like a job that I enjoy. Last year I wanted a new job and I got one, but I've found that I'm really not happy there either, and maybe in 2022 I can actually find a place where I can settle for a bit. 7. What date from 2021 will remain etched upon your memory, and why? May 20th, 2021: the day I reached the two week mark from my second shot and was officially fully vaccinated. And at the time that really opened things up in terms of what we felt safe doing. I remember how surreal it was when shortly after that I went to a coffee shop and ordered a latte and sat at a table without a mask on and drank it. Now I'm once again wearing a mask everywhere and being selective about when I take part in risky activities--but what a moment that was in the midst of all of this, when we finally got that long-awaited vaccine. 8. What was your biggest achievement of the year? Way back in January I finished knitting my giant bug and I have showered that bug with cuddles and kisses pretty much every day since. The bug has really been the backbone of my 2021. 9. What was your biggest failure? Mostly I just think about my job. Like, I'm lucky enough to have a career that, in general, I love, and in the past it's been a source of pride and achievement in my life and this new job I got this year... I spent a lot of the year without a lot to do which is not as fun as it sounds, and then when I am busy, it's with stuff I don't feel like I'm good at or particularly enjoy, with coworkers who are difficult, and in an organization that is kind of dysfunctional... I just feel so discouraged. I'm looking for yet another job now but maybe I should've done something about this sooner or made better choices when I picked this new job. I don't know. Hopefully I will have better news on this front next year. 10. Did you suffer illness or injury? The vaccine kicked my ass so it felt like I had a mini flu after the second shot and the booster, but it was suffering for a good cause. I had a sore throat for a while in the summer which I probably should've gotten a covid test for but I even saw my doctor at that time and he looked at it and didn't seem particularly concerned about the possibility of covid--people still get colds, I guess. I got a crown on a tooth for the first time this year, though (and I'm getting a second one shortly after the first of the year...)

11. What was the best thing you bought? My fiance and I split the cost of a stand mixer which is, of course, the dream appliance. 12. Whose behavior merited celebration? My sister just got a new job after looking for a while and I'm happy for her.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed? Remember the January 6th insurrection at the capital? Yeah, fuck those guys. 14. Where did most of your money go? I keep a budget now so I can tell you with confidence that most of my money went to rent, followed by actually starting a Roth IRA this year (getting over my reluctance to deal with that kind of financial stuff was my "failure" answer last year and this year I did do some of that stuff!) and filling it with money I'd saved. 15. What did you get really, really, really excited about? I got engaged! I have an engagement ring and I'm planning a wedding and we have a venue for next fall! (I read and researched a lot about weddings this year.) 16. What song(s) will always remind you of 2021? Lianne La Havas' self-titled and especially the song "Green Papaya" (which was my top song on my Spotify wrapped this year--and also what I listened to in the car on the drive home after we officially got engaged.) Also, Sufjan Stevens and Angelo Augustine's album A Beginner's Mind, the song "Bloomsday" by Samantha Crane.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you: i. Happier or sadder? Happier. ii. Older or wiser? Wiser. iii. Thinner or fatter? Fatter. iv. Richer or poorer? Richer. 18. What do you wish you’d done more of? Answering some of the other questions in this meme made me realize that while I discovered some great individual, miscellaneous songs from artists I didn't know before this year, I didn't dig into a lot of whole albums or discographies from new artists. I wish I'd been more exploratory about music this year. 19. What do you wish you’d done less of? Indulging in schadenfreude or snark as entertainment, like reading gossip-y subreddits and stuff like that. I think a little of that is fine in life, but this year I spent more time than I'm proud of relishing that kind of negativity. 20. How will you be spending Christmas? We canceled Christmas with family because my fiance was exposed to someone who was possibly exposed to Covid and we wanted to play it safe. Instead, on Christmas Eve my fiance made a nice chicken dinner and we opened one present together, and then on Christmas Day we gave each other stockings and presents, I made a dinner of beef tenderloin and potatoes, we drank champagne, and we watched A Muppet Christmas Carol.

21. How will you be spending New Year’s Eve? Since Christmas got canceled, we had a make-up Christmas dinner and gift exchange with my parents, aunt, one of my cousins and her kids (and briefly my sister.) On New Year's Day we will be flying kites in the morning (weather permitting) and then spending the evening with my fiance's family.

22. Did you fall in love in 2021? I continue to be in love with my new fiance! 23. How many one-night stands? None.

24. What was your favorite TV program? We started watching Ted Lasso together and have been enjoying that.

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year? I followed the Josh Duggar trial and also recently finished listening to the podcast I Pray You Put This Journal Away and wow do I have a lot of hatred for some people in fundamentalist Christian cults. 26. What was the best book you read? I really enjoyed John Green's The Anthropocene Reviewed, which is a series of essays reviewing... things (like Diet Dr. Pepper, Canada geese, air conditioning, and Super Mario Kart), ending with a rating out of five stars. I would like to share with you one of my favorite bits of that book as it happens to be about New Year's Eve:

I think "Auld Lang Syne" is popular in Hollywood not just because it's in the public domain and therefore cheap, but also because it's the rare song that is genuinely wistful--it acknowledges human longing without romanticizing it, and it captures how each new year is a product of all the old ones. When I sing "Auld Lang Syne" on New Year's Eve, I forget the words like most of us do, until I get to the fourth verse, which I do have memorized: "We two have paddled in the stream, from morning sun till dine / but seas between us broad have roared since Auld Lang Syne."

And I think about the many broad seas that have roared between me and the past--seas of neglect, seas of time, seas of death. I'll never again speak to many of the people who loved me into this moment, just as you will never speak to many of the people who loved you into your now. So we raise a glass to them--and hope that perhaps somewhere, they are raising a glass to us.

27. What was your greatest musical discovery? I listened to the Sleigh Bells album Treats this year and it was a bit more aggressive than what I typically listen to but I enjoyed some of that. "Rill Rill" was one of my most played songs this year.

28. What did you want and get? To finally go on my fiance's family's annual Door County vacation, which I've had to duck out of every year I've been dating him. I know it's important to him, and I had a good time.

29. What did you want and not get? We wanted to get our favorite empanada bar to cater our wedding but they never responded to our emails inquiring about it and it doesn't appear they do catering anymore :( Instead we got another restaurant we like and it'll be great, but we had been dreaming about the empanadas since before we were engaged. 30. What was your favorite film of this year? I think it was definitely tick, tick... BOOM! which I'm glad I saw in theaters (I was able to see one other movie in theaters this year--The French Dispatch.)

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you? I turned 31 this year, which wasn't as emotionally difficult as turning 30 was. We had dinner at Organ Piper Pizza, which is a local restaurant where, well, they serve pizza and take requests on a theater pipe organ. Then we ate cake at my parents' house.

32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying? If everyone in this country actually got their shit together and got vaccinated when the vaccine became available :) 33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2021? The pandemic made me want to do something bold with my look and at the end of 2021 I was brave enough to get the ends of my hair dyed pink, which is the first time I've ever had an unnatural color in my hair. I was also having fun with nail polish earlier in the year, especially after getting an engagement ring. I got new glasses and sunglasses with bigger frames. I got a couple shift dresses with bold, colorful patterns that I loved. In general, I think this was a year of responding to laying low during lockdown with being a bit more brave and expressive. 34. What kept you sane? In the summer, after I was fully vaccinated, I started taking pottery classes and then got a membership at the clay studio. Learning a new skill, making things with my hands, being creative, and fulfilling something I was dreaming about during lockdown all were really helpful to me. 35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most? I don't know that I had an obvious celebrity crush this year. There are some nice looking people in the cast of Ted Lasso that I enjoyed. 36. What political issue stirred you the most? Climate change is something I'm still really trying to reckon with and I was hoping that there'd be more happening politically this year to make me feel like something was actually being done about it. 37. Who did you miss? I miss some old coworkers of mine from previous jobs who really made my work days fun even when the work wasn't. 38. Who was the best new person you met? Maybe Liz, the woman who teaches my pottery classes, because now I know how to do pottery things! 39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2021: There's a lot of value in celebrating holidays and marking the changing of the seasons, even when things like climate change and a pandemic make it harder. I don't feel like I really did enough to savor Halloween this year, for example, and that bothered me. On the flip side, we went on a special hike the night of the winter solstice as part of a local nature center event, which is more attention than I've ever given the winter solstice before, and there was something comforting about acknowledging the changing length of the days. There's a reason this stuff has been such a big deal to all sorts of cultures over all sorts of time periods.

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:

Our hearts overgrown, longing for peace of our own Found Heaven in you, promise to be pure and true Still mountains to climb, we will survive, still got time My partner-in-crime, hoping you'll love me 'til we die

Lianne La Havas - "Green Papaya"

[omegaplus]

# 4,004

High Score Pinball + Game On; Spring 2020 & Spring 2021.

If you were an Eighties child, the video game was the pinnacle of your childhood. On Saturdays, my dad took me to the toy store where I sprinted to the game wall, have me choose any stamped ticket and hand it over the counter to customer service where they stocked all the solid state cartridges in the back. They’d hand me the game of choice and I was golden until next week. If I was lucky, he’d take us to Nunley’s Carousel in Baldwin where it was the final time in my life I’d play old electromagnetic machines and driving games that ran on paper sheets - and even film reels and plastic parts (Atari’s F1). We’d also go to Nathan’s in Oceanside. It, too, had an arcade there. Once we came back from his dietician or from my half-sister in Bensonhurst, he ended up taking the whole family for sit-in Chinese and to the Nellie Bly Amusement Park where for one time only I played Atari’s Superman and Hercules pinball tables.

Sunday was an even bigger event. My pop would drive from (also) Bensonhurst all the way out to Long Island where my family and I lived. He’d arrive anywhere between noon to 1PM and stay for an hour before taking me to the South Shore Mall. I’d have the luxury of two hours and $5.00 worth of quarters to play as many games as I could. Roadblasters, Space Harrier, Chase HQ, Marble Madness, skee ball - you name it, they had it, I played it. Pop would break it up and take me to The Emporium (later becoming Nathan’s and after that a sushi house that closed down in 2010) where they also had an arcade itself. Same time limit, same amount of pocket change. The neighborhood delis and convenience stores also had arcade and pinball machines where I clearly remember playing Seicross, Legion, Double Dragon, Ninja Gaiden, Shinobi, and other games too many to mention. I had the best of both worlds at home and beyond. By the time my grade-school years ended, I replenished the game collection my dad once sold for $50.00 and more thanks to my Dallas aunt and uncle. 

The Brentwood era just started for me and Pop had a heart attack while watching the game. He woke up out of it but later relapsed and that was the end for him. I had to take it upon myself to ride my bike to the mall or the pizzeria in the local shopping center behind the middle school to get my Neo-Geo, Super Monaco GP, or Mortal Kombat fix. With reward came risk: Brentwood wasn’t a safe neighborhood compared to the others. Every day I worried about random newjacks and youngbucks coming up to me for handouts just for being seen. Seven or eight kids waiting their turn surrounded the Street Fighter machines at any one of three stores out of fifteen who had them; some even got jumped and assaulted over them because they were caught cheating. Chain-snatchers got the unsuspecting kids when their backs were turned, and even the resting bitch-faces came up to entice me to fight their boyfriends who tried stealing my bike.

As time went by, I moved on from the scummy parts. Visits to the arcades became less frequented no matter at the mall or the amusement park. The carousels and hot dog places went out of business. Console gaming, however, kept going with the Genesis, SNES, Dreamcast, and Playstation throughout my community college and Stony Brook era. I discovered MAME and VPinball so I could stay in touch with myself. I kept it all going until I was sick of dozing off and throwing my time away while my friends, co-workers, and associates made the best of theirs. I finally moved on from gaming, and all the best for it.

It was more than ten years since I played a game of pinball. The Sopranos to be exact. Almost no place on the island where one was to be found. But that all changed last spring when the Video Game Trading Post opened up Long Island’s very first pinball arcade in the South Shore Mall / Westfield. I was stunned and paralyzed. We never asked for it, let alone couldn’t even imagine happening, but we got it. We lost Manhattan’s Modern Pinball and Greenpoint’s Sunshine Laundromat was never the same after the pandemic, so having the arcade return (to the very place where it all started for me and not having to travel to the city for it) was the pale-skinned redheaded Godiva riding on the fucking horse.

It was amazement at first sight. I enter the mall and the sounds emanating from the dark space tells me I’m close. I finally found it. My soul pushed back because I couldn’t believe it. I walk in and the darkness swallowed me in as all the flashing lights, LEDS, and the brightly-lit back-panels fight to be noticed. For $25.00, sometimes $35.00, it was all-you-can-play. I walk around in the dark vortex and the place was huge of its concrete flooring and aromatic wood smell. All three Black Knight tables, all three Pinbots, both Firepowers, Bank Shot, Evel Knievel, Harlem Globetrotters, Tron Legacy, even Police Force when it was at Vinardo’s. I spotted Big Guns, a game I remember from my Nintendo childhood. To my amusement, it was real having to find that Slugfest returned to the exact same mall I played at during the Brentwood era. The best part? Learning that both High Speed and Nine Ball would make their stay. It would make that next return trip all the more urgent. High Speed was the very first machine I ever scored a million on, let alone three. And Nine Ball? The overall design and sound effects of it was a personal must-play for me.

All throughout last Spring and Summer I’d make the effort to be the first one there and the last one to leave. Noon to 8PM. I made one final trip to High Score- before the year was over, leaving it behind in its former incarnation forever. It’s now half of what it used to be. The other half is now home gaming and memorabilia. I knew it would never be as good after when I first found it and won’t expect it to be better. But I’ll never, ever forget it - just like I’ll never forget the ride to Williamsburg’s Rough Trade, the post-punk / d.i.y. and jazz-fusion finds, the Jewish girl from Queens with the straight shoulder-length hair and green eyes who asked me if I had a copy of KIDS, or the two pale gingers with brown eyes I spent forever with at my store. Another day, another payout.

The alignments had another card up its sleeve. The King of Diamonds would be super-ceded by the Ace. The Boy Harsher show was less than two weeks away and I had to visit the Smithhaven Mall to find me a leather jacket and black hat. I walked out with the hat but no jac-. And, as I was walking out, something caught my eye: a shiny colorful array of neon lights. I stop to look at my right and there it was: a new video arcade I never knew existed. I was shut. I step in and to my immediate right was Baby Pac-Man: a cabinet shaped like an upright with a CRT monitor and small pinball playfield below it. It was a machine I only read about but was curious to seek out. Now, here it is. But, I couldn’t go any further as entry was roped off. But I see the sign at the front desk: $20.00 free play all day. It’s 3PM, I wouldn’t get my money’s worth. But I owed it to myself to come back and visit, and visit I did.

The following Wednesday I came back at noon and paid the frail emo casualty up front my $20.00. Does he have any idea what he’s doing here or what this is all about? He wouldn’t care, really. He’s only here to collect and will elicit a fake half-enthusiastic “oh, uh...that’s cool!” when asked. I’m here to revisit my Atari / Nintendo childhood. Eight hours and no time to waste. Let’s have it.

I walk in and there’s three Pac-Man machines grouped together: the 1980 original that became the first-ever character franchise, Baby Pac-Man and Super Pac-Man. Across from it is Ms. Pac-Man. How shameful they couldn’t include her from the boys’ club. There were vector games in Tempest, Lunar Lander, Asteroids, and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back in super-sharp and blindingly bright on original CRT monitors. There was Gorf, arguably my very first arcade memory living in Brooklyn. Classics such as Centipede, Marble Madness and Spy Hunter which I haven’t played in its true form since forever. Defender, Robotron 2084, and Berzerk rounded out three of four parts of the Williams trilogy. Moon Patrol, Galaxian, Zaxxon, Gyruss, Phoenix, Dig Dug, Vanguard, and Missile Command - games I played endlessly on the home system - were there. Crystal Castles, one I always played on the Atari 2600, felt super-frantic and ultra-responsive on my first time ever playing it. Pengo and Mr. Do! - two games I remember my sis- B-Bomb telling me about - were finally crossed off the must-play list.

I found two extremely rare Nintendo Vs. red tents and with that came Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., Donkey Kong 3, Punch Out, Popeye, and the original Super Mario Bros which I always used to play at the neighborhood deli (thanks ma’). Even more impressive was the fact that they had Playchoice machines when the South Shore Mall had them. I walk further and there’s Bad Dudes and the first Double Dragon: agonizingly slow and sluggish as fuck like I remembered it.

There’s driving games such as Super Sprint, Crazy Taxi, Chase HQ, and The Cruisin’ series. But, none more important than Sega’s Hang-On and Outrun, one which my younger bro- and I fought over to play first when our parents took us to the ice cream parlor. Next to those were Virtua Cop and Point Blank which I had zero interest playing because it wasn’t Cheyenne.

Konami, known for some of the best multi-player titles ever, made their presence felt with Super Contra, The Simpsons, Sunset Riders, X-Men, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; the final being the gateway and the token example of nostalgia. There was the fighters’ row: Mortal Kombat II, Virtua Fighter, Tekken 4, Killer Instinct, Marvel Vs. Capcom 2, and Street Fighter II; that final one the basis of my early Brentwood years hanging out in dangerous neighborhoods and being harassed by the youngbucks in pizzerias for quarters. How about not one, not - fuck it - four Neo-Geo MVS’s with such games as Metal Slug 4, Ninja Warriors, Fatal Fury 2, and Samurai Shodown all plugged in and more. Three of those four aforementioned Neo-Geo games all happened during various points of my Brentwood era, coincidentally at the same shopping center as the pizzeria and that down-low mom-and-pop video store in Central Islip.

There were pinball tables such as Spider-Man, Stranger Things, and Star Wars: Episode 1, but couldn’t ever compare to what High Score used to have. Foosball, (a rare) Super Chexx, a Ms. Pac-Man & Galaga cocktail machine, and even Alley Cats: a shuffleboard-slash-bowling hybrid were found. Never played anything like it. Sports-themed uprights in NBA Jam, NHL Ice, and Blades Of Steel which I played all of three minutes before walking away from it and headed for Arkanoid: Revenge Of Doh. I was even taken back by seeing games I never knew existed: Warp Warp and Lady Bug. And finally...Smash TV. I wasted an hour of my valuable life on cheap deaths and repetitious gameplay. I’ll never ever recommend it.

I look above and there was a scoreboard with all the high scores and initials written in chalk. Twin Galaxies this wasn’t and thankfully there were no Billy Mitchell sightings. Another thing up above us was a mural of Blaze, Axel, and Adam of Sega’s Streets Of Rage, deemed one of the best and most successful side-scrolling beat ‘em-ups ever. Further back of the arcade I found a bar set-up and a big projector screen behind it for anyone wanting to play Mario Kart on the big-screen. I looked hard enough to find authentic original operator’s manuals of Jungle Hunt, Centipede, Xevious, Asteroids, and Missile Command framed and hung on the wall. I also laserdiscs also framed and hung on the wall near the arcades storefront. Flashdance, License The Drive, Vision Quest, and - I kid you not - Dirty Dancing. Which reminded me...where the hell were Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace? And no Eighties’ fantasy world wouldn’t be complete without at least two small CRT TV’s set up to play Super Mario Bros. 3 and E.T. It was the perfect set-up founds in millions of kid’s rooms everywhere. And they still weren’t done.

The one thing Game On had that High Score Pinball didn’t, and this is the major validator here, was the Eighties soundtrack streamed on the overhead. High Score- only had the natural sound of licensed one-liners, PCBs, electromagnetics, and solid states emanating all the bells and hard solenoid knocks of free games. Only once had they brought out a portable speaker blasting Ozzy’s Nineties hits and alternative. Not Game On. Every song was an unforgettable Eighties throwback. It had to be to fit within the nostalgic theme of gaming’s wonder years of the very-late Seventies to the mid-Nineties.

The Seventies will always be something I’ll explore because it’s a decade I mostly missed out on. Exploring and discovering obscure jazz / fusion, soul, groove, and the hits are all a product of my fascination with hip-hop and rap’s sampling culture, console gaming, money shows, chyrons, station i.d.’s, production logos, opening and closing credits, and promos-. The Eighties were different because I lived through them 100% and still remember it clear as day. I can appreciate new wave, synthpop, the new romantics, Billboard hits, freestyle, radio plays, hair metal, and anything else I listened to as part of my Atari / Nintendo childhood. The arcade’s streaming playlist (could they not afford a cassette player?) was paired with the many original arcade cabinets of their time and served its nostalgic purpose, as intended, to its full unbeatable meaning. 

With almost every song played on the overhead there were more childhood memories that followed them. J. Geils Band’s “Centerfold” was my first-ever music memory when my other half-sister played it constantly on our turntable in our family’s second-floor Borough Park apartment. The night my dad threw the Christmas tree out on the porch and my ma’ taking both my younger brother and I to stay at gramma’s for a few days. Riding in the passenger’s seat of our white rusted ‘78 Cadillac Coupe Deville and the bubbled rainbow that formed at the top of its windshield. Being stuck on the side of the Southern State Parkway heading home as my younger bro- and I rode in the backseat with toy dashboards. The trips in my parents rusty beige Chevy van where its crusty steel interior and the smell of petrichor created a viciously sickening mess. The two ‘79 yellow and blue AMC VAM Pacer X’s my parents had. Hurricane Gloria and the week-long power outage. Friday night’s Miami Vice. Saturday afternoons spent in the basement playing Atari and watching WWF and NWA. Saturday night’s Golden Girls where the whole family died laughing. Sunday’s Long Island pop station WBLI’s Top Ten countdown on public access television. Our babysitter’s daughter who was the cutest thing of curly black hair, dark eyes, and tall stature who smelled like sparkle and white plush. My bro- and I taking apart our ma’s floral-print couches and making pillow forts out of them. Dad’s in-wall Akai eight-track player and the overhead speakers. Easter’s various assortment of sweet-smelling wax crayons and activity books. Nights spent watching New York Yankee games on PIX, New York Rangers on MSG, Night Flight and Dance Party USA. Family dinner night at Enzo’s in Bay Shore for minestrone, calzones, and newspaper clippings of Italy’s World Cup victories. Assholes in Chams tank-tops smoking in their garages while working on their prized ‘77 Trans Ams. Playing NES all night before getting ready to ride to Staten Island at three in the morning to pick up my dad’s side of the family.

The more I played the more I immersed myself back into familiar territory that I haven’t visited in decades. It’s an absolute rarity when all the right authentic elements that used to be come together as one and re-create a near-perfect rendition of what the Eighties felt like. It’s not just the soundtrack, the manuals and laserdiscs that supplanted the setting, but the actual aesthetic itself. See the decals on the side of the cabinets and the built-in one-of-a-kind joysticks and steering wheels. The amazing control panel artwork. Plenty of CRT monitors and their rasterized graphics, scanlines, ripples, burn-in, and scrambled graphical glitches. Buttons, plenty of buttons of all types. And no more having to bang on the steel coin doors when those quarters got jammed. Not a burn mark in sight and the smell of old wood cabinets filled the room - exactly how I remembered it all.

It was nearing 9PM. The trip back in time was about to end and the mall was finally winding down. I had to have one last game in before having to walk off memory lane and say goodbye. That idiot kid wasn’t there but was replaced by some cute skinny hipster girl punk with pink hair and ladened with piercings, eager to talk to any cliched grown-up punk dad or fading former Gen-X’er wanting to share a story or two about how they missed those simpler days. I’ll never get the spirit and being of the Eighties back, but I no longer miss them now that I have a monthly pilgrimage to Game On. I retire for the night and head out. She unhooks the velvet rope and clears the way for me to leave with a smile.

“Have a good night!” she says. You know I will.

Heart: “Magic Man”

Eddie Money & Ronnie Spector: “Take Me Home Tonight”

Run DMC: “It’s Tricky”

Cutting Crew: “I Just Died In Your Arms Tonight”

Toto: “Africa”

A-Ha: “Take On Me”

Foreigner: “Waiting For A Girl Like You”

Bananarama: “I Heard A Rumor”

Wham: “Wake Me Up Befoe You Go-Go”

Mike & The Mechanics: “Silent Running”

Michael Jackson: “Billie Jean”

Rick Springfield: “Jessie’s Girl”

Bruce Springsteen: “Dancer In The Dark”

Pat Benetar: “Love Is A Battlefield”

J. Geils Band: “Centerfold”

Simple Minds: “Don’t You Forget About Me”

Tommy Tutone: “867-5309 / Jenny”

Cyndi Lauper: “Girls Just Wanna’ Have Fun”

Pointer Sisters: “I’m So Excited”

Starship: “We Built This City”

Steve Winwood: “Higher Love”

Whitney Houston: “I Wanna’ Dance With Somebody”

Survivor: “The Search Is Over”

The Outfields: “I Don’t Wanna’ Lose Your Love Tonight”

Flashdance original motion picture soundtrack

The Romantics: “What I Like About You”

Scorpions: Rock You Like A Hurricane”

Quiet Riot: “Come On (Feel The Noise)”

Pointer Sisters: “I’m So Excited”

Fabulous Thunderbirds: “Tough Enough”

Steve Perry: “Oh Sherrie”

Madonna: “Borderline”

Tiffany: “I Think We’re Alone Now”

Belinda Carlisle: “Mad About You”

Debbie Gibson: “Out Of The Blue”

Phil Collins: “Sssudio”

Lionel Richie: “All Night Long”

RUM DMC & Aerosmith: “Walk This Way”

Rick Astley: “Never Gonna’ Give You Up”

Bananarama: “Cruel Summer”

Cyndi Lauper: “Time After Time”

Kim Carnes: “Bette Davis Eyes”

Sting: “Every Breath You Take”

Heart: “What About Love”

Foreigner: “I Wanna’ Know What Love Is”

Bruce Springsteen: “Jack & Diane”

Mr. Mister: “Take These Broken Wings”

Bangles: “Hazy Shade Of Winter”

Don Henley: “Boys Of Summer”

Dire Straits: “Money For Nothing”

The Cars: “Shake It Up”

Peter Gabriel: “Big Time”

Bon Jovi: “Livin’ On A Prayer”

Allanah Myles: “Black Velvet”

Culture Club: “Karma Chamelion”

Mike & The Mechanics: “All I Need Is A Miracle”

Starship: “Sarah”

Wham: “Wake Me Up (Before You Go Go)”

Billy Ocean: “Caribbean Queen”

[theunstuffedpepper]

2020 in Review..

I wanted to look back on this crazy year and reflect a bit, so I decided to put together a series of photo collages with some highlights from 2020.

In February, before the world shut down, and before we really were aware of Coronavirus, we took our second trip to the BVIs and chartered a sailboat for the week.

COVID happened, and apparently that means we have zero photos from March, April, or May. I transitioned to working from home on March 16th. I got pregnant in April. I found out I was pregnant in May. That was the biggest turning point of this year, hands down.

In June, B and I celebrated 8 years of marriage and my 32nd birthday. We learned how to make crespelles and manicotti from scratch and went fresh fruit picking. Low key, but lovely.

We did so much hiking. Throughout the summer and into the fall, we hiked so many trails within a state park close to home. It was the perfect way to get out of the house, do something active, and also stay safe re: COVID.

In August, we took a trip to Michigan. We outfitted the van with a lofted queen bed and drove around the entire state, camping and exploring (socially distanced). We saw the Great Lakes for the first time. We saw lots of national parks and explored a cave. We got to visit with some friends who live out there. It was wonderful.

More fresh fruit picking! Anything we did outside the house this year was done outdoors, pretty much. For Labor Day, we took a camping trip with a group of friends. We hiked into the park about 2mi and explored the falls, sat by campfires, read books, swung in hammocks, and enjoyed being in the woods.

I watched my body change this year. A LOT! This year has revolved around growing this tiny human and it’s been surreal and awesome, in the true sense of the word.

As the year came to a close, I have been less able to do things like hiking and have instead turned to crocheting as a hobby. I created an Etsy shop and completed some pretty cool projects.

And, last but not least, this fluffy duo brought me a lot of joy this year. Being home with them every day has been a nice change of pace.

There we have it. 2020 was a wild ride. My life has changed in ways I didn’t expect. I’ve learned a lot about my own strength, what motivates me, what is important to me, and I’ve been often reminded of the importance of friends and family, of human relationships. I’ve found this wonderful little tumblr community. Thank you all for sharing in this year with me, cheering me on, and supporting me. Your kindness and friendship is so very appreciated.

Cheers to a bright, joyful, and healthy 2021!

[creepingsharia]

“There Was Blood All Over”: Muslim Persecution of Christians, January 2021

by Raymond Ibrahim

The following are among the abuses inflicted on Christians by Muslims throughout the month of January, 2021:

Attacks on Churches

USA: Arsonists torched an Armenian church in San Francisco in a spike of anti-Armenian hate crimes believed to have been inspired by Armenia’s recent clash with its Muslim neighbors, Azerbaijan and its Turkish supporter.  According to the Jan. 6 report,

In the San Francisco Bay Area alone, there have been four hate crimes committed against the Armenian community over the last six months including a local Armenian School being vandalized with hateful and racist graffiti, which was followed by an arson attack on St. Gregory Armenian Apostolic Church. There are about 2,500 Armenian-Americans living in the San Francisco Bay Area, so these crimes per capita is a very high number given how small the community is. For a region of the country that prides itself on its progressivism, diversity and acceptance of all cultures, these latest attacks should be a warning sign that hate and violence can rear their ugly heads irrespective of where you may live….  The vandals at the Armenian School in San Francisco spray-painted the colors of the Azerbaijan flag and used threatening language in Azerbaijani. In many ways, these latest hate crimes, coupled with the resurgence of hostilities in the South Caucasus, are a continuation of the Armenian Genocide that is now finding its way to the San Francisco Bay Area.  It is often said that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. We are clearly seeing these prophetic words come to life for Armenians in the San Francisco Bay Area who have fought for decades for recognition of the Armenian Genocide. As victims of oppression, Armenians see these latest attacks as an extension of Turkey and Azerbaijan’s denial of the 1915 Armenian Genocide and a threat to their very existence.

Sweden: Twice over the course of four days, an 800-year-old church in Stockholm was firebombed.  First, on Sunday, Jan. 24, 2021, several Molotov cocktails were hurled at the twelfth century Spånga church, which is located in a Muslim majority area.  According to the church’s pastor, “the alarm was triggered when a window was smashed and flammable liquid thrown at the front gate and one of the windows. However, the fire was quickly put out by the police, who used a powder extinguisher.”  The same church had been fire-bombed just four days earlier, on Jan. 20, 2021: two explosives were hurled at and smashed through the church windows, and another was lobbed at the church gate.  Moreover, according to one report,

Spånga parish has been subjected to attacks on several previous occasions. In December 2018, an explosive device was detonated in the same parish. No one was convicted for the blast.

Hailing from the 12th century, the Spånga Church is one of the oldest in the Swedish capital. It is located on the outskirts of Tensta and is flanked by Rinkeby, both notorious for their heavy presence of immigrants (about 90 percent of the population)… Both areas are dominated by immigrants from Muslim countries and are formally classified as “particularly vulnerable” (which many consider to be a palatable euphemism for a “no-go zone”) due to failed integration and major problems including unemployment, rampant crime and Islamic extremism.

Attacks against churches have become a familiar sight in Sweden. Last year alone, a number of churches, mostly those in troubled suburban [i.e., heavily Muslim migrant] areas, were subjected to various types of attacks and vandalism, including those in Gottsunda, Uppsala and Rosengård, Malmö.

Philippines:   An Islamic group consisting primarily of teenage Muslims opened fire on a church.  According to the Jan. 8 report,

the Islamic State-linked Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters [BIFF], a terrorist group based in the southern Philippines, attacked a parish church after conducting a raid on the town’s military and police outposts. After a 15-minute firefight, both the church building and a statue of the patron saint bore bullet holes.  Police and military authorities said the BIFF had also plotted to set ablaze Sta. Teresita parish church and the church-run Notre Dame of Dulawan high school in the area. However, their attempt to burn the two church facilities was foiled by policemen and soldiers.

BIFF is an Islamic separatist organization operating in the Philippines; it swore allegiance to the Islamic State in 2014.  Right before the church attack, dozens of gunmen from the Islamic group attacked the local police station and burned a police vehicle parked outside.  The police attack came after two men connected with the group were arrested and is seen as a reprisal attack against police.  Muslim terrorism has been on the rise in the Philippines, the population of which is 86% Christian.   According to the report,

In August [2020], pro-ISIS terrorists blew themselves up in attacks that killed at least 15 people … and injured 80 others in the city of Jolo … in the far south of the country, whose population is majority Roman Catholic.

In 2019, terrorists set off two explosive devices at the Our Lady of Mount Carmel Cathedral, also known as the Jolo Cathedral, in the Mindanao region. The attack resulted in approximately 100 injuries and about 20 dead.

In August 2019, pastor Ernesto Javier Estrella of the United Church of Christ in Antipas, Cotabato Province, was shot and killed on the Island of Mindanao.

In June 2018, Catholic priest Richmond Nilo was gunned down in a chapel in Zaragoza town in Nueva Ecija province, at the altar where he was preparing to celebrate mass.

Slaughter of Christians

Pakistan:  The bloated bodies of two Christian sisters, who had long rebuffed the advances of their Muslim employers, were found in a sewer in January 2021. Earlier, on November 26, the sisters, Sajida (28) and Abida (26), who were both married and had children, were reported as missing. The two Muslim men for whom they worked had regularly pressured them to convert to Islam and marry them. Even though the young women “made it clear that they were Christian and married, the men threatened them and kept harassing the sisters.”  Forty days after they were reported missing, on January 4, 2021, their decomposed bodies were discovered. Their Muslim supervisors, during their interrogation, “confessed that they had abducted the sisters,” said Sadija’s husband; “and after keeping them hostage for a few days for satisfying their lust, had slit their throats and thrown their bodies into the drain.” The widower described the families’ ordeal:

When police informed us that they had identified the two bodies as those of our loved ones, it seemed that our entire world had come crumbling down…. I still cannot fathom the site [sic] of seeing my wife’s decomposed body.

Discussing this case, Nasir Saeed, Director of the Centre for Legal Aid Assistance and Settlement in the UK, said,

The killing of Abida and Sajida in such a merciless way is not an isolated case, but the killing, rape and forced conversion of Christian girls have become an everyday matter and the government has denied this and therefore is doing nothing to stop the ongoing persecution of Christians. Unfortunately, such cases happen very often in the country, and nobody pays any attention – even the national media – as Christians are considered inferior and their lives worthless.

Nigeria:  On Jan. 16, Muslim Fulani herdsmen opened fire on and killed Dr. Amos Arijesuyo, pastor of Christ Apostolic Church and a highly respected professor at the Federal University of Technology.  “The university condemns in the strongest terms this senseless attack that has led to the untimely death of an erudite university administrator and counselor par excellence,” the university said in a statement. “Dr. Arijesuyo’s death is a big loss to FUTA, the academic community in Nigeria and beyond. It is a death that should not have happened in the first place…. Our prayers and thoughts are with the wife, children and family members of our departed colleague at this difficult period of unquantifiable grief.”

In the two weeks before this murder, Muslim Fulani herdsmen killed 26 more people and wounded three in Christian majority regions.  A separate report appearing in mid-January revealed that “More Christians are murdered for their faith in Nigeria than in any other country.”

Finally, in a speech released in January, Abubakar Shekau, the leader of the Islamic terror group Boko Haram, made clear that, despite Western claims that his organization is motivated by secular interests, religion colors everything. According to the Jan. 28 report, Shekau called on the new Chief of Defense Staff, Lt. General Lucky Irabor, a Christian, to “repent and convert to Islam.”  He also told the new Chief of Army staff, Major General Ibrahim Attahiru, that, by going against Boko Haram, his behavior is “un-Islamic” and “he is no longer regarded as a Muslim.”

Attacks on Apostates and Evangelists

Uganda: A Muslim man beat his 13-week-pregnant wife, causing her to miscarriage, after he learned that she had converted to Christianity.  On Jan. 13, Mansitula Buliro, the 45-year-old woman in question and mother of seven, was preparing for Muslim evening prayers with her husband when she began to have Christian visions.  On the following day she secretly visited a Christian neighbor, prayed with her, and put her faith in Christ. Right before she left, a Muslim man knocked on the Christian neighbor’s door and said, “Mansitula, I thought you were a Muslim—how come I heard prayers mentioning the name of Issa [Jesus]?”  Then, when Mansitula returned home her husband informed her that he had been told that she had become Christian.  “I kept quiet,” Mansitula later explained in an interview:

My husband started slapping and kicking me indiscriminately. I then fell down. He went inside the house and came back with a knife and started cutting my mouth, saying, ‘Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar [jihadist slogan “Allah is greater”], I am punishing you to not speak about Yeshua [Jesus] in my house. This is a Muslim home.’

Her screaming caused her two youngest children (six and eight) also to start screaming, prompting neighbors to rush and stop the attack.   “There was blood all over from my mouth,” Mansitula said. “My in-laws arrived, and in their presence my husband pronounced divorce: ‘Today you are no longer my wife. I have divorced you. Leave my house, or I will kill you.’”  A neighbor took her by motorcycle to a nearby hospital.  “I was examined, and they found that my fetus had been affected, and after four days I had a miscarriage….  It is now very difficult to reunite with my family. I am now Christian, and I have decided for Issa’s cause.”

Separately, on Dec. 27, around 7 pm, eight Muslims ambushed and beat Pastor Moses Nabwana and his wife, a mother of eight, as they were walking home from a church function: “They began by beating my husband, hitting him with sticks and blunt objects on the head, the back, his belly and chest,” Naura, his wife, said. “I made a loud alarm, and one of the attackers hit me with blows and a stick that affected my chest, back and broke my hand.”  Christian neighbors rushed to their cries, prompting the assailants to flee.  Due to the severe injuries they sustained, the wife was hospitalized for five days and her husband, Pastor Moses, was hospitalized for several more days.  The assault came after area Muslims learned that an imam had converted to Christianity and joined their church; mosque leaders incited the attack.  On that same night, “area Muslims demolished the roof, windows, doors and other parts of the[ir] church building that has a capacity for 500 people, leaving a heap of broken debris… Chairs, benches, musical instruments, amplifiers and other items were destroyed.”

Then, around 4:30 am on Sunday, Jan. 24, while the pastor was still recovering at the hospital, three Muslims broke into their home, again beating his wife, Naura—who was still recovering from her first beating—as well as two of their eight children.  “I heard loud noises and plates being broken,” Naura recalled. “The children and I woke up.  The attackers had broken the door and entered in. One started strangling me, while another threw one of my daughters outside through the window and broke the skin on her leg.”   The Muslims fled before inflicting more damage once they learned that her brother-in-law and his family were rushing over: “The assailants left behind a Somali sword,” she said, “which I think they possibly had planned to use to rape and then kill me.”  Naura’s 10 year-old daughter suffered a deep cut on her knee, and her 12-year-old daughter suffered an eye injury.  Atop all the injuries she suffered from her first beating, Naura’s neck was injured: “I am still in great pain, and the doctor has recommended that my uterus, which is seriously damaged, needs to be removed,” she said. “This will need a big amount of money.”  According to a church leader who visited Naura and her family in their thatched-roof dwelling the day after the attack, “She is still in pain and needs basic assistance in the absence of the husband, the bread-winner.”

Iran: On Jan. 18, the Islamic Republic’s “morality police” arrested Fatemeh (Mary) Mohammadi, a 22-year-old convert to Christianity and human rights activist, on the accusation that “her trousers were too tight, her headscarf was not correctly adjusted, and [that] she should not be wearing an unbuttoned coat.” This is the third time officials arrest Mary.  She did six months of prison time, after her first arrest, for being a member of a house church—which the regime recently labeled as “enemy groups” belonging to a “Zionist” cult; she also spent a brief time in jail after participating in a peaceful protest in April 2020.   Officials have also pressured her employer, whom she always had a good relationship with, to prevent her from returning to work as a gymnastics instructor; and she was kicked out of her university on the eve of her exams.  Reflecting on her travails, Mary wrote that:

Everything is affected…  Your work, income, social status, identity, mental health, satisfaction with yourself, your life, your place in society, your independence….  And as a woman it’s even harder to remain patient and endure, in a society so opposed to women and femininity, though crying out for them both.

Attacks on Christian ‘Blasphemers’ in Pakistan

Pakistan:  On Jan. 28, hospital employees slapped and beat a Christian nurse who had worked there for nine years, after a Muslim nurse told them that she had said “only Jesus is the true Savior and that Muhammad has no relevance.”  A hospital member recorded and loaded a video of the attack on Tabeeta Nazir Gill, a 42-year-old Catholic gospel singer.  It shows the woman surrounded by a throng of angry Muslims who slap her and demand she “confess your crime in writing.” “I swear to God I haven’t said anything against the prophet [Muhammad],” the Christian woman insists in the video. “They are trying to trap me in a fake charge.”   “Fortunately, someone called the police, and they promptly arrived on the scene and saved her life,” Pastor Eric Sahotra later explained. After questioning the accused, police concluded, based also on the testimony of other co-workers, that “A Muslim colleague made the false accusation due to a personal grudge,” continued the pastor:

Other hospital employees were misled into believing the allegation, so they also attacked Tabeeta….  News of the incident spread quickly through the social media, raising fears of mob violence outside the hospital and other areas.

A Muslim mob later descended on and besieged the police station; this prompted police to register a First Information Report against Gill under Section 295-C of Pakistan’s blasphemy statues—which calls for the maximum death penalty for anyone who verbally insults Islam’s prophet, Muhammad.  Last reported, the woman’s two young children were “in a state of shock since the time they saw the graphic video of their mother’s beating,” said the pastor.  No legal action was taken against the Muslim nurse who fabricated the blasphemy accusation to instigate her coreligionists.   The report adds that,

In Pakistan, false accusations of blasphemy are common and often motivated by personal vendettas or religious hatred. Accusations are highly inflammatory and have the potential to spark mob lynchings, vigilante murders and mass protests. Many of those accused of blasphemy never reach the courtroom; violence has killed 62 accused people since 1990, with few prosecutions.

Separately, hundreds of Muslims descended on the village of a 25-year-old Christian man, and threatened to behead him and torch his and adjoining homes, soon after it became known that he had shared a Facebook post critical of Muhammad.  According to the Jan. 5 report, on first learning that Muslims were angry, Raja Warris apologized, pointing out that he had only shared the post “for academic understanding between Christians and Muslims and did not mean to offend any Muslims.”  The matter seemed to be closed after that; but then, and in the words of Rev. Ayub Gujjar, vice moderator of the Raiwind Diocese of the Church of Pakistan,

[W]e were informed by our congregation members in Charar that a huge mob had gathered in the locality on the call of a cleric affiliated with the extremist religio-political outfit, Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan [TLP], and were demanding the beheading of the catechist.  Fearing violence, hundreds of Christian residents fled their homes while around 400 anti-riot policemen were deployed in the area to thwart violence.

Rev. Gujjar and other Christian leaders rushed to the police station, which was quickly surrounded by Muslims who “chanted slogans against Christians,” prompting police to insist that Warris be handed over.  Police then registered a First Information Report under Section 295-A and Section 298-A of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, which call for up to 10 years imprisonment for blasphemers, and then showed it to the mob leaders, at which point they called off the siege and dispersed.  Discussing this incident, Bishop of Raiwind Diocese Azad Marshall said that “Warris is an educated youth who loves to serve God.”  Even so,

Christians especially need to be more careful in sharing content, because any faith-based post could be used to instigate violence against the community…  We need to understand that Islamic religious sentiments run high in our country, therefore it’s important to carefully analyze the content before posting it online.

General Hostility for Christians and Christianity

Pakistan: On Jan. 5, a Muslim man severely beat his Christian employee because he had taken leave to attend a Christmas Day prayer service.   Even though Ansar Masih had compensated for the missed day of work by working on the following Sunday, his manager was abusive.  “When I argued with him, he called four other staffers to teach me a lesson for going to church and arguing with him,” Masih later explained. “They abused Christians for their religious practices and said derogatory words when they came to know that I was busy praying at the church.”  The Christian man sustained several injuries during the assault and was taken to a local hospital.  According to the report, as often happens in such cases,

Police officials and the men that assaulted Masih are now putting pressure on his family to settle the matter out of court. Masih has submitted an application to police regarding the incident, but not action has been taken by officers against Masih’s assailants.

Austria: According to a Jan. 5 report, approximately 40 Muslim migrants rioted and burned down a Christmas tree in Favoriten.  On coming to extinguish the large tree, the fire brigade heard one of the migrants yelling: “A Christmas tree has no place in a Muslim district,” even as the raging mob pelted the emergency service officials with projectiles to screams of “Allahu Akbar.”

Raymond Ibrahim, author of Crucified Again and Sword and Scimitar, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and a Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

About this Series

The persecution of Christians in the Islamic world has become endemic.   Accordingly, “Muslim Persecution of Christians” was developed in 2011 to collate some—by no means all—of the instances of persecution that occur or are reported each month. It serves two purposes:

1)          To document that which the mainstream media does not: the habitual, if not chronic, persecution of Christians.

2)          To show that such persecution is not “random,” but systematic and interrelated—that it is rooted in a worldview inspired by Islamic Sharia.

Watch video below as Ibrahim describes his monthly report.

[phantastus]

CW: Suicide. Please scroll past if you need to.

It's been a week since I got the news, and needless to say it's been sinking in and I haven't really been able to muster words appropriate for talking about it. I don't really -want- to talk about it, actually. I'm already struggling not to think back on all the ways I was too self-centered, all the opportunities to be a better friend that I let slip past-- and I feel like talking too much will make it about me, and it shouldn't be about me.

Regardless, I do have to talk about it a little, because sometimes the only thing standing between someone and something like this is knowing what happens afterward.

On December 27th, a friend I'd lost touch with messaged me on Skype to catch up. 

Both being weird (not cool-weird, just weird-weird) artistic loners who barely talked to anybody, we originally met in 8th grade when an over-invested school counselor arbitrarily picked me to be some sort of mediator between them and their bully (maybe because I -also- was awkward and had no friends? Who knows). We both agreed that lady was nuts, but I guess it worked, because we wound up staying friends all the way through that summer, then high school, then college. I spent most of my teenage weekends at their house, playing video games, eating barbeque, and doing weird art kid things like finding out what happens when you microwave a banana, and planning to crash prom by running through the dance floor in fullbody gorilla costumes (we didn't, but it was fun to think about). 

After college, that more or less stayed the same-- except now we could drive, and now we were dealing with the reality of being queer, mentally ill, and stuck in a smallish not-particularly-accepting town without much clue of where to go from here. We marathoned horror movies, ate ice cream in my parked car at night and talked about depression and gender, and when I had pneumonia, they showed up at my door with a basket of still-warm banana bread and an HP Lovecraft anthology.

We both loved Silent Hill. There’s even a photo of them somewhere on this blog, from back when we made that SH2 butter cake recipe that went around. They crocheted me a pillow with the Halo of the Sun on it. My birthday/Christmas gifts were never that thoughtful-- I was and still am a procrastinatory space cadet and would usually just stop at the store and grab a shitton of candy and whatever the goofiest cat-related object that caught my eye was.

Then I moved out of state, and got really depressed, and didn't call or visit for years.

I'd already been beating myself up about not being in touch, and they had little to no online presence that I could easily hunt down-- so I was elated to see the message pop up. We talked briefly-- pretty much just enough to tell them a little about what I'd been up to, and express happiness at hearing from each other. They admitted they weren't in a good place, but hey, after 2020, who was? I was just happy to talk to them again.

They took their own life on January 22nd, 2021, less than a month later.

They're gone, and I can't fucking describe what this feels like. I wish I hadn't talked about myself so much when they asked. I wish I'd told them that after COVID they should come up and visit me in Maine and that I couldn't wait to see them in person again. I wish I'd told them how much they meant to me and how often I still think about them. I wish I'd found out sooner than three fucking months after it happened. I wish I'd just fucking called them instead of waiting for the little online indicator bubble on skype to turn green.

This isn't supposed to be a sermon to guilt-trip readers into reaching out to their friends ~before it's too late~-- I know it's hard and I know we've all been through so much in this past year alone, that isolation compounds and builds and can feel impossible to wade out from.

This is just a heartfelt plea to everyone else who feels like their life doesn't matter, or that everyone around them will "get over it": please stay. I know it hurts. I know it feels unbearable. I know the world is profoundly fucked up and feels like it can only get moreso from here. I wouldn't wish what you're going through on my worst enemy, and I know because I've been there too. But please stay.

https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/

https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/talk-to-someone-now/

https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/help-yourself/

https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/suicide-prevention/index.shtml

(If you're afraid of having the police called on you or of talking on the phone in general, anything that can get you through one second at a time is worth it. For me, it was listening to someone narrate "creepypastas" while drawing those Gravity chapter summary comics. It sounds stupid but "NES Godzilla" and drawing cartoon James Sunderland being bullied probably saved my fucking life.)

And, okay, yes: if you can, please reach out. To friends, to family, to random acquaintances you remember, to anyone. No guilt-tripping intended, I promise. It just matters, a lot. Maybe more right now in this climate than anytime else.

If I haven't talked to you in years, please know that I probably remember you, that I probably still cringe thinking about some embarrassing thing I did in front of you, that I probably still wonder how you're doing. And, if I don’t even know you at all: I hope that you're okay. I hope that we'll all be okay.

I don't have an eloquent way to end this post.

My friend is gone and I miss them and this hurts, so much.

[route22ny]

For the first time in history, Coney Island has lost an entire season. As Labor Day weekend arrived and faded, amusements remained shuttered and people began wondering aloud if the neighborhood can recover. The pandemic is testing the will and finances of even the most dedicated businesses and residents. This year was expected to be the greatest of this century, with important anniversaries, exciting events, and new attractions. None of this happened. But Coney Island has been tested before. Pestilence, war, crime, and weather have challenged the island, and each time it has clawed its way back. Coney had barely begun life as a resort in the early 1800s when its remote location made it a prime candidate for New York's quarantine station. Yellow fever and cholera epidemics had swept through New York, and the city sought to build a massive facility that would house immigrants with infectious diseases for 40 days. Coney was on the short list in the 1850s but it turned out that the location was not remote enough. Instead, the station opened on two smaller islands, Hoffman and Swinburne, built from landfill in the waters just west of Coney Island. In the 1870s, long before amusement parks arrived, Coney Island became a refuge for poor children suffering from tuberculosis and other diseases. The Coney Island History Project's 2019 exhibit "Salvation by the Sea" documented and highlighted the work of the Children's Aid Societies and the other shorefront summer homes built along the beach. These charitable homes and hospitals, supported by New York's wealthiest residents, became the island's largest landowners and operated until construction of the Boardwalk forced them out. The societies saved thousands of young lives with the "Fresh Air Cure," and trained generations of immigrant mothers in proper hygiene and child rearing that prevented disease in New York's tenements. Malaria was the culprit at Coney Island in 1903, when disease-carrying mosquitoes were found in foul standing water caused by the illegal filling and dumping along Coney Island Creek and the Brighton race track. The entire island was doused and sprayed with noxious oils, from one end to the other, in an attempt eradicate the problem. This created an ugly landscape and did little to solve the problem. A polio epidemic hit New York hard in 1916, and parents with children were told to avoid amusement parks, swimming pools, and beaches. But the disease was already widespread, and many children suffered the horrifying effects of infantile paralysis before a vaccine was found. Coney Island remained open to the public throughout 1916, but few children were seen at the beach and amusements that year. The influenza epidemic of 1918 followed the polio epidemic, hitting its peak during the fall and winter of 1919, the off-season, when Coney Island's rides and amusements were already closed and crowds were absent. Coney Island escaped the worst effects of the deadly 1918 flu. Rationing of oil, metal, and rubber during Word War II made ride maintenance difficult, but Coney Island operators were recyclers and experts at repurposing. Nothing was ever discarded, and the rides continued full blast during the war. The Island's bright lights were "blued out," dimmed, or covered with curtains that faced the ocean side. Luna Park was lit with dim but colorful Japanese lanterns. Coney was considered important for the morale of soldiers on leave, or who were heading overseas and needed a last celebration. The "Underwood Hotel" below the boardwalk was livelier than ever during the war years, filled with romantic couples saying a last goodbye. Social distancing in Coney Island has a more recent precedent. Street crime was out of control in the mid 1960s, and robbing the exposed ticket booths at rides became the rage for gangs of young thugs. Plexiglas shields and elaborate wire cages soon surrounded all booths and entrances to rides, keeping the public at a distance and protecting operators and patrons from harm. Super Storm Sandy arrived in late 2012 as the season ended. It dealt a devastating blow, but Coney Island's amusements had five months to make repairs before reopening in March 2013. This recovery led to a belief that all obstacles could be overcome. But this year is unlike any other. Coney Island is being tested as never before. The Coney Island History Project and the Vourderis family of the Wonder Wheel had planned to make this centennial season unforgettable, and it turned out that it was, but for reasons that no one could ever have imagined. Plans for the Centennial celebration of Deno's Wonder Wheel included special events like Broadway musical performers on the park's newly purchased property and our 9th annual Coney Island History Day on the Boardwalk; new and renovated rides, attractions, signage, and murals; and a splendidly refurbished Wonder Wheel. My new book, Coney Island's Wonder Wheel Park, and an accompanying exhibit at the History Project would pay tribute to the history of Coney Island's greatest and oldest continuously operating attraction. I spent the summer of 2019 researching the history of the Wonder Wheel on a tight publishing deadline so that it would come out in time for Memorial Day. The research was all primary source and I tracked down family members of the Wheel's original designers and operators whose stories had never been told. Many were planning to come to the Memorial Day celebration, including the 95-year-old daughter of Charles Hermann, the Wheel's creator. The reality of how this season would turn out began to sink in during early spring. "No opening for Palm Sunday? Maybe by Easter Sunday? Delayed until Memorial Day? Of course we'll open by July 4!" The season quietly disintegrated into despair and confusion. A Labor Day Weekend like no other in history came and went. Due to the pandemic, the Coney Island History Project suspended walking tours, events at schools and senior centers, in-person oral history interviews and the exhibition center season. Starting in March, our staff transitioned to recording oral histories via phone and Skype and creating new virtual programming including podcasts and videos. Our online oral history archive was featured in the NY Times, Time Out NY and Curbed New York as a cure for loneliness, a way to lose yourself in fascinating stories from the past, and visit Coney from afar. Amusement parks don’t have the option of transitioning to virtual programming but Deno’s Wonder Wheel is an outdoor ride with 24 open-air cars spaced 15 feet apart. It was designed for social distancing and park owners made every effort to provide a safe space for visitors. Masks, Plexiglas, distancing markers, sanitizer stations were all in place, yet the Wheel and the park's other rides remained silent and still due to New York State executive order. And now, as the season comes to a close, we can just hope for a better, safer, and much happier 2021. We will survive.

(The author, Charles Denson, is director of the Coney Island History Project)

[animeraider]

I get a lot of flack from anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, and other fuckwits about my words on the COVID-19 Pandemic and in particular the response to it in the US. I pull no punches about it, I believe firmly that the previous administration and ANYONE who enables them and their policies are complicit in the deaths of all of these people. They belong in prison.

I'm not going to fucking apologize for believing that. The fault for all of this belongs directly in the laps of the Republican Party. If you believe otherwise, you're WRONG. I can bring the receipts.

I've been pretty isolated during all of this. I went into lockdown on March 11, 2020 and I'm technically still there. I now work from home, and even though I've been fully vaccinated for two months now I still go out masked. I may never eat at a buffet again. Sorry Sizzler, but I've learned how to make your cheese bread.

I ripped a tendon in my left knee in May of 2020. I had to go to the hospital, but I was out in a few hours with crutches. I would joke with people that I'm now out of hinged joints to break.

But in July my cough returned with an attitude, and I picked up an infection. Not Covid, but it all made me pretty sick. So that you understand, I have what's called "Chronic Cough Syndrome". I've had it since I was 8. No one knows the cause or the cure. Believe me, we've looked. I just start coughing, and after a few months, I stop. It can be treated but I just have to live with it until someone comes up with something we haven't tried before.

Doctors have gotten into fistfights over whether or not I have Asthma. I don't, but sometimes Asthma medications work for a bit. To be honest, I've had this for so long that sometimes I don't even notice when I cough. It's just part of the wonder of being me.

I took the Pandemic seriously. I stayed home, I socially distanced, I got real familiar with teams, bluejeans, and zoom. I did a LOT of cooking. Started making bread. Watched the country fall apart at the seams and commented on it from my own little pocket of safety. I contributed a new song to a fund-raising effort for nurses. I did my part to stay safe, but my cough had other ideas.

Anyway, this time my coughing got pretty severe and I finally agreed to go to the hospital. As stated above, turns out I had picked up an infection. Combine that with my cough and I showed all of the symptoms of a severe case of COVID-19.

I'd been careful, but the hospital staff were all very cross with me. If I had COVID, I just exposed all of them, and the main nurse who tended to me had already been quarantined that same month for a different exposure. When the test came back negative the tension in the emergency ward calmed down immensely and everyone treated me kindly and professionally - I was a patient with something they knew what to do with and didn't bring plague into their house.

I spent 4 days in the hospital but the worst part, scariest part, was the wait to move from the Emergency Room to a private room. I came to the hospital in the late afternoon. I finally got my bed nearly 12 hours later, a good 8 hours after my test for COVID had come back negative.

I needed to be hospitalized, and needed a bed, and there weren't any. I had to wait for someone to either be discharged or to die.

I got my bed at 4 in the morning. Someone had died. Musical chairs was played and I was finally moved out of the Emergency Room.

It's really hard to understand how sobering that is without experiencing it. Many years ago, before we even knew about AIDS, I had the honor of donating blood and seeing it get used in a surgery mere minutes later. I became a regular blood donor at that moment - I felt so happy and alive that my blood had been used to save a life mere minutes after I had donated it (I'm O Negative) that I became a life-long believer. I donated every time I was eligible from that moment forward until a blood infection disqualified me from ever donating again 20 years later.

This was just the opposite. The guy with a cough and a treatable infection had to wait for someone on a ventilator to stop breathing. Someone with COVID died so that I could get a bed. They never knew this had happened, and I never learned who they were. Some random person died so that I could get better.

Try sleeping after that realization hits you. I couldn't. I barely slept the entire time I was there.

Despite the fact that I wasn't in the "COVID Ward" I got to see the effects first-hand. The newly disinfected bed and room I had was previously occupied by someone moved up to the Covid Ward. They in turn had moved up there after a ventilator was taken away from a patient who died. Staff rotated through different wards on different shifts. My first nurse was rotated into the Covid Ward. My next day nurse had just rotated out. I have never in my life seen a group of people look so haunted by their day to day lives.

A well-liked member of their staff was on a ventilator. So was a priest who worked in the hospital. I had never seen in person a "Code Blue". There were six of them my first day. There is also a "Code Black". It's much worse.

My wife and daughters weren't allowed to visit me. When your daily soundtrack is nothing but medical staff talking about the good and the bad, terrible television and the moaning/screaming of your new neighbors getting that visit from family is a huge stress relief. It wasn't available this time. I didn't see my family again until I was discharged. There was no outside world.

I admit that being in hospital during all of this, even though I myself didn't have COVID, shook me. When you're in hospital mostly what you deal with is yourself and your own condition, and getting the hell out of there as soon as you can. This time I was not only aware of the people around me, their conditions, their suffering and their recoveries, but I was also aware that a whole section of the building was dedicated to people who were going to die, and that the people who were treating me were also treating them.

This was as close as I got to the Pandemic. When I got home I fucking STAYED THERE. I went to the grocery store and the pharmacy and that was it. That was life for MONTHS.

Our grocery store was fantastic - they enforced social distancing and masks with gusto. They cleaned EVERYTHING. It had been a 24 hour store but converted to shorter hours so that the down time could be spent cleaning. Aisles were made one-way.

The first time I saw someone in the parking lot without a mask I have to admit that I lost it. I screamed at them (a white couple about my age), "PUT YOUR FUCKING MASKS ON YOU FUCKING MORONS!" Understand, I'm a fairly large man with a deep voice and have been a professional singer for decades and have played sax even longer. I'm loud and imposing. Everyone within 50 feet turned and stared at the couple. Okay, me first then the couple.

It's possible they didn't speak English. They exchanged a few words in Russian to each other and then masked up.

I've been known to let my temper show. I try not to because I know it's there and I know it's terrible. I've worked for decades to keep it in check and I just let it all out, screaming at a couple of rando Karens 20 feet away from anyone else who hadn't put their masks on yet. I had to acknowledge that this affected me profoundly. I'm dealing with that.

I've lost friends to COVID. One of my neighbors spent almost 3 months on a ventilator and survived it. Some of my friends have lost family. It hurts. It all hurts. It has changed me.

Some of you have noticed that I've been pretty productive in 2021 in terms of music, after not releasing material for over a decade. This whole experience has changed me, changed my perspective. I was already an angry liberal but I'm far angrier and much more liberal now than I was. The album I worked on forever essentially no longer exists. The person I am now couldn't make that album. I am excising demons and allowing the new to come in and take its place.

And you know what, so far, I'm okay. I'm still here. I intend to stay. In fact, what I intend to be the first song from my next album in its own way deals with the fact that I don't understand depression - I've never experienced it.

But I have to admit that I'm grateful to have family and friends in my life who accept me as I am, who provide unconditional love and support and I hope I do for them. I have the occasional doubt that I'm as good a friend/family member as I can be. I can be an ass sometimes.

(A couple of my long-time friends have just done spit-takes. "Sometimes????")

Because the scariest thing about what we've all been through - what I've been through - is that we have changed so much that I'm not sure that the people who know me best would be my friends if they met me as the person I am now. I am changed.

And the odds are pretty good that you have too. This is something we're all going to need to deal with, or we're lost.

Please, don't be lost.

And because it still needs doing, because the pandemic is still going strong as ever among the anti-vaxxers, the science deniers and the Republicans, please support our nurses. Here's the album I'm on that is still to this day, long after falling off the charts, raising money for them:

[gonebethebirds]

10 Year Look-Back

1 / 4 / 22

2021 (Age: 29) 

COVID vaccines finally became available.

Carina & I went ocean kayaking in Laguna for her birthday.

In April, for Jesse's birthday, we hiked in Glendora and hung out in his backyard, swimming and having fun with him, Katie, and Anu and Anisha too.

Carina and I got married!! on 5/1/21 (on our 5 year anniversary).

In late May we celebrated our elopement with family on multiple occasions, since everyone had been vaccinated.

In early July, Jimmy & Amber came to visit (Jimmy's 2nd time visiting me in Laguna, 4th time visiting me in SoCal overall). We went and saw Black Widow with them.

Uncle Kim passed away in early July. Dad, Jenn and I flew out for his funeral. It was our first time seeing Massillon family in 18 months.

In mid July we went to Santa Barbara for the weekend, and hung out with Jesse, Katie, Anu, Anisha, Justin and Emily.

In late July/early August, Jesse and I went to Zion again (now round 10) and jet-ski'd at Sand Hollow State Park. We also spent a night in Vegas.

Carina was diagnosed with MS in early August.

On August 21st we spent a day in Malibu with Gal and Parthiv.

In late August we went to Big Bear with Jesse, Katie, Anu, Anisha, Justin and Emily. We brought the dogs, got out on the water in a boat rental, and stayed in a super nice cabin.

In early October I went to visit Giana in Seattle. It was a super fun trip. We also spent a day in Vancouver with Lauren which was awesome. It had been 2 years, 3 months since I had seen Giana. It had been 1 year, 9 months since I had seen Lauren. Stupid COVID.

Jenn announced her third pregnancy. 

Around Nov 7th Carina & I went to Borrego with her family to stay at Jon-Jon's new house. That was a fun weekend.

Jessica Chan moved to Laguna only a few houses away from us.

We went to Ohio for Christmas after skipping 2020 due to COVID. Dad couldn't come due to being sick which we later found out were blood clots.

COVID-19 got even worse (record high numbers by Christmas/ New Year's Eve).

We spent NYE at Jesse & Katie's house in Glendora with the dogs.  

7 Trips:

July (3): Ohio for Kim’s funeral. Santa Barbara weekend. Zion. 

August (1): Big Bear round 5, delayed from 2020. 

October (1): Seattle & Vancouver with Giana and Lauren. 

November (1): Borrego Springs weekend. 

December (1): Massillon for Christmas! 

2020 (Age: 28) 

I spent my 28th birthday in the bay with Carina & friends (Brian, Jimmy, Jessie Campos, Gal, others). We spent a day in HMB with Lauren too.

I worked my final Grammys party at MSK.

COVID-19 exploded into the US and changed life as we knew it.

On the same day that COVID was declared a national emergency, Carina left for her bachelorette weekend in the bay and Jesse and I went to Sequoia where we hiked in the snow. It was super gorgeous.

Westin was born on 4/3/20.

Jesse & Katie moved to Glendora.

There were really, really bad fires.

I worked my last day at MSK on 10/30/20.

Dad moved to Southern California in October/November.

I started at Villa on 11/9/20.

4 Trips:

January (1): Home for my birthday. It was a really fun trip. Got to see LOTS of friends (Brian, Jimmy, Lauren, Nicole Leclaire, Jessie, Chris Tham) and go to HMB, the city, boat rides, Rickshaw, etc. It was really a “home-run” kind of weekend. Fitting too because I didn’t know it would be my 3rd-to-last weekend ever with having a home in the bay. 

March (1): Sequoia National Park with Jesse while Carina was on her Bachelorette trip to Napa. Ironically, this is the weekend that things started to get really crazy with COVID. Sequoia was gorgeous though, covered in snow once we got in far enough. For sure one of our most gorgeous NP trips/hikes.

June (1): the bay for Father’s Day. 

October (1): the bay to pack up the house and move Dad down to SoCal. 

2019 (Age: 27) 

Carina & I got engaged on January 1st in Chicago.

I spent my 27th birthday with my family in Laguna (while also celebrating our engagement).

I went to Atlanta for LMA in April.

Sabrina left MSK in April.

We had Jesse's bachelor party in Zion & Vegas in April.

Endgame came out (which we saw while on Jesse's bachelor party trip).

Jesse & Katie's wedding was in Mexico at the end of May.

Brian & Monique came to visit for the 4th of July. We had people over, and there was an earthquake around that time as well.

Carina & I went to Singapore & Bali at the end of July.

Lauren and I ran the Golden Gate on 9/14/19.

My dad visited SoCal in October. 

Jesse, Anu and I went to Pinnacles National Park in mid-November.

Lauren and I met up for brunch in Oceanside in mid-November.

We had Carina's family over for Thanksgiving. We hosted. It was super cold and rainy. I loved it.

Carina came to Massillon for Christmas for the first time.

News started breaking of COVID-19 in China, though it wasn't of concern in the US yet.

We celebrated NYE in Long Beach on the Queen Mary with Jesse and Katie. We got a hotel room for the night. It was super fun.

12 Trips:

January (1): Chicago with Carina for New Year’s! GOT ENGAGED!!

February (1): New York for work right after Grammys, stayed a couple extra days as Carina was supposed to join but couldn’t due to flight troubles.

April (3): Atlanta for LMA, annual Big Bear trip for Jesse’s birthday, then Jesse’s bachelor party trip at the end of the month which was in Zion then Vegas.

May (2): Home at the beginning of the month to visit Dad, then Ensenada last weekend for Jesse and Katie’s wedding!

June (1): Home at the end of the month with Carina, saw lots of friends.

July (1): Singapore and Bali at the end of the month with Carina! First trip to Asia! Amazing!

August (1): Yellowstone at the end of the month with Dad and Carina! The first time for both of them!

September (1): went to the bay for the weekend for Carina’s launch party. Actually had a super nice time in the city and a full day of walking around and exploring. It was a gorgeous day and one for the books.

December (1): Massillon for Christmas. We canceled Park City as the ski prices and hotel prices got ridiculous.

2018 (Age: 26) 

Mom moved to SoCal on New Year's Day.

I spent my 26th birthday with friends in Laguna.

I bought my Hyundai Sonata.

Kinsley was born on 1/25/18.

I went to New York to work the Grammys, with Lexie as the photographer.

In late February I went to Zion (now round 6) in the snow with Jesse, Anu, and Akshay.

Carina & I went to New Orleans for my conference.

I moved in with Carina in Laguna Beach at the end of April.

Infinity War came out.

Carina & I went to the Caymans with her family at the end of May.

Mom & I went on a trip to New Mexico in September.

I took Carina to homecoming in October. We stayed with Kim & Patty for a night or two. While there, we talked, and basically realized we wanted to get married. I started looking around for rings once we got back.

Stan Lee passed away in November.

I bought Carina's engagement ring.

Carina & I went to Iceland in November with Fiona.

I was going to have my wisdom teeth pulled but then didn't once the surgeon recommended we don't do it.

Carina & I went to Chicago for NYE. I proposed a few hours after midnight!

20 Trips:

January (2): Home for New Year’s with Carina, and New York for Grammys (followed immediately by DC)! New York was basically just hours after Kinsley was born!

February (2): DC for work with Doug, and Zion with Jesse, Anu and Akshay!

March (1): Home/SF with Jesse, Katie and Carina for St. Patrick’s Day!

April (2): New Orleans for LMA with Carina! And annual Big Bear trip for Jesse’s birthday.

May (2): Colorado for a video shoot with Sashi and the Caymans with Carina and her family!

June (2): DC for work with Doug (Capitol Crypto) and Home! (Giants game, big barbecue, pride at the park).

August (3): Zion round 7 with Jesse (Observation Point), home to help dad after surgery, home again for Nicole’s wedding.

September (1): Albuquerque with Mom just for fun!

October (1): Ohio!! OSU and Massillon with Carina (for Homecoming but also a couple days in Massillon to introduce her).

November (2): Zion round 8, with Jesse and Carina (first Angel’s Landing ascent of 2018 and first for Carina in general). And ICELAND!!! Plus home for a day after Iceland as an extended layover.

December (2): Home for Christmas then Massillon for Christmas! (We had light attendance this past year though).

2017 (Age: 25) 

I started off 2017 with a hike with Lauren McBurnie on New Year's Day.

I spent my 25th birthday with Carina in Washington, DC.

Caiba was born on 7/11.

Caiba came home to us (just Carina at the time) on 9/15.

Jesse, Katie, Carina & I went to Zion, Bryce and Arches in March.

I went to Vegas for LMA in April.

Giana & Lauren came to visit in late March.

Carina & I went to Amsterdam & Bruges in July.

Jenn announced her pregnancy.

Carina & I went to Cabo with friends.

I went to the bay with Dan & Chrystal in October.

Lauren came to visit again, for Halloween. She, Carina, Jesse, Katie and I dressed up as the Scooby Doo gang.

Caiba got bit in Borrego during Thanksgiving. Her face was slightly deformed for a month or two.

Leaving Ohio, flights got messed up, which ended up being a blessing as it made me drive from Akron to Cleveland in the snow. It was a really pretty drive.

22 Trips:

January (2): Home for New Year’s, and Washington, DC for my birthday with Carina!

February (1): Arizona road trip (through Page) with Carina.

March (2): Zion, Arches, and Bryce with Jesse, Katie, and Carina! And Vegas for LMA.

April (3): DC & New York for work, Big Bear round 2 for Jesse’s birthday, and the bay with Carina.

May (3): Vegas for Mother’s Day with Jenn, Brian, and Carina, NY & DC for work (again just a month later), and Denver/ The Rockies with Jesse, Katie, and Carina!

June (2): Pismo Beach with Carina and her friends, then Kings Canyon & Sequoia with Jesse (and we saw a bear).

July (2): Amsterdam & Bruges with Carina (what?!) and Santa Barbara with Jesse and Anu.

August (3): The bay for OSU buds, Jenn & Brian’s announcement, and Giana’s going away party. Then Cabo with Carina, Parthiv and his friends, then the bay again for Mom & Dad’s birthdays.

October (2): Zion round 5 with Jesse, and upcoming: the bay with Dan & Chrystal.

November (1): Home for Thanksgiving.

December (1): Massillon for Christmas! (No trip home for Christmas? We might have lumped that into the Thanksgiving visit).

2016 (Age: 24) 

I went to Big Bear for the first time in April with Jesse, Katie and David.

Lexie and I did a road trip to the bay in late April. Jesse and Katie met us there.

Carina & I started dating on May 1.

Jenn got married at the end of May.

Carina and I went to Borrego Springs in early June.

We went to Seattle at the end of June and even spent some time with Anu there.

I went to Scottsdale with Dad right before the 4th of July.

I went to Yellowstone and the Tetons with Jesse right after Scottsdale.

There were bad fires in the summer.

Carina and I spent time in Laguna at the beaches with Clifton, or in Signal Hill at the park or at home watching movies - also with Clifton.

Carina & I went to Banff in September.

I went to OSU for homecoming at the end of September.

Jenn & Brian moved to Riverside around November.

I spent NYE in the bay again.  

19 Trips:  

January (3): Home for New Year’s, Portland with Tina, and Grand Canyon/ Utah with Jesse.

March (2): Joshua Tree with Jesse, and home.

April (3): Austin for LMA, Big Bear for Jesse’s birthday, and home with Jesse, Katie, and Lexie!

May (1): New York City for work right after Jenn’s wedding!

June (2): Borrego Springs with Carina and Seattle with Carina!

July (2): Scottsdale for the 4th and Yellowstone with Jesse!

August (1): Home with Carina.

September (2): Banff (!!!) with Carina and Homecoming at OSU.

October (1): Home to hang with Dad & Mom post-surgery and injury.

November (1): Zion round 3 with Jesse.

December (1): Massillon! [We did our Christmas in Riverside].

2015 (Age: 23) 

I spent my 23rd birthday in Chicago with Giana, Lauren and Janelly.

Jesse and I went to Colorado in February.

Giana & Lauren visited in late March/ early April.

Dad visited in April and we stayed in Laguna Beach.

Jesse and I went to Sedona at the end of April - this marked the beginning of what would become monthly trips and lots of nature-oriented weekends or trips to National Parks.

Jesse, Dan and I went to Seattle at the end of May.

Jesse & I went to Zion in June.

I left M&R and started my job at MSK. My first day at MSK was 7/20/15.

Dan & I moved to Signal Hill in September. Dan still lives there as of this writing (1/4/22). I moved out in April 2018 but more or less kept my room there as I would stay 2 nights a week instead of commuting to Laguna. I paid a partial rent. I stopped doing that and fully cleared my room in October 2019, so I did the partial thing for a year and a half.

I went to OSU for homecoming again in October and visited Massillon as well.

I went to NY for work in October.

I went to Boston in November.

I went to Cabo in November with Dad.

I spent NYE at Giana's in San Bruno with friends.

18 Trips:

January (2): Home for New Year’s, and Chicago with Giana, Janelly, & Lauren.

February (1): Colorado with Jesse.

March (1): Bay Area with Lina.

April (1): Arizona (Sedona & GC NP) with Jesse.

May (1): Seattle with Jesse and Dan.

June (1): Zion [Round 1] with Jesse.

July (2): Rancho Mirage, then Home for a week after M&R/ before MSK.

August (2): Zion Round 2 with Jesse, then the bay for Elyse’s wedding.

September (1): Tennessee with Jesse.

October (2): Homecoming at OSU, then New York City for MSK.

November (2): Boston! And Cabo!

December (2): Home for Christmas and Massillon for Christmas.

2014 (Age: 22)

I spent New Year's in the bay.

I started at M&R on 1/7.

I moved out of Jenn's at the end of January and into Kelvin Court in Irvine.

Dad, Jenn & I went to Catalina in April.

Kassie turned 10 in May.

Kassie died in early June.

I met Dan Hough.

Vita and I broke up two weeks later in June.

Jesse and I went to Rosarito in July.

Jesse and I saw Eminem & Rihanna with Jimmy in August.

I met Anu.

Jesse, And & I went to the bay in August.

I visited OSU for the first time since graduation (in late August).

Dan & I moved from Kelvin Court to San Remo in September.

I went back to OSU in October for homecoming.

Jesse and I went to the bay for Thanksgiving.

Kaitlyn and I went to the M&R holiday party in LA in December.

I got back into running again - a little bit.

I ran my first & only sub-5-minute mile (4:53) on 12/30.

At least 14 trips:

January (1): New Year’s in the bay. 

April (2): Bay Area and Catalina. 

May (1): Bay Area. 

June (1): Bay Area for Kassie. 

July (2): Bay Area for the 4th of July. Rosarito with Jesse. 

August (2): Bay Area with Jesse and Anu. OSU visit. 

October (1): OSU for homecoming. 

November (2): Quick Mexico trip. Bay Area with Jesse for Thanksgiving. 

December (2): Bay Area Christmas weekend. Massillon for Christmas. 

2013 (Age: 21) 

We got a lot of snow in Columbus.

I was initiated into my fraternity. 

I turned 21 in Columbus.

I came home shortly after with friends from OSU.

Dan Liu became my big in February.

I worked on State Tour started starting in June.

I graduated from Ohio State in early August and flew back to the bay where I stayed with my dad for a few weeks while I worked on editing state tour footage.

I moved to Southern California on 8/29/13.

Vita & I were extras in the filming of Batman vs Superman in October.

Jimmy came to visit in late October/ early November.

I got the job at M&R in December.

At least 6 trips:

January (1): Home for my birthday with OSU friends. 

March (1): Home for spring break. 

May (1): Home for a week, late May - early June, before summer classes, state tour, and graduation. 

November (1): Home for Thanksgiving. 

December (2): Home for Christmas. Massillon. 

2012 (Age: 20)

I spent my 20th birthday weekend visiting the bay (from Ohio State).

Ginger turned 10 in March.

Brutal storms hit Columbus at the end of March - a tornado was only a few miles away.

I visited NYC in May with my dorm.

Ginger died in June.

In August I went back to Ohio (from the bay) with Vita and spent a few days at Patty & Kim's. I had to go back early to start work at my new job there and to get the move-in situated with the apartment on Chit. 

I started living off campus with Dan, Parthiv and Ben.

I took Vita to Massillon for Christmas.

At least 12 trips:

January (1): The bay for my birthday. 

March (1): Bay Area for spring break. 

April (1): Chicago with the dorm. 

May (2): Visiting Jenn in SoCal, might have been her USC graduation. NYC with the dorm. 

June (2): The bay for the summer. Disneyland visit (from NorCal). 

August (1): Back to Ohio. 

November (1): Home for Thanksgiving. 

December (2): Home for Christmas. Massillon. 

[newstfionline]

Thursday, September 30, 2021

Today’s kids will live through three times as many climate disasters as their grandparents, study says (Washington Post) Adriana Bottino-Poage is 6 years old, with cherub cheeks and curls that bounce when she laughs. She likes soccer, art and visiting the library. She dreams of being a scientist and she wants to become the kind of grown-up who can help the world. But if the planet continues to warm on its current trajectory, the average 6-year-old will live through roughly three times as many climate disasters as their grandparents, the study finds. They will see twice as many wildfires, 1.7 times as many tropical cyclones, 3.4 times more river floods, 2.5 times more crop failures and 2.3 times as many droughts as someone born in 1960. These findings, published this week in the journal Science, are the result of a massive effort to quantify what lead author Wim Thiery calls the “intergenerational inequality” of climate change. The changes are especially dramatic in developing nations; infants in sub-Saharan Africa are projected to live through 50 to 54 times as many heat waves as someone born in the preindustrial era.

YouTube is banning prominent anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content (Washington Post) YouTube is taking down several video channels associated with high-profile anti-vaccine activists including Joseph Mercola and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who experts say are partially responsible for helping seed the skepticism that’s contributed to slowing vaccination rates across the country. As part of a new set of policies aimed at cutting down on anti-vaccine content on the Google-owned site, YouTube will ban any videos that claim that commonly used vaccines approved by health authorities are ineffective or dangerous. The company previously blocked videos that made those claims about coronavirus vaccines, but not ones for other vaccines like those for measles or chickenpox. Mercola, an alternative medicine entrepreneur, and Kennedy, a lawyer and the son of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy who has been a face of the anti-vaccine movement for years, have both said in the past that they are not automatically against all vaccines, but believe information about the risks of vaccines is being suppressed. In an email, Mercola said he was being censored. Kennedy also said he was being censored. “There is no instance in history when censorship and secrecy has advanced either democracy or public health,” he said in an email.

Vaccine Mandates Kick In (1440) Tens of thousands of healthcare workers in New York risk being fired if they remain unvaccinated against COVID-19, as a state mandate went into effect Monday. Roughly 16% of the state’s healthcare workers, or about 83,000, aren’t fully vaccinated, and an estimated 8% haven’t received their first shot. An executive order from Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) signed Monday allows medically trained National Guard members to fill staff shortages if necessary. Workers fired for being unvaccinated will not be eligible for unemployment. Separately, a New York City vaccine mandate for educators in the nation’s largest school district becomes effective after school Friday—the teachers’ union says about 3% of its staff remain unvaccinated. In North Carolina, more than 175 healthcare workers at Novant Health have been dismissed after not complying with the company’s vaccine mandate. The various mandates have sparked ongoing protests, both in New York and elsewhere.

Ahead of winter hibernation, Alaska celebrates Fat Bear Week (Reuters) In Alaska, leaves are falling, daylight is dwindling and salmon-devouring brown bears are racing the clock to pack on the pounds they need to survive their winter hibernation. Unbeknownst to the enormous bruins, some of them are also competing in Katmai National Park and Preserve’s Fat Bear Week, Alaska’s annual celebration of gluttony and nature’s abundance. For seven days starting on Wednesday, wildlife fans will submit online votes in a playoff-style competition among 12 of the park’s fattest brown bears photographed at the salmon-rich Brooks River. Katmai’s bears are among the biggest in the world, thanks to the abundant runs of salmon that swim into the river system from southwestern Alaska’s Bristol Bay. Katmai’s bears, which number about 2,200, can grow to well over 1,000 pounds (453 kg) from summer feasting. They can also lose a third of their body weight during hibernation. Fat Bear Week becomes more popular each year, with online voting growing to nearly 650,000 votes cast in 2020 from 55,000 votes cast in 2018, said Naomi Boak, a Katmai media ranger. The popularity is easy to understand, Boak said. Fat bears bring joy to people, she said. “They get to do something and be healthy that we don’t get to do, and that is be fat,” she said.

America’s car crash epidemic (Vox) Driving is the most dangerous thing most Americans do every day. Virtually every American knows someone who’s been injured in a car crash, and each year cars kill about as many people as guns and severely injure millions. It’s a public health crisis in any year, and somehow, the pandemic has only made it more acute. Even as Americans have been driving less in the past year or so, car crash deaths (including both occupants of vehicles and pedestrians) have surged. Cars killed 42,060 people in 2020, up from 39,107 in 2019, according to a preliminary estimate from the National Safety Council (NSC), a nonprofit that focuses on eliminating preventable deaths. According to several traffic experts I spoke with, the explanation for the 2020 fatality spike is relatively straightforward: With fewer cars on the road during quarantine, traffic congestion was all but eliminated, which emboldened people to drive at lethal speeds. Compared to 2019, many more drivers involved in fatal crashes also didn’t wear seat belts or drove drunk.

Havana syndrome (WSJ) The CIA evacuated an intelligence officer serving in Serbia in recent weeks who suffered serious injuries consistent with the neurological attacks known as Havana Syndrome, according to current and former U.S. officials. The incident in the Balkans, which hasn’t been previously reported, is the latest in what the officials describe as a steady expansion of attacks on American spies and diplomats posted overseas by unknown assailants using what government officials and scientists suspect is some sort of directed-energy source. Still more suspected attacks have occurred overseas and in the U.S., the current and former officials said, along with recently reported ones in India and Vietnam.

Greece boosts its military, with French help (Guardian) Less than two weeks after France lost its submarine deal to the so-called Aukus Defense Pact between Australia, the U.S., and the U.K., a new buyer has stepped up. Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and French president Emmanuel Macron just signed a multi-billion euro military agreement that calls for France to deliver three state-of-the-art Belharra frigates to Greece by 2025. The option of a fourth warship is also included. Macron described his pact as part of a deeper “strategic partnership” between France and Greece to defend shared interests in the Mediterranean. Despite being among the continent’s smaller countries, Greek military spending far exceeds that of fellow states. Last year’s heightened tensions between Greece and Turkey over rival claims to offshore gas reserves in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean led to Mitsotakis’ center-right government announcing a major weapons program aimed at modernizing Greece’s armed forces with the acquisition of fighter planes, frigates, helicopters and missile systems.

Business as usual for Afghan opium trade as Taliban ban goes up in smoke (Telegraph) The sacks full of thick, brown opium paste give off a distinctive smell as turbaned traders and farmers haggle over prices. The opium being freely bought and sold in the drug bazaars of southern Afghanistan will soon make its way as heroin into the country’s neighbours and then into the world beyond. It is a trade which, a month ago, the Taliban said they would stamp out in a repeat of a ban imposed under their 1990s regime. Opium growers in Helmand told The Telegraph they were again preparing to plant fields full of poppies, with the Islamist group having so far stalled on implementing a ban—one of a number of promises that appeared designed to please the West and have since been broken. It has raised fears that Britain could see a further influx of heroin as the Taliban choose to profit from taxing the trade instead of stamping it out. Afghanistan is by far the world’s largest opium supplier and is estimated to produce four-fifths of global supply. The drug accounts for 11 per cent of the Afghan economy, the United Nations estimated in 2018.

Young Iranians Increasingly Want Out (NYT) Amir, an engineering master’s student standing outside Tehran University, had thought about going into digital marketing, but worried that Iran’s government would restrict Instagram, as it had other apps. He had considered founding a start-up, but foresaw American sanctions and raging inflation blocking his way. Every time he tried to plan, it seemed useless, said Amir, who at first would not give his real name. He was afraid of his country, he said, and he wanted to leave after graduation. “I’m a person who’s 24 years old, and I can’t imagine my life when I’m 45,” he said. “I can’t imagine a good future for myself or for my country. Every day, I’m thinking about leaving. And every day, I’m thinking about, if I leave my country, what will happen to my family?” This is life now for many educated urbanites in Tehran, the capital, who once pushed for loosening social restrictions and opening Iran to the world, and who saw the 2015 nuclear deal with the United States as a reason for hope. Since 2018, many prices have more than doubled, living standards have skidded and poverty has spread, especially among rural Iranians. All but the wealthiest have been brought low. Divorce is up, fertility rates are down and many from Iran’s younger generation are postponing weddings and searching for ways to leave the country in the face of economic and political stagnation.

Bangkok on alert as 70,000 homes flood in Thailand (AFP) Thai authorities have rushed to protect parts of Bangkok from flood waters that have already inundated 70,000 homes and killed six people in the country’s northern and central provinces. Tropical Storm Dianmu has caused flooding in 30 provinces, with the kingdom’s central region the worst hit, the Thai Disaster Prevention and Mitigation Department said. The level of the Chao Phraya River—which snakes through Bangkok after winding almost 250 miles (400km) from the north—is steadily rising as authorities release water from dams further upstream. Soldiers on Tuesday set up barriers and sandbags to protect archaeological ruins and landmarks as well as neighbourhoods in the old royal capital Ayutthaya, about 40 miles north of Bangkok. There are hopes Bangkok can avoid a repeat of the catastrophic 2011 monsoon season, when it experienced its worst flooding in decades—a fifth of the city was under water and more than 500 people died.

Kishida To Become Japan’s Next Prime Minister (Foreign Policy) Japan’s ruling Liberal Democrat Party has backed Fumio Kishida as its new leader, effectively making him prime minister-in-waiting for the world’s third largest economy. Kishida, a former foreign minister, won out in a highly contested election, beating Taro Kono in a runoff vote on Wednesday afternoon in Tokyo after the two had virtually tied in the first round of voting. His inauguration as prime minister is now assured, as the LDP holds a comfortable majority in Japan’s House of Representatives. Although today’s vote represents the end of Kono’s leadership bid for now, the short shelf life of Japan’s prime ministers (Kishida will be the tenth in the past 20 years) means it’s unlikely he’ll fade into the background.

Ethiopia crisis ‘stain on our conscience’ (AP) The crisis in Ethiopia is a “stain on our conscience,” the United Nations humanitarian chief said, as children and others starve to death in the Tigray region under what the U.N. has called a de facto government blockade of food, medical supplies and fuel. In an interview with The Associated Press Tuesday, Martin Griffiths issued one of the most sharply worded criticisms yet of the world’s worst hunger crisis in a decade after nearly a year of war. He described a landscape of deprivation inside Tigray, where the malnutrition rate is now over 22%—“roughly the same as we saw in Somalia in 2011 at the start of the Somali famine,” which killed more than a quarter-million people. Meanwhile just 10% of needed humanitarian supplies have been reaching Tigray in recent weeks, Griffiths said. “So people have been eating roots and flowers and plants instead of a normal steady meal,” he said. But the problem is not hunger alone. The U.N. humanitarian chief, who recently visited Tigray, cited the lack of medical supplies and noted that vulnerable children and pregnant or lactating mothers are often the first to die of disease.

Modern art or theft? (Foreign Policy) A Danish art museum has been left significantly out of pocket (or helped finance a brand new work of art, depending on one’s perspective) after $84,000 in cash the museum had given an artist to recreate two of his works became the inspiration for a new piece: two blank canvases titled “Take The Money and Run.” Artist Jens Haaning had been commissioned by the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg to reproduce “An Average Danish Annual Income” and “An Average Austrian Annual Income,” two pieces which represented the total amounts using framed U.S. dollars. Museum authorities believe Haaning’s interpretation went beyond the usual artistic license and have given him until January to return the money.

[livinginlandmarketing]

This story is Part 3 of a series

What actually happened to David O’Sullivan?

Two weeks into what was supposed to be a 2,650-mile hike of the Pacific Crest Trail, the 25-year-old from Ireland made it to the Riverside County town of Idyllwild. He stopped for a couple of days to resupply, checked out of his hotel room the morning of April 7, 2017, and was never heard from again.

After that, there are three broad possibilities.

One: He died somewhere in the San Jacinto Mountains north of Idyllwild.

Two: He died somewhere else.

Three: He’s alive, which would mean — unless you believe in sci-fi or soap opera plots — he disappeared on purpose.

“Oh God no,” his mother, Carmel O’Sullivan, said about the third possibility. “99.9% of my heart says no. … He wouldn’t have been so cruel to do that to us.”

Read the series

Part 1: The mysterious disappearance of Pacific Crest Trail hiker David O’Sullivan

Map: David O’Sullivan’s 180-mile Pacific Crest Trail journey

Part 2: Who’s looking for David O’Sullivan? At first, almost no one

More: Missing in the mountains: 4 families ache for those lost

Part 3: 4 years later, searchers seek an answer: What was David O’Sullivan’s fate?

A team of volunteer searchers who haven’t given up hope of finding answers are focused on the first option. But they face some formidable challenges.

No one knows which of the many possible routes he planned to take from Idyllwild back to the Pacific Crest Trail or how far he may have gotten.

“If we only had one haystack, we’d eventually be able to find the needle, but we have half a dozen different haystacks,” said Jon King of Idyllwild, a prolific local hiker who’s helped searchers try to figure out the likeliest scenario.

The terrain where the group believes O’Sullivan is most likely to have met trouble is steep and thickly forested, and quickly becomes inaccessible when you get off trail. Drones would be the best way to search, but the area is designated as state wilderness, where drones aren’t allowed, and federal rules say pilots have to keep their drones in sight at all times, which wouldn’t be possible. Even if the group could get permission, the trees and boulders can obscure objects on the ground.

One dark possibility that his mother worries about is whether O’Sullivan could have gotten lost and wandered into an area where marijuana was being grown — a significant problem in California’s national forests. Some of the people searching for O’Sullivan wonder, even if he met a natural or accidental death, could someone else have found him first? If people involved in illicit activity found his remains, could they have disposed of them so as not to attract law enforcement’s attention?

If O’Sullivan’s remains are out there in the wilderness, the forces of nature — from rain, snow and sun to gravity and animals — have had four years to claim them. Every season that goes by makes the task harder, and 2020 was a lost year because of the pandemic.

A photo taken during an aerial search of the San Jacinto Mountains shows Fuller Ridge, the portion of the Pacific Crest Trail where volunteer searchers believe missing hiker David O’Sullivan is most likely to have encountered trouble in April 2017. (Photo courtesy of FireWatch)

Still, the volunteer team has some reason for optimism. In late 2019 and again in early 2021, they found the remains of two other people they searched for: Paul Miller, a Canadian who went missing in Joshua Tree National Park in summer 2018, and Rosario “Chata” Garcia, a local woman with dementia who disappeared in July 2020 after getting her car stuck on a rocky trail 40 miles from her home.

Western States Aerial Search, a nonprofit group of drone operators based in Utah, was able to fly over the areas around where Miller’s and Garcia’s cars were found — they got permission from the national park, and none was needed in the area where Garcia went missing. Volunteer image searchers then began scouring the photographs. In both cases, a Missouri man, Morgan Clements, was the one who first spotted bones.

After Miller was found, Carmel O’Sullivan said the success gave her hope. But while she’s happy for other families to get good news, she’s a little jealous too.

Not knowing what happened to her son, not being able to bring him home and bury him, is an ache that won’t go away. She still hasn’t been able to bring herself to give away his clothes and books.

“The passage of time — in one way, it does ease (the pain), but in another, I don’t think it ever will,” she said recently.

Her son’s 30th birthday is this August, and it’s hard for her to think that as she and her husband and David’s brother grow older, David never will.

The force behind the search

After seeing the struggles of the O’Sullivans and other families, Cathy Tarr, the woman leading the volunteer search effort, was inspired to start an organization to help. The Fowler O’Sullivan Foundation achieved nonprofit status in 2020 — a bright spot for Tarr in a year that included not just the pandemic but a breast cancer diagnosis.

The foundation will use what Tarr and her team have learned to become a resource for families of people who have gone missing in wilderness situations, especially once the official search-and-rescue efforts end.

“When that’s called off, that’s when families are lost,” Tarr said. “They don’t know what to do — how to read a map, how to look for clues, how to attract volunteers. It becomes random. We do it systematically.”

The foundation’s other focus will be proactive safety initiatives. Tarr said they gave away six rescue beacons to Pacific Crest Trail hikers this year and partnered with Nomad Ventures in Idyllwild to offer discounts on microspikes, which go on hikers’ shoes to give them better traction in the snow.

Cathy Tarr stands at the Devil’s Slide Trailhead in Idyllwild on Wednesday, May 12, 2021. She considers that trail the most likely route that David O’Sullivan would have taken from town back to the Pacific Crest Trail on the day he went missing. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)

Cathy Tarr sits near the Devil’s Slide Trailhead in Idyllwild on Wednesday, May 12, 2021. Tarr is leading volunteer search efforts for David O’Sullivan, a young man from Ireland who went missing in the Idyllwild area while hiking the Pacific Crest Trail in 2017. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)

Cathy Tarr holds a rescue beacon similar to ones that a nonprofit group she founded last year, the Fowler-O’Sullivan Foundation, gave away to six Pacific Crest Trail hikers this year. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)

Cathy Tarr’s research into the David O’Sullivan case and other missing hikers has included research on how people are likely to behave when they get lost. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)

Cathy Tarr walks to towards the Devil’s Slide Trailhead in Humber Park Idyllwild on Wednesday, May 12, 2021. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)

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Tarr’s involvement in O’Sullivan’s case began with unrelated events in two corners of the United States far from Southern California.

Tarr, now 58, had been planning to hike the Pacific Crest Trail herself in 2017, and had been in New Hampshire training for the snow. Two weeks before she was supposed to head out, she was in a car crash.

She couldn’t hike, but she heard about another PCT hiker named Kris Fowler who’d gone missing in late 2016 in a snowstorm in Washington, and she figured she could help. She traveled there for a four-day search and ended up staying six or eight weeks, she said. (Fowler — the other namesake of Tarr’s foundation — also has never been found, though volunteers and the local sheriff’s department continue to search and Tarr remains involved in those efforts, too.)

While she was in Washington, word of O’Sullivan’s disappearance began to spread north up the Pacific Crest Trail.

Tarr had previously lived in Southern California and her daughter still lives here. Tarr was planning to visit and found out that O’Sullivan’s parents were coming from Ireland at the same time, so she arranged to have lunch with them after they met with the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department.

“They were very unhappy with the meeting they had just had, so I said let’s do our own investigation,” Tarr said.

She was surprised by how little was being done to search for O’Sullivan compared to Fowler’s case. “I thought, ‘Woah, this is weird. Where are all the flyers? Who’s searching for him? What’s going on?’”

Tarr knows the heart-wrenching feeling of having a son go missing. A year or two before meeting the O’Sullivans, she got a call in the middle of the night that her own son hadn’t returned from a hike to the mountains.

“I know that initial shock that a family gets,” Tarr said. “I’ve felt it. I remember pacing back and forth … I remember calling the police. I remember how scared I was.”

Thankfully, her son was found safe in less than a day. But even now, she visibly tenses up talking about it.

“Once you experience that, it’s something you never forget,” she said.

That feeling is part of what has motivated her in the almost four years since she first met O’Sullivan’s parents.

“If it weren’t for her, there probably would be no search going on,” Carmel O’Sullivan said.

Solving the mystery

Over the past four years, Tarr and the team of volunteers she assembled have done extensive research to narrow down the possibilities of what could have happened to O’Sullivan.

Working backward through that list of three broad possibilities, they don’t believe he could still be alive.

David O’Sullivan, then 25, of Ireland, took this photo of himself while he was hiking the Pacific Crest Trail in Southern California in spring 2017. (Photo courtesy of the O’Sullivan family)

Friends and family say O’Sullivan was as enthusiastic about the trip as he’d been about anything, and his messages from the trail showed someone who “had set himself a personal challenge and was enjoying the journey,” in his mother’s words.

Sgt. Sean Lawlor, a Murrieta police officer who first took O’Sullivan’s missing-person report, also did some investigating and doesn’t believe O’Sullivan survived. Knowing he was an inexperienced solo hiker and had a good family dynamic, he believes O’Sullivan probably got lost, maybe dehydrated or washed away by a river.

“I didn’t get any inkling of signs of foul play or that he would have run off,” Lawlor said.

Once word of O’Sullivan’s disappearance got out, his family received many tips from people who thought they saw him at points north of Idyllwild.

“He was even ‘found’ a few times, even to the point where we rang hostels to speak with ‘him’. None of these sightings were him,” Niall, his older brother, wrote in an online post in July 2017.

During the reporting of this story, someone Tarr’s volunteer team had never heard from before, despite all of their outreach, came forward on Facebook claiming to have seen O’Sullivan that summer in Kennedy Meadows, an area known as the PCT’s gateway to the Sierra. “I even joked with him and a few other hikers that he was the missing Irish dude. Guy basically told me to mind my business,” the commenter wrote.

Tarr believes sightings like those are cases of mistaken identity. She’s found at least three or four other hikers from that year who look very similar to O’Sullivan. The accent is what stood out to some people who thought they’d encountered the Irishman, but hikers came to the PCT from all over the world, including places with similar-sounding accents such as Scotland.

O’Sullivan had been stopping in towns and making financial transactions all the way to Idyllwild, but nowhere after that, including the next town where he would have needed to resupply, Big Bear, about five days up the trail from Idyllwild. Several thousand dollars were left sitting in his bank account. His Kindle was never turned on after April 5.

Why, Tarr reasons, would he have kept hiking without doing any of those things — let alone without contacting his family again. She’s convinced that he couldn’t have made it to Big Bear or else his family would have heard from him there.

While a hiker can run into trouble anywhere, everything that Tarr knows about the trail and the conditions that year tells her that O’Sullivan faced the highest risk on the trail just north of Idyllwild.

Heavy winter storms broke a five-year drought and covered the San Jacinto Mountains in snow that was still up to 3 feet deep when O’Sullivan was coming through. Multiple hikers reported trouble in the mountains, especially along a 5-mile stretch of the PCT that traverses Fuller Ridge. People were sliding downhill and enduring exhausting, injury-inducing battles to get back to the trail. Several hikers required rescue that spring.

A sign at the northwest trailhead to Fuller Ridge, part of the Pacific Crest Trail in the San Jacinto Mountains, warns hikers to be prepared for hazardous conditions. (Photo by Nikie Johnson, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)

When O’Sullivan set out, “He was very ill-prepared,” Tarr said. He hadn’t trained in the snow and, as far as anyone knows, didn’t have the proper equipment for safe snow hiking. He didn’t have a working phone, and his Kindle only connected over WiFi. He had paper maps but no GPS-equipped device, and no rescue beacon that he could have used to summon help in an emergency — something Tarr strongly recommends.

His last email to his parents indicated he was going to get a later start back to the trail the next morning because he had to stop at the post office again, so there may not have been anyone left behind him that day.

If he got hurt or lost, he would have been all alone out there.

Other PCT deaths

O’Sullivan wouldn’t have been the first Pacific Crest Trail hiker to die in the San Jacinto Mountains, and he wouldn’t have been the last.

In March 2020, 22-year-old Trevor Laher of Fort Worth, Texas, was killed when he fell about 600 feet into a ravine near Apache Peak, about 13 trail miles southeast of Idyllwild. The trails were snowy from a series of storms that had rolled through over the past week. Laher had been with two other PCT hikers he had befriended along the trail, and they were able to call for help with an emergency GPS device.

The risky mission to recover Laher’s body and rescue his two friends — winds were so strong that they grounded a helicopter, so searchers had to cut trail into the steep, hard snow slope to reach them — was one of several in just a two-day span. One PCT hiker slipped and fell in the ice and snow and had to take shelter under a rock through a snowstorm until rescuers could get to him the next day. Another fell 150 feet off the trail and also spent the night lost. Then two PCT hikers from France needed rescue when one fell about 60 feet off the side of the trail and the other got stuck in a section of ice.

Any of them could have ended up lost like O’Sullivan if just a few of fate’s dominoes had fallen a different way.

Then there’s the case of John Donovan.

John Donovan of Virginia, shown in an undated family photo. (File photo)

The newly retired Virginia man came to hike the Pacific Crest Trail in 2005. He was last seen in the San Jacinto Mountains on May 3, headed toward Fuller Ridge as a storm moved in. Despite multiple searches, it was a year before his remains would be found by astonishing accident.

In May 2006, a young couple visiting from Dallas rode the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway into the San Jacinto Mountains. Brandon Day and Gina Allen hadn’t intended to go for much of a hike, but took a few wrong turns while looking at the scenery and ended up hopelessly lost.

In an essay for their hometown’s D Magazine, Day and Allen described spending the next two nights trying to fend off hypothermia and the days clawing their way through thick vegetation and sliding down rock faces in terrain so rugged, they wondered if any human had ever been there before.

They ended up following a creek to a canyon where not just any human, but Donovan himself, had been until he perished.

Gina Allen and Brandon Day, both of Dallas, Texas, tell about their ordeal of being lost for two days in the San Jacinto Mountains in May 2006. (File photo by Rodrigo Pena, The Press-Enterprise)

“We couldn’t walk our way out,” Day told The Press-Enterprise at the time. The canyon was too steep. “We were stuck.”

Day and Allen used some of Donovan’s matches to start a small fire that attracted rescuers; they credited him with saving their lives.

They also found some papers that Donovan scrawled notes on, chronicling his final days.

According to an in-depth story in Backpacker magazine, Donovan described in the makeshift journal how he couldn’t find the trail back to Idyllwild amid the blizzard conditions, so he tried heading toward the lights of Palm Springs below. He ended up in the canyon, injured and down to 12 crackers. He spent more than a week there, including his 60th birthday. In his last entry, dated 11 days after he got lost, he wrote: “Goodbye and love you all.”

“Nobody knew where he was, nobody knew to come looking for him, so he was preparing for the end,” Day told The Press-Enterprise. “We were looking at the words of a man who was passing.”

Assuming Tarr is right that O’Sullivan never made it out of the San Jacinto Mountains, which scenario befell him? A quick death like Laher’s? Or an ordeal more like Donovan’s?

An image shows the flight plan for a plane hired to do aerial photography over the San Jacinto Mountains in 2018 by a group searching for the remains of David O’Sullivan, who came from Ireland in 2017 to hike the Pacific Crest Trail and was last seen in Idyllwild, Calif. The search areas were identified by previous helicopter flights. (Image courtesy of FireWatch)

Searchers will ‘never give up’

Since late 2017, Tarr and her team have conducted numerous ground and aerial searches north of Idyllwild. Always on the lookout for bright blue — the color of O’Sullivan’s backpack — Tarr jokes that they’ve become the mountain’s mylar balloon cleanup crew.

The Idyllwild area’s many hiking trails are well-used and have been searched thoroughly for signs of O’Sullivan. The group has been back out already this year, but Tarr is frustrated that the areas they have left to explore now are too dangerous to reach by foot.

“I feel right now we’re at a standstill, and that’s not where I want to be,” she said.

“I’ve always felt we could find him. Always. But, I don’t know … It’s the one case I have that I’ll never give up on,” she said.

Members of her team are equally committed.

“We will not stop,” said Gloria Boyd of Yucaipa, “because for me that’s the worst thing that could happen: Not only did the authorities walk away but the only people you have left who could potentially help walk away? I’m not going to stop. I don’t see an end in sight. If it’s 10 years it’s 10 years, but damn it we’re getting him back home.”

How to help

Anyone wishing to help the Fowler-O’Sullivan Foundation, whether by volunteering or donating, can go to www.fofound.org/joinourteam.

The O’Sullivan family asks that anyone who is hiking in the Idyllwild area and spots something potentially of interest leaves it where it is and emails information to helpfinddavido@gmail.com.

Hiker safety

Here are some of the Pacific Crest Trail Association’s safety tips, which are good advice for hikers on any trail.

There is intrinsic risk in the wilderness, and you are responsible for your own safety. Be prepared, and learn first aid.

Let someone know your plans. If you’re on a day hike, tell someone where you’re going and when you expect to return. Long-distance hikers, leave a copy of your itinerary with someone, check in regularly, let them know when you’ll check in next and have a plan for what they’ll do if you don’t.

Be mentally prepared for the risks you may encounter. Think through scenarios ahead of time and decide how you might respond.

Travel within your skill level.

Always carry current maps and know how to use them.

Cellphones and rescue beacons can save lives in emergencies — but they don’t guarantee your safety. Rely on your own skills and intuition, not on your technology.

Use extra caution if hiking alone.

Be wary of people who make you uneasy.

Stay on the trail. The moment you leave, you’re in the wilderness. If something goes wrong, you may never be found.

-on May 26, 2021 at 01:01AM by Nikie Johnson

[teacherintransition]

POSTPONED ...AGAIN!

Our trip to Czechia, Austria,Switzerland, Lichtenstein and Germany now for the second year has been pushed back a year. It’s been in the planning stages since 2019.

Grit your teeth, set your jaw, take deep breath’s and carry on ...

Three years ago, as we traveled through sunny Tuscany enjoying wine, cheese, the wonders of history and art, our little travel group entertained the idea of where should we travel next summer (enter dark foreboding music). We had been many places together over the last few years: Spain, the south of France, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Italy, Monaco and we had decided to venture north of the alps into Central Europe. It was to be a completely new experience for all of us and excitement ensued. Summer 2020, we were headed to Germany, Lichtenstein and other Germanic areas of wonder, castles, and beer. You, the reader knows how this ended in 2020 .... and now in 2021. It appears that the travel portion of my Teacher in Transition retirement plans has hit a roadblock of pandemic proportions.

It’s important that these comments are kept in perspective; we all view these change of plans as minor, first world problems in light of the real suffering taking place here and abroad due to Covid. Our traveling companions and I know full well that this inconvenience is just that and not to be compared to real world dilemmas faced by millions. We have all been touched by and experienced loss of loved ones due to this scourge.

It also is worth noting that Kim and I along with our friends who comprise this hardy group of explorers are not by any standard of measurement... wealthy. We are most of us teachers, retired or otherwise, who plan meticulously to cut costs; use our group to reduce expenses and seek out simple pleasures that soak up the vibrant culture and history of the places we visit. We travel “on the cheap” ... not excessively so, but teacher planning helps tremendously in this regard. We also plan to leave little or no inheritance to help satiate our wanderlust... sorry sons. There are no nights at The Ritz, but there are plenty nights enjoying Sangria and watching artisans perform Flamenco dancing.

Now that the explanations are out of the way, we still find ourselves in a state of desperate disappointment as very little can substitute for traveling abroad. Last year when Covid was raging with no vaccine in site, cabin fever was running high. To combat this, my wife and I went camping and hiking in the hills of state parks in the Llano Estacado. It was wonderful and challenging and outside the walls of our humble abode. This summer we will not be as restrained as we both received our vaccinations in January and February and we will always carry with us a formidable yet stylish array of masks and germ-ex. We are firmly entrenched in the world of science and social responsibility. Postponed or not, my wife and I NEED to travel ... yes, need; one gets accustomed to hitting the open road and seeing, tasting, drinking, learning about places we’ve never been. My eldest son was/IS a Marine, “once a Marine, always a Marine,” and often reminds us of the USMC motto: ADAPT, IMPROVISE, OVERCOME when dealing with the ups and downs of life ... “and here be one!” ( said with a pirates growl )

Methinks there’s a lesson to be learned here; if one is truly a person who seeks to be spontaneous and free spirited, then it goes against that grain to lament so seriously the falling through of plans. Adapt, improvise and have fun, I can’t pretend to be of Marine stock... the thought of a ten mile run could trigger a heart attack, is going to our take on this situation. We’ll do and plan as we do when traveling to more exotic environs: on the cheap, focus on the important stuff, celebrate the new and enjoy each other’s company. The unplanned lurks in the shadows of all of our lives and can be a real buzz kill, but we can choose how we react to the unplanned. There is not one way of doing things, a lesson I’ve learned over time and have attempted to document in my writing. We sat down and began listing more domestic destinations that would be equally as exciting if we carry our open minds with us.

It doesn’t pay to be so totally invested in one way of doing things or insistent on any status quo. The flexibility of our existence is a concept to be learned and understood in all things. All too often in the past year, I’ve learned of the impermanence of everything and coping with that is the key to all aspects of our lives. Every day is a gift and it’s not always a pair of socks. Me, my wife and oldest son started our family in bleak poverty, but life was anything but dull; it was perhaps the best time in our lives. Everything can and will change ... sometimes it’s a real gut punch, but when your head clears ... life is still there to be enjoyed. We can find adventure everywhere, we can find something new everywhere, there is always something new on the menu you’ve never tried; take what you have and make it extraordinary. Nothing turns out like you think it will ...roll with it. You might come across the experience of your life... outside the four walls is outside ... make the day, trip, hobby ... outstanding.

This life lesson is one for all and it is reached at different times in our paths. Some souls never learn it; mores the pity because being chained to absolutes is not how we were made to live. So, though far from the Alps, this summer will be great and an experience of our lives... that’s how we will approach it. Hey, Europe is great, but they don’t have a Grand Canyon ... do they? Carpe diem my friends!

http://labibliotecacoffee.com/

[epackingvietnam]

Travel SEO Trends and Pivots from 2020 (and What to Carry into 2021)

Posted by Rachel.Vandernick

If 2020 taught us anything, it’s that you can’t predict the future of tourism. Unlike nearly any other industry, tourism is simultaneously dictated by a number of factors including consumer proclivity, weather and climate, global economics, and government.

Travel was undoubtedly one of the hardest hit sectors in the 2020 shutdowns, which affected every business domain from the largest destination marketing organizations (DMOs) to local small businesses that thrive on the foot traffic tourism normally brings. US Travel’s year-end assessment determined there was a 48% drop in travel-related spending for December 2020 compared to 2019, and a year-long loss of $500 billion. Success in tourism in 2020 meant simply surviving for many businesses, accompanied by total content strategy revamps, product pivots, local SEO investments, and local marketing activations.

What worked in 2020

Locals-only tourism

With out-of-state quarantines in effect for most of the US, and especially prevalent in the northeast, once global destinations and metros became intensely local. Succeeding locally meant celebrating local culture and playing to the hometown advantage, and creating and activating hyper-local content and SEO to sell reimagined experiences and drive renewed interest at home.

Visit Philadelphia, the DMO for the greater Philadelphia region, revamped its 2020 marketing efforts to rollout “Our Turn To Tourist” through winter 2021, a “regional marketing initiative [that] encourages people to take staycations and close-to-home drive trips.”

Visit Philadelphia’s main objective is to attract tourists from all over the country to the city of Philadelphia. With millions of out-of-state visitors each year, and huge growth each year proceeding 2020, Visit Philadelphia had the early foresight to create content geared towards both locals and visitors, and adopted a local-first SEO strategy for things to do, see, and eat nearby.

The organization went so far as to create local-centric mini itineraries based off of current restrictions, optimizing for local tourism and attraction-related keywords, and widely distributing new COVID-19 content. This campaign supported not only the hotels and attractions in the city, but also the local restaurants and small businesses.

While not totally divergent in its approach, the long-term investment that Visit Philadelphia has made into winning at local search, snagging SERP features, and embracing new features like Discover, helps ensure it will continue to be a successful advocate for Philadelphia as “the greatest city in the USA to spend the weekend”.

Reinvented experiences

Tourism and experience-based companies hadn’t extensively ventured into the virtual space prior to 2020 — after all, why plan to watch the action from home when you could board a plane and take part live and in-person?

Philadelphia-based Beyond the Bell Tours, the only LGBTQ+-owned-and-run tour operator in the city, faced a critical decision in May 2020: Their hallmark Pride-themed “Drag Me Along” drag queen trolly bar crawl was unable to launch with bars closed indefinitely and social gatherings restricted. As searches continued to increase for virtual events, virtual gatherings, and virtual things to do, businesses that rose to meet the demand found success. For Beyond the Bell, that meant turning the “Drag Me Along” concept into “Pride In A Box”: a series of five different themed Pride boxes that included products and experiential components for use at home.

Though their website was originally built on a tour-booking engine, to execute a pivoted product strategy, they restructured it to allow an e-commerce integrated function, and optimized to sell products and experiences for Pride.

Founder Rebecca Fisher said, “We thought about how a box could embody a community. We highlighted queer people, businesses, and queer products, and held weekly events for Pride, all proceeds of which were donated to racial justice. A single ‘box’ purchased during Pride supported many queer businesses, and we wanted people to feel that impact.”

Ultimately, businesses that adapted quickly to changes in consumer search behavior, and that conducted and implemented keyword research for new content targeting previously unranked/low-volume terms, were better positioned to maintain consumer support and visibility even though actual travelers continued to drop.

Up-to-date info on expanding and changing regulations

Domestic travel is rarely regulated in the US, so when cities across the country responded to shut down orders, hot spots beloved by locals and tourists alike emptied out and revenue began to drastically fall.

As an SEO community (especially local!) we’re always advocates of the value of keeping local listings in Google My Business up-to-date, and it never mattered more than in 2020. Coming out on top were those who updated hours, COVID-19 policies and procedures, and published delivery or third-party partnerships. Unsurprisingly, AirBnB’s and VRBO’s new Covid content “enhanced cleaning protocol” and “guidelines for owners” come out top in searches for short term rental cleaning best practices, and cleanliness related to travel accomodations. Updated local listings allowed exasperated consumers to easily see what businesses were open, and allowed search-savvy businesses to leverage their GMB to position themselves as safety-conscious, accessible, and prioritize addressing consumer concerns (not to mention the features released to help businesses access these tools).

What to expect from tourism in 2021

It’s hard to remember a time of greater collective cabin fever. Though with border closings, pre-travel testing, and business closures remaining a moving target, we can still expect that a majority of travel will happen closer to home in early 2021. Here’s where we can expect to see growth first.

Short term stays: road trips, workspace respites, and snow birds

What's ahead for short-term travels? Continued RV sales, for one, which were up 4.5% annually in 2020. These growth indicators, as well as public perceptions of travel safety, continue to slate hometown and close-by exploration as the early 2021 winners.

Outdoor and spaced-out activities show continued interest in search volume and sales. Yellowstone National Park alone saw a 21% increase in year-over-year visitation in September 2020. Don’t expect this to slow down any time soon.

Another trend we expect to see continue in early 2021? Snow birding. Once reserved for the retired, heading south for the winter is especially popular this year for northerners leaving lockdowns at home. Expect extended stays, fuller flights, and busier beaches than normal.

One final place you can expect to see travelers? In a nearby hotel. Formerly reserved for the luxurious staycations, local hotels have become workplace respites for those fully remote workers who lack adequate home office space. Though not “technically” travel, many hotels (Hyatt, Marriott, and Hilton, for starters) are offering single-day, day-time only, “work from hotel” deals to help relieve lost revenue and fried nerves of managing co-occurring zoom calls at the kitchen table.

Extended visits: remote relocations

With many children and families, not to mention formerly remote employees, feeling the squeeze of their walls at home, many hotels and villa properties are offering cost-effective extended stays (three weeks or more). Mid-term relocations are becoming incredibly common, with particular flight happening from metro centers in New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C. Individual countries are actively trying to scoop up consumer demand for change of scenery and pace, with countries like Dubai, Jamaica, and the Cayman Islands offering temporary extended work visas to US citizens as a way to revive local tourism.

Short term rental properties such as beach house bookings, waterfront properties, mountain cabins, and southern getaways — or you know, just a yard if you’re a city-dweller — are booking in greater numbers in 2020 than nearly any time in 2019. AirDNA notes, “Among those leading the rebound are beaches, mountain towns, lakeside getaways, and really anything within driving distance of a major urban hub.”

Longer-term remote stays, whether for yourself or your family, are increasingly popular, as are remote work options which, according to Google trend data, have increased by two-times the previous levels pre-pandemic. Searches for extended stay vacations peaked at the end of December 2020, with previous highs in October and April 2020. Moving into 2021, we’ll likely see expanded tourism offerings to match this consumer demand, and also to accommodate pre-quarantine requirements, which vary city to city.

In conclusion

Travel isn’t what it used to be, and for the time being, we’re seeing increasingly important local search activations and feature adoption. And as remote work and location agnostic work becomes more the norm, the lessons we learned from pandemic travel search will help businesses thrive in this new tourism climate moving forward.

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