The Bright Side of a Pandemic

I’ve been having trouble posting top-level posts to the Hive blockchain, but comments work fine. Either it’s a really strange bug affecting only accounts of users with 14 letters in their user name and the letter “a” as the fifth letter, or I’m just doing something stupid. Yes, Bad User On Device does seem most likely but it seems odd that I can post comments to other user’s posts.

So instead of trying hive.blog or peakd.com for the 23rd time, I’m experimenting with a post from the Actifit dApp. Not sure if this will end up on the Steem blockchain or the Hive blockchain, or maybe both. And, if it goes onto the Steem blockchain, it’ll probably be blocked on the Steemit front end because (A) I’ve dared to use the word “Hive” in my post and (B) Justin Sun is a pathetic wanker.

There are a few positive things about life under semi-quarantine (11 days now since I’ve been to a coffee house, the gym, or a store of any kind). One thing is that I’m getting out with our dog more, taking her for the long walks that she loves. The last few days, we’ve seen a lone guy out on the thinning ice of a nearby lake dinging around with his ice fishing house. Today the fishing house was finally gone but a different guy was out on the lake taking his two dogs for a walk. Um, there’s a fair amount of open water near the shore where I’m walking. Yeah, maybe it’s different on some shoreline I can’t see. But is this really a great time to be out on the ice? Well, I guess that somebody has to win those Darwin Awards.

On the way back, we ran into an old guy out for a walk with his dog. As our two dogs had a sniffing visit, a young couple came walking through the intersection and the guy came up to pet the dogs, but the woman with him stood back. The old guy asked her “Are you socially distancing or just socially awkward?” She didn’t miss a beat and said “A bit of both.”

In addition to more walks, I’ve found more time for reading. As I mentioned in another post, I’m reading a Cormac McCarthy novel and I’ve started on Proust. In a comment to a freewrite that I recently wrote, @owasco mentioned Harry Crews, an author who I’d inexplicably never heard of. But after reading up on him a bit, I think I’ll have to read some of his stuff, probably starting with Classic Crews: A Harry Crews Reader.

Crews has some advice for young writers (applicable to older ones as well):
“You have to go to considerable trouble to live differently from the way the world wants you to live. That’s what I’ve discovered about writing. The world doesn’t want you to do a damn thing. If you wait till you got time to write a novel or time to write a story or time to read the hundred thousands of books you should have already read — if you wait for the time, you’ll never do it. ‘Cause there ain’t no time; world don’t want you to do that. World wants you to go to the zoo and eat cotton candy, preferably seven days a week”.

This may not be as succinct as Conrad Knickerbocker’s “…apply ass to chair” but, yeah, I sure as hell no longer have the “not enough time” excuse for not writing.

Walking