I continue to struggle with finding a balance. My life here in mostly-isolation is quite pleasant when I can manage to get something done each day. I have to, for my own health, write something. Occasionally, there's also something constructive like working on my taxes or organizing a jumbled file in my filing cabinet or on my D drive.
But there's just too much news, little of which is good, and it's hard to take your attention away from it. Somewhere on this blog, I have probably quoted at least once a joke that Jackie Mason used to use at a time long ago when Richard Nixon was in the White House and Jackie Mason was funny. He said, "Because of him, I get up every morning and run out to see if my furniture is still there."
(I just did a search. This is my fourth time quoting it.)
Nowadays, I awake and I pick up my cell phone and flip to a news aggregator to see what stupid, baneful thing he's done already today — and you all know who "he" is. I'm not talking about Jackie Mason.
This morning, it was spreading the insane idea that when that 75-year-old unarmed protester who was doing nothing wrong got shoved to the pavement by a "peace officer" and wound up in the hospital…well, that was a set-up. The 75-year-old guy planned that to make the police look bad because he knew one of them would shove him and then that cop and all the rest of those fine officers would just march past, leaving him bleeding on the sidewalk.
Probably by now, someone has asked Trump if he thinks that's what really happened and Trump's hiding behind the excuse that he didn't say it was so. He was just quoting someone on the Internet. If you think Trump hates the press now, imagine what they'd be publishing about him if their criteria was that anyone said it on the Internet.
This then is my problem. It may be yours too but right now, it's mine. I want to…I need to spend my name not looking like the bad guy in a Tex Avery cartoon doing exaggerated "takes" at what's in the news. But boy, is it hard.
Yesterday, trying to get my blog off the topic, I posted a piece I wrote some time ago about errors in the credits of cartoon shows. It's valuable info for someone but just before bed last night, I read a fair amount of news about racial problems and reinventing police work in this country and the spread of COVID-19 — reopening ain't working so well — and other problems. Then I looked at my blog and having an item there about cartoon credits just looked wrong to me. Of all the things in the world, I picked that to post?
This blog will probably be quite schizophrenic for the rest of this year, careening madly between topical thoughts and non-topical. That's because my brain is doing that and the whole point of this page is for me to write what I feel like writing about, as opposed to what someone's paying me money to write. I apologize if any of you get whiplash because of this.