Somewhere along the line, someone challenged me to follow through with blog posting for 365 days. I’m decently certain it was one of those free webinars that said if we could commit to it, we would see our blogs become profitable. There may have been more to it than that, but I decided I would commit to one post a day for 365 days. I had come close before – somewhere in the 200 range, so I thought I would just need to buckle down and get ‘er done. So, here I am, on day 209, struggling for something to write about. There are a lot of reasons for this; most of them have to do with COVID-19. But let’s examine how I got through 208 days.

The First 170-ish Days

Basically, the first several weeks I was ready to go. I wrote one or two blog posts a day, and I scheduled them out. I knew I was going to be on vacation, and that gave me a great subject to write about. New Zealand was awesome and learning more about it made for easy blog topics. I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to write while in New Zealand, so I made sure I had enough content to keep publishing even if I didn’t get Internet.

Afterwards, photos and more articles about New Zealand made it super easy to keep writing. I was reading New Zealand related books, including a money management book that made for several articles, and then things went wonky.

COVID-19 and Immigration

The coronavirus hit, and the U.S. downplayed its effects. People were saying it was just another flu. It wasn’t anything to worry about. I kept writing what I could about New Zealand, money management, penguins and the book I was writing: “Tales from an Alaskan Cabin,” which gave me a lot of days published because I was posting each chapter for my Penguinators at Patreon.

My wife and I went to Moscow to get her Green Card visa. That gave me more photos and things to write about. We did some touristy stuff, and we had Wi-Fi, so it was easy to keep up with. When we got back home, we had to wait for her passport. During the week between returning and her passport being delivered, the U.S. had shut down. We weren’t going to be able to get out.

Of course, COVID-19 provided some fodder for writing, especially after watching dumb people do dumb things. Seriously, in the U.S. in cases that have been resolved, a third of the outcomes have been death. It was 36% yesterday and 32% today. Those numbers might not stay that way, but even if everyone else gets well, the mortality rate of those who have tested positive for coronavirus is going to be about 6% for those in the system. Stay the F—k Home and protect your community.

This Evening

Anger and frustration can only take you so far in the writing world. Yeah, I know, Hollywood called Rod Serling “the Angry Young Man,” and he was responsible for an amazing number of great stories in “The Twilight Zone,” “The Night Gallery” and a couple of other TV movies. Still, there’s only so much bile, venom, and stupidity that one person can take. So, I found myself today talking to my mom, writing for money and not in the good way, and without ideas for how I am going to continue posting.

This problem has been coming for a couple of days now. My wife told me to write how I feel. That’s not what this blog is supposed to be about. I want to explore creativity, travel, and joy. Unfortunately, that all seems a little far off. The blog posts I have done with creative intent have fallen flat. Writing about New Zealand or money management seems to ring a little hollow. Why would I give you ideas about going places you can’t get to? Why would I write about money management as the stock market is cratering, and we have no idea what we will emerge to when this is all over?

The Crux of It All

And that’s really the crux of it. We don’t know how this is going to end. All we know is that it can’t go on the way it did before, and those that try are going to end up on the wrong end of another epidemic of illnesses. Even if you’re one of those people who believe this disease will ultimately only kill between .1 and .2% of those who get it, the reality is that it has killed more than 200,000 people worldwide and more than 55,000 people in the U.S. as of April 27. Each of those people was someone who had loved ones. It’s not just a number that you haven’t seen; it’s a person who could be you, your grandma, or your dad.

Change is the only constant, and this is going to require us to change everything. Or we face the consequences of repeating this history. The problem is we don’t have the leadership with the guts to initiate the needed changes. We have a lot of old people that want to go back to the way things were. Even though our supply chains have failed and just-in-time manufacturing practices have shown how they aren’t good for emergencies, with people showing their true colors and profiteering, much like pharma-bro did a couple of years back, and facing the selfishness of millions of scared, over-privileged people whose biggest rallying cry is “I Need a Haircut,” there’s the thought that will be able to reopen like none of this ever happened.

In the End

That’s not how this is going to work. If we ignore what we’ve gone through, we’ll just go through it again. Someone once told me that God (you’re welcome to substitute Karma, Deity, our own choices) keeps giving us the same lesson until we learn it. The time to learn the lesson is now. The time to implement the changes needed is now. We can’t wait for another pandemic or another disaster to teach us again lessons we should’ve learned before. We can either be the initiators of the changes for a better society and world, or we can react to whatever changes other people want to implement. Which would you prefer: To act or to be acted upon? Go out an make a change for the betterment of the world. Let’s let our selfish urges die, and they’ll take this disease and plenty of other problems with them.