Hey there. Y’all miss me? It’s your friendly neighborhood idiot, finally breaking the seal on the bear cave and writing some meaningless words onto the blog. It’s been nearly three months since my last post, and yes the COVID-19 pandemic is to blame, but maybe not in the ways you might think.

For the record, I did not get COVID-19 and until just yesterday followed all the rules placed on us for Los Angeles County, Glendale, and California. You won’t hear me downplaying the situation in this blog either, as by now most of us know someone affected by the disease. That’s not why I stayed away from the blog.

I’ve mentioned this before in passing, and more directly in person, that I find it really hard to blog when I am in an unhappy place. For the last two-and-a-half months, I was in that unhappy land. The obvious points people would make would be “yeah, your life situation during a shelter-in-place must be difficult.” Well, my life situation is a home with just my dog, TV, video games, and take-out is what I used to call ‘a weekend off’. No, my unhappiness was a mixture of things. For one, I bought into the fear and found myself exceedingly anxious when I left the house. For two, the weather – at least early on. Most of March was raining, so even when we wanted to get out of the house we couldn’t – and that creates some unhealthy habits. Also, I had a horrible run of bad luck or bad timing for things. The kicker of which was when the DMV dropped me a snail mail to tell me my license was suspended, which meant by the time it arrived I had been driving on a suspended license for 5 days — when I called them, they said “yeah, our mistake, we’ll fix it”.

Part of the reason why you didn’t see any blogs is the bear cave itself. Normally, I don’t write anything at home. Most of the time, I write at my friendly neighborhood Starbucks – which you can guess isn’t an option now. I tend to compartmentalize locations. I don’t like writing at home for the same reason I don’t like working from home – home is where I chill. Writing, in particular, needs me to be somewhere with little distraction, and the bear cave exists to be as distracting from the rest of the work as possible. I’ve managed to develop a working environment at home, but writing is another thing.

So how was I able to get myself to write a post today? I broke the rules.

Instead of spending memorial day weekend not watching sports; I got out of the house. My great friends, Chadd & Heather Creed, purchased a home during the pandemic in the heart of Temecula’s wine country. At their invitation, I threw the dog into the car and drove down to spend a couple days with them. Of course, the change in scenery is refreshing, and their kitchen table makes for a nice distraction free blog location – but more than anything, being here with friends makes me happy.

Of course, this isn’t over. While counties around Los Angeles are opening up, LA County isn’t. In a future post I’ll probably dig into what life is like these days, but that life continues. How I really feel about it all comes down my anger at a statement I keep hearing: “The New Normal”. For me, that suggests that our bar of life has shifted, and it’s up to us to get used to it. I disagree. This maybe new, but there is nothing normal about it. We are not meant to hide in our homes, avoid gatherings, and stay six feet apart. We were meant to be around each other, talk to each other, and hug each other. This new whatever is becoming more damaging than the disease. The goal shouldn’t be to protect as many people as possible, the goal should be get us back to Normal as fast as possible.

So that it. Sorry I have been missing, and I can’t promise I will be blogging a lot soon; but I want to get back to normal too. If that means crapping out some blogs, that’s what I will do.