Until today, I hadn’t updated this blog in 2 years. 2024 was a blur with lessons about why we don’t put people on pedestals, personal health concerns, and odd moments of clarity. 2025 already feels like 3 years in as many weeks but also that it’s going by too fast.

In the coming weeks, a minor goal is to devote more time (which would be any time) into actually naming my poetry chapbook and working on the poem order. January in my day job is always hectic and that’s going to extend into February this year with new projects I hadn’t anticipated.

Anyway, if you’re still here, thanks for sticking around despite my long absence. I hope that everyone’s 2025 is going well (or as well as it can under any adverse circumstances) and that my fellow Americans remember to wear black for mourning tomorrow. Our country’s democracy is sounding its death rattle and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream shouldn’t be forgotten.

I’ve had Space Cowboys on my mind, courtesy of a recent re-watch of Cowboy Bebop. The anime has a special place in my heart. I love the characters and the music choices. I’m not sure why disco comes to mind when the series relies on jazz and different musical genres. Cultural and social freedom, as well as revolution, are indicated by disco, which thematically fits with the series, even if the upbeat sounds might not.

Upbeat and revolutionary. Disco brought together people who weren’t supposed to be together in underground spaces, forbidden clubs, at a backdrop of criminal enterprises. The past meets the future, in the present (of the time) that the series was initially aired. We want to be more than our questionable circumstances, even more so now.

“See you Space Cowboy!” has the yesteryear feel of “tune in next week” to see how our enterprising adventurers are going to survive by their wiles, wits, and weapons at their disposal. The world feels more and more like that, recognizing that the first world areas are just catching up to what everyone else has seen, experienced, and had to overcome for some time. Are we all satisfied with others’ attempts to fix our community’s social, climate, or political woes?

Do we continue to bitch about the problems on our doorsteps or do we actually pitch in where we have influence? Or do we try to half-ass it and force change like we’re on some race for a bounty that everyone is clamoring for? There’s no monetary gain at the end of the journey, so our motivation has to be intrinsic. Like it or not, that’s really all the crew of the Bebop actually have. They’re rarely going to make more than it takes to have pepper beef for months and do the equivalent of duct taping the ship back together.

That’s life as I know it too. Simple food, good friends, music that you have to hear so that you don’t lose heart or forget who you are. And if ivory towers get destroyed along the way, well, that’s just an added bonus for living life as fully as having little left to lose permits us. If space is where the rich will go, what does that say about the planet we call home? It might be a boring dystopia, but it’s a dystopia nonetheless, with (at least in my case) the American Dream as the intended utopia. The nation lost the thread long before I was born, and I’m just doing what I need to keep my family and hopefully my community surviving, if not thriving.

Let’s put some music on and dance, even if the world decides to fall around our ears. Maybe we’ll see the stars again.

Maybe others can relate to this: Lately, I’ve been feeling like color is slowly seeping in to a dark, gray, landscape and I’m a plant getting ready to bloom. Seasonal changes aside, the first two years of the pandemic, especially working in the healthcare / health and wellness industry, have been numbing. I’m actually planning trips again, and looking forward to new ventures. Hermits on the mountain in groups of people – six feet apart when possible, that’s how I think all of this feels.

(I could speak about masking in a different context as a neurodivergent person, and how I laugh at the idea that a piece of fabric worn for 30 minutes is somehow oppressive given what society demands of me both in and out of pandemics, but I think that’s a different essay deserving of its own space.)

And we’ve all become reflective as a result. What matters in life to us as individuals? What haven’t we done that we want to still do? Are we doing work that feeds our soul and lets us live after the day is done, or not? It’s not the great resignation, in my mind, it’s an evaluation. A measuring stick. Anubis holding the scales of your heart with a leaden feather to offset. Is your heart light enough?

For so many people, it isn’t, and the question then becomes: how do I fix it? Is the answer unionizing at a current workplace to demand better treatment, better pay? Is it seeking another career, another career field? Comfort may not be enough. Change may be the answer. That is the answer that many people are reaching. Taking work out off its pedestal, and sizing it down in importance, is the first answer I’ve arrived at. I prefer life in proper balance over “work/life balance”. I work to pay my bills and hopefully give me some sense of appropriate satisfaction, not to be the center of my life. If anyone’s eulogy for me focuses on my job, I’ve not lived life.

To correct this unhealthy imbalance, I’ve started with small steps, opening toward the light a petal at a time. I’m taking my first flight ever at a much later age than most achieve this goal to visit friends whose absence in my life has been painful. I moved to somewhere with at least a somewhat functioning public transit system that goes to the airport for a reason. I am going to make use of it, starting this year. Two trips this year, one for friends, one for family. Next year, who knows?