61 Days Left of 2020

I really haven’t written anything in October despite the fact I plan to start writing every day in November. That’s a bad idea. But you know what they say. What good idea exists without a bad idea preceding it?

I don’t want to make this a reflection on 2020 since that’s better handled at the end of 2020, which we have 61 days left of 2020. 61 days left of a year that’s going to be remembered forever. Or maybe forgotten due to the events of 2021, a year that people have already convinced themselves will be better than 2020. Civilized people love to decide that if the world went around the sun, it means a new start. They forget that 62 days from now might be a new year, but it’s only one day after the last year. Where you decide your calendar begins and ends is up to you really. Is it a new year? Or is just the same life you always had?

I guess that isn’t such a great thing to hear right now. People don’t want their semblance of hope shattered by boring, eye roll of a truth. I get it. There’s enough in the world to be pissed off about, to be depressed about, to be hopeless about.

Especially if you’re American.

I don’t envy anyone in the United States of America right now. Every time I walk to the river here in Windsor, I look out across and see Detroit. What used to feel like an extension of where I live now feels like a world I’ll never see again. It’s essentially three kilometres away but I haven’t been there since the end of February. Since the 2010s begin I was basically going once a month. It made working a mundane job that wasn’t anywhere near what I wanted to do with my life digestible. Work sucks (“I know.” – Tom DeLonge) but at least I’ll have a Sunday to go to Detroit and get blitzed on mimosas, and if it’s the summer I’ll drop a mickey of vodka I paid less than $5 for into a large sour watermelon Slurpee at 7-11 and stumble around a city I’m technically foreign to.

To quote one of my favourite songs, “Just black out, wake up foreign, wander home.”

That’s really more when I’m being a degenerate. Recently it was more about seeing a concert or eating ramen. When we did the drinking in Detroit on my birthday in February, some remarked that it felt like a last time thing, once last hurrah with Aaron to relive the early parts of the decade. Some of my friends that day knew that later this year, they would be fathers and mothers. This was a chance to do that one more time before having to do a little growing up. Little did I realize, or any of us realize, it was a last hurrah. The last hurrah of going to America. For a while at least.

It’s difficult to see what the future will be for me in Windsor. Part of why I live here is cheap rent. The other part was having Detroit beside me. Having a pretty large city in a foreign country beside you means you can travel very easily. You get a lot out of a living situation like that. Living anywhere else, it has to survive on the merits of only the country it is in and the towns that surround. It’s hard to find places like Windsor in Canada, where the city itself has a lot of amenities and whatever it is missing is a river away. This pandemic and the response by the United States has told me that I might not get that benefit for the rest of my thirties. That’s less than five years.

The rent? It’s still cheap. Technically. It’s half of my pay but I know it’s cheaper than what I would get almost anywhere else. If I move it will be for a better job, and the benefit of this pandemic was showing me how great it is to work from home. Some don’t like it. I was warned by friends that it’s a bad situation. I love it. The only thing that makes it less than ideal was the raccoons running in my ceiling crashing into my living room. That wasn’t fun. Working from home is now a pre-requisite for any new job I get unless I make enough to go into an office. I don’t care if I have to take two part time work from home jobs to make it up. Going into an office is a waste of time and resources in my mind at this point.

I don’t know if I would have come to these conclusions if 2020 was a normal year. I gained a lot of weight over the summer (and have slowly been losing it but it’s a struggle) but my attitude about my job wasn’t much different in February. My aspirations are still the same as they were earlier in the year, and recently I’ve been getting things figured out. I just let myself get derailed as usual, which has been the common of my life since realizing I had ADHD and dropping a lot of the routines I used to have.

I want to write every day like I used to. Getting to that is a struggle. I want to create video content in the near future. The process is slow to just be happy with what I see before I start writing scripts or adding graphics to video content created. I have 61 days left in 2020 and I don’t know how they will look. In a few days I get to watch if the United States gets its own version of the Reichstag fire. How much of my time and focus will be eaten up by that? How much of my writing will be derailed by late mornings and days in the gym? Will my luck of avoiding the virus that has people wishing 2020 away run out? I don’t know. But I never know. And I shouldn’t let the unknown keep me stranded every day. I tell myself every day.

61 days left of 2020. I started this journal in October. It’s November now. I guess I did reflect on the year. That was dumb. But you know what they say.