Iāve been away long enough that I noticed this āhowdyā side to the site and decided there was no better place to visit first.
Iāve lived just about all of my life in California and have worked as an educator, along with numerous and varied proletarian jobs with varying amounts of precarity. While some seemed to have liked it there, even thrived there, I hated it there. Just being in the teachersā lounge, or for that matter existing in public, seemed to be an open invitation to be involuntarily exposed to the worst of āhustlegrindā and āstartupā culture. It may have been because of the specific area I was in (if you know Mountain View to Palo Alto to maybe Sacramento, youāll get what I mean), but these intrusive interactions, where a stranger could and would (if you look passably perhaps) get propositioned to āget in on the ground floorā with some grift or another, were bleakly common. Similarly, because of the sort of painfully privileged yet socially malnourished environment, just about nothing was discussed by my fellow faculty or other people I associated with except the pop cultural monoliths of the time, which I had to absorb via cultural osmosis in the worst way. Anticipating grading papers for the next few hours didnāt get any easier when āDAE LE RED WEDDING?!ā and āDAE LE SHAME, SHAME?!ā was all anyone around me wanted to talk about, unless they were discussing some investment or how āepicā (yes, that old stale word remained in vogue way after its expiration date) someoneās new Tesla was.
Thatās why I risked everything, cashed in my retirement fund early, and with eyes forward to becoming a father and finding a better place for my family, I moved to the Atlantic northeast to start an agricultural project that I intend to expand beyond sustainability into a communal project . Itās hard work, and of course itās hard work, and itās still a work in progress. For OpSec reasions I donāt want to get into too many details there except to say that itās all a work in progress and itās difficult, but rewarding. .
I like it here. I like it here quite a bit. Thereās funny people, weird people, even scary people here and there around me, but I havenāt had a single conversation that I would qualify as ābazingaā since I arrived. I havenāt seen a single ZYBERTRUKKK either, except pictures of them getting mocked on the internet. . I donāt know if itās just the area I now live in or if itās a larger cultural shift, but as far as I can tell thereās no more pop cultural monoliths that I had to be force-fed just by being around hogs gobbling up the hog slop, being it āhistorically accurateā or āsatiricalā or whatever.
I bring that up because I have no great interest in waddling into the slop anymore, to argue about it or against it for that matter, largely because I have not had to for almost a year now, and that makes a huge difference.
I still set aside time to write when I can, and my next novel project is nearing the completion of its first draft. For those curious about that, thereās no mecha this time (THIS TIME ), and itās a more contemporary setting with only some slight background science fiction elements. I may share more details about that in an upcoming post if thereās interest.
I hope you and yours are well, comrades.
EDIT: I accidentally said āthereās mecha this timeā instead of āthereās no mecha this timeā and corrected that immediately.
- CARCOSA [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish40Ā·2 months ago
- UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.netOPEnglish31Ā·2 months ago