It seems the Universe is forcing a digital detox on me whether I wanted one or not.
Now I did want one, but have been blindsided from the change from busy bee to beach bum. My Internet went out yesterday despite paying 30 days for a usually decent for my needs unlimited satellite connection on coming to Thailand 10 days ago. This led to some chaos as I was stuck on a very long and difficult edit at the time. With the AI nothing is classified anymore as a foreign or difficult call worthy of a bonus, not even one for a Chinese biomedical company.
Painting for me does not require an internet connection. Instead I’ve been living too much at the 7 Eleven closest to the airport with the most available connections. Ahh the joys of being an underpaid corporate drone.
I see a fracturing happening right now across substack and the world at large, as perhaps the shock and awe campaign of Trump 2.0 begins to lose steam in the jump the shark moment. It’s not between left and right as much as it is between those who think the current way of doing things is salvageable and worth saving versus those who think that the current incentive system will always lead to authoritarian tendencies.
I’m seeing flat Earth types who are now proclaiming that believing in a heliocentric universe is akin to blasphemy against God. They are not terribly far from outlawing astrology outright if only they seized the reins of power. This is all based on the presupposition that the Bible is the infallible Word of God, never wrong, never mistranslated, and never added to or subtracted against by other Holy or less Holy texts. Does Yeshua not intuitively sound like a better name for Jesus?
Meanwhile I also see enthusiastic Hero Ball worshippers of Trump, Musk and the whole team who are a little unnerved by the full throated endorsement of AI in charge of everything, Gaza being turned into a gigantic Las Vegas Mediterranean casino resort, and, well, what we got of Jeffrey Epstein’s list looked suspisciously like the Covid vaccine disclosures so far:
I will admit to being wrong there regarding them releasing some Epstein files at a later point in time. This is Trump 2.0 and every day is a full court press adventure! Same same but different.
Painting seems to be a better idea all around. Here’s a picture of the heart I always thought could be made so lovely again for wedded couples. Do you see two hearts? The second is just an inexplicable kink in the tree. Yes I have been painting the baseboard cement.
With the new moon I saw that at the absolute low tide the coral reef is indeed coming back. So here’s my coral reef part 3 updates:
The area is much smaller and the reef pools are much much shallower than before, say 6-8 inches at most out there. But there is a ton of new growth coral:
There were a few crabs scurrying around, many sea cucumbers and I saw a few small fish. There were no sea urchins, kelp (that wasn’t really a thing here ever), starfish, clams, lobsters, prawns, shrimp or other mollusks yet. But the area is definitely coming back to life from whatever happened to it last fall.
I sometimes think that the forces of life and death are locked into an epic battle where one side is trying as hard as it can to kill while the other side is trying as hard as it can to save. I think God always wins.
I could really use a ko-fi if anyone is interested. I lost my bank card. With my Internet outage the only money I have access to is from substack at the moment.
Does that mean it’s time to earn Thai baht?
I like the sleep/death one! So true...
Happy abt the coral. Yes, God wins. Thank you!