SO I haven’t updated Downcast on the office iPad for a few weeks, it seems. I’m into heavy reading and research and didn’t want to think about soundtracking so I thought, sling up the podcast app, because I subscribe to a lot of music podcasts.

I also walk every day, which is often when I listen to them (Downcast on the iPad syncs with Downcast on the iPhone). But, of course, I’m not walking every day any more, not sitting outside bars with a glass of wine listening to them, wandering the food hall listening to them. Hence, when I opened Downcast on the iPad, thinking, oh, it’s syncing, this won’t take long…. three and a half gig. A weird reminder of lockdown’s impact on my days.

I’ve really got to get outside for a walk tomorrow. This shit is wrecking my body now, and I have three and a half gigs of music to listen to.

So, nobody needs another plague post, but let me tell you. I’ve been running full speed since last August, with just a little lull in January. In March — you remember March, it was 100 days long — I was supposed to take a very long weekend off. I was downing tools, getting the hell away from screens, and disappearing off somewhere with a book in one hand and currency in the other with which to pay people to bring me cocktails and meats. If I don’t switch off and go dark for a week every six months, when I’m working at this speed, bad things happen.

Well, it’s April. I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in a month. And my system for surviving 1000mphclub, it turns out, has failure points. Like, everywhere I usually go is closed and I’m not allowed outside. Hahahah.

I started crashing on Monday. Thought it would pass, and that it was just down to a lot of sudden work pressure of the using-up-decision-cycle kind. Today I barely made it out of the grocery store under my own power.

So I guess it’s time for me to figure out a new way of doing things, too.

Term first noticed by me on Things To Click.

Definition on Urban Dictionary, 24 March 2020: “Obsessively reading social media posts about how utterly fucked we are.”

Yeah. That’s it exactly. Also applies to the Guardian Live blog. Doomscrolling. What a perfect word.

Yesterday was hard going, and I’m sleepy and drained today, but everything’s finally loosening up and I’m stretching and breathing and feeling better. Slipping back into Full Hermit mode, off the feeds and returning to what is, for me, my normal quiet life. I’ve got everything I need right here.

Went for a walk through local streets less deserted than you might think: a smiling workman spraying water across the debris of last week’s roadworks, people buying wine at the corner shop, little kids on their bikes with careful parents. It’s quiet, but not eerie. It reminds me a little of how days after Xmas used to be, before the shops stayed open 24/7 and you had to buy food and supplies for several days at home.

Switched off now, and it feels good. Writing focus has come back, and I’m making new things. I have the people I talk to every day, and the music, and the calm, and my work. Everything else is cut off. Away I go into the mists. With the wine delivery that just arrived. I hope you can find your own place in the mists too.

Here’s a thing I wrote a couple of weeks ago for the newsletter:

I’m possibly still brain-dead after the show launch.  It’s been a busy week, so busy that it’s kept me away from focussing on writing (focus again).  I have managed to fit in thinking time — that’s frequently a different muscle — and am developing some ideas in odd moments here and there.  I have a few surprises in store, but for much later in the year.

I mean, when I say “fallback plans”… I’m not a great planner.  I wing it, a lot. I listen to the world and try to tell which way the wind is blowing.  When I say “plan” I really mean creating the possibility of opportunity. I till the soil to try and grow my own luck. I create options.  And I invent things, relentlessly.  I am solidly a second-division writer, at best, by any model and definition.  But I’m still here because I work and think, a lot, to make new things and try new things.  Giving the fuck up is not on the menu.  

I mean, I’m often a few years too early or a few years too late with my moves. But, hell, I’m still here.  Sometimes, being here and still trying to be better is all the victory you need.

Dwayne Johnson, who fascinates me with the weird position in the culture he’s taken, recently gave a talk in which he said, “at some point you’ve got to be fucking tired of not being number one.”  Which is fair, and motivational.  But, at some point, you’ve got to decide what you’d have to give up to be number one and whether it’s worth it.

I don’t give up.  But I don’t give up myself, either. So I won’t be number one.  But I’ll still be me.  You have to be okay with that trade.  And you have to be okay with looking in the mirror and still seeing a recognisable version of yourself.  And if you smile, then the smile has to be real, whether it’s rueful or not — not brave, desperate or terrified.

Still winging it.  Still fine with the ride.

THE OLD CITY, Atrium Carceri. This one was actually gifted to me by Cryo Chamber, for which my thanks.

I just proofed THE BATMAN’S GRAVE 7, so my tiny end of the comics industry is still moving, even though the comics apparently won’t be shipped and the stores that sell them will be shut anyway. I’ve been bugging people for months and years about the current state of digital comics provision, and everyone was like “yeah, yeah, shut up.” Go and buy something from Panel Syndicate today and pay what you want.

I was gonna do a whole thing here about how work and life has been impacted, but, really, who gives a shit. It’s not like I’m going through the bins for old food. I took yesterday to clear my head. Today I’m back at the desk processing documents and things, cutting most of the news out of my diet, and getting some thinking done. The near future needs immediate consideration.

Well, today’s been another dead loss. Hails of messages and emails (thanks to all who checked in with me because, I presume, I am so old that a cough on a breeze coming from ten miles away could drop me in my tracks), clearing up from cancelled travel, sending money to precarious nearest and dearest, and observing at my local food hall that apparently in the time of plague the third thing to hoard behind toilet paper and hand sanitiser is chicken pieces.

I’ve generally avoided talking about this, because my brain is in a blender as it is. But now it feels like it might be worth doing at least some kind of partial personal log of these times. Someone said to me today, “I’m freaked out that you’re freaked out. You’re usually so unflappable.” And, I admit, it got to me yesterday, I put all the news feeds back on, watched borders close, started hearing about confirmed cases within two or three degrees from me.

I mean, I’m Generation X. We all assumed this was coming, and we’ve all been ready for decades to cut you for clean water. And, since we were the generation left to roam the streets, let ourselves in and sit around alone for hours, we are entirely prepared for all this, because we learned the tools and emotions were dunned out of us early.

It’s still a weird moment.

Anyway, I’m fine, and will likely continue to be so. Tomorrow, I need to fully shake it off and go into deep work mode.

I was going to stop using Twitter after the show launch, but, after having just turned off Tweetdeck for being nothing but cough-related, I decided to use Buffer to feed peaceful photos from Instagram into my timeline. Because maybe you want to look at something that’s not just about plague and death. I’m working on the newsletter right now — in between hails of emails and messages, because things are obviously getting nuts out there — and attempting to apply the same process.

Great time to buy music, by the way. It’s nothing but music, pictures, signals of continued life and idle thoughts here.