Internet outage ended just in the nick of time to save my Rewind Wednesday.

This is a wee reflection on a bubble crash 300 years ago, in which people demonstrated just as much awareness (or lack thereof) of the problems with unchecked private enterprise as folks have today.

Not much changes, eh?

(Night, folks. Have a good one.)
https://open.substack.com/pub/mlclark/p/bubble-trouble-in-the-1700s

At the end of my data, so that'll be it for me tonight, unless internet returns (and I'll probably check a few times before midnight to see if I can salvage my posting schedule).

If it doesn't, I'll head out to a mall with working internet tomorrow, catch up on posts, and try to salvage my work week for other projects.

This is just a crummy time. They happen.
Will post newsletters & YouTube, but I'm otherwise offline for mental health for the next few days.

Be good, you beautiful s. 💛

The downside of trying to be "on" from the moment I lost income is that losing a day of personal work via net outage has been really bad for wellbeing: too much time to think, when I've set up my whole coping strategy post job loss around "doing".

But if I go out to walk, people want me to talk things out, and there's nothing to talk out. I don't want or need to explain how fragile my life is. I just need to rebuild a routine on which I can grow and try again.

Silly internet.
Sillier brain.

Still no internet, but I guess that resolves my experiment in different posting times. Just an absolute wash of a day in which I was hoping to get a lot done, *and* a disruption to my very new posting schedule.

For next week, I'll make sure all material is out between 7:30 and 8 (I like to do a final read-through, just in case, so auto-queuing it is never going to work with my nerves). There never seem to be outages that early in the day, so hopefully that'll fix the problem.

#LearningCurves

There once was a plucky Canuck
Who strove not to cuss quite so much
But when life wore too thin
They would flash a fierce grin
And let out the most thunderous

Internet is down for a bit, but hopefully I can post today's piece soon. (I'm experimenting with posting times this week, since early morning posts might not be optimal.)

Rewind Wednesday is fun, though. Today's piece goes back 300 years to remind us that nothing changes and we always knew that companies will grift the pants right off of you if given half a chance.

🙃 But more on that #Soon!
Podcast and general scheming for now.

Perennial reminder that we are not living in the worst timeline, but we are living in one of the most mediocre: a world where we have to push back on forms of violence and ignorance that we might once have thought we were on the cusp of overcoming--only to be smacked in the face by them again.

We could have had such nice things.

Instead, we have to strive to do the best we can in mediocre times.

Starting with kindness--for yourselves, & for everyone around you, too. 🕊️
https://youtu.be/t-l91O9VxN0

With apologies for a phone camera that can't capture reds for the life of it.

"Birds flying high, you know how I feel
Sun in the sky, you know how I feel
Breeze driftin' on by, you know how I feel
It's a new dawn
It's a new day
It's a new life for me, yeah
It's a new dawn
It's a new day
It's a new life for me, ooh
And I'm feeling good" 🕊️

#Podcasts

Here's a neat little morning reminder of how the rich scam their way out of paying full taxes, via the story of a "foundation" Musk created that's finally facing heat for not distributing the minimum amount needed for charitable status. It's shaved billions off his tax contribution over the years, though!

Honestly, how we live with ourselves in this gamified world is a wonder.

Be kind to yourselves, and everyone struggling around you. 🫂💛

https://pca.st/episode/e4587ac7-1d03-427d-8b20-3e4f0dba86b7

Mornin', starshines! 💫

Off for a walk in the good dark before dawn. Happy Wednesday!

Whew.

"Toronto’s unemployment is growing at a breakneck speed. Over the past year, the region saw unemployment rise 34% (+74.9k) to 294.k people in February. If the unemployed people were a city, it would rank as Canada’s 16th largest ... Heck, if just the 75k people unemployment grew by were a city, it would be Canada’s 45th largest city—equivalent to Sarnia, and more people than Ft. Mac."

Still a rough decade, eh?

Hold on to yer butts, as Jackson would say.

#Canada

https://betterdwelling.com/toronto-unemployment-surges-adds-75k-more-unemployed-people/

The other downside to this Ramadan experiment is that it messes with exercise if you can't hydrate for half the day. (I'll go for a super-early morning walk all the same, and see if that helps.)

I'm also trying to figure out if my mood's so low from the fast itself, or from caffeine withdrawal. But when I'm water-fasting, coffee always drops away after a couple of days, so I don't *think* it's withdrawal symptoms.

No hunger, but low mood is 100% a symptom to watch. Will stop if it keeps up! 👌

Tough Times Tuesday.

Here, I reflect on the wartime mentalities that we have to overcome, and how hard it is to do so because of how much we were pitched into extremes in the early throes of conflict.

We have witnessed a lot of cruelty recently. It can feel impossible to walk back how much unkindness has been shared.

But the work of peace goes far beyond a cessation of violence. It requires us to acknowledge what war has done to us.

Are we ready for such a reckoning?

https://open.substack.com/pub/mlclark/p/overcoming-wartime-mentalities

🙃 I know this was well-intentioned, but someone this evening literally told me,

"Well, the way I see it is that you're at rock bottom, but that's a good thing because you can only go up from here. How much worse could your life get than it already is?"

And, ah... mi gente?

Don't do that.

If you're not sure what to say, you don't need to try to give a pep talk.

It's okay to just sit with someone and be pleasant together instead.

We can talk about sportsball! Or Rocky movies! Or tardigrades!

Re: Ramadan experiment

Having tried this for two days, I've got a bit of a working hypothesis:

Water fasting tends to boost my energy levels, but dry fasting is a real downer--and yet if I were doing this as a Muslim, I'd be breaking it with a spiritually moored feast with family every evening.

It reminds me of some Evangelical friends in uni who talked about how summer camps were structured to break them down emotionally so that they could be built back up in Christ.

Fascinating experience.