I hate change but it's as inevitable and immutable as time. For 14 years, since 2007 till now, I was a blogger as dcspinster commenting upon life and running in DC, especially upon running, my divorce, my three lost children who are (were?) the victims of the form of child abuse known as PAS perpetrated upon them as tender minors by their mother my ex and her coterie of family wreckers known as social "professionals who specialize in destroying families and especially childhoods through the incredibly venal and destructive arena known as domestic law, politics, travel and life in general. But blogger changed to google blogspot I guess and now I can't get into my 1400-plus posts in the past but they're here.
I was relating the year in review since it's December and my last (first) post was discussing the two salient events, beyond my brief car trip in September which I equated to my "vacation," that stick out in my mind in the mind-numbing year that is the Year-That-Wasn't, due to the pandemic and America's incredibly inept, corrupt and deadly non-response to it. All critically thinking, non-cultish adults know who is responsible for our quarter-million deaths in the last 10 short (long?) months. Two bright memories (a wedding party in January and seeing a B-29 bomber lumber overhead at 500 feet on July 4th) in a long, numbing year of dark dreariness.
I had already in my old blog related the list of the one movie I went to this year, the Academy-Award winning best picture Parasite on Valentine's Day. That might be the last movie I'll ever see in a movie-theatre, which would be a significant event in itself, since I have vivid memories of contemporaneously watching movies in theaters going back all the way to Shane, the Fall of the Roman Empire, John Wayne's The Alamo, the Longest Day, Goldfinger, the Night of the Living Dead, Morgan--A Suitable Case for Treatment, Zabriskie Point, the Battle of Algiers, 2001 (more than once), Easy Rider, Bad Company, the Godfather, Conan the Barbarian, Gladiator; and Parasite might be a good place to drive a stake through the outlandishly expensive, outmoded form of 90-minute entertainment known as movie-going. That night I got sick as a dog with racking coughing fits that for a few days made me think I was going to die and that lasted two full weeks and that I still suffer after-effects from, hmmm, I wonder what I had?
The picture of me that I posted in my profile, in the tradition of my old blog, was my most memorable or significant picture of the past year (2019). I am standing on Omaha Beach in Normandy three-quarters of a century after the history-changing Allied invasion across that beach and four others along that 50-mile coastal stretch in the American-led military expedition that saved the world from a dark new Middle Ages under fascism, at least temporarily, and that launched an era of American exceptionalism that lasted up until 2016 when it all started to come apart quickly and might have been thrown away in the last (current) presidential term irretrievably. Anyway, being a history major and the son of a WW2 combat vet who saw his share of invasion beaches in the Pacific and was slated to probably be killed in the penultimate invasion of the Japanese home islands except for the use of atomic bombs tom end the war, I was proud and reflective to be upon that beach in March last year in my first-ever overseas trip during the year marking the seventy-fifth anniversary of that stupendous event at that very place, an event that cost our country a huge and sorrowful effusion of blood that day in June 1944, a cost in lives in that tremendous battle that was easily surpassed yesterday alone in covid deaths in the US while our president blathered on in phone calls to Republican supplicants and tweets to his brainwashed masses in his ongoing post-election-loss-by-a landslide coup attempt.
