I no longer have a sense of time.

For years I haven’t known what day it is, aided by the fact that as a freelance writer my work is largely unrelated to the day of the week*. But I think the pandemic really kicked that into overdrive, and that combined with the natural acceleration of time due to aging**, means that I often not only don’t know what year it is, but certainly don’t know how long ago things were.

This is not an uncommon experience; many people my age feel like the 90s were just one or two decades ago, and can simultaneously feel that 2015 was so long ago that it feels like a whole other lifetime.

Regardless, one of the things about getting to this age is that many things actually were 20 years ago, as I mentioned about starting my relationship 20 years ago last month, and as I now reflect that 20 years ago this month marked the release of my first published**** book. It was, of course, a great pleasure and thrill for me to finally feel like I had a book out in the real world, published by a company (Barnes&Noble) people had even heard of, no less.

But also, the book was a collection of weird groups and the intro was all about how weird isn’t bad, you just have to find your people. The good news is, finding your people has become a lot easier these days, thanks to the Internet and whatnot*****. The bad news is, an increasingly-large swath of the country seems to believe that not only is being different bad, but that it needs to be attacked/destroyed/outlawed/erased to the point where even learning that other people exist and lead different lives and have their own joys and struggles is now controversial.

This is a damn shame, and is also largely opposed to what I’ve come to realize is my primary moral principle: “People are people.”****** Not terribly complex, but surprisingly unpopular. Still, if you’re going to live by a moral code, you could do worse. Of course, there are those who hold themselves above other people, like some kind of superman, and that reminds me that my latest column is a little Superman parody that is my favorite thing I’ve written in a while:

The Adventures of GovernMan

I know, that bird joke in the opening is ridiculous. But what can I say; bad puns are my kryptonite.

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* Notwithstanding my column deadline, natch.

** I have often thought that our experience of time accelerates at a steady rate as we age, and that there must be some analog to the calculable acceleration of gravity (9.8 meters per second, per second) to account for how time seems faster every year. Maybe years go by 9.8% faster every year? I don’t know, I’m no Einstein.***

*** Although on occasion people have remarked upon the similarity of our hairstyles.

**** Technically I think I wrote my first book in 3rd grade for a Young Authors contest, I believe it was about dinosaurs and preceded the book of birthday poems I also wrote in elementary school as a project. But I certainly wouldn’t call either published.

***** The glorious powers of whatnot are truly unmatched.

****** Consider it a condensed paraphrase of a Terry Pratchett quote I can’t seem to find about how most problems start when someone decides a certain group of people are lesser and shouldn’t really be treated like people with full rights.

Writing a humor column is an interesting thing. It’s tricky to hit the sweet spot. For me, I am most proud of a column when I feel that it provides people with interesting information and educates them, while at the same time making them laugh. And so if you were to ask me what was my favorite column I’d written recently, I’d have to say that it was the one about the Ides of March.* Another decent one which at least touched on the theory of relativity was Einstein Time.

More often though, I find myself oscillating between the overly silly (Candy!) and the overly serious (Roman Conservative Party). And usually these types of columns follow in close succession. If I write something that I deem “not funny enough”, then I often go extra zany in the next week or two. And if I write something that’s pure silliness, I tend to obsess about making one of my next columns really informative or otherwise grounded.

Outside the column front, I’ve been trying to do a bit more musically. The other night I got together with the inimitable Lex Friedman for an online songwriting session, so maybe if he STOPS HAVING BABIES, we’ll co-write some new funny songs this year. I have three other humorous collaborations all on hold because my musicians are too busy to meet with me, one funny collaboration on hold because I was hesitant to start another large project until I’d finished one of the many I have running, and one serious music collaboration on hold because it turns out I have trouble writing serious music.

With silly music, I just have trouble recording it, but I really enjoy coming up with ideas. This is why I may have done a little terrible voice work for this week’s RNZB Songfight.*** And I always like making up instant music as part of my improv troupe, which is especially fun since it seems like our musical games are often the most popular. In fact, we’ve got a show tonight (3/20/10), but the chance of you reading this in time to show up are pretty slim. If you wanted to know about future shows ahead of time, you should probably follow RBIT’s Facebook page.

*I’d wanted to title this post as a pun on “The Ides of March”, and have a list of bullet points to the effect of, “I’d like you to read this column”, and “I’d love to have my improv troupe perform more often”, but how do you pluralize “I’d” in a title with punctuation? I tried to make it, “The “I’d”‘s of March”, which looks completely terrible, and then “The I’ds of March”, which is bad in a different direction, and “The I’d’s of March” splits the difference and is still awful. And thus, I decided to scrap that whole idea and call it, “The Inconvenient Punctuation of March”.** But then I figured, why not flip it around?

**Also, why the hell would punctuation go inside the quotes when it’s not part of what you are quoting? The American system is part of the march of inconvenient punctuation. I consciously choose not to put punctuation inside the quotation when it’s not part of “the thing being quoted”. I’m not bad at writing in AP style, I’m just an Anglophile using superior British punctuation rules.

***I have to admit, it’s still cool to me that I am now entering songs in Songfight, many years after interviewing them for “Think You’re The Only One?“.