Mornings

PETERMBALL Journal

Interesting thing about putting a Now Page on the internet: you’ll put up things that are very much a work-in-progress line of half-baked thinking up there, and people in other timezones will will prod you for more information before you’ve had your morning coffee.

At which point you will need an extra three shots of caffeine just to cope with the idea that you need to be human and articulate.

Which also means I could be doing a long, thinking-in-progress series of posts about the “Structuring a prose-based publishing company around comic book publishing models” entry, trying to pin down exactly what I’m thinking beyond “reading too many Warren Ellis rants about the state of publishing.”

Please send coffee. No, more than that.

Adding a Now Page

PETERMBALL Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

Earlier this week I launched a Now Page, based on an idea put forward by Derek Sivers about including pages about what you’re focused on right now alongside the customary About and Contact pages.

Most websites have a link that says “about”. It goes to a page that tells you something about the background of this person or business. For short, people just call it an “about page”.

Most websites have a link that says “contact”. It goes to a page that tells you how to contact this person or business. For short, people just call it a “contact page”.

So a website with a link that says “now” goes to a page that tells you what this person is focused on at this point in their life. For short, we call it a “now page”.

from about NowNowNow.com

I first came across the idea on Warren Ellis’ blog, where he plumbed the flaws of the concept; namely, if you want it to be effective, people need to go and update their Now page on he regular and that’s not an instinctive habit.

Mine is largely reposting content from the blog. This works better for me because I spend more time thinking about blog content than I do overall site structure. I’m more likely to look at an empty day in the schedule and post an update than I am head over to a static page and update it (as are most authors, to be honest; just look at the sheer number of out-of-date bios and book pages on author sites around the internet).

Short version, every time I post an update with the Status tag here, the site will automatically display the latest copy on www.PeterMBall.com/now along with a date-stamp.

Folks who follow the blog regularly will get updates about where my focus is–a net win given that I’m starting to work with folks outside my household–while other folks who want to check on the status of things can click over to the static Now page and get a quick precis of where my head’s at.

Tiny Moments of Terror and Telling Stories

PETERMBALL Journal

I posted this to Facebook on Sunday, when I was still twitchy as fuck about everything that happened. Now I’m revisiting it, 48 hours later, because this shit has derailed things pretty badly on the writing front, given the way it spiked my anxiety..

The story begins like this: our local pharmacy was out of the medication my partner uses to ease their chronic arthritis pain. For our household, this qualifies as a very bad thing, so we made plans for me to try the pharmacy at the local shopping centre when I did the weekly shopping.

That pharmacy has been locked down, with signs on the doors alerting everyone there was an active COVID patient on the premises over the last few days. I start doing the math, figure trying a third pharmacy is a better choice than doing shopping. So I hit Google, search for other small pharmacy outlets in my local area, and hie over to a hole-in-the-wall place about ten minutes away.

It’s not exactly a place doing a lot of business at 3:30 PM on an Easter Sunday. The woman behind the prescription counter is one of those cheerful customer service types who asks how your day is going and chats as they take your order, which is a surprisingly comforting trait in a world where you don’t leave the house more than once a week.

I put in my partners script, and the pharmacy is well stocked. Their chemists go to work, and I loiter out of the way so that any new customers have a clean path along the spatial distancing markers when they come in.

Then the fuckhead appears. Young bloke. Late twenties or early thirties. Not looking well.

This sniffly, coughing motherfucker walks in without giving the spatial distancing markers a second glance. Woman on the counter asks how his weekends going, and he tells us his tale: he’s got bronchitis, but the hospital put him in a COVID ward.

“Oh no,” the woman on the counter says. “Good that your tests cleared okay, though.”

“Didn’t wait,” this asshole says. “They weren’t treating us like adults, and I’m a grown man, so I discharged myself. Going to head home and eat my mum’s cooking while I recover.”

Woman at the counter stares at him in semi-professional horror. I am far less discreet as I back the fuck away to get as much distance as possible between us. My brain is a riot of questions, the firs six or seven layers of which are panicked variations of what the actual fuck? Which is followed by how the actual fuck do you discharge yourself from a COVID ward?

Meanwhile, this stupid motherfucker stands in the middle of the store, trying to tell us the hospital is a hellhole and a man shouldn’t have to put up with that. All the ways in which he is personally aggrieved and affronted by the way he’s treated by hospital staff in the middle of, you know, a fucking pandemic.

They call my name, so I collect the medication and bail the fuck out. He’s coughing into his hand as I leave, positioning himself in the walkway between doorway and counter. It’s easy enough for me to go around him, skirting the fringes of the store, but nobody coming in has the background.

I feel sorry for the woman on the counter, and even sorrier for this asshole’s mum.

I keep wanting to tell this story to people, even now that I’m calmer than I was, because it was basically two minutes of horror. A short window where the permeability of the steps we take is laid bare–my partner and I have careful as heck about spatial distancing and exposure, and started a week or so ahead of the guidelines for such.

Those precautions are so easily undone, all because this asshole with a head full of toxic masculinity was affronted by the way hospital staff dealt with him.

Sure, the odds of infection are significantly slimmer than it seems on the surface: COVID is more reliant on an hour’s exposure than a few minutes, and it’s more likely this guy was in an observation ward than an actual COVID-specific treatment if he hadn’t been positively tested.

Still, it’s a wake-up call. I’m living on our couch for the next week or so while my partner takes the bedroom. A precaution, because the odds may be crazy slim, but neither my partner nor I are eager to take chances.

Right now, the urge to retell the story is all about regaining some small measure of the control I lost.

That’s the nice thing about writing. Every experience gets transmuted, somewhere along the line, transforming from a moment of hideous panic into a more reasoned and reflective understanding of the moment.