The significance of my current display name, avatar and banner image is a simple one. In those misty old days before Covid, I liked to rise well before dawn and go over to a coffeehouse that was already open.

I'd sit outside with an iced coffee, a few books, my laptop and a journal, reading and scribbling away as I waited for the sunrise. That image might have been a little more romantic if the coffeehouse in question hadn't been a Starbucks, but the independents in Chicago didn't open that early.

Then came the Zombie Apocalypse of 2020 and the state of Illinois, in its infallible wisdom, decided that while liquor stores, weed dispensaries and adult bookstores were essential, coffeehouses, respectable bookstores and libraries were frills best kept closed.

And so the people of Illinois were kept in that state that our peerless leader and governor for life knew best suited them: drunk, horny and stupid.

Even after the bars were allowed to open, the coffeehouses were only allowed to sell drinks to go, which rather defeated the purpose of spending that much on flavored water.

"The heart longs not for coffee, but rather for company. Coffee is but the excuse." I forget who said that, but it was and remains true. Noting how little company I was finding in that Starbucks before the Great Calamity, I suddenly had a few radical thoughts.

1. Tea, not coffee. 2. I can brew my own. 3. If I'm sitting by myself, anyway, why not just sit out in a park? 4. Who needs the laptop? Don't we all spend way too much time online, anyway? Leave it at home, where the muggers can't "borrow" it.

5. I really should thank whichever gods might be for a metabolism that lets me walk around comfortably in 40 degree Fahrenheit weather in T shirt and shorts, because Chicago's climate being what it is, I'm going to need that.

The Midwest being as open minded as it is, I was soon gifted with feedback, and I didn't even have to ask for any. "40 degrees? You sure you don't have a fever?" One that I've had since I was two? Probably not.

"Don't you know there's a pandemic on, and that you're supposed to stay home?" That one was actually more from the Internet. That having been said, who am I going to manage to infect sitting on a park bench by myself, at least a few hundred feet from anybody else?

The old routine, then, lives on in mutated form. Instead of a Starbucks cup, I grab a few water bottles filled with some kind of spiced ice tea, and my books and journals, and head out to the park a few hours after most of the muggers have gone to bed.

Nobody else out there, which at the moment is fine, because over the last two years people have been getting on my last nerve over things so stupid that I couldn't believe I was hearing them. My heart is not longing for company, right now. Maybe I'll look into doing something about that later.

I have a semi-private blog, which I have deliberately kept out of the search engines, in which I will be posting some of the writing exercises I'll be doing as I go out in the morning. Those are rough drafts for things that might be seen on my more public blog.

My account here will mainly be used for notices of new content. I'll be linking my blogs to this microblog, so you should be notified of new content fairly quickly.

It will be amateurish content (at least at first), but while I do acknowledge that fact, it should not be taken as an invitation to give unsolicited writing advice. I don't accept advice from random strangers, because why would I?

Not to be unfriendly, but lately, everybody seems to think that everything is their business, and I find myself surrounded by self-appointed life coaches. It gets old, and I'm done putting up with it.

I MIGHT post some brief pieces of fiction directly to this microblog, with copies posted to my blog, because I don't trust Twitter (or its offshoots). I've heard the stories about people being arbitrarily locked out of their accounts, and known people that was done to.

Usual stuff "You've been locked out because we detected automated activity from your account that violated the rules." "But I've used no automation. Would you please tell me which rule I violated and how I did so?" "No, because I'm having fun flexing my power."

I know somebody who has been kept out of his account since 2018, on the same 12 hour lockout. The company will not admit that since 2018, well over 12 hours have passed. He appealed and they've gaslighted him and gone on gaslighting him. (*) (*) Note: see update, below.

Instead of what was actually there. No amount of rhetoric about the free market ("hallowed be its name") will change the fact that that was shady behavior, and that Twitter is and has been a shady and more than faintly racist company.

I am not here to change that fact, because I know that I can't. Twitter is what it is. But what I can do is be aware of the low ethical character of the people running this site, and plan around it.

If my content is over on my blog (hosted by the far more trustworthy Automattic) instead of here, and Twitter (or Bluesky) wrongly deprives me of access to my account, no problem. I'll post a note telling visitors what just happened over on my homepage.

That would be this page y45y45h45hrtnbtyj67745h6ukj34gfgnyujhdrbtdujrftngumtyhfyn.wordpress.com/yw4yhrtetbet... on my Twitter / Bluesky blog. Yeah, strange url, you'll never remember it, but just go to my profile and you'll see the link. You don't need to memorize all of that.

Having told people what happened, I'll then tell them where they can follow me, now, and turn my Twitter / Bluesky blog into, maybe, a Gab blog. Or a Minds dot com blog. Or something, realigning my links accordingly.

I'll go on doing more or less what I was doing before, with little to no interruption, and Twitter (or Bluesky) will have hurt itself more than it will have hurt me, because I'm not going to turn this microblog into a handcrafted work of art, as some of my friends and classmates have done.

Those collages - those could look very nice, but Twitter never appreciated the users who made that kind of effort, because the people on their staff never had that kind of class. They'd see something made with love and think "cool, that's something we can hold hostage."

What they did to other users made this much clear.

But we can learn from the misfortunes of others. I'm simply not going to make that kind of effort HERE. On Wordpress and Tumblr, sure. But here, where I can get locked out on an anonymous admin's whim and there is no real appeal process? No.

As I said, I MIGHT post some very brief fiction directly to Twitter and Bluesky. If you see one of those pieces and I've left replies open, feel free to continue the story and take it in a direction of your choice. No reason not to. I'm not writing holy scripture. They're just stories. 🤷‍♂️

I see that other people had that idea long before I did, so maybe I'll visit some of the other fiction accounts on Twitter and do a few continuations of my own. Or maybe not, because I've heard some wild stories about how some other users responded to such efforts.

Eg. Somebody trying to pretend that a piece of satirical horror fiction was a coded death threat, trying to assemble an "online lynch mob" to take down the author, and then claiming that he had "harassed" others by blocking the members of the mob which she was assembling publicly.

At least one of the ringleaders in that effort has since been permanently suspended, but that's still far more craziness than I feel like putting up with. (1) (1) There's an update about that one, too.

For these and other reasons, my engagements on Twitter and Bluesky themselves will probably be extremely limited, as will be my patience with anybody who comes over to troll in the comments on my blog. As it should be.

These will just be stories, not attempted guidelines to life, and one really shouldn't be creating drama over a piece of fiction. Unless one is on stage performing it.

Some characters will be jerks and say and do horrible things. I expect my readers to have the maturity and intelligence needed to understand the difference between an author and his characters.

To portray racism is not to be a racist. To show a fictional rape and its aftermath is not to condone and certainly not to celebrate the inexcusable act of rape.

Truths these simple should be obvious, and yet lately, they've been forgotten, thanks to an attitude that holds that the world should be made into a safe space, built to be so blandly non-threatening as to accommodate even the most neurotic among us.

My posts might not be undying literature, but I'm not going to turn them into pablum just to cater to some crybully, somewhere. Nor will I ever agree to post "trigger warnings," because those are a kind of spoiler. They take the reader out of the story.

I'm not ever going to agree to post something like "on page three, a toddler's head gets torn off by a passing car," because real life wouldn't give such a warning. Whatever happened would just happen and people would have to deal with it.