Blog Post No. 522
It’s no secret that people are angry and have been for years. The culture in North America (and seemingly in other places as well) has been leaning towards an atmosphere of meanness, selfishness, pettiness, greed, and spite. This current decade has no monopoly on those feelings, but in the last few weeks I’ve been watching some television shows from my youth and I’ve noticed that, while television now is generally great, there isn’t the same emphasis on the moral message as there used to be. Plus, with so many ways to watch shows from so many services, there’s no general audience like there was in the days of network dominance.
My first story submission to an open call was rejected. I’m not surprised. I wrote it last minute, it was for a horror collection, and I struggled to make the story any scarier than intense. It would have been nice if it had made the cut, though. I was happy with the idea, if the execution was a bit lacking. Plus, even though it wasn’t a big payday or anything, the little bit of extra cash would have been a tiny boon to my current focus on financial goals.
It’s my birthday tomorrow and it’s one of the big milestone years. I haven’t really felt the same kind of excitement for birthdays since high school. Not to say that birthdays make me sad. I just see them as a marker of the years and my years are starting to add up. It’s all relative and as much as age is just a number, there are more battle scars each time the date rolls around. In my mind, I’m the same kid excited to get out of high school, sure that he’ll blossom in university, and bummed out that exams start on his birthday. That’s real, by the way. For all four years of high school, my first exam was on my birthday. 
Ben Van Dongen 