Proof of Life

always assume camping

Apologies for a days-long absence, with some very brief thoughts below on what I missed by being out of touch with the news. But first:

Finishing out the holidays in style, we’ve been family-testing the idea of sleeping in serious cold by lighting fires inside a tent. This idea caused a certain amount of alarm in the extended family until we really nailed down a complete description.

So we crept up into the Eastern Sierra, camping in the hills a few miles west of Lone Pine. The tent looked like this as I set it up in the late afternoon light:

And it looked like this soup sandwich of awkward staking and general crookedness as I packed up the car this morning, but it’s not my fault and I admit nothing:

In between — you might be able to guess — it was cold. But we were warm and mostly asleep, though between the campfire and the tent stove we burned more wood than a German environmentalist. I entertained myself this morning by watching ice slide down the sides of the tent.

So I’ve been silent because I’ve been doing that. But it always strikes me, after a break from the news, that I come back and find I haven’t missed much that couldn’t wait. A professional athlete’s heart stopped on the playing field, and don’t you dare speculate about the cause:

James Lim, MD @JLimHospMD

Those in the “Die Suddenly” crowd trying to tie Damar Hamlin’s collapse to the 💉 are vile.

But also, it definitely wasn’t because of the mRNA injections, which we can already say for sure without waiting for more information, because it’s not speculation to rule that out, so shut up.

What a shame to have waited a whole cycle to dip back into the stream of daily news and find all of this narrative policing waiting there. Every day a little more of “the news” is people telling you what you must not believe, what you shouldn’t permit yourself to think, what conversations are to be considered out of bounds, and on and on and on. As a secondary consideration, the news is sometimes about things that happened. Step away from that garbage from time to time.

Which is what I’ve just tried to do, but I’m back — smelling like campfire and sort of grimly ready for 2023. More soon.