Gone Fishing?

 

I miraculously weathered all the mini-crisis’s of the past 6 days— like my hearing aids not working on the date of my departure— and here I am at 9:00 pm heading to the airport for my midnight flight to Hong Kong and then on to Hangzhou. My biggest worry is that I’ve seen all the movies I care to on these flights and any new ones will certainly be the usual fare of guns, guns, guns, superheroes, end of the world, brutality.Snore. Does anyone make real films anymore? (I did see a reasonably good one on my flight from New Orleans called Tow, but having surfed through some 65 movies to find that, the pickings are slim.)

 

China will present the usual challenge of access to the Internet and even e-mail— though I think the Surfshark ap I got last time might solve the e-mail problem, if I remember how to use it. But no Internet means no Blogposts, so if you don’t see anything here for the next 12 days or so, that’s why. Don’t give up on me! And I’ll dutifully write them anyway and post them when I get home. 

 

Dear reader, it’s a blooming miracle that any of you are still reading these things. I wonder if anyone has been following these for the entire 15 years I’ve been posting! Is there really anything that continues to hold your interest? I guess I’ll never know and that’s okay, but in the past months, the readership has skyrocketed to some 10,000 readers per day! But really? Are these real people or bots? And if the latter, why? And if the former, it does give me that little dopamine rush, but as mentioned last time, that kind of “success” is meaningless. It literally changes absolutely nothing about my life, financially and otherwise. It hasn’t brought more people to my books or Podcast or movie or CD, all of which would give me a little thrill and a little money. And if those 10,000 are people, I have absolutely no relationship with them. So better to have one genuine friend than 10,000 fans. 

 

But meanwhile, for you handful of faithful readers, some of whom I know and some of whom I don’t, assume I’ve “gone fishing” and look forward to re-uniting somewhere around July 20^th. Meanwhile, let us see what awaits that justifies the long hours of travel, the carbon footprint and missing the next episodes of the engaging Shetland TV show I’m watching!