Agent Palmer

Max was my producer, my unexpected friend, and part of my sanity.

Most of all he was my friend, and I will miss him.

Since I wrote about our unexpected pairing a couple years ago, things had maintained our balance until he got sick. Last fall, he was just having bad day after bad day. He couldn’t keep food down, so we took him to the vet where we heard the word that no one wants to hear as a prognosis for anyone they care about… cancer.

Twenty Twenty-Two. No jetpacks, no faster-than-light traveling, no flying cars (at least not mass produced and widely available or reliable). In short, this isn’t the Jetsons future we thought it might be.

Why does that matter? Because by any metric for arguably anyone born on the other side of Y2K, 2022 was the future. Well, the future is now, and it’s not living up to expectations, I can tell you that. So let’s look back on the year as it was, and ignore the things it would or should have been.

I’m not sure how or when it happened, and it’s not like I suffered greatly from it to begin with. But I no longer even consider myself a victim of FOMO, the Fear Of Missing Out, when it comes to consuming media.

It goes back to “Must See TV” and the idea of “Watercooler Talk.” And perhaps that is where we should begin.

With so much remote and hybrid work, there just isn’t the same workplace environment that there used to be.

It’s been more than six years since I started a post with “I’m not sure if I’ll do this again, or if so, how often,” but here I finally am again. Consider this another “take out the trash” from my mind post.

Now, it’s not really trash, of course. It’s just that when I sat down to draft this post, I had too many competing ideas. It felt better to write a little bit about a few of them than to try to compete with the chaos and work on just one.

I’ve written about it here and spoken of it on my podcast in various episodes. In high school, I was a shapeshifter. I was in marching band, jazz band, pep band, and symphonic band. I ran cross country and track. I was in a classic rock cover band and a metal band.

I did Science Olympiad and hung out with the gifted kids even after my grades kept me from officially joining. I messed around with the school paper and yearbook.