Once Upon a Time, I Used to...

As I sat here, at my home office desk, I contemplated Shadow the cat... peacefully sleeping in his cat bed, next to me.

His cat bed is actually sitting on top of a blanket, which sits on top of an older cat bed he simply didn't like, which all sits on top of the filing cabinet drawer that's built into my desk.

Shadow, in his "towering pile of cat beds, on my file drawer

Once upon a time, I used to keep (and update) all my daily paperwork and bills in there...

I've had the desk since the late 1980s, when I first started to do the (at least part-time) work-from-home gig, in a time and life, far far away.

I don't remember exactly when it got partially appropriated as cat sleeping place, but I know it was sometime after we moved to this house, in 2011.

Our local beach...

Once upon a time, I was a professional beachcomber....

I think back on that, and on the unlikely reality that I was actually able to make some semblance of a LIVING from picking up interesting things on the beach and selling them on to artists, jewelers, craftspeople and interior designers, pretty much all over the world.

So what happened?

What often happens in this world. "Someone" notices that enterprising individuals have found ways to make a bit of cash from their ingenuity, so they swoop in and "industrialize" a cttage industry and the opportunity simply washes away in a matter of a few years.

TL;DR version: I can't compete with "cheap crap from China."

Once upon a time, I really enjoyed playing golf...

And I was actually pretty good at it. I think I'd still enjoy it, but that's just very unlikely to happen... I haven't touched a golf club in 25-odd years.

So what happened?

It's an enjoyable "walk in the park" but also a very time consuming game. My needing to work ever-longer hours to get by in life ran headlong into the need to be able to set aside 5-6 hours to play a round of golf with friends.

That particular fact also made the game more and more elitist and expensive because fewer and fewer "regular folks" could justify participating. Meanwhile, many older golf courses were on "valuable real estate" that so-called Private Equity was dying to develop and earn higher rates of return on, so the direct cost of participation went up.

Similarly, the equipment itself became super expensive. The last set of new clubs I bought (around 1995) was custom built and cost me about US $650, which I thought was a small fortune. Today, a comparable set would set me back between $2,500 and $3,500... so way out of proportion to what it should be, given inflation.

Once Upon a Time, I "made mine" as a writer and book editor...

I still write, of course... I'm just not "making mine" anymore.

In some ways, these are professions that are gradually heading the way of manual typesetting and snail mail. But hey, I was also the last person in the neighborhood to get a VCR... and a DVD player...

I was a technical writer for a number of years — and a good one — but that started to crumble with the advent of the web and "distance work" because much of what I did increasingly became outsourced to SE Asia where people with English degrees from major US or UK universities could do the same jobs at a fraction of the cost.

That was the beginning.

These days, the work is increasingly being supplanted by AI, especially in the editing and proofreading area. Everybody who employs people like me want it "faster and cheaper," while their need to fulfill that is intersecting with an increased willingness to have their text "acceptable" and "close enough," as opposed to "excellent," and that's pretty much leading to the whole industry (if you are a "provider") gradually shriveling up to almost nothing.

And so, we arrive at the middle of 2025. Whereas I could write a number of other "Once upon a time vignettes," all of them relating to significant parts of how I live my life, I mostly just sit here with the realization that life is constantly changing.

Sometimes change comes because we want it to come, and we create a path for those changes to unfold.

Perhaps what troubles me, these days, is that most of the major lie changes I have experienced in life have been unfortunate and externally initiated. I didn't want to lose several professions I really enjoyed; I didn't want to lost two retail stores to (respectively) a 3-year road construction project and a flood due to a freak flood; I didn't want my only two decent corporate jobs to end prematurely due fo (repectively) a merger and a legal battle between companies.

As I face — once again — the need to "reinvent myself" in terms of what I do for a living, it's not that process that scares me, so much as finding something "that works and I really like" and once again having some version of "the hand of God" sweep it off my plate, for the umpteenth time.

It would be nice if something went right, for a change... and for more than 10 minutes!

Maybe that's what I need to focus on.

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great rest of your weekend!

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Created at 2025.07.06 00:50 PDT
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