Radio silence for nearly a year and a half. Has anyone had contact with him? His most recent post (from December 2020) indicated a very complex situation in real life getting on the way of posting. 17 months of silence during these last couple of years raise concerns about his well being. If anyone has had contact with him, an update would be appreciated.
this thread from Dec 2021 might help you a bit
https://storiesonline.net/d/s2/t9433/jay-cantrell
From his patreon blog:
"DEC 31, 2020 AT 7:58 AM
Dear God!
I have been meaning to post some an update here and on SOL for the past six or seven months.
As with many things in the year 2020, it didn't work out the way I'd planned. I know I can't boil an entire 13-14 months down into a few paragraphs but I'll do my best to hit the lowlights.
First off, I have managed to spend a grand total of 29 days (by my rough math) actually inside the building of the company that employees me. More than half of those came in the first three weeks of the years.
As some of you might recall, I was struck by a moving vehicle about a decade ago (in the middle of posting Daze in the Valley on SOL). It messed me up pretty badly (mostly because the inattentive teenage driver who chose the sidewalk as her preferred roadway didn't touch the brakes until my ass hit her windshield).
After just dealing with the pain for the past few years, I finally had to get my knee replaced in mid-January. There were some complications and I wound up having to work from home for more than a month.
I had been back to the office for three days when we were told that everyone was going to work remotely for the foreseeable future.
I enjoyed my first foray into remote working. I had been alone. It was quiet.
The second time was a clusterfuck. My wife had been sent to work from home at the same time. All three kids in high school were moved to remote learning a day later. And my stepdaughter's college didn't let her return after Spring Break (since she had left the state where her college is located).
It took us a month to get shit figured out – who was going to work from where; what time everyone had to be doing what; which task got priority for the lone printer in the house; when a bathroom going to be free.
We all needed a place to set up shop; workspace was at a premium; everyone thought what they were doing was the most important thing in the world.
It's been years since I've been angry for more than an hour or two at time. I spent from mid-March to late May pissed off at everyone and everything.
I wasn't alone in being pissed off at the world.
My wife got a first-hand look at the bureaucracy involved in academia. She is the assistant dean of students … and the students were the last of the university's concerns. They were interested in how this would affect the school financially. I wish I could say it came as a surprise to me, but it didn't.
The kids in high school (a junior and two seniors, at the time) missed all the fun stuff. There were no proms, no graduations, no year-end picnics, no weekends hanging out with their friends. They got all the bullshit of being in high school but none of the rewards.
It got a little better during the summer. Our house has a nice yard so we could be outside some. School was out for my wife and the kids. I had hope that life would less hectic at some point.
I am a fool.
Summer turned to fall and we were right back to where we were in the spring.
My wife's college went fully remote (and since she is an administrator, they cut her pay by 30 percent); my stepdaughter's college did not permit out-of-state students to live in the dorms (and we hadn't been able to travel up there to look at apartments); my stepson chose a college he'd visited only twice (and they were fully remote for out-of-state students, as well); our adopted daughter wasn't planning to attend college (but her job market consisting solely of service-industry jobs so she started to take classes at a local community college); my son's school district elected to keep the high school students remote to use the classroom space to spread out the elementary school students.
My office resumed on-site work in August … for a week. Then COVID went through one of the departments like a California wildfire and we were back working from home.
We're still working from home. I have to go into the office for one day every month. I have never worked at a place that I looked forward to seeing. I treasure my one day each month away from the lunacy that my life has become.
Really, though, it's been sort of fun to be around the family. I've watched the kid's grow and mature, learn to compromise and adapt. I have a better idea of what my wife really does and they have a better idea of how I'm using the "fake it to make it" approach at my job.
Oh, and my oldest little girl, my granddaughter and my son-in-law will be moving to the area in a few weeks. He got hired at one of the overwhelmed hospitals in the area and we live about three hours from his family so it wasn't a hard choice for them (except moving in the middle of a pandemic).
I do, however, miss my moments of solitude. There is no place in the house that isn't "occupied" by a person or their belongings or a project.
There is hope on the horizon but no real end to this in sight.
The area where I live in inundated with COVID cases but few seem to be willing to stay away from other people.
This area never really got out of the first stage of the pandemic. The county where I live hasn't seen a day below 500 new cases since the first week of July. The past two weeks have brought 10,000 new cases.
We've reached the point where 1 in 11 people in the county have the virus or have had it. My family is the outlier. We have six people here and we're all good (maybe because we have enough sense to know what's safe and isn't).
But the neighborhood where we live isn't so fortunate. A family that hosted a Fourth of July barbecue (that we didn't attend) wound up passing along about 150 cases to our neighbors (oh, and killing three of them – two of the dead are a decade younger than my wife and me).
And yet, many in the neighborhood either traveled or brought in folks for Thanksgiving. The same was true for Christmas so I can imagine the January numbers are going to be higher than the December numbers.
For now, the clan here just keeps muddling along.
To the folks out there, I wish you the best and hope everyone has managed to stay healthy and content in 2020.
Let's hope 2021 brings a bit of relief and normalcy to our lives."
After reading Jay Cantrell's blog, it struck me that if you eliminate the remote learning parts, he's describing what an average, normal life was like when a lot of us were kids.