I wrote a 700-word introduction to the upcoming post. Then I deleted it. Let’s try again:
Today is the 76th day in the newest year of the serial freak out. Our baseline panic evolved so gradually I can’t pinpoint the date of its inception. It simply is. I once lived with long periods of “nothing new” punctuated by occasional crescendos of “holy shit”. Now I live among, but not of, a society in a constant bout of hyperventilation.
Recent events; the third or ninth or eleventh “end of the world” in the young year, have made us forget the year’s other moments. The ones that failed to engender panic. This one is certainly well fitted. It seems as good an event as any to flesh out “chapter one in the story of how it all burned down”. I’m not overly worried. I’m taking prudent precautions, as I always do. Beyond that, the sky is blue and the sun rises in the east.
Personally, I think we’re seeing monkeys with mildly elevated minds failing to handle a new technology. The herd instinct gets out of control when jacked into the global hive mind. The propaganda treadmill built to agitate us is now self-perpetuating. Who’s at the wheel? Nobody.
But what do I know? If, by August, this hasn’t been replaced by some new and improved reason we’re all doomed, you may mock my complacency.
My problem is scale. I see at the wrong scale. I’m in the 39th day of a universe where my dog died in my arms. That’s the scale of real life. I wish everyone all over the planet well but I don’t know them personally. Clutching a dead dog in a snowy driveway, that’s real… and it took away my will to fret over toilet paper supplies at some Walmart in Tuscaloosa.
Miracles happen on small scales too. I was motivated (perhaps dragged kicking and screaming by a reawaking soul), to write about the smallest event of four decades ago. Because small events matter. That story will follow shortly.