This is the 34th installment of the second journal of the second plague year, which means I’ll write eighteen more entries and then start writing fiction. That’s the plan, anyway.
Fiction has its own rhythm. You can wander about in vaguely fictional worlds for weeks until characters grab you and demand you finally tell the truth about them.
Essays, as you know by now, can be narcissistic endeavors. Short stories (the form of fiction I write) demand that you give up your ego imperatives for those of imaginary but terribly real people.
That means an end to regular posting, although I am aware of Ray Bradbury’s advice to write a story a week for a year. He said one or two of them would be good—it can’t be helped.
I can’t write stories that fast. Fiction is a different animal than the essay, with a longer gestation period. I’m pretty sure if I wrote fiction every week for a year, none of it would be good, Ray Bradbury notwithstanding.
I should be done with Ghost Dance by my 72nd birthday in October. We will celebrate, with a caveat: as with most celebrations these days, we’re celebrating the end of something.
It will be a relief to not have a deadline. What began as a casual something-to-do-while-quarantining exercise during the first weeks of the pandemic turned—like the pandemic—into a multi-year monster, one that has regimented my life far more than I had intended. Anxiety accompanies a deadline, whether it’s self-imposed or not.
Still, the paragraphs add up. By October, I’ll have about 220,000 words and a combined 104 entries from the End Notes and Ghost Dance files. I hope to publish them in two volumes, and this summer I’ll be contacting agents and publishers.
It will not be an optimistic enterprise, because publishing and agenting seem to be in a period of retrenchment. It’s hard for them to make money, even with self-help books and confessional autobiographies, and they’re looking for instant best-sellers. Not many are willing to take a chance on an aging misanthrope with a fondness for doomsday prophecies and bad jokes.
It’s likely that I’ll have to publish my plague journals myself. It’s not a happy transition to go from being published by high-quality presses to self-publishing, but better writers than me have gone and are going that route. Some of them, I hear, have even made a living at it, which strikes me as requiring a rare and exhausting combination of hard work, chutzpah, hustle, and luck.
If I’d had to live on the money my writing has earned over the years, I would have starved to death long before Y2K.
If you’re a reader who considers End Notes and Ghost Dance worthy of publication, and you know a publisher who might be interested, please let me know.
Also, this is a final appeal for you to introduce new readers to Ghost Dance, if you have friends, neighbors, or family members who would a) appreciate reading something dark on Mondays, or b) be improved by reading something dark on Mondays. Please don’t sign anyone up without their permission, no matter how much you think it would improve them.
I’ve received some truly nasty emails from Trump supporters whose family members signed them up for my blog, but those comments have blossomed into less contentious email dialogs and the occasional discovery of common ground. For example, people have told me that they wouldn’t want to work with Donald Trump in the timber, or trust their horses to fences he’d built, or let him go out with their daughters. Such small points of agreement sometimes blossom into a recognition that Trump’s loss of the presidency isn’t as terrible as the alienation of loved ones because of divisive politics. Almost everyone I know has become estranged from one or more friends or family members due to politics. It’s not worth it.
But I digress. To paraphrase Volodymyr Zelensky, Ghost Dance needs readers, not a ride, to get through the next eighteen journal entries.
In the two years since I began writing these entries, the news hasn’t gotten any better. As someone who believes that there’s an objective truth out there somewhere, I’ve felt compelled to report on glimpses of it, however fleeting. I’ve tried to avoid make-you-feel-good lies, make-me-feel-good lies, lies of omission, and, God forbid, deliberate lies.
I think the truth is an essential component of consciousness, and I’ve noticed that people who lie to themselves become less and less conscious as lies take up more and more space in their heads. Consciousness, I’ve decided, is what makes life worth living. Without it, love and laughter couldn’t exist. Neither could grief and rage, of course, and they can wreck you, but if grief and rage are the price of love and laughter, I’ll at least put down a down payment.
The Johns Hopkins pandemic dashboard has finally listed over a million American Covid deaths. Worldometer lists about twenty-nine thousand more, which is a negligible difference unless you’re one of the abouts.
These numbers are tragedy beyond imagining, but the tragedy beyond even that is that we’re not at the end of the pandemic. We’re stuck somewhere in the middle of it. No one knows when it will end, or if it will get more lethal or fade away into milder and milder variants. No one knows what Long Covid is, or if it’s going to cripple its victims for life. Nobody knows if antivirals and repurposed drugs will allow the coronavirus to occupy the same category of worries as appendicitis—something that could kill you unless you see a doctor (in this case one who’s not a surgeon)—but is generally survivable.
The pandemic has been much better at showing us what medical science doesn’t know rather than what it does. The new Omicron variants are proliferating quickly and are reinfecting people who have had previous variants.
Journalists and even some scientists have described the virus as having an intelligence that evades human efforts to contain it. That’s wrong. Viruses don’t have intelligence, but if you have octillions of them randomly mutating, some of those mutations will randomly mutate in ways that keep the virus going. That may look like evil genius, but it’s not.
There is an evil genius in people who exploit scientific uncertainty to promote conspiracies about vaccines that kill people, make them sterile, or turn them into zombies. I’m not sure why anyone would promote these lies, unless they are doing the work of Satan. They are causing grief and more grief for the people gullible enough to believe them.
I’m more than aware that medicine, as it’s practiced in this country, could be improved. I’m also aware that I’d be dead several times over without medicine as it’s practiced in this country. I’ll put my faith in an over-administered medical industrial complex rather than the Deep State on this one. If the Deep State, as rumored, is using mass vaccinations to reduce the population, it is displaying the all-too-familiar incompetence of humans in leadership positions, and I don’t want them making medical decisions for me.
The war in Ukraine continues its assault on human decency and on the human spirit. If there is such a thing as demonic possession, it’s demonstrated by Putin and his fellow mobsters. The war thus far has not been in the average Russian citizen’s interest in this life, much less the next. The Russian Orthodox clerics who promote Russia as the last best hope of Christian civilization must not be paying attention to what Russian military forces are doing.
More centuries of hatred will exist between Ukrainians and Russians no matter who wins or loses. War creates less-than-whole people, generations of them. So does totalitarianism. So does living in a mafia state.
Of course, nuclear weapons offer a quick but drastic solution to the problem of evil, human or otherwise, and a nuclear war is more possible now than at any time in history. Putin, like a lot of psychopaths, is in essence a suicide, one who has difficulty contemplating the idea of anyone replacing him, and alive only because he projects his own inner horrors onto others. Faced with carefully examining the void where his soul should be or detonating that first tactical nuke, I think he’ll go with the nuke.
Humanity has faced periodic eruptions of nihilistic evil since the get-go, but now we’re able to combine them with extinction-level technology. Whatever organism dominates life on earth sixty million years from now will appreciate Vladimir Putin the same way we appreciate the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs.
An opinion essay in the New York Times described college students as unaware that they’re back in their classrooms. Instead, they’re acting as if they’re on a Zoom call: muted, detached, with a zombie stare. The author, a college professor, noted that students are less able to learn than they used to be, less engaged, trained to see reality as something on a screen. The nearly fifteen hundred comments on the essay came mostly from retired or about-to-retire teachers and professors who noted a general breakdown of communication between the generations. Whatever social contract allowed students to sit and pay attention while a teacher instructed them is gone. The pedagogic transaction, the one that allowed people to exchange ideas and use language to communicate experience and wisdom, no longer exists. Paying attention itself has become painful.
The author recommended a back-to-basics approach, noting that getting back to effective teaching would require an as yet nonexistent buy-in from students and a recognition that screen learning doesn’t work. If the culture is going to pass anything of value to its young people, the young people will have to cooperate, and—understandably, considering the future they face—the young people aren’t feeling cooperative.
The internet’s commodification of attention has created a cultural self that loses value every time it listens up. Lose attentional capital to enough attractive distractions, and you run out of dopamine and cease to exist. Any addict can describe the subjective process.
The challenge is to convince people to believe in something rather than nothing in a world where nothing appears to have all the momentum. Students of fascism have noted again and again that it progresses inexorably to a death cult. The essay and its accompanying comments did nothing to contradict the idea that we’re producing a generation of incomplete human beings whose idea of ethics boils down to might makes right, home-grown Putins who lack the cognitive receptors for oxytocin. Empathy is not something we old folks can expect from them.
Other things that need attention, if you’ve got any left:
Overheating oceans. Monkeypox. A coming civil war over abortion. Worldwide economic collapse as debt default becomes a general phenomenon. Mass migration as whole climate zones become unlivable due to heat, lack of electricity, or war. Overpopulation and Peak Everything. Floods in deserts. Deserts in rain forests. The emergence of ever more specialized salvage professions as wealthy countries start mining their landfills for stuff they’ve thrown away. The revival of chattel slavery as an energy source.
I’ll write about these things obliquely, because they’re hard to approach directly, and—believe it or not—harder to write about than to read about. Underneath the surface of any journal of the plague year is a struggle between human values and nihilism, and that strikes me as a life-and-death matter, at least in our present moment. But as I’ve said before, just because it’s a life-and-death matter doesn’t mean it can’t be funny. In fact, if you’re in a struggle with nihilism, one of your main weapons is a shared laughter and the human connection it allows. It’s fitting that Vladimir Putin’s nemesis has come in the form of a comedian.
So that’s what the next eighteen journal entries will be about, barring any radical change of plans. I guarantee nothing, but I very much appreciate your uncommodified attention and I’ll do my best to ensure that whatever I write will be worth your while.