Inertia Gives Way to Dread

I feel like covid and my friend’s medical crisis put my life on pause. I have to get up tomorrow and live again, before doing nothing becomes an unbreakable habit.

On the day Travis died, there was a lot of communication. I spent a lot of time texting and talking. Yesterday, things died down. People were digesting the news. Today there was a little chatter. I had a very long phone call from a young lady he knew. Listening to her appraisal of the people he knew was like listening to a recording of myself.

Everyone seems to be saying the same things. They can’t understand why things were handled the way they were. They are fed up with Travis’s social circle.

I find myself talking to so many wonderful young women. Where were they when I was 35? Oh, right. I was a physics T.A. at a university. You could station such people strategically around a property to repel women and prevent them from entering.

I used to have someone I could hope one of these girls married.

Some people are holding Travis accountable. For too long, he held onto people who were going nowhere, in a city that was going nowhere. He was not honest with himself about their faults and the power of their negative influence. Sometimes I had to bite my tongue when he praised people he knew. He was in denial.

Today I heard something positive. I had been told that Travis had not had a single visitor during his month in the hospital. Someone now says his mother and brother visited as often as they were allowed. Whom should I believe? I hope the second source is right.

If you knew everything I knew, you would understand why I can’t assume the new information is correct.

In case anyone from Miami reads my blog (doubtful), I sincerely apologize if I said anything that was incorrect. That was not my intention. I don’t think my judgment regarding Travis’s situation has been that great over the last few days. It is an emotional time.

It appears there will be no funeral that amounts to anything. The epidemic still has South Florida shut down. I’m glad for my sake. I told Travis to cut his crowd off. I should be able to take the same advice, and it would be unpleasant to see some of these people. There are roses among the toadstools, but I don’t know if it would be worth it to wade through the toadstools to see them.

People who took advantage of him in life are posting complimentary things about him now that he’s gone. I am told preachers are praising his loyalty. This loyalty is exactly what kept him in trouble.

I am told Richie Wilkerson, Kanye West’s former pastor and the son of my former pastor, posted something. I’m glad I’m not able to see it.

I hear Kanye is now a pastor, at least in his own mind. I just checked, and the pastor’s wife is topless on Instagram with a lei around her neck. Things are going as expected.

I truly believe Kanye West is feeling a call from God, and I think that if he lives long enough, he’ll be all right, but at the moment, he ought to be keeping quiet and confessing his faults to God.

I haven’t done much of anything today, apart from communicating. I stuck a 4-terabyte drive in my new PC. That ought to hold me for a couple of years. There was no way I was going to blow for a solid state that size, if they even make them, but I got a fast hard drive with a big cache. Should be fine.

Why are nonmechanical drives called “solid state” drives? Ordinary hard disks are also solid state. They don’t have vacuum tubes.

I keep having an ominous feeling, as if the end of the world were just around the corner. I have this feeling that we may end up forgetting about responsibilities that seem important right now, because things will happen that will make them vanish into insignificance.

It’s just a feeling. Maybe it’s the pandemic combined with the unusual set of events I’m dealing with in my personal life.

Has there ever been a time like this? The black death certainly had an apocalyptic feel to it. There were places where a third of the people died, whereas covid is still only a little more lethal than the seasonal flu, for all the hype. During plague attacks, everyone saw dead bodies. They were everywhere. I still don’t know a single person who has been diagnosed with covid.

During the black death, the disease, not the panic, was the major problem. The reverse is true now. Confinement has us feeling like there’s a plague when there is not. We have a plague mentality without a plague.

A big difference between the current day and the plague years is that today’s world was already coming to the end of the slack in the rope before covid showed up. In the 14th century, the world was sparsely populated, and we weren’t faced with a rising tide of technology that could be counted on to completely destroy privacy and free will in the near future. To me, this makes the present age seem full of foreboding.

Back when God flooded the world, the earth got a fresh start when things dried up. If we lost half of humanity today, that wouldn’t happen. We would still be besieged by malignant, unstoppable technology. We would still be close to the end of free will and free thought. Humanity would have to be decimated in order for the reset button to work.

It’s wrong to call technology malignant. Technology doesn’t destroy freedom; people do.

Human beings can’t be trusted with pointed sticks or handfuls of sand. It would be insane to hope we could resist ruining the world with computers.

I have this feeling that nothing earthly matters. I feel that if I never pay my bills again or do my taxes, it won’t make any difference, because something is going to come and sweep concerns like that off the table.

I wonder if other people feel it.

It’s very quiet here right now. It feels like the day before a hurricane. If you’ve been through one, you know what I mean. Is God’s orchestra tuning up, to accompany the fateful horn? Doesn’t line up with the timeline I’m familiar with.

Whatever. I’ll get up and start moving again in the morning, God willing. I believe there will be a morning for me.

My new beam reloading scale is at the mailbox, if Skynet 9000 is giving me the straight poop. I guess I’ll go grab it, and in addition to fixing the pool and working on business, maybe I’ll tune the scale tomorrow and see if I can make some ammunition.

My expectations for the future are dramatically changed, but my life is not over yet.