It used to be ten, but we’re down to eight now.
I’m speaking metaphorically, of course, before you manage to pull your undies so tight that they cut off your circulation. It used to be that I had an amount of work I could generally accomplish in a day. Write all morning. Errands in the afternoon. Editing and publishing related stuff in the evening.
It worked.
Then the pandemic hit. I held out for a while and it was fine. I’m used to sustaining my end of things through hell or high water, because I had those kinds of jobs for a good chunk of my day job career.
But lately I’m finding myself worn out sooner. I hit a point in the evening where the brain just shuts off and rolls over. Out of spoons. Other folks have gone through it, but maybe didn’t have a vocabulary that let them express it.
Stress. A straight punishment can be survived because it is predictable. You develop coping and defensive mechanisms. (And God knows I’ve got a few from my past.)
It’s the randomness that knocks you off kilter. And me. The not ever knowing what to expect next. My last couple of day jobs used to be like that, because I was a middle manager type dedicated to hunting chaos down and fixing it. Boxing it in. Limiting it. I was really good at it.
I used to say “Chaos offends me.” but at the same time, I’ve always been good at surfing chaos. (Note the F, as opposed to the V.)
But at work, that was predictable chaos, if you could call it that. I had certain channels of stupid shit that would come across my desk. Or long lead times to identify solutions when shit was going to go sideways. And I was good at fixing it.
I don’t have control here.
I can write. I can publish. I can watch my income and sales numbers bounce all over the damned place to the point I wonder if I’ll have to go get a day job of some sort. Not going back to what I had, but part-time minimum wage kinds of things, just so I can turn the brain off for a while and use muscles instead.
Predictability.
Others have talked about their feelings of recovery, now that an attempted coup has failed and we’re left cleaning up the mess from folks who have no interest in discussing their part in attempting to overthrow the government of the United States. Or the years they spent up until now trying to break it.
I was not surprised that they tried. I’ve been expecting it since I wrote a political science paper in 1988 entitled “The Fall of the American Republic in 2020.” (Yes, I really did. He gave me a B+ on it, but I don’t feel like looking him up in his retirement (or he might be dead by now) in order to say “I told you so.”)
I’m glad they failed. And a little surprised for reasons I have talked about elsewhere and which will cost you beers to have me explain later.
I need to recover. The stress has been there, but I held it down. Would not admit it. Don’t know what it will take for me to slide past all this. Probably orange jumpsuits on a few of the fuckers who deserve it.
“If more people went to prison for this shit, fewer people would go to prison for this shit.”
But I abide. Hopefully, it all starts getting better, now that we’ve passed a crest of history that will be the end of certain history books and the beginning of others.
I can survive on eight spoons, now that I have finally understood that I only have that many for now. It was the confusion as to why I was suddenly so tired all the time that threw me off. I already cut way back on the things I was trying to do, because there were certain topics I didn’t want to write about. Too dark. Too depressing. Too close to home.
Bad juju.
So now we are really at the dawn of 2021. The world gets to change again, and hopefully criminals and anarchists will be put in small, concrete boxes where we can laugh at them and taunt them like the losers they are.
There should be no mercy for attempting to overthrow the government. In the ancient times, the term used was “Neck or Crown” because if you tried to kill the king, you either succeeded or your life was forfeit. They should not get a stern talking to, any more than Julius and Ethel Rosenberg did. In fact, that is the legal precedent for aiding and abetting enemies of the state, and I feel like we need to introduce a few dozen folks to it.
Not all thousand or so who really deserve it, mind you. Most of them are weak-minded fools who honestly just need better mental health coverage to get them the help that might spring them out of their delusions. But there is a hard core of folks that are evil, and need to be dealt with.
Permanently.
I can’t go out to eat these days because folks like that refuse to take the pandemic serious. I was at the grocery the other day, and half the people I saw were without masks, in a county where the mandate is everyone. The store could have been fined $5000 per infraction, and a few have, but those fuckers don’t care for anybody but themselves. Same with the coup. They didn’t want a country where non-whites might be granted equal rights, and were willing to burn the whole damned thing down rather than share.
And that’s why I got so angry, but I can’t express that anywhere but in my writing. I have to hold it inside and just smile. Just write. Just abide.
But that takes spoons out of me. “I can do this thing, but it will cost me” is a favorite phrase of an old acquiaintance, and something I have taken to heart.
They say pick your battles, and I try not to fight that many any more. Can’t.
Just don’t have enough spoons to save the world right now.
Not sure when I will.
This is The Tick’s war-cry! “SPOON!” Much like Tick, we want to shout it, but we don’t even know which direction to charge.
We are in the midst of a zombie invasion. The zombies will continue to attack any that show they have warmth in their heart or intelligence. For now all we can do is hunker down inside our barricades. We are still looking for a method to fight off these zombies. We are still trying to respect laws as they attack with no such limits and without any sign of logic.
You can see them with their masks below their nose ready to go amok the moment any one notices that they are no longer the compassionate thoughtful beings they once barely were.
Yet these zombies are more kin to the original zombies of voodoo lore. They have hidden arcane masters who call them from their resting places and send them to destroy. The attack on the capitol was planned. Thankfully not well, but there was a concerted effort and they all knew and agreed on what their goals were. This much is quite clear. This disorganized mob had organization and support from high places.
The sheriffs, right now are either ignoring the zombie invasion, or part of it. The few concerned sheriffs are hunkered down. They have no choice. They don’t know who would follow if they shouted “Spoon.” They too are scared. Scared that those around them will drag them down and eat them the moment they appear to be alive and thinking.
Of course we are a few spoons short. We don’t know who to join with and right now the news is ignoring that the invasion is even happening. We just about lost our nation and we are not even close to uniting against the cause of that threat. We stand in limbo behind leaders who are showing signs that they know there is a zombie hoard out there but we haven’t even named the voodoo practitioners behind this invasion. We can be sure that these leaders practice voodoo politics and voodoo economics. The odds are we know a lot of their names.
Right now we are looking with hope at the sheriffs who have accepted bothsiderism like the teacher who said that it takes two when the bully attacked you from behind. Some of the sheriffs are making gestures like they understand that the zombies are here among us. Yet we have been here before. We have heard reassurances before. We has been quite while the zombie leaders have stolen election after election. We could have predicted that the uprising would start the moment we didn’t let them steal our country from us.
So, yes, we are all shy a few spoons.
But maybe as we look over our bunkers, realizing what is going on might give us a spoon to hold aloft.
This is not a conspiracy theory, it is simple truth that manufactured and nonsensical conspiracy theories are part of the song the voodoo masters use to call their minions. It is clear now that when the voodoo practitioners were crying, “False flag!” that they were the false flag.
The power of the “Big Lie,” is that it puts truth on even ground with it. It make rational understanding seem as farcical as the lie being told.
So amidst all of this chaos, I will shout, “Spoon!” from the top of my barricade in hopes that knowing you are not alone, you can find one of your lost spoons.