Today's Weather Forecast
Maybe we're all not long for this world.
And this
Was just a bad moment
We were fumbling around
But we won’t get caught like that
Soldiers on our backs
We won’t get caught like that
—Free in the Knowledge, The Smile
In the time I've been away, an angry man in an ill-fitted suit, which I think we can agree is a tired sight many times over by now, waged an utterly useless, now-grueling war somewhere on the other side of the earth. Over on this side, our neighborhood active volcano threatened violence and apocalypse in similar fashion.1
Three months ago, I moved to a nearby town in a rural area, situated along this volcano's picturesque caldera—I'd lost my job at the start of the year and found this new one. I've effectively secured myself a front-row seat should its brand of apocalypse come to pass, all to avoid the more immediate, more threatening apocalypse of... becoming unemployed again… for me, that is. It would mean a weighty defeat, a relapse into a state of unbeing for someone like myself.
It feels as if in this pseudo-post-pandemic (mid-end-of-the-) world, the universe is now demanding a critical mass of insanity to sustain itself for reasons I don’t think I could even begin to understand. It demands for things to always be on the verge of ripping at the seams, like the initial moments of atomic fission but in painful slow motion. The new normal has become, apparently, the lack of any normality whatsoever. What I once saw as a much-needed hard-reset for the planet turned out to be the great catalyst for everything it needed to reset from. A year or so indoors does that, I guess.
And it seems these shelters which we've made, once protecting us from the heaviest of rainstorms, now see hailstorms and seismic rumblings and nuclear fallout for which they definitely were not built to withstand.
My shelter is no longer in any one place. My shelter now is hope—after these testing years, being denied my right to hope, I’ve taken it and reposited it now in many places. The hope of friendships, both old and new, the hope of God, affirming my hope for peace and order, the hope that comes with every breath of fresh air—an ever-scarcer resource. The hope of plans—rather, of planning and creating direction, then bullheadedly moving forward amidst the thickening of the smog. The hope of dreams—the urgency that now comes with fulfilling them, chasing them down before the uncertain deadline of apocalypse, whenever that will be, however that will come about.
I've found that in every crevice with despair can also be found an abundance of hope, in its many, many forms.
And now, my actual update.
I'll write more, I promise. Or I won't. You know the deal.
Rage against the tempest. Care too damn much. Live in spite to love another day.
Yes, I’ve taken my time with this one as well.