But you went and left me here with troubles on my mind

It’s been over three weeks of a low-grade cold, body aches, fatigue, fucked up stomach, chills and fever. I’m like, please just take me out, don’t let me wake up for another day of this torture.

There’s no motivation to do anything but wake up for another day of making a wage, dealing with corporate bullshit, responding to emails that ultimately won’t matter—the words are useless and the content less so.

Seven more years until retirement I remind myself as I lie awake at three in the morning, drawing the darkness into myself. Wondering if I’ll make it that long, if there’s not a fatal accident in my not-so distant future. Maybe cancer, who knows? It’s a fucked up world and none but a few of us would do it all over again given the chance (no changing the timeline, of course).

Get yourself together, snap out of it, straighten up and fly right (seems homophobic), get your pecker up (seems homoerotic), put your big boy pants on and quit whining. Because the problems in this world can be solved by doing things we have no motivation to do, dogpaddling instead in the shit we continue accumulating from our inability to find the motivation to do what needs to be done.

At 3 am, suddenly wide awake, not like having to pee or anything, just thinking about how dismal life has been.

There are so many memes about how awesome it was to just jump on a bike and explore, check out weird things, hang with friends. Almost all of those memes are about being suburban and white, not urban and black but that’s the internet we got, not necessarily what we need. Nonetheless, there’s a romanticism about that kind of freedom, a nostalgia for a simpler, less-scary time. For white people.

What those memes forget is that it was also a time when the effective tax rate was still around 70% and the rich were paying their fair share, funding the ability of white kids to ride bikes unmolested.

In the meantime, cops gunned down black people with impunity. Wasn’t a great time to be riding your bike around if you were a black kid. Must not be a lot of nostalgia around that.

3 am and wide awake thinking about how fucked we are, all of us (except the rich pricks)—Earth is hitting back at all the shit we’ve done and there’s no way to nuke our way out of this (bombs, not energy which I’m totally behind). Remember when Trump thought we could nuke a hurricane? Inject solvents to defeat covid? Is he really going to be the Republicans’ savior?

At 3 am, that frightens the fuck out of me.