Future

Jason Abdilla

I read a piece today about how prolonged stress can lead to persistent fatigue in a person who might be at a loss as to an obvious cause, and I’m thinking that that is what’s going on with me now. The worst comes at the end of what seems like a terribly long working day, which is frequently one where I felt like I came up short in results. I had a Telehealth call with my dietician this morning and was recounting the last six weeks since we talked. It seems like the stress of losing a family member to the virus and the job uncertainty caused by the layoffs has deepened the burden of stress on me. Right now I’m just holding onto the two days of leave at the end of next week which I don’t have any firm plans for. It’s conceivable I’ll just spend a good chunk of that time sleeping in response to the weariness that I feel every weekday.

Apocalypse When?

Some people I know are convinced we all have only months to live, certain that the kind of rhetoric being hurled around means that nuclear annihilation or maybe biological catastrophe will take most of us by surprise. The rules of society in the US have changed so completely we can no longer count upon collective good will to get us through tough times and that we’re due for either anarchy or brutal repression. That it’s self-delusion to fail to recognize the warnings on our screens. As in a big budget film, survivors of the shock will be thrown into a world where every choice might decide whether more will live or die, where any shred of the old social order will be lost.