Happy apocalypse from the Hellish Handbasket

I'm feeling anxious. It's pouring cold rain outside. At 4:00 pm, it's already dark. When winter solstice arrived, I got happy, sure that the days were finally lengthening, until a self-righteous friend pointed out to me the days don't actually start lengthening until about January 6. After that news, I sunk into a pit of seasonal affective disorder. When I get S.A.D., I worry about the failure of important forces like gravity. Suddenly I'm aware of how tenuous is my connection to the surface of the earth.

Everything gets under my skin. The holiday TV season is a desert wasteland. (How many times can you watch It's a Wonderful Life before you puke?) My inbox is overrun with emails begging my help for refugees, bees, and the rights of women to keep control of their uteruses. I'm worried about global warming and nuclear war. I keep thinking more chocolate is the solution, but my cupboards are bare.

I'd like to help every refugee, bee, and uterus, really, I would. If I could be sure my donated dollars would prevent Armageddon, I'd be happy to contribute. But everything will have to wait until spring. I'm mired in the dog days of winter blues.

I've washed the breakfast dishes. I've folded a pile of laundry I did days ago and lost an hour I'll never get back surfing Facebook. I guess there's nothing left to do but binge-watch episodes of TrueBlood.

This month has been a bad ending to a year that started out looking pretty good, for some of us, anyway. I miss the good old days of last spring... Apart from the election madness, the closing of this year seems especially sad. Some of my favorite musicians and actors have exited the stage for good. I still can't believe Bowie and Prince are gone. And Emerson and Lake. And now George Michael and Carrie Fisher. It's like everyone decided to opt out of 2017. Like rats from a sinking ship.

I don't feel much joy contemplating the mayhem that I fear is coming. Of course, I don't know what the future holds, nobody does. But do you get the feeling we are all sitting in a kettle of rapidly heating water? Will we be able to jump before we end up on China's dinner plate?

When I started this blog, my conception of “going to hell in a handbasket” was personal. I was slogging through dissertation hell and I wanted to share my misery with anyone who might listen. In my postdoc life, my idea of a dystopian nightmare future is no longer just my personal hell—I fear I'm not alone in this apocalyptic journey. Welcome to the Hellish Handbasket. To avoid serious injury or death, keep your arms and head inside the basket at all times.

Don't pretend like you know what is coming

We are barreling into a new year. This year, I'd really like to put the brakes on. Can we just freeze time before we get to January 21? Then I could pretend I've been watching a particularly gruesome and disgusting reality show. I would like to change the channel and return to sanity. Where's the BACK button on this thing?

Clearly I'm still in shock. I'm not ashamed to say it, I feel like I've been bludgeoned by stupidity. My own stupidity. All my yammering about empathy and listening, yada yada, and still I'm shocked when unhappy people express their needs in unskillful ways. When will I learn? I'm just as unskillful as the rest of us. I include you, sorry, readers. We are all in this hand-basket together, and you know where we are going.

Guilty, again! I make cynical pronouncements (like that one I just made) as if I know what is coming. I spout nonsense as if I have the inside track on knowledge about the future. It gets me every time. I act like if I just say something enough times, and loudly enough, that by itself will make it true! We're all going to hell in a hand-basket! There I go, wallowing in the wreckage of the future! I'm masquerading as a person who knows what the future holds, when in fact, I have no clue what's coming! Argh. I hate not knowing. (Not to mention the small detail about defining my terms... is there a hell? And what is a hand-basket, anyway? Whatever it is, how will we all fit into it? I have no idea.)

I hate not knowing even more than I hate my fear that good things could actually come from stupid decisions, and then I won't have the perverse pleasure of saying, see, I knew it! I told you so. Sometimes it happens that "bad" outcomes ensue from "good" intentions, and "good" outcomes manifest from "bad" actions. Despite all the stuff written to the contrary, we humans don't have a Magic 8 Ball that allows us to peer into the future, except by using past outcomes as a predictor. And if you have ever lost money in the stock market, you know that past performance is no guarantee of future results.

I get lassoed by my fear of uncertainty into believing I know what is coming. Besides the certainty of death (and taxes), does anyone know what is coming? No. That doesn't stop us from prognosticating about the future as if we have a hotline to fate. As if we are inside the mind of Secret Santa. As if we know what is in our stockings. Let me guess: a toothbrush and a Hershey's chocolate bar. Whoops, that was 45 years ago. (Good news: at least I still have teeth).

We are having a little snow day in Portland. One inch of snow and a half inch of ice and the city shuts down. The electric trains can't run with ice on the wires. The buses can't get up and down the hills. I can't get my car out of the parking lot, and walking on this ice is likely to result in a trip to the ER with a broken hip (I'm not certain, I'm only guessing, based on past experience). So here I am, hunkered down in the Love Shack, waiting for the ice to melt, bored and trying to avoid the tedious task of turning my print book into a Kindle book.

I guess it's good I don't know the future. If I knew that writing this book would be a waste of time I probably wouldn't have spent two years writing it. Even now, I can hold out hope that soon people will find it, buy it, like it, talk about it. Hey, it could happen, right? Nobody knows the future.

Coming soon: A future without facts or truth

I don't know what is real anymore, with all the falsehoods flying around the zeitgeist. Americans can't seem to agree on the facts. Can I trust the calendar posted on the Internet? Is it really almost the end of 2016? Maybe, maybe not. I'm sure if I forced enough fake news on Facebook, I could convince some people that it's still October. Or that we have a new month now, the month of Terrorary. The month of Muck. The month of Run Them Down. We all know who "them" is.

It's not a great time to be anything but rich, white, and male. I want to lament, but what good does that do. It just makes me one of the whiners. And we all know, nobody likes a whiner.

The next four years will be good practice for weathering the apocalyptic effects of the many impending disasters looming on the time horizon (earthquake, solar flare, cyber hack of the electrical grid, sea level rise, volcanic eruption, tsunami). I need to learn to suck it up. It would help to have a tent, camp stove, and sleeping bag, I suppose. And some MREs stashed in a tote bin. What can I say. I'm not ready. I've never been a prepper. I worry a lot, like a prepper, but my fear paralyzes me, so I'm unable to take action. I sit in paralysis like the proverbial frog in hot water, too scared to leap out before I'm parboiled. I won't be a survivor. I can't say I'm too sad about it.

But I'm not ready to go quite yet. I need to survive just long enough to see my mother exit the world stage. I wouldn't abandon her, not by choice. Fear of the future makes me gag sometimes, but we all know what is coming. She's going to die, someday. I don't know how or when, but I know it's coming.

After she's gone, I don't really care much what happens to me. Depending on how much money I have left (if the banks aren't belly-up by then), I'll probably move somewhere where it's warmer, just in case I end up sleeping outdoors. I don't expect to see 80, but who knows.

Maybe when the Chinese-Russian alliance takes over America, we will all finally relax. Let someone else be in charge for a while. The nursinghomes will be full of old white American prisoners of war clamoring for organic gluten-free dinners and internet access, even though we won't remember in five minutes what we've eaten or how to access the future equivalent of Facebook. Torturing us will be useless: What can you learn from people who think they deserve to have whatever they want without paying for it?

You can't reason with Americans. Most of us don't care that our activities for the last 50 years have destroyed a good portion of the planet. Have I stopped driving my fossil-fuel burning Focus? No. We don't learn. Don't bother picking our brain, Russia. There are no state secrets among us except how to get the best deals on Black Friday.