I'm on the up, in general, after being down on my uppers for a while longer than envisaged, despite being in a country where the economy is moribund, limping along just avoiding recession, while all around us nations are thriving, relatively speaking. Like the Green Woodpecker who visits these parts to eat ants, I try to keep busy, and not to give in to defeatism.
Things are worse elsewhere, we tell ourselves, as children starve and disabled people deprived of benefits die in their thousands. We suffer the resurfacing of fascists in Italy, Hungary and the USA, smugly saying, but we're not like that here in Blighty, oh no, we won WW2! We're not like them on the continent. We don't want to search house-to-house, to have Roma removed. We don't want to put immigrant children in cages, and destroy all records of their abuse. Oh no. We just wait until our neighbours go to their mother's funeral or their child's wedding and refuse to let them back into the country.
It would be wrong to say that this doesn't piss me off mightily, because it does. I shun vast tracts of social media, because I can't bear to watch yet another report of society's collapse, a video showing ecocidal maniacs killing everything from the last African elephant to the bugs we rely on for pollination, and then "like" a talented 8 year old drummer's incredible playing whilst munching on a Royal Gala New Zealand apple. The cognitive disarray is enough to drive me mad again.
Morale is difficult to maintain in these conditions. It's the many little things that make me think, too often, that we are very possibly well and truly fucked.
And then, something happens which pops the bubble of sanitised, permitted engagement and blows away all my petty responses.
Tomorrow is a full moon. On the Book of Face, I have many real friends, i.e. known them for years, met most of them in the flesh. I curate the feed so that I can keep in contact with contacts. I lock that privacy shit down. I run Ad Blocker. I make it bearable.
I have evolved this habit of announcing the exact time of the full moon. I expect it pisses some people off, they mute me, or unfriend, that's how it works. I accept it. There's a small group of lunatics which seems to appreciate it. Yesterday, someone I know and like ended her life. My only contact as I've been away from her land was via social media. Now she is gone.
I was immensely saddened, I still am. I have so much to do, I struggled not to let it stop me working.
Last night, thick curtains were not enough to keep out the light of the almost-full moon. I awoke, thinking, she always "loved" the moon posts. She did. It was a connection we shared.
I told this privately to my good friend who knew her for many years, who broke the news, and who along with her close friends is doubtless grieving worse than me. He replied, it's many little things like that.
He's right. It's many little things like that, once gone, which linger. The wit and wisdom, the particular viewpoint, the intelligence.
I have lost friends before, but sometimes it hits you harder than you expect. I'm still recovering from a death which knocked me for six some years ago; but it was this renewed sensitivity to the sudden ending of a life which promised so much more time which hurts me again today.
And then, the news. The social mayhem, the victims, the bullies, the lies. Too much, just too much. I want to give up, and I never give up. Don't let the memes get you down, I say to myself. I do care, regardless. It's my duty and privilege to care. I care that Melania Trump's coat quotes a WW1 Slovakian stormtrooper fascist motto (it really does).
It's many little things like that which, if we don't skip the entertainment and self-interested titillations and knuckle down on the real work, we lose. Many, many little things which take a functioning though flawed democratic system and destroy it in a matter of months. Many, many, many little moments before you realise there really is no food in the shops, or if there is, you need a wheelbarrow full of cash to buy it, and you don't even have a wheelbarrow, let alone meaningful paid work, and that your neighbours are gone, you are under surveillance, and your precious rights are no more.
It's many tiny non-observances, many miniscule failures to speak and to act which lose us the things we value so highly.