Hello from the Ongoing Slow Motion Apocalypse

Hello! It has been almost two years since I updated this blog – I know this because my granddaughter is now referred to as The Toddler and she will be 2 entire years old in July. She is still perfect, by the way: she is small, determined and delightful and she lives with me – as does pretty much the entire rest of my family. “Come on, Harvey!” she shouts, “Harvey! Come on! Running!” And Harvey, her devoted pal, comes running. She drops her Hs like a tiny French person, so really, she is yelling Herve! And it is adorable. She calls me Mum, or Mummum and she likes to climb up and bounce dangerously on my bed or, better yet, play – and win – games designed for older children on the iPad.

Okra and Perdita are no longer with us; I miss them. It’s been five years since I moved to Oregon and the animals who came with me are gone; now I only have one pet, one Oregon dog in this filled to overflowing with humans house. He is a pretty great dog, though.

There is no housing in most of the US now. Not just no affordable housing, no housing. My daughter, who moved across the country to me with her significant other and The Toddler in November when she got finally and absolutely priced out of Asheville, has set an alert on her phone in case a rental vacancy ever shows up. Any rental vacancy. In the whole county. It goes off about once a week, if that. Yesterday it was a 500 square foot basement studio apartment for $1300 a month. That’s kind of a lot when your monthly income is around $2000, but it is, of course, cheaper than the $3000 a month an actual 2 bedroom would cost even if it was not, as they all are, mysteriously furnished, with strange lease terms: they’re Airbnbs. Of course they are. $2000 a month is what most people actually make, by the way. Even though THAT’S ANOTHER FORBIDDEN TOPIC! SHUT UP! EVERYTHING IS FINE! IT’S PERFECTLY NORMAL! REAL PEOPLE MAKE REAL MONEY, SO THAT MUST BE A LIE AND IF IT ISN’T, THEN THEY AREN’T REAL PEOPLE SO THEY DON’T NEED A HOUSE. OF COURSE THE MIDDLE CLASS STILL EXISTS! WHY DON’T THEY JUST MOVE TO KANSAS? IT’S CHEAP THERE. (No, by the way, it is not. This is actually a national issue. And, to broach another forbidden topic, there are real serious reasons why sane people, particularly those with uteruses, might not want to move to, oh, a whole damn lot of the country.)

My son and his girlfriend moved in with me for a month in October. They’re still here. They both work full time. We all work. There’s still no housing and no daycare and the price of food keeps going up and up. My house is 1200 square feet. Me, I live in the garage. It’s not a very big garage, but it has three new windows, a real plastic wood look floor and a genuine vintage pink 1960s toilet in a tiny half bath. I painted it orange and crammed it full of stuff.

The plague is still here but the level of denial has ratcheted up so high that it is the primary forbidden subject these days – in these days of oh so many forbidden topics – and people in masks are stared at the way people in masks were stared at back before we got to experience a worldwide pandemic THAT NEVER HAPPENED SHUT UP SHUT UP. Yes. We have always been at war with Eastasia. EVERYTHING IS FINE! IT’S PERFECTLY NORMAL FOR PEOPLE IN THEIR MID FIFTIES OR YOUNGER TO KEEL OVER AND DIE ON AN INCREASINGLY FREQUENT BASIS! COVID IS IRRELEVANT TO THE RISING DEATH RATES! COVID IS OVER! IT’S NO WORSE THAN A COLD!

I still work at the college albeit in a different department and that’s a whole, UNBELIEVABLE, INSANE, hot mess right now. I can’t talk about it. I mean, I want to, and maybe someday I can, but right now I need the job and part of the job is keeping my mouth shut. This is such a bummer, you have no idea.  

So, instead, let’s talk about cognitive dissonance, the end of the world as we know it, climate change, the fact that my house is literally falling down, how you live with yourself when you’re actively working to normalize stuff that shouldn’t be normalized and, my recent trip to Canada.

Did you know that Canada is still an actual functioning country? Every American should visit if only to walk around for a day or two and go wait, functioning infrastructure? Public transportation that works? Housing and they’re building more? Healthcare of course, but I’ve beaten that drum so long I no longer pretend it’s actually possible. Honoring indigenous people – ok, fair, their track record is pretty abysmal on that front, as is ours, but in Canada it feels like they are actually trying to make some amends. Sort of. I guess. Maybe it’s just for show – but show is better than nothing. I sure don’t see a lot of native art around here, and I’m only 200 miles from British Columbia. The differences were just stark and when it came time to come back, the contrast between entering Canada, which took five minutes and involved a friendly guy asking friendly questions and the US, which took hours and involved a variety of heavily armed white men with crew cuts screaming at me and everyone else, was appalling.

The apocalypse has been proceeding in fits and starts and we’re deep in the boiling frog phase. We don’t even notice things like the tent cities anymore; they’re normal. We’ve managed to normalize so many, many things that shouldn’t be considered normal in any way shape or form that it’s no wonder there are so many crazy people around. The streets are filled with crazy people, the mass shootings continue apace, climate change has accelerated, the mass extinctions are going on – ALL THE CRABS IN ALASKA DISAPPEARED LAST YEAR AND IT WAS ONLY REMARKED UPON FOR A DAY OR TWO. The government, in the last two years, has revoked Roe vs. Wade, thus making women’s health care illegal in much of the country, refused to do anything about the shootings and demanded that old people getting food stamps get jobs. That’s just three off the top of my head. But we just keep on working our many jobs and pretending things are okay.

THINGS ARE NOT OKAY, AMERICA. THEY REALLY ARE NOT.

I feel like I’m crazy when I try to talk about stuff like this with my colleagues and yet every conversation I overhear or walk into is all about the end of the world. I am crazy, probably. I think we all are, now. I don’t see how we can possibly not be.

So, anyway, hello from the end of the world. Sometimes I think I’m just writing for some kind of weird posterity or possibly the sapient raccoons of AD 6754, whose children are as impressed by museums full of fossilized humans as ours are by dinosaurs. But for now, we’re still here and I hope I’m wrong about all this.

But I don’t think I am.