April 28, 2020
5:50 p.m.

How many days have passed by since New Years' Eve 2019? Don't worry, I'm not going to bother with counting them down, because it doesn't really matter. We have almost reached the 5th month of 2020, and I am considering the irony of my hopefulness in starting a new year, when 2019 had been a bit of a bitch.

Now, I rather long for the inane inconveniences of last year, don't you?

Whatever went wrong last year, at least I could visit with family members, take in a movie or go out to dinner. I could go on a trip. I could go to the library.

I have been out of the house once in the past 6 weeks, and that was for groceries. Whoop-dee-doo.

In a few days, I will begin a new decade of life. This strikes me as odd and unbelievable, particularly since it was once my fervid belief that I could never turn 40, and the year 2000 could never come to be. It was an insane notion. Science fiction. Never gonna happen.

But, of course, it did. Since I am currently still alive (to the best of my knowledge, but who can say for sure? Perhaps I am just a figment of my imagination) I did turn 40 and the year 2000 not only happened, but time continued to fly by.

Needless to say, 2020 was another year that seemed obscure and unimaginable to me. Sure, we made it to the 21st century, but how long could it last before we just--poof!--blew it all away?

Now, that question doesn't seem silly at all.

In the past few years, I have come to realize that the planet is populated with increasingly dumber beings. This surprised me. I thought with all the technological advances, people would get smarter. That doesn't seem to be the case.

Instead, I have watched, appalled, as gullibility has multiplied about a hundred-fold. If you spoon-feed the masses false information laced with just enough truth and as much candy-coating as they require to swallow it, people will eat it up by the truckloads.

Now, having said that, if I go no further, I can count on people from all sides of the spectrum to agree with me regarding the people on their opposite sides. Apparently, we all think we're right and everyone else is wrong. We're sane, and everyone else is crazy. We're smart, and everyone else is dumb.

I'm not excluding myself from this; I know I'm right, and sane and smart. So, there!

Enough people know me, know what I believe or don't believe, who I believe or don't believe, and what sort of choices I will make based on those beliefs. Other people don't have a clue, and I'm not going to enlightened or disillusion them of anything on this platform. What I think about things isn't the point of my little rant. My point is that I, myself, am disillusioned to learn that so many people I regarded as intelligent and sane have now proven to be completely off their rockers, and it makes me sad.

I am a consumer of literature, and as a consumer, I have devoured a ton of science and science fiction, a ton of fiction and non-fiction, a ton of conspiracies, spies and intrigue, murders and mysteries and mayhem, true crime and fantastical "perfect" crimes, drama and comedy, fantasy and horror. None of the nearly six decades of drinking in story after story after story prepared me for the dramedy/horror/crime/conspiracy/whatever the hell else that is today's so-called reality.

Honestly, even decades of television didn't prepare me for this. Of course, if there had been a show like The Walking Dead Meets Perry Mason in Peyton Place, I might have had a clue what awaited me in this century.

Do you get it? The Walking Dead is about a pandemic that eventually will turn everyone into a zombie. People rush to self-isolate, all while hoarding food and other products and fighting to the death for gasoline and toilet paper. In the meantime, the government is holding he said/she said and I didn't/he did trials in public, denying that anything is wrong, or that anything is happening, or that anything ever did happen, and Perry Mason points at the guilty party, but no one will believe him. In the meantime, everyone is sleeping with someone else's spouse, diddling the help and the kiddies, and pretending to be higher and mightier than the next guy, all while hoarding all the money and letting the poor fend for themselves, and...

Yeah, I don't want to watch THAT show.

But it's on every day, and we call it THE NEWS.

Ugh.

I think I'll go watch Star Trek and pretend it's 1966.  At least then everything went off the air for a while every night, and we could look forward to men on the moon.

Unless that's not true, either. Or it was really Mars. Or someone besides America got there first.

Sigh.



Author's note: this was previously published over five months ago. Things have certainly not improved since then, and have, in fact, gotten considerably worse. When I update stories, I like to have some sort of resolution. Sorry.