Tag Archives: virus

There Will Always Be Monsters under the Bed

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They will continue to wait, whether we remember to check or forget to inspect. On bended knees, our eyes remain peeled for a glimpse of anything unusual sitting on the planks. But it’s pointless to pretend the floor is clear. They were hiding there last night and last year. They’ll be back again tomorrow…and forever.

The nagging knocking behind the eyes that keeps us awake. The sense that we are barreling toward the inevitable edge. The lists of boxes that remain unchecked. The threat of impending doom. The planet on the verge of collapse. The infighting. The declining educational system. The poor. The sick. The sad. The struggling. The confused. The hurting. The hurt. The loop stuck on a loop. The dubious distrust. The fear. The uncontrollable variables. The time. The schedule. The appointments. The wasted opportunities. The cost. The consequence. The imbalance. The chasm. The loss. The hammer. The nails. The virus. The variants. The worry. The wonder. The sense that any plan must be penned by our own hands. The inattention to intention. The lack of air. The lack of breath. The search for courage. The responsibilities. The falling hourglass sands. The questioning. The projecting. The diet. The disease. The swing. The strike. The call to action. The answer. The bruises. The blood. The tightrope walk. The guns. The drugs. The laws. The disconnections. The deleted lines. The money wearing masks. The trust split into pieces. The rankings. The rancor. The voices. The voiceless. The hardened. The heartless. The abusers. The abused. The race toward a constantly drifting finish line. The ridicule. The neglect. The bottom line. The ringing. The spinning. The tension. The waves. The shortened fuse. The easy ignition. The order. The angles. The criticism. The denigration. The obsessions. The compulsions. The rigid routines. The punishing patterns. The reaching. The rejection. The shooting star wishes for a second chance at another lap.

There will always be monsters under the bed.

Be a scarier monster.

Adolescence Interrupted

Parting clouds

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Riding a bandwagon in the backseat of the planet’s most unoriginal thought, let me be the millionth person to comment about the rigor and emotional discomfort of the past twelve months. Guess what, everyone? Things were a bit difficult last year.

But, for the first time in a deep stretch, I see a future lined with silver optimism and some serious potential for the globe to recognize lessons learned from reaching out for a hot stove, simply to see what happens.

If our collective crispy singed digits weren’t enough of a system shock to take a different course of action, it seems we are drowning in a sea of punishment gluttons who relish the disruption of every conceivable facet of their lives. If that’s the case, we’ll need a lot more than masks, common sense, and science to save us from ourselves.

Offering benefits hidden inside doubts, I’ll wager this next spin around the sun feels more like fuzzy slippers than frozen skates. Just the ability to walk out of a grocery store without immediately initiating NASA-level decontamination practices is enough of a reason to rejoice.

Suffice to say, our limbo stick expectations aren’t very low. Most of us would gladly take normalcy over excellence, and the installation of leaders who are intellectually capable of recognizing the stakes will benefit the greater good, regardless of how much detractors resist the helping hand. But “normal” needs to wear a different outfit or we’ll still be able to see the stains.

A fresh start to something stale. A moment to reflect, banish, and then change. Watch this worldwide debacle get smaller in the rearview as we walk into a better and brighter tomorrow.

Raise your hand if you’re ready.

Adolescence Interrupted

Death in place of pain

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“Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.” ―Ralph Waldo Emerson

Thrust into a modified global reality where the skyrocketing daily death rate has become a TV screen graphic as commonplace and mundane as lotto numbers, it’s hard not to pull that handheld mirror in for a closer look.

As a general rule, I have spent much of my adult life sprinting from pain, but standing steady for death.

With a bevy of nutritional supplements, a crippling need for exercise, and a diet that has become so limited it’s nearly impossible for any average human to follow, a meticulously constructed system has been designed to maximize health and eradicate weakness or deficiency. 

I’m smart enough to realize it’s most likely the result of pure insanity, but convincing myself of its necessity reinforces its strict adherence…and the loop spins round and round.

For some wholly inexplicable reason, colds, viruses, sore muscles, mental fatigue, any decline of joint function/mobility, headaches, reduced energy levels, etc. are avoided like the plague. But the threat of death is embraced with almost zero care or concern.

There is definitely some mixed brain wiring to blame for a deleteriously inverted fight-or-flight response, but this black-and-white laissez-faire perspective with regard to mortality has probably been rattling around in this head for longer than I’d like to acknowledge.   

To confess that a torn ACL ranks higher on a list of fears than a fatal plane crash is pretty vulnerable stuff. But this blog has repeatedly been a platform for naked testimony, and there’s no point in trying to pull up the covers now.

As always, there’s a focus here on sharing, not solutions. Catharsis takes many forms, and if an online diary is simply a means to wipe away some mud from the surface of the madness, so be it.

Introspection can be a nauseating teacup spin into the most baffling recesses of the psyche, but the fun is following the breadcrumbs back to the beginning…unless some hungry crows have already had their way with your exit strategy. 

Adolescence Interrupted

Life and Loss

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A terrifying concept of personal psychological hell states, “On your last day on Earth, the person you became will meet the person you could have become.”  —Anonymous

This could be read as a simple warning to keep carpe diem on the top of the list, or a friendly injunction not to squander talents or time.

But in this moment of global uncertainty and personal panic, perhaps the message is much simpler at its base. The clock on the wall that seemed to run on solar power is really just a parasitic imposter, suckling at the teat of a couple of old Duracells.

The days, weeks, and months are disappearing at an alarmingly unsettling rate. We are relinquishing the reins precisely when the horse needs our help to find his footing. But this is not a roller coaster that ends when our eyes finally open, and there is no waiting on the sidelines until things return to “normal.”

People are going to continue to die, and we need to prepare for the weight of that loss. There is an emotional heft in the acknowledgment that so much could have been prevented and so many lives could have been saved.

We are a selfish, shortsighted, and dangerously myopic society. Unwilling to sacrifice our petty personal “freedoms” for the greater good of our most vulnerable citizens will ceaselessly drive these infection rates and further delay any notion of achieving even a remotely flattened curve.

We’ll keep striding into crowded restaurants and bars without masks, and pretend this is all some overblown hoax designed by imaginary foreign foes (or local liberals) to keep us incarcerated in some oppressive fairytale prison of our own creation.

Wake up. Mask up. Shut up.

You’re ridiculous and ignorant to believe your life has any more value than another’s. Putting your foot down in refusal is merely flattening the gravesite soil.

Adolescence Interrupted

A Generation Modified

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“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”    —Jiddu Krishnamurti

Life locked behind windows and doors.

A new reality. A new planet. A new challenge.

An opportunity to do it right this time.

Developing minds are being asked to trade outside stimuli and ordinary social interactions for a brief glimpse at grandma on a small, shaking screen or distracted learning from remote educators saddled with unfair expectations and dwindling patience for throwing blindfolded darts at moving targets.

Still, the anti-quarantine protests and a deadly desire to dive back into “normal” life dominate the headlines. If we were all in mutual agreement with some widely accepted notion that the world we constructed was normal, I think it’s time for a better blueprint.

The growing chasm of wealth disparity is threatening to hobble established empires, the planet’s resources are irresponsibly plundered to fill the coffers of selfishly shortsighted puppet masters of profit, and we remain numb to the impending downfall by affixing our eyeballs to screens that constantly, cleverly administer just enough dope (and dopamine) to keep us begging for the chance to be repeat customers.

But there is hope. The next generation has a bullshit detector the likes of which we’ve never seen, and it won’t bow at the altar of blind acquiescence. It is deeply feeling the effects of this pandemic, and that code is being imprinted and branded on impressionable, malleable mental motherboards. Lessons for the future are being ingested in the present.

Those in power better seize this final opportunity to blatantly misallocate vital financial resources, sacrifice the sick who are too scared, too poor, or too alone to save themselves, and take one last lap around that privileged scotch circle. Your cigar-stained fingers are raising a glass in celebration of your own demise.

Adolescence Interrupted