What Follows Numbness [Mental Health]

Fair warning: what follows is going to be about my mental health, which is perhaps an ugly place to visit. So if you aren't down for that particular fantastic voyage, I'd check out an earlier blog. A further warning: this will include a frank discussion of topics such as suicide. Yet again, if you don't want to deal with that, don't make yourself. I'm not here to upset you.

I know that I have discussed this before, and I know that a popular definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over and expect a different result.

Nevertheless.

A term I see used to describe depression, often, is numbness. It's a simple way to explain a complex scenario but - on the surface of it, I agree. You become numb to certain stimuli but not to others. If it's assumed that life's positive stimuli are the "default", then yes, you are numb, because that is the stuff that gets muted. Like flattening the top end of a sine wave.

All the bad stuff, though - that gets worse. Like, even minor setbacks become insurmountable problems or breakdown-worthy complications. If we use the idea of the sine wave - just move the entire thing down. The peaks are less high, the troughs are far more low. Our mountains are flattened while our valleys gouge deep.

That would be pretty bad in and of itself, right? Because that isn't just a thing you sack up and deal with, not if it is hitting you for days, weeks, months. It robs you of life. It robs you of Good Things.

And that isn't the final step.

Not by a long shot.

So with this dunk in your serotonin, stuff that is usually fun stops being fun, and stuff that sucks increases in suck. Which means everything takes a lot more effort. Everything is more tiring. In a brain that isn't working under these conditions, something coming up that you are looking forward to makes it easier to get to the thing, to do what is necessary to enjoy that thing. The drive to go do a thing, when your ability to enjoy the good stuff it will bring you is suppressed BUT your ability to suffer from the bad stuff is heightened, takes a huge hit.

Which begins a spiral, because you start doing less good things, which leads to less good things, and... well, here we start to understand how depression is a battle of attrition against the rest of your existence.

That's what it turns into. It chips at you, digs away at your ability to just go and do things. It erodes your will to take steps to make your life better or even just less sucky. It undercuts you at every turn. All of the things you want or need in a day, become a struggle, and sooner or later, you start to lose that struggle.

You ever wonder where the nihilistic sense of humour comes from, that a lot of folks that suffer depression have? It's about here.

This is where we talk about something called passive suicidal ideation.

Suicidal - that is a very scary word, yes? A lot of people will freak out just from seeing it written down there. It's scary, and we hate to think that people we know have even considered it. When they actually perform the act (there's a reason I don't use the word succeed) then it is a heartbreaking tragedy.

The difference between passive and active suicidal ideation is relatively simple when we get down to it.

If you are active, then you are doing the thing, seeking to do the thing, wanting to actually physically do the thing. If you are passive, then you just... kind of want that, a little. Maybe not even specifically death. You just kind of wish you didn't exist any more. Didn't have to deal with it.

When you have little value for your own life, this passive ideation state is very common. Because life is tiring, and a bit rubbish, and you don't want to have to deal with it day in and day out. Like, you wake up and you are tired already. Great, right? Fucking great.

Some days it is worse than that, and those are the days when you can't really hide it.

It is at this point that, those people I know who are wondering if this is a delayed cry for help or an indictment for not being sufficiently "there" or similar - this isn't that. That's not what I am doing here.

There's not a lot of helping. Not from outside. Nothing much you can do to redress the chemical imbalance that is kicking the shit out of our will to achieve anything at all. That's a very internal thing, and no amount of positive words, friendly memes or song-and-dance numbers will actively correct that. It's like an invisible switch in our skulls.

There just comes a stage when you are halfway doing something totally normal, like something that is just everyday and ordinary and shouldn't cause anyone any issues, even you... and it's like something pops, inside.

You want to break down in tears, right on the spot. Wherever you are. Your face contorts and it is going to be ugly. You grit your teeth and swallow and you tell yourself, no, not here. Not now. Not fucking now.

Not now.

And if you're lucky that only happens once, and you can get on with your day.

That's only on real bad days, mind. But it's those real bad days that dig at you, because even the good days are only okay, and the okay days kind of suck. It's like working retail, customer-facing. You don't remember the 99% of customers who just wanted the thing, paid the fee, said thank you and left. You remember the jerkwipe that took it as a personal insult that you don't stock that brand that you've never stocked, and wants to talk to your manager about it.

That leaves the world looking like a cold place even at the best of times.

I don't know what sparked this particular quagmire of nonsense. Maybe it's the change of season - the Autumnal chill in the mornings telling my subconscious that soon shit is going to turn bad. Maybe it's because I experienced several minor triumphs in the last two weeks, including meeting some family I've never met before, and my brain is incapable of seeing that as just a thing that can happen. Maybe the universe rolled some dice and they came up Double Fuck You, and that's where my brain goes.

I don't know. It happened though.

I am mostly riding out of it, right now. Like, the less of a pit you are in, the easier it is to talk about the pit. Sort of.

If I had anything else in mind to blog about at the end of this week, it all kind of went away late Friday early Saturday. But hey, that's what this blog is for - and for god's sake, don't worry about me. I've lived with this since I was in middle school. It'll be fine.

Sorry. This one was heavy, and it doesn't have an answer or a solution, outside of this:

I am at this very moment planning on getting more help than I currently have.

There is zero shame in getting treatment for any medical condition. Mind, body, spirit.

Get help.

Don't suffer this alone.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

It's Like We Finish Each Other's...

So who remembers this scene from Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

The entire Shave And A Haircut bit.

As a joke that actually became a thing, we used the shave-and-a-haircut knock in several RPGs to test if the being on the other side of a door was sentient, because who doesn't know shave-and-a-haircut? It almost answers itself. It sounds so satisfying as a string of beats that it almost fills itself in even if you don't know what it is from or haven't heard it before.

Those of you who are following this from something I said on Facebook are probably nodding knowingly right now, and for good reason, for I've discussed this over there before now, and relatively recently:

The human brain fills in a bunch of stuff that you aren't necessarily perceiving.

Like you'd be amazed how little of what you think you are seeing right now is stuff you are actually seeing. A lot of it is just what the brain estimates is there, and it feeds you that instead of there just being grey fuzzy patches that you can't perceive at all.

So it's not so unlikely that something similar can happen with audio - and that this can be altered via conditioning. It's part of how we get used to talking, after all. How we learn how to communicate verbally. Our brain starts to connect things together, the language shapes our thoughts, and all of a sudden we have got these entire complex sentence structures inside our mind that inform us if something sounds right.

Which means that, sometimes, we can be conditioned into having a response to a partial sentence or even a single word.

And sometimes, that conditioning can come from something other than conversation.

Let's experiment.

If you are reading this blog there is a greater than zero chance that you watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I've got a theory.

Which verse did you just riff off that sentence with? My personal favourite is the first one - it could be demons - but I know this one is a crowdpleaser:

You start to see what I am talking about.

Now this can be a popular culture thing. It can be a way to identify if the people around you are into the same stuff as you, right? Like how long someone can draw out the word "anticipation" tells you that they have probably, at least once, also uttered the words Damn It Janet and meant them.

I mean, has anyone heard the words "Frankly My Dear" any time in the past twenty years and not known what the following line is? Has anyone not visualised a pair of San Dimas washouts playing air guitar when they hear the word Excellent? Are there, indeed, any spoons? I'm pretty sure everyone I know believes that there isn't, at least a little.

Is it ever game over, without it being Game Over?

Who can hear the word Witness, without...

It's not just movie and TV quotes though.

Song lyrics?

A brief round of experiments:

Tell Me Why.

Sweet Caroline.

Mama.

Help.

Stop.

Let's focus on that last one, shall we?

What song do you hear, when you think about the word, Stop?

1. ____! Hammertime!
2. ____! In the name of love! Before you break my heart!
3. ____! Collaborate and LISTEN!
4. ____, hey, what's that sound, everybody look what's going down!
5. You'd better ____ before you go and break my heart!
6. Don't ____ til you get enough!
7. ____ pressuring me, makes me want to scream!

There's a few, right?

I think that if we can compile the things that do this in our heads - the things that we have to finish, the quotes that we have to complete - then we can build an interesting picture of who we are. And hell, it will certainly point out that some of our sense of humour is wacky and weird.

Stuff like this spreads, too. People repeat things that are stated as a short sharp quote, when the situation calls for it, then don't know what it came from. A bunch of people I know have heard me quote the Goon Show without ever knowing it exists - after hearing any kind of clash or weird noise, following it up with a smug, upper-class, "And why not?"

You know what all this is, right?

This is why we know stuff like the Crazy Frog, despite hating it. This is why we all have a favourite moment from Only Fools And Horses, despite not having watched a full episode in a decade. This is why some people start laughing when they hear something that has no real humorous context, because it is so inherently tied to something in their minds that does.

This is all Memetics, people. Cultural information transfer. The communication of a shared culture through goofy jokes, memorable quotes, slapstick humour and song lyrics.

Just thought I would dwell on something vaguely fun and interesting, while my government guts the democracy it claims to be protecting and swears to break the law if it doesn't get what it wants.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

Gold Beneath The Ruins

I blogged, once upon a time, about how screwed up the infrastructure of my home town is, and why it doesn't necessarily get fixed. In doing so, I talked about how Beirut got rebuilt, and the fact that doing so was considered an investment by the company doing it.

A ruined city, torn apart by a civil war that nobody living in it really wanted, became an investment opportunity.

For a more recent example - if you somehow missed the fact that Halliburton, a company that the US vice-president of the time (Dick Cheney) headed for five years, was given the keys (and the cash) to rebuild Iraq following the 2003 invasion... here is a reminder

It's not just actual warfare or mass destruction that results in profits, either. No, there's other ways. Shorting shares, for example. If you don't know how that works, there's a good description here, but let me give an example:

You know the price of milk is going to tank (harhar) so you go to your mate Billy the Milkman and ask if you can have ten bottles. You promise you will give them back tomorrow, and maybe give him some money on top of that. So he gives you ten bottles of milk.

You then go and sell the milk for its current market price - and overnight, the price of milk crashes. You sold the milk for £1 a bottle, and now it only costs 50p a bottle in the shops. (I don't know what would cause this, just roll with it.)

So - you take the £10 you made from selling the milk that wasn't yours, you buy 10 bottles for Billy the Milkman for £5, you give the bottles back to him, and give him £1 for his trouble. £4 profit for you, for essentially doing very little indeed, with things that aren't even yours.

It's only the rather unique way the stock and share markets work that allow this to happen, obviously. The thing is, though - it also allows people who can directly make money from shorting, to be in the sphere of influence or friendship with the kind of people who can influence share prices.

Let's say you are mates with Sheila the Shop Owner. Have been for years, went to school together, you used to work for the shop once upon a time. So you have a means to, for a period, influence the price of milk. So you go to Billy the Milkman, and instead of borrowing ten bottles, you borrow ten thousand.

You sell the ten thousand bottles of milk for £1 each. The next day, the town wakes up and the Shop is selling milk for - let's be conservative - 80p a bottle. So you take the £10,000 you just made, and you spend £8,000 to buy back the ten thousand bottles. You give them back to Billy. You give Billy £200 for his trouble, you give Sheila £800 for her time, and you pocket a cool £1,000.

These two examples are grossly simplified, but I think they give an accurate depiction of how this whole thing works.

Of course, shorting and share-dealing isn't available to literally everyone. It's a level of brokerage that you require expertise to get into, expertise and money of your own - getting that expertise also requires money - it's a literal class barrier.

What is missing from the example above, however, is what it means to everyday people like you and me - and how that would be represented is simple:

To cover the shortfall from a 20% reduction in milk prices, Sheila the Shop Owner cuts staff wages and increases prices everywhere else.

So we have two kinds of people, here; the majority, who would suffer if share prices suddenly dropped because the costs of such losses would be pushed down the line to the average consumer - and the minority, who would stand to not only avoid suffering under such circumstances, but could also make a significant profit from everyone else's misery.

That's pretty gross. It's amoral, obviously. It's also a built-in function of the system as it stands.

Why is this relevant?

Well - there have been several reasons why a referendum on our membership with the European Union has been suggested in the past ten years, one of the first being that our then-Prime Minister David Cameron wished to garner the support of the eurosceptics within his party. Throughout Ed Milliband's tenure in charge of the Labour party, he was strongly opposed to a referendum on leaving, which of course made Cameron's position much more concrete. More anti-immigration rhetoric started to creep into the justifications around 2014. It wasn't until the years following that the movement really started to pick up steam, though.

It was formalised in late 2015 - and the very beginning of 2016 began the formal introduction of an EU directive that had been years in the making, a package of anti tax-avoidance measures. Just a coincidence, I'm sure. Definitely just an absolute coincidence, that the Economic and Financial Affairs Council reached agreement on the directive literally two days before the referendum was due to take place. Just... plain lucky, I suppose.

But is that enough? The government has been utterly baffled by how much this little exercise is going to cost us individually and as a nation, or at least, has made little effort to be transparent to the public about such costs. Going so far as to quash the release of internal reports detailing suggested emergency measures, for when we start running out of insulin and all of the ports are in gridlock. It should still be patently obvious that the cost is going to be significant. We're already suffering for it.

Meet Jacob Rees-Mogg.

I'm going to do my best to not make any jokes about this man. What I will stick to is how he is relevant to what I am talking about.

1. Rees-Mogg is one of the hard-line Brexiteers within the Conservative party - he has gone on record as saying that the EU is a "threat to British democracy", which is a delicious irony given our current unelected PM just shut down Parliament because he wanted to.
2. Up until July 2019, Rees-Mogg was an advisor in finance company Somerset Capital Management. He "stepped down" from his role when he was made Leader of the House of Commons. He still owns 15% of the company, mind. It took the protective measure of opening a branch in Dublin to fend off some of the damage the finance sector will suffer during Brexit, another irony.
3. Rees-Mogg's father, William Rees-Mogg, was a Baron when he died in 2012. He'd worked for the Times, the BBC, and described Rupert Murdoch as a thoroughly nice chap. One of the books that Rees-Mogg Senior co-wrote with James Dale Davidson (ardent supporter of right-wing news company Newsmax TV) was all about how to make money in a crisis, and it was literally titled, Blood In The Streets. It was released in 1987. Here's the cover.

"The time to buy is when blood is running in the streets."

And that is why Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson will happily prorogue Parliament to push this through. That is why he will do literally anything he can to maintain the majority of one that he currently enjoys. That is why he will sidestep and countermand any check or balance that would allow Parliament from stopping us from leaving the European Union by any means necessary.

Because people like him, and people like Jacob Rees-Mogg, are part of that minority that will be just fine when it all crashes down. Because people like them already know how they are going to profit from the collapse. Because people like them have probably already optioned shares in the companies that will be brought in to fix the nightmare that will follow.

They have prorogued parliament, they will see Brexit through, they will call an election in November, and then let the chips fall where they may. All the better if they aren't the ones in government when the costs really start being counted and people really start hurting - when people start dying - when the blood is running in the streets.

Then you can watch them slink off, one at a time, resigning or retiring or taking some family time. To go back to their investment portfolios and their overseas homes, to avoid the fallout of their work.

They'll still be able to profit from the gold beneath the ruins.

But yeah, sure, project fear, we'll be fine.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

A Torch To End All Torches

I was going to blog about something relatively light-hearted and meaningless today, but then...

...this has been going on for over three weeks.

I find it hard to believe that anyone wouldn't know what this is in direct reference to, but just in case you missed it - a massive swathe of the Amazon rain forest is currently burning. A huge amount of it. Beyond any conception of what a fire should be. In fact - let me see if I can't find you the image that NASA put out.

Yeah.

Why is it burning?

Well there's been a lot of wildfires out there in recent years, and the climate being as it is, they have only gotten worse - but that isn't what is actually happening right now. It's far more basic, than that. It's far more stupid and evil and selfish.

Over a month ago, several of the indigenous tribes won a legal challenge to stop oil drilling and other industrial exploitation of their land, including deforestation to make way for pastoral farmland.

And now this happens:

And Bolsonaro's government claims there's nothing they can do, so sorry, so sorry.

I mean. Evo Morales of Bolivia is sending a fucking fire fighting tanker plane, but yeah, nothing anyone can do. So sorry.

So in summary, the Amazon is being deliberately burned to kill off the indigenous individuals who live there and to clear the land for industrial purposes, in an act of deliberate mass murder and environmental mutilation that would make the bad guy in a 90s anime stop and reconsider.

I've blogged before about Saturday morning cartoon evil - and about how stupid the villains in Captain Planet were.

I've also blogged before about how a bunch of stuff that is happening to the world is coming across like the news montage at the beginning of a disaster movie.

This is it, right here.

This is the part where it goes from "something bad might happen" to "fucking awful things are literally happening right now".

There are things we can do.

Short of actually heading out there and fighting fires our damn selves, there are organisations trying to help. The Instituto Socioambiental, AmazonWatch, Imazon and Friends Of The Earth. Do some research, make some donations. Spend your money smarter. Boycott assholes. Hit them in the wallet where it hurts. Consider cutting the meat and plant products they grow in the cut-back areas of the Amazon out of your diet. That might mean giving up meat and soy altogether, but you want solutions, you got em.

Write to your representatives. Keep writing to your representatives. Sure, a lot of us live in areas where our representative couldn't give a fuck and probably gets a backhander from someone who will be made rich by this whole fucking affair, but it can't hurt to try, god dammit.

Oppose the kind of nationalist, neoconservative, pro-industrial, pro-capitalist, right-wing asshole that would burn down half of a continent in order to make some scratch and appease the agriculture lobbyists. Oppose them at every fucking turn. I guarantee you that a bunch of the other social causes that you care about a lot will be helped by rejecting this kind of asshole.

Most of all? Don't look away.

Don't let this happen. Don't just LET it happen. I know it sucks. I know it's unpleasant. I know it hurts. I know it's sad. But if we just let things happen then things just keep on happening, and then the world is fucked and we are all dead.

Hank Green did a video about it. It deserves watching.

This, by the way, is what swaps the imminent apocalypse from Blade Runner to Mad Max.

God fucking help us all.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

Ding Dong

Only a short one today, folks, because last night I... may have imbibed a little too much rocket fuel.

If you know me personally - most of you do, to some degree - you may well be aware that two of my best friends, very recently, got themselves hitched. They liked it, so they put a ring on it.

I've always been a matrimony-cynic on a personal level, but - I like seeing it for other people. I like other people who are into it, I like them having a good time on their big day. So seeing that big day actually happen was, frankly, an absolute joy.

And if someone ever tells you that you can't have a good party in a field, I come bearing news - you ruddy well can. As long as you don't drink too much of the blue stuff. I still think about the blue stuff when I close my eyes. Like, I can feel it fizzing in there somewhere. Most of it is gone but enough remains that I know it has forever...altered me in some way.

Was good to see a bunch of people that I haven't seen in a long time, too. I don't get out often. Body doesn't allow it. It was only through the sheer good grace and patience of my friends that I could even be there, so like... doubly blessed, I suppose?

I will avoid getting too sentimental. But there's not many finer people in the world. They deserve each other. Alike and different in all the right ways, like a jigsaw puzzle.

Congratulations, Mr and Mrs Lamb.

The collage of pictures below was put together by a good friend who took them at the event itself (Rachael, far left, middle pic, top row - yeah, she's a pretty good photographer). More may get appended later once I have sourced them out.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

The Second Coming In Wrath

"The atomic bomb is the Second Coming in Wrath."

Winston Churchill said those words when he found out about the Trinity test, conducted 16th July 1945.

This past week has seen the anniversaries of the two combat deployments of nuclear weaponry, both of which were notably against (primarily) civilian targets. 74 years ago last Tuesday, a bomb named Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima. After levelling most of the city but not having the desired effect, that Friday, a second bomb named Fat Man was deployed on Nagasaki.

Precious little was left standing.

This is a torii, a gate usually demarcating the entrance to a Shinto shrine; many of these were left amongst the rubble. In a sad turn of events, during the postwar occupation of Japan, "State Shinto" was one of the things the occupational forces of the United States saw as responsible for Japan's pre-war culture, and so was thoroughly discouraged; even if the torii stayed standing, the religion itself was undermined for decades.

Before the atomic plan, the numbers were drawn up for an actual land invasion. The casualty figures in potential looked to be between half a million and four million. The figures were so great that the war department put the Purple Heart medal into mass production, to stockpile it for the inevitable amount of severely wounded individuals that would be merited with one following the invasion of the Japanese mainland. They made so many that they stopped producing them after the atomic bombings, and only actually got close to running out - despite involvement in many military conflicts since - in 1990.

The poster below was produced as part of the propaganda effort running up to this potential invasion. I doubt I need to provide a content warning for racism, but have one anyway.

The total casualty figures from both bombings - counting those that died before the end of 1945 of radiation sickness and other injuries - comes out to around 200,000 civilian, and 20,000 military. That's approximately the population of Southampton in the UK, Baton Rouge in the US.

Was it worth it?

The debate has been batted back and forth ever since before the bombings even happened. No matter how many lives it might have saved in the first place, it was a decision arrived at in context of many other decisions made previously - the concept of strategic bombing being a valid strategy, for one.

The definition of strategic bombing, over tactical or mission-based bombing, is that the targets are not strictly production or industrial or even military in nature. The entire point of strategic bombing is to kill civilians, to disrupt and destroy civil infrastructure, to hurt and kill people who have nothing to do with the fighting in order to erode the morale of those that do.

The first example of strategic bombing was the German army dropping 8 bombs on Antwerp via airship in 1914. A word that I find fascinating and horrifying in equal measure was invented via strategic bombing. Coventrate - a verb meaning to devastate by heavy bombing, named after the German bombing raid on Coventry in 1940.

This is Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Travers Harris, aka Bomber Harris.

He was in charge of RAF Bomber Command from 1942 to 1945, and he was a great proponent of strategic bombing. Harris famously had a large number of books in his office, books filled with photographs of cities that the RAF had bombed. When asked as to the effectiveness of strategic bombing, he would open these books and gesture to them. Four Coventries right there, he would say. Three Coventries. Hundreds of thousands of casualties, perhaps in the millions, by his direct command. He is on record as saying:

"I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British grenadier."

That is how it becomes acceptable to kill two hundred thousand civilians. Because the civilians stop being individuals. They start being numbers; they start being the weak points in the enemy army's fighting strength, and so become part of a military consideration.

It gets even easier if you stop thinking of them as human, a condition further enforced by significant numbers of "enemy nationals" being rounded up from their homes or places of work and shoved into cages.

And I am sure we have all seen pictures of armed guards getting civilian prisoners off a train at a camp before, haven't we?

Should we be ashamed of the nuclear bombing of Japan? Perhaps. It is the cherry atop a cake already heaped with shame. We - yes, we - are so easily talked out of humanity. So easily pushed into doing the inhuman thing. All it takes is for the regular folks on the street to do literally nothing while the tiniest proportion of the population dehumanise everyone they see fit to dehumanise.

It never starts with Little Boy and Fat Man.

It doesn't even start with the camps.

It doesn't even start with the eight bombs dropped on Antwerp over a century ago.

It starts long before that.

Which stage do you think we are at as a civilisation?

I'll give you a clue:

Bombs are already being dropped on human beings that we've been convinced not to care about.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

People Being Ugly To Each Other

My mother calls me the ultimate pessimist.

I mean, I know people so much more pessimistic than I am - HER mother, for one - but I think, probably, it is my willingness to voice it. When I have doubt that a thing will work out well, or when I believe that a particular action or situation will be used for evil purposes. I tend to say so, and so, I am pessimistic.

Things like, back in 2017, after the election, when I told her that we'd probably sleepwalk into Brexit without any kind of deal, but that was fine, because the people whose job it is to prevent that kind of thing are okay with having their tax loopholes maintained.

Like I told her at the time. I hope that it doesn't happen, but I think that it is likely. And here we are, four months away from a recession the likes of which none of us have lived through, while Boris and his cabinet of incompetents and crooks sit with their thumbs up their arses.

It's not fun, being right about shit like this.

Like, unless you are a sociopath, there's very little smugness or pleasure to derive from watching the next shitty thing happen to us as a town, as a county, as a country, as a species. It would take a very ugly process for me to laugh in triumph as the lava overcame the village.

It just gets so... tiring.

I don't try to assume the worst in people. Individual people, on a personal level. I used to. But then I used to always assume the best, too, and look how that worked out.

There just comes a point wherein you start seeing commonality, and you start seeing the repetition of patterns.

The men in suits say bigoted things. They get corrected but it's just echoes. Bigots continue to be bigots. It's okay - they know it's okay, because the men in suits are bigots too, so when will there ever be any serious repercussions?

The men in suits want to make their money. There's outcry because they're making their money by punishing and hurting people and taking things from others, but the men in suits don't care. Nothing is stopping them. If something temporarily stops them they will find another way.

And it is... exhausting. Because it is this absolute, ongoing, never-ending cycle of the next shit thing happening to people that don't deserve it - and it happens daily, sometimes hourly, and it ruins (and often ends) lives.

It makes it hard to see straight, let alone fight against.

But we have to.

We have to, because otherwise, it will just keep happening. If we don't speak truth, the lies will become repeated so often that nobody questions them. If we don't call out shitty behaviour, people will continue to be shitty to other people. If we don't decry hypocrisy or corruption, then it will happen more, and worse. If we don't stand up for the people under the boot, then the boot will come down again, and again, and again.

Will we win?

Who knows?

In the end, the better world, the better place, isn't a plateau we ascend to once we've punched a hundred Nazis. It comes in increments. It comes in the tiny reductions in suffering caused by each good action taken and each bad action averted or subverted.

Because a better life, like love, isn't just a thing. It's an action. It's work. It requires input, and gives output.

So we do what we can, in the face of reckless hate and insidious greed and choking malice.

I'm sorry, El Paso. I'm sorry, Dayton.

We're trying.