​LIFE IN THE TIME OF COVID

​Currently Listening to: Dry the Rain by the Beta Band
 
Happy Birthday, Hunter S. Thompson.
 
Oh, what would you have to say on your 83rd birthday? The United States has been crumbling and gasping for air since 9/11 and a pandemic looms in the midst of race riots and massive protests, economic disparity, homelessness, evictions. I’m sure Hunter would have had far more and far better words than I could ever write.
 
As I sit at my desk and watch Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas for the 10,000th time, one quote sticks out. “All energy flows according to the whims of the Great Magnet.”
 
Below is a piece I wrote around November 2019 and it has only become truer as time has passed. I hope everyone out there is safe, well-fed, sheltered, and eating gobs of delicious hallucinogenic drugs.
 
There is a human issue, transcending borders and cultures. It has nothing to do with political parties or affiliations, nothing to do with nation-states as it effects us all equally and worldwide.
 
We are sick, ill, the world around us is sick and everything and everyone keeps getting sicker. It’s almost like we have a huge hangover from the 20th Century.  The worst part is we sit back and watch it all happen in complete and utter denial that we are in any sort of danger.
 
Something is fundamentally wrong.
 
I know you feel it - I feel it too. We’re angry, we’re depressed, we want to kill ourselves, we want to take others out with us. We have anxiety that prevents us from enjoying life at all. We crave numbness and distraction, burying our heads in glowing screens of ads, pornography, and empty entertainment.  All of us traverse the globe with our sunglasses on, our headphones cranked, and our faces in our phones, hoping that no one tries to actually talk to us.
 
Something is fundamentally wrong.
 
We hate Mondays and we love Fridays.  They’re the same but not to us.  We sit at our jobs and wish away huge portions of our lives – I wish this day were over.  Every human life is finite but we sit and pray for the end of a day, ask for hours of our lives which we will never get back to disappear as if we are serving lifetime prison sentences.
 
Something is fundamentally wrong.
 
We are so full of hatred, we hate each other, we hate ourselves.  We walk into malls and schools and kill as many people as we can while hoping the police end our lives, police dressed like marines, strapped with incredible weaponry, juiced up for a war they’ll never see, beating protestors, locking up non violent offenders.  We go to political rallies and spit in each other’s faces, we beat people to death over differences in sexual orientation. Women are stoned to death for not wearing the right religious garb.
 
Something is fundamentally wrong.
 
Corporations have more rights than individual humans. The air is poison, the drinking water is poison, the ocean is a landfill, and no one wants to cut off the endless cycle.  Politicians in the USA spend more than 50% of their time in office begging corporations and lobbyists for more money to run again. The will of the few outweighs the will of the many.
 
I don’t know when it happened, maybe it’s always been this way.  Globally, 300 million people suffer from an anxiety syndrome.  In a time where mass murder, war, genocide, and sex trafficking run rampant, 1.5% of global deaths are actually suicides. We have more empty homes than homeless people.  The number one irrigated crop is grass and people live without clean water or fresh produce.  Our souls are suffocating under the endless race to have the biggest house, the nicest car, the newest phone, all to impress people we don’t even like in the first place.
 
Something is fundamentally wrong.
 
Turn on, tune in, and drop out.

​- Dickie