Will This Fog Last Forever?

"I forgot how hard it is to breathe in these things."

While the nurse fussed with the earloop mask I'd given her, I said nothing. Sometimes an awkward silence conveys everything you need. After all, we both knew she was still fumbling with the thing. She hadn't even put it on yet, and she was already talking about how hard it was to breathe. It was becoming clear she was only familiar with baggy blue surgical masks. "Which way does it go on?"

"The nosepiece fits on your nose."

She finally got it on.

She looked at me. "You're not sick, are you?"

"No," I said. "I know masks freak people out now. I've gotten used to them."

"Ah," she said. Finally, she backtracked. "You're trying not to get sick."

"That's the plan."

The nurse drew my blood and took my vitals. Maybe it dawned on her during our interaction that it's actually not hard to breathe in a quality mask at all. Sometimes, the reality of an experience does more to make your case than words. After finishing, she said the life insurance company would get back to me in a few days, after they were sure that I wasn't going to die soon.

Life insurance might strike some doomers as quaint, given the way things are going. I figure it's better to have it than not, at least for the next ten years. What happens after that?

Who knows...

Why did the nurse complain about how hard it was to breathe in a mask before she even put it on? Maybe she wanted validation. Maybe she wanted a reaction. Maybe she wanted me to intervene and tell her it was okay if she didn't wear a mask. I gave her nothing. Sometimes, that's what someone needs.

Nothing.

Anyway, I'm just going to say it.

The world has become a bitch to deal with. Every single day, we put most of our energy into survival. We're not just trying to survive collapse, a slow motion doom that includes the rampant spread of disabling diseases. We're trying to survive other humans and their ignorance.

A decade ago, life partners used to get together over the kitchen table and talk about the nitty gritty details of the future. They talked about things like life insurance, college savings, and retirement plans. In 2024, my partner and I talk about what to do if the power goes out during a tornado in the middle of a heat wave in the middle of a pandemic. We talk about what to do if flooding disrupts the drinking water supply. These aren't hypotheticals fretted over by fearmongers. Over the last few years, it has all happened.

They happened to us.

I know several writers who are struggling with Long Covid. Not one. Not two. Not three. I know at least half a dozen.

By the way, college savings?

Lol.

College has already started turning back into what it was at the beginning of the 20th century, a club for rich kids to make friends and learn how to hate the poor. That includes learning how to take advantage of them. The colleges where I used to work have turned into little more than Ponzi schemes designed to take money from the labor class and offer them no practical job skills in return. Most of my students already had jobs. They just needed a piece of paper in order to satisfy the requirements for a raise or a promotion they were already qualified for.

My old university employs teachers who don't know how to use Google Docs or Zoom. They teach like it's 1997.

During my last year as a professor, one of our vice-chancellors admitted something ominous. He said within five years, institutions like ours would simply become machines that award paper credits for job experience. It's going to become a largely administrative process that doesn't require teachers. He's not wrong.

It's already halfway there.

Everywhere you look, a diminished future hovers on the horizon. That's exactly why there's so much fake hope floating around.

It obscures that horizon.

The campaign rhetoric and gaslighting has become unbearable. It's so full of denial, toxic positivity, and gaslighting that we dread opening the internet, because we know the shameful lies that will greet us. It takes more and more energy to call them out, and that's the whole point.

They're trying to exhaust us.

Gaslighting became a popular term under Trump, but insta-libs have learned how to do it even better than the orange menace. It's a special kind of moral injury to watch the leaders you once supported lie to your face and call you names for wanting to protect your family and save what's left of the planet.

This weekend, Atlanta will host Dragon Con, one of the largest cosplayer conventions in the world. My partner and I had our honeymoon there. Yeah, we dressed up. It was fun. We met Daredevil. We went again a couple of years later. Here's their 2024 Covid disclaimer:

We are still dealing with pandemic from Covid-19 and its variants. You agree to abide by any Convention Covid-19 protocols, which may change, even if you disagree with these protocols.  You understand that there the Convention will have thousands of people who will be indoors, and very near each other, and you. You will risk contracting Covid-19 or a variant while you travel to or from the Convention, and throughout the Convention. Under Georgia law, Dragon Con and its personnel are not liable to you or anyone else for an illness, injury, or death that may occur, wholly or even in part, from Covid-19 or a variant.  You assume the risk of any illness, injury, or death from contracting Covid-19 or a variant during the Convention, including traveling to or from the Convention, entering any of the Hotels, or participating in Convention activities.

We'll probably never go to a conference or convention ever again, because there's almost nothing you can do to prevent a Covid infection at an event like that without universal masking. At the very least, you need air purifiers galore and Far UV to boot. I'm sure Dragon Con does better than many conventions, but still, we have a long way to go before they're safe.

Hence the disclaimer...

Imagine living in a world where a major comics convention can't guarantee that you won't leave with an airborne disease that ruins your life if it doesn't kill you, and they make a point of telling you that.

It's the stuff of dystopian literature.

Nobody wants to live in that kind of world.

Hence the denial.

And of course, deep widespread denial is a defining feature of dystopian literature and cinema. It's bad, but nobody wants to admit it. They just go on about their lives. That's what you see in everything from Fahrenheit 451 to Bladerunner. It's bad, but nobody really cares. Nobody wants to talk about it.

You can imagine how many people would find a future without Dragon Con almost unbearable, why they'd be willing to risk death or permanent disability because they're unwilling to give it up.

My partner used to talk about a day when we'd take our daughter to Harry Potter World. We don't talk about that anymore, for the same reason. On top of that, there's the oppressive reality that its creator is now an unapologetic bigot, being rightfully sued for cyber harassment.

It's easy to dismiss the deep yearning for "normal" that compels hundreds of millions of people to disregard their own health and safety, to burn the future for the moments of joy they were promised. We all remember what it used to be like. We're just the ones coping better with its loss. For us, "normal" was always more of an excursion anyway. The real normal was always a return to solitude, and maybe that's why we're handling the new reality better.

From an ecological standpoint, the planet could never afford the normal we'd gotten used to anyway. Those conventions and theme parks, the coffee shops and fast food restaurants, the palatial grocery stores with sushi bars, the giant shopping centers, the busy airports, the nice hotels, the stadium concerts, the idea of investing for retirement, it was all built on an endless growth destined to come crumbling down at some point. It was just easy to ignore. Now, every year, it gets less easy to ignore. It requires an upgrade to the denial and wishful thinking that keeps it all going. So it's going to get harder and harder for us to witness.

The desperate exuberance wrapped in lies that greets us from our screens is going to get harder to endure over the next few months. As the world gets worse, the smiles are going to get bigger, and the lies are going to get more brazen. The need will grow to shut it off altogether because it's too much.

More than anything, it's this surge of toxic positivity that gets us. We feel like that's never going to end, and it's probably not.

With any luck, it will ebb.

The only way to bring an end to it now is to speak our truth, and then turn our screens off when we need a break. They might outnumber us, but we're still a group. Those of us who pay attention are still in this together.

Beneath it all, we ask the same question:

Will it always be like this?

There's two ways to look at the future now. You can cling to old expectations. That leads you to the empty hope and delirium we're seeing. Peel that off, and you find a yawning desperation and sadness. You find the real nihilism, that life is pointless unless you can distract yourself from things you can't hope to change. That's what the urgent normalizers are fighting for. They need their distractions.

Or...

You can change your expectations.

That's what we've done. I don't know about you, but I no longer look forward to simple pleasures from the last decade. That era has ended, along with all the amusing distractions it brought us in the form of poignant shows and superhero movies. We live in a new age now, with different priorities and values. Our real world Tony Stark turned out to be a giant fascist who can't even build a car.

Isn't that a little depressing?

That doesn't mean we don't think about the way things used to be.

It's okay to miss something.

It's good to think about how things used to be. It's important to remember. These days, memories of the old normal feel weird. It's weird that I used to go to a gym to exercise. It's weird that I used to walk into a classroom or a store without even thinking about pathogens floating in the air. It's weird that I could once take my child to a daycare and have a few hours to myself in the middle of the day. It's weird that relatives could babysit her for a few hours. It's weird that I used to just meet someone for a cup of coffee.

Now, all of that's gone.

I used to have anxiety dreams about being in public naked. Now I have anxiety dreams about being in public without a mask. I had one last night.

You know the saying: It is what it is.

It's not what we wanted it to be. What we wanted it to be doesn't matter. So we find new, simpler pleasures. We adopt new routines. We adjust to new levels of risk, which means dealing with them instead of ignoring them.

We change our expectations.

We live them.

If you appreciate my work, you can buy me a cup of coffee or get my book.