Asleep at the wheel

I have often noted that I’m from a very big family. Growing up, I never had many friends, but I made up for that with plenty of aunts, uncles, and cousins. Lots of people to learn from, and lots of them to teach.

Yesterday, that big family got a little bit smaller. My cousin was killed in a near head-on collision when he was ejected from his friend’s car, where he was a passenger. He was 41 years old, only four older than me, and…I’m not sure how I feel about it.

Every family, once it gets to a certain size, is sure to have an outlier. That one member who, for whatever reason, just doesn’t fit in with the rest. In our case, that was Brian. We all knew it. We joked about it. He joked about it. Of the whole lot of us, he was always in the most trouble, no matter what kind you imagine, and he was the one most likely to turn down any offers of help from those who truly loved him.

Let’s not mince words. He was, in many respects, an awful person. He was an actual psychopath, with a more-than-healthy dose of narcissism and some general destructive tendencies thrown in for good measure. He lied, he cheated, he stole, and he rarely showed any kind of sympathy for his victims. He was a drug addict who spent too little time in jail for what he’d done. The people he called friends were, by and large, just like him.

Yet he had moments of genuine warmth and compassion, times when he seemed to realize what his self-destructive behavior was doing to his family and himself. I don’t believe in demons or demonic possession, as many of my relatives do, so those flickers of humanity Brian sometimes showed often felt, to me, more like a drowning man who had managed to break the surface long enough to scream for help.

He leaves behind four children by three different women, each of whom left him to save herself, choosing the life of a mother over that of a junkie. His 4-month-old grandson, Wyatt, will grow up having never seen his grandfather. And all of us who tried to help him can only wonder if our efforts were always in vain.

I don’t believe anyone is irredeemable. That’s just how I am. No human being is beyond saving. But they have to want it. You can’t force someone into rehab, or into the hospital, or into a better life. The first step is one they must take.

I’ve often wondered if Brian wanted it. There were many times where it was clear that he didn’t, that he’d rather be high than healthy, that he would gladly trade everything good in his life for one more hit. But then I think about his more lucid days, or at least the ones I saw. I think about the man who always called me for computer help, who all but begged me to take the GED test in his name because, as he put it, he didn’t think he was smart enough to pass it, but he needed it so he could get a job and settle down.

More than anything, I think about someone who, late Wednesday night, tossed the last of his crack to a family friend and said, “I’m tired of being a drug addict. I want to be better.”

And I wonder why the world is so cruel that “I want to be better” is a death sentence.

Summer Reading List Challenge 2021: Late start

In all the bustle of actually having a job, I completely lost track of time, and I forgot about the Summer Reading List Challenge!

Here are the rules again, for those curious:

  1. The goal is to read 3 books between the US holidays of Memorial Day (May 31) and Labor Day (September 6). Yes, that’s winter in the Southern Hemisphere. I can’t change that.

  2. A “book” is anything non-periodical, with very wide latitude. Comics, graphic novels, and manga are out. Just about anything else is in. And, thanks to the socializing I’ve gotten from having a job, I know to add something else to this: audiobooks count for the challenge if they would be considered books in written form.

  3. One of the books needs to be a genre outside your normal reading habits. Nonfiction, horror, whatever. Anything different, because one of the object of the challenge is to expand your reading horizons.

  4. Books you wrote don’t count. Even if you’re reading them for fun.

Now, because of my late start (which I can’t apologize enough for), you get a little extra time this year: the deadline is extended to September 17 if you haven’t already started something new since Memorial Day.

I’ll be posting my progress here and on the fediverse, where you can follow @mikey@mhp.singleuser.club. Have fun, have a great summer, and keep reading!

Human pride

June, as everyone not living under a rock knows, is Pride Month. It’s that special time of year when corporations across the country dress up their logos with the rainbow flag that gains colors faster than a box of crayons and spread vague, virtue-signaling one-liners about how they stand with certain people against hatred. Oh, and there used to be marches and stuff, but then Valentine’s Day used to be a Catholic saint’s day, too.

The original purpose of Pride Month wasn’t that bad…at least in theory. As a social movement to increase awareness of alternative lifestyles and relationships, it served a purpose. Of course, since the Oberfeller decision a few years ago, that purpose is now superfluous. Gay marriage is legal across the nation, the ultimate expression of acceptance. And that case also set a precedent: sexual orientation is considered a protected legal category under the 14th Amendment, so the entire “gay rights” agenda has been fulfilled. Equality is here. There’s no need to fight for it any longer.

Thus bereft of a goal, Pride Month has been left to a rather confusing pair. Commercialization is the fate of all holidays, really, so it’s only natural that a month-long celebration of once-forbidden love would find itself in the corporate crosshairs. But the movement was always geared towards the political left, so we now see the curious juxtaposition of anti-capitalist progressives on June 1 “standing with” the very global corporations they were threatening to boycott on May 31.

Both sets share the same desire, however, so it’s not entirely unreasonable to see this temporary alliance of convenience. For these groups seek to divide us for their own gain. Progressives thrive on conflict, as we know; their whole worldview is based on class warfare, on setting us against each other. Corporations, of course, are only out for short-term gains, but those most immersed in the “pride” culture tend to be the ones with captive markets and virtual monopolies. They can’t very well lose market share, but a few tweets can reach the small segment of the populace who would otherwise ignore them, and that’s just modern PR.

But using this month as a reason to incite further divisions in society or, worse, to cast those who are tired of the force-fed propaganda as hateful and loathsome, is a tragic miscarriage of justice, to say the least. Much like Black History Month, what was once a celebration has become an inquisition. It’s anti-human. It’s anti-equality. It is, to put it simply, a perversion of everything the various equal rights movements were founded upon.

Instead of worshiping what sets us apart, we should begin to embrace what we have in common. We should take pride in being human, because all of us share that. Whatever you believe, whatever you look like, whatever attracts you, you are human. You are one of billions, yet still unique in many ways.

Not only are you human, but so are other people. Everyone you love, everyone you know, is a human being, just like you and me. In a world where dark forces seek to dehumanize us at every turn, to fit the entire population into a number of mutually-exclusive categories solely to set us against one another, it’s important to remember that we are better than that. We can do better.

Within the last decade, we proved that by ending a restriction, a limitation of rights defined as inalienable, that had been in place for over 200 years. None of us is lesser because of who we love, and that statement is now the law of the land. True, we may not always live up to the ideals we express, but that is no reason to reject them. No, we must do better. We must strive to reach them, while knowing we will never quite attain the perfection and utopia we long for.

We are human. Our reach will always exceed our grasp, but that should not dissuade us. The pride we should celebrate is not that which separates us, and certainly not the idea that some of us deserve more because of who we are. No, our pride is in the knowledge that humanity can grow, that each and every one of us can contribute to that growth if we all work together.

Progress doesn’t care if you’re gay or straight, if you’re black or white, if you’re male or female. All that matters is being human. The only entry card to the clique of progress is your humanity. As corporations aren’t people, they’ll never understand that. As progressives stand against unity, they will always fight it. But we know the truth.

In this month and every month to come, be proud. Be human.

Dear agony

(Title for this post is from the Breaking Benjamin song of the same name, whose refrain you’ll see as soon as I finish this parenthetical.)

Dear agony,
Just let go of me
Suffer slowly
Is this the way it’s gotta be?

The simple answer to your question, Ben, is…no. No, it doesn’t have to be that way. But only if something good happens to give you a little bit of hope.

Over the past few weeks, it has.

For fifteen long months, I had suffered. I had all but given up. I’m not afraid to admit that. There were nights that I cried myself to sleep, days where I would hide in my room, not wanting to do anything but sleep. And if that sleep turned into the more permanent sort, well, I wouldn’t have been opposed. At least then the pain would stop, right?

Now, I honestly feel like a whole new person. While I’m sure a certain man in northern Virginia wouldn’t mind taking all the credit for that, it wasn’t just the job that gave me hope. No, landing that position merely gave me the spark. As I’ve said often, if I could get just one good thing to happen to me, all the rest would fall in line. And it might be doing precisely that.

The world still sucks, as we all know, but things are getting a little better. The ranks of those who question the narrative are growing, and they have grown large enough in my humble state to start putting the brakes on our slow decline into tyranny. Better would be throwing this train into reverse and getting us back to liberty: banning mask mandates, banning vaccine passports, opening schools and bars and sporting events. In short, living our lives, instead of cowering in fear. But any progress is good, even if it’s so slow that snails are outrunning us.

That is one belief I hold dear. Progress is good. Progress has given us immeasurable benefits, and it will continue to do so as long as we embrace it. Not everything new is progress, however. Anyone who has grumbled over an app update or yelled at a voice menu knows that all too well.

True progress is that which improves the human condition: longer lives, healthier lives, more freedom, more resistance to the ravages of nature, and so on. Unfortunately, it’s so often the case that we are told these things are bad. We’re defying the will of God or poisoning Mother Earth or whatever.

The worst of this sort of thinking became popular last year, when elites and their hangers-on parroted the line, “Nature is healing.” In effect—and, in some cases, in words—these people made the claim that we humans are a pathogen, and the made-in-China coronavirus was, in fact, a natural response to our overreach in some nebulous way. Of course, the same people say the same things about weather disasters, so you can’t take them seriously, but the sheer idiocy of such a statement never fails to annoy me.

My contemplations of the past year or so gave rise to technetism, but this anti-human religion gives it an enemy. And I feel it gives me a higher purpose, something beyond writing novels and computer programs. Common sense dictates that I reject the nihilism and doom-saying of the environmentalists, the pandemic fearmongers, and all those who stand in the way of progress.

However, a negative philosophy is no philosophy at all; this is my biggest criticism of atheism, and it fits here, too. It is perfectly fine to say that you don’t believe in something, but far more fulfilling if you can find something you do believe in. If you have to make it yourself, then so be it. Every movement began somewhere.

I choose to believe that humans are an inherently positive influence on the world, and on each other. We build, we create, we invent. We solve problems. We come together and make something greater. Yes, there are individuals (and large groups) standing in our way, blocking our progress. Impediments have always existed, though. They’ll never truly go away. What we can, and must, do is overcome them. The best way to start, in my opinion, is to be more sociable. Shake hands, hug, get close to one another again. Take off the masks and let people see that we are human beings.

There’s still a lot of agony out there. For me, it hasn’t all gone away over the past few weeks. But now I have enough positive influences in my life to see the sun peeking through the clouds. Now I have a reason to fight that extends beyond myself and those I love.

Maybe that’s all I needed.

May it be

(Yes, it’s a pun. You’ll just have to get over it.)

At the start of April, I felt I had nothing and I was going nowhere. It’s just that simple. A long time ago, I decided I wouldn’t sugarcoat things here, so I told the truth as I saw it: I began last month aimless and, to put it simply, hopeless.

Since then, things have taken a turn for the better. I have a job as a full-stack developer—basically what I was already doing, but with the added bonus that I’ll be paid for it now. My relationship with the woman I love is slowly but surely picking back up, and I believe it’ll soon reach new heights.

Best of all, Hamilton County at last rescinded its illegal mask mandate a few days ago. Now that this human rights violation is gone (a year too late, if you ask me), I can actually go inside again. I mean, I could before, but only if I went up to Dayton, which doesn’t have nearly the commercial variety of Chattanooga. Now, though, we have finally been allowed to regain one of the vital freedoms, the inalienable rights, we lost last year.

We still lack others guaranteed by the Constitution. Freedom of speech is useless if you’re blocked from using it at every turn, as anyone who criticizes the regime on Facebook or Twitter (or who tries to start an alternative) will quickly discover. Freedom of religion and assembly both normally require being in proximity to other people; Zoom calls just don’t cut it. The right to privacy (enumerated, in part, by the Fourth Amendment) has been in mortal danger for two decades, no matter which party claims to be in power.

To be sure, other places have it worse. Most other English-speaking countries are effectively country-sized prisons at this point: Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are the most notable. The Pacific states get to suffer both lockdowns and riots. Compared to the sheer horror of other places, rural Tennessee really isn’t that bad.

Lately, I’ve been getting a lot more philosophical. I attribute this to my precarious mental state, my disdain for the way things are, and maybe even the first wisps of middle age, a phase of my life I’m approaching far too quickly.

I won’t say I’ve become religious, because I still find most forms of organized religion to be far too controlling and irrational for my tastes. If I wanted that, I’d turn on CNN, not TBN. But I, with a little help from those closest to me, have been discovering a kind of spiritual side of myself that was buried deep within.

(One of the few perks of getting older is that you get to use a few certain phrases to start sentences. Here’s one of them.) For decades, I’ve wanted to make an impact on the world, a change in the way things are that bring them closer to how I feel they should be. I don’t believe I’ll ever be the kind of thinker who deserves to be named alongside Thomas Paine, John Locke, or Baruch Spinoza, three of my favorite Enlightenment-era voices, but I do feel I have something to contribute in that vein.

I’m calling it technetism: literally, belief in creation. Because that is what I believe in. Creation over destruction. If I’ve learned anything from the depths of the past year, it’s that. What I value most strongly as a person, as a human being, is the positive power of making something. Whether that’s a computer program, a garden, a baby, a house, a scientific discovery, or a new social order, as long as you’re creating something, you’re adding to humanity as a whole. If you only destroy, by contrast, you’re taking away from all of us.

Creation, then, is the central pillar, but not the only one. It’s flanked by two others that, to me, also represent fundamental aspects of being human: learning and exploration. Without knowledge, we can’t make the right decisions; learning is the way we acquire that knowledge. Exploration lets us grow our worlds and add to our experiences, ultimately with the goal of sharing them through creation, even if that creation is merely the making of a new friendship or a lifelong relationship with, say, a soulmate living 100 miles away.

All three of these qualities are sorely lacking today. Too many people are seemingly against the whole idea of learning, closing their eyes and their minds to anything but the propaganda doled out by their favorite news outlet. Exploration is actively discouraged from childhood, and actually illegal in many places at the moment, because our society has chosen the wrong path in prioritizing safety above all else. And finally, we have all seen the sheer destruction that has wracked our country since last May.

Someone has to stand for what is good in this world. It might as well be me. I’m a man of principle, and I will stand up for what I believe is right. I will speak out against the evils I see in society, and those bent on destroying it. I do this not to make enemies, but to remind you that we can all be friends.

We have more in common than we realize, because we are all human. Deep down, we all have that spark of creation within our hearts. It doesn’t matter if you think it came from God or evolution or whatever. It doesn’t matter if that heart is inside a white body or a black one, a male or female. We are creators. We are explorers.

I, for one, am going to act like it.

Writing updates for April 2021

I have updated The Big List to reflect a couple of minor progress notes. One, I’ve officially named Otherworld #19 as Forever Faithful. (I still don’t have a title for #20, and I have it on hold for numerous reasons. It’s looking more and more like Adventures in the Otherworld might not come out until 2023!)

Second, I’ve begun writing Pitch Shift, the fourth Endless Forms novel. How I’m going to juggle that and a job that can end up full-time, I have no idea, but never let it be said that I did things the easy way.

A new chapter

I have battled depression and anxiety for a very long time, far longer than I’ve been writing about it here on PPC. Even before I understood what was wrong with me, I fought, and I have learned that it’s not a fight I can win alone.

In the past couple of years, I’ve been more adamant about finding ways to combat the demons in my head, and all my best strategies boil down to one simple task: get my life on track. I’m 37, and I very often feel like I’ve accomplished nothing in the past 20 years, that the entire 21st century, for me, has been a waste of time. I tried to start my own business, and it never really worked. I didn’t bother with dating until my 30s, because I figured it was just a waste of time; who would want somebody like me?

As I descended further and studied my condition more, I came to see how it was exacerbated by my perceived failures. I had dreams, much like anyone. I still have them, though they aren’t the same as they were when I was 18 or 25 or even 33. Now, thanks to the rigors of the past two years, the trials and tribulations I’ve endured, those dreams are more concrete and more…mundane. I want a life of my own. I want to get paid to create things. I want to be a husband and a father. That’s pretty much it.

For 30 months, I fought to drag myself towards any of those goals, with no progress whatsoever. In some cases, I feel I regressed, and that was both due to and contributing to my depression. Why? Because I was trying to do it alone. As I’ve stated on here before, when I’m in a depressed state, my natural reaction is to hide. If I’m going to be a disappointment, my thinking goes, let it just be for me.

And that line of thinking has taken me to the very edge on more than one occasion. Not a full month ago, I was at quite possibly the lowest point I’ve ever faced. I had given up on all three of those life goals, and I had made my peace with that. I was ready to abandon the eternal (and eternally disappointing) job search. I did abandon my relationship. And I was okay with it, because I didn’t think there was any point lying to myself or to those around me anymore. In the last week of March, I made a deal with myself. If I couldn’t get hired for something, somewhere, by the end of this month, I’d quit trying. I would try to find a way to explain to my beloved that it wasn’t her fault I failed her, and I would spend the rest of my life writing as many books as I could, while making preparations for an end that, I had planned, would come in the days before my 40th birthday, in 2023.

I am happy to report that this plan went out the window.

I had mentally prepared myself for the breakup text, but she contacted me the day before I’d planned to send it. Some of the things she said hurt because they came from the anger she felt at being ignored for almost a full month. Many more hurt because they showed me the pain I had caused her. Because of her, and the love she showed me even when I had none for myself, I resolved to try one more time.

I didn’t expect much when I applied for the job. It was yet another startup (something like a startup, at any rate) looking for a full-stack developer, yet another one of those “1-click easy apply” deals on Linkedin. Something I’d done literally a thousand times before, with 99% of those ignoring me or sending me a polite, yet still hurtful to my fragile psyche, rejection message. Sure, what little description of the job was there did fit my skills: HTML, CSS, PHP on the back end, some jQuery-based scripting for the front. In other words, what I’ve been doing for most the last decade for fun. But there were already 30 applicants, any one of whom might be better qualified. They would have degrees. They would have enterprise experience. They wouldn’t be insecure introverts who freeze up in an interview.

Somehow, I beat them all. I still don’t understand it, and I’m not completely out of the shock phase. I keep wondering when I’m going to wake up and find it was all a dream. I met the team—the rest of the team—on a video conference last Thursday, and the scariest part of that is how I didn’t feel completely out of place. I expected a group who would look at the shy man with the graying hair as someone they were merely tolerating. I instead found…people. Ordinary people who welcomed me in a way I’d never truly known before.

Parts of the arrangement continue to make me uncomfortable. I honestly don’t know how I’m going to perform under the pressure of a full-time development job where I have actual deadlines, not vague milestones or schedules I’ve set for myself, and actual responsibilities that go beyond “just get it done”. I know I’m the outlier in pretty much every aspect: they’re all animal-lovers and risk-takers and generally outgoing types, while I’m allergic to cats and not a big fan of dogs, and I’d rather stay home and read a book than go scuba diving.

I’m not a perfect fit, then. I likely never will be. But it doesn’t matter right now, because I’m there. I’m hired and accepted.

All along, I’ve told myself that I could get my life going if I could just take one good step forward. Now’s my chance to prove the truth of that statement.

Character portraits: Levi

Name: Levi Maclin
Series: Orphans of the Stars
Age: 15
Height: 6’1″
Weight: 194 lbs.
Hometown: Vancouver, BC, Canada

About the character

Levi is a high school student and total space freak. Living in the 24th century, he still knows more about one specific part of the 20th than most people alive today, because he reads everything about our era he can get his hands on, at least if it’s about the space race.

But there’s more to him than that. The oldest of three, he’s the perfect age to be the family babysitter, so he’s used to watching over Justin, age 11, and six-year-old Holly. He doesn’t mind, though. They’re not just siblings; they’re his friends, too.

At home in Vancouver, he sometimes gets a little lazy, especially in summer. He’d rather read or watch a movie than get out and play with other boys his age. School, in his opinion, is for learning more than socializing. That’s not to say he doesn’t have friends. He’s made a lot of them, in fact. Something about him just makes it easy to like him.

If anything can describe Levi Maclin, it’s that he’s a dreamer. He dreams of going into space, even if it’s nothing more than a simple lunar shuttle ride, something people in his time do every day. In his wildest dreams, he’s the captain of an interstellar ship, saving the galaxy and discovering new worlds for humans to colonize. Maybe even walking on the surface of those worlds, meeting aliens no human has ever laid eyes on.

Too bad only adults get to do all that, right?

Author’s thoughts

Levi shares my love of space. Indeed, that was the first bit of characterization I did for Orphans of the Stars. I chose him as the main character of the series before deciding on placing him as the prologue character for Innocence Reborn, and that comes solely because I wanted the captain of the “kids’ ship” to be a space nut like myself. It fits the setting, I think. Sure, people in his time have done a lot better with space than ours are willing to do, but that just gives him more imagination fuel.

Almost everything else about his character came from my initial vision for the series. I wanted something focused a little earlier than the typical young adult fiction: teens and preteens, for the most part. (In my head, I envisioned Orphans of the Stars as “The Expanse for kids”.) The main character, then, had to be one of the older ones, but not too old. I gave him siblings so he would have skin in the game, so to speak. Rescuing Holly became the main goal of the first novel as I was writing the prologue.

Levi isn’t exactly like me, though. He’s far more impulsive, for one thing. He doesn’t always think things through, while that’s something I pride myself on. He’s more sociable, as well, with that kind of magnetism I’d kill for. Being who he is, he doesn’t use that gift for ill, however; for some strange reason, I’ve avoided giving him anything close to a romantic interest, even though his preteen brother gets one! Maybe some part of me recognizes our similarities.

When I started the series in 2017, I didn’t see myself as commanding in the same way Levi is. Either I’ve changed, or writing him has helped me understand myself. Yes, I’m often ready to take charge (if people would just listen to me…), but I never felt that I could be a commander of anything. It didn’t fit me until a very special person helped me understand a part of my personality I’d overlooked.

Character portraits: Alex

Name: Alex Caulson
Series: Otherworld
Age: 22
Height: 5’9″
Weight 206 lbs.
Hometown: Pueblo, Colorado

About the character

Alex is a self-described nerd. He’s overweight and insecure. He likes video games, anime, electronics, and other geeky things. At the start of Out of the Past, he holds a bachelor’s in astronomy, a subject that has always been his passion. As history is another one of his interests, he’s trying to specialize in the field of archaeoastronomy, which is how he got roped into an archaeological excursion to Mexico in the first place.

But he doesn’t fit there or anywhere. He never has, and he knows it. Almost all the friends he’s ever had were online, and he met most of them while gaming or on obscure forums—the only reason he even has social media accounts is to keep up with his family. He keeps to himself, rarely speaking up even when he probably should.

When he and ten fellow students get lost while investigating their earth-shattering find, he blames himself. After all, it was his idea to go back out there a day early, before the experts leading the team were willing to set out. Though the others don’t blame him, he blames himself. Why? Because, in his mind, he deserves the blame. If they won’t give it to him, he’ll just take matters into his own hands.

Of the eleven members of the Otherworld expedition, he’s the most out of place. A gamer and internet junkie suddenly cut off from everything electronic that he wasn’t carrying? A fat geek (his words) stuck in a place where everyone walks? He would consider it a miracle that he survived the expedition, but he doesn’t believe in miracles.

Author’s thoughts

Quite simply, Alex is me in almost every respect. He’s younger, of course (22 to my 30, when I first started writing Otherworld), and he has more formal education, but we’re otherwise a lot alike. We’re both huge nerds—in more ways than one. We both read a lot of science fiction. I’d never been in a serious relationship when I created him in 2013; his first started in the summer of 2020, around the same time I was beginning to throw mine away.

That’s absolutely intentional on my part. I wrote Alex as something between a personal deconstruction and wish fulfillment. I’ll grant that the latter took over after a certain point; that point, in case you were wondering, was around Situational Awareness.

In other words, Alex began as a representation of who I saw myself as. Now, as I’m writing the 20th main Otherworld story, I see him as who I want to become. He’s happily married, two words he never would have dreamed could describe him. Though he’s had to sacrifice almost everything he had, he was able to build a life for himself. A simple life, but a life nonetheless. He didn’t realize what he was missing, how important it was to his well-being, until he found it, lost it, and found it again. I…have only made it to the second step of that process.

Of the hundred or more characters I’ve written, this is one of the easiest. The dialogue and exposition don’t always flow, but the inner monologue is easy: I just write what I would be thinking in that situation. That’s usually what Alex would be thinking, so it works out. I can put him into situations and draw on my own experiences to resolve them. Not only does that save me time as a writer, but it’s cathartic for me as a person. It lets me imagine a world in which things actually work out for me once in a while.

Year of hell

(The title isn’t from a song this time. Instead, this very appropriate name comes from my favorite episode of Star Trek: Voyager, the most underrated of the Trek series.)

One year ago, I was free. One year ago, I had hopes and dreams. I believed I had a chance to succeed, to achieve some of the life goals I’ve had for decades. I lived in a country where this was possible, if unlikely for one such as myself. I was depressed, yes, but I felt like I could see the light, that I could reach it, if only I tried hard enough.

A lot can change in a year.

Now, I live in a dystopian nightmare. I haven’t been inside a business in a full year, apart from five seconds inside the America’s Best store in Hixson last May. I went in to get my new glasses. I’d gotten the prescription in February, but then I had to find the money to pay for them. By the time I finally managed that, the whole world shut down, with the notable bastions of intelligence in Sweden and South Dakota. So I couldn’t actually pick up my order until businesses were “allowed” to reopen.

But it wasn’t that simple. As soon as I walked inside, the cashiers demanded a temperature check, so I walked right back out. My mom, who took me down there (can’t drive without glasses, remember), is less allergic to authoritarianism, so she submitted to the illegal medical exam long enough to retrieve what I had already paid for.

Since then, I’ve mostly stayed at home. And that’s most certainly not because I believe that’s the best way to combat a virus.

No, lockdowns don’t work. We have proof of that. You only need to look at the places that didn’t imprison their entire citizenry for months on end to see the real numbers. Similarly, masks don’t work. That’s why I haven’t worn one since December 2019, when I thought I had the flu. (As it turns out, I had the Wuhan coronavirus. You know how I know? Because it was listed as the flu and an “unknown pathogen” on my release papers.) As I haven’t been sick—in the physical sense, as I know I’m seriously mentally ill—since, I’ve seen no reason to restrain my breathing, trigger my anxiety, and curtail my liberty in that manner.

Well, you might think, what about the vaccine? Uh-uh. First off, it’s not a vaccine, because the purpose of a vaccine is to provide immunity to a virus by stimulating the body’s immune system. The Moderna and Pfizer mRNA treatments don’t do this. They don’t prevent you from contracting the Wuhan virus. They don’t prevent you from spreading it to others. They barely alleviate the symptoms. What they actually do is even worse. Ask Hank Aaron. Ask the nurse from Chattanooga who passed out on live TV. Ask the women who’ve had miscarriages, the perfectly healthy men in their 30s who have suffered serious injury or even death.

The virus has an overall fatality rate of around 0.02%, and essentially no reinfection. (Wait, 0.02%? Don’t the official numbers say 0.26%? Yes, but those are heavily inflated. Per the CDC’s own report, only about 6% of deaths can be traced to the virus itself. The rest are due to comorbidities: preexisting conditions such as obesity, heart problems, kidney failure, etc. Since comorbidities aren’t counted for vaccine deaths, we need to compare apples to apples.)

The mRNA “vaccines” cause serious harm in about 5% of cases, and death in as many as 0.4%. We don’t know the exact figures, because they rely on voluntary reporting, and no one wants to point out that Emperor Fauci has no clothes. However you look at the data, though, it doesn’t lie. On the whole, getting the virus is actually safer than getting its supposed cure!

And that’s merely one more truth the world has decided to deny in the past year. But there are many more.

  • Lockdowns are ineffective. They achieve nothing in terms of slowing the spread of an illness, unless you go to the extremes of a certain communist dictatorship and weld people’s doors shut so they can’t go outside. As sane countries are supposed to respect things like basic human rights and dignity, citizens will go outside. And they should, because the fastest way to end a pandemic is to reach herd immunity.

  • The Chinese virus isn’t even a pandemic. Take away the overinflated death counts, where suicides, overdoses, car accidents, and murders are attributed to a virus simply because the victim tested positive in a flawed procedure three weeks before the time of death, and it never reached the CDC’s defined threshold of pandemic status. That’s when approximately 5% of all deaths are caused by the pathogen in question; only by counting every death under the sun were we able to hit that mark even at the peak last April.

  • The makers of the “vaccines” have ulterior motives. Notice that they are indemnified against all liability, and they’ve received billions of taxpayer dollars. These treatments have bypassed the normal FDA requirements, and why? The virus isn’t another Spanish flu. It’s not smallpox or polio. It has killed fewer people than tuberculosis in the past year.

  • People are suffering. The single-minded focus on this particular virus has caused irreparable harm to our society and our populace. Suicides are at an all-time high. Childhood trauma is rampant. Depression and anxiety, as I know all too well, can make plenty of people wish they were dead, or at least not living through this.

  • The media is not on our side. For twelve months, they have parroted the talking points of a specific segment of the political spectrum. Andrew Cuomo was a hero when he sent infected patients to nursing homes a year ago, killing thousands of elderly men and women. The governors of California, Washington, Ohio, Michigan, Virginia, and many other states have acted in a way more appropriate to the old Soviet Union, if not the feudal era. And not only have journalists not called out these gross abuses of power, but they have lauded them every step of the way.

Twelve months ago, even expressing these ideas was heresy of the highest order. You were instantly branded a denier, a skeptic, an alt-right fascist terrorist. You were called racist, sexist, or any number of other hateful epithets.

Now? Oh, it’s even worse. But some people are waking up. There’s a strong anti-mask movement that isn’t hard to find. The worst government abuses and excesses are finally getting pushback. Alternative social media platforms are gaining in popularity, especially now that the big players—Google, Twitter, Facebook—have deemed scientific accuracy and a love of personal liberty to be violations of their terms of service.

It’s been a rough year. In twelve months, I’ve gone from cautiously optimistic to suicidally depressed. The only thing that gives me hope is the knowledge that I’m not alone in this. Anyone who has taken any time at all to think about what we’re being forced to endure feels the same way. We don’t want a “new normal”, where children aren’t allowed to play, where handshakes and hugs are illegal, where you’re a prisoner in your own home unless you agree to undergo experimental genetic modification. No, we want what we had. What was taken from us.

This “pandemic” isn’t worth the name. Compare the total death counts in the US from 2019 and 2020. Shouldn’t those “500,000 coronavirus deaths” show up there? Look at the flu stats for this winter—rather, the total absence of them. Look at the mental health crisis sweeping our nation, and tell me stopping what amounts to a bad cold is worth that cost. Spare a thought for the record number of suicides in the last year.

Because there were a lot of days where I almost joined them.