I know this all sounds like the spoiled tantrums of a grown ass man. And it is, partially. It’s embarrassing, if I’m being truthful. I know it’s a terrible way to sell myself as a writer, and so I sit and tell myself lies about how others might feel the same and thus appreciate the knowledge that someone else understands what it is they’re experiencing.

Partially, it’s that. Spoiled, selfish, solipsistic, navel-gazing bullshit with all kinds of justifications to avoid taking responsibility that my behaviour can, has and does play into it.

Partially, it’s also a response to a world that is, by and large, unfair, and has demonstrated an increasing willingness to make everything as stressful and awful as possible.

COVID is one of those things that happens in world history. It’s stressful, but we have a tendency to band together in stressful times. There are many examples of that – see the people that ran to help during 9/11 or after one of the far too many school shootings in the United States of Guns.

People do care. People do help. In times of calamity when everything gets more immediate, people dive in.

Except apparently, these times, where the twin cultural viruses of conspiracy fucknuttery and right wing callousness have conspired to make a bad situation so much more unbearable, in that a good thirty to forty percent of the world’s population has decided that everyone else is subordinate to their own pathetic whims, and thus, undeserving of even the most moderate of societal kindnesses.

I’ve never seen such a large group of spoiled, over-entitled children, and it’s not just at the political level. It’s day-to-day shit. The stupidity is staggering. And the spinelessness of those in charge in holding these assholes responsible for their behaviour?

Worse yet again. Throw in murder hornets, cannibal pigs and a war in Ukraine and what have you got?

Perhaps the acolytes of the apocalypse have it right… this could be the end.

All I know is I need some time and space to breathe and not a single clue on how to fucking get it.

Target: 400 words
Written: 408 words, novella: The Mungk