The World That's Coming

How quickly things change, and how these strange coronavirus times make you think that they’ve never been anything other than they currently are…! It was just a six weeks or so ago that I wrote about sleeping late and remembering my dreams for the first time in ages, and now… well, let’s just say that I’ve finally climbed on board the “COVID is fucking up my sleep cycle” bandwagon, just a month or two too late, and when the rest of the world has moved on.

Story of my life, as a late adopter. I still haven’t seen all of Twin Peaks: The Return, can you believe that?

When it comes to the disruption of sleep, I’m somewhat lucky, I guess. Not for me a particularly nightmare-ridden existence; after a brief, welcome return, my dreams have returned to living permanently in my subconscious once again judging by recent experience. No, for me, it’s all about a very unexpected shift in my sleep cycle that I’ve started calling My Ongoing Fight Against Time It’s Very Own Fucking Self. Or, to put it more clearly, I’ve developed a seeming inability to sleep past 5:30 in the morning.

I’ve been an early riser for a long time — I’m tempted to say it’s always been the case, but in reality, I might have been sleeping in back when I was a kid and I just don’t remember it. Certainly, there were times when I was in art school where I’d struggle to wake up, but those were also the days when I’d regularly stay out past 2am like the callow youth I was. For the most part, though, I’ve woken up between 6 and 7am for the better part of three decades or more now, and it’s been something I’ve gotten used to, before this current spate of displacement started.

It doesn’t matter when I go to sleep, I’ve discovered. It doesn’t matter how tired I am. I can — and, frustratingly, do — wake up before 5:30, but it’s almost impossible for me to sleep past it, now. I manage it rarely, but it feels like an effort I make after initially waking at 4 and refusing to accept it. It feels like work. There are times when I wake up all too early and think to myself, maybe it’s not that everything is so stressful right now. Maybe I just need to sleep more. And then I remember that whole pandemic thing.

There are times when I wonder what the last few years have done to us, as a whole; if the constant stream of seemingly impossible, unthinkable things that have kept happening over and over have piled up on top of each other in our brains and created a crust where there didn’t use to be one.

Every week now, every single week, the news will report at least one story that, even just five years ago, would have produced enough outrage and bluster to echo for weeks, if not months. And each of these stories feels like a big thing for awhile — remember that time when the Attorney General announced the resignation of someone investigating Trump, only for them to say that they hadn’t resigned? Or, hey, what about the President retweeting racist propaganda over and over again? — and then, somehow, we move on. Even if we don’t really mean to.

To put this in some kind of context: I found myself thinking the other day, things seem to have calmed down a bit recently, and then I remembered that there are still countrywide protests against police brutality featuring thousands of people every single night, and there’s also still a fucking pandemic that the US doesn’t have under any appreciable level of control. In fact, just the opposite; cases are spiking in multiple states and lockdowns and quarantines are coming to an end anyway, because… we’re bored, maybe…? Someone wants to make more money…?

Maybe I’m alone in feeling nervous about the ways in which events have seemingly blurred lines about what’s important and what’s not in our heads. Perhaps it’s a survival technique to prevent us all from being overloaded and collectively losing our minds, because of all the bullshit and formerly unthinkable things that we’re living through and the need to operate on a day to day basis without being frozen by all of it. When was the last time you really thought about the US putting kids in cages, for example?

At some point, things will slow down again, and we’ll hopefully start to reckon with everything that’s happened on our watch. My worry isn’t that we won’t do that; my worry is that we’ll find ourselves missing the endless, numbing, non-stop everything pace of the last five years when we do.

I love the comment spam I get here. For one thing, There’s a strange, enjoyable beat poetry aspect to the auto-generated text that tries so hard to be friendly, everyday real people making friendly conversation; the enthusiastic — always stunningly, inhumanly, enthusiastic — tenor that almost vibrates off the screen with anxious need and awkward, unlikely emphasis in the wrong places. “Oh wow I’m so GLAD I found your site what you guys do is THE BEST” with no punctuation or breath to be found.

The fact that, for the most part, spam comments are so complimentary is a pleasure to me. This site is, as I’ve said before, something I do for myself first and foremost, but I like imagining people who create a site seeking an external validation they’re not getting anywhere else in their life receiving any number of spam comments that say things like, “you guys are the best at what you do,” or some variation, and it actually making them feel better. The very notion of confidence building through automation is appealing, even if it’s an accidental by-product or more cynical ambitions.

Not every spam comment is complementary, of course; some are faux-helpful, telling me that I can reach more readers if only I buy this particular product, or sign up for this special SEO service, or something similar. I feel almost guilty when I receive these ones. It’s not that I recognize them for the phishing schemes that they so clearly are, because, well, I’m not stupid. But I feel bad because I don’t want to reach more readers or grow my audience or increase my search rankings; that kind of thing is the antithesis of what I want from this site, and I feel as if I’ve wasted the auto-generated spam’s time as a result. I’m sure there are others who need to read that untrustworthy offer far more than me, little bot. I’m sorry.

I get a curiously high volume of spam comments here, considering I’m off in the internet back woods, off by myself and typing away quietly, and the spam filter catches them all. But I look through them all anyway, enjoying their nonsense as if they’re genuine correspondents from an alternate reality of bullshit. I’d miss them, if they were to disappear entirely.