The World That's Coming

The fall is, I promise, my favorite time of the year. There’s something about the dull light on the overcast days, or the way that sun is almost mixed with crisp chills if and when it eventually arrives. (I’m writing this on the first sunny day here in Portland in something like three or four weeks, and it feels magical how much it’s lifted my mood.) Despite that, I’ve noticed that in recent years, the fall is also the time of year when everything just… folds in on itself as if time is collapsing around me.

This year, for example, it felt as if October just… didn’t happen. Or, rather, days of it did — I remember by birthday, and Halloween, for example, and I know I went to New York for a week of it even if all I did was work endlessly — but the entire month seemed to pass in the blink of an eye overall. Suddenly, it wasn’t just November but midway through November and I felt as if I’d magically arrived here through time travel or sleepwalking through the last few weeks. (To be fair, that might have been the case, given how intense my workload was for about four or five weeks there.)

Last year, the fall was lost to my UK trip; I left mid-October and when I was back, it was almost Thanksgiving and the holiday season felt as if it was already underway. I spent the holidays trying to catch my breath and wondering what had happened.

What is it about this time of year? Is it the stress of the entire rest of the year finally catching up with us and pulling us under for a little bit? Is it that the darker mornings and evenings just fuck with our sense of time and sending us spinning as a result? Am I simply not as much of a fan of the fall as I used to be?

Maybe I’m just getting old. But the final two months of each year are becoming increasingly tricky for me, and I’m not quite sure what to do about that.

There’s something to be said, I’m sure, about what the spam of any particular era says about that time. Who amongst us fails to remember the time when almost every single spam email wanted to trick us into confirming our existence — not to mention our personal details — by promising untold wealth if only we’d believe that an African Prince was asking for our help? Those were happier, more naive years, when the counterfeit powers that be sought to take advantage of those political promises of “Hope” and “Change” by suggesting that we should dare to hope that our lives could change if only we revealed way too much about ourselves to a stranger. (Hey, he was down on his luck and just needed some help!)

Lately, though, I’ve found that the spam of today has two significant differences to the “classic” spam of the past. (Those quote marks around “classic” are doing a lot of work, let’s be honest.) For one thing, so much of it seems to be coming in as texts, rather than emails — am I the only one who’s getting multiple spam texts every day now? I blame the fact that my phone number is likely on several million lists after years of convention attendance — and, more importantly, it’s… sad now. Take, for example, this spam text I received earlier today:

Maybe I’m just too much of a sentimental old man, but there’s something about this message that feels like there’s enough backstory to fill at least a novella of longing, pretentiously and anxiously written by a first-time writer processing a recent love affair in the most self-indulgent manner possible. But it’s melancholic in such an inescapable way to me that feels fascinating. Is this where we are now, wondering about people we miss and wanting to hear from them?

I could be reading too much into these messages, of course; I am me, after all, and for every “I hope you still have the same number, I haven’t heard from you in so long and I was thinking of you” spam text, there’s a “I work for an employment agency and I’d like to offer you a job” one as well. Perhaps the real feeling out there is “economic and emotional uncertainty,” to which I’d respond, “I think that was my 20s, and my 30s, and a lot of my 40s as well, glad you all caught up.”

I should simply delete these messages, and not think about them so much. And yet, hours later, I’m still wondering about whoever came up with the above text and what’s going on in their lives for that to be their attempt to catfish us into disaster. Spare a thought for the spammers; it seems like maybe they’re having some hard times themselves.

It’s difficult to accurately describe my feelings this morning, seeing the results of the election. If there’s such a thing as “stunned disbelief that is also the realization that this was almost inevitable, mixed with the crushing disappointment in your fellow citizens,” it’d be that. As I said on Monday, I had a pit-in-my-stomach feeling things were going to turn out this way, but I was… I don’t know: I think, despite that, I was hoping that I was wrong and that I was too cynical about everything, and without even knowing it that hope was actually where I actually was.

I actually woke up at 3:45 this morning, stressed about what had happened while I was asleep, even though I went to bed with the dull certainty of the outcome. The first thing I did after checking the news was have a brief moment of depressed introspection and I shouldn’t say anything, and the second thing was to write what ended up being an op-ed on Popverse which was a letter to myself to remember to be kind and fight for the right people in the next four years. It was one of those, “when in doubt, write,” things.

I’m scared of what’s going to happen in the next four years, and beyond. I’m angry about the fact that 15 million Biden voters disappeared on the way to this election, whether through vote suppression tactics on behalf of the other side, or apathy on the part of those who are ostensibly “anti-Trump.” (Trump won a landslide this time out with 3 million voters less than he had when he lost in 2020; some Republicans really did abandon him.) I’m exhausted by the certainty that things are going to get worse across the foreseeable future, and in ways that I can’t even imagine just yet.

In 2016, Trump’s victory felt like a bad thing that was this great unknown. This time, I feel like we know all too well how bad the baseline is. This feels so much worse.

I’m terrified about the upcoming election. I have tried not to be, and failed, completely; I have talked to people smarter than I about why I’m merely doomscrolling and panicking in my head, and that the reality is possibly significantly better than I am imagining, and yet none of it sticks: I am convinced of a worst-case scenario purely because I have a feeling in the pit of my stomach that things are going to turn out badly.

Part of this is, I know, that I’m paying too close attention to the race at this point and getting lost in the weeds. This has been the most disorienting, most frustrating election season I’ve been through, which feels like it’s really saying something, considering 2020; it’s nonetheless true, and that too has added to the feelings of being continually gaslit by reality across the past few months, and especially weeks: how can things be a coin-toss decision after everything that we’ve seen? How can this still be as close as it seems to be, 24 hours out from ending?

That closeness — which might not even be real, but instead the result of people lying to pollsters, or polling being entirely flawed for any number of reasons this time out — is what’s doomed my mood about the whole thing more than anything else: the idea that, in a race between the two candidates where one is so clearly and obviously a danger to all kinds of core ideas of American democracy or even simple decency, there’s an almost even split in terms of support. Who are these half-of-the-country people who are okay with fascism and hatred so such clear display, and what is going to happen to them after the election, no matter how it goes?

I want my very strong sense of impending disaster to be wrong; I want to not feel that 2016 feeling again. But right now, all that I can say for sure is that I’m worried, and I want it all to be over.