Update

Finding the drive to write lately has been really difficult. Watching this country fall into fascism has been extraordinarily hard to watch, especially as someone who feels like he has been warning people of it coming for, essentially, his entire life. And how quickly it has come has really been crushing me mentally.

With that comes a lot of consequences that can't quite be predicted.

For example, up to this point in time in my life I have felt that I could take big risks and come out alright. I could move across the country and figure it out once I was there, or I could take a gamble on moving on to another job. I felt like options were there to make improvements on my life, and that has always worked out in the past. Now, however, I don't feel like it is feasible in the slightest. I am young enough to do a career jump if I wanted to, but I don't want to, and I don't think any of those jumps would be able to bring in the kind of income I have now. Meanwhile, positions in the career path I am in are drying up faster than a puddle in desert heat.

And that also means that I feel completely stuck in Oklahoma. Quite literally the worst state I have ever lived in, out of the seven I have lived in, and to be stuck here is like some kind of hellacious joke I have played upon myself. This feels like the best my life is ever going to be again, or at least for a painfully long time.

I could keep on going, of course. It has always been my strength to see all the ways my life could improve. It has rarely been my strength to accept things the way they are, and it doesn't truly matter how much good there is when I can highlight so many ways they could be better.

I suppose that is what has also always been so confounding to me about humanity. The ability for the masses to just settle into a routine and be good enough with that. Why settle so easily? You have exactly one life to live, and there is more to experience in this world in a single second than what you'd be capable of experiencing in your entire lifetime. Why not try to squeeze as many experiences into your life as possible?

Which then circles right back around to the start of this post. The idea that anyone would want to back track to experience things we have moved past as a society, when where we are currently at as a society isn't good enough, is incredibly depressing. As a worldwide whole, we have discovered that racism is idiotic. We have discovered that poverty leads to crime and violence. We have learned that without education then societies crumble. Why the fuck would we ever want any of those things as a societal majority?

And the answer is obvious. It is because the uneducated think they are more knowledgeable than the rest of us, and they are louder, and less civil. And, as the movie Idiocracy so elegantly pointed out, the uneducated breed far more, so they outnumber the educated. And it isn't like education, or the lack thereof, is the only issue. Educated people are just as susceptible to being gullible to foolishness as the rest of us, it is just that they have a greater propensity to being able to see it and rectify their beliefs.

But for the first time in my life, I don't see a "better" in front of me. And I don't want to accept the way things are, but alas, I feel I must because I have most assuredly lost any hope of it being any better for the foreseeable future.

I am sure that, eventually, my desire to write will come back. It always does, but until my creative side decides to rejoin the land of the living, sporadic will be the name of the game.

-Dustin S. Stover