Normally, as patient readers know, on Sunday I do my grocery shopping before doing McD’s with my friends in the Ironwood parking lot.

But I won’t be doing that this week, partly because I am sick, but mostly because the world is sick.

It’s developed a terrible fever. I mean, it’s really burning up. And that means that where I live, Richmond, the air is not really fit to breathe out there.

Why it’s any better when you’re inside is beyond me. People do know that inside air and outside air are the same air, right? It’s not like we live in hermetically sealed isolation units. What’s outside comes inside and vice versa.

Oh well, I suppose people need to feel like there is something they can do to protect themselves. What else can the government say when it’s the motherfucking air we breathe that is the problem?

We’re all doomed? Head for the hills? Time to bash your neighbor over the head and steal their go bags and SUV?

Actually, I would love to head to a higher elevation. Particulate contaminants are heavier than air, and thus tend to settle in low lying areas over time.

So now might be a very good time to visit your friend who lives on the mountain. As opposed to being where I am, which is below sea level.

At least we have the sea breeze to keep the air moving.

As I mentioned yesterday, I am very worried. My thoughts are increasingly stark. Potential acts of eco-terrorism keep popping into my head.

And even eco-war. The stakes on climate change are getting higher and higher. Eventually we will stop asking bad actors to stop killing the planet and take matters into our own hands, even to the point of invasion.

And as things get worse and worse, the feeling of being called to fill the world with my voice grows stronger. I no longer feel like I have a choice. This calling will eventually overcome my enormous inertia and I will get into the thick of things somehow.

Yeah,. somehow. That’s the question now. How do I get my voice heard? Where is the most proper and effective point of entry? How does a nobody like me get enough people’s attention to get the ball rolling on making myself into a pundit?

I am sure there are places online that could give me some tips. But how do I know what tips are good?

Part of me – my id side – wants to just say fuck it, pick a point at random, and trust that the power of my voice and my words and my message will attract an audience regardless of where I start.

I feel like a diver on the edge of the high dive board. I’ve gone past the point of thinking I might climb down out of fear, and now I am trembling on the brink, waiting for the energy to be right.

Of course, I could just dive in. That’s what I will do eventually, after all.

But there’s some shit I have to go through first.

More after the break.

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There are things far worse than silence

Looking at the above, it occurs to me that my biggest fear is that wherever I take this voice of mine, I will make my big entrance, clear my mighty throat, lay down some words of blood and fire laden with wisdom, insight, and the will to destroy evil words….and get absolutely no response.

And I mean nothing. Not even cricket chirps. Zero reaction whatsoever. Like so many times in my life, it will be like hadn’t even been there.

Opposition I can handle. Hell, I thrive on it.If I made a post on Reddit then went to bed, and in the morning I found my inbox jam packed with hate emails, I would be the happiest man on Earth. I would dance with joy.

That would be worth far more to me than a lot of tepid agreement. People saying “Gee, I guess you’re probably right. ” and “I’m glad someone finally said it” and “you know, I never looked at it that way before. ”

Thanks…. I mean that. But what are you going to DO about it? I’m not doing this to entertain you, I’m doing it to inflame and inspire you.

I want to build a network of hardheaded pragmatic liberals determined to fix the world by any means necessary.

Even bribing billionaires to stop fucking with democracy. These people are compulsive money hoarders. If we attach a big fat tax cut to our election finance reform bill, they will not be able to stop themselves from biting that hook.

Come to think of it. I could sell it to the billionaires as a way to stop people from hating them. We only hate billionaires because they fuck with our elections.

If they stopped doing that, and paid their taxes, nobody would care.

Anyhow, back to silence. I can’t guaranteed that I won’t get ignored the first time I post to my chosen subReddit. Or the tenth time. Or the hundredth time.

But I know that I am capable of analyzing the posts that do gets lots of replies and activity, and learning from them.

And I can also analyze my own posts and figure out what went wrong and apply those lessons to future posts.

So really, it’s just a matter of picking a place and going for it. And trusting in my ability to really, really piss people off to take care of the rest.

It’s about time I used that power for goodish.

The way I see it, it’s okay to be an asshole if all your assholery is directed at much bigger assholes than you could ever be.

People like that kind of asshole. Enough to, ya know, buy their merch. Pay to hear them talk. Maybe even work for the cause.

Who says you can’t get rich doing the right thing? At no point will I compromise my morals for money. This entire enterprise is a moral crusade on my part. I want to use my voice to destroy the hateful smallminded garbage passing for morality these days and get people back in touch with the pure, wholesome, uncompromised morality that not only leads to doing the right thing but purifies the soul as well.

I’m slightly ambitious.

So yeah. I can see this thing happening.

The only question is…..when?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Last night, I was very sick.

Felt like an alien creature made of thick black smoke had crawled into my body through my pores and was slowly murdering me.

My energy level was catastrophically low. My mind was battered, tattered, and scattered. I felt like there was a blast furnace in my inner abdomen. And my head was pounding with the sort of pain that obliterates reason.

I couldn’t concentrate well enough to play Skyrim or do Facebook stuff. So I tried lying down for a while. But the malaise was making me restless and the headache was making me cranky so, despite how tired I was, I couldn’t escape into sleep.

And then…I had some kind of attack.

I felt like I was smothering. I could feel the air moving in an out of my lungs, but it might as well have been chocolate pudding for all the oxygen I was getting out of it. My lung hurt and things started to blur.

Luckily, it was over before I could truly start to panic. I sat up and that made things better. Then I got out of bed and sat in front of the computer and that made me feel a whole lot better.

And doing my little breathing exercise where I push as much air out of my lungs as I possibly can in one long exhalation helped a whole lot more.

I seriously felt like I had just barely survived an assassination attempt.

Guess I don’t want to die after all.

At least, not if it’s going to hurt.

Just thinking about the incident is freaking me out. So let’s switch over to the comfortably cool detached world of science.

My theory for a long time has been that somehow. when I exhale, I don’t quite get the job done. Some CO2 remains in my lungs. Over time, this builds up.

When I was younger and healthier, this manifested harmlessly as the occasional deep sigh. Well, harmlessly for me, anyhow.

If my mom was in the room, she would worriedly ask me what was wrong. Because from her POV, I just heaved a deep, heartfelt sigh of trembling despair.

Sorry Mom. It’s just part of how I breathe, apparently.

So I figure that what happened was that this CO2 buildup reached critical levels. And this had something to do with the fact that I was lying down. Like in the prone position the CO2 pools in my lungs more easily.

So when I sat up. the CO2 moved to the bottom of my lungs and I could get good air via the now cleared top part of my lungs.

Manual exhalation took care of the rest.

Right now, I dunno what to do with this information. Tell my doctor, I suppose. See if he knows of a way to learn to exhale better.

I feel like my heavy gut is involved somehow. Like it pulls on my lungs so that it weighs down every breath I take, and that keeps me from getting all the bad air out.

Would explain the sleep apnea too.

Now I need to go lose myself in Skyrim till I calm down.

More after the break.

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The edge of annihilation

I looked at the last line of Part 1 and, at first, i thought “Calm down from what?”.

So I guess it worked. I went through my freaking out period and now my personality uncanny ability to get back on its feet and keep going has kicked in and convinced me that everything has gone back to normal.

It hasn’t, of course. I am as overheated and tired and dizzy as ever. The Demon Nipple is still there and being a Cronenbergian nightmare.

Don’t worry, I’ve promised myself that if it starts to moan, weep, chant, or speak backward Latin, I’m dialing 911.

So far, the heavy dose of Sulfatrim^[1] I am taking is not producing any side effects that I know of. That’s how it tends to be with me. On the one hand, I have IBS and a rather fussy digestive system.

On the other hand, I almost never get side effects from meds. Go fig,

Well I’ve dicked around enough. Time to justify that title.

Never in my life have I feared for the future as much as I am right now.

Things are getting worse. The climate continues to heat up. California is an inferno and the rest of the West Coast isn’t doing much better. Various completely predictable effects of global warming rock the world 24/7. At the same time, the sociopolitical equivalent of global warming continues to add energy to the zeitgeist, raising people’s ire and shortening their tempers and making us, as a species, a time bomb.

And I am no longer able to avoid thinking : these could be the last of the Good Times.

Because that’s how we’ll refer to these golden days of unprecedented peace and prosperity on Planet Earth once everything goes all to hell. When global warming destroy so much of the world’s food-growing capacity that real scarcity kicks in and people start losing their minds out of uncertainty and fear.

When the very foundations of modern life like firefighting and the police and especially public utilities like water and electricity start to break down from the strain.

They were not designed to handle bullshit like this.

When people, en masse, start losing faith in the forces of civilization to the point of banding together with people they already know and establishing tiny fiefdoms.

When all of us alive today who survive will be called upon to justify our standing idly by while the world burns because 20 billionaires didn’t feel like sharing?

That’s the future nightmare I envision. Everything gone to shit. A shattering of the stability and safety and security of modern life that we never appreciated until it was far too late for us to save it.

Some day, this will be known as the Final Golden Age.

Future humans will revile every single fucking one of us for not being willing to sacrifice literally anything to save the world.

And that’s really starting to bug me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.