The World Has Officially Become Strange in My Absence

I went out the other day. And I don't just mean outside for some fresh air, either. I literally masked up, got in an Uber, and ran an errand before Ubering back home. I've voluntarily done almost everything I need to from home for years at this point, so up until now, I've been able to stay the hell away from the outside world without changing much about my routine. And honestly, I would have been happy to continue that way indefinitely, but I needed to get a new ID and couldn't avoid visiting a DMV field office in person.

The DMV errand went just fine, but holy shit, has the world ever gotten weird in my absence. I'm, of course, well aware of how things have changed since the last time I was out frolicking around, never even having heard of COVID before. I knew what to expect in every way. But this was my first time seeing it all with my actual eyes and experiencing it in person. Seth came with me and also hasn't been out since the pandemic began, so I at least wasn't alone when it came to the perceived weirdness of it all.

It's one thing to know everyone masks up and social distances now, pretty much as a rule. It's another thing to actually visit places I've been to plenty of times before and see people doing it. It was a strangely similar experience to nightmares I've had in the past. In these nightmares, I'd visit places I either knew very well or had found very comforting in the past, but something vital would be wrong with them, suggesting it only looked like I was where I was supposed to be. 

My sense of direction has always been terrible, so getting lost was one of my most persistent childhood fears. When I'm anxious, I still dream about it in various contexts, especially those that suggest I might just have to stay lost forever. So seeing definitive proof that COVID really has touched my town -- the place where I grew up and have lived off and on for most of my life -- was a little strange. I can actually kind of see why so many people have so much trouble accepting this reality and choose to deny it altogether because they don't know what else to do.

On Election Day

People have never quite understood why I am the way I am. Particularly in regards to why I don't trust the system, wish to be part of society to a greater extent than I absolutely have to, or believe in the inherent goodness of humanity. Something tells me they're starting to understand now.

The thing is I've understood for a while that we live in a garbage society filled with garbage humans that are the very picture of arrogance, entitlement, vanity, hypocrisy, and prejudice. Our society is infected with an illness you can smell even on people that don't see themselves as being anything of the sort and this has been the case for as long as I've been alive. That society threw me away a long time ago in a way I've been painfully aware of for as long as I can remember.

Nothing has really changed as far as the type of world we live in. It's always been like this. You just see it now. You are realizing how big, and bad, and putrid the sickness really is, perhaps for the first time. This election dragged it right out into the open where everyone had no choice but to look at it, smell it, and try not to vomit at the stench. What I am talking about isn't even about politics, really. It is, however, something that has been exposed by politics as such things often are.