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August 2020
While working through the dark labyrinth of government documentation I would still think about the progress of my book. At times the subject haunted me with ghostly accusations as if the entire project was personified into a conscious being who taunted me for inattention and outright laziness as if I was not preoccupied enough with neurotic compulsions about survival. “Go write something. Finish the piece about “Fear”; or some other commandment from a cranny of my unconscious mind.
After three or four iterations the drafts I wrote did not seem to work. Then a couple years before the plague I hit on the idea of writing short very concise hard hitting epiphanies about subjects that came into my mind. I had written essays on various topics sometimes veering off into incoherence but still interesting rants. What could I do with them I wondered?
Then the notion came to me that I should abandon the essay format and start to write in the most popular style of the times: the social media post. I did some research and found the average post was measured in characters not in words. So I set a goal to write short pieces and targeted them at approximately 300 characters per selection.
It was a fateful goal but one that I had no idea how difficult it would be to compact sometimes complex ideas into a few hundred characters. It required me to cut into pieces essays that were already written and then repackage the ideas into quantum bits. I would need to find novel uses for words and phrases and throw syntax and sentence construction out the window in the cause of accurate impact.
Studio work had shifted down into low gear with headway cut to nearly nothing. Producing silver art jewelry seemed futile with no market or outlet open to selling it. Nevertheless, I tried to go out nearly every day and do something. Clean up the work bench or try to repair a tool and at times set up and cut and polish some small stones. We still had some good turquoise rough1 and working it into cabochons was always useful. Regardless the size or shape the finished stones would be put to use at some point in the future if not by me than someone else.
My wife was still combing all of our sources as well as the internet for news of art fairs and festivals that might have appeared on the horizon. For all her efforts not much was happening with show after show canceling their plans or postponing dates.
The art festival business was not the only group that was effected. Events were being canceled all across the world. Sports, conferences, state fairs, school gatherings, and others seem to fall under broad mandates certified by one capricious authorization after another.
For instance people could not go to church under penalty of law but it was ok to have a street riot. People were forced to wear masks in public even though there was little or no scientific studies to prove that a mask would stop the plague. The authorities might as well have mandated that people wear garlic around their neck to ward off evil spirits.2
Under the cloak of public health people everywhere were having their livelihood, civil rights, and property taken away in a government fiesta of usurpation. Of course we felt it keenly because the cancelation festivities in Washington eliminated our right to earn a living.
Of course the tentacles of the central government were the ringleaders in the assault on civil liberties but the forces that pulled their strings were not wasting any time feathering their own nests. Dr. Fauci the leading medical authoritarian and his cohorts are reported to have pocketed $300M on the vaccine gambit.3 His supervisors in Big Pharma corporations have made off with huge profits worldwide from their less-then-effective nostrums pushed by compliant governments.
Although President Trump did push for grants and supplemental unemployment compensation which saved a lot of families from penury in the short term, he was not leading the charge against the obvious global corruption scam swirling around him. I watched his briefings on TV and day after day he seemed to be like a bricklayer building a wall only to see it collapse overnight then rebuild it the next day. It was a dispiriting exercise in powerlessness. I had enough of my own angst to live with so I finally quit watching.
All these televised scenarios along with the homogenized “news” broadcasts infected my writing. I had made a pledge to write in a positive style but the fortress I built around my writing was brutalized by siege guns battering down my defenses. I begin to feel like the President constantly reacting to the artificially real narrative hurled at me. The reading entitled, “Conclusion” (p.183) may be one of the selections that leaked through the cracks.
Can we envision an event that causes the sky and then the stars to disappear? Something so far beyond our rational thinking that we cannot get our minds around such a catastrophic event. Yet there will come a time when we all must face such an outcome. Our world will disappear and we will be just a spiritual shell that will be changed by eternity.
Although writing somewhat replaced my job as a studio silversmith it lacked the intensity of metal work. The cutting, hammering, soldering, polishing, and general fussing and obsessing over each and every piece was being replaced by scribbling selections for the book inserted between bouts of filling government forms or queries sent out looking for some new avenue to make a living.
Writing on the book was on the one hand an existential issue of immediacy and on the other hand it was a shelter from the storm that blew and blustered in the heavens above. Yet it was not a solution to the festering frustration I felt regarding the future. The government was throwing us a bone with the new compensation policies but when that ended where would we be.
I monitored my email for some sign from the SBA even though the prospect of being directly indebted to the same government that through fault or negligence brought us to this place. In effect I was asking my captors for mercy. The unpleasant reality of that thought never left me.
Then one day I got this:
The status of your SBA Application No.330089xxxxx has been updated. Login to your SBA Economic Injury Disaster Loan Portal account to continue with the next step.
Dread and relief at the same moment. It was almost poetic in a fatalistic Dostoevsky fashion.
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Rough is the term used by lapidary people to describe raw unprocessed rock.
Addendum: Mask Update
Reading this I think of the Maui fires in terms of the sky and the stars disappearing. So much of life is unanticipated and unexpected.