Another year. Another variant.
Is that too dark?
Or has the TVA decided “to hell with it” and cut everyone loose?
(This is an MCU reference. Apologies to all those not well-versed in the cinematic universe.)
Anyway, it’s 2022 – how’d that happen?
And will it be its own weird year or 2020, Vol. 2?
Please no Vol. 2, let alone a whole new season…
Let it be a New Year, with genuinely new possibilities. Good ones, too. Please.
Then again…
The exhaustion is tangible, all the body batteries are in the red.
No, this is not the Matrix (again, apologies for the cinematic reference), but things do feel wonky and out of sorts all round.
There is, strangely, simply no rest, no space or time for genuine recuperation.
Between “us” and “them” everyone is tired.
Exhausted. Enervated. Enraged.
Why? A plethora of reasons, but the virus and its variants are top on the list.
This is what it means to be on a planet: there’s no getting off it.
Some try, but gravity yanks them right back.
A bit like family, there’s no escaping.
Being human means living on Planet Earth. With all the other humans.
That’s the whole condition.
And we’re all a bit tired of us, aren’t we?
Annoyed, too, by the species.
Tired of all the you’s and the me’s and the y’alls and the them over there’s.
Tired of all the people being people…
So, what now?
We have 11.5 months ahead of us because the year is already 12 days old (by the way, whatever happened that pre-Christmas partridge in that much-besung pear tree? And we really need to talk about the maids and the pipers and the lords and the ladies, but I digress.)
11.5 months of ’22 and no one dares predict anything because look what happened last year.
So, maybe the written word might help, except that reading has actually become a problem. Murmurs of short attention spans – shorter than what Social Media has already inflicted on all of us – can be heard more and more often.
“Reading fatigue” has been uttered more than once, and not just by the booktubers, book-tokkers, bookstagramers, and book-bloggers. Something is happening, readers are crashing, and writers…
Oh, the poor dears.
We know, we see, and we understand.
It is tough at present, yes. It is hard, writing. Harder than usual and that’s saying something.
So, for this New Year, let us all stick to the old and known:
Don’t give up.
Keep on writing.
A happy and propserous 2022 to you all (and y’all).
~VR
von reuth 