Shine on you crazy diamonds

 "Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun."

It's been a while. A really long while. I wish I knew where to begin...if I only knew how to begin. An author of Hobbits might argue that one should begin exactly where it all began: In a hole in a ground. But those days are but memory, a remnant of a past washed away like tears in the rain. The world has changed and much that once was is lost, for fewer now live who remember it.

Beginnings are a delicate time.

Know then that it is the year 2021. All of earth is ravaged by a deadly virus which has claimed the lives of millions. Hospitals have been overwhelmed, cities have been locked down, curfews and stringent distancing laws have been enforced. Survival is hard, harder with all the rampant crime, looting and riots that have escalated during the pandemic and, as a result of poor governance, unemployment, poverty and corruption and through it all - innocents suffer. Then, as if in response to all the death, genocide, racism, apartheid, sexism, murder and inhumanity of it all, the earth responded in turn with natural disasters: floods, fire, earthquakes, locust plagues, hurricanes and more. It feels as if the Doomsday Clock is ticking even closer to midnight than ever before...tick...tick..tick...

Two years ago this might have sounded like the perfect candidate for a grand dystopian science fiction story. Two years ago I might even have written it. But this future? It's nothing like we imagined.

The world is changed. Times have changed. We now live in a new normal: Work from home, avoid large social gatherings, sanitize, wear a mask, isolate, vaccinate...

And it is hard. It's been really really hard. We've lost family, friends, coworkers and more. My thoughts and prayers are with every single one of you who had to deal with loss as a result of this COVID pandemic. I wish I could offer some comfort, some advice but, even though I have strength through words, I haven't much strength for finding the right words. But maybe it's not words we need, just a reminder to always stay steadfast in faith. Because in faith there is hope. No matter how bleak things look, no matter how hard it becomes, the pain, the loss, the agony, the deaths, the sickness, there is always hope, there is always a brighter tomorrow.

That's why not knowing what the future holds is a blessing. To know the future is to be trapped by it. Those words are very wise if you really sit down and think of it. 

While the future remains as gloriously unknown as it has always been, the past offers more of an exciting form of nostalgic escapism. Travelling back in time, finding a cure earlier, reversing the pandemic, the wars, the deaths... all of it. Would you? Or would you rather just hop into a DeLorean and just travel back to a time when things were...less complicated. The eighties? Maybe the nineties?

Or maybe everything was always complicated - I just hadn't the notion of how much of it all I would be absorbing and processing later on in my life. So, no...maybe not a time machine. Maybe just a way to rewind my mind back and shrug off all the processing. All the worry, all the panic, the stress, the anxiety, the depression.

Anxiety and depression cases have increased a hundredfold since this pandemic hit. I had a vice, a totem, a coping mechanism...even wrote a blog about it here.

I'm holding a bag of my totems now, prescription meds - my prescription meds: About thirty assorted variety of dice.

Some 20 sided, some 10, some 6 and even a 4 sided one.

Somewhere there's a quote by Einstein about God not playing dice with the universe. Kind of feels like we been getting a lot of really low rolls lately. Ones and Twos mostly. I doubt Einstein was really big on any dice rolling mechanics. He probably would have extrapolated all the varying permutations and possibilities based on statistical mathematics. Such a buzzkill. Fuck Einstein. Right now, I don't want stats or figures or numbers or predictions...I just want a world of possibilities, of variance.

I'm tempted right now to just let go and roll them all at the same time, to just crank up the cyberpunk ambience on my Spotify and randomly roll them over and over again...hard and fast, in defiance to everything...in defiance to the governments of the world, in defiance of stupid rationale of the blooming ignorance that refute vaccinations on the basis of some pathetic conspiracy, in defiance of war, genocide and human rights violations, in defiance of abuse, domestic violence and the dark nature of man, in defiance of corporate conglomerates who abuse power through corruption and illegal transactions, in defiance of fringe exotic markets that sell butchered animal products where viruses infest and multiply, in defiance of my own mind that threatens to overwhelm me with feeling when all I really want is to not feel at all.

I'm tempted to roll some dice. So, so tempted.

I cave. The dice all fall from my fingers in a spectacularly random rumble of a roll and as they land I don't bother looking. It doesn't matter. All that matters is that I can keep rolling, keep looking forward and keep blogging.

Life of uZ is back and I'm making it count this time. Get ready to roll.