PROBABLE FINAL DISPATCH, END OF DISPATCHES (17 April 2020)

For the past 14 hours, I have been at work on the weekend edition of Dispatches, not only scanning something like 100 separate reports for relevant contents but continuing the process of redesigning the site for maximum visual attractiveness. 

But when I attempted to publish my work, whatever it is that happens beneath a "BAD GATEWAY" notice obliterated every bit of it. 

I do not know whether this psychologically devastating loss was deliberately inflicted by a newly censoring Typepad regime or by some ChristoNazi hacker, or whether (unlike Trump's deliberately sadistic, maximum-misery-to-Working-Families machinations with the stimulus payments), it was a true (and truly wounding) glitch. 

Now, physically trembling not only with rage but with the indescribable wrenching of its attendant flashback to the 1983 arson that destroyed my life's work and thereby destroyed forever my access to meaningful work and also proved (even to my otherwise ever-agnostic self)  the awful reality of that vile, allegedly satanic lifetime curse of insurmountable obstructions my birthmother put on me in the wake of her 1945 failure at post-partum abortion, I can only ask myself why I torment myself, knowing as I have since 1 September 1983 that anything of genuine quality I might manage to produce is literally doomed before its conception.

Which doom -- as it comes to me just this instant -- may have extended to the son my second wife and I conceived  in lights-on, eyes-wide-open-love, the mutually intentional blending-of-our-genes my second wife bore in her womb with such joy until a seemingly minor subway accident at the beginning of her seventh month brought him into the world two days later already dead -- and turned our anticipation to grief so toxic it eventually killed our marriage.

Nor can I deny its eerie parallel in the aftermath of the 1983 arson:  a post-traumatic depression so severe it eventually forced me onto welfare, which created an ignominious public record of disability that could not be hidden from prospective employers and thereby ended my career as a member of the working press and obliterated any real or potential attractiveness or significance I might have beyond the (very) small (and ever-more-mortality-shrunken) circle of pre-fire friends, kinfolk and comrades who continued befriending me thereafter. 

Though I continued freelancing as best I could -- even hired myself out to a local journalistic sweatshop -- I realize now after tonight the real (heart-deep) reason I sustained such efforts was to protect myself from the undoubtedly bottomless horror of acknowledging the reality of my accursedness: the one truth with which (as I realize now) I could never cope without the pre-mortem strengths one acquires as an octogenarian.

       

Now after tonight's knife-in-the-heart debacle -- not just the total loss and utter invalidation of nearly two days work but the destruction, forever, of what I had believed would be the best edition of Dispatches yet -- I seriously doubt I can ever again convince myself to risk such effort. 

Indeed I think this may be my professional deathblow, the knife-slash that robs me of any further reason -- beyond my perverse curiosity to see how quickly the apocalyptic magnitude of  COVID-19 inflicted collapse becomes undeniable even in Moron Nation -- for ever again reading or writing anything more expressive than a to-do list. 

I say this not as an act of surrender -- though I cannot deny that is what it amounts to -- but simply because the near-paralyzing totality of my physical reaction to this most recent hammer-blow from fate, two hours of arrhythmic tachycardia included,  tells me the next such wounding will probably stop my heart. 

-- LOREN BLISS/17 April 2020. 

(Should anyone seek to contact me in response to the above, please be aware that as of 8 a.m. today I will be off-line for a major Microshaft update, and that if its past malicious rejections of my opensource software occur as anticipated, I may be off-line for some time afterward, all the more so because the virus quarantine denies me the in-home visit from a Nurd that is sometimes necessary to resurrect my on-line presence. In other words, if in the immediate future I might seem unresponsive to on-line communication, that's why.)  

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