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.
(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.)
-30-
