It’s been a hot minute since I’ve posted anything, for a few reasons. Personally, it’s been a busy year navigating being a dad and a husband, while also working on a new edition of my debut novel. Politically, it’s been a tumultuous year of competing hysterias that have consumed the right and the left, and I didn’t even know where to start.

I’ve opened up the editor and stared at a blank page a few times in the last few months, only to close it again. Sometimes it was the stress of trying to press on in the editing process of my book. Sometimes it was not wanting to break a creative momentum of a new novel I’m plotting. Usually, though, it was just being too tired to deal with it.

Going on social media has been painful as I watched friends and former fellow travelers willingly descend into obvious conspiracy and paranoia, gossiping like high schoolers about things they don’t understand and making assertions they aren’t nearly qualified to even pretend to back up.

More than a year after the 2020 election, the red caps still believe Trump’s lies and probably always will. There are entire segments of libertarians who actually believe they are entitled to public spaces without taking even basic precautions, even during a global pandemic that’s killed 800,000 Americans and over five million people internationally, because of “freedom“.

Where are the adults anymore? Now all I see on Facebook is a bunch of spoiled, middle aged, and (usually White) thin skinned brats throwing tantrums over how “oppressed” they are by having the BS they parrot fact checked. We’ve reached peak irony, with the right becoming the entitled snowflakes that they’ve always accused the left of being.

“Insisting on your rights without acknowledging your responsibilities isn’t freedom. It’s adolescence.”

Hopefully, 2022 will be a better year. Regardless, I’ll try to get back on the LIFTW horse.