Thinking

I’ve been thinking about the people in 1929 and the stock market crash. In all my history courses it was so clear: Stock market crash = beginning of the Great Depression. Yet now that I’m living through a rolling, unraveling crisis I wonder if it was that clear to the people who lived through it. I’ll bet that life felt mostly normal for a long time, months perhaps a year. I read today’s news and I see all the seeds for massive economic collapse. Yet my daily life is pretty close to the same except for a feeling of impending doom which comes and goes.

I’m also thinking about the radiation therapy I had twenty five years ago. The effects of a radiation treatment always took time to manifest. Taste buds shut down instantly, everything else took time. It was toward the end of therapy that the accumulated damage became visible burn marks on my neck until the final week when the top layer of skin gave up and sloughed off. When the treatments stopped things still got worse for a few days afterward. Getting better was a slow process. A year before I felt normal. Five years before I began to lose the fear that the tumor would return. Ten years before the irradiated skin stopped being drier than the skin around it. Damage has already been done we just haven’t seen the full ongoing effects of the damage yet.

This morning I don’t have any additional information about the world that I didn’t have yesterday, but everything is feeling heavier today. I’m worried about supply chain problems. I worry that the longer it takes us to ready Big Dumb Objects for printing, the harder it will be to physically get it printed even though I’ve held the money necessary to pay for the work. I wish that the events I’ve got scheduled for August and September would officially cancel so I can let go of the contingency planning for them.

I think that I need to go do something useful to occupy my brain in a positive way rather than letting it continue thinking.