It All Frays Apart

Tattooed arm with skewed exposure. tattoo is of a small illustrated axolotl wearing a crown of leaves with the words "sigo vivo" underneath it. Overlaid are the words: "A Doomer's Guide to getting Rigth with the Apocalypse"

doomer’s guide part 3

One thing that gets lost a lot these days is that Societal collapses take time & it’s not going to collapse in any sort of uniform way – and while the general pattern is pretty damn predictable, the exact details will never be . they will always be shocking, but at this point shouldn’t be the least bit surprising. Oh well, nevertheless…

anyway, one of the terms I use often for this collapse is “The Fraying” because it highlights the fact that a lot of our present problems are the result of (and/or accelerate the process of) societal unraveling – institutions that form the very structures & glue of society have been, are continuing to be, completely gutted to the point of annihilation. that’s bad BTW.

So, my mind broke. Or more specifically, this orientation I had towards Life, my personal little monkey way of being in this world was not just proven “wrong” during CF 2020s – that wouldn’t’ve been so bad, I’ve been wrong lots of times. Hell, it’s pretty much a prerequisite for getting anything important in life right at all.

No, not wrong. Obliterated. Destroyed. Chewed up, shat out, and put on a platter and molded into the head of John the Baptist. It wasn’t awesome. If you’re curious, I can actually pinpoint the exact moment/event where my mind broke. I’d guess this is true of most doomers, but keep in mind that this is almost inevitably different for everyone. This is not a proposition whose validity comes from its truth value, but more like the line in a drawing that causes your perception to flip a switch and see the picture as a whole in a new light (or having no fucking light anywhere on the horizon anywhere at all, in my case).

boxer looking sideways disappointed. caption states "ain't nothin's been the same since my razzle lost its dazzle" — Razzles apparently need dazzles to properly function in everyday life. I learned that the hard way.

Anyway, for me it was during the height of the push to “return to normalcy” [if you can consider Weekend and Bernie’s-ing an entire society “normal” in any sense of the word] when in the United States there was a concerted effort to allow/force children to not wear masks during an earlier phase of this century’s first runaway pandemic.

This effort ended very shortly, though, and not because it was rejected by every rational human being as being the most dystopian, anti-Life, and aggressively stupid thing imaginable. lmao. lol even. No, no… the effort to unmask children during a very fucking airborn toxic event ended because these assholes actually fucking won. Quickly and decisively.

This shocked me more than anything else in my life up to that point and even after. And I’m not fucking naive – and by the way if this event wasn’t a shock to you then I’m sorry but you either do not understand literally anything about Life or what makes a society an actual fucking society or not, or your brain is just broken in this very unfortunate way.

A Brief Aside

Oh Dear, You’ve Done Broke Your Brain

A Brief Aside On the universality of broken brains, these days

two dogs with one looking judgmentally at the camera. the caption underneath says "sorry, but it ain't lookin' good for you, bro." the push to return to normalcy did not set well with the author — Everyone’s brains are broken these days – the worst kind of broken brain by far are all the deathcultists out there (all of your 21st century fascists are deathcultists btw, if you were wondering how widespread this really is)

The Late, great howard zinn famously said “you can’t be neutral on a moving train”. well, what if that train is the apocalypse express?

I take it as a basic fact that everyone alive today is broken (specifically their brains/minds), in differing degrees and in all types of different ways. This entire what-have-you is just me diagnosing and describing the particular brain affliction that I suffer from.

And I know that there are many others out there suffering from this same affliction and I really and truly fucking care about them, which is why I’m writing this to and for them. Honestly, if you don’t think your brain is broken then please stop reading this and self-reflect for apparently the first time in your life jfc.]

Anyway, once an entire society goes deathcult they don’t go back. And when a deathcult has both the ability and the inclination to take everyone else with them? Well, that’s everyone’s problem, now isn’t it? Personally, as part of everyone I wasn’t (and still ain’t, for that matter) super cheesed up about this at all. So, that was fall of 2021 iirc [honestly, when you’re unemployed and in the midst of ego death timelines tend to fuzz, so if I’m off a bit here just consider that I don’t actually care about the exact date and actually prefer not to revisit that particular moment in time just to get a few details right, so…].

You also might be quick on the uptake and have noticed that there was a bit of time between then and now. Well, downward spirals do take time. As does clawing your way back up to some kind of level ground where you can assess the damage and begin to reassemble the shattered pieces of who you were and what you might’ve been into a whole new person – not to mention the time it takes to then try and get that new personality to a place where it might actually be somewhat capable of navigating (ie bumbling through) a completely new landscape. Sure, almost every element of the entire picture is exactly the same – but those few new lines, those few new stones in the mosaic of Life [more on why tf I keep capitalizing Life shortly, I promise, only a few more digressions until the main course], just those few changes were enough to change the entire picture in some very world-upside-downing ways.

[*musical notes*: bum bum bum!] Enter the Doomer’s Guide To Getting Right With The Apocalypse. It was some time around fall of 2023 when this project started to take shape as an answer to the question, “What the fuck went so fucking wrong?” With me, remember. How the hell did I break so fucking thoroughly? (and believe me – it was pretty fuckin thorough. Not actually a fan of the thoroughness, honestly – the analytical part of my mind can be kind of a dick about that sort of thing, as I’m sure the more perceptive of you are beginning to surmise.)

puppy just sitting and looking sad with the words "yeah...sure...okay..." — ngl ego death is a way easier process than ego re-birth, but I’d still rather not’ve gone through the ego death part before getting to where I am now [shrug emoji]

The Doomer’s Guide was also an attempt to answer the question, “can I do it? Can I make a new me out of what was left over from what was and what could’ve been? One that could at least function? [notice that it took like two whole fucking years of ego death until I was even in a place to begin asking these questions. And for the record, these are not in any way, shape, or form easy questions to answer.

I mean, I started this process in September/October-ish of 2023 and finally had both enough of an answer and enough functionality to begin writing a first draft of this in January 2024. It took three or four months or very intense and very fucking thorough self-reflection – looking at every choice, every phase of life, every important conversation I could recall in the middle of the night and obsess over, and looking at them from every conceivable perspective.

Then it still took me quite a while to get this to where it wasn’t pure rant, but a sober (again, trying to look at reality with clarity and tbqh sometimes it does take a little pharmaceutical intervention to reach that level of existential sobriety, at least for me *shrug emoji*) look at myself and my world and how those two things fit together, these days. Processes take time, what can I say.