I posted a comment today that simply said, “I’ve lost interest in absolutely everything. Almost.”

I wasn’t kidding. Sometimes I joke or lead on, sometimes I post things in a broad stroke as an inside joke to someone out there who gets it and everyone else is like, “Huh?” And sometimes, once in a while, I mean it. That’s this time, now. I’ve truly lost interest in absolutely everything.

The news has stolen so much of my time I feel like I should be ten years younger but for the endless endless ENDLESS barrage of manure pouring out of left and right and mainstream and radical outlets, filling the empty spaces of life with reports on the childish behavior of world leaders. So I turn to see what’s going on around the world and I see children dying in droves in the Middle East, but nowadays in a world filled with bitter and anxiety-ridden people ready to snap at anyone who speaks, those that point out the tragedy of dying Palestinian children are called anti-Semitic when they just are trying to say no matter what else you feel about land rights and terrorist organizations, at the very least we should be able to agree that tens of thousands of children should not die from war and starvation, right? Right?!

And my beloved St Petersburg is a place I’ll never go again because two or three men at the top decided to change the lives of the entire nation–two nations actually–so I turn my attention to students and classes since I stumbled into that career, but everyone is cheating with AI claiming it doesn’t make a difference since the work is done and the essay is written and I did the same thing when I was their age by using a calculator instead of working out the math on paper and it is nearly impossible to prove anyway. So I look toward some planned trips I had with some groups of people, but when they fell through and I let them know, I received mostly belligerent, nasty, attacking emails from the same people because they decided not to read my emails. People suck. Come on, you know it. They just suck.

So I turn my attention to my work, but one book project for a publisher in New York got pushed off a year, and the other book project for my publisher in Texas is going well and launches this Christmas, and while I think it is some of my best work and the endorsement from writers I respect is unprecedented, it will never be what I want it to be because it is so personal, so significant to me, that it took forty-five years to tell the story and I’ll never be satisfied, and letting it go to the publisher was like watching the main character die all over again.

I’m exhausted. No. That’s not right. Fatigued isn’t close either.

Numb. The worst kind of numb; the numb that feels good and makes it hard to give a rat’s ass about anything at all except being numb. Exhausted and fatigued can be bad. Numb can be dangerous.

But I had a few moments of “excellent” in the past few months. In The Netherlands. At Spirit Lake, Utah, and with my son hiking various trails along the Chesapeake. But I’ve lost interest in almost everything else. True story.

So I decided to forget about the news and the world situations and the AI essays and the publishing delays and writing disappointments and instead just focus on the Almost.

We spend much too little time focusing on the things that we do find interest in, we are too often held hostage by the news cycle which only pisses us off. This cannot be healthy. So I’ve decided to save myself. It might be one thing. Sometimes you might be close to a tragedy but there is one thing–perhaps a child, perhaps an event, maybe some faith–that keeps you going anyway.

So I turned to the things that motivate me from inside somewhere.

Shit.

I wish I could remember what they were.