Sun Dec 20 13:17:23 UTC 2020 It didn’t happen that year. In fact, it’s been nearly three years since I updated this Gopher hole. Which means it’s been nearly three years since I finally managed to publicly perform the first third of my twenty minute Columbine piece. For two of those years, I was helping care for my dad. But when he died earlier this year ‐‐ not from coronavirus ‐‐ it was only the beginning. Because it was only a few weeks later that an al‐ ready crazy world went completely over the edge and headlong into the abyss. I don’t even know who I’m talking to. Once‐dear friends have been ghosting me with increasing numbers for over ten years now, and there is absolutely no sign of improvement on the horizon. Now, talking about something as innocuous as the weather is fraught with peril. One word astray, online or off, and you won’t even have time to say goodbye to life as you knew it. As far as family: I have no siblings. I have no kids, and so far all my cousins are following in my footsteps, probably for the same fucked‐up reasons. My mother hasn’t disowned me, but our conversations are full of long and clearly disapproving silences on her part, no doubt full of troubled thoughts on where and how she went so horribly wrong. And on top of this already enormous mountain of isolation comes the worldwide bullshit response to a "pandemic", where the cure has clearly been worse than the dis‐ ease. And the hypocrisy, double standards and false equivalence just keep piling higher and higher, and nobody gives a fuck ex‐ cept Nazis, which now means everyone to the right of Mao. Or any‐ one who dissents from the Holy Narrative. Which by saying, I have now clearly outed myself as a Nazi and earned a permanent spot on the Bad List. I do my best to refuse to give in to rage and despair. I try to count my blessings every day, and enjoy the small bits of happi‐ ness. But if I didn’t have my wife, who is very much God’s gift to me, the odds are quite high that by now I would have killed myself. In fact, last week I came closer to it than ever in my entire life. Not actually doing it ‐‐ just thinking about it, and seriously wanting to. Because I may never get another hug from my mother ‐‐ even if she still loves me, she’s been infected by those who deliberately spread the plagues of fear, hate and mis‐ trust. I may never perform my Columbine piece in full ‐‐ even if public gatherings ever again take place, everyone has been in‐ fected with said plagues by people who are deliberately, openly doing their damndest to start World War III. Race war? Class war? You name it, they’re for it. Billionaires who could bail out the entire middle class with the pocket change in their couch cush‐ ions lecturing the rest of us how we’re all in this together, so just stay inside for the rest of your life, you filthy pleb. Hide your face and know your place. Nobody wants to feel alone. But for people like my mother, it seems like nearly the entire world is their support network. I have my wife, and two other people I can open up to without reservation. That’s it. (Oh my God, do I wish my very good, very gay friends were still with us today instead of having died, es‐ sentially, because they were overly promiscuous and irresponsi‐ ble. We would be having so many good talks. I’m sure of it. I like to hope that we would.) For the good of Western civilization, and indeed, for all humani‐ ty: Silicon Valley as we know it must be destroyed.