An update on my mental & physical state.

whether you wanted it or not.

Newer subscribers to my blog don’t know that I haven’t written one of these in a while. A long while. In fact, some older subscribers probably received this and thought, “I forgot I was even subscribed to this thing”. Yes, I was really busy with my book release for a few months, but the big reason that I wasn’t writing to you was because I could find nothing of interest to write about, and worse, I just didn’t care. I hope it’s not just me, but at some point around the end of this pandemic (whenever that was) I found myself not giving a shit. I could not find the humor in anything in the news and I noticed that I had something I call “Empathy Fatigue”, a condition caused by the relentless bombardment of social issues that the media feels I should be outraged by. Climate change. Covid. (it’s still all around us!) Transgender rights. Economic disparities. Racial inequities.

I don’t care. Maybe I used to care - at least a little bit - about some of those things, but the media’s constant nagging has extinguished most sympathy I had for my fellow man.

Today, an article decried the fact that there are still millions of workers not even making $15 an hour. I know why. It’s because a lot of people aren’t worth paying $15 an hour to. In fact, there’s a lot of worthless slugs not worth $10 an hour. Now there’s a newspaper headline I’d like to see. I’d look up from my reading and exclaim, “Finally! Someone is pointing out the obvious!”

On the racial front - the outrage I’m expected to have about cops pulling over young black men more often than whites is somewhat overshadowed by the fact that everywhere I look, young black thugs seem to be going apeshit in out of control crime & violence sprees. So excuse me if I don’t wring my hands in anguish.

But the real reason that you might feel somewhat as I do is this:

The war in Ukraine has put life in perspective.

It was a jolt that reminds us that, “Whoa there’s people just like us suddenly sleeping in a bombed out mall that they were shopping in just two weeks ago!” Ukraine is why the transgender outrage over how they want to be addressed seems a little silly nowadays - and why they aren’t on the front page lately.

Suddenly, there’s a lot I want to talk about but this little rant will suffice for now. I still haven’t really addressed the title of this blog, which was about my mental and physical state. Actually, you got a glimpse of one facet of my mental state.

More to come shortly.

Drew