Feeling overwhelmed?

That’s probably because everything is a bit overwhelming right now. And I’m sorry, but it’s gonna get worse, a lot worse, before it gets better. I’ll probably do my Friday column on this, but for now, I’m just contemplating the last week I had.

I was in Sydney, minding two cats and an apartment, a pleasant job. I brought my laptop down to work on World War 3.3. And, yes, I worked on 3.3. Huzzah!

But it was a helluva lot harder to maintain focus than I thought it would be. The day that woman got shot in Minneapolis, I basically got nothing done besides hours of angry doom scrolling. I fear there’s a lot more shooting and, with it, a lot more anger to come.

I took myself off the continuous news torrent after Trump was elected. I could tell it was damaging my mental health. I can tell we’re back there again.

I’m gonna have to write about all of this shit, at least as long as I’m doing ASB, but I’m thinking of ways to titrate my exposure to the minimum necessary dose to get that part of my job done. I think I might use the other part of my job, writing books, to help. It’s a rare privilege to be able to pay the bills with novel writing. Mostly, I think of it as a lifestyle thing. No commute. No boss. Make my own hours. But I’ve been thinking the last few days that the greatest privilege might be the ability, indeed the requirement, to disappear from the real world every day, for hours at a time.

I might be doing even more of that, I reckon.