End Game

Almost three months in now. The days are now marked only by what I choose to get done. It hasn’t been all that bad for me, & I think at least on the surface the Australian public is doing fine, for now. The real test will come after the noble effort of the sweaty nervous big business bros & their cabal of hounds reopen the country for the sake of “normal.”

Putting my ear to the wall of the science community has an unnerving effect once I realised that we still don’t know a lot about this virus & it could easily evolve into new strains at any moment. On the whole Australia dodged the Corona bullet, for now. But the prospects of COVID-19 sticking around in the same fashion as the flu are likely. Not only that, but even if Australia can effectively eradicate COVID from our borders. For how long?

Imagine Australia succeeds in this endeavour, while the rest of the world is stuck with a yearly cycle of COVID deaths. Imagine a hundred years goes by (I know it’s hard to imagine we will get there but indulge me), & somehow Australia has avoided the virus up until then, only to have it slip through the cracks on a contaminated tampon from a shipping container crew member. Well now you’ve got an entire population that has never had contact with the virus that has now had a hundred years to mutate in the human gene pool. Could be a real Siege of Fort Pitt situation.

So yes i’ve had a lot of time to play these scenarios out in my tiny white walled granny flat in the middle of suburbia. Outside of the podcast & this blog, my routine has become horribly stale. I stopped scrolling through my fifty odd games on Steam once a day. Opening up a game only to feel unmotivated once the game menu loads in.

Porn has completely lost the little appeal it had prior to COVID. Now it is merely a means to get rid of an urge I can’t do anything about. Some of my friends have been pushing to get back on Tinder. I caved in after finding what is probably the only existing good photo of me while cradling a baby rabbit. But it’s hard to keep up conversations with women who live in Japan with nothing in common other than mutual boredom & loneliness.

Despite all this, despite the denial, the despair, the misplaced optimism I see around me, & the filter of Nihilism I beat back with a stick on a daily basis. Despite it all I have found a new burning desire to become a father. Which is a statement that exposes my deepest hypocrisy, as anyone who knows me would attest to the philosophical disagreements i’ve had regarding creating new balls of existence. That I didn’t ask to be born, & often wish that I wasn’t. So I concluded that I didn’t want to impose that on anyone else.

But I realised something about all my years of depression in the late 2010’s. That I was depressed, because I loved the good in life too much. But the tragedy of it all, the broken dreams, the friendships gone, & the dying fire of passion was too much for me to bare. So it was easier to see life as a horrible curse, then I wouldn’t have to grieve each beautiful moment as it slipped through my fingers.

So the paradigm I am dealing with has given me the need to choose my end game. Which is either against all odds to make a family, or wait patiently until the pain gets so great, that I take fate into my own hands.