I received a comment on a post I wrote a couple months ago called, “Dark Times.” It’s about the general state of things and how life is getting harder all the time. I know the comment feature exists, but I sort of forgot about it until I got an e-mail informing me someone commented. I like responding to people about different things sometimes, it can be fun. This is probably a good time to leave the reminder: if you feel like commenting, go ahead. I’ll read it and try to get back to you (maybe, haha). Some people prefer to e-mail me instead of leaving a comment up, and that is also fine with me (you can e-mail me at larrysingleton92@gmail.com if you feel the need to do so). I’ve gotten various e-mails from people all over the world over the years, and it’s never not entertaining.
What I wanted to do here is revisit the idea of the same, “Dark Times,” I was writing about before. If you’re familiar with what I’ve written about, you already know the list: overpopulation, the climate emergency, the pandemic, other possible pandemics, inflation/rising costs of everything/low wages, water and food shortages, power grid failures, etc. These are the big, major things that affect all of us. And you might remember I’ve talked about the “smaller things,” instead of these larger global issues and problems. These smaller things are what I have called, “The Permeation of Collapse,” the everyday occurrences and slow build-up of the system’s failures and how they’re crashing all around us in real-time. For example, the effect of people having brain fog after recovering from covid is something huge to consider that will have a big effect on life moving ahead. Many people will be walking around in a general state of confusion, irritability, and low IQ energy. This will have detrimental effects on society as a whole, and no one seems to be talking about this much. There are small everyday effects that are happening all the time all around us. Another obvious case would be (something I just mentioned above) overpopulation and the ramifications involved there: as the planet loses more and more space, and requires the use of more resources and energy, things are heating up all the time and feeling less comfortable every year as it gets overcrowded and shitty all over. It feels less like a wide open space, and more like a shitbox we’re all trapped on.
I don’t want to delve too deeply into that stuff right now, because I’ve discussed it over and over, and that’s not the point of this one. I wanted to write about two very specific occurrences from my life recently that speak to this small-scale “permeation” of collapse I refer to when I say things like that. This is an attempt at defining the phrase a bit further using real and recent examples. The first one would be an attempt at theft: someone entered my father’s car recently and made a big mess of things while searching for possible items to steal. Thankfully, the person didn’t end up taking anything (and there wasn’t anything valuable in there, because we aren’t rich people), but it’s still a noteworthy thing and a violation. It’s particularly interesting because: firstly: this type of thing generally does not happen in this area, and even when it has in the past (which, again, is probably very rarely), it is not a pattern of behaviour that has persisted, it’s more of a freak occurrence type of thing. And the second reason it’s interesting to me is that people in my household were up late and woke up very early (it is Ramadan at the moment, which means there is currently always at least one person in my household up very late at night and very early in the morning), which would mean the thief had to have done the break-in between the hours of 11PM - 2AM. This is such a slim margin of time to be going around neighborhoods and trying to take people’s stuff, which suggests to me that this person is at least fairly competent at this type of thing and planned it out accordingly. It was not a careless, haphazard approach, the person chose a window of time they felt things would work and gave some consideration to their criminal efforts. Another interesting detail about this attempted theft is that the person didn’t go as far as breaking the windows. Whoever it was, was probably just going around opening doors specifically, which is another thing that leads me to assume they’re fairly competent and know how to steal effectively. They didn’t necessarily want to go too far, but they were still going around trying out which car doors were open and seeing what they could do under the circumstances. It sucks that they have to stoop to this level, but I at least understand it. By the way, I should reiterate: of course, I have no real idea and I could be 100% wrong about all of this. It could also have been some drunk guy walking around late at night who wanted a lighter for his last cigarette, and started looking through cars with no intention of taking anything other than that. Or it could’ve been someone who had no intention of stealing earlier that night, but noticed the locks were open and felt bored. Who knows?
I could be wrong about all of this, and I have no clue about who this person might be, but if I had to make guesses or some kind of speculation, I’d say it is someone not doing particularly well in life financially at the moment. I don’t think they are evil, they’re probably just broke, and the system is pushing them to have to think outside of the box, so to speak. I wrote earlier this year about how I imagine people will continue getting desperate and acting in ways they normally wouldn’t, and here is a perfect example of what I was talking about.
The second “smaller” example of everyday collapse occurred after I was done work for the week. After work I drove to the library in my neighborhood to get my holds, and there were several cop vehicles all over the place (at least like 7). I had no idea what was going on, and didn’t think the library would be affected (sometimes the police are just in the area for general safety; I guess the library calls them a lot), so I didn’t think too much of it and continued to try getting my books. When I got to the front entrance, the doors were locked, and I could see a police officer talking to an employee or someone like that (I have no idea). I guess their conversation got interrupted when I tried opening the locked door, at which point the employee taped up a sign saying they were closed and under lockdown — a real dangerous one for safety, not a bullshit covid lockdown — because of some kind of emergency in the building. The sign looked like it was just freshly made in MS Word, and printed in a rush: it was in a weird ass font picked at random that no one uses, there were lots of exclamation points, and the whole thing was bolded. The 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper itself was a lil wrinkly too, lol, it was like the employee didn’t know the proper protocol for something crazy like whatever happened, and I don’t blame them. I got the hell out of there after that. (On my walk back to my car, when I was leaving the library I saw two people coming from the rec centre attached to the library: they said that building was under the same lockdown).
I have no clue what happened at the library, but these types of situations usually mean there is some level of threat in the area, usually a person with a weapon. Perhaps a gun. Or a possible fight broke out that could endanger the rest of the area (not a real fight with measured chaos like boxing, I mean if they both have guns or someone has a knife or some such shit, who knows). I don’t want to exaggerate here, because like I said: I still don’t exactly know what happened at the library. And the annoying thing is I probably won’t ever know: they don’t really update their website or let people know about incident reports, they only tell us about “closures” due to maintenance or whatever. Seems like they keep stuff like this private, and I won’t ever know. But the reason I’m bringing it up is because it captures the idea of collapse “permeation” perfectly. Think about what this sort of thing says: that a guy can’t even go to the goddamn neighborhood library these days without some dumb shit happening. It’s funny that libraries tend to attract two polar opposites: people trying to better themselves, read books, learn things about the world, print government documents and forms, and the second type who has given up on life completely. There seems to be a razor thin line separating the two types, and that is very closely related to the idea of collapse manifesting in everyday life.
I went back to the same library to pick up my books the next day, and it was back to running smoothly, which is nice. However, it was still a bit frustrating to not get any update or info whatsoever about what had occurred the previous day. I thought this was kinda funny and emblematic of collapse: shit is breaking down around us constantly, and we just go back to normal right away to keep the system running as if nothing happened. This is either a very effective, brilliant way to live, or it is the dumbest existence of all time. Guess we’ll see in the near future!
Perhaps this is just a reaction to experiencing two different out of the ordinary things happening in the span of the same week, but it just reminded me of the concept again. I think times are getting harder for a lot of people, and I’m not surprised by things like this at all. I almost expect them to happen, however, I obviously would prefer they didn’t. They are still very disappointing and sad for humanity overall. I wish humans could be better, but it feels like we’re just letting the earth fall to shit right before our very eyes, like a basketball rolling away in front of us. We’re just watching things collapse, and various people are reacting in drastically different ways. That’s one of the challenges we all face right now, aside from the survival of bills and all that other shit, there is now the threat of being around people who are barely keeping it together and losing their mf minds. I don’t even know the proper way to end this one, so I’ll just say: good luck to you out there, whoever is reading this, I wish you well, and I hope you keep yourself sane and healthy, and that we all get to the end of this thing with our dignities intact. God bless.