The forty-first installment in this series finds me chasing my BoogeyMens.
A weekly writing summary also follows.
“Our future seems secure together.”
Writing sometimes seems more like a haunting, for I am usually dredging up memories of past experiences to serve as grist for my work. I also sometimes exhume as yet unexperienced futures, and these can also prove to be problems. I imagine a few of my futures to be warm and inviting but more likely to harbor threats, many inhabited by BoogeyMens. The Boogeys remain from childhood stories rather than from lived experience. Their prior lives entirely consisted of stories, some of the types usually shared around a campfire on shadowy summer nights with a forest crowding in too tightly. Those stories promised an impending visit, scheduled for sometime between then and dawn. Later, some disturbance on the side of the tent will seem to announce doom's arrival, sparking some real drama inside. However, we almost always discovered the next morning some completely benign explanation for what we'd presumed had been our grisly demise. We'd somehow survived.
I've also somehow survived so far, though I often glimpse futures I would not willingly wish upon anyone, let alone myself. I remain supremely capable of scaring myself, though, my BoogeyMens sometimes prominent presences. Shadows turn into serious threats. The cats can thump around like thieves in the night. Whatever's next can easily seem terrifying, overwhelmingly so. If I slow down, though, I might notice where my BoogeyMens stand. They're always in the future rather than closer to hand. They remain impending, or at least have remained impending so far. Those futures I sometimes imagine breathing down my neck might remain imagined and never actually threatening. Even my recent shivering in the throes of Covid mostly left me anticipating, for even in those moments, I seemed fine and would have felt perfect had it not been for the dread I sensed stalking me then. The dread was an anticipatory, projected experience. I was not nearly as bad off as I'd imagined.
Of course, I can declare that now that I've conquered that infection. I had spent more than three years avoiding that scenario only to learn it was worth avoiding. If anything, through those years of isolating and masking, I'd been underestimating the threat those particular BoogeyMens offered. That BoogeyMens' visit proved considerably worse than expected, but how could I have accurately anticipated how it would have felt to feel sicker than I'd ever felt? That projection would have been impossible. Nobody ever gets to imagine anything even remotely like any worst-case scenario. We might well live in anticipatory dread, but we will have been underestimating the experience, however graphic our imaginings.
I saw this week a short video of the mother of all BoogeyMens, a preview of what astrophysicists might well insist would be our likely demise a few billion years into the future. The video shows a Gas Giant consuming a planet. The planet merged with the gas giant's molten core to become indistinguishable from the rest of the material already sucked into there—a small singularity containing the entirety of the contents of that sun's former neighborhood. Scientists believe we face a similar fate, that our sun, too, probably faces a gaseous giant future, expanding in size and reach until it fatally attracts every planet within its present solar system's orbit. This story with it. Our Villa overlooking the present center of this universe, too. Everything we presently hold dear will very likely become as one in the gaseous belly of our future sun.
Tell me, please, what more proximate BoogetMens pose any more significant threat? I suppose I could likely survive any of those future-dwelling entities since I seem stuck here in the present. I imagine an asymptotic future, one where it remains pretty much the same until it doesn't, and where once it doesn't, nothing matters anymore, for it will have been subsumed into something larger and even more inclusive. Until then, whatever I attempt seems preternaturally significant, truly important. Any dread standing between me and any future certainly exists within an infinitely bigger shadow. The future appears massive, much larger than the total of any and all pasts. It holds potential that might ultimately coexist on the most fundamental molecular level. This story. Your attention. Our collective anticipation. Our differences. Our so-called similarities. Fear not. Dread not. Our future seems secure together.
See my weekly writing summary HERE
©2023 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved
Good stuff here! 👏