July 2020 doesn’t seem that long ago in retrospect, but when I try to place myself back there, the timeline seems chaotic and obscured. I recall a daily ritual of wondering what fresh hell would visit us each day. Chaos and a riot of emotions. COVID-19 countermeasures in full swing. Domestic terror from every corner. Fear and uncertainty ingrained in every facet of our lives by an all too eager media. The beginning of the end of the world as we know it. The “New Normal” that would put the lie to many social structures, that up until that point, many considered unassailable.
Conflict is friction and we do not move forward without friction. Is this revolution? Blood and fire? Or, is this the natural growing pains of an adolescent species, that is struggling with its own identity and its ability to captain its own fate? Who knows? We’re still in the mess we were dealing with back then. Nothing has been resolved and we still plug into the media cloud every day, wondering what new crisis seeks to assail us anew. A hamster wheel of dopamine and overprescribed anxiety medication. Stimulus/Response conditioning writ large.
But, I digress.
In the midst of this not-so-long-gone time, “Rescue Breathing” was written. I guess it is a snapshot of my headspace at the time. Like a lot of my writing, it is a kind of stream of consciousness that attempts to reconcile disparate, o difficult ideas into something that might be understood later. A kind of literary waking dream that tries to pull together the torn and tattered edges of perception into something resembling a coherent image. I’m not sure I was successful, but I tried.
Give it a read. Tell me what you think. I’d love to hear your feedback on this piece.
Thank you, as always, for reading and following.
Be well.
Much Love.
-DJR
