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Archives from 2002-2006

There are a number of terrible wildfires burning nearby right now and the valley I live in is filled with smoke. We get smoke pretty much every summer at some point but this blew in (literally, on once-in-a-generation easterly winds) within minutes and it’s worse than I’ve ever seen it before. The sun is a blood-red ball and the skies are dark greyish-yellow, casting an unsettling light that doesn’t feel anything close to normal. The air is filled with ashy particles that almost look like snow, they’re almost pretty in how they drift and dance, in the way that flames can be mesmerizing even as they obliterate.

The outside matches the inside, is what I keep thinking. Everything everywhere feels like it is burning, acres and acres that are literally engulfed and people in beds with soaring temperatures. Violence in the streets and people struggling to breathe. Angry rhetoric being spat by our great leader adding more fuel to it all.

Our phones keep jittering and buzzing with emergency alerts and everything smells black and scorched and it’s hard to remember that even after the worst fires there is new growth. It’s hard to imagine what things might eventually look like, here in the burn.

I had been saying for months that I wanted some sort of percentage that compared the chances of dying from COVID next to some other way of dying, let’s say in a traffic accident, a way of dying that we all just accept as being a risk that exists but never prevents us from getting in the car, and I finally came across something just like that recently. I won’t link it here because no way can I be assured of its accuracy, but it should have alleviated my virus anxiety in a pretty big way.

I mean, statistically, my personal chances — according to this one maybe-dubious source — are low that I will die. A 0.104% chance, specifically. My chances of catching it (and then there is the unknown of recovery, all those stories about “long haulers” dealing with all kinds of lingering damage are pretty distressing) are higher, 5%, but still fairly low.

(Also please take those numbers with a giant grain of salt, I know everything about COVID is a moving target and there’s no way to be accurate about risks yet.)

Anyway, it does help to try and put things in perspective when I feel a runaway train of worry barreling through my head, but there’s the rational side of me and then there’s the side of me that is always, always waiting for the other shoe to drop.

My deepest fear is that I have had this incredibly lucky life and because I don’t deserve it, there is a massive karmic reckoning coming. I know that sounds ridiculous and dramatic, but it’s the truth. The COVID odds don’t soothe me because when I think of someone drawing that bad card, I think, why shouldn’t that person be me, or worse, someone I love?

What an insanely self-absorbed way to think, right? And it’s not even a helpful way to think, in the sense that these gloomy thoughts drive more useful self-protective behaviors.

I have no good conclusion about any of this. Just that I am tired of thinking about it and I bet you sure are too.

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