Here I sit on our apartment patio in Scottsdale. It is sunny today after a stretch of solid rain and grey skies. They brought the monsoons to central Arizona for the first time in several years. People had begun to wonder if they would ever return. They returned with a vengeance, as they say, swelling the rivers and flooding much of the valley. I loved it of course. The rains reminded me of the tropical storms in Austin that would last for days. Sadly I found out that this meant that many, many trees here would be toppled, their roots unable to withstand the drenching they received.
This morning I had a job interview by Zoom call. I am spending the rest of the day combing through an old program I wrote that generates automatic conjugations of Spanish verbs. My ongoing hobby. I keep trying to bring this application to the world, and each time I get bogged down with the '"Front end" (the web site part). So this time I am not writing any front end at all. I am only doing the raw data mechanics. It is soothing, like the rain, to work on this.
I can't remember the last time I wrote you. Certainly it has been at least six months, and I barely feel like the same person as six months ago. I feel much more detached from the world. The election and its aftermath were rather traumatic. For a few months at the beginning of this year I was convinced that America as I knew it was over and lost.
I would love to write to you about all the weird things I have come to believe in the last few months, about America and the world, but in an email like this I would sound like a madman. You would be rightfully skeptical.
I have no American friends anymore with whom I correspond regularly. I have had an extended conversation with only one family member in the last year, who is 95 years old. We understand each other. One of my sisters is still polite to me. The other refuses to speak to me. We are going to be in the same YMCA camp in Colorado in two weeks, and yet I will not be able to see her or her family. So strong is her disapproval of me, and all that I represent.
The world feels so broken. Yet I am at peace with so much. I am not afraid of any virus, or any variant of a virus. I will not take a vaccine. I am ready to be denied all of the pleasures of the world because of that. I suspect that within a month, there will be calls to deny me access to basic food in grocery stores. I am ready for it.
I was inspired to write just now because of the news I have seen coming from France this morning. I see this news because I do not watch the "news" here in America, which would not show such things. They will show your president being greeted warmly at the Olympics, but not what is happening in the streets. I get all of my "news" from alternative channels, from people on Youtube who must speak in code. The word "jab" is now forbidden in referring to the vaccine. It will get you kicked off. So they speak of "vacation" instead. Likewise anything about election fraud must be in code words.
Of course I don't know where you are on this spectrum of belief. I know you prefer to remain detached from most worldly things, but in these days that seems very difficult.
I wonder where you are, and how you are doing, and how all the people I know and love are doing. I would send them all my love and regards. I would sit down with all of you and tell you frankly of the crazy things I have come to believe, and some would be shocked, and some might tell me they cannot abide me, that I am an --ist, or --phobe, or what have you.
I would describe how what I think is going to happen, in the near future, and what is playing out now, even here in Arizona, and in this county where I live, which seems to have been destined to be the epicenter of events that are playing out in massive scale, for the highest of stakes.
But I am just an onlooker, a nobody, a pawn. I prefer to be a pawn.
Someday I hope to come to Europe again. Right now I feel lucky to get to the neighboring state.
Yours with much love and warmth,
Matt
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