It’s a beautiful June evening. The light is balanced at that magic moment where night and day are equal partners. Fireflies are rising at the fence line and in the distance, the peacocks blown in by a tornado a few years before are calling, a beautiful alien aria rising above the low and raucous racket of grandpa’s chickens in their ramshackle pens leaning in the woods just over the crest of the hill.
Dad left hours before, mouth tight, wearing his fatigues. In the house behind me, Mom is sitting in front of the TV, smoking, her cigarette a small, slowly moving orange-red point of light in the dark. Barefoot, I cross the damp, gem-green. I walk through the stand of young cedars — fallen needles poke my callused feet — and I go up to the point where the driveways split and one fork goes up the hill toward the TVA tower. I stop for a moment.
My legs seem to go away and it is as if I’m floating now. I walk on the gravel roadway to the top of the hill and to the north I see it, a slowly rising mushroom cloud, almost beautiful in the waning light. I freeze for just a moment. Then I turn and sprint, heedless of the gravel, the cedars — there is a terrible thunder that seems to roll and roll…
If you were born between 1965 and 1980, something about this waking nightmare, which I’ve recounted from memory, might seem familiar. If what I depicted was vivid, it’s only because it always lives in some dusty back room in my memory from the thousands of times I played it out when I was a kid. It’s on the wall in that back room, a poster that was dusty and dry with age but is now glossy and new again.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has wormed into that back room, shaken the dust off fearful visions, and restored them to life, the same way a digital artist might refine and process old film back to its original technicolor brilliance.
I can’t be alone in feeling this old anxiety shake itself awake. I’m sure I’m not. I’m self-conscious about it, of course. It feels absurdly self-dramatizing. But an aggressive, irrational Russia immediately awakens a Gen Xer’s sense of threat, of ambient danger. Like some disease we thought was in remission flaring up with crippling potency.
And following the COVID-19 pandemic? It’s like a new virus, a slow tightening band around the chest. Churning in the guts.
We still don’t know what will happen. In fact, for all the prognosticating out there, no one truly knows what World War III would really look like. It could be a buildup to a very quick and horrific end, with children everywhere standing in fields watching the way I imagined myself all those years ago. It could be a brutal slog, with all sides in a state of attrition, every leader’s finger hovering over the nuclear trigger as the ultimate final result.
In early March 2020, my friend Kyle and I were driving to rehearsal for a show we were doing and he asked me — he was about my oldest kid’s age, 26, at the time — if the unfolding coronavirus crisis, soon to be a pandemic, was like anything I’d experienced before. I looked up at the wooded hills by the interstate. I remember lights flashing on a water tower. “No,” I said, “I want to say yes. But no. It’s new.”
He’s a generally chipper guy, good at conversation, but we were quiet for a while after that.
This is as close as the world has come in my lifetime to what they taught us was the ultimate human-made disaster when I was a kid. I want to stop thinking about it, but I can’t. Somewhere in my head, that kid is still sprinting through the fading June sunlight with the terrible thunder behind, wanting only to be with my mom for one more moment before the shockwave hits.
Note: I decided that if I tried to adhere to my original remit for this newsletter (it’s a blog, y’all. Substack is blogging. But I’ll go with the currently accepted nomenclature, fine) I would put myself in a neurotic state that ensured I didn’t update the damn thing on a regular basis. And that’s something I very much want to do. So While I’m certainly going to pick up threads I’ve already started, like Mr. 3X — a story that really needs to be told — I’m going to follow my muse, whatever the hell that means. Otherwise, I’ll feel artificially restricted, and part of the point for me in having this at all is being able to do it entirely on my own. It might, like the blogging 18 years ago that led to me becoming a professional writer, turn into a single-subject thing, but I’m not promising. I’m only saying it’ll be updated and I’m too much of an entertainer at heart to not want to make this readable, regardless of what I’m talking about. The nice thing is “Obsessions and Digressions” totally still applies. This has been your Digression for this episode of the newsletter.