Folks, I'm not dead.

I just took a day off.

Maybe you don't realize this, but I've been online continuously for more than a month now without a break. Sixteen, eighteen hours per day, EVERY day. And it's the same shit, every damn day, one thing furiously after another.

1/

At this point, the train hasn't just jumped the tracks, it's on fire, filled with screaming circus clowns energetically honking their little horns and squirting their seltzer bottles with their bowties spinning in mad panic, careening downhill, over a crowded highway...

2/

...through a hospital filled with running orphans who have all tested positive for the virus, and into the river, where it rolled over and exploded raining down red hot metal and burning clowns and bloody gobbets of diseased orphan across the countryside for miles around.

3/

So, I took a day off.

As a writer, you can't do anything original or creative, because every day there's ANOTHER emergent insane crisis. As previously noted, it's starting to feel like being on deployment after all the fresh produce has run out.

4/

LOOK at the attached message. LOOK at it. If that was your grandfather you'd be taking away his keys and his shoelaces and looking for an in-patient facility.

Instead, America gave this lunatic control of all the nuclear weapons. I mean, FUCK! Just ... fuck.

5/

And that's EVERY DAY around here.

It wears on you after a while.

Also, if Trump was your grandfather, then your dad would be Eric or Don Jr. and Dread Cthulhu have mercy on your soul.

But I digress.

6/

I took a day off.

Shit gonna be here tomorrow and you can't deal with this Republican Alternate Reality TV bullshit, endless doom, booger eating insanity, and an unending fire hose of hate in your face, all day, every day, without it affecting your mental health.

7/

I'm not dead. I'm not ill. I'm not insane or pissed off. I don't got the PTSD or the virus. I just took a day off, that's all.

I'm probably going to take the rest of today off too.

8/

I've got some trees to plant in the yard and I've got a short story, a sequel of sorts to The Deserter, to finish. So, I'm going to go do that and I'll be back when I get back.

I suggest that some of you, all of you, maybe take a day off from the internet too.

9/

You need to turn this thing off once in a while and go outside. Especially now, in this time of crisis and plague and manufactured insanity. Go do something you enjoy. Trust, me, you can use the break.

AND WASH YOUR DAMN HAND AFTERWARDS.

See you in a bit.

10/10