Stop imagining the apocalypse

Build the world you want to live in now

A friend of mine dropped dead from a heart attack yesterday.

It was the hard slap in the face I needed. Really. I’ve been sitting in my bungalow, feeling sorry for myself for goddess knows how long. I have 1,500 unread emails, hundreds of Messenger and Instagram messages. At some point this year, I fully committed to quiet-quitting from this mess. I just scroll through the dozens of Substack notifications on the daily. Leave everything unread. That’s when I realized that I was spiraling HARD.

If I, a former journalist, news junkie and overall glutton-for-punishment, have stopped reading, then who could I fathom is still not checked out?

I decided the hell with Substack, the hell with this American nightmare, the hell with all of it. I thought maybe I should compile some of my old poetry, because we still read poems when we are sad.

I was going to do that during my two-week stunt as an overnight dog sitter later this month. Then my client called and said her dog died. Which nearly broke me. Sad for the dog, sad for my client, sad for myself.

I went into an epic nervous breakdown. Classic, old-fashioned existential crisis stuff. I went all in with a box of discounted rosé. It felt really good to sit with my sadness. I made a few phone calls and sent a bunch of texts to former lovers, friends. Called my mom. Jesus, I called my mom. If y’all had any idea how bad things have to get for me to call my mother? It was a shitshow of epic proportions.

I cried myself to sleep, eventually.

When I awoke, while having my first cup of coffee and cigarette of the morning after We Almost Died, I found a text from one of my best friends telling me his girlfriend had died. Randomly, while mowing her grass. Just dropped dead at 48 in her front lawn.

If there was a faster recovery from a hangover in the history of the world, I am not aware of it. His text jumped out of my phone and gave me a strong punch to the left chin.

Besides shaking one’s hangover loose in a split second, the other thing that an early death of a friend does is to shake any inkling of romanticism you may or may not have had about the early death of your own.

I cannot emphasize this enough.

Once you see young people die young for no good reason at all, you just get committed to being an old, spiteful crone who is a pain in everyone’s side. You just do. Those are the rules. I didn’t make them, I just observe.

So, my friend died at 48, from a sudden heart attack, which is why I am compelled to write the blog post I resisted writing for 18 months.

The infamous, “What can we do?” post.

In Allison’s memory, I have to say that the number one thing you have to do right now is build community. Get to know your neighbors. Get to know the charities and activists who are dedicated to serving community.

In the last year and a half, I was resentful of folks who turned to community gardening, only because I ran a community gardening program for three years and couldn’t find volunteers to save my gardens. I am now letting go of that bitterness, too. You wanna grow some food? Great! I’ll send you the 11 locations in our hometown. I’d be happy research for gardens that are in other parts of the world, too. Just message me. I promise I’ll respond.

Oh my goddess, dahlinks, kittens, comrades… please, for the love of fairies in the garden, please do something… We have this one timeline. We gotta try to save it.

Also, don’t hoard resources. Sharing is caring & that’s how we create the world we want to see.

That’s it. Love harder, practice real mutual aid and solidarity (not charity) and we may just make it. Maybe.