Rancho Tarzanadu: "Heartbroken"

     

     Miss Linda felt completely and utterly heartbroken by the world and by her own human frailty and flaws. She was avoiding her Humanities homework to write this, and realized what a gigantic procrastinator she actually was, and most likely still is.

     The world was on fire…literally. What seemed like the entire state of California, most of Oregon, and parts of Washington were completely ablaze without hesitation or redemption. Miss Linda’s half-brother would say it was the “End of Times”, which drove Miss Linda bananas, and was completely not helpful at all during this particular moment in time. Everything smelled like smoke, and ashes were raining down from the broken sky. Pictures from San Francisco revealed an orange sky at 11:00 AM that looked like the middle of the night, if the middle of the night was bright orange…it did resemble Hell, Miss Linda had to admit with furrowed brow.

     Overlord L’Orange was caught on tape this week telling Bob Woodward that he knew the Covid-19 virus was deadly back in early February, but wanted to “play it down” to the public so the stock market wouldn’t crash (the real reason) and it would make him look better in the public’s collective unconscious eye. Later that day or the next (they’re all one big blur), he said that he was just trying to keep the public “calm”, which is completely ironic, because he loves to rile people up – that’s his schtick…he lives for it. He loves to tell the White Supremacists that “Antifa” is coming for their fancy houses in the suburbs to destroy them and eat them alive like cannibals. He loves to play up all the crime in the streets, caused by “wild-eyed Leftist Marxist Radicals” for example. Miss Linda could go on and on about all the ways the Overlord liked to stir up frenzy and chaos (kind of like the Antichrist would, if there was such a thing), but she was just too exhausted.

     She had witnessed her dear, sweet 95-year-old mother trip over a step (a small front porch step) and fall to her knees the day before, crying out like a wounded animal who just stepped into a sharp mawing trap, while Miss Linda scrambled to stop the fall and only partially succeeded. This broke her heart more than anything else that was happening in the world. It was her small, tiny world, and she was an animal, too. All of us wounded animals, isolated in our own cages, crying out, Miss Linda thought.

     The money was running out, too. Congress and the Senate could not agree on an appropriate amount of money to give the hungry masses, so they just gave them nothing instead. So many people could not go back to work (either because businesses were closed, or they were justifiably terrified of dying), but also could not find  new jobs, magically, in new fields…jobs of any kind were scarce! So…how do people buy food for example? Miss Linda wondered about this, too, and the horrible, very obvious (to most) tangible inequality in our “great” nation.

     Miss Linda had sushi waiting for her downstairs, which was a gift from one of her housemates. There was also cake (“Let them eat cake!”), because it was the German dog-trainer’s birthday today, September 11^th.

     September 11, 2020, and the world was literally on fire.

     All of this patchworked together, equaled heartbreak.

     But oddly, Miss Linda was so emotionally numb that she could not shed a tear over any of it.

     Then the tears would come out of the blue (or grey, or orange) sky while she was brushing her teeth, or watching a stupid comedy on Netflix attempting to distract herself from the misery of the world. The tears would come in a wild gushing burst, from the depths of her soul like an unclogged torrential geyser.

     She overheard her housemate downstairs talking about dog euthanasia (she also worked at an oncology pet hospital).

     Ugn.

     Too much.

     Miss Linda slumped downstairs to grab her sushi and a vodka cocktail…what else could she do?