jelly bean boom

my first apocalypse was the vague sense i had that when i closed any door, the other side of that door changed to some sort of alien laboratory - that i was the only real human and was part of some alien experiment

mid 80s i lived in dread of nuclear war - the Day After really shook me and i would do marches when they happened

soon after that i was caught up in the AIDS crisis. in college in hattiesburg i had friends who were effected, but then the move to downtown NYC dropped me into ground zero of the AIDS scare, it was omnipresent and was background noise to almost any physical interaction

panic chilled out for most of the 90s

9/11 did anther job on me. i was in mid-city at the time but was psychically yanked back to NY as soon as i heard the news. I had broken up with my ex in the Spring - in fact i was living with someone else - but i could not get my ex and friends out of my mind. We reconciled about a month after 9/11 when i went up to visit. the tension in downtown NY was palpable. nerves seemed to be both jangly and sedated

then, of course, Katrina - still mostly a surreal experience for me - there are those stories of people who were married to spies and everything they thought they knew about life was put into question. that's what katrina was for me - everything i thought i knew about life (living in the city of new orleans) was called into question

and now Covid