Dog Days of January (?)

The retired lawyer stared at his computer screen, not as a retired lawyer but as a blocked writer trying to push through the final chapters of what might be his final novel.  He was, after all, retired, seventy-six years old, and dealing with Parkinson's, a disease that, in the retiree's opinion, was getting a lot of mistaken and possibly more-harm-than-good media attention. 

The ex-lawyer struggled with plot movement.  He couldn't figure out how to creatively move his characters to the next chapter.  He knew where the characters would land, eventually, and he felt okay about that, but he couldn't construct the literary device that would accomplish that goal. 

At the same time, he worried that the days and nights of his winter existence folded into one another at the speed of a frozen blizzard racing into Denver with climate change energy.  Time waited for no one, he gratuitously reminded himself, and the vaporous awareness of his mortality crept into his seventy-six years old bones and ninety years old guts and one hundred years old creaking neck.  But nothing stirred within him to solve the lack of movement, regardless of the urgency inherent in the process of solution. 

Disasters exploded to his left and right.  

To the west, California burned without pause, and bright entertainment stars usually untouched by mundane issues of survival found themselves on the six o'clock news talking about community and rebuilding and resilience.  How else could they prove that their anguish and pain were real and not post-production problems to be fixed with a good editor.  The lawyer watched the news, which suddenly had become old, and he realized he watched the future unfold on his big screen smart device, sponsored by appeals on behalf of big pharma's snake oil miracle tonic.

To the east, the disaster known as Trump eagerly prepared to ascend his Olympus where he would proclaim himself son of Zeus immediately before he created fires of his own and slashed the universe with his maga sword of greed, hatred, idiocy, and contempt for all those unable or unwilling to accept their fate. 

And yet, his characters remained in the computer, immobile, stiff, lacking substance.  They had no response to the disasters.  There was no easy inspiration in nightmares. 

It would be a long night.