These days.
Hello, how are you? I’m fine. Considering everything. I can’t really sleep through the night, one of these days I’m going to crack another filling because of the constant clenching in my jaw. But I’m managing, you know, trying to grind out some sort of productive contribution at my day job and in my all the time job, the writing I’m supposed to be doing but am rarely able to do. But, you know, it’s okay. I would like to talk to Nero about fiddle lessons, but he’s not getting back to me. Though I’m not an emperor or anything. Lion food if anything, these days. I’m reading more than usual but enjoying it far less. I want to make a list, but of what?
I’m thinking about Chernobyl. When I was in college, Apollo 13 was my disaster of choice. Now it’s Chernobyl again, like during the earlier phases of the pandemic, before vaccines. Chernobyl, the slow-motion disaster, with its Exclusion Zone. American Democracy was put into service without a containment building. Well, we can’t Exclude this much Zone.
So the reactor is melting down and the higher-ups in the control room are still arguing and arguing about how it can’t be happening, scolding the operators who are running around with sheaves of papers in their hands, begging anyone with enough power to make a difference to stop the test, just stop the test. It’s all gone wrong.
And it’s hard, you know, these days, living in a runaway nuclear reactor. Did you know there are substances in the remains of Unit 4 at Chernobyl that don’t exist anywhere else in nature? That were created by the exploding and melting down of all that radioactive material, that glow and burn to themselves, to their heart’s content, way down there under all the lead and boron and sand, having absorbed all of that, turned into treacherous beauty. It’s too dangerous to get to them or explore them. So these mysteries are buried in layer after layer of the containment structures put into place after the fact, and we know they’re there, but they’re so deadly that we can’t get near enough to assuage the fell curiosity that makes us human in the first place.
But I was just doom-scrolling and—ruining the whole point of the endeavor in the first place—I saw a post from Wil Wheaton about how much he’s enjoying what he’s writing, how much he loves being a writer and a storyteller, and that made my stubborn heart beat faster for a minute, so that’s something, anyway.
Some writers still love writing, and the half-life of the fuel in the Chernobyl explosion is 24,000 years, and it hasn’t even been forty yet. It’s enough to make you want to keep going, these days.