THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 89

I am so bothered by doomerism these days. Doomers are people who are extremely fatalistic about global problems such as overpopulation, peak oil, climate change, ecological overshoot, pollution, nuclear weapons & technology. It is obviously a direct product of a certain kind of brain that is exposed to too much bad news. These days you don’t have to look for it, bad news is always following you around because that potential danger gets the clicks. If it bleeds, it leads. A big reason why I’m so tired of this is that I fell into that doomed feeling when I was a kid reading articles about AIDS, nuclear war, the hole in the ozone layer, Iran Contra, global warming & countless other negative things in the world. At some point it became really clear to me that life goes on & these existential crises were bad sure, existential for some but not for all & that these neat & tidy narratives were a distorted narcissistic desire to control. The thing is, bad things happen, there are bad things in the world, they need people countering them, but that’s a constant. That has been a constant since human consciousness & it has gotten concentrated with each variation on mass communication. I can remember distinctly living in Eugene, answering a knock on the door from some Jehovah’s Witnesses. Their tact is to give answers (via the Bible) to people’s questions. The thing is, I have no questions. I understand that reality just is. I’m very curious, but I know that the “big questions” are a delusion of the mind. I was plagued by those big questions when I was little, but it became very apparent to me that they were the ego trying to sort out its existence in the world. The two starchy, older men tried to sell me on the negative qualities in the world & I just told them to open their eyes & take in the neighborhood around them. Yes, it was shabby, some lawns needed to be trimmed, some bushes cut back, some homes repainted, the street repaved, but it was pleasant, it was a sunny day, the city wasn’t & had never been bombed, raided, burned to the ground or anything else & it was fine. The Jehovah’s Witnesses had no response for me, they agreed but they weren’t  prepared for my obvious observation. When I say this to people around me, they always bring up things that are happening somewhere else or that have happened in history. I’m not delusional or ignorant enough to ignore that I don’t live in some place that is actively being bombed or invaded or ignoring that the seasons have shifted & that extreme weather is more common (it hit 115 degrees fahrenheit in Portland a few years ago). Still, the news has made Portland out to be a hellhole. Portland definitely became uncute during the lockdown, but it has gone from shitty to shabby over the last couple years. Portland will probably come back in a new, fantastic enviable way, it will take a lot of work, but that’s what people do.