Three years ago, standing in the ruins of the Roman Forum, centuries of sediment rising around you, each layer besting the one below, you wondered how such grandeur could now be rubble. You wondered where your own nation lay in its own timeline of rising and falling. Were the barbarians at the gates? Was Caesar crossing the Rubicon or Augustus proclaiming himself a god? In Greek plays, hubris brought down kings.

Will today be the Last Day, the Final Day, the Before before the After?

Tomorrow the transition will sort itself out. Tomorrow will be the unity of time in the Greek tragedy that could end with the divine justice brought on by the king’s hubris. Something will happen, and you wonder if this is what living in some crisis of the Roman Empire or the Weimar Republic felt like. You’ve wondered this for longer than the past four years.

You don’t so much worry about yourself, up here on your suburban hill in your lily white neighborhood where everyone holds on economically and puts Black Lives Matter and Democratic candidate signs out in their yards (with the exception of the one white family down the street, with their giant Trump flag and their Black child). You worry about your aunt down in Louisiana, one of the few people in her upscale neighborhood who puts out Biden/Harris signs. She has to take them in at night now because they have disappeared, stolen. Her Democratic friends warn her not to put them up anyway because they make her a target. You worry about the BIPOC-majority neighborhoods in this, one of the most segregated cities in the U.S. You have visions of Tulsa and Springfield and Rosewood and all the places that burned for being Black. You worry what will happen to a lot of people in the next month.

This nation has always struggled to actually be “of the people, by the people, for the people” and to realize “all men [and women and intersexed and non-binary and just plain human beings] are created equal.” That concept more than geography or ethnicity or religion or any other feature has defined the United States as a nation. The central conflict in our nation has been manifesting those ideals — and defining how they actually look in the world — since the reality began in slavery, misogyny, and genocidal dispossession.

You have wanted to be radical in your life, but ultimately your middle-class upbringing has always planted you squarely in some area of liberalism, pragmatic and progressive-leaning with questions about the means of accomplishing goals and cautious about radicalism eating its own. You wonder at the reasons that liberal has become a slur in some people’s minds, both right and left. Liberalism, one that embraces social liberalism and rejects the neo-liberalism of capitalism, wants a better life for everyone, and society cannot be better or safer or smarter or enduring or beautiful if everyone is not fed and educated and can earn a decent living and be well and not worry that the people who are supposed to protect them are actually preying on them. That means that people actually have to care about one another as classes of people, as part of the “us” of the United States and the world.

People show a shocking naivety when they expect the one candidate to solve everything. You advise your activist students on this when they attack potential or actual allies as if the allies are enemies. You have to look at the direction someone is facing or could be persuaded to face. In a presidential election, voters get two choices regardless of whatever third-party candidates appear on their ballots. Whatever way a person votes, they will have to live in a world with one or the other. The question comes down to the direction that candidate faces or could face.

Trump has always faced totalitarianism. He himself is an authoritarian, but the Republican Party has either actively or passively allowed him to set up a system (to be fair, pieces were already there, but they cranked all up to eleven) that creates totalitarianism. The Democrats may have extensive flaws — ask any BIPOC person — but they, right now, face in the correct direction. They still maintain that core belief — hope — vision — “of the people, by the people, for the people,” and “all [humans] are created equal.” They are the last wall against totalitarianism right now. You feel so naive yourself in thinking this. You teach U.S. history enough to know that the moral arc of the universe does not bend toward justice. That’s usually an optical illusion. Still…this year has taught you your limits, and this is one.

The totalitarians have the reins of government at this moment, and they have no intention of handing them over. As far as they are concerned, a Trump victory is a foregone conclusion and the election is merely a formality that they are fixing in order to maintain the façade of legitimacy. You thought that this would all happen two years ago. Here it is now.

What shall become of us all?

Will this be the Final Day of the Republic?

Some time has passed and you realize that you have not asked yourself “why am I still alive?” Indeed, you have long stretches of time in which you feel not so bad in being alive. You chalk this up to your incredible skills of denial. The future, after all, remains unimaginable and without hope.

You allow yourself to research more than you ever have before during the semester. You let it become the productive procrastination. You let it occupy your thoughts as you jog. Indeed, jogging has shifted to the point at which you no longer feed the body dysmorphia so much as you feed your mood. You feel like you live in your own body again, rather than a blob. Now that you think about it, with these two parts together, researching makes you feel like you are in your own mind, too. In the evenings, falling into a serial t.v. show or doing a puzzle with the Eminent Historian or reading an absorbing novel makes you feel you are in your own mind, as well, just another part.

This is now, and you can jump from one to the other in seconds.

The program running in your background is teaching — online teaching, which is to say grading. Constant grading of the same answers to the same assignments, making the same comments, with no hope of making any dent in anything except this constant grading. It’s an assembly line, followed by constant e-mails from students who couldn’t upload this or (for this you are truly sympathetic) have horrible crises at home, or (for this you are not sympathetic) do not follow instructions. All of which ends up in assignments in three different places, and troubleshooting the online platform, and adjusting due dates and accommodations, and having to remember what for whom and where, and your emotions drain and drain and drain.

You do this with e-mails dropping into your in-box offering funds for “racial justice” initiative, just not for you or your classes or anything you do. They are only for the newly “woke,” those who just discovered racism exists and maybe they can address it in their classes. Fuck all of those who already do that, who aren’t noticed as doing that in the first place. This is where you wonder, “what am I for?” This is the type of thing that ruins what little time you feel you have left in the world.

So, when you can, you ignore that pile of grading. You research. Or work in the yard. Or research. Or go for a jog. Or research. You enjoy the time left.

Seconds, not decades, has kept you from freaking out. Perhaps someone else might term it denial. Perhaps your therapist would. Then, again, one of your past therapists said that a little denial is good, necessary to get through life. You, right now, balance between the two interpretations.

The online conference went well. Your performance came in at just under the alotted 15 minutes, your pace calm but energetic, your ability to look into the camera enhanced by having the paper on the screen just below the camera’s eye. The Famed Ivy-League Historian also brought up your work repeatedly in his paper, reminding you how generous he is, but also making you feel intelligent, influential, as if your work had shifted someone else’s point of view on the topic.

You had a brief moment of embarrassment when, in lieu of Q&A, the chair of the panel asked your panel to comment generally. You ended up like a deer in the headlights and bumbled your way toward something beyond sounding like a fool. Then, almost no one but that Famed Ivy-League Historian, mentioned your paper again, all praising one another. Not until one of your co-panelists, himself an important scholar, wrote to you to say that you had changed his thinking with your paper did the thought occur to you that all of these guys (and, with one exception, they were guys) worked within the framework of the same ideas. They had similar conversations and debates and built upon one another’s work.

You, on the other hand, walked in as the token woman’s rights representative (bookending the conference panels with the other female participant who did not talk about woman’s rights), and discussed politics and political engagement in entirely different terms, challenging a given narrative that they all generally accepted as an add-on to the story, not an integral part. Your newness, meant that they would have to think awhile, integrated what you said (or ignore it, whatever). In any case, you felt more confident about what you do as the scrappy Cinderella-story from the off-brand degree program at the school no one has heard of. You felt buoyed.

So, you spent two days working on your book. No, you spent two days torn between avoidance of grading, which piled up, and desire to work on the book. You enjoy working on the book, so you feel guilty when you do work on it, especially during the school year when the grading and course preparation and e-mails pile up and you so desperately resent all of that, moreso when getting paid less for more work (as the college trumpets record enrollment!) and ignores the work that you have always done, privileging shiny new or job training, preferably both. Ultimately, you settled on the book because that would mean the weekend would not become a total loss.

This book is supposed to be a biography, but the nature of the subject means that it cannot follow the rules of a traditional biography. Whereas the last book started with your biographical subject, and built out from there, this one has an absence where the subject and many of the formative figures around her should be. Like you always said about the mother of your previous subject, “there is a her-shaped hole in the narrative,” you want to get a better sense of the shape of its shape and contents. You end up world building, which brings you back to your original study of history in grad school, or even back in the Bicentennial when you were a child visiting Williamsburg. Only now, the awfulness of that harassing and mean-spirited advisor, the sociopath liaisons, the insecurities of that period of time, have become gremlins, weak and chained and near-death but for the memory of them. The joy and curiosity of a world so different from now that captured you initially carries you forward, only now you understand and revel in the complexity and ambiguity.

What makes you sad, then? The news, for one — that’s a whole other, rage-filled series of posts that may require the pronoun “I.” For this, this semi-private, professional, personal milieu, you look at the time. When you turned 40 — no, earlier than that, around 37 or 38, but definitely 40 — you began to feel time getting shorter. Some people probably feel that for children, but you felt it for doing things that you wanted to do in life. Since then, you have done many of those things. Life improved since 40, markedly! Then, you had a shift again, you felt that shortening time, after your father died, and you now in your fifties. You did not want to waste energy or time on things that did not matter. You haven’t gotten over that feeling, nor been fully able to integrate it into your life. (No, be fair to yourself, you began.) Now this, the feeling that the world will end shortly, that the republic will end, that your job will end, that — as you heard put so succinctly — we are all in an extinction crisis has put you back in that place.

Time isn’t just short. It is damn near over.

You would rather spend it doing the things that make you feel good, and appreciated, and happy, and well right now. Writing a book seems like an act of hope, creating something for the future. That’s not the reason you find joy in it. You enjoy it because it is, essentially, an escape and creative. The puzzle of research is fun. Now. So, when you have to turn down other research projects — two, now — because you can barely manage the one contracted one because of the damn teaching. You feel sad. You damn the teaching because you get so little intrinsic joy out of it, what little joy there was has been all but eliminated, and it seems to have no purpose in the absence of any sense of future or appreciation from either students or administrators. Only the paycheck and the schedule that does allow for some time to research.

So, you shirk the grading and preparation to do the research because the rest seems not to matter except to keep other people — happy is not quite the word, — to meet other people’s unhappy requirements.

You just had a thought: you should invent one of those internet-social-media games: based on your behavior now, who would you be in the Great Plague? You would like to be one of the story-tellers in the Decameron.

This moment. This moment. This moment.: This strategy puts you in mind of this scene from Season 2 of Umbrella Academy. Throughout both season, Five had leapt through time over decades, finding and causing much mayhem. Here, himself on death’s doorstep, he remembers a suggestion — from his own older-but-really-younger-by-two-weeks self, if I remember correctly — to try leaping in “seconds, not decades.”

This slow, tiny, hopping is the way you visualize yourself, now, moving through your day, resolving your conundrum. You can manage being in this moment, doing this thing, not thinking about the future; but life demands that you think, look, forward to the next thing and the thing after that and the thing next week, causing you panic. So, how do you get from now to then without collapsing? Like Five: “by seconds, not decades.” Think of yourself as leaping from this task to that; or, rather, non-think of yourself leaping from this task to that.

In a moment of synchronicity, which wasn’t so magical because the whole world pretty much is finding themselves in the state of despair, you came across a New York Times article on resiliency. They seem to be doing a series of articles on the topic. This one — oh, lord, it’s the FB algorithm spiders, isn’t it? — this one showed up in your feed — the fuckers! (What would Carl Jung do with social media?) The author said roughly the same thing, just less whimsically. She got herself and her children through a traumatic experience by not thinking beyond the present. (Of course, you now cannot find the article, so who knows how old it was.) Her experience became a means of growing stronger and enabling her to manage this present crisis and she argued for seeing crises as means of developing coping mechanisms.

Well, yes and that conclusion also seems like the simplistic, upbeat conclusion for a popular publication. The article also ended with a list of traits that mark people as being more resilient. Anyone reading this can already guess that they included the exact same checklist for modern-day, well-adjusted happiness that could be dropped into any self-help article. You hate those lists because you seldom can check anything off on them and, as a result, feel like you are a failure. They feel like yet more things that you have to do and you are just tired of chasing that trophy even as some inner magnet seems to pull you toward them.

Still, you were with her up to that list.

You also wonder — and your shrink raised this question — if your own coping mechanisms have more been to escape than to develop that resiliency. As a child, you read to escape, not to learn things or develop a critical eye or anything deeply intellectual. You wanted a safe way out of the screaming conflict of your home. You turned to literature and then to history because they seemed routes out of the miserable here and now.

Here and now always catches up to you.

Your mind has blocked off the future as a reality after a certain point, or turns it into a dystopian hellscape that paralyzes you, because you cannot deal with a potentially world-ending level of uncertainty. You cannot deal because you feel powerless and your reaction to feeling powerless has always been to find an escape route, to make a contingent plan, and then a contingent plan for the contingent plan, and there seems no way to make a contingent plan these days.

So you freak out.

So you concentrate on this moment and try to make leaps by seconds, not decades.

Time to make a leap.

The day progresses. You write a little. Go for a walk that becomes a run. Go to the grocery store. Write a little more. Somewhere in there you feel yourself gathering calm and concentration. You realize the key catalyst involved the absence of a computer. (Is that a catalyst? A catalyst would work the other way. The computer catalyzes the anxiety.)

Without the computer, outside, elsewhere, your brain unclenches, stops that tense shivering frenzy. Somewhere in the baked goods section you find yourself able to see a cake, appreciated the cake, not even want to eat the cake, just enjoy the general cakeness of the cake and the pretty icing colors and the momentary enjoyment of cake. How silly to enjoy the existence of cake! How wonderful to feel silly! How alive to feel silly!

So, you try again. “Under Pressure” on the sound system. You open yourself to the groove, knowing that it might open you to emotions that make you cry, but you open yourself to that. You feel the beat, “coming down on you…lovelovelovelove….” How silly to be jamming in the middle of the grocery story next to the Instapots, waiting for the Eminent Historian to return with Teriyaki sauce! How alive to feel silly!

This moment. This moment. This moment.

Earlier that morning you had patrolled the yard. The sun not entirely above the treeline left much of the back, by the thicket, in shadow. No socks, tenny shoes, spooky-story podcast still in your mind, dark undergrowth, made good companions for a mood that asked “why are you alive?” You stepped on a soft spot, a divot of deeper grass, and felt your death.

What does that mean? You aren’t sure exactly, but those words came to you, or the sense of those words. A sense of a grave and being on its edge. A sense of dark, damp earthiness. You weren’t sure how you felt about it, but you weren’t quite ready for it, yet. You just don’t want to feel this way. That much you are sure you know.

This moment. This moment. This other silly moment that made you feel this side of that death.

You again wonder what hope is. When you were younger, you rejected the concept of hope as a fool’s errand, a thing that people clung to in the absence of action, in helplessness. You felt that you had to reject it to force yourself to act. “Fuck hope!” you told yourself, “hope is dreaming. Do something.” So, you did. Hope remained dreaming in your cosmological dictionary.

You listen to a podcast, With Friends Like These, hosted by Ana Marie Cox, a recovering alcoholic herself. She talks about hope as an action. You began listening to her in the past two or three years — since the last election. (Time moves strangely for you, the older you get.) For some reason, hope seemed necessary since then. Maybe not “hope,” but something like it. Something that keeps you on this side of the grave. Something that keeps you moving in something resembling a forward motion (and maybe the fatal flaw is the idea of “forward motion”). The idea of hope as an action fit with your “fuck hope” ideology.

She interviewed author Eva Hagberg this week who told of a friend who, on her deathbed, still had hope. “How?” Hagberg wanted to know. “Hope is the now,” the dying friend said. Well, that’s a twist.

Then, again, maybe not.

This moment. This moment. This silly moment. This keeps you on this side of the grave. This is also what kept you sober for a year and change. This is what kept you wanting to be on this side of the grave and wanting to be sober for a year and change (ok, wanting for most of that year, the last few months have had their challenges). This action of inaction, of concentration, of calm, like in meditation or the right kind of yoga in which you have to pay attention to unclench. You have to pay attention to now.

This summer of fury, frustration, worry, more fury, all of the worst parts of your work, all of the things you feel that you have earned that now feel snatched or devalued, the binaries and meanness (even from people preaching – no, demanding! — empathy), felt like a room getting smaller and smaller and smaller. Why were you alive?

You still ask that. Why are you still alive? The hope, the thing that keeps you on this side of the grave is the moment.

But, here is the conundrum: you cannot think about the future at all or the moment collapses. The future can be as soon as finishing this post, as soon as this afternoon. The future can be next week, or next month. You really have a hard time thinking that anything after the election exists. Next year does not exist in any form in your head, and when the Eminent Historian in his optimism says something like, “maybe we can go to Greece,” or “maybe we can finally do those research trips,” you find that thought far more depressing than what will more likely happen and what will more likely happen makes you ask why you would still be alive. (Except not to be alive would hurt him beyond reason, and you also do want to be with him and never hurt him that way.)

Yet, you HAVE to think about some future. You have to grade. You have to finish this paper for this Zoom conference on Thursday and Friday. You have to grade. You have to prepare for class. You have to grade. You have to write this review. You have to grade. You have to write this peer review. You have to grade. You have to answer these e-mails. You have to grade. You have to grade. You have to grade and grade and grade because online teaching is all about the grading and very little about helping students understand the subject. All of these put you in front of the computer, all of these make you feel dread, and all of these force you think of the future. The future heightens the sense of futility and pointlessness of all of it, which steals the moment and any concept of hope.

That. That is the conundrum. You don’t know why you feel this way, what about you, with no children, no dependents, no nothing to add to this, drives you into deeper despair than anyone else you know. You don’t know how not to be this way because every time you try not to be this way and think you have succeeded, you find the conundrum and end up right back in despair and feeling a failure as a human being. Yet, here you are. Looking for the moment.

“There is no hope and the future sucks!” you joke. Actually, you kid on the square because humor keeps you from losing your damn mind. Like in the wake of your father’s death, you rather wish you could lose your damn mind. The idea of it seems relieving but for the inconvenience and, worse, distress that your mindless damnation would cause the Eminent Historian and others.

You are also rather shocked at how humor places such a cushion around your mind that even you cannot tell how much of it is lost and how much of it is real. What is kidding and what is square?

After you write that, you have to leave to meet a colleague for socially-distanced coffee. On the way, a sense of grief wells up. You want to cry. Why do these moments always come when you are driving, and you so seldom drive anymore? Because they are the moments when you actually have solitude, and you so seldom have real solitude anymore.

When you have the solitude, the resistance lifts. The need to appear not so bad, the “kidding” to reassure that the “square” isn’t so sharp recedes. Unfortunately, driving must occupy your attention. Then, you arrive at the coffee shop.

This incident is relevant in that the conversation over socially-distanced coffee further reveals the invisibility and devaluing of faculty whose work is completely relevant to current events. Once again you are caught in the gray area between the 1 and the 0 of a binary.

A staff member, recently-hired and recently-appointed to be Co-Head of Diversity Whatever, told faculty that their research and teaching on matters about race don’t matter, that they need to take bias-training seminars and educate themselves on race,. For thirty minutes. In a faculty meeting. Where she was not on the agenda. Then, she sent out various “woke” articles from popular, unvetted websites that half of the faculty could have written as undergraduates. When the faculty of color, and the faculty who do teach and research about race, objected, they were told, in so many words, to be quiet.

When those same faculty tried to apply for newly-appropriated funds to further their teaching and research, they were told that the newly-appropriated funds (let’s not forget that this is in a year when you are all taking a pay cut, receiving no contributions to retirement, and have been told that, crisis or not, your health benefits are on the chopping block) will only go to such 101 types of initiative as starting a group to read White Fragility or the work of Ibram X. Kendi (who, by the way, does not cite scholars — some of whom work at your college — on whose research he bases his conclusions).

In other words, all diversity initiatives and money go toward the newly-woke, and you can’t say anything critical because everyone is so WOKE and you are supposed to pat them on the head and give them cookies for being WOKE. Meanwhile, everyone who has something to contribute are all ignored, so much so that when the Office of Communications puts out a statement on something so simple as Juneteenth or the death of John Lewis, they don’t think “hey, we have a history department, maybe someone down there teaches U.S. history and might know a little something about this.” Instead, they go to one of the Heads of the Diversity Whatever. Neither of whom are historians nor know anything accurate about either. This, after being told to shut up when pointing out that the students who protested lack of classes on race or African American history were factually wrong.

By the way, their leader admittedly knows those classes exist and has actively avoided taking them. Their leader said this to your colleague as she sat in your colleague’s office complaining about the lack of the very same classes that your colleague teaches. “I teach that class,” you colleague, who is not white, told the student. “Sign up for it.” The student did not.

The binary here for faculty means falling into either the college-sanctioned Diversity Whatever, regardless of expertise in the subject, or the Nice White Object of the Diversity Whatever. You are either one of about three people that the Administration likes because you will tell them what they want to hear, or you are part of a newly-woke white mass waiting to receive, willing to simultaneously self-flagellate and self-congratulate. You can’t be a scholar with expertise on which anyone could draw.

But that was more than you wanted to write about that. That was a venting. Going home you felt less alone, but more demoralized. The philosopher Head of Diversity Whatever you have worked with. She knows better than this. She knows the faculty and what they do. Yet, she goes along with this assumption that all the faculty are of a type and doesn’t see how those who don’t fit that type are more and more infuriated that their lives’ work gets shunted aside and ignored except for those students who actually do take your classes.

The administration sees you as skilled labor whom they suffer because of the skill, yet they know nothing about nor see the added value of that skill to the institution. The vast majority of students see faculty as an impediment to their futures, unless they are in your majors, then they learn how little the majors are valued unless they involve business or the professional school. The activist students don’t even bother to find out if the classes exist, and then they reverse engineer a reason that faculty are a problem to cover their lack of research. And you can’t help but wonder if the students might respect faculty more as experts in our field if the administration showed us more respect as experts in our field.

You start to wonder what the point of remaining sober might be. You start to wonder what the point of education might be if all you do is grade freshman papers and fight with Canvas all week. You start to wonder what the point of gaining expertise in a field might be if the people you work for don’t recognize it, if the white guy (in spite of his own efforts to help you) gets the credit, if doing anything less than radical puts a target on your back, if voting will not matter because Trump will not leave office, if fascism and authoritarianism and anti-intellectualism have become virtues that have allowed a faction to gain enough power to hold on, if the last best hope of the future lay in the survival of a frail, 87-year old, cancer-ridden, brilliant woman.

And, now she’s gone.

There is no hope. The future is doomed.

Your dad always said the anticipation was worse than the experience. Actually, he quoted Shakespeare, “Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once.” You understood what he meant, but never could change yourself.

In this case, the beginning of the semester proved much less stressful than its potential. The build-up of planning, changes in plans, adjustment of plans, confusing schedules, anxiety about woker-than-thou students all smoothed as the small size of each class meeting, of each grading batch, became a reduced reality, not a quadrupled nightmare. As for the woker-than-thou students, once you began talking, you realized just how balls-to-the-wall, grown-up, been-there-done-that, forgot-more-than-they-have-yet-learned you actually are. Goddamn, that felt strong! Two weeks down.

On the first day back, too, you returned home to the Eminent Historian and his visiting daughter commemorating your year of sobriety. They had a small cake, a card, Elderflower and Rose Lemonade soft drinks, and a year chip on order. As the young folks say, you felt “seen.”

Still, everyday you feel yourself on a rollercoaster of emotion, especially of the last month. Partly you feel a cellular-level memory of Dad’s death, a pocket of pure grief, guilt, and regret. You feel, too, your mother slipping. You can’t go see her. You fear that you will turn on the television and see your brother among the militia, and you feel somehow responsible for that. You feel like a Puritan: inherently depraved, and you feel hopelessly sad. The changing seasons feels less a relief, as it always has, and more a sense of time passing too quickly. You feel as if you are trying to hold water.

You try to ride the depression, as if you would a roller coaster. You used to say “float in the feeling” to yourself, but riding it feels more appropriate these days. Riding is forward, right? Yet, you can’t really see much to hope for. You can’t really see a future. Next month seems like a possibility, next year a fantasy, beyond that? An impossibility. Or perhaps this year has been so horrible that you don’t want to think about a future for fear that it could be worse.

Now that the intensity of anticipating the semester has relented, you at least find your ability to find moments of appreciation here and there. The children next door putting out their Halloween decorations and creating imaginary friends from the blow up creatures, or the little girl having a picnic amid the witch and skeleton parts scattered about the Styrofoam headstones. The old-timey feeling of listening to a webcast of a play reading while spinning. The genuine sweetness of the Eminent Historian and his daughter, together and individually. A walk on the canal and forgetting everything but that for a minute. A puzzle.

The future makes you miserable. So does the past. Before, you have rejected hope as a false and painful god. Yet, you still had it. Now, you wonder. What is hope? A thing for younger people, you thing. How do you act without it when you aren’t ready to die?

You suppose you are finding out. For one, you aren’t getting drunk!

Today begins your teaching for the fall. You sit here in anticipation, a bit like the upward climb on the first big hill of a roller coaster at a dubious travelling carnival. The other side might not have passed inspection and the beams might be rotten.

Already, freshman have innundated you with e-mails, having misinterpreted your general instruction to indicate their class and meeting time when they contact you as a command to send you a message right now indicating their class and meeting time. At least you know how they think and which ones anxiously plan to do well.

Somewhere along the way, in juggling three different schedules — the T half of classes, the Thursday half of classes, the classes that meet on even numbered weeks, and the classes that meet on odd numbered weeks — you mixed up even and odd numbered in a document. Two students alerted you to that, so you had to do a quick fix. By “quick” you mean find the document. Find the mistake. Fix it in its program. Scan for other mistakes. Save as its program. Save as a pdf. Remove the original file from Canvas. Replace with new file. Move new file to correct place in sequence of files for the week. By “quick” you mean about 15 minutes for each class.

Nothing is “quick” online. Everything requires multiple steps.

Mo’ technology, mo’ problems was the first draft of the lyric, you are certain.

You remember the days when all of your preparation for class went into learning more material, devising new ways to present it. You remember that you enjoyed the use of powerpoint as a visual supplement, but most of the work went toward the material. Now, the majority of your time goes towards demands for ever more detailed powerpoints, and more and more of this Canvas crap.

“Easily accessible,” you have actually learned, is really the new, “file it away in a cabinet and forget about it.”

So, now you must get dressed — easily the most creative thing you will have done in a week (aside from knitting a Phrygian cap while watching old movies in the evenings) — go to campus, loaded down with books, find the cleaning supplies that you forgot to pick up last week when they did a mass distribution (again, your mistake), hope that everyone got to the right class at the right time, and get them all oriented.

You just learned that you can’t bring coffee into the classroom.

Take bets on when you snap like a dried-out twig. When, why, and will it come before we all end up all online?

You put your own money on the week of September 21: first assignments and therefore first rounds of grading due, online conference and therefore Zoom and preparations for conference due, book review due the next week, along with next round of grading due.

You are a ticking bomb of unfocused resentment, waiting to go off.

A year ago today you stopped drinking. Back then, a year seemed a long time to go. Back then, you did not know what a year you would be facing. In retrospect, it wasn’t as bad as losing your father; and, in retrospect, it was probably best that you quit when you did. Otherwise, you would most certainly have the problems that you anticipated when you stopped.

You definitely would have started day drinking. At work. That still sounds like a good idea that is really not a good idea.

In all honesty, the chips kept you going at first, partly. The sense of not being alone and of being among other women who were imperfect also kept you going, but the chips were like gold stars and you have always liked gold stars. Chips are little, Mardi Gras doubloon type coins marking your time. You kept them in a tiny bag for earrings or some such thing and wore it on a string around your neck when you went on trips to remind you not to give in when you knew that you would be tempted. It now hangs on the neck of a flask that was a gift when you received tenure. You used to joke that everyone would know when you got tenure because you would show up for class wearing jeans and a t-shirt and drinking out of a flask. You also started to fold an origami crane for every month, stringing them together. Today will be twelve.

Then the pandemic ended the meetings; and to be honest there, too, you had kinda slacked off of meetings because the previous month’s topics always focused on God and Faith. That’s just not your worldview and the effort to translate to your own was not working. Some of the other twelve steps did not seem to be quite right for you either. The sense of connection wasn’t working, and you just kept feeling like maybe you had gotten what you needed from this method and should look for another method. You still hold on to what you can from that one, however, because something is better than nothing.

The best part, at the beginning, last fall, came with finding whatever was on the other side of the Drunk. You had to replace the habit of drinking with something else, first. You discovered Ginger Beer, which you first had to discover was not actually beer, but similar to ginger ale or root beer. In other words, you discovered a world of soft drinks. You also discovered that soft drinks in England and Scotland are different from in the U.S., but that’s another story that involves fizzy lemonade. You got back to knitting and crochet — anything to keep your hands busy. “What are you knitting,” people would ask (regardless of the specific needlework). “A sober person,” you answered.

Then, you discovered whimsy. Roller skates. With hot pink wheels. Acting in a play (that the pandemic cancelled and now you have nightmares of going on stage and not knowing your lines). Dressing up for class. You discovered the joyful, uncorked, drunk feeling without being drunk. You actually enjoyed teaching the shitty, first semester freshman world civilizations class. So much that you were looking forward to this semester and almost asked to be one of the professors who teaches it all of the year because you found a purpose in it.

You discovered paths in your head through the brambles that usually made you sit down and drink. Or, you could just sit an listen and hear through the noise in your head rather than drown it with those sweet sweet bubbles.

You gained the strength to get yourself through the first onslaught of the pandemic, through your mother being on the Grand Princess and being among the first infected. She recovered. Through being unable to go visit her. Through the shift to online teaching. Through the snow in May. Through the overdue on extensions now one last extension now finally submitted awful bibliography.

You probably put a wall of denial up at the end of May, now that you look back. You usually do. “Just get to the end of the semester…”: the mantra from Spring Break on. The summer spread out before you. The garden. Maybe a research trip. Maybe. Certainly research at home and only research. Crafts and projects around the house. Hell, cleaning the house. “Just get to the end of the semester….”

Usually, that works.

You know what happened?

May 31, at 10 pm, you broke your pinky toe. Caught it on an armchair leg, fell forward, and stood up to find the toe at a 45 degree angle to your foot. What a perfect metaphor. The summer went downhill from there.

To skip over your descent into depression, anxiety, anger, frustration, and helplessness, where do you find yourself at Year One? Not at one of those victory moments, that for sure. But then, who has those? They are dramatic story arcs for film.

You miss drinking, but not that much. You miss when you would just have a drink, like on vacation at dinner or lunch, even, or at the end of a week. You miss the fuzzy edges that it gives to the world that lets you feel spiritual. These are the most dangerous moments because they could fool you into thinking “just one won’t matter, right? It’s not like I’m trying to drown anything.” You have to remain vigilant on these moments because you know that that “just one” always makes you think the next one is a good idea, which makes you think the next one is a good idea. While three usually was your limit, there in the last year you would think, “ah, what the hell, have another,” and “well, might as well finish the bottle!” You are still shocked that no one noticed that you were drinking a bottle every night in August last year.

For the calories alone you had to stop! For your liver function!

You miss it also when everything feels like it has gone to shit. No, not everything. When all of the gremlins swarm and make you feel horrible and purely evil at your core and you just want a fast road to “don’t give a fuck.” You could sometimes hold that “don’t give a fuck” feeling with you through the rest of the day. The gremlins swarm quite a bit lately. You don’t let yourself take that road anymore. You’ve seen the sights there and you want something new.

The swarms have made you worthless for any work, but you think that this is a lesson to figure out how to hold them at bay or beat them off. You have to plow ahead; but to where? That you don’t know either. Or can’t have. Whichever.

In many respects, you still have to remind yourself “one day at a time,” and you have not been doing that lately. You’ve always seen the world in terms of oncoming disaster. That was bred into you ever since you can remember.

To be fair to yourself, the world is in immediate disaster. You just hold your breath until the worst of it comes to your door.

Still, one year. Not even “one year down” with the implicit “x to go,” which seems a good sign. You know that you don’t want to go back, but this particular moment, on this particular day, you aren’t sure why you should go forward except there seems to be no other way to go.