The Collapse LX: New Year's Plans

 07 January 20XX+1

My Dear Lucilius:

Our temperature here was slightly above freezing (if you can believe it), which makes for an almost Spring-like day after the rather hard slog of cold weather that we have had. It never becomes quite warm enough to fully melt the snow, only enough to make things a bit muddy and difficult.

The New Year here was quiet enough, as I am sure you can imagine. Young Xerxes did take the time to walk by and give a New Year’s greeting, which was deeply appreciated. Truth be told, even we curmudgeons need a bit of human interaction now and again in order to feel “engaged” with the rest of the world.

Normally at this time of year, I would be bustling about with a combination of planning for the upcoming year, planning for my tax submission, and perhaps thinking of some local drives I would like to take for the coming year. Most of that is off the table now, of course: planning will still go on, but it has a vastly different cast to it (e.g., survival instead of interest or novelty). Even if I had retained the truck at this point, the chances that I would be going anywhere this year would appear to be nil (I do still have my receipt carefully stored away and fully intend to attempt and collect it from whatever governmental authority, if any, rises to the fore someday). I suppose on the bright side there are now taxes to plan for at this point, which I am forced to admit pleases me to no end.

Still, it is the New Year and I need to have some kind of goals to aspire to, even if they seem much more constrained by circumstances. To live without any sense or desire for improvement is simply to begin the process of dying that much earlier.

I have all those works of Dostoevsky that I purchase right before everything stopped, of course. I need to pick those up for reading (I know, I know – what have I been doing with my time up to this point? Perhaps avoiding what seems like the finality of the last set of new books I may see in my lifetime. Agreed, it is a maudlin sentiment). And the garden – well, the garden has become even more necessary than ever (and fortunately as I will be going nowhere, I have the additional time to devote to it). The usual banal commitments to health and weight, which are not so banal now that there is slim likelihood of seeing a doctor in a while.

But that is probably not enough. None of those are particularly stretching goals.

I need to ponder more, my friend. There is something – even in this (to this point) quiet, “armchair Apocalypse” (it was a genre of books, by the way) in my world – that my heart tells me I need to be about. I can be here, alone and ensconced, probably for quite a while. The suggestion that keeps bubbling back to the top of my mind is that there is something more.

Your Obedient Servant, Seneca