Yesterday, John Scalzi wrote in his AOL Journal about the difficulty of being expected to produce what he calls a “variety show” — meaning lots of entries about many different and mostly lightweight subjects — while Something Big is going down in the world:

…it’s causing me some real cognitive dissonance to have an entry [about] the complete horror of what’s developing in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and an entry about cats in a sink, right next to each other. I’m feeling mildly guilty about talking about cats in a sink at all.

I’m experiencing much the same kind of angst myself, actually. I’ve been looking at my last couple of published entries and thinking about the topics I’m planning to write about in upcoming ones, and suddenly I feel like I’ve got some really screwed-up priorities, like I’m a modern-day Marie Antoinette or something. Huge numbers of people are dying pathetic deaths right here in our own country and I’m writing about fake zombies and space movies, for god’s sake. It’s frivolous, isn’t it? A sign of a superficial personality? Do I have a responsibility to use my abilities and my little public forum here to acknowledge what’s happening? Am I being disrespectful to the victims of Katrina if I don’t?

Maybe I’m overthinking this and taking on burdens that aren’t mine to carry — it wouldn’t be the first time — but I keep thinking that someone who didn’t know me might suspect from this blog that I’m one of those artificially constructed, emotionally stunted replicants in Blade Runner who are incapable of feeling empathy for other living creatures. It’s not true. The fact is, I suffer from rather an excess of empathy. I find it all too easy to imagine myself in what’s left of New Orleans, struggling to keep myself and my loved ones going for just one more hour, listening for the sounds of a chopper or a boat coming, finally, to pull us out of that wet hell and take us to safety, our throats tight from thirst even though we’re surrounded by water too polluted to drink.

If you’ve guessed that I’m in something of a dark mood today, you’re right. And it isn’t just the hurricane that’s bringing me down, either. I haven’t written much lately about politics or current events, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been paying attention to them. I’m not at all happy about what I’ve been seeing. This isn’t the world I always thought I was going to live in when I grew up. It’s not because I’m a basically a liberal and the hard-core conservatives are currently calling the shots, although that’s part of it. It’s not because the suburbs keep spreading like a cancer across the landscapes that I used to know, although that, too, has been bothering me again lately. It’s not really any one particular issue; it’s the whole, big, overwhelming ball of every issue you can think of, and it just starts with the hurricane.

Let’s run down the list, shall we?

One of my dream cities has become an Atlantean wasteland filled with death and anarchy, no one seems able to do anything about it, and some jackasses have actually suggested we leave it that way.

Gasoline has hit three bucks a gallon here in Salt Lake, and I understand it’s even higher in other places. I fully expect it to be higher before the end of Labor Day weekend, and the price will likely never go back down because it never does. There’s a lot of talk in the blogosphere about “peak oil,” the moment when we reach the maximum possible level of oil production, after which there will be an inevitable decline as the available supply quite literally dwindles away. I love my car, but I feel guilty everytime I drive it. And that’s just my modern, semi-economical Mustang I’m talking about, not my beloved but gas-guzzling old Galaxie that hasn’t moved all summer long. I’ve always loved the movie The Road Warrior, in part because it was such a far-fetched, over-the-top fantasy, but suddenly it doesn’t seem all that implausible that people will one day be reduced to scavenging droplets of fuel from roadside wreckage.

With all the ports along the Gulf Coast shut down, we’re going to start seeing the price of all sorts of consumer goods rising, which means the economy will very possibly tank out again just when it’s starting to show some signs of life.

The war continues in Iraq, and Americans are dying — according to the latest slogan — for the concept of freedom, but Iraqis probably won’t have much of that when their new constitution is finally finished. Well, women won’t, at least. Sorry, girls.

Here at home, meanwhile, we’ve got terrorists in LA and polls indicate that a majority of Americans don’t understand the fundamental wisdom of teaching science in the classroom and religion in Sunday school. Hell, I’ve even heard that a fifth of our population apparently thinks the sun goes around the Earth, something that was supposedly settled way back in the 1600s.

I could go on, but that’s a pretty good sampling of what’s getting under my skin lately. In addition, there’ve been some issues in my Real-World life that I’m not going to discuss here. Basically, it just feels to me like everything is coming apart, like the United States is this massive, steam-driven engine that’s accelerated to such a pace that it’s beginning to shake itself to pieces, and I don’t know how we’re ever going to stop feeling that way. It just seems like, as a society, we’ve spent decades making the wrong decisions, going for the easy answers and the short-term fixes, and now it’s all coming back to bite us in our collective ass. Again, this isn’t a partisan thing. The Democrats have been just as guilty of short-sightedness as the Republicans. But I don’t see anybody willing to admit that and figure out a way to move on, and, I’ll be honest, I’m really starting to worry about whether our country is going to survive much longer. Everywhere I look I see signs of decay. People can’t even agree on what America is supposed to be about. Everyone has their own versions of history and morality, and those different visions don’t correspond at all. And this scares me.

It’s all too much. Too many problems without any solutions, too many bad feelings. I can take it for a while, but eventually I get to a place where I just can’t process any more of it. And so I try to escape. I focus on movies and fantasies and the way things used to be, because I like them better than what’s really in front of me.

If it was possible, I’d turn the clock back to 1985. In a heartbeat, I’d do it. I’d fly around the world at the speed of light and reverse-rotate us all back to the days when we wore leg-warmers and parachute pants (the original, pre-MC Hammer variety) and Members Only jackets, and we liked ’em. We used to worry back then that Reagan was going to push The Button, but it never felt like the world was a train flying off the trestle.

To boil it all down to the simplest phrase, I’m sick of this shit.

And on that cheery note, Happy Labor Day weekend, everybody.