Clinton, South Carolina, Wednesday, January 1, 2020, 8:48 a.m.

Most mornings I awaken thoughtful. This is, in part, because there is no sports on TV yet.

I’ve thought about capitalism a lot lately, but it’s not really capitalism because I don’t completely mean the economic angle, and, I think, to be accurate, there is no other angle in the term.

It’s still a matter of commercialism, competition, and free enterprise. Just not the stock market.

Success means envisioning what is next, not reacting to what has happened. People are so busy with the latter that they forget about the former.

I’ve reacted a lot to my gradual loss of market value. It wouldn’t have happened if I had been able to envision it. The decline of newspapers was something I observed and lamented without doing something about it. Since I have been trained, both educationally and by nature, to write, I just keep on doing it. I write more and more in a world that is reading less and less. I am no different from the people who were trained to work in a cotton mill.

The world is a game of Tetris. Eventually it piles up, no matter how quick and nimble the player is. The self-fulfilling prophecy is the question: Is there still such a thing as Tetris? It has gone the way of AOL and MySpace.

The impersonal rules and, ultimately, by choice. People shy away from communicating face to face. They prefer to sit behind their laptops or peck away at their phones. They take no responsibility for their words because they no longer have any obligation to do so.

News is fake, and fake is news, and it doesn’t matter which is which.

I fear what this means.

I’m a ship without a rudder, adrift with no sails, and the water’s still choppy on the bay. My life ain’t so hot, and I’m past the point of caring about all the things I ain’t got.

I’m struggling. Who ain’t?

 

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