No, no. Not a desk. A desktop. And not a letter. An email. It was from a friend who is going through a hard time. Hard times are not uncommon. It’s a Charles Dickens novel and sort of a Stephen Foster song, both of which came out sort of at the exact same time. Mid-nineteenth century. Look it up. Anyway, my friend’s hard time has to do with a relative who got under her skin and made her feel worthless, and then the way she reacted by withdrawing inside herself, sometimes with the help of a liquid or pill or smoked substance. She said it was a shitshow. I always wonder why, when mistakes are made, people are so loath to take a step back and fix them. I mean the relative, not my friend.
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THE WAY THE MAYOR WINCED
A new malady has been identified in the region, and officials are not sure what to call it. “We would not say a virus, necessarily,” said the mayor, after which he motioned to his left and welcomed Dr. Frances J. Bufalina to the microphone. Bufalina began by stressing that she is not an epidemiologist proper but rather a psychoepidemiologist. “That does not mean I am a psycho,” she said to laughter from the crowd, “though my husband might disagree,” more laughter, “but rather that I specialize in investigating how mental conditions might pass from one person to the next in a society, for example anxiety, for example stress, for example anger.” Now there was no laughter. She endeavored to describe her most recent discovery. “I can only give an example and leave it to you to decide if you have experienced the same thing,” she said. “Yesterday I was taking recycling out to the bin on my driveway, and a small cardboard box fell out of the pile and landed next to the bin. My first thought was to leave it there. Who cares that it didn’t reach its destination? I began to walk away. Four steps later I was consumed by a feeling that mixed guilt, self-reproach, and a simple recognition of how easy it would be to take four steps back — that would be eight steps wasted in all — and put the little box into the bin. I did. What is that moment of resistance to what should be done? Can it speed to afflict what needs to be done? And can we always depend on that recognition of simple solution? We have begun to see cases springing up across town that are similar but not identical, and they spread into all corners of our lives: responsibilities at work, picking up children from school, intimacy in marriages. A minor obstacle arises in the completion of a task, we balk at the effort required and to some degree revel in its incompletion, and begin to move back toward a world of chaos that we have in part created, only to have our better nature settle back upon us. Or rather, to hope that it settles back upon us. But we do not know the progress of this disease, in an individual or in the society around it, and we are watching closely for the moments when the momentum of walking away outstrips the magnetic pull of returning to the obligation in question.” The mayor now returned to the lectern. Bufalina made one final remark, which is that she has dubbed the new condition “regetfulness,” which she called “an inelegant portmanteau combining elements of regret and forgetfulness.” From the way the mayor winced, it is unlikely this name will stick. [©2025 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas]