Mentally I was feeling quite depressed and hopeless for the last several days. Finally, last night, I had a decent chat with my best friend. She and I have been best friends since high school. We went to prom together one year but were never romantically involved.

My friend, who lives in Denver, has come to the conclusion that her city is getting bad enough with the crime, homelessness, drug abuse, unemployment, etc. that she’s getting her conceal carry permit. She already owns a pistol and goes to a shooting range every so often.

She works for a landlord who owns several properties in Denver. My friend often has to deal with repair orders, deadbeats, and forced evictions. Says that drug abuse is not even hidden in most of those properties. Trash is all over the facilities as are broken appliances and rampant vandalism.

She’s always having arguments with tenants who can’t or won’t pay rent, can’t or won’t vacate properties when the lease is up, rampant sanitation problems, people always wanting to fight, etc. She always carries a bottle of bear spray on her person when she’s visiting her bosses’ properties in case the tenants get too unruly or violent. She’s received lots of death threats from tenants.

Things are getting really bad out there, I’m sure almost everyone knows this. The assassination attempt on Former President Trump and President Biden’s declining health are making things even worse.

I’m so not looking forward to the November election. I’m preparing to bunker down and stay off peoples’ radars for a real long time. I think things will far uglier in the coming months and years. I don’t see any way out except batten down the hatches and plow through it with pure grit and guts.

Since I don’t go out in public much anymore, I might be able to blend in and disappear easier than some. As much as I dread living in a suburb of a large city for when social chaos does happen, I just didn’t see any other option if I was to stay in touch with my immediate family.

I used to live in Nebraska. All of my friends left that state years ago. I didn’t have much for extended family except for a few elderly aunts and some cousins that I’m just not sure I can count on when shit gets really bad. But, I never had much of a support system in Nebraska my entire life even when things were good.

Strangely, I saw a lot of this starting to develop when I was still in high school. Since I grew up in a predominately right-wing community, I was taught that those on the left wing were evil, hated democracy, hated small business, hated agriculture, and generally were not friends to the working class.

Ironically, kids growing up in left wing communities were told the exact same shit about right wingers. It’s like we were predestined to turn on each other.

I’m glad I heard from my best friend. She has the exact same concerns I do. I just don’t know how many more opportunities I will have to communicate with her until things get ugly, I’m talking collapse of nations type ugly. Nations rise and nations fall. It’s pretty much the story of history summed up in one sentence.