If you asked me five years ago what I'd be doing with my life, it wouldn't have been this.

Now, don't get me wrong, after the crisis hit and I got that red notice, I was happy to get any kind of income flowing in that I could.

After all, the bills didn't give a damn about social distancing.

But now, as I sit here typing in in the dark, because I'm bone-wide terrified of what I may see

when the lights come on, there's nothing I could wish for more than to go back in time. Just three weeks, so I would have the better mind to delete that

damn email before I opened it and maybe sit the laptop on fire just to be in the

safe side.

I don't know why I'm writing this.

Think of it as the last memoirs of a man who's quickly losing his grip on reality.

I'm being dramatic. I always wanted to be a writer. Let me start over. I was desperate for work after I got laid off five months ago.

Down-sizing, they said, and six dedicated years of my life were made irrelevant with one letter.

Can you believe it? A letter.

My boss didn't even have the balls that tell me to my face. It may be hard to

imagine, but the job market for mechanic, but only with printers and air conditioners, wasn't really booming when everyone was out of the office, and it was midwinter New England January, so I had to suffer through the worst of it.

It wasn't that bad honestly, even without comparing it to the hell I'm living in now.

I was a poor college student, broke the most, and got by on thrift or clothes and beans and

rice just fine.

Even the two years after that, back when I was a drifter, I scrounzed by with our jobs

and soup kitchens. I used to struggle. But there was something

about it all that just made me feel so desperate. Like this was the end for me, like I was drowning and just waiting for that floating

ring of life to appear so I could grasp at it.

On second thought, I might have been having a panic attack.

...