Constant Troyon: Unfinished Study of Sheep (c. 1850)

"If you think changing the world is difficult, try to keep it the same."
The ninetieth installment of any of my series marks the planned last story for me. This NextWorld Series will be a little different. It was probably always the nature of this particular series that it might hold the potential to be never-ending, for I designed it to be more about chronicling than post-facto reporting. At the beginning, I couldn't have known how or even if it might ever end, and that was my explicit intent. This has been my thirty-first series written over the prior almost eight years. Each followed this same design principle: the story would unfold rather than be outlined beforehand. In this sense, each series has violated one of the fundamental principles of both fiction and non-fiction. I might have been a writer much earlier in life, but I had to first get over the instructions that my fifth-grade teacher insisted represented the only proper way to write. She demanded an outline first before even laying pencil to paper. Then, she'd judge the result by how closely the finished work tracked to the original outline, as if this represented how anything works. It took decades for me to outgrow that poisonous lesson and simply start writing.
" … to mistake an aspirational for a supposed-to-be might be the source of most tragedy in this world."
Now, I can't seem to stop. With each fresh series, I slow down to consider whether I'm over this obsession. I ask myself if I might better focus my time and attention on something else. If I began to prove I was a writer, that proof became self-evident years ago. If I were to slow my production rate, perhaps become more thoughtful and more thoroughly research each installment before creating it, I might become an even better writer. It might even be time for me to finally learn how to outline, though the mere thought of going legit seizes me up a bit.
" … I do not keep going because of my conditioning but rather because of my lack of it."
What have I created this time? What makes this series unique? I suspect this series might prove most useful in retrospect. I found it enormously helpful as I struggled to cope with the changes emerging after the first felon was sworn in as president. (I would ordinally capitalize that title, but I won't with this incumbent.) It was as I expected, only much more so. More than any other transition in my life, this one proved breath-taking in its studied stupidity, and while I hold faith that most of what passed for policy will shortly be reversed and the inept incumbent eventually impeached for good, much drama and tragedy will probably continue into and beyond the foreseeable future. What used to pass for foreseeable future no longer holds water. The whims governing our once-proud system defy prediction, as each competes to be stupider than any prior one. Our self-sabotager-in-chief never seems to sleep. Neither do our much-respected Attorneys General.
" … procrastination is more communicable than measles."
I suppose I've been creating my legacy here. When my progeny asks what I did during this fateful period, they can read my stories. I have always been disturbed by how little of any story seems to stick. I remember short flashes and seldom direct quotes. It seems hopeless to try to reduce each story into a single quote, and even more so to try to recall their gists. I started rereading each story in this series this morning, a process that, if I'm diligent, might take me the rest of this week to complete. And what will I have accomplished once I've finished? In the past, I've managed to whet my appetite to reread it or to set it aside as an embarrassment. I usually finally realize that the stories were meant to exist in the moment I wrote them. They required that context to make complete sense, and even then, I could not finely remember even the gist of most by later in the morning I wrote them. This series might live forever but in a form similar to one of those prehistoric burial chambers filled with curiosities and mysteries to the archeologist who uncovered them. They attempt to reason meaning into the artifacts by employing modern understandings that so post-date the items as to render them indecipherable. The historian might marvel at how advanced that society was, but only because they expected it to seem so much more backward than it does.
" My role now seems to have become to embrace this newly-recognized way it has apparently always been and to distance myself from what now seems was always merely fantasy, though heart-warming."
I have posted a few quotes in bold above. I pulled these from earlier stories in this series. I might use the least of these as inspiration to continue anything, for as near as I can tell, life remains about continuing. I won't take seriously my inquiry into whether my series writing ends here. Of course, it doesn't. Something must come next. I just haven't imagined what yet. Yet. I will produce a coda tomorrow, adding an appendage to round off this week's writing summary without leaving a ragged end. I'm considering extending this series since this story still seems awfully unresolved. The courts, the slowest horses, have finally started kicking back and making dramatic rulings. The mumbling incumbent seems less coherent every morning, and even his prior partisans are tiring of his senseless antics. The world seems to be realizing that the once essential country has squandered its considerable advantages, and those who once looked up for permission before acting now find themselves looking down and acting in concert in ways that so recently seemed unthinkable. We have a madman in charge, and our democracy's antibodies are aroused. Whether the emerging NextWorld becomes a new beginning or an old ending, I feel confident it won't be over everywhere. By long tradition, we will have to make most of the wrong choices before moving on and into any more proper one.
Thank you for following along through these discoveries.
©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

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