Hiroshige II (二代目 歌川広重, Ni-daime Utagawa Hiroshige
Catching Lampreys, Eels, and Red Rockfish on Lake Suwa,
Shinshu Province ,
from the series “One Hundred Famous Views in the Various Provinces
(Shokoku meisho hyakkei)”
(1860)

"…will this just become another excuse in the already overlong list of reasons why I can't have the Prosperity I once believed I deserved?"

One sure sign that Prosperity feels threatened comes when a persistent ExistentialDread descends. Periodic ExistentialDread offers no real information about the present or future, for these come and go as an inescapable part of any aware existence. To exist has always been to sense threats to continuing that existence, and, as long as these remain intermittent, they offer no real threat to anything, let alone existence. These come as more or less wake-up calls, increasing awareness of the inescapably temporary nature of all existence, of which human existence has never served as any exception. In some ways, intermittent dread serves as a gift. It can sharpen focus and reawaken a lost sense of urgency or significance. Love seems to flourish with a touch of dread in the mix since it can reassert the importance of assertion itself, reminding one that they’re more isthmus than island and should find reasons to appreciate sustaining relationships. But when the Dread turns Existential, and moves in claiming it holds a long-term lease, hinting at permanent residence, Dread’s few benefits quickly evaporate into much worse than nothingness.

The certainty that ExistentialDread brings remains just as illusory as any other certainty in this existence, but it carries a uniquely threatening gravity. While other certainties can seem curiously reassuring, ExistentialDread’s certainty does not even pretend to hearten. Its certainty does real damage before it gets around to delivering anything. Hints of potential threats can, under ExistentialDread’s tutelage, deliver the potential other certainties merely hint at delivering. I catch myself second- and third-guessing myself. I sometimes even catch myself actively preventing myself from engaging when no physical barrier exists to actually impede my engagement. Other times, I feel impeded without ever discovering that it was only me inhibiting my own progress. The mere threat implied by ExistentialDread moves into my head and seemingly starts thinking for me. My logic and reason both lose their usual clarifying edges. I start making irrational, wholly unexplainable choices. I shirk my work. I feel I’ve failed before I even engage, and leave discouraged as if I had somehow lost without actually touching the first puzzle piece. The gardens go untended. Crops unharvested.

In OrdinaryTimes, Prosperity successfully serves as the barricade between my life and ExistentialDread. It surely seems a sure sign that Prosperity has already started retreating when the shadow of ExistentialDread falls across this Bambi’s meadow. This shadow can transform anything into awful. A sweet Spring day can turn threatening. A Summer afternoon can seem as confining as the coldest winter’s seasonal affective disordered day. A hopeful morning can transform into discouragement once this Dread kicks in, and almost anything can spark a reappearance, seemingly from nothingness. Even a sense of nothingness, normally not all that threatening, can utterly debilitate me into an abiding sense that I’ve descended into abject nothingness and lost.

Even those usually invulnerable to political intrigue might feel threatened with an utterly unfamiliar bout of ExistentialDread once they get wind of what our anti-Prosperity self-proclaimed king posted on his Truthfully Antisocial rumormill overnight. His rantings seem more than merely fright-wig threatening, for they can only be successfully classified as ranting. It’s never reassuring when the presumed leader of the free world spends his nap time ranting. As every parent learned, it’s never a good sign when the adolescent repeatedly misses his nap time. You’d think the whole world had conspired to offend him, the way he reacts to even the tiniest perturbations. He hints at using nuclear weapons because he threatens himself, not because any exterior existential threat necessarily exists. He wages an unsuccessful war against himself. This alone justifies ExistentialDread’s visit and planned extended stay. Until this wannabe adolescent can manage his naps, we’d be foolish not to feel threatened, and we might be even more foolish were we not sequestered behind ExistentialDread’s barricades. I curl up in the fetal position and whimper as if whimpering were my sole remaining superpower.

The significant part of the MAGA art, dark though it always was, involved invoking just this debilitating response from the Prosperous. Not even MAGA’s army of slavering white supremacists could ever hope to accomplish much more threatening than an inept collective clusterfuck, but if the populace, that Prosperous population that has historically comprised the vast majority of this nation, were to be cowering beneath their covers shivering with an overwhelming ExistentialDread, then maybe that inept and backward minority might make some real backward headway. It acts as a form of hypnosis and seems to be as easily invoked as hypnotizing any chicken. The adolescent incumbent just acts crazy enough to excite this perfectly human response, and the whole society cowers in ExistentialDread in curiously coherent response, as if that could defend against anything inevitable. Look, this playtime was scheduled to disappear for each of us, regardless of the Prosperity any one of us might have ever achieved. Dreading its departure has never once in the history of human existence, fleeting though it certainly continues to be, staved off the least threatening of any of its many departures. That goes double for the more significant ones, all currently scheduled to depart on time regardless of the ExistentialDread any of us erects in our defense.

There was no cure this summer for these seemingly inescapable Summertime Blues. The ExistentialDread, similar to the stuff that moved in six years ago this summer when the Pandemic was having its way with our Prosperity, bloomed in the place of the petunias I never got around to planting along the front walk. Lawn died due to ExistentialDread-induced inattention or indifference. Suppers tasted more like cardboard than July some nights. My writing reflected my sense of unjust imprisonment, too, and every corner of my life, every aspect of my hard-won lifestyle, seemed affected. The Muse broke both ankles as if in abject acknowledgment that we’re ultimately all screwed, anyway. Mine was no mere seasonal affective response to the heat and smoke, but an amplified, seemingly autoimmune system reaction to actual poison invading my life support systems. I have been lacking some of the courage or foolhardiness necessary to properly defend my equally hard-won Prosperities in the face of these continuing insults. Will naming the invader ExistentialDread make any difference in my response, or will this just become another excuse in the already overlong list of reasons why I can’t have the Prosperity I once believed I deserved?

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Prosperity, #PureSchmaltz