Hard eight: What cometh

When we used to go camping in Baja, we would sometimes find an old snake skin on our walks. I have not seen one for a long time.

But they were special — translucent, tensile, a ghost-shape of the snake itself, left to dry on a bush in a vast desert.

A bit like that, the past year has been shed, left to dry and hang on the memory. And I don’t know if that snake was glad to leave his old skin, but I am glad to get through the time that marks time and drop back into the meandering river of day-to-day events.

Don’t have to think about the past, the paths not taken, the fact that a chunk of that precious commodity time has just dropped away into the ocean of eternity. Just deal with what is before us, the battles of our news service.

One of my best friends in life was here visiting over the holidays. The leading book cover artist in the book-crazy nation of Denmark, I met him and his Danish wife at, naturally, a bookstore — Vroman’s in Pasadena. The conversation, as it always had, rollicked and rolled through lunch and the rest of the afternoon.

But I was telling him, just as we were saying goodbye, that I had a sense of foreboding that we hadn’t gotten around to discussing.

And so, the common stuff of newspapers as the new year starts is to predict trends, and, in the few papers that are left, you can still see those look-ahead columns. Here’s mine.

If you take Denmark, you see a society that in large measure pulls together. But it is also a tiny nation that in many recent years had the highest per capita income in Europe. The U.S. is not like that.

In the next year, the things that pull us apart will keep doing so, and get worse. All of this will be in slow motion.

More of the haves that have an extra house will put it on Airbnb instead of dealing with monthly rentals. The have-nots will pay more for what’s left and more will live in a car.

The regular jobs that used to pay for that rental will, bit by bit, one by one, get either outsourced, as a whole lot already are, or get taken over by a machine, something as simple as another pay box instead of a parking attendant, another self-checkout machine instead of checker.

Knocking on, the people mad at those and other changes will vote for the shouters on the right, giving the whole she-bang over to the super-haves who will carve and cut their livelihoods, their rights, their health, everything, away from them.

The climate, record heat last year, will keep getting hotter, not necessarily this year, but the next, or the next, slow, desiccating fraction of a degree by fraction of a degree, and places that had water will have none or little, and people will move and they will bang on the doors of the rich nations, here and in Europe. The walls, maybe actual walls, will extend, will harden.

Democracy, that ineffable thing I love so much, will have a hard time of it. Strong men will keep rising.

Knowledge, in the general sense, in the sense of a common awareness of a rough truth in the world, will keep transmogrifying into a poisonous jello of propaganda and trickery. As the internet, phones, social media and AI combine to warp the nature of truth.

The Middle East will continue on its path to Armageddon. Weapons will get more lethal, easier to make, cheaper, more widespread.

Technology will not be the nursery of new wealth so much as the co-opter of invention, the aggregator of any good idea into the massive — way bigger than the biggest communication conglomerate — accumulations of wealth already piled into the existing tech giants. And our government will continue to be helpless in controlling their domination.

That’s eight. The dark vision of the time to come, the hard eight.

Outside the office here, it is now also dark. A workmate came by and told me, as I was writing this column, “I refuse to think like that.”

She’s a Grateful Dead fan and repeated a line from one of their songs: “When it’s as good as it can be, it gets better, wait and see.“

We can hope.