A work of literary fiction, Hard Times in Babylon tells the story of a man in his early sixties, a husband and father and filmmaker, who is already adrift in a malaise of irrelevance and invisibility when a worldwide plague jolts him with thoughts of suicide. Why bother to live, he wonders, now that the world is facing its apocalypse.
As he trudges through the ensuing days and months, seeing nothing but futility all around him, he imagines all the ways he could end things: rope, pills, a leap from a bridge, a step towards an oncoming bus. He even goes to a gun range, if nothing else but to hear what a bullet sounds like up close.
As the relentless drama of the pandemic continues, with its pocket-sized tragedies, the slow motion rockfalls of continuous deaths, and the ravings of a two-bit king, something keeps tugging him back from the edge of despair. He wonders if maybe, just maybe, there is too much living going on to call it quits now.
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About the author
Rustin Thompson is a writer, filmmaker, and deejay. He is the author of Hard Times in Babylon (Sisu Press) and Get Close: Lean Team Documentary Filmmaking (Oxford University Press). He is also the director-cinematographer-editor of several feature length documentaries, and he hosts two music programs, Road Songs and Night Train, on the independent radio station KBCS-FM based in the Pacific Northwest. He lives in Seattle with his wife, Ann Hedreen.
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