Tag: August Sucks

That Low Hum: On Gut Feelings and the Gravity of August

There are times when the world feels… loud. Not in the audible sense, but in a deeper, vibrational way. It’s a low hum just beneath the surface of things, a feeling of building pressure that you can’t quite place. It’s the sensation that the narrative of your life, or even the world at large, is about to take a sharp, unexpected turn.

I’m the first to admit a certain fondness for what might be called “magical thinking.” But as someone who generally prefers to operate on a foundation of science and verifiable fact, these moments of pure intuition are deeply unsettling. And for the last few days, that hum has been getting louder.

It feels like a disturbance in the force, to borrow a phrase. A sense that kismet is gathering its strength, that cosmic dice are being rattled in a cup, ready for a momentous throw. Something, either personal or public, feels imminent.

Perhaps it’s the time of year. As of this writing, we’re on the doorstep of August. And let’s be honest, August has a reputation. It’s a month that often feels heavy, humid, and historically fraught. From the start of major conflicts to calamitous market crashes, August often seems to be the month when the world’s simmering tensions boil over. Our minds, brilliant and treacherous things that they are, are pattern-seeking machines. We look back at the calendar and connect the dots, and a narrative of August as a “horrible month” begins to write itself.

Is it a self-fulfilling prophecy? Or is there something to the oppressive, late-summer heat that serves as a catalyst for chaos?

But to dismiss this feeling as mere superstition or pattern-seeking feels too simplistic. The rationalist in me wants to find a logical explanation. Maybe that “gut feeling” is actually our subconscious mind working in overdrive. We are inundated daily with thousands of data points—news headlines, social media chatter, shifts in the local economy, the tone of a neighbor’s voice. We consciously process only a fraction of it.

Could this premonition, this sense of wrongness, simply be the result of our subconscious finally connecting disparate dots that our conscious mind missed? Is it recognizing a subtle but pervasive pattern in the global mood, the political climate, or the financial markets that signals an impending break? That “cosmic pressure” might not be cosmic at all; it might be the accumulated weight of subliminal information overload screaming for our attention.

So, what do we do with this phantom data? This powerful, visceral intuition that something is off?

To ignore it completely feels like hubris, a denial of the part of our brain that kept our ancestors safe from unseen predators. Yet, to give it full command is to abandon reason and drift into paranoia.

We’re left in the unsettling middle ground, with one ear to the news and the other listening for that low hum. We check the locks twice, not because we heard a noise, but because the silence itself feels too loud.

I don’t know if anything is truly coming. The feeling may fade as quickly as it arrived, a false alarm from a hyper-vigilant internal system. But I know what my gut is telling me. And it’s telling me to brace for impact.

Something Wicked This Way Comes: When Your Gut Says the World Is About to Shift

Let me start with a confession: I’m susceptible to magical thinking. I know this about myself. I’m a person who believes in data, evidence, and the scientific method—but I also can’t ignore the strange electricity that’s been crackling in the air lately.

There’s something building. I can feel it.

The August Omen

As I write this, August looms ahead like a storm cloud on the horizon, and anyone who pays attention to history knows that August has an unsettling reputation. It’s the month when the world seems to tilt off its axis: wars begin, markets crash, leaders fall, and the unexpected becomes inevitable.

August 1914: World War I erupted. August 1939: The stage was set for World War II. August 1969: Woodstock and the Manson murders. August 2005: Hurricane Katrina. August 2008: The beginning of the financial crisis that would reshape the global economy.

Maybe it’s confirmation bias. Maybe I’m cherry-picking dates to fit a narrative. But the pattern feels too persistent to ignore, and right now, with August approaching, there’s a cosmic pressure building that I can’t shake.

The Physics of Intuition

I’m generally skeptical of my own mystical inclinations. I prefer spreadsheets to horoscopes, data points to gut feelings. But there’s something to be said for the unconscious mind’s ability to synthesize patterns that our rational brain hasn’t quite processed yet.

Think of it as emotional meteorology—the way animals sense earthquakes before seismographs register the first tremor. Sometimes our nervous systems pick up on frequencies of change that our conscious minds haven’t yet decoded. The subtle shifts in conversation, the barely perceptible changes in social mood, the way certain topics suddenly dominate headlines: all building toward something we can sense but not yet name.

Personal vs. Universal

The tricky thing about these premonitions is their ambiguity. When you feel that cosmic pressure building, it’s impossible to know whether you’re sensing something personal—a career shift, a relationship change, a family crisis—or something that will ripple through the collective consciousness.

Is this feeling about me, or about all of us?

The honest answer is that it doesn’t matter. Whether the coming disruption is intimate or global, the sensation remains the same: the feeling that we’re standing at the edge of a cliff, and the ground beneath our feet is starting to crumble.

The Reliability Problem

Here’s the thing about gut feelings: they’re notoriously unreliable. I’ve had this sensation before, and sometimes it’s been followed by major life changes or world events that seemed to validate the intuition. Other times, August has come and gone without incident, leaving me feeling foolish for believing in cosmic timing.

But the failures don’t diminish the successes, and they certainly don’t eliminate the visceral reality of what I’m feeling right now. There’s a restlessness in the air, a sense that something fundamental is about to shift. Whether it’s political upheaval, technological breakthrough, economic disruption, or personal transformation, I can’t say. I just know it’s coming.

Living in the Space Between

Maybe this is what it means to be human in uncertain times: to exist in the tension between rational skepticism and intuitive knowing. To acknowledge that our brains evolved to detect patterns and threats, even when the patterns are incomplete and the threats are undefined.

I don’t know what’s coming. I don’t know if anything is coming at all. But I know what my gut is telling me, and right now, it’s saying: pay attention. Stay alert. Something big is building, and August might just be when it breaks loose.

Time will tell if I’m a prophet or just another person spooked by summer’s end. But either way, I’ll be watching the horizon, waiting to see what emerges from this gathering storm.

Back To The Nadir Of The Year

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Well, after about 24 hours of excitement, it seems like we’re back to just meh. Nothing of note is happening. And it could be that for the next few weeks that’s what it’s going to be like — just one long meh.

I still don’t know what’s going to happen this fall and winter. It really could go either way. It really could. It could be that, lulz, nothing happens. And it could be a regular HOLY SHIT moment in America’s history.

I hope all my ranting about the possibility of a civil war / revolution is totally wrong. But there is going to be a moment — maybe a few moments — during late 2024, early 2025 when we all have to take a deep breath and see which way things are headed.

But, maybe, the point is just to relax and enjoy not much going on. August, though, tends to be a pretty shitty month. So bad, maybe it would be better if it just didn’t exist.

Yet, who knows, maybe this year’s August will be different.

Let’s Run The ‘China Attacks Taiwan’ Scenario


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

August is careening towards us. And we all know that August sucks as a month. If something shitty is going to happen in 2021 – it’s probably going to happen in August.

So, let’s say it’s China going to war against Taiwan.

First, let me say, I have no expertise in this subject, so this is just a rough back-of-the-envelope scenario. But let’s suppose at some time in August, 2021, we find ourselves with a major East Asian war. What happens?

Well, at first, the United States would freak out. There would be a lot of rallying around the flag and Biden’s approval rating would skyrocket. And…then…once it became clear that the US wasn’t going, to, uh, blow the world up to save Taiwan, everything would go back to normal.

The center-Left would support Biden’s thoughtful, reserved approach, while the MAGA New Right would would suggest that what they believed all along — that Biden is “soft” on China — was right and why isn’t Trump president since he really won?

The other thing that would happen is such a huge event in the world would great destabilize everything. Flashpoints across the world would likely heatup for no other reason than a governments with an itch for conflict would say, “Well, China is scratching their itch, why can’t we do it?”

The DPRK is the country I would be most concerned with. It’s easy for me to imagine that as part of this scenario, that the DPRK would attack the ROK as some sort of Communist brothers-in-arms thing. In fact, I could even seen the PROC gently goading the DPRK into doing just that as a way of distracting the US so it could successfully secure Formosa.

Anyway, the whole thing would be a fucking clusterfuck. If China was cocky enough to attack Taiwan, then we really would be in a New Era. The entire post-WW2 liberal order would collapse and who knows what would replace it.