Reading Moby Dick and the whole opening is wild. "I'm Ishmael. Sometimes being a person makes me want to scream, so whenever I feel I can't hold it in anymore I run to the nearest shipyard and sign up for some hard manual labour on a random ass boat where nobody cares who I am. After a few months I'll settle down and get back to business. Everyone does this sometimes, it's probably normal. Anyhow, I'm at the pier."
NEW DAY NEW CHANCE TO PROVE LOVE. LETS TROT
how many times can a fish circumnavigate the globe before it all becomes meaningless?
I joked with someone recently “In The Walking Dead, when did everyone decide they didn’t have to go to work anymore?” Or it felt like a joke. But my brain keeps returning and returning to it.
Apocalypse movies show us sunny life as normal. Then hard cut to our hero waking up in a world broken beyond repair. No need to check emails at least.
But what happens when the world crumbles slowly? A time of endless uncertainty. When we’ve blown through our mental health days and we’re expected back to work on Monday? When we watch someone else’s apocalypse from the safety of our phones?
I don’t know how we’re expected to keep doing this. To see a father holding the arm and leg of what was his child. To see a boy hugging a body bag. To see the charred remains of a car a six-year-old girl sat trapped in. Trapped with the bodies of her loved ones begging the world to help her. “I’m so scared, please come.” Please come. To watch, to watch, to watch.
And then. To keep moving. To go to meetings. To one-on-ones. To performance reviews. To talk about work load and quarterly goals and oh man, I did drop the ball on that, won’t happen again. I just seem. I guess I. I can’t seem to focus lately. To abruptly look up from our phone as someone impatiently hovers at our desk. God, so sorry. I was just, I was just, I was just. Watching.
Because in this time of politicians so blatantly disregarding the wants and desires of their constituents, sometimes it feels like all we can send across the world is our attention. We drift between two worlds. Skimming the email over and over and over, no room to take it in as our mind conjures only the image of a woman screaming with endless grief.
What is it doing to us to continue to buy into this illusion of structure as everything we ever believed about the world shatters?
I've got something very special in my hat
Do you live in a cotton-candy house?
