Let Folly Be Our Cloak

This is one of those weeks where I Just Can't Even Anymore With All The Trump Shit. It's so pervasive and prevalent--the perpetual-motion avalanche gaining size and speed toward no obvious end as the very earth to which our civilization clings sloughs away from the rest, mantle and core--that any respite from it is a feat of active will. Trump news has become elemental, like air or water or sunlight, a component part of our natural world that we breathe in and absorb passively as we try to go about our business, except instead of sustaining life, it tries to give us all skin cancer. To be fair, sunlight does that too, but it's supposed to do that. News is supposed to be a thing that happens on the internet somewhere else while you're trying to watch compilation videos of baby pandas falling down. Instead it's asbestos in all our mental attics.

It's so bad that I felt the need to write a whole paragraph talking about why I don't want to cover Trump news this week, because to use any public forum to not address at least some part of all the shit that is going on in that direction feels like I'm abandoning my fellow citizens. In some respects, it's incumbent upon all of us, the Living Sane, to be present for and support our fellow vast majority of citizens dying from chronic cringe, even to the point of simply offering said support when nobody is asking for it. It feels like we all have to constantly keep signaling "I know, right?!" in all our thoughts and gestures just in case we happen upon someone else who needs the validation to survive the next 30-90 seconds.

And look, all I wanted to do was come on here and VERY SPECIFICALLY NOT talk about anything to do with Trump and I'm now three paragraphs deep talking only about his unholy taint.* I'm looking at alternatives and I'm seeing stories about how we in California only have two weather modes: perfect and biblical; how America's best pal Vlad Putin's video show-and-tell with his legislature includes a PowerPoint animation just casually featuring the nuclear annihilation of Florida; or how we're standing on the precipice of the end of organized labor in this country.

Oh hey, everyone loves technology and infrastructure! Here's a story about potentially spending billions of dollars of public money in order to get people very speedily from Columbus, Ohio, to Chicago. That doesn't at all seem like another nail in democracy's coffin. At least not immediately... so... good news?

Look, somewhere along this spectrum of exhaustion-induced emotions, there's some slippery, dangerous shit out there. Frustration is fine, as is the occasional spasm of rage, both of which, when channeled and directed, can be motivating, inspirational, liberating even. They can be perspective-shakers that jar loose action. But we get to the point where we have to honestly evaluate our own emotional capacities. The constant drumbeat can drown out the melody, the poetry underneath until all we're left with is cynicism, indifference, despair, the last of which at least is a mortal sin. Not just literally (if you lean that way), but figuratively. It's the neglect of basic emotional maintenance, an active behavior that would happen passively if one were suffering from clinical depression.

But down beneath the war cadence and the rhythm of marching boots, there's music down there still, somewhere, in fellowship, kindness, literature and art.

Sometimes the art only becomes comprehensible after 500 centuries and the total annihilation of your species, but hey, we get there eventually. Bright side, people. Bright side.

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*I realize too late that this particular choice of phrasing may have accidentally put a rather graphic image in your mind. If that is the case, all I can do is apologize. Forever.