No Sleep Til...

It's kind of a bummer when the best you can do in a good news/bad news situation is a qualitative relativism that lets you recast what would normally be the kind of thing to ruin your week in normal circumstances as "well, maybe it's for the best." That's a fair ways away from "actually possibly good," but that condition as a concept seems to have been pause-buttoned in about 2014.

For example, this past week my team lost one game away from the championship, which I talked about in the previous blog; the positive spin would be to point out that I'll be spared a lot of stress-watching from here on out, so that's a win for my over-taxed limbic system! I do lose the chance at distraction, missing out now on the sweet soft-caramel florality of sportsball superficiality masking the bog-fever fetid reek of... well, literally everything else. But that doesn't get to qualify as "bad news" when we've got state sponsored extrajudicial murder and acts of terrorism by government actors describing what would be an otherwise peaceful, normal American city as though it were a war zone. Without the sports, I guess now I have time to really focus on the important stuff. Which is terrible news for my over-taxed limbic system!

If it sounds like I've run myself in a complete emotional circle here, that's because it's the only shape we're allowed to experience anymore. Complexity in all its forms has been banished from every social and experiential level, from politics and economics and news in general to entertainment and sports, the gravity exerted by the grim, inevitable banality of the black hole at the center of it all, warping every news cycle it touches, leaves us with a perfectly circular ouroboros in the form of a snake angrily fellating itself. Which is no small feat considering snakes have two dicks.

Everything is so obvious and overwhelmingly simple, it frustrates the possibility of hiding out in a niche corner of interest or self-interest to find even a bit of relief, which would be the best we could do when we know that anything actually good isn't even remotely on offer. The historian in me says that the long view is the right one, that the way things are now is unsustainable and will pass. Happy things small (football!) and great (the concept of a just society!) will reassert themselves at some point, certainly, right? But when things like whole Constitutional liberties are being set aside in favor of arrest quotas and extortion for the sake of undermining future elections, even that gets the gritted-teeth emoji and a long exhaling "yyyyeeeeeeeeeahhhh...." trailing off into a question mark.

I wish I had a better message of positivity and hope, but it looks like the only way forward currently, when it comes to your community, is to look to the Upper Midwest and see that the best way to keep yourself occupied is actual action. I don't know what it will look like in your community when the need arrives, it just seems like it's going to involve a lot of whistles.