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The Real Reason For Trump’s Iran Bombing

I understand the inclination to believe that Trump is acting erratically when he seemingly arbitrarily bombs Iran. But this is the culmination of a long-term plan for which the chief beneficiary is, unsurprisingly, himself. You don’t have to look far for clues, either.

This morning, while the bombing was underway, Trump wrote:

Iran tried to interfere in 2020, 2024 elections to stop Trump, and now faces renewed war with United States.

Let’s be clear: Trump doesn’t care about foreign countries meddling in our elections. If he did, he’d be bombing Russia right now. So why then would Trump invoke Iran interfering in our elections as he bombs the country? Put simply, he is trying to validate the claim that our elections are not secure, so that he can use that as a pretext to usurp control of our elections in the name of national security.

Here’s an excerpt from The Washington Post’s reporting from just days ago:

Pro-Trump activists who say they are in coordination with the White House are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting.

I do have one gripe with this framing: declaring a national emergency would not “unlock” extraordinary presidential power over voting. There is noextraordinary presidential power over voting. The states control elections, not the federal government. Full stop.

But that poor framing notwithstanding, Trump is very clearly looking for claims of foreign interference (first China, now Iran) to serve as a basis to declare a national emergency. He has threatened to nationalize the election for months. This is how he’s going to try and do it.

Add this to his apparent obsession with passing the SAVE Act, which in part gives the federal government access to the voter rolls (and if you’re looking to suppress the vote, it helps to know whose vote to suppress).

And of course, Trump has a long, sordid past when it comes to steps he’s already taken to undermine the sanctity of our elections. He tried to seize the voting machines in Georgia in 2020. He tried to get Brad Raffensperger to find 11,780 nonexistent votes. This year, he sent his Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to Fulton County to collect all of the ballots. He’s sending troops into US cities who can serve as his boots on the ground in the event that he hands down orders. He’s put in place an attorney general who herself is an election denier. History shows that Trump is not shy about using any pretext necessary to interfere in a free and fair election in the United States.

There is a silver lining. Because he is so ham-handed, his scheme is already apparent. I’ve spoken with Marc Elias, the founder of Democracy Docket, who can see the writing on the wall. If and when Trump asserts his nonexistent authority, he will be sued. And he will lose. But our job is to spread the word, because the more Americans recognize the real reason for his actions, the less effective this pretext will be when he attempts to use it.

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Don’t Forget To Be Happy

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Welcome to another day.

You probably didn’t give much thought to the fact that you’re here, that you woke up.

You likely haven’t stopped to breathe in deeply, to feel the air expand your chest, and to let it fall slowly as it departs.
You probably haven’t taken a second to realize that you’re alive.

There’s a good chance your mind has already been overtaken by all the things you need to do, the tasks at hand, the appointments you have, everything filling up the small white block of your calendar assigned to today, all the worries that made sleep difficult last night, the clattering parade of bad news you’re already scrolling through.

You’re already running so fast, so quickly.

Because of all that urgent and terrible and necessary pulling at you from every direction, I bet you went from zero to 6,000 in a matter of seconds, not giving your body and mind a chance to ease into it all, to be intentional about this moment, to decide not what you’ll do today, but how you’ll be today.

You’re likely going to be really busy, and since you are, I don’t want you to forget something important:

I don’t want you to forget to be happy.

I don’t want you to fritter away the next 86,400 seconds as they skyrocket by you from the present and into the past, never filling them with the things that give you joy or generate gratitude or register contentment.

Today it’s going to be difficult for you to remember that this is life: that you are not waiting on a day that is coming in which to do all that you dream of doing or to say everything you should say to people you love, or to create and build and write and make the beautiful things stored up inside you.

If not reminded, you may not remember that this is not a day to RSVP for some future living you’ll do somewhere off on the horizon.
You and the daylight are both here now.
I’d hate to see you procrastinate away living for another time, when this is the living time.

Because it was not a guarantee that you’d wake up today.
Many people didn’t.
They didn’t get to feel the rise and fall of their chests.
They didn’t get to stop and notice they are alive.
They are missing this day you and I are present for.

If they had opened their eyes today and joined us here, they’d likely already be running too, and also in danger of making the same mistake you and I can make if we’re not careful.

They, too, might be seduced by the calendar and distracted by their obligations and weighed down by the tragedies, so much that they would forget to fully live in this small twenty-four-hour sliver of time and space in front of them.

I realize that conditions aren’t perfect today for any of this, but trust me, they will not be tomorrow either.

There will again be things you need to do, tasks at hand, appointments you’ve made, everything filling up the small white block of your calendar assigned to that day, all the worries that will have made sleeping tonight difficult, and the clattering parade of bad news you’ll be scrolling through should you reach the morning.

All the more reason you need to do, in this imperfect day, something that declares you will not be so overwhelmed by all that is not right, that you refrain from living well, from being human.

Fill your time with those who make you feel loved, with moments spent in the places that refresh and inspire you: creating and making and dreaming the glorious stuff that cannot wait because they can only be born today and by you.

Please put joy on your agenda today.
Don’t make it wait.
Create space for it.
Meet with it.

Work for justice and be outraged when it is denied.
Passionately oppose every bit of inhumanity that you can.
Never grow comfortable with cruelty or brutality.

But amidst the countless appointment reminders, calendar notifications, and sticky note prompts that you have to keep you focused on all that seemingly needs to be done, include one more critical reminder, even if you have to tattoo it on your heart:

Welcome to another day. Don’t forget to be happy.

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The Week In Stupid

as another stupid week comes to a close here in America, let’s look back at the dumbest fucking shit that happened.

monday: you’ve got to hand it to her — or maybe not

let’s watch as five-time international lap-hockey champion Handy Oakley takes a simple request to define a common word and gives it a vigorous beetlejuicing.

Piers Morgan: “what is inflation?”

Lauren Boebert: “well, inflation is— when, uh, when the, the price of things, um, is, is over, um, is, is, is too expensive because of, of, um, the, uh federal government, uh, really squandering the tax dollars. so you have the green new scam, uh hundreds of billions of dollars spent there, um to provide [makes air quotes] affordable energy, uh, and it was not affordable, it was never free, it was never—”

Morgan: “okay, yeah—”

Boebert: “that money was taken from the American people—”

Morgan: “yeah, okay, I don’t think—”

Boebert: “and forced into the system.”

Morgan: “hang on, hang on—”

what the fuck did we just listen to? even Piers Morgan is dumbfounded by the sheer incoherence of it all. folks, excuse me a moment as my brain tries to process Handy’s shit-salad of word-adjacent gibberish.

yeah, no. I tried and failed — because holy shit, she’s a fucking moron. as a lawmaker, she’s in way over her head, and her flat-lining shitwittery affects us all. Handy Oakley really needs to stick to what she’s good at.

but you know what? fuck it, let’s go all-in and pass the popcorn — because that exchange between Piers and Handy was actually pretty entertaining. I’d watch the shit out of a show that was just Handy’s cerebral cortex leaking out of her ears as she struggles to explain everyday words. admit it, so would you.

tuesday: all hat, no brain

I have a question: if our Big Boy Preznit ‘completely obliterated’ Iran’s nuclear capabilities when he dropped a shitload of bombs last year, then why all the drumbeating for dropping more bombs on Iran right now?

(yes, I know Donny’s bombs didn’t obliterate shit, but that’s the fairy tale Dear Leader fed to us last June, and it’s the lie that every Republican now has to defend.)

oh look, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins has the very same question I do — but look who she tries to get an answer from: Markwayne Mullin, the dumbfuckiest dumbfuck who ever dumbfucked his way through the Senate.

Kaitlan Collins: “if we obliterated Iran’s nuclear program last summer, then why are you worried about it right now?”

Markywane Mullin: “because they’re rebuilding it, and you can see they’re rebuilding it.”

Collins: “but it was obliterated?”

Mullin: “that doesn’t mean you can’t rebuild. I mean, people have car accidents and obliterate their bones in their legs, and yet they can still put you know, they can still put metal back in them and, and and walk again.”

oh fuck, it’s happening again —

oh dear lord. um, could we get Handy Oakley in here to explain what ‘obliterated’ means?

free clue: if you obliterate your leg, that literally means it’s gone forever. your nickname is now Stumpy.

where in the hallowed name of Head Trauma Jesus do you even start with this nonsense? is Marky Many-Names tying to win the Nobel Tortured Metaphor Prize? because I’m sure that’s exactly what Iran did — they just shoved some metal in their nuclear program, put a cast on it and told it to get some bed rest. and seven months later — hey nonny, it’s as good as new. yeah, what a perfectly sensible explanation. I’m sold.

isn’t it maddening when morons lie us into an unnecessary war? the thing about stupid is that it just doesn’t burn — sometimes it gets people killed.

wednesday: who among us, indeed

this week we learned that the fucknugget who created that heartwarming video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes is a White House staffer named Garrett Wade.

isn’t that lovely? there’s actually some bro inside the White House whose job is to crank out racist videos. what a great use of taxpayer dollars, am I right?

wait, it gets better: Wade is also the fucknugget behind the ‘johnny maga’ not-twitter account. now, Garrett seems like a real charmer, so let’s just celebrate that time he forgot to switch to his burner account and posted the following beaut to Elon’s Nazi Bar and Child Porn Emporium.

because who among is isn’t a gay black guy who felt so betrayed by Barack HUSSEIN Obama that we went all-in for Donny?

it’s all so relatable.

thursday: most fucked-up family tree, ever.

remember Ann Coulter? for a while there, back in the pre-MAGA days, she was a Big Fucking Deal. every now and then, Ann tries to regain some of that relevance, so let’s all watch as she tries and fails to do a proper racism.

“That beautiful ending to Trump’s SOTU address reminds me why we can’t have a second-, third-, or fourth- generation immigrant as president. Love for our country has to be in your genes.”

seriously, Ann? nobody gets to be president unless their family has been in the good ol’ US of A for five generations? well, that would certainly mean that Preznit Fuckwit is ineligible to serve. am I right, Community Notes?

Donny’s grandfather was the draft-dodging Bavarian immigrant Friedrich Drumpf.

so now we know who Donny inherited his bone spurs from.

and his mother was the Scottish-born Mary Trump.

and now we know where Donny got his fucked-up hair. yeesh.

friday: the further adventures of some fucking idiot

some fucking idiot started his Friday by waxing rhapsodic about the construction of his gaudy Epstein Dance Hall.

according to the fucking idiot, the Epstein Dance Hall is going to be ‘the Greatest of its kind ever built!’ it’s going to be a big, strong, building, with tears in its eyes as it says ‘sir! sir! no one has ever built an Epstein Dance Hall is gaudy as I am. how do you do it? sir!’

the fucking idiot also displayed once again that he has no idea what ‘exonerated’ means.

yeah, no. remember, the fucking idiot’s name appears in the Dead Pedo Bestie Files more times than Jesus’s name appears in the Bible.

the fucking idiot then denied that he was going to try to steal the midterm elections.

why don’t I believe him?

oh, and the fucking idiot gave a special shout-out to Rep Tony Gonzales.

Tony Gonzales, it must be noted, is currently being pressure to resign from Congress over allegations that he coerced a sexual relationship with a staff member who later killed herself. so what the fuck is the fucking idiot congratulating him for?

oh dear sweet lord, it’s happening again.

the fucking idiot then told a ‘sir’ story about a big, strong teary-eyed New York City cop whose sex life was made better by the fucking idiot’s economic policies.

and then, in the middle of the night, we all found out that — holy fucking shit — the fucking idiot has now taken us to an unprovoked and illegal war with Iran, because obliterated.

because if you can totally obliterate something once, you can ‘totally again obliterate’ it all over. it makes perfect sense to me!

let me just put this here, for no particular reason at all.

oh, and this, too.

and despite all that dumbfuckery going on right in front of their noses, not one reporter stood up to ask ‘what the fuck is wrong with you?’

how fucking idiotic is that?

this is going to be my closing message for the foreseeable future:

practice self-care. do what you need to do to keep sane. if that means you need to disengage with my daily posts for a while, I get it. this community of ours will still be here when you return.

to all the people who have signed on in the days since the election, welcome aboard. settle in as we all try to deal with the shitfuckery that’s ahead of us.

we are all in this together, and we are all here for each other.

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D’oh!

Back in December, when I got my new (old) CD player, it didn’t come with either the remote or the owner’s manual. I could grab a copy of the horrificly scanned—and apparently only—PDF online, but I wanted a real, original, tangible manual. Fortunately, I located one seller who had a copy and I ordered it. A few days later the packet arrived, but he’d sent the Service Manual, an entirely different beast altogether. I emailed him and he wrote back, apologizing profusely and instructed me to instigate a return through eBay. I did as directed and got the return postage mailing label and my account was refunded.

I reached out to the seller a few days later and asked how I could pay for the manual since eBay had already refunded me. After several more days with no response I emailed him again. (This is a seller with a 99.5% positive feedback rating with whom I’ve done business before.) He wrote back and apologized again for the delay, telling me he was out of town and he would “try to find” the correct manual upon his return.

Another week passed and I heard nothing. So I wrote him again. He said he was having trouble locating it.

At this point I said fuck it, and told him not to worry about it. It was obvious he either didn’t have a clue where it was, or he was dealing with something personal that was preventing him from responding in a timely manner and to just forget about the whole thing.

No response. Of course.

Well, apparently this particular manual—much like the matching remote control for my unit—is rarer than proverbial hens’ teeth. I set a trigger on eBay to notify me if one ever showed up again and basically sulked off.

Today, I was attempting to locate the instructions in my desk folders for a CD Walkman I just put up for sale. And what should pop out?

My original instruction manual for the deck that I purchased in 1990!

There was obviously a reason the seller couldn’t find his copy.

Sometimes the universe smiles laughs at you.

In thanks, I’ve scanned this physical copy and upload it to the hifiengine.com repository so a good copy will be available to others.

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Wide Awake

4 am and I’m wide awake. Fuckin’ cortisol…

After laying in bed, tossing and turning for an hour and the entirety of Jazz At The Pawnshop 3 failing to lull me back to sleep, I finally decided to just get up. Apparently both pups also needed to go out, so it was apparently meant to be. I heard Sophie in the kitchen attacking her empty bowl, so I also fed her. (Raffi had already gone back to bed.)

At this point I think I’m up for the day. But one of the nice things about retirement is I have nothing on my schedule today,  so if I need a nap calls…

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An Explanation…

An explanation for the last week’s worth of very-Richard-Bach-Messiah’s-Handbook-style inspirational quotes from the author herself:

You are stardust that learned to overthink.

You are a walking, breathing impossibility, atoms that figured out how to fall in love, get anxious about font choices, and wonder if their email subject line was “too much”.

You’re hurtling through space on a rock that somehow grew trees and oceans and you and you’re still not sure your weirdness “fits”.

We treat creativity like it’s something to earn. Like there’s a prerequisite. A readiness level. Some imaginary threshold of “good enough” or “acceptable” we need to cross before we’re allowed to make something.

But you were literally forged in the death of a star. The iron in your blood is billions of years old. Your atoms have been recycling through the universe since before this planet existed. You are ancient material arranged into something that has never existed before and will never exist again.

The creative cost of waiting until you’re “ready” is collective. Every unmade thing is a map someone else can’t navigate by. Every unsaid thought is a conversation that never gets to happen. Every voice that sands itself down to fit is one less frequency in a world that desperately needs the full spectrum.

Creative Living exists because we believe creativity isn’t a hobby or a side quest or something you get back to when life calms down. It’s how you fully experience the absurdity of being alive.

It’s how impossible, stardust, skeleton-riding, dream-hallucinating, conscious-universe-folded-into-a-body humans like you make sense of the fact that you’re here at all.

[@loismac on Instagram]

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Back At It

This one—a player that was a total lost cause—is a surprise gift to be sent to my tech who repairs this shit for me. I think he’s the only one in my circle who can appreciate it.

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Every Accusation Is A Confession

James Cockrell has been arrested on 2nd degree child exploitation charges in South Carolina.

Following a child s*xual abuse materials investigation into Cockrell, authorities found a child living in a condemned home covered with rat feces and holes in the floor.

Cockrell’s X account is filled with posts idolizing Donald Trump, referring to him as “god.” Cockrell ironically calls for a p*dophile to be killed in another post.

Not a drag queen.
Not trans.
Not an immigrant.
Not Muslim.
✔️MAGA!

 

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Tuesday Tiedrich

oh look, United States President Piss-Baby McDiaperload is once again doing what he does best: whining because reality is being mean to him.

“and I hadda go through, and I still do, fake stories, fake polls … I saw one today. 40%. I’m not at 40%. I’m at— much higher. I mean I’d love to run against anybody. the real polls say ‘you’d kill everybody. wouldn’t even be close.’”

oh boo fucking hoo, you pathetic sad-sack. stuff a sock in it already.

go press that big red button on the Resolute Desk, and when Walt Nauta comes scampering in with your diet coke, tell him you need your diaper changed, pronto.

here’s one of those ‘fake’ polls that has Donny shitting himself blind.

CNN’s Harren Enter: “Trump’s net approval rating. look at the pre-SOTU polls, the State of the Union. look at that — negative 27 points! my goodness gracious. Compare that to where he was in 2020, 2019, and 2017 — minus 10, way lower now. the bottom line is Donald Trump has never been weaker going into a State of the Union address, according our CNN polling than he is right now, and weaker by a considerable amount.”

Donny’s poll numbers are circling the drain right now because none of this shit is popular, and all of it is fucked up.

aside from the brain-dead cultists for whom Dear Leader can never ever do wrong, nobody voted for any of the fascist shit going on right now.

nobody voted for the historic and stately East Wing to be demolished so that Donny can replace it with some vulgar Epstein Dance Hall — and speaking of Donny’s dead pedo bestie, nobody voted for the continuing cover-up of a massive pedophile ring.

nobody voted for off-the-charts corruption and greed.

nobody voted for masked ICE thugs teargassing children, and murdering anyone who looks at them funny. nobody voted for innocent immigrants to be disappeared off the streets and shipped off to far-away slave-labor gulags.

nobody voted for our allies to be insulted and ignored, or for Ukraine to be thrown to the wolves, or for Greenland to be perpetually harassed, or for Venezuela to become a vassal state.

nobody voted for the price of everything continuing to skyrocket — especially when Donny promised bring all that shit down on Day One.

and it’s sure as shit that nobody voted for whatever the fuck this is.

“why— why would you do this? and they walk in— nobody even asks for— like, you have an identification? do you have an ID? um— [long pause] it’s so crazy. you know, the Mayor of New York, and he’s a very nice person, I, I met him. his ideology is not, not too good. but uhhhh— we’re having a massive snowstorm right now, and I’ve heard that he’s asked people to come out and help shovel the snow. okay, so you get a shovel and you start shoveling. what? what the hell, you’re not gonna help too much, but you help— [points to a woman in the audience] hello, darling, how are you? [points again] no, right behind you. look. my friend, right? are you okay? yes, you. are you okay? are you okay? [long pause] good. good. are your eyes okay? I gave her money to get her eyes fixed. lotta money, to get her eyes fixed. that doctor ripped me off, but that’s okay.”

holy shit. what in the actual fuck did we just listen to?

my dear sweet lord. it was just last week that the entire media ecosystem dogpiled AOC, because she paused and said ‘um’ in the middle of an answer — but Donny somehow gets an endless series of free passes to shit out incoherent nonsense on a daily basis. nobody in the press blinks, nobody says boo. it’s fucking maddening.

here’s a thing historian Timothy Snyder said yesterday on the Jim Acosta Show. Snyder had just returned from ten days abroad, and he was stuck by what he saw watching other nations’ leaders on TV.

“I mean, I just abroad for the last 10 days or so and I was watching other people’s TV and other people’s leaders. And when you do that and then you come back and you watch our TV and our leaders it takes some adjustment, right? Like, that person that we were just watching, he does not seem well, in any sense.”

“I realize if you watch it day after day after day, it kind of maybe seems normal, but when you contrast it to people who can actually finish sentences and people who can stay on the topic and people who are perhaps sharing the same reality as you, it is really striking. I mean, that guy — just abstracting from the fact that he’s the president of the United States — he does not … He just doesn’t look well.”

Snyder gets it right: President Pudding Cup is not well — physically or mentally. and as much as we try to remind ourselves that none of this is normal, we can’t help but become inured to it.

Donny’s minders are still having to spackle makeup all over his bloated, corpse-like hand — and they’re not telling us why. nobody voted for a medical coverup.

and it’s damned certain that nobody voted for absolute batshit bugfuckery.

when Donny blithers on about “I can use Licenses to do absolutely ‘terrible’ things to foreign countries” he’s giving away the game. tariffs were never about responsible or coherent economic policy. they were about having a hammer with with to punish the shit out of any country that pissed him off.

nobody voted for a buffoonish dipshit in decline who makes everything about him.

Jesus wept. Donny can’t just let the US Olympic hockey team enjoy their own victory. he has to horn in and pretend he had something to do with it. how weak. how sad. how small and petty.

did you vote for that? I didn’t.

here’s your Zero of the Day: it’s Judge Aileen Cannon, up to her usual fuckery.

Cannon is so easy to loathe. amateurish, dumb as shit, and totally in the tank for Donny Convict, she’s less a judge and more a member of Donny’s own legal team.

Judge Fangirl took some time off from scrawling ‘Mrs. Aileen Trump’ over and over on the covers of all her notebooks to commit an evil.

“Breaking: The Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon has permanently blocked the release of special counsel Jack Smith’s report on the classified documents case — saying releasing the report would be unfair to Trump and his co-defendants.”

when Cannon says the releasing the report would be ‘unfair’ to Donny, she gives away her game.

Melanie D’Arrigo, can you please explain to the nice people why that is?

“Blocking the release of a report on potential crimes committed by Trump and his co-defendants because it would be ‘unfair’ to them, is admitting that the report contains compelling evidence of crimes committed by them.”

exactly. Donny is guilty as fuck, and everyone knows it — even Judge Fangirl.

and now, here’s your Hero of the Day: whistleblower Ryan Schwank.

last week, Schwank resigned from his job at an ICE academy in Georgia, and yesterday he testified before Congress about all the evil shit ICE expected him to do.

 

“on my first day, I received secretive orders to teach new cadets to violate the Constitution, by entering homes without a judicial warrant. for the last five months, I watched ICE dismantle the training program, cutting 240 hours of vital classes from a 584-hour program. classes that teach the Constitution, our legal system, firearms training, the use of force, lawful arrests, proper detention, and the limits of officers’ authority. for example, they ceased all of the legal instructions regarding use of force. this means that cadets are not taught what it means to be objectively reasonable. the very standard which the law requires them to meet when deciding whether or not to use deadly force. our jobs as instructors are to teach them so well, that they can make split-second decisions about what they can and cannot do in life-or-death situations. yet in the name churning out an endless stream of officers, DHS leadership has dismantled the academic and practical tests the we need to know that cadets can safely and lawfully perform their job. all to satisfy an administration demanding that they train thousands of new officers before the end of the year.”

brave man.

this is going to be my closing message for the foreseeable future:

practice self-care. do what you need to do to keep sane. if that means you need to disengage with my daily posts for a while, I get it. this community of ours will still be here when you return.

to all the people who have signed on in the days since the election, welcome aboard. settle in as we all try to deal with the shitfuckery that’s ahead of us.

we are all in this together, and we are all here for each other.

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Damn You, YouTube!

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Your atoms were forged in the belly of a dying star.

The iron in your blood is ancient.

The calcium in your bones was made in a supernova.

You are literally made of reincarnated stars.

And you’re worried about being “too much”?

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3am Musings

I’ve felt it. You’ve felt it. Things feel off. Things don’t work the way we’ve come to accept as normal and expected. Whether that’s our institutions, our devices, or—dare I say—our bodies (TBH, the latter may be colored by my own experiences over the past year). The simplest tasks are glitching. Trying to get anything accomplished through customer service anywhere is a lesson in frustration. Nothing is working the way it should.

I have a theory.

Judging from the prevalence of YouTube videos on the subject, as is the case with many older people I find myself waking up almost every night like clockwork around 3 am. Sometimes I can fall right back asleep; other times—like this morning—not so much. My mind starts wandering.

I know I’m not the only one—again, because I spend too much time on YouTube—that everything just feels off. In fact, I will go so far as reality itself has felt off since I watched those planes slam into the Twin Towers on the morning news that fateful day in 2001 as I was getting ready for work—although nowhere near as much as it has over the past five or six years.

“High strangeness” is the only way I can describe it. Yes, life eventually returned to normal—and for a few brief months our country was united in a way I now doubt we’ll ever see again. But then Republicans got a war hard-on and Bush invaded Iraq (even though it had nothing to do with the attacks) and things started unraveling.

This morning, while laying awake listening to Ben breathe beside me, I envisioned reality as a meticulously maintained Jenga tower; a tower representing our shared reality.

Bear with me here. This is kind of in the weeds and I’m not sure I can adequately convey it in words.

This tower of our shared reality is composed of blocks made of 8+ billion smaller towers representing our individual lives. When we die the small gaps left in the structure from our individual towers disappearing are replaced by new towers of those who follow after us. The big, life-altering events we each experience individually can be represented by blocks being knocked out of our personal towers. It’s never enough to bring down the entire fabric of reality, but these events definitely affect our personal realities, forcing us to change. (see: cancer, etc.)

But something happened in 2001. Something came along and knocked out several rows wholesale making everything unbalanced. The tower started listing.

When it descended that golden escalator in 2015, more critical rows were knocked out. The tower started leaning dangerously and it’s only gotten worse over the past decade. That’s this feeling of everything being off. Because it is.

COVID, 2020. Another block pushed—although not immeidately out of the tower. Somehow this managed to give our collective reality an opportunity to reset. But then, BAM! It was knocked out as well and it was back to business as usual. The tower was beginning to look like a certain monument in Pisa, Italy.

I fear all it’s going to take is one more event, one more loss of a row of blocks and…

I don’t know about y’all, but I keep feeling like this is just around the corner.