Sometimes I find comfort in a two-thousand-year-old myth about a Chinese emperor.
Last night I woke in the middle of the night and wondered if it’s possible to believe in something otherworldly in 2020.
We had a pleasant June for a while, but the long mean heat of summer is finally here. Beyond this, I’m losing the plot.
And there’s the sound of someone in the street laughing and saying, “How did we get like this?”
Aliens could land in America and we would politicize them until they became just another round of ammo in our endless red versus blue battle.
As I listened to a woman talk to the pigeons, I began humming that Jesus’ blood never failed me yet.
They’re calling it the Gorilla Dust Cloud, and you can see it from outer space.
For years I would reach for my telephone the moment I woke up, groping for it with a junkie sense of need.
She made a comment about her life that seems like a solid piece of wisdom for dealing with any kind of history: “I need to look back, but I don’t need to stare.”
During commercial breaks, I sang along to radio jingles for machines that control your brainwaves while you sleep.
People are edgy, their dreams infected with anxiety if they can sleep at all.
I scrolled through streets named after Hank Williams and Big Mama Thornton while the radio worried about leftists and alien abductions.
More than ever, surrealism might be the best strategy for surviving these days.
And I’m reminded that I think better without the screen tugging at my thoughts like a magnet.
I want to square my life with these instructions from Thich Nhat Hanh: “Vow to work for reconciliation by the most silent and unpretentious mean possible.”
They call it the hour of the wolf, and I think it’s reassuring there’s a name for this time, that others feel it too.
Sometimes my mind lands on a jittery thought: screens have become our reality and the physical world simply exists to serve their needs.
This morning I came across a stray photograph from my mother’s things, and something about it looks like a scene from a dream.
It’s a strange kind of whiplash, living in a society that’s somehow becoming more sensitive and cruel at the same time.
Tonight I’m going to play Funkadelic on repeat, dim the lights, make bad coffee, and write some purple prose.
