The age we are living in is starting to feel like an omni-trigger, a cosmic strategy to tease it all out right now. The great tabling of pathos and pathology may account for sharp spikes in suicide rates and opioid relapse, a marked uptick in Kingston gunplay, and in my general observations a soaring epidemic of ragged despair and public displays of end-of-rope rage against the air and sky!
I am a blogger from way back. I started writing on blogspot.com when I needed to rant about what I saw as the disintegration of democracy. It was during the Bush era. I needed to vent. It clearly didn’t do much good. Here we are, waving the flag while thousands are dying in a pandemic, and fighting fascism on our own soil by our own government, despite eight years of Obama.
In this man’s presence, I was able to believe the musician life I’d long envisioned, of fans, tours, and some kind of stardom, was still possible, even as I entered my mid-thirties. My friend and I worked diligently towards that fantasy. Tapping into his will was intoxicating.
The woman could make a friend of anyone. She knew the old families throughout Ulster, who dated who when, and who drank a bit too much or just plain couldn’t be trusted. She wasn’t afraid of mixing in the down-home info with her coverage of meetings and politics.
I have no idea what’s behind the outages. Downed tree, Liz thinks, but well into the calm after what wasn’t much of a storm anyway, I prefer to suspect a creeping infrastructural collapse, a climate-related over-taxation of the Eastern Seaboard power grid and SCADA systems, regulatory and staffing insufficiency, and the malignant let-it-rot indifference of the one percent.
I danced with my granddaughters this weekend, one of them on my hip and the other twirling around the floor. We sang as I made breakfast. They tried to snap their fingers and whistle. We played hide and seek and we had a good talk during an early morning walk.
Clearly, all hackers are, to a degree, sociopaths. Some more blind to other people’s emotional lives than others. My vigilant nature, combined with my innate, ever-sharper curiosity, wants to look them in the eye, hear how they talk, register them in my mind’s impregnable database.
I’d sensed rain’s power when I was young. At the moment the 1969 Aquarian Festival in Bethel became a mudpit, my parents got caught out in that same storm’s southern origins as Hurricane Camille. My mother ran our Virginia county’s welfare department at the time. My father had a motorcycle and was called in to duty reaching mountain hamlets cut off from regular vehicles. We took trips through the devastation in the family car well into 1970.
For many in New York, Irene and Sandy were startling awakenings to the fact that, yes, we get real weather here, too, weather that can destroy, disrupt, reposition large structures, and burn permanent and surreal images in our minds, like Avenue C turning into a river along which taxicabs merrily floated by toward New York harbor and the light of Liberty.
During the shutdown, I discovered online ballet workouts, and they are actually kind of enjoyable. Some chirpy young women conduct classes that are not only a tough workout but also make you laugh while you’re doing them. “Why are we doing another five sets?” one asks the camera. “Because I cannot remember how many we’ve done so far! Big smile, everyone! And …”