Solo

 We put one of our cats down today. Solo--named not after Star Wars but because originally we thought we'd be getting him and his brother. When his bro was given away before him, we got a solo kitty instead of a duo. He'd been having gastrointestinal trouble for the last year or so--throwing up a ton, lots of poop problems. Gradually he went down from his former 14 pounds to 10, then 9, then this week 7. Despite tons of vet visits and medication regimens--is it IBS or lymphoma?--over the last week or so he just stopped eating. 

Even at the end, Solo so enjoyed his "water treat": we trickle water from a cup into a bowl for him. He's always gone gaga for that, pawing (and clawing) at the cup, taking a turn around the mini waterfall, examining the back of the cup, sticking his little nose underneath the stream, sneezing violently after water would go up his snoot, and even sticking his head into the cup to drink directly from the cup as water trickled out of it. Just the words "water treat" would summon Solo like magic.

That remained up even this morning. When I got up, Solo came in, thin and bony and bleary-eyed, and sat next to his bowl and cup. I gave him water treat. He stuck his nose in the stream. But he couldn't bring himself to drink. He hadn't eaten anything for days, not even the nibbles or licks at kibble or canned food. 

We had stopped the nightly ordeal of stuffing meds down his throat a few days prior. 

After I got home from school, we took him to the vet down the street, the same vet that had taken care of Solo when he was a kitten with what they feared was kitty pneumonia. 

As we pet him, the vet gave the first of two shots--this one to relax him into near unconsciousness and painlessness. His eyes stayed open, and I tried to close them so they wouldn't cause any discomfort (though he was by that point beyond discomfort). They then brought in the heart-stopping injection. They had to struggle a bit to fit it into his thinned vein. But they did, and he was gone.

Solo is only the second cat that I've raised from a tiny kitten, and the only one so far I've seen all the way through from kitten to passing. (Our other cat, Hidey, we got from a shelter when she was just emerging from smallest kittenhood.) Our next cat is likely to be my partner's attempt to domesticate the stray he's been courting for over a year now. I'm not convinced NC ("Neighborhood Cat") wants to be indoor, nor am I convinced Hidey would want her. But he'll try anyway, and we'll see.

I cried earlier this week, holding Solo, anticipating this day. I shed tears all day and sobbed on the way home. I'm going to bump up against a kitty-shaped absence in my life for some time to come. All the little places he'd be: hopping up to take one of my hands as I work on the computer, waiting outside of the shower to investigate the drips and puddles (a scientist of water was Solo), chewing on anything crinkly and often carrying it to his water bowl like an offering to some sea god, and mostly snuggling up to me. At his healthiest, he was so big, and he insisted on taking up my torso. 

Cats are infamously aloof. You can't count on a cat to show affection to you. But Solo outdid any dog in loving on us. He adored us. We adored him, even in his destructive kitten phase. (We would often joke about having visits from some mysterious cult's monks, who in their gentle way would inform us that our cute little kitten was in fact Destruction incarnate. "Behind his innocent face, he dreams of the world broken and burning." "But he's such a cute boy!" we'd respond. "Yes," they would sigh, shaking their heads, "That's how he gets you.")

We withdrew somewhat as his health declined. I suspect some touches of kitty dementia. But he was still happy to sit with us, kneading a blanket and sucking on it, never having grown out of his nursing phase. He loved our hands resting on him or his head and paws resting on our hands. 

He was an exceptional cat. I told him often how much I loved him, what a good guy, a good Solo, he was. I thanked him often for being with us, and I thanked God for bringing us together. 

May God take his soul to a paradise of water treats, crinkly plastic, and beloved hands and warm torsos to snuggle with. 

Chapter Challenge or Other Things?

 So--there's a book institute for faculty this summer. I wasn't able to participate last summer due to a conflict. But this summer, the week is open.

The deadline to get a full chapter in is in one day. I have no such chapter.

Put it this way: you get $500 if you write a chapter in 24 hours. Could I do it?

What if it's $1,000?

I might try in that case.

 But. Part of me feels too old and tired to invest the kind of madcap-dash, put-anything-on-paper rush this kind of thing would require. I have classes to plan. I have friends to see (maybe, if they're free). 

And, if I'm honest, I have a lot of hangups about this project. It's the one I was supposed to complete by last August, the one where two weeks before that due date I found an old book that absolutely did what I was planning to do much better than I ever could have. So I gave up. It was freeing to give up, all that energy and worry about August evaporated in a puff of "should've done better research." 

"It happens," said one colleague. "Really? C'mon," chided others. 

The relief won out. 

And now--after today--I have other matters to occupy myself this summer. I may even have a church after July. 

I may even have a church after July. 

Yeah, it was a big last few days. My life is gonna take a big step into a different thread of the strand, methinks.

I suppose I'm thinking of ways to tie off this strand--write another book, the book I was supposed to write--before I hop onto the new strand.

I don't anticipate I'll have much time to write a book and get full prof after I start seminary and (somehow??) have a church. 

But that might be a long shot anyway. The number of churches that want a queer pastor--the first in the conference so far as I know--is small. And I've signaled that I'm good sticking with just full-time professoring and full-time grad studenting. It's not like I need a congregation on top of that.

And of course a congregation of my own would mean stepping back from my church, the church I've attended for twenty years. 

All this is God stuff. May doors open, and may I say yes--either to a madcap writing dash, a church, both, or something else entirely.

 

Boring Updates and Perspectives on The Awfulness

 Well, I got done SOME of what I had planned. Nothing read of the many comps for next week, nothing written in terms of rec letters or article reviews. 

But I took the car to the mechanic--replaced a sensor and met another prof from my university. Both of us are stuck at the associate level, too overworked to focus on a book (maybe). Both of us are nervous in that resigned way of institutional veterans: more of the same. Both of us wonder if this time is worse? Because the governor hates us? Hates higher ed? Stacked the Board of Regents with his cronies? 

And I got good news: a call from one of the seminaries I applied to, offering me a full tuition scholarship. Very nice, that personal touch. 

I also figured out midterm grades, loaded them up, sent them out--and then immediately discovered an error in the grades for one class, recalculated, changed the grades, and sent out an explainer email.

And I dipped back into some News. Tariffs seem to be off again. Or delayed? Suspended? Who knows. Some random quote from some anonymous White House staffer basically praised it as a thrilling what-comes-next story line. We'll see how enjoyable markets find chaos. 

Another death from measles, this time an adult. This is more deaths this year than we've had in the past twenty-two years. 

I read two pieces today about The Awfulness--well, two blog posts and a video.

Writing in 3 Quarks Daily, Barry Goldman reflects on the conventional wisdom he has absorbed and transmitted about care and deliberation in the face of seeming emergencies. Goldman recalls a speech by a political science professor he heard once when he was young:

He said all revolutionary movements are essentially utopian. The central idea is that there is a madman at the wheel. If we could just knock out the madman and grab the wheel, we could steer to safety. He said, sadly, this is a juvenile fantasy. The bitter truth, he told us, is there is no madman. And there is no wheel.

The world is much more complicated than the slogans of the revolutionaries would have it. There are no simple solutions. There are not even any simple problems.

Worse, the idea that there are simple solutions leads inevitably to fanaticism. The notion that there is a simple truth, we know it, and that guy over there is preventing us from reaching it, leads us to excuse pushing that guy out of the way.

Goldman says he has long attested to the truth of this insight. But, quoting e.e. cummings, "There is some shit I will not eat":

There can be no respectful listening to the other side when the other side says children shouldn’t be vaccinated for polio, or January 6^th was a day of love, or Ukraine “got in a war.” Ukraine did not get in a war. Ukraine was attacked by a murderous dictator. RFK Jr. is a dangerous crank. Elon Musk has no business mucking around in the Treasury Department computer system. There is no such thing as the Gulf of America.

So I have changed my mind. I do so with the greatest reluctance. It goes against everything I’ve been saying for nearly 50 years. But the facts have changed. And “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

The time for politics as usual has passed. We are in the midst of a coup. The Constitution is in danger. Democracy and the rule of law are at stake. There is a madman at the wheel.

THERE IS A MADMAN AT THE WHEEL!

(I'm reminded of John Mulaney's bit from the first T admin [I paraphrase]: It's like there's a horse loose in the hospital. The surgeries and procedures go on, but now and then you hear galloping, neighing, crashing--and you remember: There's a horse. In the hospital!)

 Timothy Burke (the historian, not the more famous one) offers some advice for those of us convinced that there's a madman at the wheel/a horse in the hospital/a coup in the US:

If you want to do something about it, whatever that it might be, you have a bigger and harder job than just being right. You have to be part of a we. Being part of a we is not just organizing, it is allowing yourself to be organized by others. It means giving up some of your own vanities, you own insistences, your own certainties and urgencies.

Don’t start from the biggest “we” imaginable, and we don’t start with the “we” that is required to win out in a struggle, as if fighting for a better world is a Request For Proposal with an attached list of minimum specs. We start from where we are as individuals, with the people who are most likely to know us. But that is precisely where the lonely purist fails hardest when they mistake their vain righteousness for a truth everyone has to be bullied and cajoled into accepting. If you can’t convince the people most proximate to you, most likely to listen to you, about what you want to make a shared cause or common concern, then that’s what you have to leave behind. If you can’t leave it behind, then embrace being alone, accept that what matters to you is being right as opposed to being effective. Choose the perfect and scorn the merely good. 

And finally,  John Green (one of the vlog brothers) simply gives a sitrep on his own anxiety. His book about tuberculosis gets released in a few weeks, just as (as he notes) we seem as a country dead set on giving a huge boost to "diseases of injustice" like HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis. This boost to disease (by abruptly and cruelly withdrawing aid) will cost lives. He ends by admitting "I'm scared because it's scary." But, he reminds us, we live not at the end of history but in the middle of it. We don't know the ending, which gives us hope and lays out for us work to do.  

The work, it seems, involves not merely raising the alarm about the present but also imagining a "we" who live today and tomorrow with us.

 

Fall!

 I fell earlier this evening while on a run. Typing is hard because my right middle finger is swaddled in a Toy Story band-aid. Larger band-aids are on my palm and my knee. Both knees look a bloody mess, and I'll be plucking sidewalk grit out of my hands for a while.

I hate falling. What a silly thing to say, right? Who enjoys falling down unexpectedly, slamming into the sidewalk? Aside from the pain, it's embarrassing. I was running later than I should have on our neighborhood's buckled sidewalks. I failed to see a buckle that I'd stepped over countless times before, my foot caught, and BAM. 

I hate the noise I make: UHHHN. I hate the moment of panic--Did I break something? mixed with Did anyone see? 

I hate how old and inept I feel after falling. I've fallen before--worse than this--about five years ago. I remember that awful feeling after getting up, realizing that, despite the pain, I wasn't gravely injured--but still feeling the full-body bone-shock of the impact. It keeps reverberating, repeating, as you hobble away, not yet looking at your hands or knees, pressing your fingernails into the uninjured parts of your palms to forestall the pain.

I sent pictures to some of my snapchat friends. My sister: "It's like stigmata in all the wrong places."

My partner panicked a bit, wondering if I needed to put my legs up to stop the bleeding. Just scratches, I assured him. He watched as I washed them with soap and water, dabbed at them with paper towels, and poured alcohol over them. That was unpleasant. It hurt so much I laughed. 

I anticipate greater pain tomorrow, the bruises and body aches joining the pain of the scrapes. 

I was going to do more writing--the statement of purpose for the next seminary will require more new composition--but I may need to hold off til I can type better.

It may be a bit before I try running again. Run-shy. Or fall shy. No more running at night unless I have smooth paths and more lighting--or more youthful eyes, better reflexes, or superhuman invulnerability. 

The day before this was great--shopping with my friend. I resisted buying much for myself beyond some beauty/hygiene things. I think I should indulge in some transformers, though. Right now they're giving me some joy against, well, other stressful things in life.

Nothing like a toy robot that turns into something else to take the sting out of a fall.

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Stress, Turnaround, Shutdown

 Some days I can get honked at for a stupid driving maneuver and shake it off. Some days, like this evening, I can get honked at--rightfully--for merging without looking sufficiently and decide that's enough driving and being conscious for today. I turned around and went back home without the groceries I was going to get. 

I should get my eyes checked, my partner suggests. It's not (or not only) that I don't see well at night--who does? It's that I'm just not a good driver. Even when I look, I miss things. I'm being hard on myself. 

I just really hate driving.

And it was a long day. 

And I'm tired. 

I did start applications to seminaries. Turns out getting my transcripts is easier than it used to be thanks to electronic systems. I asked my recommenders to recommend me. I just need to finish a statement (only 500 words--that's so short!). And then wait.

My partner thinks my anxiety about applying made me extra sensitive to driving stuff.

Maybe? But really, it just seems like I'm getting worse at driving--or, well, worse at handling the stress of driving. It seems I'm avoiding and honking at inattentive or unsafe drivers more myself, too. And I don't navigate well at any time of day. I don't deal with other drivers being impatient with me well. 

This isn't a great trajectory, I know. I'd prefer not to retreat back to the olden days where I lived in active dread of the next time I had to drive somewhere. Is this a new old-age thing for me? Just getting more anxious about driving? Ugh.

Maybe I just need some sleep. There are times when unconsciousness just seems like a better place to go. 

If I were not me, I'd be telling myself to try to do some exercise. Move a bit and then decide how I feel (still not like driving, but maybe not just "stop all conscious thought ASAP"). I'm healthy enough not to want to respond to stress by shutting down.That response is likely an indicator that I'm pretty stressed out otherwise about something else (The Awfulness, for instance). 

So. I dunno. Signing off for now, maybe to do a little exercise in the name of resisting the decline into anxious paralysis.

That Ugh Feeling at the End of a Week

 Ugh. It's strange how much one day of actual going-to-school work this week just it out of me today. Today's post may just devolve into meandering.

In my defense, I've worked steadily over this last mostly snow-closed week: creating assignment structures and prompts for class (I nearly said "creating content for class"--double ugh), grading stuff, writing on my sermon for Sunday, keeping up with my workout schedule (i.e., something every day). And I even succeeded at accomplishing non-productive-but-joy-giving things like setting up my Star Wars Lego and many of my transformers. 

The standard question I asked today: how was the snow for you? Most of my students responded with some variation of "delightful." And I agree. This was a delightful week in so many ways. I felt like I had permission to not do anything except stuff that gave me joy. Partly I was responding to the Big Depression from the Inauguration. (This continues as more and more news items about the wrecking-ball approach to governance this administration adopts.) 

It set me back to go back to work today. I mean, I always enjoy teaching, and today I taught one of my favorite little lessons (dramatic irony). But it seems to have wiped me out. 

Why don't I do something else? Because so much remains to be done--more assignments to grade, more feedback to give, more letters to write, a stack of applications to our program to process--and this blog to write, a workout to do (maybe), and even some old transformer purchases to unpack. Even joy has become A Task. Perhaps I'm getting sick? Free-floating anxiety? 

Or just tired because I worked hard today? 

Or depressed because of all the things? 

...aaaaaand BOOM I just remembered a big letter of rec I still haven't written for a colleague. That wasn't the cause of my down-tired-ness. But it does add a load of guilt on top of everything. Sigh.

OK: priorities. I need to finish the sermon for Sunday. I need to respond to blog stuff with my grad students. I need to fill out a form for one of my advisees. That's likely tomorrow's thing. 

I need to work out, maybe just a recovery routine. 

This is why I don't play with my toys much. Always something else to do. I don't know how I think I'm going to fit in seminary. I can't even put "apply to seminary" on this week's schedule. 

Ugh. Maybe workout will clear my down-ness. That happens sometimes. 

Ugh.

Pre-Storm Breakfast and Some Pampering

 I keep wanting to start blogs with "The storm is coming," but I don't want the Q-Anon connotations That brings. 

But really and truly: the storm is coming tonight. I mean the winter storm, where we're expected to get 2-4 inches of snow? Maybe? Or maybe ice? Or "snow showers" mixed with sleet and freezing rain? So much depends on one or two degrees either direction.

My city sits right on the demarcation line between "snow" and "ice" on all the radar forecasts, so who knows? Everything will freeze for at least a few days, no matter what happens. The whole city is scrambling to prepare: flooding stores, emptying shelves, stocking up on non-perishables. Foods that need refrigeration pose no problem. If electricity winks out, just put the stuff outside or in the car. The problem involves reheating. 

We have a fireplace in our house. We've never used it, but the prior owner says he often had a fire in there in wintertime. I give it the side-eye myself--not because it seems suss but because of my ignorance of all things fireplace related. Is the chimney cleaned out? Is the flue open? How would I know if the flue is opened? What exactly is a flue? Do I have an ember screen? (I don't think so?) Pokers? My partner wants us to have a duraflame log or two just in case, but I don't know. I can all too easily imagine our house burning down because we couldn't go 12 hours without central heat.

Meanwhile I have one last-minute set of errands to run today, and all of them involve my best friend. I hope to get one last fancy breakfast with him at our current favorite place. Then we hope to get mani-pedis. Will anywhere be open today due to MLK Day? Due to the coming storm? Dunno. But we'll try. 

He'll go for both mani and pedi. I'll probably stick to pedi. I want to give my feet and toes some love. I went so long thinking they were ugly. My genetics predispose me to hammer toes and calluses, and age twists my feet toward boniness. I had a few years where I ran a lot, which was murderous on my feet and toes. Nowadays I have only to walk a bit one day to find that I can barely get down the stairs the next day.

Thus: my toes are due some love. And by "love" I mean the professional scraping and filing and cleaning and pampering that folk at those places know how to do. It's an absolute indulgence--a pretty dear one, too--but I'm doing it today in the spirit of joy-producing activities.

Yeah, I got a lot of work after this, even with the likelihood of closed schools Wednesday. I have to write a sermon. I have to put a ton of stuff online. I need to think about pitching a paper to a conference, writing an article, recovering my book project from its purgatory, cleaning my office...

But for now: food and pedis.

Driving Nerves

 If I haven't mentioned it already: I hate driving.

Don't get me wrong. I like being able to drive. I appreciate having the capability to get into my car (I also appreciate that I have a car) and go wherever I'd like.

But the actual driving? I find it stressful. I always have. I learned to drive very late. Unlike most other teens, I was not eager to take the wheel. My family went through rough times during my learning-to-drive years (the early 90s). We owned an old blue Toyota Corona--not Corolla, CoroNA. Bless its mechanical heart. It got us where we needed to go, mostly. But take your foot off the gas at all, and the thing died. Stopping anywhere but your final destination required combining the break with a constant revving of the engine, as if starting a street race. More than once I would forget, or get the combo wrong, or something. I have vivid memories of my father panicking as we shuddered to a halt in the middle of a busy intersection.

I drive with two feet--on an automatic--to this day. I drive with panic and shame as well. I get very nervous changing lanes, turning out onto a busy street, navigating a four-way stop, or--worst of all--turning left without an arrow. Most of the time I flatly refuse to turn left without a protected light. I'll happily make a block of right turns to avoid it.

I was twenty before I took a driver's test thanks to my friend A. I used her car. I passed only because the weary, done-with-all-this old instructor neglected to make me parallel park (a feat I still could not manage today). 

In college, for a few years, I had custody of my family's next vehicle, a 1979 Ford cargo van that we had been gifted by a kind elderly woman. She had many dogs, whom she loved dearly and spoiled with every indulgence she could manage. The van, as we got it, consisted of a driver's and passenger's seat up front, with the cargo space in back covered in archeological layers of rugs, all matted with various canine extrusions. The smell . . . took a long time to leave, lingering well after we had peeled the rugs off the bare floor.

I didn't use the van much. The lack of any windows made merging so much more thrilling, and I cared not for those thrills. On those occasions where I'd venture off campus to a store or somesuch, I'd spend the entire time shopping with my heart racing, dreading the necessity of the trip back. 

For most of grad school, I relied on Minneapolis's public transit system--and my partner, who drove in any weather with perfect confidence. I drove his car only a few times then. This changed as we moved to Florida for a few years. I'd help out with long drives now and then (highway driving outside of cities is usually fine for me). 

All this changed when he got a job in a big metropolitan area, and I got a job in--well, the mid-sized city where I still am. He couldn't have a car, and I needed one. Thus, I got his. I went from near-zero driving to driving all the time overnight. And, like all other awful learning curves, I eventually got to where I can drive without it being a source of dread--mostly.

But there are still days like today, where driving to a new location and navigating parts of the city I don't know well in heavy traffic lead me to abandon my tasks and get home. Home--where I can be glad that I drive while still hating to drive.

Careful Work and Stormy Skies

I didn't get much more work done on classes today. My best friend contacted me about a Lego half-day to finish up our prior projects before the semester started. I took him up on that.

I got a bit done--mostly errands and some minor administrative tasks. There's almost always tasks that need to be done but don't really matter much, at least not as much as finishing a syllabus. But when you're stuck on syllabus-writing, as I am, you welcome distracting tasks. They keep you busy and give you some vague feeling of productivity even though they are at heart distractions.

I also recognize I'm in a bit of a depression season. I have really, really low-grade depression most of the time. "Dysthymia," my therapist tells me, "if you need a label." Most of the time it's just a low mood and a ramping up of my usual Eeyore outlook on things. Occasionally it blossoms into something a bit more nihilistic, marked by some really awful internal monologues.

I've adopted a metaphor (simile, I suppose) I heard from Stephen Fry. Depression, he says (I paraphrase--see here for the original), is like the weather, a rain shower or thunderstorm. On the one hand, you don't want to deny that it's storming when there's a storm. You wouldn't stroll outside and defiantly talk about how sunny things are as the downpour soaks you. You have to accept that, yes, it's raining. You take steps to adapt: staying indoors, bringing an umbrella, driving carefully with wipers and lights on, and even monitoring reports for anything worse.

But on the other hand, he continues, depression is like a storm in that it passes eventually. (He's talking about his depression;mileage varies, of course.) You don't assume that even a bad storm is just here forever. "Well, I guess it's raining from now on." (Imagine Eeyore voice.) It won't. It'll pass. It's out of your control when it'll pass, just like it's out of control that it rains or storms at all. But pass it will.

Usually, when I'm in a depression shower, I try to let myself off the hook of having to make any big decisions. My perspective when depressed isn't great. It's hard to see in a torrential rain. I'm prone to catastrophize, to make decisions not in my best interests, to gum up my own works in ways I rue later. So usually I try to wait out the storm before deciding things.

But time is short. I gotta make some big decisions about my script analysis class--a big cloud in my depressive stormy skies right now. Having two packed sections with no TA means I need to cut back on grading. How will I record attendance? Can I even teach writing (with planning and revision phases) as I'd planned to do? How do I keep the class rigorous and rewarding for students? Can I keep my ungrading practice? How do I make it through the semester without burning out?

I don't know. I have to determine how to do this, but my stormy weather is giving me some unhelpful suggestions. 

Perhaps my storm will pass in the next few days, giving me enough time to adapt. B

But I suspect I'll just need to do some careful work in the rain.

Computer Crash Terror

I'm conferenced out this evening, just struggling to write something/anything.

Remember how I was going to write about fear for this roundtable I'm proposing (for a whole different conference)? I experienced a moment of pristine, twenty-first-century, first-world terror earlier this evening.

I was grading papers, merrily adding edits and comments to a student paper in Word, when suddenly I realized no button I pressed was having any effect on the screen at all. Total lock. I did the usual things Windows users do: control/alt/delete, escape, nothing. I closed the lid  (putting the laptop to sleep) and opened it. Blank screen. Total lock.

Last resort: I forced a shutdown with the power button, waited, pressed power again--

And watched as the computer's usual startup cycle stalled. A series of terrifying messages, all in that things-are-really-screwed-now old style DOS computer font cropped up: Windows boot failed. More fail messages followed. Finally a screen--not even blue but nihilist gray: "Windows has failed to load due to an error. Insert your Windows disk to effect repairs."

I have no disk. Like most people in 2019, I downloaded Windows 10.

Now, I have a backup or two of my stuff--but it's about a month out of date now. So much grading, so much writing, so much research has happened since then. And then the cost of a new computer at this point--well, thinking about it gave me the deep dark willies.

I shut down, unplugged, took out the battery, counted to 30--look, I have no idea if this is effective or not. It's the kind of desperate ritual magic we do when it looks like our computer has died. I put the battery back in, plugged in, and pressed power.

The computer started--loading everything very slowly. But it started. And sure enough, there was an update pending. I downloaded the update, restarted, and so far so good.

But before I did that I scooted everything I could over to a flashdrive. You betcha that a full backup will happen as soon as I get home Sunday.

Until then, I'm behind on grading, I'm writing my blog late, but I'm grateful to be writing on my computer at all.

No more shocks like that, please, Mr. Computer. I have enough fear and dread and deep dark willies.

Warning Lights on the Control Board

Ugh. The funk that is this less-than-stellar week continues.

I do not drink, nor do I do any drugs. I dislike inebriation, find it a turn-off.

But at times like these, I see the appeal of creating for yourself a blackout period. You dive into non-consciousness. You wake up, days later, and resume your life. It's nothing like that, really, I know. Actual blackouts are terrifying for loved ones and no picnic to pick up after for anyone.

But the fantasy of just turning off for a while, sleeping through it, like a surgical procedure: that has appeal. If perfect cryonics existed, I'm sure people would dip into the freezer for weeks, months, years at a time, just to escape . . . everything.

All these thoughts, I know, are little warning lights blinking on my mental control board. "Check engine." "Maintenance needed." But that's costly work. It feels better to power off and restart in the hopes that jump-starts things.

Except I have stuff to do yet tonight, stuff I wasn't able to do earlier because Reasons.

I've checked all my usual news sources for some inspiration about what to write about. I do not recommend such an activity when the warning lights are blinking. Evidence increases of Trump's having done--or at least having tried to do--exactly what the whistle-blower's complaint alleges: using military aid already allocated to Ukraine to get Ukraine to investigate/embarrass his political rival. Republican response? Condemn the inquiry, disrupt it, delegitimize it, call any GOP member who dares question Trump "human scum."

The Wall Street Journal editorial, apparently (it's behind a paywall) suggests that Trump ought not be impeached because he is too inept to have accomplished the crime. As with the Russia thing in the Muller report, Trump tried his darnedest to break the law, but his own people foiled him. He tried to bend Ukraine to his will via pressure, but someone cracked and filed a complaint. I'm worried that argument--he would have done it, but he didn't--will actually work.

I'm more depressed, though, that it just seems impossible to foresee a working democratic government emerging from this crisis.

Such is the working of despair. Hope is forward-looking, future-imagining. Despair is stuck on the present, extending the worst aspects of the now into the forever.

Perhaps my worrisome fantasy of "just sleep through it" is hopeful after all. At least I imagine waking up. At least right now I do.