Today I read the first line of the blogpost I wrote last week and felt a wave of pity for last week’s poor innocent stupid blogger, who had no idea how her complaints would sound so pathetic in light of this week’s horrorshow. I won’t tell you how cruddy I feel about the state of the world, but I will tell you, I really hope aliens (and I mean the outerspace kind) will enter our orbit, take one look at the mess we’ve made, and nuke the entire planet to smithereens. The loss of all those butterflies, puppies, and polar bears seems a small price to pay for the galactic relief of annhililating a species that was bound to ruin everything if allowed to propagate beyond our puny solar system.
Anything I might say about anything other than to report that a wild turkey strolled across my patio on Tuesday seems ignorant, self-centered, and pointless. As cool as wild turkeys are, the thought of writing about turkeys makes me want to take a nap. I’m so demoralized by everything, it’s all I can do to offer up a sigh of gratitude to the housing gods who finally took pity on me and inserted me into a low-income studio apartment in a neighborhood overrun by wild turkeys.
Last Saturday as I was heading out to protest, I met one of my neighbors, an elderly woman with an unusual name that escapes me at the moment. She is one of the small posse of smokers who carry plastic patio chairs out to the sidewalk because smoking is not allowed on the property.
I paused to say hello. She looked at the camping chair I carried and asked me where I was going. I told her I was going down to the crossroads to join the protesters and do my part to save democracy.
Pity seems to be the theme this week. The look she gave me was half pity and half disgust, with a sprinkle of ridicule and disdain and a splash of plain ordinary resentment. She made a passive aggressive snarky comment that my brain has erased from my memory out of self-preservation. I replied something to the effect of “live and let live,” which seems to be my sadly misguided motto these days. Truth, I’d like to bust some heads (slowly, given the condition of my right hip), but busting the head of my tiny old neighbor is probably not the way to express my outrage. I try to remember that everyone is angry, and under all that burning anger is deep existential fear.
Expressing my fury is futile. My hair caught on fire and disappeared a long time ago. Now pink scalp shows through wispy ash-colored shreds. In the olden days, I would have resorted to ice cream and alcohol to stuff down my feelings. Now there’s not much I can do to soothe my inner maniac other than take a nap.
You might say, Carol, call your State representatives and express your anger. I will say to you in response, first of all, I hate talking on the phone, and second, sending emails to my Congresspeople through their contact form to ask them to stop whining and do something is not satisfying, especially when ten seconds later I get an automatic response thanking me for contacting So-and-So’s office and alerting me that due to the high volume of calls and emails, So-and-So won’t be getting back to me anytime in the next millennium.
If you are still here, thanks for reading. I really have nothing to say that hasn’t been said by everyone, everywhere, so I’ll shut up now.