More Comfortably Numb

There are days when I'm looking at my life through thick glass. I think you know the feeling. There are days when you care, and days when you... don't.

Can't?

It's tax season. I've been spending too much time thinking about retirement, rainy day funds. I should be working more. Prime earning years. Then going over to r/wallstreetbets and scrolling chart porn. A little dopamine hit. One trade and you could hang it all up.

My grandparents just moved into full-time care, and the monthly cost of that follows you around. You hear that number and everything tilts backwards. You're an inch shorter after that day.

Got back from K's uncle's memorial, and haven't worked out the heavy emotions from that weekend yet. A lovely afternoon, really. At the Museum of Flight, all the old guys choking up, fondly remembering their wild years together in the 1970s. But it takes a few days for the cold steel clang of mortality to flush itself out of your system.

Then a text on the guys' thread, from Teddy:

"I'm following the NYC case on hush money pretty closely and it struck me how much Americans just do not care that..."

He's following the trial coverage? All the way from Scotland?

"Americans are tired of pearl-clutching," I type back.

"Yeah. But it DOESN'T REGISTER," Teddy insists.

"It's surreal," Thomas agrees.

It is surreal. That surrealism is part of what makes this moment in history so stressful. Not just Trump, though that is often the prism. It was Earth Day on Monday. We never really got over the cracked reality of Orange Skies Day. That stays with you too.

(That's a link to a Wikipedia page, btw. The page is titled "Orange Skies Day.")

Columbia University. The protests. The war. The mind recoils. The fishbowl effect, where you stare at the world through a solid pane of glass... Blurred. Inaudible. Removed. It must be protective. I am more comfortably numb.

Deadlines come and go. Texts chime away. I just stare at the screen. I want to play Civ. I think of where I'll move my Biplanes after taking London, and how many National Parks I can build in Budapest, up by the snow.

"Nobody would guess you have an addictive personality," Kerstin says at lunch, prodding about my recent video game habits. I chew, and stare out the window.

Caring, urgency, will come back. It always does. Although it takes longer, since covid, to return. For cortisol to start flowing again. Levi is in the hospital with a burst appendix. Agent Coulson, Diego, Lillian are all having babies. Gotta sign up for the Meal Train.

This is a very middle-aged post, I'm writing today. Entropy, my old foe, wins another one.

Postscript: I had my physics corrected, after the last post wrung from middle-age angst.

"Entropy is a measure of how many future trajectories are possible," my father texted after reading the You Are Here post. "Chaos is a measure of how much these trajectories diverge in a high-entropy system."

Is that what this is? This moment in history. In our lives. Being 40. Watching possible futures collapse. Is that why every movie in the 2020s is a multiverse movie? Because everyone my age sees the kaleidoscope of possibility twinkling out? Maybe this time, the heroes won't save the multiverse.