Post 728 - March 7, 2025

I feel as if I’m in a daze.

While I’m out walking, I can let my mind wander, but it’s stopped going to some of the more interesting places it usually goes. Instead, it keeps circling back to the relentless immediacy of what seems to be unfolding around us.

I say it seems to be unfolding around us, because it’s hard to see any physical evidence of what that might be.

Graffiti is always an interesting thermometer for gauging what people think and feel. If someone is moved to draw on a wall or the sidewalk, they usually have something pent-up to say.

When Russia first invaded Ukraine, people scribbled their reactions on everything. During COVID murals appeared on every available surface. When George Floyd died? Forget it. Pictures of him appeared everywhere. His name, along with the names of so many others who’d lost their lives at the hands of an uncaring police force, became ubiquitous. I can still find his likeness painted on a wall in places around the city if I look for it.

These days? Nothing. I’m not sure anyone knows what to think or how to react.

Where to start, is probably the first hurdle. How to reduce the enormity of what we are facing into a single image, or a few words is likely another.

The hotel that bears the President’s name that sits just uptown from Columbus Circle often has something written in chalk on the sidewalk just in front of its sign. People draw there so often that the sidewalk appears to be permanently discolored from all the times workers have washed away the angry sentiments.

There’s an African American guy who sells pro-MAGA t-shirts, hoodies, and other garbage who stations himself in front of the President’s residence on Fifth Avenue. The other day, someone had chalked the word “pathetic” on the sidewalk with an arrow under it pointing to his table. I haven’t seen him out there in the last few days, though.

Michael and I started watching Severance on television last night. We’ve both been so anxious, that we haven’t been able to sit still and concentrate on anything. We’ve also been jetlagged, so by the time we are both in the right headspace to be entertained in the evening, we are usually close to unconsciousness.

Severance, without giving anything away that isn’t in the promos, is about a company where people work and while they are there, they have no memory of their outside lives. When they leave at the end of the day, they then have no memory of what they have done during their work hours.

We only watched the first episode last night, but I think we are probably hooked. The only thing that will keep us from watching it is how similar it feels to what we, ourselves, are experiencing every day.

Each morning, we scan through the news and see what’s going on. It all seems like a dystopian science-fiction movie. Then we leave that behind and have breakfast as usual, I go for a walk as usual, we maybe go out for dinner with friends as usual, then we come home and check the headlines again. Suddenly the mundane enjoyable events of the day have vanished, and we are back in the middle of a horror film.

A few weeks ago, I made a conscious decision to start reading fiction again. I have always been an avid reader, but somehow, during COVID, I stopped. I was reading so many essays and articles, that it was hard for me to switch off and tune into something else.

One of my favorite writers is Haruki Murakami. He captures the daze I can sometimes feel existing in our society better than anyone I know. In his novel Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the lead character ends up sitting by himself at the bottom of a well for hours on end. In Dance, Dance, Dance, his protagonist, a popular actor, somewhat aimlessly ping pongs through his life at the mercy of everyone around him.

I am in the middle of Murakami’s latest, The City and its Uncertain Walls. In this one, the lead character finds himself running a tiny library in a lonely mountain village in Japan. The person who hired him is the ghost of the library’s founder who recognized him as a kindred, pardon the expression, spirit. Before coming to the town, the lead guy had lived in a place without his shadow.

Murakami is probably not for everyone, but he really speaks to me. As an observer out on the street, I often feel as if I am not casting a shadow either. I can snap pictures of people lost in their own worlds thinking I am invisible, only to find when I’m at home looking at what I’ve shot that they’ve caught me stealing their image.

The President has now paused most of the tariffs against our neighbors and allies until the beginning of next month. The rapid and seemingly randomness of his actions is wreaking havoc with the stock market. Nobody knows what to expect.

I saw that the folks who manage Michael’s and my retirement investments just moved a chunk of it into gold bonds, a usually reliably safe place to keep money away from the volatility of the markets. We are always warned not to look at gains and losses in the short term, so I am doing my best to ignore it all. Having experienced such a firm, steady growth under Biden’s Administration fall so completely apart in just a few weeks is difficult to not panic about our life savings being so at risk.

It's just numbers. I keep telling myself.

SpaceX just experienced another catastrophic failure. They launched another test rocket that exploded quite spectacularly across the sky not long after takeoff. Like everything else these days, that feels like the perfect metaphor.

I’d like to think that this feeling of utter disconnect is just a phase. By going through this, maybe I will come out on the other side with a concrete plan of action with which to take up arms to join the good fight.

In the meantime, though, I acknowledge the daze, but I refuse to give in to it. The cat may be content to curl up in a ball all day, but I’m not. I can feel dazed and confused without stopping my forward momentum.

There are books to read, plays to see, art to experience, and television and films to watch. World events play out beyond our immediate orbits all the time. In the long run, this will be no different.

Today is the first day of the Amazon strike. For a week moving forward, we buy nothing from Amazon. I hate to break it to you, but Amazon also owns Whole Foods. For a week we should all be buying local. We’re also not shopping from Target this month.

I have a bunch of older orders coming to me from various places, including Amazon, that were due to arrive days ago. It may be a coincidence, but everything involving the USPS coming to me in recent days has been delayed. My sister and my mother both mailed me things that have taken much longer than they should have to get here.

The United States Postal Service was under attack from the President during his first term in office. I am sure that the move to privatize the agency by putting one of his billionaire buddies in charge of it is in the works. The first step, as always, will be to make sure they break it so that it will need to be fixed.

Now I’m angry again. Maybe I’m not as dazed and confused as I thought I was after all.