I’m trying to get back into the swing of transferring the Journal again. It’s a LOT of work but I think I’ve fallen off the wagon for perhaps almost a year and I’m not going to get ANYTHING done that way.
And so – here I am writing about writing in the Journal, in perhaps one of the more meta examples of procrastination I’ve ever engaged in – but I certainly feel I ought to be writing more on all sorts of fronts. I’ve been writing music, but not learning music –and somehow though MY Life has been very static, the world around me certainly hasn’t been and I’ve felt very little urge to document it.
I was scared for yesterday right up until I checked the news before the Inauguration started. What if QAnon’s got SOME semblance of a skeletal digital finger on the truth and there’s enough insider support for an insurrection that those 25,000 troops TURN on Biden? What if the bastards who stormed the Capitol on January 6th actually contained within them a couple of people with the wherewithal to successfully hide a bomb? WHAT IF Trump cleared out early to enable a foreign actor to execute some attack with a FOOTPRINT?
WHAT IF WHAT IF WHAT IF.
It continues to amaze me that there don’t seem to be a whole lot of competent evil geniuses out there though – and we should continue to thank our lucky stars.
A lot of that’s been cycling through my head for days. I don’t know that I entirely agree that a “great weight hath been lifted” from me per se, but I was glad that none of my doomaginations came to pass.
Now what?
I don’t know that it keeps me up at night. Knowing that the world doesn’t change THAT much for me personally depending on who’s in power is a comfort and a lie. A position of privilege in knowing that MY family goes unaffected no matter the crackdown on immigration, knowing that my taxes probably aren’t changing dramatically no matter how much the rich are being taxed, knowing that my street’s not changing too much no matter how we’re policed. We’re able to work from home enough that shut downs influence us ONLY after they’ve influenced everyone above us and have little enough of services that shut downs influence us ONLY after they’ve influenced everyone BELOW us.
Being too small to matter has affected a LOT of my behaviour over the year. I have vast columns of concerns that fall into the category of “if I’m ever important enough to worry about that, I’ll be well-off enough to hire someone to worry about that”.
Health care scares me, certainly. I was slowly priced out of the market till the ACA came along and literally generated a new market. But it’s so far beyond what I can change I try not to think about it. I try to stay healthy because I don’t really know how the System will treat me if I get sick. There seems to be a recurring clerical error that kicks me OUT of said system every couple of months, and that scares me, but … I just keep calling. And when THAT happens, it keeps me up at night.
It’s a strange kind of privilege – but it’s one shared by many. The fact that I only have to care inasmuch as I have a soul. Some days it’s bigger than others. Today, with my head aching but with the world’s fires seemingly banked for the day (ready to engulf us again in the morn), I care mostly about my little audience and whether they had a good time last night and my family and whether Rowan gets the day off or Sharif’s safe or Heather’s convinced her kids to do their homework or if we’re REALLY seeing Joey next week…
I lean back, ignore the spam calls, filter through my various digital to-do lists and listen to Pandora’s collection of African reissues of Habibi Funk bands. Because I can.
