When we return from a trip, which for much of my Life has meant “Tour” but I’ve often called The Trip, there’s certainly the feeling of coming back to the world. Generally we don’t listen to the news as much. Everything feels like it’s on pause. For the last two weeks we’ve, not really Lived in a bubble, but there’s been some sense of INSULATION, if not actual ISOLATION.
We’ve had other shit on our minds.
But as we head north out of Durham, we’ll pass Washington DC and sleep in our beds again tonight, firmly back in the radius of politics and nuclear crosshairs. In Georgia they talked about crime and war and The State of Union as vicarious, distant happenings, secondary or tertiary to the weather and what the neighbours were up to. Heading north on I-85, rejoining the 95 corridor, crossing the capital beltway, it all comes back to being very, very real and in the past two weeks war has come to Europe.
I try not to get to wrapped up in it. The horror of what’s unfolding in Ukraine is undeniable, shelling cities and nuclear power plants, crushing cars with tanks and the grinding march of troops choking the Life out of the nation. Red arrows and civilian centres and casualty counts that will probably cross from thousands dead to tens of thousand in the next few deads – but putting that in context of other wars or morbidities means that so far this pales in comparison to what we’ve faced in just the past two years, or in previous wars. Will this be a passing fancy of Putin’s, or are we truly looking at World War III? Looking at maps it won’t take much for this bullshit to spill into allied countries and then… well it’s just an obligation, isn’t it?
I hate that driving down here I was worried about my father-in-law’s health, my cat, my home and how many people would be wearing masks in the truck stops on the drive home, not necessarily in that order. And now the hubris, the disgusting ego of one aging Russian has dislocated all worries, displaced the primary driver of all of our geopolitical problems with a new number one, in the midst of ongoing pandemic, rising oceans, environmental catastrophe – never underestimate a single person’s ability to make it all a lot worse.
