It’s not quite a week post Shakespeare and I’m still trying to put my life rhythms back together. Sleep patterns are adjusting, stress level has gone down a bit, some things that have been sitting on the ‘to do’ list for a while have been stricken off. My big chore for the weekend is to get my final decision in regarding my fall trip. I have it down to two options and I’ve promised myself I will have a decision made by Sunday. I still haven’t come up with a decent travel companion with similar tastes, bucket list and finances. Some day… Or I strike it rich and start treating friends.
As I’ve come back to the surface and I’m starting to pay attention to the world outside of my condo, office and the theater, it looks like we’ve all stumbled into more of the Upside Down than I would have thought possible a few months ago. In the last few days I’ve seen mouthpieces for the administration opine that we should have taken Hitler’s side in World War II, that McCarthyism was a good thing and should be reestablished, and that the key to future success is the deportation of all non-native born Americans. Considering that pushback against these senitments has been muted at best and certainly there’s been none coming from the party in power, I can only assume that we’ve pretty much arrived at full blown fascism. There’s nothing I can do about it, just circle the wagons around me and the people whom I care about and hang on as things will get worse and there’s no white knight coming to the rescue.
Since I last paid major attention to politics, the president of the US has had private conversations with Putin (on American soil no less) where his aides were obviously distressed by the nature of the talks (pity there was not someone in a tree). The leaders on NATO dropped everything and raced to DC along with Zelenskyy to shore up support against Russian aggression. The secretary of defense keeps firing top military officers who insist on speaking truth rather than the lies he wants to hear. The Supreme Court continues to hand down decisions designed to speed up the conversion of government from tripartite to unitary executive. We’re busy opening concentration camps with cute names suitable for T-shirts and other merchandising opportunities. The Department of Health continues to suppress public health data.. All signs point to a sledgehammer about to be taken to the Smithsonian to rid it of degnerate history exhibits. And the FBI is being weaponized to attack Trump’s personal enemies. It’s enough to make anyone turn to drink and I have no idea how to parse it in such a way that I can even begin to wrap my brain around it.
On the Covid front, cases and hospitalizations continue to climb, especially in the West and Southwest. What few CDC numbers I can still find plus wastewater studies confirm this. Why this should be is unclear. It looks like we’re settling into a bimodal distribution with peaks in late summer and in midwinter. The peaks are likely related to human behavior and more extremes in temperature, whether cold or hot, pushing us indoors for either heat or AC and into closer proximity to our fellow beings. It’s still around locally. A local theater lost its star for the majority of the run of a cabaret show due to a covid infection last week. I haven’t been sick in some months following my winter from hell. It’s been nice to have felt normal for a while. This is probably a sign that I’ll come down with something next week. What likely saves me is the nature of my job which requires me to wash and sanitize my hands a dozen or so times a day which is going to reduce my environmental exposure.
I’m trying to figure out what I should write next. The posts about the state of all of our lives I’ve been writing for the last six months or so don’t lend themselves to much of anything other than Substack and I’m starting to think I need to embark on a project with a more definite goal in mind. Is there anything within my usual purview that people want to read about? Both of my vacation options come with some significant down time where I can possibly break the back on a new project of some sort. Perhaps a play in iambic pentameter. I tried that once. It was not a successful experiment. The juices just aren’t flowing at the moment.
Perhaps Richard II took more out of me than I quite understand given all of the various production disasters which I have detailed in previous missives. Anyone who wishes to judge my ides for themselves can do so at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gvaegg120 – I have no idea if I managed to pull off even half of what I was going for. Maybe, maybe not. If you skim through it and like it, Yay. If you skim through it and hate it, tell me. I’m an adult, I can take it. You don’t improve without constructive criticism.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 