The days are no longer getting shorter and darker, and I’m keenly aware of the sun sneaking through the parting clouds. My light-deprived skin craves a stroll outside, and my mental state is in desperate need of a walk to clear my head. That first drink of spring air is refreshing and invigorating. The freshness of the season has been riding in on the breeze for the past few weeks, but the cherry blossoms have finally fallen open, and the seedlings strewn across my windowsill have broken free from the soil. I stop to smile at this new life, just the tips of greens poking out of the dirt. This is where the magic is. After months of decay, seemingly lifeless trees bud with life, and brown branches burst with the promise of renewed leaves. I marvel at the regeneration in the same way I admire a lone dandelion that sprouts through a sidewalk crack. This is proof that life perseveres through impossible conditions. Some days I need that proof.
I let my feet carry me to the café at the end of the block. I smile and nod to the people I pass. It’s a simple, reflexive gesture, but maybe it’ll make a small impact on the complex and challenging lives crossing paths with mine, and it’s impossible not to smile with the warmth of the sun on my face, which makes me think of this post I saw that said, Leaving your house is good for depression but bad for anxiety, but staying in my house is good for anxiety but bad for depression, so maybe I should’ve stood directly in my doorway to achieve peak mental health, but instead I am waiting in line at the café. I order a cold brew and drop some extra change in the tip jar as I banter with the barista as my cup waits my turn and once my cold brew is in hand, I consider settling into a corner booth to enjoy my bev, but then I see someone sitting at a bistro table with fucking double monitors gabbing relentlessly in what I presume is a Zoom call for work which is absolutely killing the vibe and these motherfuckers will have the audacity to ask the barista to turn the music down, which is the coffee shop inversion of people who blast music on public transportation, but these dweebs need to know that coffee shops are for the artisans and creatives and people who want to doomscroll and nebo babies working on a screenplay that will definitely fail, so if there is a work meeting in a public place, everyone else in the establishment has a moral obligation to join that meeting or the person should connect their meeting to the coffee shop’s speakers so everyone inside can contribute one idea.
After realizing that it is physically impossible to bask in the spring air from inside a café, I follow my feet to the water, zig-zagging absentmindedly down familiar streets, smiling at everything and nothing in particular, and now that a reflexive emotion has overcome my face, I’ve been noticing a lot more millennial core and millennial cringe comps on my Instagram feed, and all these loser online soybitch commenters saying, you’re being millennial which is now synonymous with being cringe, and this idea has become so pervasive that it feels like the desire to tell someone they’re being cringe is stronger than the feeling of cringe itself, because if someone felt comfortable enough to record a video of themselves and post it online, then they must feel confident in how they present themselves to the world, so to be met with an onslaught of nameless, faceless assholes accusing you of cringe—often for something as benign as a facial expression—then social media is truly a pantopicon hellscape of nerds monitoring each other’s behavior, but we’re just discouraging people from setting themselves apart in any way, and the fear of cringe can create a fear of curiosity and discovery, and if we’re conditioning ourselves to respond in specific ways to whatever is happening around us, then we’re just developing a distaste for individuality, so if it’s cringe to express certain kinds of emotions, then is it cringe to have a feeling other than apathy? I breathe in the salt air as I stroll leisurely around the seawall and in the sun, then I pause and close my eyes to take it all in, blissfully uncaring of how I look to anyone around me, and I am anchored by the rhythm of waves cresting and breaking against smooth rocks, holding their ground but losing the overall war because time will make dust of us all, which makes me appreciate Buddhism a little more because it has helped me achieve a state of zen in a chaotic universe, and that means vomiting is the last true zen state that a person can experience, a moment of complete worldly abandon and absolute, total thoughtless focus; shitting was supposed to be that, but phones have ruined it, and actually, no one is on their phones while they’re puking, and if they are, then God has truly lost, but if you rawdog your morning poops by leaving your phone in another room, that would be the modern form of meditation.
I make my way down to the beach, slipping my feet from my sneakers and socks, placing them carefully out of water’s reach, and rolling the cuff of my jeans up carefully. I choose my steps up to the water’s edge, and the beach is a sharp medley of rocks and shells. I brace myself for the unforgiving cold of the ocean, as the water grabs hold of my heart and lungs even as it barely covers my ankles. I savor the sensation of this moment, of nature, because it is so fucking crazy that the same troglodytes who insist that we can’t do anything about climate change will place their unwavering faith in a walking K-hole to terraform Mars, and I saw a post about why people are feeling off these days and apparently it’s because Mercury is in retrograde, but I’m not sure if it’s because of a celestial body or if it has anything to do with a goof crew of glossy-eyed narcissists deciding to crash the global economy, like, the entire world is in retrograde and no one has time to look at their sun-moon rising—Pisces isn’t making us depressed, it’s the cost of living!
Some days I’ve looked into the ocean and thought about walking in until the waves are far over my head and my feet lose the ocean floor and it’s hard to tell which way is up, which is roughly the same level of situational awareness demonstrated by Wall Street and CNBC pundits, as it took them months (years?) to finally catch onto the reality that Trump is following through on pressing the Destroy The Global Economy button—he has said he’s wanted to do tariffs at literally every campaign rally he’s ever done for the past 10 years, and he replaced Steve Mnuchin with a bunch of factotums who do whatever the he says and defend it on TV—so now these CNBC assholes run segments that are basically, There has to be some method to all this, there is no way we consigned the country to a guy who’s going to keep doing tariffs randomly, and this market plunge is worse than when it collapsed during COVID, so the Wall Street is betting that Trump’s presidency will be more unpredictable than a virus that killed millions of people, and so there are two contradictory stances about what Trump’s tariffs are and what they’re intended to do, so the line that’s coming from Republican intelligensia is that this is a madman negotiatic tactic even though there is no evidence of this, and the second one is that the guy who has bankrupted multiple casinos will remake the American economy and compel multinational corporations to restore manufacturing jobs and that tariffs are good but it’s also good that they’ve been paused for 90 days, but whenever these idiots are pressed about the increase in labor costs associated with building iPhones in America, they tell us not to worry about that since robots and automation will do most of the work, so the factories are coming back but the jobs aren’t, so we’re going to achieve a 1950s production economy without any kind of central planning and an unwillingness to deficit spend on anything besides the military and as private industries will be stockpiling cash for the next 18-36 months, and while this is happening, businesses are fantasizing about automating every service worker they possibly can, but you can apply to a job at Apple to install pins in iPhones while making way less money than you did before, so this is all just uppers mania thinking that we will create millions of jobs that will only require an Associate’s Degree and these jobs will be similar to when Fred Flinstone looked at a brontosaurus crushing steel beams for a construction job, but it will be for a robot, and I’m no economic expert but as an observer of politics, it’s clear a lot of the GOP apparatchiks don’t have a lot of confidence that this will end well for Trump because they are taking this strange philosophical approach to financial well-being and just repeating to the media, What is money? What is prosperity? Does your 401(k) even matter when your family loves you?
On the days when everything is overwhelming and too much, that closed-in, muffled silence I can only find by holding my head underwater is peaceful and welcoming, and it beckons me, so I stick my head in to feel my hair ripple with the tide, and this moment is time for a quick appreciation for Walton Goggins because he might have the most important head of lettuce in history because he has that Pantene Flow-V while rocking a receeding hairline, which sends an important message to all men who feel like they can ride out an economic recession but may feel like their lives are crashing if there is a recession on their dome, but now we can persevere. The warmth escapes my feet until they are pins-and-needles numb, and something is lapping playfully at my calves so I open my eyes to see a fish, and anyways, who the fuck still eats at Long John Silver’s, but actually, who is keeping that business alive, and now my eyes sting and a constriction in my chest starts to well up and spill over and I can’t help but remember this article headline that was titled “Lucid dream startup says people can work in their sleep” and I’m pretty sure that even in Hell, they would think this is excessive, so I swallow it down and dab the corners of my eyes and get the fuck out.
Back on the beach, I pick up a small, time-worn pebble and it’s dark grey and glistening from where the water has kissed it before receding away, and I’ve started making a funeral playlist on my Spotify so I can have the aux cord one last time, because imagine someone ruining the vibe and you can hear it from your grave, but instead I hear the sounds of gulls crying overhead and the consistent, reliable rhythm of the waves and it’s time for me to face the wind and retreat back to my apartment, and I pass by a sunny window of a restaurant and it’s cracked open to let fresh air in and the smell of garlic bread out, and, for the record, restaurants where the vibe is better than the food should be fined or have a disclaimer posted on their front window that says, Our wall is grass and our food is ass, and some ambient music is cool, but I don’t need someone to blast Biggie while I’m trying to eat steak frites, and restaurants really need to chill with the artisanal ketchup, because Heinz has perfected the recipe, so we don’t need mango chutney bullshit especially since it always comes in a little karafe as if I’m an animal, and I don’t know what’s going on with servers but they talk like they were trained by corporate consultants, because they’ll come over and ask “How’s everything tasting?” like, get out of my fucking mouth, it’s an intimate space, and the other annoying one is “How are the first bites?” and that smell of garlic makes me think of this one time I went to a shawarma spot with my girlfriend and as we just finished our first bite, we overheard the manager talk to a person in line about how they can’t go more than one day without jerking off, and then I noticed my shawarma had a suspicious amount of garlic sauce…
So I need to allow myself to be distracted by the moment and appreciate the sunshine and my girlfriend is texting me to remember to pick up some toilet paper so I head into a local boutique mart, and it’s so nice when the grocery store has a free food aisle so you can reach into those little snack containers and grab a few bites of almonds and gummy bears so you can snack while you shop, and I’ve decided I’ll start doing this at pharmacies and bless myself with bits of ointments, pastes, and hair gel, and as I hear Khruangbin on the speakers, it’s a sure sign that this place will rip me off, and wow, it turns out a half-dozen of locally sourced strawberries are $20 and so I eventually secure the toilet paper and as soon as I step outside, I am almost run over by an e-bike and it’s someone delivering Sweetgreen, and my hot take on this is if vegan food is delivered, it’s no longer vegan because an animal is suffering as they bring this food to you, like, if the dog was fetching the food, it would be an issue, so does that mean emotional support animals are a form of slavery? But these DoorDash fuckers are wreaking havoc on sidewalks and pedestrians because the shareholders demand efficiency, and I love how all these business dipshits talk about efficiency as if it’s inherently good, like, a nuclear bomb is very efficient at causing mass death, and there really needs to be some special kind of licencing for e-bikes because there are millions of people who should not have a drivers licence, and we really need stricter road rage tests, like, everyone should be put into a scenario where we’re are driving to the Newark Airport during rush hour and Apple CarPlay won’t connect and our mother-in-law is in the back seat telling us that we made the wrong turn when we definitely didn’t and there’s a loaded assault rifle in the trunk.
As I recover and take a deep breath, I notice that grey clouds have fully coated the sky in a blanket of gloom and rain is falling in increasing intensity. I slog through the damp sidewalks with arms full of toilet paper and I notice two maintenance people outside of an apartment building using leafblowers to blow puddles off the divets of their walkways in the middle of a rainstorm, and even though I admire the Sisyphean persistence through a task so mind-numbingly stupid, leaf blowers need to be eradicated from society, since people will use them to literally blow a single leaf, which makes it a metaphor for what’s wrong with us as a species, like, we will spend hours moving piles of leaves from one side of our lawn to the other side before the wind eventually blows it back, and honestly, why are we blowing leaves instead of vaccuming them? These are the kinds of moments where I wish North American cities had more robust subway systems so I could abruptly end my walk and escape the nasty wetness, and if our governments refuse to make public transportation free, they should follow the Spotify model and let us ride for free if they fuck us up with ads, Times Square style, and there is a separate line for premium riders for $6/ride, and while we’re at it, landlords can also make my rent cheaper and put ads in my room, and put them in doctor’s offices before they remove my spleen, shit, I’ll watch three hours of ads instead of a hospital bill: “This surgery is brought to you by RAID SHADOW LEGENDS!”
I get home as the clouds finally part and pass the rest of the afternoon next to a sunny window, cracked open to let fresh air in, buried in blankets with a book in one hand, and my beagle nestled under my other arm, and while I love that my dog’s name is Whiskey, maybe dogs should have human names, because they will eventually grow up and if dogs are man’s best friend, we should put some damn respect on their names—we shouldn’t be infantalizing them, like, puppies have cute names, but when it grows up and gets a personality, then we should give them a human name, like, we wouldn’t be calling a 40-year-old guy Mr. Butters, but if I’m hanging out with a dog named Marcus and we watched a movie on a Friday night, then it sounds like I’m hanging with a homie and adds some credibility to me as a human. But none of this matters now, and I feel renewed and energized as I lie on my couch. My mind is clear and my thoughts are focused, and as the days get brighter, I have to wonder to myself, what if we all died during COVID, and this is hell?
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Author: Sam Colt
Karen O’Blivious – Senior political correspondent who insists she’s neutral but only interviews people who agree with her.