We don’t understand a thing, but it’s still better to try

Here is what it is like to live in America: you go to the movies one night, after a year of not going to the movies at all, after a lifetime of going to roughly three movies a month. (We rented out a local theatre.) (We saw [REC], a Spanish horror movie, which is quite scary, though a slow build.) (I ate so much popcorn, Swedish fish, and later ice cream, that I have a sugar hangover.)

Then you go home, and learn that a man mass-murdered a number of Asian American women in Atlanta.

This morning, it’s sunny and warm, and the bees are buzzing around the last of my bolted mustard greens, and the first of my tomatillo flowers, and there are so many ranunculus blooms by now that they constitute an abundance. Paul is always kind of dirty, because he’s afraid of baths, but it was so nice out I gave him a washcloth bath, and then a warm towel rub-down, and he blissed out on it. The birds are still eager and annoying; I saw one fall into a bush, so eager was it to eat what lay beneath.

I did my taxes, so I can pay to fund a nation that doesn’t come close to protecting my friends and neighbors and loved ones of color. I felt like the movie was my reward for doing all that paperwork and light calculation. A few nights ago I chopped up perhaps a hundred mushrooms for dinner. People are already trying to pretend the murders weren’t racist and misogynist, which, what do you say to such willful unseeing?

My little wet dog looks skinny, but he’s perfectly happy, laid out on the carpet, sucking on rocks. Dave baked a loaf of bread a few days ago, and it’s already almost gone. Another bird just crash-landed into our Texas Ranger bush, wings fluttering, loud of mouth. The sky is really blue, though yesterday I woke up and there was snow on the mountains for the second time in a week.

Here we are, here we keep going, with the flowers blooming in time with the sun’s ascendancy and our own inherent violences never quelled. I have some edits to finish. I have some pictures to draw. I have a life to be lived, this strange way we live it.