You ever start writing up a profile of legendary figure Bass Reeves, then get the feeling you might have already written him up, and then be unable to figure out how to check your prior posts in WordPress? Pretty universal feeling I expect.

Okay, well I guess I’ll speak extemporaneously on subjects of interest to the general public (*instant flop sweat ensues*). Okay here we go (protect ya neck):

I think the feeling is how do we balance our relief and enjoyment at seemingly vanquishing one odious foe with the realization that things aren’t even approaching something called “over”? A person pushed to “fight” mode all the time curdles their happiness. A person willfully “happy” loses the thread. I guess my thought is this is the thing we’ve been doing all along. I know it’s hard to remember, but we’ve been doing this for a long time.

If you squint into the dust of the recent past, I think you can pretty well see a figure of base populism coming to capture our attention. Wasn’t that the basis of a book or something once? But I also think the further back you squint you’ve seen things like our times come and go. People talk of our flirtation with authoritarianism, but it’s not like we ever played footsie with Nazis. Er, well it’s not like we’ve trained and supported paramilitary death squads. Oh. Okay, but we’ve at least never interfered in any other country’s election. I see.

As we spasm into a hopefully more representative society it is truly incumbent on us to take the lessons of the past and carry them forward to the future. If we, as the people who are living this, don’t remember nobody will. More than that though, is an imperative to conceive of that elusive “more perfect union”. What does it look like? What are its contours? It is incumbent on us to actually dream of a future. The audacity! The sheer cheek!

I could write for days and get nowhere trying to summarize why we can’t simply just “get back to normal” and why we can’t simply “never stop fighting”. It’s a balancing act on the edge of a knife and your birb knows that. So I’ll leave it to a couple wordsmiths to speak to it better than I.

I love life. Life is beautiful. It’s just the shit in it that’s fucked up.

To believe in this living is just a hard way to go.

I guess the thought I want to leave off on is one of balance. Of equilibrium. My sister would likely attribute this to being a Libra. But if there is any damn cosmic energy we need right now, that might be it.

Don’t step on the flowers. Smoke em if you got em.