the ocean

If you're having a day where you're feeling just a bit "down" or "blah," perhaps reading a New Yorker piece about Josef Mengele isn't the thing to perk you up. And the piece about Flannery O'Connor's racism isn't exactly the most chipper chaser, either.

Playing MarioKart and eating generic fruit sours from CVS still seem to work just fine, though.

I'm not sure what exactly threw me into a funk today. We ordered delivery for breakfast, which combined my passions for bacon and other people doing things for me, and the new part for my record player came yesterday (since I am writing this from the 1930s), so I was finally able to spin some discs again. (That's a phrase people use, I swear.) I even had a decent on-demand workout, even if there was a pregnant lady in the video who seemed to be handling it better than me. But I hit a wall late afternoon, and even the photographs of all the empty seats at the Trump rally couldn't quite get me past it.

Part of it may be the fact that someone in our neighborhood was shooting of fireworks from midnight to 1:30 or so last night, which was not the most conducive to sleep. This also led to the dog demanding to be in bed with us, which in turn involved lots of dog claws in my back at inopportune moments. But I did sleep until after nine, so come on, that can't be the whole story.

Maybe it's just the continuing realization that life isn't going back to full normal anytime soon, and that this won't just mean avoiding things I don't like -- like going to the office five days a week and traveling to places like Sherman, Texas for work -- but also missing out on things I do like. For instance, Fourth of July parties, live theater, and brunch buffets. This all started so quickly that it was easy to do magical thinking and convince ourselves it would only be a matter of weeks. But here we are three months later, and the numbers are still only going up.

Anyway, maybe I brought you down too, now. Probably you should go back and read one of my posts from when I was younger and sometimes ingested random things given to me by strangers, with hilarious consequences. Wouldn't we all love to be dumb and frivolous again?