Hello, the house

The fact that I am posting pictures from inside my house tells you everything you need to know about my hermit tendencies these days. Except for quick errands, I am mostly indoors, sitting next to the big window, working for hours at a time, pausing when my brain gets tired, or when I come to the natural end of a scene or section, or when I'm not sure where to go next, or how to write it. I'll get up from my chair then and turn on the TV and watch another episode of The Leftovers, the twisty apocalyptic series I'm currently making my way through. Has anyone here watched it?

The Leftovers, streaming on Max, is about the people who remain behind after two percent of the world's population simply vanishes without a trace one day. This is not a religious happening where the good and virtuous are taken up to their great reward. Rather, some people, good and evil, just randomly disappear, and the rest are left to grieve them, and to pick up the pieces of a world they no longer recognize. Everyone is deeply dysfunctional, just trying to make it through another day, and I guess what keeps me coming back is the way people hang on through the darkest of times, clinging to one another, helping each other, giving space to the broken places in one another, stumbling toward, not healing exactly, but maybe answers. 

Sometimes an episode gets a bit too intense for me in the moment, and I turn it off and go back to my swivel chair beside the big window, try to knock out another section, and the next one after that. I have surpassed my contracted word count now, but there is still much of the story to tell. The writing is going a bit faster in this last third of the narrative, the story is more in view for me, I don't have to search as hard to find it, which is a relief. Each morning when I awaken, I whisper, "Please make me an open channel today," which is my way of asking the muses to come through the veil, to give me the right words, which I like to think are already written in another dimension, I only have to channel them faithfully in this one. 

I imagine that will sound crazy to most. Oh well, whatever gets us through, I say, because one could make the argument that our world is just about as dark and dysfunctional as the one I'm watching on The Leftovers. The Supreme Court just this morning came down with a series of rulings that are fully aligned, not with the current admin, as everyone will say, but with the project at work behind all that bluster, the forces that deploy the clowns to distract us and themselves while they move the pieces into place for the new techno feudalism they are designing. The high court handed them some critical pieces of that design today. 

And so I stay inside my house, keep my head down and listen for the muses, going outside only to do things like get my hair cut and vote in the primary for the new mayor of New York City, a young Muslim man the same age as my son, who manages to have an aspect of joy about him, who seems to retain the idealism of being a true public servant, who, having trounced the establishment candidate is now being seen as a threat by the right wing, who have rushed to vilify him in the national media as a Jew hater. But he is not that. In fact he is widely embraced by Jews in New York, the vast majority of whom share his grief at the bombing of children. He could not have won without the Jewish vote in our city. And Jewish New Yorkers are now vigorously defending him against all the ugly epithets and outright lies, the posts referring to him "little Muhammed" and calling for his denaturalization and deportation. 

I'm proud of my city that we turned out for for him in droves this week. I'm proud that 25 to 34 year old voters showed up at the polls in numbers never before seen in a primary. I hope he will be our next mayor, despite the dark forces now arraying themselves against him. I think he will prevail. I think the light in him will not be dimmed. This is the sort of thing that gets me through.