Mood On Monday, Exhaustion and Dead White Men

Thoughts

 
Awareness of the outside world. It’s all outside world today.
~~~
“We could not even be said,” replied Ford, “to be home and vigorously towelling ourselves off.”

Dear Future Researcher, this is what it is like to be living in a pandemic. [The Ugly Bits]

I’m mentally exhausted.

Physically, much is the same. We remain well and safe. No one I know IRL has gotten sick. (Touches wood. Tosses salt over shoulder.)

My schedule is the same; my mind is mush.

I get up and bike because it’s easier than deciding not to. [Route 66]

Ditto the blog. The earlier hypermotivation is gone. As with biking, I continue because it’s easier than stopping. I spend more time than usual figuratively staring at blank spots on my calendar. This post began as a comment on another blog (waves hi), where I was apologizing for my lack of recent participation. [Blogging In A Time Of Crisis]

The horses continue. They even make mild progress. Rodney cantered to the corner of the field and back. Progress. Yay. Not narratively gripping. Also remedial, in that we are trying to work our way up to normal. We are struggling to arrive at a place where one can get on one’s horse in a variety of circumstances and have a reasonable expectation of being able to walk, trot, and canter in a sensible fashion. Is that too much to ask? Apparently it is. [Why Is This Hard For You]

Reading/watching the news ties my stomach in knots. Not reading/watching the news feels like hiding my head in the sand.

My neighbors appear to be willingly heading toward catastrophe. People I love, people I want to respect are acting in ways I find incomprehensible. The cognitive dissonance is tiring. To quote Scalzi, “I want to be a friend to my friends and I also want to chuck them off the side of the fucking boat and be done with them.” He’s talking about a different issue, but yeah. When Friends Fuck Up, and So Do I.

As for racial justice, the conversation seems to have derailed into discussion of statues. One counterargument is that no one from the past has 21st C values. So what. Maybe it’s time to stop using our public spaces to deify dead white men. Give them an alcove in a museum. Write PhD theses about them. Just get them the hell out of my face. That Lincoln emancipation statue? It has got to go.

I have now shown how easy it is to get derailed into a discussion of statues. I say this as a history major – Who gives a shit about statues? We should be worried about people. Protecting the old, sick, & hungry, educating the next generation, providing everyone in society with space to work and play and pray, you know, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.

I never said dead white men didn’t have good ideas. Let’s act like we believe those ideas.

Not to undercut the moment, but anyone else out there read the Preamble & hear Schoolhouse Rock?

Stay safe. Stay sane.
Katherine Walcott