The phone warns that the air is toxic and the sun too sunny. Smog to the left of me, forest fires to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle of modernity. Drink water. But the tiny omnipresent poison pellets are giving the kids cancer. I know this and drink it anyway. The A/C daily fights a losing battle. Utility bill as climate tax. Breaking records is banal. In the Caribbean, islands are eviscerated. In Saudi Arabia, hundreds drop dead. It’s a Tuesday. Meanwhile, the argument continues over who gets to captain the Titanic. One is committing genocide, the other wants to commit genocide. Get out the vote. Get out of my vote. Our dreams don’t fit in your ballot boxes. I sit between my parents and my son and think about how the aperture of perspective shifts as the wheel of time spins. Or how we navigate future pasts, tending to generational wounds. There was no cook at Denny’s, so we went to another one. How strange to be in two different locations but the same place. Quantum level capitalism. The left tried to sell me a paper. I tried to give it a zine. Turns out no one reads anymore, unless it’s on Instagram. X (née Twitter) is having a fire sale on fascism. The soul is broken when the path to freedom is premised on the suffering of the Other. God is dead, their corpse caresses our conscience. Alas, it’s muted by anhedonia. There’s no dopamine left for the divine. We are walking tragedies not of our own choosing. I try not to feel guilt and shame, and fail more often than not. It all just seems too big. I know it’s by design, but sometimes the design works. The ingenuity of an unwalled prison is that wherever you go, there you are. Seems the only choice left is to rebel. It’s already so damn hot.