In Consideration of Turning 43

Hello, old friend.

No, really. It's been a really, really long time since I've written anything substantive here. So long, in fact, that even doing a "catch up" seems ridiculous.

Everything seems ridiculous right now. It's like we're living in an alternate reality, or some slow-moving dystopian epic… like a thorough and detailed character study on society slowly losing its mind collectively. If I'm being honest, it's felt like this for the last three years, like pieces of our national identity and cultural pride as Americans has been chipped away one dusty, jagged fragment at a time. That feeling has only intensified as COVID-19 has screamed through our cities, our infrastructure and political system ill equipped to respond.

Tomorrow is my birthday, and I normally take this time to reflect back on the last year and think about how things have changed and where I'm going, and that seems like an impossibility this year. It's hard to think back without wishing things different than this mom…