How To Counter Numbness

Distraction? Stoicism? Don't Speak Of It?

I feel the same way you feel, fossilized.

For about 9 hours I’ve intended to buy something for the cats to eat. And for myself. Even appetite shuts down when fresh traumas of this magnitude happen.

It’s made so much worse for knowing there will be no accountability. Only stale denials, like the one from Ted Cruz, and the assurance that we who bring up weather modification will be called “reprehensible” even though the contracts and fever dreams of “rain enhancement” are all online for anybody to read. They’ll protect only the feelings of the kid who runs Rainmaker. Because he is some kind of sacred being, and genius.

We are permitted no normal reactions, and somehow, summer camp cabins spinning into raging rivers with children in them will become the next thing we’re supposed to view as normal. Could not possibly have been prevented.

Here’s what I’m thinking: We have to guard against personality collapse. I worry about that, in myself. Going basically catatonic from it all.

As I was writing the last post, dehydrated and blank, I looked up and saw Rafa’s little face, peering at me from the ledge, and I laughed, surprised to hear the sound. He’s the sentinel, who always negotiates for feeding on behalf of the whole crew, and this time he clearly decided to just stare at me until I got moving.

I wondered if you all might take comfort in Rafa, I thought. Or, is it wrong to leave the “medlidande” (suffering with, Swedish for what in English is compassion) of the victims? I truly wonder. We have to carry on, and at the same time, not forget the victims. But thinking about them is paralyzing. And it doesn’t help them. The problem is, we can’t help them. We can only wait for the next thing, and the next thing, while trying to reconstruct some semblance of hope.

I just wonder how people are managing to keep getting things done, or keep narrating, reporting, when there seems to be no there there, no answer.

Will we feel joy again some day?

I’ll go buy cat food.