Fishing for Jellyfish

Jellyfish, Ocean Beach, San Francisco, May 4, 2020, 5 pm. Photo by author.

The temptation is to keep thinking about matters to which we haven't yet given a great deal of thought, and then to up the ante by having too many thoughts, or by thinking the thoughts others are thinking, to thereby join the deplorable mass of our countrymen and women.

Never, in my lifetime, have these temptations been greater, stirred up as they are by a pandemic-like dependence upon evanescent ever-new technologies and the media outlets created to outsource them, uninterrupted, 24/7. Never mind remote-control, hi-def, survaillance-capitalism, or the spate of Strongmen sent to earth to protect themselves first and their loyal subjects second. Their names--Putin, Orban, Maduro, Xi, Trump, Bolsanaro, Modi, Kim Jong-un--are enough to make one crazy and scare You to death.! There's nothing worse than a Christian atheist, or a Muslim Buddhist who commits fratricide on his Hindu brothers and sisters.

It's time for a nation wide rent-strike! And to put red meat on the hamburger! There's now polling data that show women make better political leaders and, according to The New York Times, better drivers. Strongmen Nations of the Earth are excited to announce the Graveyard Expansion Program--they need more room to bury the dead having sucked the earth dry from both above and below. The big money's a little depressed: not even Warrn Buffett is putting his Berkshire Hathaway money on the silver-lining. Those lower down the food chain lament there's no Major League Baseball, no NBA, nothing to watch on tv but police procedurals and repeats of Chicago Bulls games of the 1990s.

The dogs that run on the beach every evening are now dropping the balls their masters throw; they must be bored. The watches melt, the Phones get sand in their teeth, a day-old face mask bobs up and down on the water.