The Great Disorienting

 It's been hard to write about anything here lately. Somehow I lost the bead of thought I had going, I suppose. But it is more than that. I feel profoundly disoriented in a way. Maybe it's the heat partly, but the days come and go with a strange sameness that feels anything but normal.

The news. It's the news. Of course it's the news. But it isn't the news. Not like we would say in the old days. Oh, did you read the news today? Can you believe it? My mind is abuzz with it all! I lie awake at night thinking of it!

That was how news used to work, the normal times before. But it doesn't feel that way to me anymore. For one thing we know much of the news is a pageant meant to tell us a story. It has always been that way, perhaps, but in the old days the story was mostly coherent and made sense to us at each passing stage.

Now we are aware of the depth of the pageant, and that changes our perspective in a fundamental way. It's as if I don't know the ground rules of reality in the world anymore. I feel as if I am in a world that is unfamiliar to me, trying to make sense of it without outdate rules, as are we all. This means this. That means that. 

So I go about my daily life, walking through a familiar, comfortable sameness while feeling utterly unable to frame my life within a larger story, because I don't know what that larger story is anymore. My greatest solace is knowing that I am not the only one feeling this. To know that others are feeling this kind of this makes me feel in league with them, in our giant disorientation.

Will the world settle back down into anything resembling what we used to call normal times? That is truly hard to tell, and I am the last person to make a guess. Most of my guesses about the future are very wrong.