Holy cow, is it hard to think about anything other than current affairs. We've been working up from one or two big stories a week, to one a day, to multiple bombshells a day, even on weekends. It's stressful and exhausting. It's tempting to let myself block it out, become numb to the onslaught. I can't, though. There is too much that is awful, but to stop listening is to normalize it. I have to maintain the ability to be outraged.
Today felt like a recap, all day. I'm always on top of the headlines as they break, and have been for a long time. There are enough people who have just come into this story, who don't have all the granular detail memorized like I and my friends. For the sake of the new ears and eyes, most of the people I watch and follow have made a point of aggregating all of their previously written articles and opinion pieces. The teevee people spend a lot of time saying, "And who is that? What does that mean?" They act like they are learning the cast of characters for the first time, feigning surprise and mild ignorance of topics they had reported on a hundred times last year. It feels like being in the same exercise class for years, where new people drop in an have to have all the moves explained, while you're on the side just wanting to get into your usual zone. It would be cool if they had an intermediate and advanced section where those of us who have been watching history unfold as if we were planning on getting a PhD in it could go.
They've really been working us up, though. Like they want to make sure we are all looking in the right direction because they think something huge is on the way, and soon. The talk about the news is changing, in ways both subtle and glaringly blatant. Maybe it's true, something big is about to happen. I oughta make one of those gambling charts like they do for office pools, like who will score first in the Super Bowl or when will the pregnant lady in HR pop. This will just be "Who will be arrested? Who will be cleared? Who will be fired? How many policies will become laws and how long will it take?" Sure, it's weird, but it could be fun.
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