In the last five days, multiple news anchors have called for the death of homeless people and they all still have their jobs. Other people have stated, with no spin or hyperbole, the beliefs of a man who was killed in the middle of making excuses for mass shootings being an acceptable loss for the right to have guns and gotten themselves fired, doxed, or stuck on administrative leave as a result. People have come out of the woodwork to praise a man who spoke only hate merely because he was killed. An entire factory of temporary workers were abducted by ICE and had their human rights violated while imprisoned, which isn’t even the worst thing that happened that week. The president of the United States of America has called on the various executive powers of the government to start investigating anyone who has spoken ill of him publicly (culminating in Jimmy Kimmel getting taken off the air for incredibly innocuous comments, but that seems to have broken through to the general public in a way nothing else has so far, which feels both horrendous and mildly relieving–horrendous because so much worse has happened already and mildly relieving because finally, something broke through to the public). A man going about his day-to-day life was killed by ICE agents who lied about what happened and will likely face no real consequences because there’s no way to know for sure who did what because they’re going around with their faces hidden and all identifying information removed from what can’t even be called their uniforms. All of this, and so much more I can’t bear to write about (or don’t dare to write about) has happened in the first half of the month (September, 2025).

There’s a lot wrong in the world. I feel like I’m losing my grip on reality, not because I’m changing or because my grip is weakening, but because reality is slowly being supplanted by this copy where nothing matters, the rules are made up, the bad guys always win, and you can see public figures call for the death of Democrats and liberals based on the agenda-driven speculation (and probable lies) of the partisan hack heading up the FBI. How am I supposed to get anything done? How am I supposed to talk to people about stuff that doesn’t matter? Calling my reps doesn’t move the needle. The payment processors are not only not loosening their grip because of the ire directed at them, but they seem to be actively making things worse by slowly clamping down more and more. I feel insane. I feel like I’m front an alternate dimension and that’s why nothing seems to make sense anymore. That’s why everyone around me can go about their lives like this is normal as I struggle to keep a straight face while failing to stay focused on my work as I head deeper and deeper into the overtime I need to afford my rising rent costs, the ever-increasing cost of groceries, and enough little treats and takeout that I can keep myself going when I’m just too tired and worn down to even cook a frozen pizza. The antidepressants and rest helped a lot (and the antidepressants are still helping!) but there’s enough going on in the world that they can’t keep up with the toll of staying aware enough to know when I might need to act. All of which goes without mentioning all the dumb stuff going on in my life that is capitalism’s greedy little fingers trying to filch as much money out of my pocket as it can.

For exmaple, my landlord–or at least the corporation I rent from as represented by an individual property manager–wants me and all my fellow tenants to pay fifteen extra bucks a month for a service that will get us points, somehow improve our credit scores, and give us access to a “free, user-friendly online portal” that is apparently separate from the new online portal we had to sign up for at the end of last month, with a one-week warning, in order to pay our rent for September. There has been no specification of what you can do with those points beyond “gift cards,” there’s no information about how it supposedly helps your credit, and the online portal is just a log-in/sign-up webpage with nowhere to click for more information. I mean, I know it’s a scam because that’s how the extractive landlord class works, all of this stuff is a scam when you get right down to it, but this screams “scam” in a way that doesn’t require someone to agree with my socio-economic understanding of the world in order to call it a scam. Sure, $180 a year isn’t a lot of money, but I can get a storage unit for two-thirds of that and I actually have storage needs. I don’t need reward points for paying my rent, much less reward points that I have to pay extra rent to get, at an exchange rate that is never stated, with a value that’s never even slightly indicated by any of the information I’ve found. If I wasn’t sure this was from my property manager, I’d think it was a legitimate scam someone was trying to pull on the people who live on this property with me. But I can believe it’s something my landlord would do because that’s just how the world works these days: those who have more than enough try to take everything else they can get their hands on, damn what it does to the world.

All I’ve got is my friends. My little games. My routines. The cute kirby wallpaper on my work computer. The steady hum of my fan and a slowly curated playlist to help drown out the thoughts when I need a moment. My little podcasts. Fresh air after work. This blog. Plenty of iced tea. Zero covid ever. A good, if expensive, bed. Just enough time at the end of my days to enjoy some amount of my hobbies (even if my hobbies are mostly reduced down to Final Fantasy 14). Enough to get by. Somehow. I don’t know how I’m going to do it. I can’t change anything and it’s all I can do to survive, but survive I will. Thriving will come later as it unfortunately has often had to in my life. But I will figure out how to get through each and every day until either everything breaks or it finds some semblance of stability agian. I don’t know what that’s going to look like. I don’t know what else I might have to give up along the way. But I’ll get there or die trying and, sometimes, that’s all you can ask for. As the inestimable Mountain Goats once sang, “I am going to make it through this year if it kills me.”