Out of the Frying Pan and Into the Apocalypse

Someone spilled sunshine and springtime all over the place, so I'm outside in the park waiting for it to dry. I don't have much to put on the public record right now. It's a dangerous time to be openly creative. If it weren't dire enough that global warming is arriving ahead of schedule, World War III looms on the horizon, and we're all marching back to our office buildings as though COVID-19 were a fragment of underdone potato, we also have to contend with the uptight-citizens brigade monitoring our every public utterance to ensure we comply with the newspeak under threat of retroactive prosecution for thoughtcrimes real, implied, unintentional, and even outright imagined; meanwhile the only ones willing to speculate publically on the wisdom of this social engineering effort are self-avowed bigots and madmen with minds polluted by conspiracy theories and the fumes let loose from burning books, who are in turn led by dimwits and narcissists hellbent on enslaving themselves to one aspiring autocrat or another, and they mean to drag the rest of us along with them for the sake of social media likes. But I've already said too much, and on such a lovely day as this, no less!

Things are not entirely bad. It's sunny and pleasant outside, yet still quiet in the city for now; you can hear the gunshots from miles away. And my eyes seem to be improving after switching away from high-index lenses, although dry eyes continue to be a challenge. A combination of prescription eye drops supplemented with preservative-free unmedicated eye drops, blinking exercises, and increasing humidity seems to be improving the situation. I can once again read books, so I've picked up where I left off with Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler, which is about people reading chapters from various books whose titles are similarly improperly capitalized. It's weird, and I like it. Finally, I've decided to renew my lease for another year-go-round, so I'll be in the area awhile, Tyche willing, but who knows what she's thinking lately? I'm sure I don't.