Here are your top three, maybe four, stories from the news at one o’clock.
Kyiv is about to fall. Some good rich white leaders met with the bad rich white tyrannical despot guy and urged him to stop his advance just short of total victory. They agreed to not release any more detail than that, so you, me, and all good rich white journalists can’t comment further, although the tone and subtext tells you all you need to know about how you are supposed to feel about it all. There are all flavors of human misery available in abundance, but shortages of food, water, and medicine. These conditions persist well beyond the fluid borders of the Ukrainian state, whatever that is, and are expected to worsen over time, and no one ever lost money betting on that, in lviving memory. I mean living, sorry. This is NPR News, from Washington. Insert significant pause here.
Meanwhile, the weather. There’s snow, which is normal for March, and something called a bomb cyclone, which apparently isn’t. It has an lushly evocative name anyway, perfect somehow for the times: O tempora, O mores.
Meanwhile, the sports. Some coach somewhere made a record for the most victories in some league. Well good for him. There’s a cheerful story of murican opportunity and success for you. Cienegray skies are gonna clear up. doubtless.
After that much I turn off the truck and therefore the radio and go back into the house to write you this.
Half an hour before that, I went truck in the first place because there was simply nowhere else free of noise and fuss, no place suitable for a fruitful awakening.
Outside, there were a few dogs barking, a few neighbors screeching, the sound of a vacuum cleaner, loudspeakers from the fairgrounds talking as they so often do about some competition involving horses and horsepeople, and even the weekly test of the air raid siren from two blocks over, every Saturday at noon.
Inside it was mostly just pure caterwauling. The fluffy inmates overflowing two and three to a cell, but of course every once in a while their shit has to be hosed out of the those cells and they have to be temporarily relocated, and they don’t like change. So basically, a loud series of futile riots.
I filled up my coffee cup, went out to the truck and cranked her over, and listened to the soothing white noise of FM static for a while. Between the big rumbling V-8 sucking down precious fuel, the tuner jammed between signals, and the windows rolled up tight, there was a respite that I had no other way to get without vacating the property, this property, my property completely.
In the end I had to do it anyway for a time. I bought the rice, the water, the tone probe for the electric job, and by the time I got back the noise if not quite every last bit of the fuss was passing like a storm.
Analysis and conclusions drawn: None, except … clean independent and especially serene space measured in the low hundreds of square feet is just as important to health and life as pure water, home-cooked food, and air to breathe.
Planning, scheming, and acting decisively in the direction of that truth provides a north star that will never go out of fashion and always be a good investment.