State of the World 2024: Ritual and Solidarity

The 25th annual State of the World thread on The Well has commenced. This is one of my favorite rituals. It can get a little hard on the “catastrophizing,” a little digressive, and it isn’t necessarily the most inclusive… it is what it is, and that is part of what makes it interesting. Not necessarily the be-all end-all on the “state of the world,” just this particular group’s (whoever that happens to be at a given time) sense, as much as they can write it out, as much as you or I might chime in, at that moment.

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A photo of a stop sign, located in Capitol Hill, Washington, D.C., which is stenciled in a fashion so that it reads “STOP GENOCIDE JOE”.

Fairytale of Gaza

Sky News had a split screen for the funeral of Shane MacGowan and the United Nations Security Council meeting on the UAE resolution for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas conflict. Sadly, unsurprisingly, we expect the United States to veto this call. Perhaps these were seen as equal events (make no mistake, I am interested in both) because they’re things one might expect Bono to show up to? (Guess which one he [was actually reported to be]* at!

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Finally!

Christmas is the only time my wife lets me pipe jazz over the household Sonos without objection. I make a playlist and sneak in some things that aren’t on swinging Xmas streams—sometimes tracks that aren’t at all seasonal.

Or I let SomaFM do it for me—they love to play.

Adjourned to the porch.

I said “it’s gonna freeze tonight, going to take the hose off, back in a minute.” The hint to the contrary was the whiskey in hand.

Shame on The Guardian. They took the coward’s way. They could have done the work of linking or adding the context they suddenly feared was missing. Meanwhile, these words, whatever each of us make of them, will only proliferate more—Barbra in full effect.

So validating.

My son meets his mortality in a storybook

Tonight we read Dragons Love Tacos 2: The Sequel at bedtime. There’s a point early in the book when a time machine is introduced. You, the reader, are informed that you can go back to when you were a baby or into the future when you’re an old man. I paused and said to my son, “Someday you will be an old man, isn’t that silly?” Or something like that.

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The Hell I do not believe in is real

Children carrying other wounded children. I’m already incensed, horrified, disgusted at the latest failures of humanity that have produced so many dead children, among so many other dead. But my pacifist tendencies (the word “tendency” is doing a lot of the work, but it does have a breaking point) are tested at the murder and torture of children (as well as state violence pointed right at me—see, I’m ultimately not a pacifist).

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