Erasure

 Dear you,

A clever gentleman I follow on Twitter said this was his current morning routine:  wake, check on Zelenskky, coffee.  That is pretty much my morning agenda too, except “feed the cat and clean her litter box” comes before coffee.  This man and I are not alone in our obsession, and for good reason.  Ukraine falls, we all fall, in major or minor ways.  But something posing as "life" seems to be going on as usual.  In states like my Florida, the effort to avoid all this uncomfortable news is requiring Herculean effort.  The big sell for our tourist season is on.  Condos, hotels, and motels are booked up.  The Panama City Beach bars are in EXCLAMATION POINT!!!!!! mode.  See Hammerhead Fred’s ad:

“Party like a SHARK STAR at Freds!”  (Notice the lack of the possessive apostrophe.  Why should vacationers care about punctuation?)  This joint “gets the party started with 40 FREE KEGS of ice cold draft nightly”.  WooHoo!

40 kegs of reality erasure.  I wonder what happens after the free stuff taps out.

And at our state capitol, the ghoulish representatives and senators are really having fun this session.  Our new “don’t say gay” bill passed.  Its intention is to (of course) protect the little ones from inappropriate discussions of you-know-what.  I think we know what it really is all about, erasure.  Under the mask of typical puritanical conservatism, there are uglier faces.  The visages of enraged, homophobic, religious zealots.  They want to ban people, pull them off the shelf in the same way they seek to ban books.  Just make them go away.

So many bills like this are ready for the gov's signature, bringing us one step closer to state enforced reality erasure.

My phone’s Google app is in on the erasing game too, perhaps trying to derail my continual searches about Ukraine and other “weighty” topics. When I hit the big G icon on the screen, I am fed a list of articles meant just for me and my reality erasing pleasure.  I kid you not, these came up 30 minutes ago and they are real titles, not Onion satire:

“Meet a 74-year-old woman who became a model in retirement”

“Twilight star Ashley Greene says that it was only natural for the cast to develop crushes on each other”

“Woman forbids child from visiting Disneyland due to photo policy”

“Man who spent $58,000 in COVID relief on Pokemon Charizard card is sent to prison”

“Giant spiders expected to drop from sky across the East Coast this spring”

OK.  These were momentarily distracting.  I wondered, is this senior model forced to strut the catwalk in adult diapers because the designers have an age bias and fear she'll soil their creations? Did the Twilight affairs involve cross-species, werewolf-vampire hookups? Considering all the creepy things you can see at Disneyland, why would a photo identification policy be the big deal-breaker? What the fuck is a Charizard card?  Can those spiders turn us into Spider-people?  (That would be cool.)

The Google reality erasing capability is pretty weak; minutes later, I am back on the reality train.  That’s fine. I like it there. The real world is also wonderful.  I know this because she lives there, a magnificent Ukrainian fighter who refuses to be erased.  I close with her image:

#WeStandWithUkraine

#ResistErasure