In which I took a Saturday off.

When I got hired, I said I’d be happy to work Saturdays for as long as needed, but not forever.

Well, now it’s basically been forever and I’m still scheduled every Saturday; the only way to get one off is to schedule it. I picked today at random.

I was hoping to maybe do something fun with a long weekend. Go for a drive, spend a night out of town maybe. Instead I slept for fourteen hours. Didn’t get up until two thirty! Must have been tired. Can’t really summon the energy it would take to either drive off on my own or convince what’s-his-face to actually do something out of the house.

Gonna cook and eat, meditate, make myself go for a walk. Maybe find a movie and watch it the old-fashioned way: without my phone in my hand.

Starting to worry about stuff. Like: it never got particularly cold this winter but my utility bill was still a lot bigger than it was last winter. How will I afford air conditioning season if the prices keep going up? Like: should I be hoarding coffee? It’s 30% more than it was a year ago, the market is idiotic, the administration is a joke. Will coffee soon be for rich people? Like: should I just let the entire lawn die instead of watering it? Can I afford to water the goddamned lawn? There’s no snow pack. Half of the country’s already in drought (my county is in ‘extreme drought’) and it’s fucking March! Like: should I be hoarding food? With the war situation gas, which moves everything, is going up. Everything will get more and more expensive, right? I know a lot of members (of what’s left of) the upper middle class are doing so; I see people online talking about buying up stuff they expect to go up in price soon, like appliances and toilet paper.

On the other hand, there’s nothing I can do about any of it. The powers that be are venal fucks and I have no influence over them or their ridiculous AI or their wars or their racist cops; if the shit does hit the fan I certainly don’t have enough wealth to hoard enough to make more than a few weeks’ difference in outcome. If water rationing is necessary I’ll follow local expert advice. Best I can do is be a good person who isn’t a wasteful shithead. Compost, recycle, eat the stuff in the fridge before it goes off, manage the sun this summer with blinds and drapes as well as I can, etc. Worry doesn’t solve anything, it just makes one unhappy.

Reports show that today’s No Kings is possibly the biggest protest in U.S. history, more than 8 million people at more than 3,300 events. People are pissed about a lot of things: book bans, the death of science, that Kennedy idiot, DOGE, abortion care, vaccine policy, inflation, Iraq, the Supreme Court, propaganda, concentration camps, the death of due process, the takeover of the Fourth Estate, oligarchy in general. Things are a mess. It seems so obvious to me that instead of funding war and racism we could just, you know, fund health care and housing instead? But that’s not what the people in power do, they just double down on causing unnecessary human suffering. You really do wonder what the fuck is wrong with those people.

There’s a tulip in bloom in the backyard! Must be just about Easter!