Tuesday in the house with Lou

Forgive me, Stephen Sondheim

    With my eyes barely open, I walk past the silent, powerless TV in the living room. Its harmless for the moment. I dread the thought of turning it on, knowing it might capture me, once again, with YouTube’s latest AI logarithm of today’s assortment of another thousand screaming, desperate, influencer heads. They must stop your scrolling, each in a panic to be the first to flood you with today’s lists of eight, ten, fifteen more things you simply must watch till the end because that’s the best one so they can earn todays billion-dollar stipend.

     I head into the bathroom to wash the sleep out of my eyes and dig my teeth out of the jar, but Buddy is already in there, purring, looking up at me from the bottom of the sink. He’s waiting for me to turn on a small stream of water so he can get his morning drink from the faucet. I feel something against my leg, turn and Beau is already standing next to me with a ball in his mouth. As soon as he captures my eye, he heads for the door so I can go outside and throw it for him. Of course, I’m still naked and can’t go out to play, but that’s a detail he hopes I’ll forget in the urgency of the moment.

     I find myself in another mental composition of a David Sedaris rant.

Somehow it seems appropriate. It’s the beginning of another day in what was once the home of the free and the brave. But now just the beginning of the two-hundred-fiftieth-year exercise to protect my sanity and survive another twenty-four hours of assaults on my intelligence. Oh, the shock and awe of wondering how much longer any of us will be able to afford to buy or do anything because another billionaire has discovered a way to keep it beyond our reach.

-    Lou Kief