Man, I don’t even know where to start. Four days of dealing with the most extreme heat wave in recorded Socal history. Four days of having weak/irregular AC during that same period (I know, first world problem). Same four days dealing with the physical and mental aftereffects of knee replacement. I am…kind of exhausted. It’s a lot to deal with. All my go-to stress relief mechanisms – golf, dinners with friends, wine, BBQing, traveling – none of them are practical right now. Neither the heat nor the knee rehab are going away anytime soon. I need to adapt.

This morning of Sept 8th it’s only 70 degrees outside, but it’s an uncomfortable, peculiar 70 degrees. It’s muggy, very humid. And the light outside is dull yellow, from all the smoke in the air. The still air is like thin soup. It’s all very Lovecraftian. It just wouldn’t surprise me to see Cthulu lurching about in the driveway.

These things – heat and knee rehab – are hyper-local concerns. But beyond those, out in the larger world, there are several semi-existential threats that add to the background stress:

• The way COVID-19 is burning through the US population unchecked by common sense. (I’m pretty disappointed in Americans).
• The CA wildfires, which could become a very local threat at any moment.
• The upcoming election, with the real possibility of another four years of Trump’s malevolent presence.
• The way civil and racial injustice is dividing Americans (again, disappointed).
• The astoundingly open political stage-setting for the elimination or minimization of Social Security, in which I expected to participate in 18 months.

So the question is, how do you adapt to all that? I’ll try to cover that in a more optimistic post later today.