Travel, get sick, recover. Rinse and repeat. That feels a lot like my life lately. One side effect of a bicoastal life is getting sick a lot. Travel exposes you to a lot of disease vectors and lowers your resistance through recurring jet lag. I’ve tracked the correlation between my travel and post-travel illness, and the cause and effect is very real. All this is to say I’ve been sick for a couple of days. Sinus problems, sore throat, rather extreme fatigue…could be a cold, could be a Covid strain. But I’m waking up to the fact that this is one more reason why my chosen lifestyle can’t go on forever. This will get tougher and tougher as I age, and the cycle may accelerate the aging process. Not good. A day of reckoning is out there somewhere.

Speaking of a day of reckoning, I’m reading The Testaments by Margaret Atwood, and watching the same on Hulu. It’s an amazing story, picking up where The Handmaid’s Tale left off. Atwood is a superb writer – her characters really come to life, and the world building around Gilead is horrifying. It’s basically like 2026 reality skewed just a tiny bit more toward MAGA. Many of the scenes in the TV series take place in huge homes/estates guarded by military security (the Eyes and Angels, in her story), where Commanders and their Wives live. The Commanders are Gilead’s political and military leaders, protected from their subjects by walls and guns. In our 2026 America, dozens of Trump’s Cabinet members have moved to housing on military bases – protected by walls and guns – for “security reasons”. In 2026 America, MAGA/SCOTUS just made it much more difficult for women to decide if they want children by outlawing delivery of mifepristone by mail. Voting rights and elections themselves are under attack by the Trump crime family. The similarities between Gilead and 2026 America go on and on, so reading this book, a cautionary tale when written, is now like reading a factual description of 2030. The scenes in which women get rounded up in American states and dumped at gunpoint into a stadium-turned-prison camp feel all too possible. Patriarchy, authoritarianism, religion twisted into government, racism, and sadism is a potent, toxic mixture. A mixture that a lot of MAGA has embraced, wittingly or not.

Observing US politics right now is like watching a slow motion train wreck. You can see it coming, and as a puny individual you’re pretty sure there’s nothing you can do to stop it. You just don’t want to be in the train or the car stuck on the tracks when it happens. But here we are, 330M US citizens on the train. There’s a safety check coming in November 2026 (Congressional mid-term elections) that might slow the train or even switch it to a different track, but if that fails…welcome to Gilead.