I don't know how to live

Adapted from this piece last year.

We watched every snap of the game. Both of us. Me and you. Everyone else did too. The commercials for Jesus from an evil church and the commercials for an ongoing massacre by an evil country. We watched the whole thing which I guess was itself a commercial for the entire concept of this evil country of our own. I was going to say it is our essence distilled but that implies something being made small and more potent which is the opposite of the Super Bowl and America neither of which can be diminished but instead can only expand. 

Devour. 

I don't know. 

Something so garish defies metaphor. Something so large defies metaphor. 

If a towering beast appeared on the horizon laying waste to everything in its path right now you wouldn't think to describe it as being like something else you would simply and dumbly perceive its horrible mass. 

Unless that exact thing happened in a foreign movie in which case it would typically be a metaphor for America.

Hold on someone is at the door.

It was some guys delivering our new mattress. I asked them if they would help me carry it up the stairs and they said no. So now I have that burden.

There were pummeling civilians in a densely packed area of Gaza that people had previously been told to go to for safety. You could tell it was a bad one this time because even CNN was assigning agency to Israel in their reporting.

I had a brief notion that this tension I was feeling was something remarkable but it wasn't at all. It was just how every day is anyway for those of us lucky enough to live how we do. 

A matter of course.

I scrolled by an image of a little baby Palestinian boy whose head looked like a smashed jar of tomato sauce and had to immediately avert my gaze. I thought that this has to happen for some reason. Every day this has to happen.

Even though I only half saw him I can still see him now like a bright red migraine aura when I close my eyes. 

Then a picture of me and you came up in my phone memories from the Super Bowl years ago in Houston. The greatest comeback in history. 

Look how happy we were. Like nothing else mattered. 

I need to be distracted again like that. I need to be distracted from this. They should have the Super Bowl again tonight. 

I’m just thinking out loud here. 

Tomorrow too. Make the entire year out of Super Bowls. An entire country of it. Spreading and swelling. One game after the next. Script it like that. So that our easy lives may never be interrupted by new word from the world. 

I don't think I know how to live correctly. If there is a correct way. 

What does a person do?

The next morning it was a sunny February Monday in Massachusetts. I should have been hungover if I could still get hangovers. They were saying that we were supposed to be buried under a surprise foot of snow tomorrow. It was probably going to be a day off for the kids.