This after this after this

I watched every snap of the game. The result of which was fine. I'm not mad about Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs already being on pace to catch up to Tom Brady and the Patriots' legacy this quickly. I'm not mad about that at all.

I watched the whole thing. The commercials for Jesus from an evil church and the commercials for on ongoing massacre by an evil country. I 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 same thing happened in a movie in which case it would most likely be a metaphor for America.

Hold on someone is at the door.

It was some guys delivering a mattress. I asked them if they would please help me carry it upstairs and they said no and that's also fine.

While I and probably you were watching the game Israel was busy carrying out yet another slaughter. This time it was in Rafah a densely packed area that Palestinians had previously been told to go for safety. You know it's a bad one because even CNN is assigning agency to Israel in their reporting this time.

I felt the dissonance while looking back and forth from the spectacle on the TV to the horrors of the news on my phone and I had this brief feeling that it 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 thought of something I wrote in the Lockdown book about how we handled the first year of the pandemic.

I briefly convinced myself that there is some number of deaths some horrific massive number with real gravity to it that demands attention and action a tipping point type of number that we might reach whereby Republicans and “open the economy” types might stop acting like they are now. Is it 500,000 I wondered is it a million but if we’re being honest no such number likely exists. Instead what will happen is we will come to accept thousands dead every single day as another voice in the churning ambient chorus of suffering we do our best to tune out already much like with gun violence or unnecessary deaths due to the cost of healthcare or the thousands our military kills around the world. Many of us even the “good ones” like me and you already have started to do that in a way right or else how would we manage to function on a daily basis? How do you get up and measure out the coffee and heat up the water and poke your stupid face into the fridge for a nice piece of fruit every morning without pretending if at least for a while that no one is dying outside your walls?

I said this about gun violence back in August of last year in between the shootings in El Paso and Dayton — do you remember which those ones were or did it take a second? — and I suppose it’s just what deaths from the pandemic are going to be like going forward.

“It’s just like a weather report for a state you don’t live in at this point.”

Until it happens to you or someone you know and then it’s real.

Regarding the actual weather it's a beautiful and warm sunny day in February here in Massachusettes. They say tomorrow we're going to be buried under nearly a foot of snow. And that is fine.

It's probably going to be a snow day for the kids they're saying.

Hold on a second. I'm reading this piece in the London Review of Books now.

What strategic bombing does to a city is to produce, by military means, something similar to the massive urban destruction of last year’s earthquakes in Turkey and Syria: mangled pipes and wires, the ganglia of shorn rebars and masonry, homes cut in half, exposing their foundations like uprooted trees. Somehow there seems to be more debris than the total mass of the original buildings. Who could ever clear all this away, and where would it go? How would diggers sort the rubble from the bone? 

...

One might wonder what the response would be if the arguments deemed good enough to justify the attack on Gaza were inverted. Suppose national newspapers were to argue that because the government of Israel has ordered hideous atrocities, as it certainly has, Israeli officials should be killed at any cost, and if Tel Aviv must be destroyed to achieve this then so be it. If the bars of Rehavia must be turned into rubble, too bad – besides, look how close they are to the presidency on HaNasi Street. Has the Israeli state ‘diverted funds’ to the building of underground bunkers for its leadership? Is carpet bombing justified on grounds that the government and the political parties that constitute it are ‘integrated into Israeli society’? Arguments as absurd as these acquire respectability in the service of killing Palestinians.

Here's our man our savior of democracy posting last night during the latest massacre.

He was joking about the Chiefs and by extension Taylor Swift winning. Taunting the morons who've talked themself into a conspiracy theory about everything being "scripted" (for purposes that remain unclear). But of course that is fake while the killing Biden is facilitating in Gaza has indeed been scripted. If by a script we mean setting a series of events into motion. This after this after this.

In fiction at least catharsis eventually arrives.

In sports too.

The Independent:

A six-year-old Palestinian girl who called authorities begging for help as the lone survivor of an attack in Gaza City has been discovered dead. She died alongside a pair of paramedics who were trying to save her.

The girl, Hind Rajab, was with family members – her aunt, uncle, and her three cousins – racing in their family car to outrun Israeli tanks and escape the city.

Tanks ultimately fired on the car, killing Hind's relatives. The little girl survived the initial assault long enough to call emergency operators to try to find help. Gunfire can be heard just before Hind's call abruptly ends, the BBC reports.

"For every person who heard my voice and my daughter's pleading voice, yet did not rescue her, I will question them before God on the Day of Judgement," the girl's mother told the BBC. "Netanyahu, Biden, and all those who collaborated against us, against Gaza and its people, I pray against them from the depths of my heart."

Here's a picture of me and M. at the Super Bowl seven years ago. Look how happy we were. Like nothing else mattered.

I need to be distracted. I need to be distracted from this. They should have the Super Bowl again tonight. And tomorrow too. Make the entire thing out of Super Bowls. A country of it. One after the next. Script it like that.

Let me read something else. Let me know about something else. Perhaps some poetry.

I don't think I know how to live correctly. If there is a correct way. What does a person do?