Zzzzzzzzzzzz?

Warning: I am about to tell you about a vivid dream from which I just now woke up.

Saving grace: It is very short.

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I was driving an 18-wheeler on a highway. I don’t know why. A long journey was ahead of me. I decided to scope out the trip, so I fast-slid the GPS icon forward a few dozen miles ahead, scoped out what I wanted to scope, then went back to real time and place. A few miles up the road, I passed what was clearly a fatal accident. It looked as though a small car had been rear-ended off the road and into a tree by a much larger vehicle. A big truck, maybe.

A sickening feeling descended.

What if I was the truck, rocketing forward virtually, at impossible speeds while checking out my route? I looked back down on my phone, and, for some reason the GPS now said “FATAL” in the spot I was.

I drove on for a while, then pulled on to the shoulder. Got out, checked my front bumper. There were new scrapes on the front passenger side, and a big dent I didn’t recognize.

I got back into the truck and drove on. I’d decided to just shut up. Nothing to achieve by confessing; nothing practical to accomplish; I could not change what happened. I wasn’t really at fault, after all. And no one would ever find out, probably. I felt TERRIBLE.

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I think we’re all feeling an awful responsibility to do something. And shame that we can’t, or aren’t. I think we fear we’re asleep at the wheel.

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That’s it for today.

Mailbag:

Q: Regarding being very, very cold: I was in Mongolia for several days in a February, as a journalist. On my first morning I asked about the temperature at the front desk of my hotel, and was told it was 26 degrees. That sounded quite reasonable, so I walked outside. My face froze instantly, broke off and fell to the ground. It turned out, it was MINUS 26 degrees, but in Mongolia, the minus part is always just implied. — Robert Basler

A: Indeed.

Okay, speaking of cold, and dreams. Rachel just now took Lexi out for her morning walk, in the newly fallen foot-deep snow and ice crust. The dog was living in a bad dream, the one where can’t find a bathroom. She had to pee but could find no olfactory evidence, in that deep snow, of what was an acceptable canine bathroom. The dog searched and searched, patted the ice, to no avail. It did not yield. This continued for two excruciating blocks, until Rachel spotted a little yellow dot, and brought Lexi to it. Relief.

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Q: Is there any way to track the total number of people Trump has killed through his evil policies, and how that compares to other evil people throughout history? His botched management of COVID, his bombings of other countries, his anti-vax policies, his executions, his USAID cutting off, his ICE goons killing people (and I suspect they're killing a lot more that we don't know about - where are all these people going after they're "deported"? Nobody knows. Nobody's seen them. There's a reason for that.) It's got to be in the millions, right?

A: We will see it in a book in about two years. That’s just a prediction.

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