Farewell, for Now
Because Truth doesn't matter
We have lived in this apartment for four years, I just renewed the lease, mostly because my daughter has one more year of high school, and this neighborhood suits her perfectly.
Since we have moved into this apartment, it has become obvious that its water system, every aspect of it, is somehow cursed. Because of the age of the building, built in the 1970’s; because the neighbor above us keeps hiring incompetent people to do repairs; because it just took almost a full year for some of the neighbors to build porches, whereupon they damaged the walls of the building along the way, and Lord knows which pipes.
No amount of smudging with sage is going to help us.
The latest round just began, with a dripping leak in the kitchen that is spreading throughout the house. A closet which holds things of value to me - things that are irreplaceable - and a lifetime collection of sheets, towels and jackets, smells like mold.
I saw the leak in the kitchen last week, Sunday. The neighbor promised to bring in a plumber and as yet, over a week later, it hasn’t happened.
The owner of this apartment, who has said in the past multiple times that she doesn’t really recognize our suffering, told me this morning that she would “understand if we wanted to move.”
When I asked if she was kicking us out, her reply was, as the Magic 8 Ball would say, “outlook not so good.”
Even if I don’t move, my day-to-day existence will now be taken over by insurance adjusters and plumbers and construction workers. Even if I don’t move, replacing all the items that have been destroyed by the growing epidemic of mold in our apartment will cost thousands.
And so I have decided that I can only deal with one stressful event at a time, and on Saturday night, purged my social media of any mention of Trump and Israeli elections. I also blocked all those trauma porn reels, that tell stories of men and women who have been abused and taken advantage of by their families, of Mothers-in-Law who are permanently attached to their little man-children, of employees whose work gets stolen by their bosses.
I used to sometimes listen to those horrible AI stories, to make me feel better about my own life. Now I am basking in my own nervous breakdown.
I don’t need to know that Trump fell asleep again during a meeting in the Oval Office, or that his cankles are expanding exponentially. I don’t need to know that once again this week Netanyahu was rushed in the middle of the night to the hospital for an “emergency dental appointment.” I don’t need to know who wore what in the wedding of the century at Madison Square Garden.
Will Iran try to bomb Israel into oblivion? Who knows. I will find out when the siren sounds on the Home Front Command application.
My Facebook feed is now the most boring thing you can imagine, and as a positive consequence, I have no urge to doomscroll.
All this is a long explanation to say that I will be paying much less attention to the screwed up globe and the politics surrounding it.
If something happens that is of particular urgency, I will sit in front of the computer. As the Israeli elections get much closer, towards October, I will resume my interest, only because I need some information in order to vote.
But mostly I have learned that my vigilance to report the truth, nee the truth itself, just doesn’t matter anymore.
Happy birthday to me.
Stay well, stay cool.
(Here’s my last Truth for a while: Climate Change is real.)