Damned if You’re Damned, and Damned if You’re Not
I go out into the streets to take photographs once or twice a day, nearly every day. I don’t know why, but I need to, even if no one asked me. Tonight, I puttered around in the subway tunnels a little. It’d been years since I last wandered down those steps. I’ll be down there again soon, for sure, but I can’t recommend it to tourists. The tunnels are filled with drug addicts and the smell of piss. While it’s not exactly dangerous, it definitely isn’t safe. It’s like the eighties without all the graffiti. Yeah. Yeah. There’s a lot of graffiti now, but you should’ve seen Philly in 1982. We scribbled over every inch of it, and yet everything was also much, much cleaner. The city was still gritty and grimy, for sure, but it wasn’t gross like nowadays.
In other news, there’s too much news. The outgoing President of the United States of America has pardoned family from prosecution both legitimate and malicious. The incoming administration is threatening to wage an epic war on the ashes of Gaza if Hamas doesn’t release the remaining October 7th hostages, pronto. The French government is on the cusp of collapse, albeit in the lesser sense of government collapse. Georgians are “protesting” their own government’s suspension of talks to join the European Union because of “reasons.” Syria is popping off again, with rebel forces pushing into Aleppo in an offensive led by an al-Qaeda spin-off. Putin is carpet-bombing Ukraine with non-nuclear ballistic missiles. In return, Ukrainian forces are using agricultural drones to drop antitank landmines on the heads of Russian conscripts and mercenaries. North Korea is threatening “offensive actions” against the U.S., as per usual. And in a surprise twist, the president of South Korea unilaterally declared martial law today, seemingly on a whim, but everyone said, “No, thank you!,” and cancelled it.
The apocalypse is everywhere all the time all at once.