So often, there are competing versions of reality at work at the same time. For instance, I am coughing constantly and sound as if I am infectious and decrepit, but in fact I’m recovering nicely from my asthma flare-up. I know I’m recovering because I have energy; I was able to run errands (get a new iron, pick up my new shop vac from the Amazon counter) and take care of household tasks (laundry, assembling the shop vac, light vacuuming) with dispatch and satisfaction, as if I was not sounding like fucking Mimi dying of consumption in La Bohème.

I realized another double presentation of reality while talking to my friend Beth today; she’s going to Europe in a couple of weeks and suddenly realized that the USA is at war with, apparently, everyone including NATO, and that the country she is visiting is threatening all kinds of sanctions against the country.

The conflict doesn’t seem to deter people from traveling. A different friend joined (via Zoom) a meeting of a group I belong to on Saturday night. She is in Thailand, and was on retreat at a Buddhist monastery but had snuck out to hang out with us on her phone, in the garden. Many of the people in my senior citizen French class have foreign travel plans. I seem the be the only person who has largely given up going to other countries for the time being.

Then, too, there’s the conundrum of food and gas prices going up vertiginously, and of my conservatively invested 401(k) losing chunks of money, while people are still ordering food delivery and paying bizarre amounts for various forms of insurance. I myself bought the iron and the shop vac as if it made perfect sense to spend the money. To go on as if I could just keep going on.

One of my other errands today was getting my six-month COVID booster at the same time my government is waging full-out war against science. When I read the paper, it sounds as if vaccines are increasingly rare and systematically discouraged, but when I went to the pharmacy and asked, the pharmacist just said, “Sure,” and asked me whether I wanted the Pfizer or the Moderna. A court just rejected the government’s recommendations about vaccination schedules, so that’s nice, but it doesn’t exactly seem relevant.

I am reminded of what one of my dissertation committee members said in the 1990s. He was a distinguished anthropologist, and he said that even in the most war-torn countries, people are going about their everyday lives. Well, here I am, in my quiet house, coughing up a storm, with a new shop-vac in the basement and my cat washing his belly in the armchair, living on the verge of whatever precipice theoretically exists, and looking forward to baseball season.