Focusing on work with this sky staring at me through the window is tough tbh. This yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes is the mustard gas of my time, rolling out from 3 million dead acres to slide along the street. This is a TS Eliot sky and I have to do emails

Last year, I saw a lecture about the 1918 flu pandemic & how people seemed to forget it afterward, at least on the surface. They knew it was a major event, they just... didn't really write many songs, books, etc about it. And I thought, how could that be? But I think I get it now

For me, the pandemic we're currently living through underlies so much of what I think & write & say & do, and everyone around me is so aware of it as well, that it often just goes without saying a lot of the time. It's the constant background & the obvious subtext at all times

Do you say, "Due to restrictions related to the global pandemic preventing us from meeting in person, wanna hop on a group chat?"

Or do you just hop into the discord where your friends already are & say hey?

There's no reason to say something that everyone already understands

And the 1918 influenza was way worse. Tens of millions were killed. It must have suffused everything, every discussion, every decision, everywhere. Why write a song about it? Or rather, what was there to even write about? In a way, the ubiquity of its destruction hid it from view

Will we do this with climate change too? That yellow fog feels new for now. But will the day come when my brain is so marinated in global warming that that fog begins to feel normal? Will global warming become so pervasive it can hardly be discussed? I hope not, but, I don't know

If you're curious, here's the lecture I mentioned above. It's called "Forgetting Catastrophe: Influenza and the War in 1919" by Prof Nancy Bristow, given at The National WWI Museum & Memorial @TheWWImuseum in 2019