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Today is one of the first **vaguely** autumnal days of the year — 9 days into October — and I feel like writing for the first time, not coincidentally, in weeks. Simply: my summer mood was exhausted; we cannot be expected to produce endlessly in the same mood. Climate change alters the rhythm of consciousness to the point where consciousness loses the beat. That’s how I feel. It’s an interesting place to begin: looking in on my own inner-workings the same way a mechanic looks under the hood of an old car. As I write this, a mother of four young kids, most of them screaming, stepped onto the train, and immediately, after yelling at her kids to be quiet, dove into her phone. I see this every day in New York: young parents ignore their children in favor of the screen. This behavior cuts across divisions of class, race, gender — it has many iterations, many faces. The mother kisses her child on the head, one of them; I don’t blame her. It’s as if for a second she remembered she was a mother and not a creature-who-exists-for-a-phone. We all know that feeling: surfacing out of the flashing domain of the screen, the cave, into the light of day, of reality. The love of a parent for child is not necessarily strong enough to bind them to reality; love is nothing, really, compared to the slot-machine we perpetually wave in front of our eyes. This sad truth will not have its impact in 2019: only in the future, when and if we’ve found a better relationship to technology, will we understand the full spiritual barbarism of the Present Age. We are no different, I think, than a school of spawning salmon who one season discover a…
