I’m angry.

I’m angry about a lot of things, things I have no control over, things that are spiraling out of control. I’m angry and I have nothing to do with this anger, nowhere to put it except into written words, a reach for catharsis which may or may not come.

I’m angry at the world. How dare it be this way. How dare it push tragedy after tragedy on us, not letting up, not letting us feel a breath of fresh air. How do I list all the things I’m mad, sad, anxious about. Bullet points? Numbered list? Stream of consciousness paragraphs of grievances? No matter how I dress them up, they will still be exactly what they are: societal failures.

We start with the generality of racism and slowly meander into the field of systemic racism within our society, to police brutality of specifically Black people, to the rise of white supremacy. We travel from there to protesters meeting with police violence, protesters dying at the hands of a gun toting vigilante. We then turn our attention to COVID, to a thousand people dying every day from this virus, to a president who does not seem to give a fuck about it, to people walking around unmasked, crowding into bars, schools making their students come to campus only to spread more of the virus around. I’m angry that I spent months inside my house and we’re all going to probably have to do that again come winter because our response to the virus was weak and ineffective. And then we travel on to climate change, to an angry world bringing us fires and hurricanes and tornadoes and derechos at an alarming pace. Which, also, the president does not give a…