four_horsemen ovenbird We linger over breakfast. Coffee, tea, strawberries, sourdough. We wonder, are we old, or are times really as bad as they seem? Objectively, things are bad. But they’ve been bad before. We can’t quite decide where current events fit on a scale of bad. Are things as bad as they were in the lead up to world war two? It’s possible. We lament. We say we didn’t want tickets to the end of the world. I’m not sure what will be left for my children, but I suspect parents have always felt this way. And children too, who are given plenty of things to fear. In sixth grade we learned about acid rain, how it was eating everything away. I had a book called Scary Poems for Rotten Kids by Sean O’Huigin with a poem in it about a child who gets caught in the acid rain. The illustration shows a kid melting and the last few stanzas are all slushy decay: My knees turned muddy, then fell off I opened up my mouth to cough My jaw fell down and hit the ground My arms were soft and runny My bellybutton washed away It really wasn’t funny. There were years when I was legitimately concerned that my eyeballs would dissolve if rain got into them. Now I think, how nice to have a problem as concrete and solvable as acid rain, or the hole in the ozone layer. Implementing stronger emission controls and regulating chlorofluorocarbons went a long way to fixing these issues but what’s going on in the world today is a lot less cut_and_dried. We finish our breakfast. We walk the dog. We watch an eagle swoop low over our worried heads on its way to feed its young. I put a record on the turntable, eat leftover apple pie, and think about writing a poem. Is this what people do at the end of the world? Do we ignore the sound of pounding hooves and find solace in the splash the eagle makes as it hauls a salmon from the river, tragic and shining in its final throes? 260315 what's it to you? who go blather from