Today the price of oil went negative for the first time since we’ve started keeping track of these things. There’s too much oil now. So much that we have no place to put it. I’m not bright enough to understand the implications beyond the fact that we’re living in an age of graphs and charts doing unthinkable things. Meanwhile, our president does everything he can to make things worse: tonight he announced that he was suspending immigration to America “to protect the jobs of our GREAT American Citizens.” It seems appropriate that a rejection of the American experiment would be announced with idiotic capitalization.
I’m pressing on with Camus’s The Plague after pulling it from my bookshelf in some sort of fugue state two nights ago. I thought I’d only dreamt about picking up the book in the grey light before dawn; I’m not even sure how it ended up on the shelf. I don’t remember buying it. But I’ll keep reading it because I want to believe in limbic wisdom and subconscious patterns.
My eyes stutter and loop through the words before me because my attention span has been chewed up by the news. I read the same sentence on page five again and again, struck by how it harmonizes with today’s headlines about oil, stocks, and employment numbers: “Think what it must be for a dying man, trapped behind hundreds of walls all sizzling with heat, while the whole population, sitting in cafés or hanging on the telephone, is discussing shipments, bills of lading, discounts!”
