Everything is collapsing. The senators are insider trading. The algorithm is relentlessly selling the most tepid, flavorless version of your life back to you. The last remaining industries are meal delivery apps, “cloud software,” and threadbare money laundering schemes. Your account has been deducted a fee and you’re just now hearing about it for the first time. We fluctuate between rage and limp nihilism and back again, and while this column won’t fix that, it will provide you with a small good thing to appreciate, a recognition of something weird and valuable and beautiful, despite it all.
When I can’t sleep, I watch bears hunt for salmon in a river in Alaska. There’s a live-cam that broadcasts all day long and won’t turn off till October, till the bears have ballooned to obscene round champions and it’s time for them to drag themselves back to the woods to hibernate. “Bear 480,” or Otis, as biologists have named him, arrives at the river each June with visible ribs and pointy shoulders; by mid-summer he sits hunched beneath a grassy rock jutting out from the bank of the river, his enormous stomach bobbing between his legs like an old conquering lord alone in a castle.
