I walked to work this morning behind a lady who was eating a chunk of baguette while headed towards the city. She dropped her bread in the middle of the street, cursed, then picked it up. It was just the final butt of the baguette, but she put it in her pocket. I watched her. She passed a trash can and didn’t chuck it in. Maybe she was saving it for a pet at home. Maybe she was going to eat it. I would’ve eaten it, it was only on the ground for a moment.

I followed her. I watched her cross the street. She had a long drapey black coat on with large pockets. She had thick glasses and terrible posture. She was listening to something through wired earbuds. Was it a podcast? Was she talking to someone on the phone, did she tell them about the bread? Did she even care about its fate or did she want to forget about it? She pushed her hand further into her pocket, leaving her hand in the pocket for the length of a block. Perhaps squeezing it. I bet it was soft.

We approached the library. By this point I was far off the path to my office. She didn’t stop to break bread with the seagulls surrounding the lawn. She exited the footpath and sat on a ledge.

She looked around. There was a high school group nearby but they were distracted.

She reached into her pocket.

She rustled around.

I stood behind the tree.

She took out the bread.

She took a bite.

I fucking knew it.

A grief conspiracy throughout time

I often wonder why we don’t run around and shake people screaming: we just went through a pandemic!!

It feels like most people have forgotten. In the TV show The Leftovers, the world is thrown astray because one day a random blip disappears 2% of the global population. And the people left behind just have to cope somehow.

HBO’s The leftovers= sort of like the Avengers.

Many people choose to move on. One group, however, walks around organizing protests where their sole purpose is just to remind others of the people that got blipped away. They don’t want people to stop asking, why the f aren’t we addressing the fact that this random fucking thing happened?

Even though that group is obviously a cult, I really related to this urge, this need to alert people. I understand it’s a healthy person thing to “move on.” But if you lose someone or something you love, and someone you love dies, how can someone put it aside? What I’m really asking is, to anyone who is trying to move on, what’s wrong with you people.

I was in a grief group over zoom and the counselor said something that annoyed me: This drive to scream in people’s faces, has existed for everyone throughout all of time. In its most recognizable form it’s driven by things that aren’t related to one person’s death. It’s climate change, genocide, homelessness. Everyone’s got a reason or multiple to stand in the middle of a Costco and scream “Wake up SHEEPLE”

When the counselor made that connection between me and people who seem crazy for other reasons, I felt annoyed. People like to say that we can grieve many things. Like you lose ur parent, but also you can lose your job or your car or your spot in the line at the grocery store and on and on and on.

However when something is too many things it tends to become nothing and what I mean by that is, I have no idea what the word grief means anymore.

But the counselor hit on something true for me, that grieving things can look just like… having a cause to fight for. This can be sort of comforting.

At first it kinda seems like it’s okay to let grief guide us. It does seem that plenty of these crazy mourning people have gotten things done. It seems like all those history people have tapped into that well. Like Greta Thunberg? That girl is grieving.

Greta has requested not to be referenced in my writing so often. Sorry greta.

Feeling that pang makes making life decisions so much harder, not just because it’s painful. But because Grieving makes you feel so alive. When I’ve felt sadness after loss, I hadn’t known before that humans could feel so much. When you do feel it, that crazy thing, how can we not allow it to lead our lives and never let go? When it’s the most visceral thing we’ve ever felt?

To think of it as grief being that crazy thing that everyone feels that makes you want to throw your life away or scrap and start anew, and be more focused—this is BIG, people, let’s not ignore it.

Join a cult of grieving today.

I feel honored to have felt something so large. I reject anything smaller than the size of grief.

• Heading
• Body text
• Blockquotes
• List Types
  • Ordered Lists
  • Unordered Lists
• Tables
• Code Snippets
  • highlight with line number.
  • highlight using triple backticks
• \(\LaTeX\)
• <q> tag

This is a sample post.

Below is just about everything you’ll need to style in the theme. Check the source code to see the many embedded elements within paragraphs.

Heading

# Heading 1

## Heading 2

### Heading 3

#### Heading 4

Body text

This is strong.

This is figure

This is emphasized.

53 = 125. Water is H₂O.

The New York Times (That’s a citation).

Underline.

HTML and CSS are our tools.

Blockquotes

Justification: This species is listed as Extinct in the Wild, as all populations are still under captive management. The captive population in China has increased in recent years, and the possibility remains that free-ranging populations can be established some time in the near future. When that happens, its Red List status will need to be reassessed.

I follow up the quest. Despite of day and night and death and hell.

-- Idylls of the King, Tennyson

List Types

Ordered Lists

1. Item one
   1. sub item one
   2. sub item two
   3. sub item three
2. Item two

Unordered Lists

• Item one
• Item two
• Item three

Tables

Code Snippets

Syntax highlighting via Pygments

#container {
  float: left;
  margin: 0 -240px 0 0;
  width: 100%;
}

highlight with line number.

1
2
3
def foo
  puts 'foo'
end

highlight using triple backticks

a=1:10
for(i in a)
{
  print(i)
}

\(\LaTeX\)

you can use latex with double $$

<q> tag

here is a <q> q tag </q>

here is a q tag