Bread and Circuses

…And frankly, I’ve been better. I feel as though I’ve been keeping my head down and praying for daylight since mid-January. I signed up for Substack sometime in February, thinking that I’d add some sort of pithy notes about life in America as things continued to devolve. What this looked like in reality? I opened that page approximately every two weeks for the better part of a year, and didn’t write a damn thing.  So what did I do instead? I doom scrolled. A lot. I relocated to Alabama with my tiny dog in the name of love. I learned to cohabit with another human after honestly thinking that would never happen again. I got a job with a national law firm. I protested. I had the honor of reading of two dear friend’s manuscripts and giving them some edits. I worked on developing my musical ear (a necessity if you live with a musician). I got to spend some time with my nephew. And I firmly retreated into the written word. I read 95 books this year, mostly about history and income inequa...