For most of the Saturday morning, I’d been Monitoring the Situation. The Odd Lots Discord had been unusually busy since the start of the war a week ago, and I was glued to the screen. I don’t even think I was anxious for updates; I was really just trying to make sense of everything. They finally did it – the stupid, grotesque thing everyone thought surely they’d have enough of a sense of self-preservation not to do.

Someone in the Defense channel asked if anyone was winning: everyone was losing, the response came back.

Tony Benn’s speech against the Iraq War had been doing the rounds lately, and it really stuck with me. How am I an appendage of this barbaric culture?  I had just been having a conversation about responsibility in the face of pre-determined structures, but it offered little relief. Here I was, with all of the other information junkies taking our hits, giddy over the flow of information, terrified by the reality it signified.

I’d known I had to get out for hours before I actually did. I had tried to formulate a plan, but nothing came, so I just got in my car and drove. Someone had posted a recording of a Farsi numbers station, and with that fresh in my mind, I flipped on Boards of Canada as I drove. The ethereal tunes met my scattered head at the right frequency as I found myself gliding through the tree-shaded roads of Griffith Park.

I had taken my book with me – should I read here in the park? No, I don’t want to be exposed to the elements. Should I go to a coffee shop? Meh, I don’t want to sit in an uncomfortable seat and drink overpriced drinks. Besides, it was getting late in the day. Before I knew it, I was out of Griffith, but I just kept driving. Someone had recently told me that restless indecision was a side effect of ‘doomscrolling’. I wish I’d known that years ago.

I was getting close to Riverside Drive, and Astro Burger called out to me. I wanted to read from the comfort of a classic Americana diner leather-style booth, sip thin coffee, and eat a burger. Would David Lynch have approved? I sat down, ordered, and pulled out my copy of Pale Fire. King Charles Xavier was making his escape from his castle-turned-prison. Should I be siding with the revolutionaries who have thrown off the yoke of oppression?

My burger came. The charbroiled taste brought back memories of childhood barbecues. It was unseasonably warm, and if I closed my eyes, I could just about make out the Memorial Day barbeques that were still a couple of months away, feel the slightly too wet grass crunch underneath me as I tried to sit while balancing a flimsy paper plate, hear the murmur of party talk, growing louder as the sun dipped lower and lower. Charles Kinbote explained that the issue with Zemblan painter Eystein’s strategy of mixing a real-life trinket into his paintings was that reality was not the subject or object of art, and that the true work was to create a reality that transcended the source material.

I paid for my coffee and left, restarting the Boards of Canada album as I headed home. Nearing Vermont, the sun caught me off guard as I came over the hill, causing me to lower my gaze. As I did, the song title on the radio was “Hey Saturday Sun.” I’ve listened to this album a thousand times before and never noticed the name. Surely this was some minor glitch in the matrix?