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Of all the many strange things about this year to consider, wandering around town and feeling as if we’re living in a literal police state is up there with that whole global pandemic thing in terms of “Welp, I certainly didn’t see that coming.” And yet, here we are, in Portland, Oregon in July 2020.

I’m not (just) talking about the federal occupation of the city, with Department of Homeland Security and Customs & Border Patrol agents showing up in armor at riots with live ammunition and a seeming desire to start shit no matter what; I’m not even (just) talking about the fact that protesters are being pulled off the streets and into unmarked rental vans by federal agents who don’t identify themselves, nor have any legal right to arrest the people they’re snatching — although even the fact that those things are actually happening for real feels utterly surreal and horrifying.

No, I’m talking about the fact that, in an evening walk recently, we ran into the police patrolling the streets no less than five times, despite the fact that the walk lasted around, at best, 20-30 minutes. (We were going to the local movie store to return some films.) On two of those five times of seeing the police, they’d stopped to confront people who… didn’t seem to be doing much of anything, to my eyes.

Add to that, the number of nearby sirens I’m hearing daily, or the helicopters flying overhead each night. To say nothing of the sound of flashbangs in the distance every night.

Let me clarify something: I live in a relatively quiet part of the city. It’s certainly far from anything I’d describe as dangerous, and the last time I felt under threat in this neighborhood — outside of seeing the police driving around, checking everyone out at a time when the city’s under the thumb of the authorities, I mean — was more than a year ago, and purely the result of my own paranoia. There is, to put it bluntly, no need for the amount of police presence I’m seeing out there right now.

And yet. And yet.

It’s genuinely surreal to think about where 2020 has taken us so far, and scary, too. I dread to think what could be next.

It’s quite a thing to be as scared for your city as I am right now. To know with actual certainty that federal forces are literally kidnapping people off the streets and pulling them into unmarked vans in broad daylight — on camera, even — and that there’s nothing I can do about it, in a practical sense. The feeling of powerlessness, of helplessness, is the point, of course; what’s happening is entirely about intimidation and fear and trying to push people’s spirits down even further to break them. It’s a show of force, and there’s never a reason for that beyond emotional abuse.

The whole thing feels almost cartoonishly dystopian, even as it’s just a small increase from where we’ve been living for weeks, now. The Black Lives Matter protests have been happening for, what, six or seven weeks by this point, and they’ve been peaceful each time until police have arrived and literally pushed for violence; there was a video from a protest just last week where a cop smacked a protester’s phone from their hand into a store window, with that smashed window then used to justify beating the protesters. It was, after all, “property damage,” and such things take priority over everything else, even if the damage was the result of police actions.

Also this week, there was the confirmation of something long rumored, as court documents revealed that undercover police really are seeding protests and trying to work as agitators, pushing others into acts that will then be used as “proof” that the protests are unjust, uncouth, unconstitutional in some way. That they’re reason enough for authorities to “fight back,” to fight, to become the thugs they declare the other side to be and beat down an argument that they can’t have, have no interest in having. The tactics of bullies in uniforms throughout history.

As reports of what’s happening in Portland started spreading across social media late last week, I saw so many people say things to the effect of, “This isn’t America.” It’s a lie that makes people feel comfortable, and I understand why, but the truth is, this is America. This is what it’s been like for some time. And it’s why it’s all the more important to stand up and do something about it, no matter how scary it feels.

We’re at the point in the year where we can sleep with the windows open without fear of waking up the next morning feeling as if we’ve frozen solid; indeed, without warning, we ended up at the point where not having windows open makes the air feel thicker and, just maybe, it’s time to think about sleeping on top of the sheets, too. (It is the end of June, of course; okay, maybe there was some warning.)

The reason I mention this isn’t to update on how I’m sleeping or my temperature regulation activities; it’s because, as the weather improves and the windows open, I’m rediscovering the joys of listening to the morning anew.

I’ve previously written about how quiet the house is first thing in the morning, but the rest of the world doesn’t follow suit, wonderfully. There is bird song, as countless different birds chirp and warble to each other in high-pitched Morse Code that seems as pretty but unintelligible to me as it does incessant; lists to it, the invention of music feels inevitable — it wasn’t even as if humans had anything to invent, given how melodic, repetitive and rhythmic the birds have been singing all along. We just ripped them off and gave it a different name.

But it’s not just nature out there. There’s the sound of cars in the distance, that slowly increasing, then decreasing hum of the engines and the crunch of the road underneath the tires. I lie there, listening and unintentionally trying to work out where each car is, relative to me. That one’s on Belmont, but this new one has to be on Cesar Chavez…? and so on. I don’t really mean to do it, it doesn’t matter, but I can’t stop myself, nonetheless.

And then there are the occasional footsteps, even in these quarantine times — although, of course, the quarantine is losing its strength as time goes on. I listen to people walk past, jog past every now and then, hear snatches of music or conversation as they do. It’s a gentle reminder that this isn’t a bubble or a life raft, but that I’m part of something larger, a world out there, filled with life, ready for me to wake fully and join in.

When July started, I saw enough people talk about us being midway through 2020 that I ended up researching it; surely that couldn’t be right, could it? February is so short that we must be a week off or so, surely, before we catch up again? Surely we can’t actually be halfway through the year?

Much of that disbelief came from, simply, the feeling that we couldn’t be half done with the year just yet. (More cynically and dramatically, that the year wasn’t half finished with us yet, perhaps, but, it’s been that kind of a year.) 2020 has been existentially difficult, a year that’s assailed us in ways that I’m not sure I could have really seen coming in any way beyond jokingly imagining worst case scenarios that could never, really, come true; a year that looked at my End Of 2019 wish that, coming off a year that saw my divorce and attempts to rebuild my finances in the wake of that, maybe the next 12 months would be just a little bit easier and laughed maniacally. Oh, if only I knew what was in store. If only.

Time has flattened, or folded, since quarantine went into effect. March was seventy years long, but April seemed to go by in a blink. Even just writing that feels like a surreal thing, though, a reminder that we’ve been in quarantine for longer this year than not — everything shut down mid-March, and since then we’ve had fully April, May and June living almost entirely inside our homes while our jobs go away and, judging by the infection rates in the US, nothing actually really gets better. Is this just the way things are going to be, now? Surely not, and yet…

(A brief aside; something rumored for the President’s July 4 speech and thankfully missing was an announcement that, basically, we’d all just have to learn to accept this as the new ongoing reality going forward. Even the idea of saying that felt so callous, so cruel to me.)

So I looked into it, like I said, and it turns out that July 2 is the actual midway point of the year — the 183rd day, with 182 behind it and 182 ahead. Still earlier than I thought, but still; we’re firmly in the second half of 2020 now. May it be kinder than the first.

How quickly things change, and how these strange coronavirus times make you think that they’ve never been anything other than they currently are…! It was just a six weeks or so ago that I wrote about sleeping late and remembering my dreams for the first time in ages, and now… well, let’s just say that I’ve finally climbed on board the “COVID is fucking up my sleep cycle” bandwagon, just a month or two too late, and when the rest of the world has moved on.

Story of my life, as a late adopter. I still haven’t seen all of Twin Peaks: The Return, can you believe that?

When it comes to the disruption of sleep, I’m somewhat lucky, I guess. Not for me a particularly nightmare-ridden existence; after a brief, welcome return, my dreams have returned to living permanently in my subconscious once again judging by recent experience. No, for me, it’s all about a very unexpected shift in my sleep cycle that I’ve started calling My Ongoing Fight Against Time It’s Very Own Fucking Self. Or, to put it more clearly, I’ve developed a seeming inability to sleep past 5:30 in the morning.

I’ve been an early riser for a long time — I’m tempted to say it’s always been the case, but in reality, I might have been sleeping in back when I was a kid and I just don’t remember it. Certainly, there were times when I was in art school where I’d struggle to wake up, but those were also the days when I’d regularly stay out past 2am like the callow youth I was. For the most part, though, I’ve woken up between 6 and 7am for the better part of three decades or more now, and it’s been something I’ve gotten used to, before this current spate of displacement started.

It doesn’t matter when I go to sleep, I’ve discovered. It doesn’t matter how tired I am. I can — and, frustratingly, do — wake up before 5:30, but it’s almost impossible for me to sleep past it, now. I manage it rarely, but it feels like an effort I make after initially waking at 4 and refusing to accept it. It feels like work. There are times when I wake up all too early and think to myself, maybe it’s not that everything is so stressful right now. Maybe I just need to sleep more. And then I remember that whole pandemic thing.

There are times when I wonder what the last few years have done to us, as a whole; if the constant stream of seemingly impossible, unthinkable things that have kept happening over and over have piled up on top of each other in our brains and created a crust where there didn’t use to be one.

Every week now, every single week, the news will report at least one story that, even just five years ago, would have produced enough outrage and bluster to echo for weeks, if not months. And each of these stories feels like a big thing for awhile — remember that time when the Attorney General announced the resignation of someone investigating Trump, only for them to say that they hadn’t resigned? Or, hey, what about the President retweeting racist propaganda over and over again? — and then, somehow, we move on. Even if we don’t really mean to.

To put this in some kind of context: I found myself thinking the other day, things seem to have calmed down a bit recently, and then I remembered that there are still countrywide protests against police brutality featuring thousands of people every single night, and there’s also still a fucking pandemic that the US doesn’t have under any appreciable level of control. In fact, just the opposite; cases are spiking in multiple states and lockdowns and quarantines are coming to an end anyway, because… we’re bored, maybe…? Someone wants to make more money…?

Maybe I’m alone in feeling nervous about the ways in which events have seemingly blurred lines about what’s important and what’s not in our heads. Perhaps it’s a survival technique to prevent us all from being overloaded and collectively losing our minds, because of all the bullshit and formerly unthinkable things that we’re living through and the need to operate on a day to day basis without being frozen by all of it. When was the last time you really thought about the US putting kids in cages, for example?

At some point, things will slow down again, and we’ll hopefully start to reckon with everything that’s happened on our watch. My worry isn’t that we won’t do that; my worry is that we’ll find ourselves missing the endless, numbing, non-stop everything pace of the last five years when we do.

I love the comment spam I get here. For one thing, There’s a strange, enjoyable beat poetry aspect to the auto-generated text that tries so hard to be friendly, everyday real people making friendly conversation; the enthusiastic — always stunningly, inhumanly, enthusiastic — tenor that almost vibrates off the screen with anxious need and awkward, unlikely emphasis in the wrong places. “Oh wow I’m so GLAD I found your site what you guys do is THE BEST” with no punctuation or breath to be found.

The fact that, for the most part, spam comments are so complimentary is a pleasure to me. This site is, as I’ve said before, something I do for myself first and foremost, but I like imagining people who create a site seeking an external validation they’re not getting anywhere else in their life receiving any number of spam comments that say things like, “you guys are the best at what you do,” or some variation, and it actually making them feel better. The very notion of confidence building through automation is appealing, even if it’s an accidental by-product or more cynical ambitions.

Not every spam comment is complementary, of course; some are faux-helpful, telling me that I can reach more readers if only I buy this particular product, or sign up for this special SEO service, or something similar. I feel almost guilty when I receive these ones. It’s not that I recognize them for the phishing schemes that they so clearly are, because, well, I’m not stupid. But I feel bad because I don’t want to reach more readers or grow my audience or increase my search rankings; that kind of thing is the antithesis of what I want from this site, and I feel as if I’ve wasted the auto-generated spam’s time as a result. I’m sure there are others who need to read that untrustworthy offer far more than me, little bot. I’m sorry.

I get a curiously high volume of spam comments here, considering I’m off in the internet back woods, off by myself and typing away quietly, and the spam filter catches them all. But I look through them all anyway, enjoying their nonsense as if they’re genuine correspondents from an alternate reality of bullshit. I’d miss them, if they were to disappear entirely.