I haven’t thought about this photo in months. Maybe years. It’s hard to keep track at this point. I don’t remember what crisis brought this photo into being. There have been too many since then, and they keep coming faster and faster.

What I do remember is how this photo—like some of the other gems from the 2016-2018 period, so concisely sums up our situation.

It’s gotta be the smirk.

The attitudes, the antagonist and protagonist (which is which?), the bystanders, all wrapped up into an incredibly dense visual package. One that’s blessedly free of corporate logos with a cohesive color palette.

I’m in a fit of nostalgia tonight, nostalgia for the meme wars of 2016. When the fight seemed winnable. When the memes were actually funny. When the conflict was somehow still in meme-land and not something that I feel the need to prepare for.

For the longest time I’ve known that if I were ever to write songs, they would be lamentations. I could never write angry songs—that’s not my mode of being. But lamentations, when there is so much beauty in the world?

The older I get the more I know why. The conflict—the war—is already around us. We just can’t see it. We’re in a fog of our own making, waiting for the spark that will explode the gas so that we can see again.

I know that we should not give in to despair, but dang sometimes it’s hard to keep my chin up.