I remember during the financial crisis, reading truly stomach-churning headlines, then glancing out the window and wondering why there weren’t people running down the streets clutching 10-pound bags of rice to their chests. It was such a disconnect between Life as Reported on the News and Life as it Happens Close Up. While I’m certain there were anguished conversations happening in homes over collapsing home values and disappearing jobs and cratered stock portfolios, by and large life looked normal from the outside.

Some people were not surprised by this. My last editor’s parents were both Holocaust survivors. His mother, a teenager at the time, was pressed into factory work for the collapsing Nazi regime. She told him that she and her fellow workers joked and laughed all the time, because what else could they do? In Auschwitz. So I get it, but there’s something about a weekend that we just endured that feels like 10-pound bags of rice clutched to the chest would be a totally normal thing to do.

We are…about to invade Greenland? Sending troops to Minnesota? About to see the Department of Justice investigate the widow of Renee Good, just as soon as they find the toadies willing to do it? And yet, I spent the weekend socializing, exercising, shopping and eating hamburgers. Well, just one hamburger. And I didn’t buy much, but it was nice to get out of the house and walk around a mall, like it was the ’80s again.

Then I come home, read the news and learn that this dork is nominated to be our ambassador to Iceland. I love Iceland. I could live there, easily. It’s so beautiful it almost hurts to look out a window. I’m sure this chucklefuck will have the Icelanders hating us soon enough, like the rest of the world.

However, there was comic relief. In the wake of the shameful gift of Maria Corina Machado’s Nobel medal to Tubby, there appears to be a grassroots effort for people to send their own awards to the White House. Gene Weingarten offered his Pulitzer Prize. If I hadn’t tossed all our journalism awards a few years back, I’d be happy to send the miniature bust of Mark Twain that Alan won for something, I think in an AP contest. For once, the AI creations are really funny:

But still, it’s an unsettling time. How weird that as I got in the car to go get that hamburger, this was on the radio. What a great song. All they have is Lee Greenwood. We have Gil Scott-Heron.

I don’t have much to report. But a new week lies ahead. Let’s white-knuckle through it.