I’m starting to get bummed out here. Too many good people are dying. The Knicks are terrible. The weather is deteriorating into some Blade Runner perpetual thunderstorm shit. Polar vortexting, tweeting, and Instagramming in a vacuum, searching for meaning.

Puerto Rico is a sinking ship but now that the New York State Attorney General has disbanded the Parade board everyone knew was corrupt for years and replaced it with earnest well meaning sorts–some from the private sector–we can celebrate a Nuyorican simulacrum of Puerto Rico on Fifth Avenue in June and it doesn’t matter what kind of shape the island is in or does it?

They’re gonna push through the Tar Sands pipeline and make the Koch Brothers billions so they can finish the process of buying out the government the way Comcast snatched up Time Warner. Ted Cruz’s father’s views will become mainstream and Obama’s legacy will be that he was a ruthless socialist dictator. The window dressing: as a compromise, gay marriage will become legal in all 50 states and so will marijuana.

After a long struggle and lots of haggling, we will forget how to speak Spanish, just as we have forgotten the indigenous and African tongues, and in the end it will only be spoken in the mountains, by people who still live off the land, and they will be under constant surveillance. There will be Latinos in key roles on American Idol, The Bachelor, and The Biggest Loser, and no one will remember what fiction was. There will be no need for Pulitzer Prizes.

Drones will assassinate all our enemies and read our children bedtime stories when they go to sleep. Everything you need will be delivered to your door before you realize you need it. Memory will devour itself like a restless serpent.

When the skies finally clear, there will be moments when people have a conscience, but most of them will be fleeting. Some of us will look into each other’s eyes, capture a glimmer of meaning, but find difficulty in expressing it. If there’s hope, it will be in our willingness to start over, uncover all the buried feelings and put them into words again.