Crises stupefy. The mind gets stuck in the quick-mud of dread. You can’t think about anything else because unless you surmount this threat you’re dead or as good as. Your future has been erased, replaced by pleading, perhaps in the form of prayer. It happens to us all, even Jesus: “O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt.” (Matthew 26:39) Hard to think of Heaven when you’re limping toward the Cross.

Thrice this has happened to me. The diagnosis, physical or existential, felt mortal. There could be no tomorrow. Why bother even thinking about anything else! Yet this brooding was boring to distraction. My crisis wasn’t interesting, simply dire.

America finds itself at such a pass. I grow impatient when anyone talks about the ’28 election or what the Supreme Court might one day do or repairing our electoral college. Quit rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic! If we do not get through the ’26 election – counting the votes correctly – our ass is grass, fella! Later we can discuss how to repair our Republic – the fix list is long – but first we’ve got to save it.

(“Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully,” said Dr. Johnson pithily. It pithes me off how pithily.)

This stupefaction frets me most in the morning before our stroll. I want our time together to be pleasant, lest you scram. Your interest has become my raison d’être. Such exclusive dependence is unwholesome, you might say, and I’d agree. I’d prefer not to care so much for your regard. But we love what we love, there is no gainsaying. Our adventures don’t just fill my time, they fulfill it.

I ask myself what’s on my mind, then groan, “Not him again!” No creature in living memory has blobbed out so completely into the collective consciousness. Every frigging day a new predation, outrage, jolt! He’s the maestro of malevolence and scary as hell – and cognitively impaired, to boot – recalling that old cartoon of a pudgy baby in diapers playing with dynamite.

On occasion I ask Henry to pinch-hit, who, feeling no such trepidation, tries licking away my dread. The present is so much pleasanter without the future, he counsels. True, I sigh, but we humans are stuck in the future like Br’er Rabbit in his briar patch. We can’t disentangle ourselves from tomorrow – or yesterday either – and we get so busy trying to we overlook today. Henry lives now, sniffs and zigzags in the exuberance of immediacy. You’d think it had never snowed before, the way he zooms. (It’s snowed a lot here this winter.) Oh to stand at the verge of day like Keats’ explorer, feeling

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published like some watcher of the skiesWhen a new planet swims into his ken;Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyesHe stared at the Pacific—and all his menLook’d at each other with a wild surmise—Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

That’s the ticket, my prayer! But it is not to be. Stuck is stuck until we become unstuck. Maybe I’ll risk a riff on this theme to induce a smile.

That is art’s gift – to abduct us from our murky moment into the glamor of whenever. Keats when he wrote that miraculous sonnet (which I append in full) had every reason to grieve. Sick, no girlfriend, no reputation, no job, dying young! Life sucked! – and dread might have sucked him in, but for art.

Lucky guy.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published*Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;Round many western islands have I beenWhich bards in fealty to Apollo hold.Oft of one wide expanse had I been toldThat deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;Yet did I never breathe its pure sereneTill I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skiesWhen a new planet swims into his ken;Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyesHe stared at the Pacific—and all his menLook’d at each other with a wild surmise—Silent, upon a peak in Darien.