Right now, all I want to do is sit back and listen to the new LPs I got for Christmas. Just listen and close my eyes and let the music absorb into me. I’m exhausted. Burned out by the craziness. Fed up with authoritarians and conspiracy mongers and fascists. Tired of everything. I just want to escape for a few hours into something beautiful, something resonant and good.

Art, music, literature, cinema — all of these provide sustenance. They can be “escapism” in a sense, but as Tolkien noted, the ones most threatened by escape are the jailers. I don’t want to be imprisoned in the small-minded, selfish, petty, arrogant, racist country that the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol yesterday want to build. The country they want to build is a nightmare world, a world where might makes right, where selfishness and bullying and entitlement rule the day, where votes don’t matter only the will to power. So I’ll escape from that hellhole, if I can. And if that means listening to Tea for the Tillerman or Tales from Topographic Oceans for an hour, just to escape, then that’s what I’m gonna do. Then I’m gonna go read a book.