Disney World

Some days you look out the window and all you can see is the newspaper. Everything looks provincial then, no matter where you live.

Disney World re-opens in Florida, the same day that state reports 15,000 new cases of covid-19. A woman named Sonya Little, 45, flies from her home in Birmingham, Al. to Orlando, Fl. with her friends Tammy Richardson and Kristi Peek. "I'm so overwhelmed with emotion," a weeping Ms.Little said as she stood on Main Street USA wearing Minnie Mouse ears. "The last few months have been so hard. We have just felt so defeated. Being here gives me the strength to go on."

The newspaper was at my doorstep in San Francisco where it always is every morning, the newspaper that would tell the story of Sonya Little and her friends attending the re-opening of Disney World, along with "thousands of others." I had to come inside though to read it, multi-tasking, making coffee with one hand and reading the front page of the newspaper with the other.

When I pulled the blinds, before opening the front door to go down stairs and fetch the newspaper, I could see immediately that the day was going nowhere. It was just hanging there, with just enough light to be called day but not enough light to have any new ideas. Not that any ideas are new anymore--we passed that time some time ago--having passed through the library of Albert Camus to the present time when virtually all social-political-cultural activities are transactional, in which both the thinker and the recipients of the thinking base their relationships on money, one identifying as agent and one as client. 

The newspaper also reported that Sonya and friends especially wanted to visit Fantasyland.

The coffee finally brewed, I sat down to read the story in its entirety. Then I had a thought, not an idea but a thought, and not one thought but two thoughts: 1) America and Americans are now ready for existentialism, in the manner of Albert Camus and 2) how fun it must have been to be a philosopher in the time before there was philosophy, to have been a man like Heraclitus.