Most everyone, myself included, considers each new year the blank slate it isn’t. Yesterday, I woke in the afternoon, Green Day’s Dookie playing on loop from my iPhone; I listened to it 4 times through, then turned it off, then did nothing. New Year’s Eve, I’d passed out, listening, apparently, to Green Day’s Dookie, after reading the first twelve months of this book to a muted Zoom room. Moments I’d forgotten, or else repressed, caught me off-guard and I choked with the onset of potential unraveling—then read the next sentence, and the next, until the feeling left. I’d been sipping beers so I burped a lot as I compacted my 2020 into under two hours for the audience—an act I’d expected would be cathartic, an act that was cathartic, but also not. Today, a girl on the bus flicked through Twitter, briefly enlarging a photo of a man hanging a Celtic-cross-repurposed-as-white-supremacist-symbol flag from a column inside the US Capitol, then exited the app to open Candy Crush. It’s terrorizing, how many times I’ve seen this face-painted doofus Viking, versus the video of the journalist yanked and dragged through the murder-eyed MAGA mob, or the photoset of the DC woman tortured on her walk home, both of which, only once. How convenient I enter my worst headspaces on Fridays when therapy’s on Thursdays. An Instagram with an Aahhh!!! Real Monsters profile picture DMed to say they’d figured out how they knew me—it involved a party, an old friend, alcohol, a conversation about writing, a red kitchen, and a cool bathroom. I’m going through something I’ve named The Thought Crisis which, when thought or talked about, only reinforces itself.