A year ago, I was circling Texas roads with the same restlessness I carry now, but with a different expectation. January 6 had not yet broken open. People still spoke of Biden’s presidency as if it would calm the country. Some thought the virus would fade, that vaccines would mark an end. I wanted to believe it too. By the end of that January, the idea of “settling” was gone.
Now December closes the year, and nothing has settled. The pandemic lingers. The economy whipsaws. Families fracture over masks, over politics, over the simple act of gathering at a table. The noise never stops. In Shoreacres, the noise arrives like weather: sometimes a distant rumble, sometimes a gust that knocks over the lawn chairs. You learn to tie things down and keep moving.
From town, I watch the country play at normal. Offices half-open, schools arguing over rules, stadiums roaring on weekends. If you squint, you can pretend the ruptures are patched. But you don’t have to look hard to find the seams. There’s a whole industry dedicated to turning those seams into content. Outrage is a business model. The people selling it know how to keep an audience, and the audience knows how to keep score by counting enemies.
Time doesn’t move by seasons anymore. It moves by ruptures. January 6. The Delta wave. Kabul’s fall. Each event framed as a turning point, each devoured by the next headline. We don’t finish anything. We just repurpose it into a new episode. The show cannot end because too many careers depend on keeping it running. Politics becomes a subscription service: cancel anytime, but most people let it auto-renew.
I know what endless crisis feels like. Jail drilled that into me. Two years of waiting, boredom punctured by sudden violence. Every man carried a story, most swore they were innocent. Truth became irrelevant; masks mattered more — the posture you carried, the performance you gave. The only thing that counted was whether your act worked on the audience in front of you. That habit survives on the outside. Politicians campaign in place of governing. Commentators posture in place of reporting. Citizens cosplay as revolutionaries and then go home to air conditioning and streaming subscriptions. We’re fluent in performance and illiterate in repair.
Distraction fills the gaps. On Bayou Drive, lights blink over “Don’t Tread on Me” and “Let’s Go Brandon.” Churches pack the pews with carols wrapped around speeches about enemies. Families pass ham and mashed potatoes while swallowing words that would blow the room apart. These rituals don’t fix cracks. They hang tinsel over them and hope guests won’t notice the bulge in the drywall. I notice. Everyone notices. We’ve made noticing into a private sport because saying it out loud ruins dinner.
When I came back to Shoreacres, I told myself stability might be possible. Inheritance and insurance bought me a roof and four walls and a little space to write. I wanted steadier ground than the one I’d been walking. But stability, as I imagined it, depends on a promise from the world: that events will slow long enough for you to catch your breath. This year taught me the world isn’t offering that promise. Not to me, not to anyone. The pace is set elsewhere, by markets and microbes and men who profit from keeping the tempo high.
What remains instead is steadiness. You choose to face storms without lying about their force. You choose to stop borrowing vocabulary from people selling outrage. You measure life in work done, neighbors helped, drains cleared before the rain comes. The bay won’t flatter you. It floods when it chooses. It recedes when it’s ready. The tide chart doesn’t care about your feelings or your faction. The ferry across the channel doesn’t launch faster because you’re in a hurry. Order belongs to the parts of the world that still have to work to keep existing: tides, ferries, power poles, pump stations.
I think about accountability. Courtrooms in Washington fill with people who swore they were patriots. Sentences stack up. Those who lit the match travel to rallies and sell hats. That’s not closure; it’s a map of who the system protects. But it’s also a record. Records matter. They keep the ground from shifting under our feet more than it already does. You can build on a record. You can’t build on vibes. If there’s any hope for the center to hold, it starts with paper — filings, indictments, findings — the boring work of truth written down and signed.
Steadiness means keeping your own records. It’s paying the bill on time and fixing the gutter that rattles in a north wind. It’s knowing your neighbor’s generator cord can reach your porch if the outage lasts past midnight. It’s stocking water because the bay teaches the same lesson every storm season: nobody is coming fast enough to save you. Not the county, not the state, not the party you voted for. If they do show up, be grateful. But don’t plan your life around it. The freeze last winter burned that lesson into the walls; pipes don’t care about your politics when they split.
There’s a phrase I used to love: “We’ll get back to normal.” It belongs in a museum now, a relic from a time when the average person believed institutions could absorb shock without breaking. I don’t believe that anymore. Normal was a story we told to end a conversation. The conversation isn’t ending. The better word is “adapt.” You adapt by making smaller circles you can actually manage, by learning which alarms deserve a response and which deserve the off switch, by reserving your outrage for things you can influence within walking distance of your front door.
So I’m not waiting on normal. I’m building habits that don’t require it. Wake early. Walk the blocks that flood first and check the storm drains. Write the truth even when it cuts into former allies. Stop mistaking internet noise for community. Buy what you need, not what performs a tribe. Refuse to repeat lies to keep the room comfortable. Help quietly, and not just when someone is watching. When the power blinks, know which breaker matters. When the water looks cloudy, know where the shutoff is. When a neighbor stumbles, hold the ladder.
This year never settled. Next year won’t either. The wind will push whitecaps across Trinity Bay; refineries will throw heat into the night; politicians will keep shouting because shouting pays. But shouting doesn’t make sandbags heavier or roofs tighter. Steadiness does. Attention to small, stubborn acts does. It isn’t dramatic, and it won’t go viral, and that’s exactly why it works: it builds a life that doesn’t collapse when the spectacle fails to deliver.
The choice ahead is simple, though not easy: keep numbing ourselves with spectacle, or face what the spectacle tries to drown. I’ve done both. Only one leaves the house standing after the water drains. The other leaves you with a busted sump pump and a head full of noise, wondering why the cavalry never came.
I choose to face it. And then keep choosing, every day the wind comes up and the headlines try to sell me panic in a new package. The bay will be there in the morning, telling the truth in waves. My job is to meet it with steadiness — not because that saves the world, but because it keeps my corner of it honest and intact long enough for the next tide to turn.