“Beadrel with a barn.” That’s what the note on my phone from 3:06am says. It’s possible it was supposed to say, “Beadrel in a barn.” This is what my wife shouted as she walked up the stairs to find that I was taking a shower but had left the bathroom door open. “There’s a Beadrel in the barn.” Or maybe she was asking a question, “is there a beadrel in the barn?” Either way it meant you’ve gone mad or are you crazy? and because she had an English accent she could have just as easily used the word daft. While I may be daft, I don’t have a wife, I don’t have an upstairs, and I have no idea what a beadrel is. My best guess is that it was supposed to be some devilish critter that lives and causes havoc in barns in the English countryside.
Today is day three or three and a half of being sick. With each day, there’s been some improvement, but I’m still sore and sleeping poorly and having cuckoo dreams. The first real night of this bug, the night with the high fever, I went to bed at 8:30pm and woke up several times throughout the night in a cold sweat. Last night I went to bed at 10pm – which was much more reasonable. I had stayed up following the news from LA. A friend lives a little more than a mile from one of the smaller fires that erupted. He told me he was packing his go-bag just in case.
As I followed the news, it was hard to miss the president-elect’s and our co-president-elect’s politicization of this event. Tr*mp stated that Governor Newsom (who Tr*mp called Newscum, because Tr*mp is behaves like a child) refused to sign the “water restoration declaration.” Newsom later pointed out that no such document exists. Meanwhile, on that hellscape social media platform formerly known as twitter, a post viewed over 5 million times claimed that LA had refused to fill their water reservoirs (again false). The owner of that platform tried to blame the fires and the inability to contain them on DEI and “woke” policies.
This administration hasn’t even taken the oath of office and already they’re spreading bullshit lies that simply distract from getting real things done. The fact that legacy media outlets are hesitant to label these statements as lies and social media outlets are rolling back policies on fact checking is a clear indication that we will once again be thrown into the chaos of intentionally politicized misinformation with no arbiters of truth to see us through. I don’t want to deal with the batshit crazy things we’re about to experience. I don’t want to deal with the beadrel in the barn.