My wife and her friend dragged my grumpy ass outta the house last night, and forced me to go to a birthday party at The Old Spaghetti Factory for a good friend who just turned 50. Marginal food. Terrible service. (Apparently they have gotten slammed every night since they announced they are closing, and are short-staffed and don't have a lot of menu items any more.) We had some laughs with 40 good friends crowded around the table. But it was very subdued. Most of us are Burners/hippies/progressives. We have worked for more than 30 years to get the meager social gains our society has been enjoying recently, and watched decades of our good work get completely dismantled in three short days. We're tired. We just don't have the fight in us that we had when we were 18, or 28, or even 38. We've lost. Our friends have lost. We are lost. I keep thinking of the survivors of the Titanic, after the ship has disappeared below the waves, and the water has calmed, and a quiet pall falls over the surface... here we are floating on the cold ocean in a flimsy raft... nothing but ocean in every direction around us... Well, fuck. now what? Get real face time with people. ... Go get lost in a group of people.