On sun worship, absurd headlines, splitting worlds

A selfie of me and a fake sun, the harsh lightbulb inside a Target dressing room, circa 2010.

​IN A SINGLE CONVERSATION, we address gender construction, teleportation to a Waffle House in Georgia, prom etiquette in the age of AI, absurdist after-life headlines, ayahuasca trip visions—that one lady who saw her sister as a dense purple rock.

There’s only so much content we can consume in a day’s scroll before we start to question the nature of reality—this “splitting of worlds” through absurdism. When we see absurd headlines, some of us will want to call out the delusion, others will file it away as signs of spiritual awakening. That the New York Times ran the story—about the FEMA official who swears he was teleported multiple times to a Waffle House—is beyond me, and sets a dangerous precedent.

And yet, a red cardinal just flew past my window and I’ve convinced myself that he’s my father, flitting away with his day after a quick wave-wink of his wing. We’re struggling to hold all possibilities in the absence of any solid path out of the present, chaotic moment.

A war-mongering maniac has taken the wheel and we have to keep waking up—many of us without work—to make it through another day without losing it. It’s an hour-by-hour kind of arrangement, isn’t it?

Nearly 100 years ago, life may have been very similar, at least according to Thomas Merton, who documented his time as a student at Columbia University in 1935, and described the mayhem and fervor with which communists on campus snarled at anyone who raised a question about their tactics and morals. Taking an anti-war stance is one thing, adopting the tactics of your enemy to enforce it is quite another. At some point, time itself lifts the veil on all these contradictions.

“[Communists] are always crying out against the injustice of capitalism and yet, as a matter of fact, they very often say in the same breath that the very concept of injustice is simply a myth devised by the ruling classes to beguile and deceive the proletariat,” Merton writes.

Bless the young radicals who still have a heart, bless the tender ones who worry about water supply and try to reverse the curses cast upon us so long ago; bless the visionaries who vouch for another way through the caves toward commencement; bless the ones who have figured out how to care without the brand deals.

We need a porch revolution, it’s obvious. Sun worship is another option. I follow a young kid on TikTok who believes God found him through rays of sunshine beaming through his window. If I view his videos in the morning, I worry about the kid and wonder how he’s gone so far astray—feels like he needs a friend. If I view his videos at night, he’s a prophet and I’m ready to denounce my life to join his sun-worshipping services at any moment.