I don’t invest in the stock market but I am afraid of the chaos. And I can’t be the only one nervous about traveling with my laptop and phone. One of my mindless activities lately is cleaning out my techno storage and drives, which is more useful than playing Spider Solitaire ad nauseam. Today, I deleted dozens of individual chapters of two novels I wrote and rewrote several times in between the Angels series and the Birds. It was similar to ripping up thirty years worth of journals while I emptied out my Soho apartment when I left New York. I have no regrets about doing that, in fact it was incredibly freeing. I also, for the record, tore up four large garbage bags full of art I unearthed while cleaning out my studio. It was stuff I never bothered to photograph, because frankly, it was weak and had to go. As did those novels. I was in love with one of my characters, and friends who read the books liked them, but now I cringe at the idea of anybody else seeing them. So - bye bye, Kitty and Danny, off you go. I also felt like that about Abraham, the bald eagle I posted in February. My fiancé is a painter as well, and he often comments on how quickly I work. His paintings can take ages to finish but we’re still each other’s critique partner regardless of our different processes. So when I decided to rework Abraham, he was all for it. That’s the newest version above. He’s better, no? Finally, I’ve noticed a drop in my internet numbers. Website hits are down, likes on Instagram are too, and last week’s Substack reactions to Persephone were surprisingly low. I’m not taking this personally, I know it’s because shit has gotten too real. Hey, I just gave my phone 53 gigabytes of storage space and cut what’s saved on my Google Drive in half. I grew up military, I lived in Germany during the Berlin Wall crisis, it was terrifying. When my father came home and burned documents after memorizing them during the Bay of Pigs, our tornado cellar became an atomic bomb shelter. Later, I lived less than a mile from the World Trade Center. 9/11 was very personal to me. I get it. This is PTSD territory. If you think you are over-reacting, you are not. Be kind to yourself. Stay in the moment. Onwards.