The Endless Loop of Noise and Blood

A eulogy turned campaign rally, a loyalty test disguised as mourning.

There was the boy, and there was the partner, and there was the family that claimed not to see what was already standing in front of them like a tower of glass, transparent yet blinding, and there was the chorus of voices that rose after, a roundelay of grief and suspicion and rallying cries dressed as eulogies, each voice swelling into the next until you could not tell where mourning stopped and propaganda began, because the microphone did not go quiet, the broadcast never ended, the stream kept spilling its static into the room where we all sit now, eyes wide and throats dry.

And there is me—the two of us, still doing the dishes, still feeding and loving the pets, still dragging the garbage cans to the curb like a ritual against collapse, the never-ending laundry baskets rising like waves, the ache in the arm from COVID and flu shots, the Halloween decorations brought from storage to dress up a home I cannot stop wondering might be our last — last here, last together, last in this America that keeps reeling — the bright pumpkins glowing like borrowed joy.

“We are not stopping our lives; we are treasuring them more fiercely, defiantly, against the backdrop of collapse.”

And there is the sweetness and sorrow of the final Downton Abbey movie, that carefully poured cup of nostalgia, one more piece of good and tender life given and then taken away. And there is The Sound of Music back on the big screen — sixty years since its premiere in March 1965 — the hills still alive with song, the same opening notes spilling over the mountains, reminding me that time is fluid, treacherous, fleeting, a song we think we know until it is gone. And there is the hint of fall in the Las Vegas air, almost imperceptible, a cooler breeze slipping through the desert heat like a ghost, whispering change while everything else insists on sameness.

And there is Clairee, the new Snowshoe kitten, a whirlwind tornado in fur, spinning through every room like she owns the place, announcing that life doesn’t pause, it interrupts. And there is the promise of a baby Leonberger puppy soon, the thought of giant paws and clumsy love filling our days again. We are not stopping our lives; we are treasuring them more fiercely, defiantly, against the backdrop of collapse.

And there is the friend who tells me she is reeling, who tells me that exclusion has layers, that the language of Discord is incantation, that love collapses under ideology, and I hear her because she is right, and yet I hear also the silence of those who will not speak because they are too busy tightening their collars against the sound of collapse, and I wonder which silence is worse, the imposed one or the chosen one.

And there is the man who says we must build something strong and stable, as if the ground is not already buckling under us, as if gravity itself has not abandoned its contract, and I want to answer him gently but cannot because the truth is that the pendulum does not swing on its own, it rusts in place until someone with bloodied hands yanks it back.

And there is the unshakable voice thanking Bernie Sanders for a bill that may never see light, a bill that will wither in the chamber like so many before it, because the men with guns and the lobbyists with their chests of gold have made sure hope is always a whisper shouted into a void.

And there is the woman who wishes she could close her eyes, cover her ears, retreat from the noise, and I want that too, I want the garden and the coffee cup and the cat at the window, but instead I am here parsing code, parsing chants, parsing the language of boys who think they are avatars until they discover blood is not a pixel and cannot be respawned.

And there is the cousin in the headset, the Buffalo shooting, the subliminal voices that are not so subliminal after all, the test balloons of hate that are always floated “just in passing,” proposals so grotesque they should collapse under their own weight but instead gather air like fire gathers wind, until laughter itself becomes complicity.

“Movements do not die, they molt — shed one skin and grow another uglier still.”

And there is the refrain that MAGA is choking itself, and I want to believe it but know better, because movements do not die, they molt, they shed one skin and grow another uglier still, and when we mistake suffocation for death we forget cruelty always learns to breathe again.

And there is the roundup, the buffet of collapse, where Kirk’s murder sits between HBCU bomb threats and Russian drones and Senate chicanery, and the only constant is the merch link at the bottom, democracy with a price tag, horror as coupon code, and I wonder if the packaging is not itself the narcotic that keeps us from screaming.

And there is JD Vance at the mic, fumbling his words, inventing his statutes, swelling with grief only to pivot into boasts, a eulogy turned campaign rally, a loyalty test disguised as mourning, a call not for unity but for surveillance, for neighbors to rat neighbors, for employers to judge employees, and I hear in his stumbles the laughter of boys on Discord, code and chant and incantation all looping back to the same end: silence for some, amplification for others, violence for all.

“A eulogy turned campaign rally, a loyalty test disguised as mourning.”

And there is me, there is you, there is Crystal beside me, there is the circle of readers whose words arrive like lanterns, like offerings, like warnings, each voice carrying its own tone — some afraid, some naïve, some profoundly kind, some hardened — and all of them spinning together into this vast cacophony that is America right now, not a pendulum, not a balance, but a wheel that refuses to stop, spinning, spinning, until even grief becomes part of the entertainment cycle.

And if there is a question left to ask, it is only this: how much longer can we watch the loop without becoming part of it ourselves, our voices drowned, our faces pixelated, our fear turned into their fuel. And even though the world may be tittering, breaking itself into pieces, it is still spinning at the same speed, and the sun rose this morning in a glory of reds that gives any color man has created a smug sniff.

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Thank you for staying with me through this. I know it’s heavy — heavier than what anyone wants to carry on an ordinary day of laundry and errands and feeding the cats — but this is where we are. If this piece shook you, unsettled you, or gave you words you didn’t have, I ask you to pass it on. Share it, talk about it, argue with it.

The loop is relentless, but silence only feeds it. Our voices — fragile, cracked, insistent — are still the only break in the static. —Gloria

SHE WHO STIRS THE STORM is read across 50 US states and 83 countries