Bob Barfed on Easter Sunday
American Empire burns while I clean up a loved dog's puke.
It was Easter Sunday and the president of the United States posted a nuclear-adjacent threat to Iran at 5am. Power Plant Day, he called it. Praise be to Allah. The Strait of Hormuz or hell descends upon you. Forty million people saw it before breakfast.
My wife and I were on the floor. Cleaning dog puke. It was stinky and wet.
Bob had eaten something he shouldn’t have — he always does, pit bulls are optimists about what constitutes food — and Maple and I were down there with paper towels doing what you do. The sun was coming through the window at the angle it comes through on April mornings in the Pacific Northwest. Bob looked sorry. He always looks sorry afterward. It doesn’t stop him.
This is what empire collapse actually looks like from the inside. Not the headline. The floor. The puke cleaning. My memories of brain matter and the randomness of death in war. If the elites have their way, you will have the death bits sanitized. Makes it easier to get ignorant people’s anger-fueled votes.
We have been trained to experience history at the scale of the catastrophic. The strike package. The body count. The market close. The Truth Social post at 5am threatening to bomb civilian infrastructure on the holiest morning of the Christian calendar while signing it Praise be to Allah — as if the man has ever prayed to anything but himself. We watch the scale of it and feel the helplessness that scale produces, which is the point, which has always been the point. If the disaster is large enough you don’t look at your own floor. You don’t look at the person next to you. You don’t tend to the immediate because the immediate seems irrelevant against the magnitude of what’s burning. You get numb, but you also get angry beyond the point of return.
The floor is where you actually live. The floor is where history happens to bodies.
Every empire that has ever collapsed has left behind people on their floors. The archaeological record is full of them — the hearths still warm, the bowls still set, the ordinary objects of ordinary life preserved in the ash of whatever came down from outside. The literature of collapse is always this: Chekhov’s characters playing cards while Russia dissolves around them. Didion watching California burn while making dinner. Orwell in a Barcelona trench writing about the smell of the trenches. The catastrophic and the mundane occupying the same moment, neither canceling the other out.
You don’t get to choose which scale you live at. You live at both simultaneously or you don’t live at all.
Bob recovered. He always does. Maple and I finished with the floor. The coffee was ready. The Strait of Hormuz was still closed. The Kirk essay had 148 views. Trump’s Power Plant Day threat was still live on Truth Social, 4,000 likes, the machine grinding forward without any apparent awareness that somewhere in the Pacific Northwest two people had just spent Easter morning on their knees next to a pit bull who looked sorry.
Cui bono. Not us. Not Bob. Not anyone who has to breathe the air or drink the water or tend to the people and animals they love while the people with nuclear codes perform dominance for an audience of themselves.
The empire burns. The floor needs cleaning. Both things are true every morning.
That’s not defeat. That’s the only honest account of what it means to be alive inside this.
Bob is fine. He waits for me every time I go, whispering, “Bob, I love you. I’ll always come home as quick as I can.
