In the fog and haze of awaking from sleep, my mind is unfocused, and for a few blissful seconds there are no thoughts of The Thing, the looming thing that elbows its way into my consciousness each morning now. While I awaken to warmth and quiet and lights that work, the people of Ukraine are living in hellish confusion and deprivation, their homes left behind or taken away from them, their families uprooted and facing the prospect of having to navigate life in unfamiliar places, if they’re lucky enough to have been taken in by someone in Poland or elsewhere.

It is always there now, a constant aggravation and ache, and I’m always wondering what will happen next, how far this is going to go, how much things are going to deteriorate, how much of the devious plotting and planning Putin will be able to implement. Such an investment in evil.

People of faith and people who are just at the end of their rope, whether faithful or not, might by now be imploring, “Come, Lord Jesus.” But what are the chances of that happening? We’re always waiting for deliverance. Always fucking waiting.

We can keep praying and hoping, but we best not hold our breath.

Real losses, real tragedy, vicious attacks on civilians and another nuclear power plant. And the world is standing by, watching, claiming unity but afraid to take any next step that looks too aggressive, for fear of what Putin would do next. Sanctions, shmanctions.

All the media attention to Russian efforts getting bogged down, the kindness of Ukrainians toward captured Russian troops, confusion and low morale among invading troops, running low on fuel and food—it’s all in the service of trying to keep world morale up, trying to hint at a glimmer of hope that the Russian effort is destined to stall, that Putin is getting more than he anticipated in the way of resistance.

But the reality is that Russia won’t fail. They’re claiming more territory every day, and in a ruthless, scorched earth manner. Ukraine will be in ruins, Russia will have achieved its objective, I guess, and then we will have to ask, “What next? Moldova?”

Where and how does this end? Are we at the beginning of a long slog, or is there something in the wings that will bring a cease fire? My money is on the former.

The interview with a young woman who had survived some harrowing moments somewhere near Kyiv was heartbreaking and touched on something I and probably many others have been feeling lately. Through her tears, she ended up saying something like “… blue sky, just look up and appreciate the blue sky…” It was riveting. It hit home. The news reporter was probably fighting the instinct to give her a hug.

The cruelty of this, the sheer inhumanity of it. Haven’t we had enough of this?

And another thing… everybody over here seems to be worried about us poor Americans and the price we’re paying at the pump. My word, if sanctions work and we’re cutting off cash flow by reducing demand for gas, then maybe we should consider this a piece of the sacrifice we can make. We need to have skin in this game, too, so if bearing the burden of high fuel costs can be a way to do that, then so be it. It’s truly the least we can do.

Think of all that Putin has stolen from the people—their homes, their livelihoods, their routines. Their loved ones. Irreversible, unrecoverable, ghastly losses of all that is familiar and at one time perhaps taken for granted. The feeling of being uprooted from home and never returning. And the fear, the constant, gut-wrenching fear.

Vladimir Putin is a monster. It would be a remarkable thing if Russian troops came to the same conclusion.

I’d rather be vaporized than linger in nuclear winter.

Backing up from that unsolicited slice of sunshine, I’d rather not be thinking in those terms at all. But it seems this is where we are now, thanks to Vladimir Putin and his willingness to go there. Whether or not we readily admit or acknowledge, we are currently living our days under the threat of nuclear catastrophe. The end of life as we’ve known it. And I don’t see how that’s hyperbole.

This must be a piece of what Putin was hinting at after the opening salvos when he talked about anyone who got in his way seeing things they’d never seen before, or somethng like that. We are dealing with a cornered rat now, a madman with a chip on his shoulder. One might be thinking that things are developing just as he planned.

We can only hope that there are cooler heads, humbled by and cognizant of the gravity of this moment, and willing to be heroic in the face of a command, should it ever come, to let the missiles fly. To say “no” to that.

In the meantime, I will count each day I awaken to relative peace and warmth and lights that still work as more of a blessing than usual.

This is where we are now. And Donald Trump thinks Putin’s moves have been “genius.”

Putin is really going to go rogue now. The US and its allies have decided to enforce sanctions against him and Lavrov personally, which apparently is another way of saying, “we’ve given up trying to talk to you.”

It’s gut wrenching to watch and hear about what’s happening in Ukraine. It hurts to think that everything familiar for the people there has been upended or destroyed. Now there will be thousands more refugees driven from their homes and into the cold, and for what? There is no good answer to that question, other than it is one little man’s nagging grievance and the remarkable fact that he can command an army to do his dirty work. Such pain and suffering, such cold calculation. I hope the resistance to this that we’re seeing from the Russians, Georgians,  Kazakhs, and others is real, and that it eventually helps tip the scales with a sentiment that cannot be ignored.

How can people like Putin keep coming along? He’s not a leader. He’s a devious, self-involved, twisted romantic pining for the way things used to be, decades ago. He has no heart for the people he leads. In fact, it seems if it was actually up to the people, he would have been gone a long time ago.

We in this country should be watching all this with great interest. Putin’s #1 ass-kissing fan wants to be POTUS again. This just can’t happen.

So the invasion has started. What now? Is Ukraine Putin’s Poland?

We should absolutely know better. Grown men motivated by such elemental things. Maybe they still have some growing to do. There have to be a couple screws loose.

So it turns out Putin is just the next guy with a burning grievance, an old grudge. Wonder what he has in store. It can’t be good. He’s had a lot of time to prepare. Is he just the latest megalomaniac with designs on world domination, or does he want a place at the table? Seems there are better ways of going about that.

And of course leaders in this country will counter with the typical American bravado– no appeasement, zero tolerance and all that. But this time they may be wise to take time to weigh their words and respect the threats Putin is making. Oceans can’t protect us anymore. The distance between us is really no distance at all. Putin can bring the world to its knees by cutting a few cables and hacking our internet lifelines. Or is he even threatening nuclear weapons?

The citizens of Ukraine are pawns now, fish in a barrel. Such horror, an actual living nightmare.

The media in this country better get their act together—try to keep calm instead of fanning the flames and creating panic. But they probably won’t. They’ll go quickly to worst case scenarios, tripping over each other in their desire to be the first ones to break the latest bad news.

Freedom, or any belief system, incurs a cost. What, exactly, is that cost? Can we agree on a number?

I know, I know… ultimately the price is paid in sacrifice and blood and lives cut tragically short, yada, yada, yada, all because we humans can’t trust each other, and we have a propensity for wanting to wield power and get our way.

Seers and sages and rightwing wackadoodles speak of the human cost as that which comes with the territory, a duty, as if we all must be willing to buy a lie and buy into whatever twisted vision someone might be selling. This doesn’t work for me. I wasn’t born into this world to be a discarded pawn in someone’s chess match, or to do the dirty work of some detached billionaire in a suit or a backwater ignoramus convinced that people of a certain political stripe eat babies.

Maybe we as a species will never turn the corner. Evolution is slow in rendering an abhorrence of war and its vile offensiveness, its monstrous waste of human life. We should be aghast at what is about to unfold in Ukraine. We should treat it as an assault on all of us.

So any way one looks at it, there will be a cost– either the cost of playing along, or the cost of saying enough is enough.

Here we go again. Where are we headed, as a nation and a world on the brink of war? Again.

It’s way beyond sad.

As we sat at a corner table in a little back room of a farmhouse restaurant, enjoying a fine breakfast, the news of Russia’s entry into Ukraine popped up on my phone. I couldn’t help wondering if such peace and joy, such a simple pleasure as enjoying breakfast on a quiet Tuesday morning, will once again feel like stolen time, spoiled by the knowledge of what else is going on in the world, somehow tainted by the cursed lust for power possessed by a pesty weasel of a man.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

We are hungry for heroes. I am, anyway. For as long as I can remember, mine has been Abraham Lincoln. The latest documentary currently running on the History Channel is just adding more fuel to that fire.

While no one is a true saint, Lincoln still exists, for me, in rarified air. He was the right person for the job during the years of the Civil War. His mental strength and acuity, the emotional roller coaster he rode, alongside the ability to keep everything in check and continue to find ways to act rationally and thoughtfully in the midst of personal loss and a monumental national crisis—it’s all astounding to me.

I suppose if one were to compare, FDR might give him a run for his money. But to me, Lincoln is the one who stands above all the others before and since. And not just because he was six feet four. He learned from his mistakes and, political expediency aside, came to know that “states’ rights” was a cliched excuse, a weak argument, and slavery was an abomination.

He also had a knack for zeroing in on the right words.

The possible summit between Biden and Putin doesn’t give me much hope. I have little faith in anyone out-maneuvering Putin or managing to hold his ground against the little big man.

There will likely be no walking away from such a meeting with any sense of accomplishment. It’s all for show, maybe a hedge against stock markets plummeting any further. One last Hail Mary before the shtf.

I get the impression that there is no talking to Putin. He’ll always be two steps ahead and not giving up much in the end. Besides, Biden to me has always been more bluster than substance. No match for the Kremlin guy. Still, I hold out hope that Putin can temper his own impulses enough to keep from plunging the region into chaos and bloodshed and grotesquely needless suffering.

Call off the troops, Vlad. Give peace a chance.