This is the ninth installment of The Last Normal Day series.

Part 1 by Samantha Irby
Part 2 by Zaron Burnett III
Part 3 by Luke O'Neil
Parts 4-5 by Chris A. Smith and Shane Ferro
Part 6 by Kim Kelly
Part 7 by Julieanne Smolinski
Part 8 by Josh Gondelman
Part 9 by Jeb Lund
Part 10 by Joe Keohane
Part 11 by Linda Tirado
Part 12 by Aisha Tyler

Please be sure to also read Jeb Lund’s previous Hell World piece from earlier this summer. It was “one of the good ones.”

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It's Been Today Forever

by Jeb Lund

Retrospectively, I wonder if I would have spent five years begging for the chance to cry if I'd have known that what finally triggered it would be a quesadilla.

It's not that I can't physically cry. I do it all the time. I cry at TV, movies, the radio, books, magazines. After I became a dad, all composure at the sight of hurt or unhappy children vanished forever. My sadness remains on a hair trigger, even for marketing. I managed to mourn throwing away a disintegrating refrigerator magnet with an adorable cartoon recycling can on it. Can-Do was cheery and kind-looking, and all he wanted was to remind me to save the planet while he held my collection of improbably ruthless fortune cookie fortunes to the fridge (Summer, 2003, in my twenties: "Maybe you can live on the moon in the next century!"), and here I was throwing him away—his welcoming wave and faded and cracked smile falling away from me into the dark of a garbage can as I whispered a Judas goodbye.

After 9/11, I spent months periodically getting catastrophically ripshit on Milwaukee's Best, listening to a CD anthology of great historic speeches, lying on my back on the floor of my apartment, letting tears stream from my eyes, past my temples, into my hair. I didn't even live in New York or lose anyone in the attacks. For some reason, I wanted to crawl into the disparity between the great aspirations that drove the 20th Century and the mush-brained verbally incontinent junior warlord in the Oval Office. I needed to affirm, with brutal contrast, the lethally incurious and assured world I was living in.

No, the problem is that I can cry for stupid shit—I'll weep like Niobe for every low-rent drama that mashes the fathers-and-sons button—but not my stupid shit. Weeping is reserved for something vague and external, more conceptual than real—not for anything trivial like personal expiation. If I need a cry, I can go fuck myself, but if I want to make watching The Right Stuff intimately uncomfortable in mixed company, or even if I don't, someone up in the brainworks cranks the faucet all the way open and rips off the knob for the last five minutes, when Ridley spies Yeagar walking out of a plume of black smoke, and Gordo Cooper becomes the greatest pilot that anyone has ever seen.

So it went for a whole election and nearly one full presidential term. First, watching the person I married disappear into postpartum depression for years—making hash marks like a prisoner to count weeks between conversations, counting on a hand the number of wakeful hours per weekend day—then watching only parts of them return years later. Then, covering the worst election of my lifetime, having the president's allegedly coked-up pants-pissing firstborn follow me on Twitter and start retweeting me for tap-dancing on Ted Cruz's electoral grave in Rolling Stone, dragging with him 8,000 bots and counting, so that every new piece I wrote critical of Trump was greeted by what one could only hope were automated DMs that threatened me along a series of clumsy but effective conditional statements pairing my presumed identitarian flaw (Blackness by association, Jewishness, homosexuality) with whatever historic form of murder most intimidatingly applied to it.