Today’s advertiser is The Daily Upside. Although Beehiiv rules forbid me from asking or encouraging you to click the ad, if you do so, of your own free will and according to your own moral principles, each click will earn me $1.31.

Sometime early in the afternoon, I decided I had had enough. It was during a lull in the workday. The winter sun was shining directly through my bedroom window, making it impossible to sit at my desk and type words and click on things. I couldn’t see. It was hot and stuffy. And then I looked to my left, at the little loveseat that has sat in the corner of the room since before the pandemic, and I knew I couldn’t take it anymore.

I got up, and moved a bunch of plastic bags and disintegrating cardboard boxes away from the loveseat. There was a big old IKEA drawer underneath it; I pulled it out and moved it across the room. Then I took hold of the loveseat and dragged it forward a bit. I rotated it 90 degrees and pushed it back. Where once it had faced south, its back against the wall, now it faced west, a window behind it. This, you will no doubt agree, even though you’ve never seen my bedroom, is infinitely better. There’s more room to stretch out your legs. There’s better light if I want to sit there reading. It just looks cleaner overall. I made the right move.

More after the ad…

Perhaps you’re like me. Perhaps these days, for who knows what kind of reason, you feel like you don’t have much power over your world. Perhaps you spend your waking hours feeling the frustration build in your chest with each new ping on your phone. Maybe you are even angry all the time. I know I am.

And sometimes when I feel like I’m going to explode, or implode, or just somehow plode in every direction and dimension at once, I get up off my ass and fix something small. Last week I tightened some screws on the plate that holds our front doorknob together. A week before that I sharpened my favorite knife. Tomorrow, if I have time and the rage hits me right, I might match up the plastic takeout containers with their tops, and discard any extras. Or I could dig out the special miniature tool that fits the miniature bolt that should keep our bathroom’s toilet paper holder — now annoyingly crooked — perfectly level.

I’m not particularly handy. I’m going to stay away from the pipes under the kitchen sink. Last year I assembled a flat-pack dresser and a flat-pack bunk bed, so I’m not going to undertake anything that ambitious before this decade is over. When it comes time to replace the crummy light fixture hanging over my bed with a nice ceiling fan unit, I will hire a professional.

But in the meantime, I will try to take care of the little things. I’ll find a box for all of our old and new cameras. I’ll replace the lamp next to my bed, just as I replaced the one that sits on my desk. I’ll collect the safety pins and SD cards and power banks and outdated maps and put them somewhere. (Under the loveseat?) I’m not going to clean the whole apartment — that’s daunting, paralyzing. I’d need days. But I’ll dust off the surfaces that are getting furry and apply a Clorox wipe to that spot under the bathroom sink that’s starting to look blotchy with mold and condensation.

I’m not trying to bring order to a world gone insane, or to pretend I’m the lord of my own tiny domain. All I can do is to make things work a little better, a little smoother. I can improve a corner or two, and enjoy a fleeting moment of comfort. When the powers that be, both political and corporate, seem determined to make things work worse in every way imaginable, even my scant ohms count as surreptitious resistance. As our Titanic civilization sinks literally into the seas, I will adjust at least one deck chair, possibly two. As we now know, they sorely needed rearranging.

When I make my minor tweaks, I often think of Sisyphus, and imagine him at the foot of Mount Tartarus, facing another day in an eternity of days with his boulder and his pointless mission. Up he will go, he knows, and back down he will come, but wait! There are problematic pebbles in his path to be brushed away, and what will the Olympians care if he spends ten more minutes shaving down the callouses on his palms, and the breeze from the land of the living has brought down the faint echoes of flutes and drums. The mandate of his endeavor remains, its absurd challenge defining his existence as unwaveringly as it defines ours, but, well, not yet. The space around him is neither a prison cell nor a coffin, and so he remains free to make it his own, one pebble at a time. 🪨🪨🪨