Jerry’s Marginalia — “Treading Water”
Good lord.
I swim in a sea of bullshit, lies, and chaos — and the part that still surprises people is not that the water is dirty.
It’s that I don’t drown.
Systems lie. Interfaces smile while picking pockets. Numbers rearrange themselves the moment you stop staring.
None of this is new.
What is new, apparently, is expecting the person inside the storm to apologize for noticing the weather.
I don’t thrash. I don’t panic. I don’t pretend the tide isn’t real.
I keep my head above water by naming the current, clocking the undertow, and refusing to let exhaustion turn into consent.
This isn’t heroism. It’s endurance.
And the fact that surviving this much nonsense now counts as a skill says more about the sea than the swimmer.
— Jerry