Jot down the first thing that comes to your mind.

Dangerous thing to ask.

Genuinely, specifically, structurally dangerous — the kind of question that sounds innocent in the asking and detonates on impact, because the first thing that comes to mind in response to what are you thinking is not polite, not organized, not remotely fit for public inspection in any jurisdiction that has standards about these things.

It comes staggering out of the mental brush with twigs in its hair and a knife in its teeth and the specific wild-eyed energy of something that has been living back there in the undergrowth for too long and has opinions about everything and the social awareness of something that has been in the undergrowth for too long.

Yelling something about unfinished books and bad coffee and the general accelerating collapse of civilized thought and who exactly is responsible for it and why the answer to that last question is — with a comprehensiveness that should alarm everyone — everyone.

The first thought is usually not a thought at all.

It’s a flare.

A bright and ugly emergency signal fired from somewhere deep in the engine room where the real machinery lives and has never once been concerned with whether what it produces is going to behave itself on the page or in polite company or before a congressional subcommittee investigating the current state of the American mind.

Which would be a short hearing.

The American mind, as currently configured, is not a subject that rewards extended examination.

And that’s the fundamental problem with writing prompts like this one.

They proceed from the assumption that the mind is a calm and orderly little office. Receptionist at the front. Labeled filing cabinets arranged in a system that makes sense to outside observers. The appropriate documentation available upon request. Everything categorized and retrievable and ready for professional presentation at a moment’s notice.

Mine is more like a backwoods radio station during a Category Four thunderstorm.

Static everywhere — the ambient static of a civilization running fourteen simultaneous crises and calling the management of those crises governance. Voices overlapping in the specific cacophony of an era that has confused the volume of the argument with the quality of the argument and has been running that confusion at full operational capacity for longer than the nervous system was designed to sustain.

Old memories breaking into the broadcast without filing the appropriate interruption paperwork — a half-built sentence about photography colliding mid-transmission with some ancient family ghost while the news screams from a ditch somewhere nearby about the latest emergency that the people responsible for the previous emergency have decided to manage by generating a new one.

Democrats performing their elaborate theater of principled concern while doing approximately nothing that principled concern would actually require.

Republicans performing their elaborate theater of common-sense populism while picking the pockets of the common people whose sense they are ostensibly representing.

The media performing its elaborate theater of objective coverage while being owned, operated, and editorially directed by the same financial interests that own and operate and editorially direct everything else worth owning in the current arrangement.

Everyone selling something.

Everyone outraged about something.

Everyone absolutely certain that the specific variety of idiocy they are promoting is the necessary corrective to the specific variety of idiocy being promoted by the other side —

As if there are only two sides.

As if the whole corrupt and thundering enterprise hasn’t been running on the two-sided illusion for decades specifically because a two-sided illusion is the most efficient mechanism ever developed for ensuring that the people with the actual power never have to appear on either one.

So what comes first?

Past the static and the overlapping broadcasts and the political theater running simultaneously on every available frequency?

Probably this:

Get outside.

That’s the thought.

Not profound. Not the kind of insight that gets framed and hung in the offices of people who want visitors to believe they think deeply about things. Not pretty in any sense that the current content economy would find monetizable.

But honest.

Get outside before the walls start talking.

Get outside before the algorithm finishes mapping the specific contours of your despair and starts serving you the targeted content designed for someone in exactly your psychological condition — the ads engineered for the broken, the outrage calibrated for the exhausted, the political messaging focus-grouped for people who have run out of the energy required to notice they’re being played.

Get the camera.

Find the trail.

Any trail. The kind that doesn’t have adequate cell service. The kind that requires boots rather than footwear optimized for the indoor environments where most of contemporary life is conducted. The kind where the first mile requires enough physical attention that the noise starts losing its grip and the second mile is quiet enough to remember that quiet is a thing that exists and was, at some point before the current arrangement, considered the baseline rather than the luxury.

Chase the light.

Not the screen light — the other kind. The kind that moves. The kind that exists for eleven minutes in the early morning before the world wakes up and starts generating the day’s first batch of problems that will require your engagement with the system that created them. The kind that falls through old growth at an angle that no algorithm has successfully replicated because the algorithm has never been outside and doesn’t know what it’s missing and wouldn’t care if it did.

Let the mud and the trees and the cold air conduct the necessary scrubbing operation on the skull.

The modern world is too loud.

Too stupid in the specific way that things are stupid when they have been optimized for performance rather than function — when the appearance of intelligence has been substituted for intelligence itself so consistently and for so long that the distinction has become academic.

Too convinced of its own importance in the manner of an enterprise that has confused the quantity of its output with the quality of its contribution — that has mistaken the volume of the noise it generates for evidence that the noise contains something worth hearing.

The Left convinced that its particular brand of performative virtue is the thing standing between civilization and the abyss — while conducting its performative virtue from platforms owned by the same billionaires it claims to oppose, using the same financial infrastructure it claims to find problematic, living lives that would require significant modification if the values being performed were actually being practiced.

The Right convinced that its particular brand of performative toughness is the thing standing between real America and the forces of effete coastal unreality — while being led, funded, and directed by people whose relationship with real America is limited to the focus groups they’ve commissioned to find out what real America wants to hear.

Both of them absolutely certain.

Both of them absolutely wrong.

Both of them generating noise at industrial scale and calling the generation of noise engagement with the important questions of the age.

Everybody yelling.

Everybody selling.

Everybody demanding a reaction — a click, a share, a comment, a donation, a signature, a subscription, a momentary allocation of the attention that is the only genuinely nonrenewable resource any of us possess — and then using whatever reaction they extract to generate the next demand for reaction in a cycle that has no natural terminus because the cycle is the product and the product is the cycle.

But the woods don’t care.

This is the thing.

The woods do not have a position on the current political situation. The woods have not been briefed on the latest polling. The woods do not receive push notifications about developing situations and do not experience the neurological response to push notifications that the people who design push notifications have spent considerable resources engineering into the population of people who carry push notification devices into the woods and cannot leave them in the truck.

The woods just stand there.

Ancient. Indifferent. Conducting their slow green business with the patient authority of something that has watched civilizations come and go and has never once been asked to take sides and has never once volunteered to.

Letting the moss do its work at the speed of moss — which is not a speed that can be tracked on any timeline that the current news cycle would consider relevant but which has been producing results continuously since long before the current news cycle was conceived.

The old growth doesn’t care who won the last election.

The river running cold out of the Cascades has not been briefed on the latest GDP numbers.

The wildflowers erupting out of the mud every April in the North Umpqua country are not performing the eruption for an audience and are not monitoring the engagement metrics and are not adjusting the next eruption based on what the current eruption’s numbers suggest about the preferences of the demographic they’re trying to reach.

They just bloom.

Because that’s what they do.

Because the ground and the rain and the specific chemistry of what the winter converted into what spring requires has produced the conditions that make blooming the natural next step.

No strategy. No messaging. No carefully focus-grouped color palette designed to appeal to the target audience while remaining sufficiently ambiguous to avoid alienating the secondary demographic.

Just — flowers.

Coming out of the mud.

Because it’s time.

That’s the first thought.

Past the static. Past the political theater running on all frequencies simultaneously. Past the noise machine and the outrage engine and the comprehensive bipartisan stupidity of an era that has somehow managed to make every single available option worse while arguing continuously about which option is better.

Past all of it —

Get outside.

Escape the noise.

Find the road — the one without adequate signage, without cell coverage, without the infrastructure that keeps you connected to the system that is making you need to escape.

Take the shot.

The one that’s available for eleven minutes before the light changes.

The one that required getting up before the algorithm had the opportunity to suggest you check your notifications first.

Write it down before the whole strange and beautiful and politically unaffiliated thing disappears back into the undergrowth.

Before the walls start talking again.

Before the broadcast resumes.

Before the Democrats and the Republicans and the media that serves them both while pretending to serve you resume their regularly scheduled programming about the most important moment in human history —

Which is what they call every moment.

Which is what makes none of the moments important.

Which is the whole trick.

The woods are still there.

Past the static.

Past the noise.

Past the elaborate bipartisan production currently running on every available screen.

The moss is still doing its slow green work on the old timber.

The river is still running cold and clear and completely indifferent to your engagement metrics out of the Cascades.

The light is still available for eleven minutes in the early morning before the world wakes up and starts generating the day’s first batch of manufactured emergencies.

Get outside.

Now.

Before they find another way to make it complicated.