It’s the third of four November Wednesdays here in the year 2020. In Minneapolis, we already have the tentative beginnings of the snow dance. I believe we’ve had to shovel twice so far—nothing too bad—with a few other days of flurries. It’s not yet consistently cold enough that this particular snow will remain with us until March. Thus the dance. Can I still park in the back of the driveway? Will the ice on the walk be melted by the sun or does it need to be attacked more directly? Will we have more or less snow on the ground by the end of the day? For now it’s still a question. By late December, the answer is never less.

Last month’s lecture being the first of the new Machine, I was compelled to make some decisions, several of which I want to revisit. In my current phase—in which the lecture is written but not yet recorded—I’m going back over the decisions I made last month about how the Machine manifests in the visual realm and deciding what is essential to the Wave Machine and what decisions applied only to that lecture. Decisions made by intuition get interrogated—was I responding to some unworded insight or did I just have an image I liked and wanted to get into the lecture? Did the transitions I chose embody the way the Machine flows or did I just figure out a new technique I wanted to play with? None of the answers are wrong, but only some decisions are a crossing of the Rubicon. Now’s the time when I make those choices.

I hadn’t been thinking this at all when I started to write this post, but I think there’s a lot of that kind of interrogating going on generally. Probably not the president, because I don’t believe he’s been graced with the capacity for forethought, but certainly many who support him have to be wondering just where the Rubicon lies. How far can claims of a fraudulent election be pushed before you’ve committed yourself to rebellion? Because only the most shiftless of cowards would lay down and accept that Satanic pederasts are now going to run the country. So just how much can you talk about election fraud and the perfidy of the democrats before you’re no longer able to just use it as a talking point to rile the base and are forced to either admit your lie or take up arms, with no middle ground left to you? Similar kinds of questions occupy the minds of those who oppose them. Or switch over to the virus—just how rampant do infections have to get to justify not seeing your family for Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah? Did we cross that Rubicon without realizing it, or do we still have some time left before we ultimately have to make the choice? Perhaps in a world with some leadership every person wouldn’t have to make these exhausting decisions for themselves, but that’s not the world we live in. So we have to decide, or pretend we don’t have to, which I suspect drains just about as much energy, every day, many times a day, for ourselves.

I’m not one to go out of my way searching for happy endings, and I certainly won’t here. This is going to be a difficult holiday season with a lot of hard decisions for a lot of people. Good luck finding your Rubicons and deciding whether to cross them. Maybe there’s comfort to take in the fact that everyone else is doing the same thing.