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# Grey
- URL: https://www.jamesreeves.co/grey/
- Published: 2024-11-06T13:05:00.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-15T03:48:20.000Z
- Description: Yesterday a man who smelled like gasoline attempted to enter the Capitol with a flare gun.
- Author: James A. Reeves
- Tags: Notebook

The sun goes down at 5:23pm, and the temperature is an unseasonable seventy degrees. The skies feel hungover, damp and grey, which matches my mood. Yesterday [a man who smelled like gasoline](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/man-arrested-when-trying-to-enter-u-s-capitol-with-a-torch-and-flare-gun-police-say?ref=jamesreeves.co) attempted to enter the Capitol with a flare gun. A few hours later, my country elected another man to do more or less the same. Again.

Materially, my life is the same as before. I trade encouraging nods with joggers as I run my morning laps around the pond. Strangers make room for each other at the supermarket. But my mind is stained with suspicion. Did *you* vote for him? Did *you* want this? This is the zone of horror: the inability to see the world as others do and vice versa.

I feel like a fool for allowing myself to hope for a few weeks, mainlining punditry from CNN and The New York Times and The Guardian, assuming we would choose consensus-driven reality over the poisonous feedback loops and silos of the internet, where the extreme left and right have driven each other into madness. But now I must accept that I’m the one who’s been living in a silo because the internet has won.