March 5, 2026 
“Meanwhile TN wants to murder women for having abortions, we’re building concentration camps for undocumented persons, and Epstein’s best pal is president.”
I apologize, Dear Reader, for the untimeliness of this column. I got sick—I am still sick. I write this through a fog of illness that pinches my head and makes my eyes water continually. My forehead is sweaty, my hands are hot and moist on the keyboard. One nostril is plugged and my throat feels as if it has sand in it. I am happy asleep, but to write I must be awake.
“These are the strangest times.”
I am quoting from a comment received on the Facebook post of my column of last week. I do not like Facebook much at all and only go there occasionally to read comments left on the posts of my columns. I do not know what I expect to find—perhaps recognition of my genius?
But what I find is a reminder of what I am thinking about all the time continually, so that what was supposed to be the fun and frivolous reflections of an owner during the Winter Equestrian Festival in Wellington, Florida, becomes instead the reflections of someone dancing on the deck of the Titanic as it barrels towards the iceberg.
Or have we already hit the iceberg?
On Saturday night last, we had the annual WEF Nations Cup, which included the nations of Australia, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Ireland, Israel, Mexico and the USA. It was also the day a war started in Iran, quickly metastasizing throughout the region.
It’s not something we talk about.
Usually, in the USA, a war is begun with some sort of congressional debate or at least a coordinated propaganda campaign that assures the public of the war’s necessity and further guarantees a quick and lasting victory. This is because per our constitution, war must be declared by Congress, whose members represent and enact legislation and do other things like declare war for the benefit of their constituents.
We don’t really have this system anymore. We have a system where someone decides and everyone else falls into line. Also a system where analysis is as deep as an insta reel and if you know how that works, you got eight seconds until someone is doomscrolling to the next reel.
I write about horses and the sport of show jumping. My most popular columns are ones in which I get drunk and talk a lot of sh-t and carouse around. The only thing deep about them is my knowledge of vocabulary. I think I know a lot of words but I found out just yesterday that I did not know the word philtrum.
Do you know this word? We all have one and I feel a bit ashamed I’ve had one all these years without knowing its name. The philtrum is the vertical groove between the base of your nose and the border of your upper lip. It’s also referred to as the “infranasal depression,” which I like because it includes the word depression and I’m relating to that right about now.
But I do miss the days when people like me, or like you, or like someone you know, suffered from melancholia rather than depression. It sounds more romantic.
I don’t think there are any romantic names for the philtrum, which is also called the “medial cleft.” I kinda like cleft because I feel like I could describe something dirty with that word, but not romantic. On the romantic side, I was testing out “infranasal melancholia,” but that doesn’t work at all.
But none of this has to do with horses! Let’s get back to that.
On Saturday last week I invited a whole Canadian crew to VIP and joined their party. Only a few days earlier, I had attended the Equestrian Canada fundraiser, where I arrived bedecked in red and white (as was everyone) with two Canadian flags sticking out of a headband on top of my head.
I bid on and won a bespoke oil painting of a favorite pet, an absolutely magnificent prize I thought, for doing the good deed of a donation.
I love the Canadian team because I’m Minnesotan and that makes me practically Canadian. They also have a small program and a tight-knit group of riders and this group of riders is what I call “legit,” meaning professional, hardworking, and highly talented.
When I think of myself, I think of myself as American. I’m American in the way that other people from other countries make fun of, like I’ve memorized the Gettysburg address and I really believed in like our democratic experiment and I really used to think a lot about nuclear war and its prevention and so I really believed in the post-WWII world order.
I remember when I first learned about nuclear war. I was, I think, five years old and the movie Hair was on TV and my babysitter explained that we have bombs that can blow up the whole world and I had never heard anything so terrifying. A profound horror entered my five-year-old soul and I did not spend too much time thinking about anything else for a year.
Well, I’m an adult now so things are different.
But what is the same is we don’t talk about these things. War begins and one goes to the Nations Cup and one cheers for their country and Team USA wins for the second year in a row. Canada makes the podium in the bronze-medal position, much to the delight of my tablemates, while Ireland takes silver.
The important thing is the markets and that people make money. It is easier to make money with war and mass surveillance and things like private prisons and detention centers or building AI data centers than it is to make money off of things like education or art or healthcare or conservation of the environment. I guess. If something makes money or if someone has money or a way of making money that is the most important thing because money makes the world go ’round.
If someone says, “I’m not really sure I want a world with AI,” that is a stupid thing to say because not investing in AI or autonomous weaponry or mass surveillance of a population or private detention centers where people are warehoused might cause the economy to crash so we must do these things.
And someone says, “Without money, there would be no sport.” Sometimes they say that about music too, but I know someone will always sing or strum a guitar in the gutter because a human soul sings. And someone will always love a horse and ride a horse with or without sport because a human soul finds its partner very naturally and you can’t make that go away.
And I write all of this to say to my commenter that, yes, all of this is continually on my mind and yes, I don’t know who I am anymore, but no—it is not the words that people want to hear from me. I write about horses and make stupid jokes.
Once I read that Anderson Cooper became a war correspondent after his brother committed suicide by jumping off a 14th floor balcony in New York in front of his mother while she pleaded with him not to do it. And then he could not reconcile the chaos and grief in his mind with the calm and ordered outside world, so he had to find the places where the chaos and grief outside matched the chaos and grief inside.
And if I tried to do that, Dear Reader, where would I go?
