You ever just… feel like you're losing your mind? Not even in a dramatic way, just like, the wires in your head are getting crossed and you can’t tell what’s up anymore. This is stupid but it's been eating at me. It’s about the high school basketball team. Our town is… well, it’s not doing great. Everyone knows it. The mill closed, then the big box store. People are leaving, houses are empty. The only thing, and I mean the ONLY thing anyone can talk about that isn’t absolutely depressing is this goddamn basketball team. They're actually good this year. Really good. State championship good. And you know how much that means here. It’s like a collective psychological anchor for everyone. Something to cling to when everything else is just… crumbling. So the star player, a real phenom, total lock for a D1 scholarship, got caught doing something he shouldn’t have. Nothing major, not like, criminal. Just a clear violation of team rules. The kind of thing that, in any other year, would mean suspension, maybe even getting benched for a game or two. But the coach… he just looked the other way. Pretended he didn't see it. He knows. Everyone knows he knows. And nobody said a word. Not a single parent, not the principal, not even the kid’s own parents. Because if that kid gets suspended, if we lose him, we don’t win state. And if we don't win state, the town loses its last shred of hope. Its last reason to pretend things are okay. And I get it. I DO get it. My kid looks up to that team, to that player. It’s the one thing that makes him light up. And I’m exhausted. Beyond exhausted. Constantly managing, constantly making sure everyone else is fed, clothed, relatively stable. I don’t have the bandwidth for more despair. But this feeling… it's like a cognitive dissonance that's just grating on me. You're supposed to have integrity, right? Rules are rules. But then you see the bigger picture, the sheer, crushing weight of communal desperation, and suddenly, those rules… they seem so flimsy. So conditional. Is it really okay to sacrifice a small piece of moral consistency for the greater good of collective morale? I can’t stop thinking about it. About how easy it was for everyone to just… ignore it. How quickly principles evaporate when the stakes are high enough. And I can’t decide if that makes me feel relieved, like, finally, some pragmatism, or utterly disgusted. It’s a complete dissolution of what I thought was right. And it just… sits there. Right in the middle of my brain, humming. And I'm just… so tired. So fucking tired of trying to figure out what's right when everything is always so… complicated.