(Sound of a coffee mug being set down too hard on a desk, a sigh, the creak of a chair)

Okay. Okay. Look at it.

No, really. Get up from whatever screen you’re mainlining this on and look out the window. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

See it? That’s not a colour. That’s the absence of colour. That’s the sky’s resignation. It’s January 20-something, and the holiday lights are a sad, tangled memory in a trash bag. The sparkle is gone, and what’s left is… this. A flat, dimensionless grey that seems to stretch from here to the edge of your motivation. It’s not a weather pattern; it’s a metaphysical condition. It’s the universe saying, “The fun is over. The bill is due.”

And you feel it, right? In your bones. It’s in the damp chill that seeps through the window frame, the way your joints creak a little louder in the morning. It’s the backdrop against which we’re all now reading the news, which, if you dare to glance at it, feels like it’s being written by a deranged scriptwriter who’s given up on coherence and is just throwing cultural dynamite at the wall to see what explodes. Wars, conspiracies, algorithms selling our last private thought, politicians performing a kind of rhetorical street theater that would be funny if it wasn’t so terrifying. It’s chaos. It’s noise. It’s a three-ring circus where all the rings are on fire and the clowns are armed.

And you sit here, in this grey January capsule, with that psychic static screaming in your head, and a deeper, quieter hum underneath it all. The hum of the two big ones. The twin pillars of adulthood, of existence. The only two things in this maelstrom of nonsense that are truly, mathematically certain.

Death. And taxes.

Let’s sit with that for a second. I mean, really sit with it. In the middle of all this curated, frantic, ephemeral madness, the tweets that vanish, the trends that die in a week, the outrage of the hour, these two things are the bedrock. The ultimate “FYI: You Are Not Getting Out Of This” from the cosmos. Your heart will stop. And a form will be due.

And the truly hilarious, tragic, human part? Our entire species is basically a Rube Goldberg machine of denial built specifically to evade both.

Think about it. We don’t like to talk about death. We really don’t like to talk about taxes. We’ve built entire industries, philosophies, and self-help empires to distract us from the former. We’ve got offshore accounts, loopholes, and desperate, creative deductions to sidestep the latter. We seek immortality through art, through children, through posting a really great photo of our lunch. We seek a financial loophole through a get-rich-quick scheme, a crypto rabbit hole, or the desperate prayer that this year, the finances and taxes will somehow… fix itself.

We’re all just running through the grey January mist, trying to dodge the one finish line we all share, and hoping to hang onto a few more bucks before we cross it.

It’s absurd. It’s the core joke. The world is burning, the sky is the color of lint, and here I am, Googling “meditation apps for existential dread” while simultaneously wondering if I can write off my podcast microphone as a “home office therapeutic device.”

So that’s where we are. Staring out at the grey. Listening to the crazy. And quietly, in the back of our minds, doing the calculus. The math of mortality, and the math of the mortgage. Trying, always trying, to find a side door out of the room that has no exits.

Maybe the point isn’t to find the door. Maybe the point is just to acknowledge the room. To say, “Yep. This is the room. It’s grey, it’s cold, and the bill is on the dresser.”

At least we’re in it together.

Maybe I’ll make another pot of coffee.