I don’t think it’s up for debate that we are in the midst of a collective mental breakdown. If there were any lingering doubt, the photos of Will Smith dancing at Oscar parties after he assaulted Chris Rock has removed it. Did Will’s publicist just walk off the job? Probably. I imagine she just sighed and bellied up to the bar. We are all very tired.

There’s a Kafka novel waiting to be written about our multiple paid subscriptions to media sites we can’t log into. Or websites asking if we are robots, when the websites are in fact the robots. Or those phone scammers, calling to lower your credit card debt, or to sell you a fake Medicare plan. Relentless. If they call to sell you “cheap drugs,” it’s sometimes fun to tell them you’re in the market for some hemlock.

Why can’t we stop these calls? Because no one is actually steering this ship, that’s why. Do you remember when you realized that maybe no one was in charge, and that adults weren’t really that capable after all? And yet when things go south, I still look around for an adult. Did I mention that I’m 51?

Everything is upside down and nothing makes sense. A few weeks ago, I opened my front door and found three tiny takeout bags from McDonald’s, with a single cookie in each bag, delivered by DoorDash. Some of the bags had salt packets added, some had sugar. They were delivered in the wee hours of the morning, one after midnight, one after 1:00 a.m, one after 2:00 a.m. I did not order these single cookie bags in the middle of the night, but yet here they were. From McDonald’s, of all places, where you are definitely not allowed to eat, but everyone secretly does anyway.

I called DoorDash to figure out what happened. You may be wondering why I bothered — who cares if there are three cookies delivered to your door in the middle of the night, in separate bags, one after the other? But to me it felt ominous, like someone was testing whether my dog Fish would get out of bed and bark in the middle of the night. (He won’t. Despite showing a willingness to rip people’s throat out during the day, Fish knows when he is off the clock.)

I explained the situation the best I could — the three tiny bags, not meant for me. Or maybe meant for me by the serial killer who was testing out Fish’s limits, but three little bags that I definitely did not order. I gave them the order number on each bag, and this is when I found out that DoorDash cannot track orders by the order number.

Yup. You may be wondering: what is an order number for, if not to track an order? I can assure you I had the same exact, apparently cosmic, question. After wasting some of my wild and precious life on the phone with DoorDash, I have now accepted that I will never know the answer. They just don’t track orders with order numbers, okay? You might as well ask DoorDash how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

But who cares about the midnight cookies anyway? I aged out of the serial killer victim demographic long ago. The most likely explanation is that someone extremely stoned with a traumatizing case of the munchies, tried to show some restraint and ordered just one, single cookie. When that cookie failed to arrive (because their cookie was mistakenly delivered to my house) they ordered another single cookie. And when that cookie didn’t arrive, they ordered yet another single cookie, and when that cookie didn’t arrive, they finally gave up, and honestly the whole thing breaks my heart wide open. Here we are, squirrelled away from one another, desperate for cookies. One person high as a kite, and another so paranoid that she thought the cookies were a precursor to her own murder. Same mental decline, different address.

When did we start to unravel? I can’t pinpoint it, but I try all the time. In the 1990s it seemed like everything was gonna be great, like we were all on the cusp of something bold. But there were hints that we were going off the rails. There was the genocide in Rwanda, and a UN commander, Roméo Dallaire, who was on the ground desperately faxing the UN in New York, asking for help to stop the slaughter, but they said no. Let’s repeat: there was this guy in Rwanda, Dallaire, who saw the bloodshed coming — they were broadcasting instructions on how to kill your neighbor on the radio, after all — and he faxed his bosses at the UN for help, and they said no.

Unsurprisingly, Dallaire ended up back in Canada with a severe case of PTSD and a drinking problem, which is about as healthy a response you can expect, if you think about it. I think about Dallaire a lot. Sometimes I think he’s patient zero in our collective mental breakdown. His trauma went viral.

Today I brought Fish to a cafe by the LA River, where abandoned homeless tents floated next to Mallard ducks. There was a woman there muttering to herself with a huge German Shepherd off leash, and when I asked her to put him on a leash, she screamed “my dog is a good dog!” and without missing a beat I screamed back “good for you!” and nobody blinked an eye and we all just continued to sip our lattes. Just a normal day at a cafe in Los Angeles, two unhinged dog-ladies screaming at each other.

But what do you expect when everyone hates everyone? Most of my friends have stopped dating completely — and we consider the ones who haven’t truly insane — because the idea of meeting a stranger is appalling. I think there might have been a time when the idea of a conversation with a new person sounded fun, but does anyone remember when that was?

We now barely tolerate each other, but who can blame us? I have friends who went to school at places like Princeton, who have fallen victim to multi-level marketing schemes and are now trying to sell me powdered collagen with a straight face. Drivers in Los Angeles lean on their horns if you don’t turn left the second they think you should, and they speed up when they see you want to change lanes, just because. Russian soldiers are gang-raping Ukrainian women, and people are rooting for Putin, the translucent war criminal. I don’t know if we can come back from this, but we gotta try.

When I was a kid in the 1970s, we went out to dinner at the local Chinese restaurant with other families. Inevitably, the kids would misbehave, by spinning the lazy Susan too fast or sticking chopsticks up our nose, and the adults would send us outside until we could pull it together. We were five or six, but we would shuffle outside onto a busy LA street, and hang out until the adults noticed we were gone. If a parent did that now, they’d be arrested, or the very least, recorded, shamed, maybe doxxed. We live for that shit now, for ratting people out, for throwing people into the center of the town square for bad parenting or a meltdown on a bad day.

But someone does need to send us outside, so we can stop throwing chopsticks or screaming while we run around the table. We need a stern grandma to tell us to pull our shit together already, to remind us that she survived the war by walking across Europe, eating potatoes and snow, so we can sit still and be nice to each other.

I’m praying for her arrival. While I wait, I am going to execute my signature move and crawl into bed. And maybe order a single cookie.

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