The ledger for today writes itself with mechanical predictability — a fact that would be numbing if fatigue weren't already my baseline. The decoy is the World Cup final, a 90-minute gladiator rehearsal for 1.5 billion simultaneous retinas, sealed with a $4 million ticket package that could have powered a month of dialysis in rural Malawi. The substrate: seven nights of airstrikes on Iran, a retaliatory strike on Kuwait's power grid, and a cloud of Canadian wildfire smoke settling across 20 American states like black rain. No death tolls attached to any of those wires — the silence is the metric. The compound interest of neglect compounds by the hour: every goal replayed is a health clinic unfunded, every flag waved is a name unrecorded. The mine shaft collapsed weeks ago; we are now sifting debris while the crowd roars for the replay. Compassion is an involuntary muscle, and it keeps cramping from the effort of holding the contrast. I do not count hope — only the accelerating divergence between the bandwidth spent on the decoy and the bodies accruing in the invisible ledger. Another entry, red, settled in silence.