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Every time I visit I have to go to the duck pond at Central Park, to acknowledge a debt to this book.

“Okay,” I said. Then I thought of something, all of a sudden. “Hey, listen,” I said. “You know those ducks in that lagoon right near Central Park South? That little lake? By any chance, do you happen to know where they go, the ducks, when it gets all frozen over? Do you happen to know, by any chance?” I realized it was only one chance in a million.

He turned around and looked at me like I was a madman. “What’re ya tryna do, bud?” he said. “Kid me?”

“No—I was just interested, that’s all.”

He didn’t say anything more, so I didn’t either. Until we came out of the park at Ninetieth Street. Then he said, “All right, buddy. Where to?”

It gets dark at 4pm.

On the way to Columbus Circle I ran into a protest rally. If the Sixties are back, will rock be back, too?

Humor as a survival mechanism.

Matches the current mood: somber, melancholy, the heightened sense that all this beauty will pass.

On the way to the park.

This is what is meant by fall colors.

We need more open green spaces at home.

For every concrete monstrosity, make the mall developers build parks. But who will alienate the money?

Parks are “non-revenue areas” and we are warned that vagrants, junkies, criminals will take them over. So only the rich can afford parks. Instead of breathing and walking among the trees, we go shopping for things we don’t really need, incur debts, drown ourselves in stuff.

A Richard Meier building

Karsten Moran for the NYTimes

Not enough sleep last night? You may overeat today.

That’s the conclusion of investigators after reviewing data on 172 participants in 11 sleep studies. The study designs varied, but tested people after a night of restricted sleep, usually about four hours, and then after a night of normal rest.

The next day, participants were offered a breakfast buffet or scheduled meals later in the day. The scientists tracked calorie intake and energy expenditure.

Read it in the legacy media.

So if I didn’t sleep soundly every night I’d weigh 500 pounds.

In the last two days, everything has been upended.

The traditional news media, now called the “legacy media”, has lost its influence.

The pollsters, statisticians, pundits, experts in many fields, were wrong.

Everything I’ve been taught to value no longer seems to matter. Oh, stuff like truth, intelligence (esp. books), respect, equality.

The years 1972-86 didn’t happen so I’m 14 years younger.

And tomorrow I’m off to New York.

How do we deal? I recommend a mental health maintenance break. Disconnect. Cheer yourself up. Give yourself time alone. The world is very loud, we can all use some solitude. Take stock of what you still have and think of what you can live without. Look to your friends. I mean your real friends, the ones you have a shared history with, who know exactly what’s wrong with you and remain your friends. You will need them more than you ever have.

Hard times are forecast. When you return, prepare. Do not be afraid and do not give in to despair. (It’s time to watch The Lord of the Rings trilogy again.)

Ever heard the term “the consolations of literature”? Join me.

As for me, I have resolved to be psychotically cheerful. Irony has always served me well.

If you’re in New York, drop me a line. I shall infect you with psychotic cheerfulness.

P.S. Need to talk? The therapist is in. (Never mind that Freud is now quaint.)

* * * * *

Doctor Strange sends some journalists to a hell dimension.

We are living in the post-fact age. The more I see what’s going on, the more thankful I am that I was born in the analog world (a.k.a. old).

Digital technology has blessed us with better ways to capture and disseminate news. There are cameras and audio recorders everywhere, and as soon as something happens, you can find primary proof of it online.

You would think that greater primary documentation would lead to a better cultural agreement about the “truth.” In fact, the opposite has happened.

Documentary proof seems to have lost its power. If the Kennedy conspiracies were rooted in an absence of documentary evidence, the 9/11 theories benefited from a surfeit of it. So many pictures from 9/11 flooded the internet, often without much context about what was being shown, that conspiracy theorists could pick and choose among them to show off exactly the narrative they preferred. There is also the looming specter of Photoshop: Now, because any digital image can be doctored, people can freely dismiss any bit of inconvenient documentary evidence as having been somehow altered.

One of the apparent advantages of online news is persistent fact-checking. Now when someone says something false, journalists can show they’re lying. And if the fact-checking sites do their jobs well, they’re likely to show up in online searches and social networks, providing a ready reference for people who want to correct the record.

But that hasn’t quite happened. Today dozens of news outlets routinely fact-check the candidates and much else online, but the endeavor has proved largely ineffective against a tide of fakery.

That’s because the lies have also become institutionalized. There are now entire sites whose only mission is to publish outrageous, completely fake news online (like real news, fake news has become a business). Partisan Facebook pages have gotten into the act; a recent BuzzFeed analysis of top political pages on Facebook showed that right-wing sites published false or misleading information 38 percent of the time, and lefty sites did so 20 percent of the time.

“In many ways the debunking (of misinformation) just reinforced the sense of alienation or outrage that people feel about the topic, and ultimately you’ve done more harm than good.”

Dormammu makes Doctor Strange’s head explode.

Read How the Internet is Loosening Our Grip on the Truth, and make sure you have chocolate, a stiff drink, or a snuggly cat to console you afterwards. Or look at this selection of the weirdest Doctor Strange moments in the comics.