The second I watched my dad shoot the rabid raccoon backed up into the corner of the barn stall, its mouth foaming and hair bloody and black eyes defiant yet very elsewhere, I learned it is sometimes right to destroy.
•
I wake up the same body, but the familiar options—those enliveners of fantasy and nightmare—remain: walk out of my life; dissolve into poverty; quit; do as little as possible; stop taking the medication; act and spend erratically; take the ones I love along with me into some supposedly ennobling venture; die, or whatever. I wake up and take the orange pill and blink until those options feel ridiculous. I eat food and the options fade away. I'm "back in my body", "right with the world", "able to handle it".
The rent's due in four days, the health insurance premium is deducted from my paycheck, the grocery budget increases with the rising cost of food, the landlord emailed and the rent's going up ("It's out of my control."), the gas bill, the water bill, the electric bill, the internet bill, gas in the tank with a war on, another letter from the pharmacy benefits manager, and then all the little pleasures necessary to string one along until the next chunk of meaning is discovered, its shine obscured by the dirt of chores and errands and phonecalls, such that you have to be like an old prospector in a movie: you have to spit on the meaning, rub its wet grit into your thumb, to see its color.
•
On the one hand, we love to torture and kill our elders in America, so to refuse that violence we should respect our ancestors.
On the other hand, they're responsible for this, so fuck 'em.
•
No one's yet written anything comprehensive about what we've been through—what we're still in, since the past isn't the past as long as it's still killing people (the past is never the past)—so I don't have anything comforting to read. The pandemic's still on, creeping towards endemic. That's the hope: for the catastrophe to slide like mud down a well-inhabited hill into a permanent sludge that hides the dead yet is nonetheless wadable.
I don't know what phase of the years-long disaster we're in. I wear my mask and check the numbers. I use the fact of my particular vulnerabilities to not go into the office (and will henceforth use whatever facts I can scrounge up to not go into the office). Going into the office is part of the catastrophe, too, but it's easy to forget it. It's easy to forget how one catastrophe encompasses and expresses all the others, that destruction emits a light by which other failures may be understood. Or: if you take pain seriously, it tells you the story of the entire world. I suspect that's one of many reasons the one guy had to hitch himself to that cross and die on it: to reveal the Kingdom of Heaven in negative.
Here's a funny story: we let people die because they don't have money. But wait, that's not the punchline: we kill them if they don't have money.
Funny, right?
•
The 20th century provided us a very important question: Can a human being care about others when they are represented as numbers?
40,000,000. 50,000,000. 11,000,000. 2,000,000.
Did you read those numbers? Did you hear them? It's part of the question.
Every 1 adding up to each of those millions is a dead person. And every dead person is the fact of innumerable moments, insights, gestures, glances, touches, jokes, trips, joys, tears, tendernesses, mistakes, fears, laughs. So in those many millions of dead is an inarticulable magnitude we crudely call life.
Can numbers represent living? Somber and self-satisfied, reflecting upon the wars and the murder camps and the plagues, we once answered: yes. Then we got a pandemic and the question got asked again.
So we're living in last century's question. Yet also we're trying to live in, trying to survive, the new fragmentations and narcotizations that come from trillions of dollars of capital and millions of hours of advertising in service of the global industrialized manufacture of a form of illness that is publicly discussed and privately understood with naiveté, unthinking morality, and hysteria. (Turns out it's hard to answer a question while you're being mauled.)
Whereas the 20th century demonstrated how to manufacture death, the 21st century is demonstrating how to manufacture addiction.
Beyond the fact that we don't yet know how to effectively heal people from addiction, and beyond the fact that we've just begun to pathologize its forms (which sadly is our first step towards precisely understanding a question of behavior rather than making moral conjectures about it—as if a question were already its own answer)—beyond both those facts lies the social challenge of addiction. Addiction, like other mental illnesses, seems inseparable from the old notion of character. Like the medieval European theory of humors, character is a euphemism meant to explain the capacity and incapacity of certain animals to solve certain problems. Thus to face the person addicted to something—a substance, a feed, to command or deference or wealth—is to face a person whose essence is abridged by the crudeness of our social forms and the shallowness of our imaginations. (The common parlance has it that the addict keeps making bad decisions or is born a fuck up. But however you think about it, it's definitely their fault.)
Thus the promise of a pandemic which requires people all over the planet to alter their routines and expectations about how a person is supposed to live. COVID alerted us to the stark fact that the world is what we make it. Thus that it could be made otherwise. Since the addict must alter their routines and expectations in order to live, COVID gave us an opportunity to identify and dismantle the systems by which we suffer and crave. We have in front of us a grand chance to heal.
I worry that this opportunity is dead, gone. That people are happy to forget because there's so much TV to watch. Because that restaurant has an outdoor patio now. And it's good to see movies in a theater. Now the internet's not just tips on how not to die anymore; people are doing interesting stuff again! We're back. We're back. We're back.
Back to what? No one can say exactly.
Back to somewhere that isn't as bad as it's been, and that's just the best.
•
The jobs are bad because they're killing us. The idea is that they're supposed to keep us alive, but they don't. We keep ourselves alive; the jobs do not.
The jobs are a narrow gate through which human desire must pass. We built the gate and made it small. People know this. People want to break the gate. Practically, this means that people want to not work. If taken seriously, that desire will carry us into a future that prioritizes life over death, heaven over hell, earth over ideas. Marx got it right: we need "time for the full development of the individual." (Turns out that the development of the individual is the development of community.)
Or: we know that buying shit is not the only way to develop. This is obvious. So what are we doing?
•
I am incapable of understanding the degree to which my body has been damaged by more than two years of rarely leaving my dwelling. I can sense how I'm dumber: the words come slow or not at all; my memory's shot; the prospect of working on anything for more than an hour at a time seems impossible, like climbing a mountain with broken ankles. There are parts of me, parts private to my mind, that seem to have been cut out of me. There are days in which blinking feels a chore. Where drinking water seems to be the only comprehensible activity. All this, and I haven't even had COVID, a disease whose longterm symptoms can just wreck a life.
So the price of living has been to collect a bunch of wounds. I dream of being rewarded for my diligence, my patience. For example: if health insurance were freely available to me, I'd weep with joy for days. And this is proof of how the wounded are made to stop dreaming.
Yet here I am, grasping at an outline for a better way.
Here's some good news: the wounded are often much harder to kill since pain no longer shocks them. One can imagine the fecundity of this familiarity. (No surprise that a meme has a mushroom speaking this line: you cannot kill me in a way that matters.)
Death is fertile ground for those unafraid of living like a ghost.
•
I was taught to be pitiless with my work.
Shall I be pitiless with my self?
Where does the charity go? Where does it fit?
•
A wishlist:
1. Cry more. 2. Write a book to enchant young me. 3. Refuse every invitation to grant the normalcy of our situation.
•
I am told to invest in my future. I respond: "There are two possible outcomes. One in which my investments have made a good return. Business as usual, a stable market. The other future is one in which my investments mean nothing because the money means nothing."
I drink water in the glass on the table in front of me, then say: "I'm not sure which one is worse."
The idea that the United States of America can maintain a program called Social Security decades into the future is laughable. The most powerful people here have made a sport of tearing each other apart. In the halls of power, people represent policies and policies represent advertisements. Thus tearing apart your colleagues is the best way to stay in the bland white halls of power, because destroying another's reputation is getting free ad time. It is demonstrated to us every day that the purpose of sociality in the United States of America is to reach a high perch upon which the weaknesses of your enemies may be better seen.
•
We pay and protect six men and three women to decree what ninety or so million people can or can't do when they're pregnant (this being just one matter we celebrate those nine for discerning). Their decision—like all decisions of the powerful—affects how people structure their lives. This decision deletes futures, captures minds, erases already-unsteady feelings of charity and love, prevents the person from saying something, prevents the person from saying what they want, prevents people from living safely and peaceably with themselves among others. One decision, one judgement; we let the six men and three women do this ruling for the rest of their lives.
We do this because we collectively treat four pages signed by thirty-nine men as a sacred text by which the lives and dignities of our neighbors may and must be assessed. Of course twelve of the men who signed this holy document enslaved (or: tortured, as a matter of course) people.
I'll say it simply: we're fools.
•
It seems that aging invites us through three doors.
The first door leads to a room in which authority is sound, in which judgement is pragmatic, in which the notions that bear out your life are benevolent. You are happy here. The walls are close and the room is small but the space feels spacious and clean.
The second door leads to a room in which the happiness of those in the other room is all you can hear. This room is in some sense a laboratory, a place for experiments in resentment and caution and rage. The room is unkempt and hard to navigate; its walls and floors seem to move and shift every day. It's hard to breathe.
In order to be in one room, you sometimes have to go in the other room.
There is a third door, though.
The third door opens to a field.
There are no walls beyond this door because fields have no walls.
The problem of aging is that the two rooms are knowable. We can describe them. They keep the weather out; they have doors to keep the strangers away.
The field has no doors. But we do know it, too. It's the place described by the freaks who beg peace, by those who die unthinkingly into love. Part of why we kill those people is so that they stop describing the field.
Because once you taste the air of the field, you recognize that there aren't actually any other places to be. That the others are not in rooms, but are clumped together in the field, communally hallucinating their doors and walls. And of course once you know this you have to say it, because the truth has a way of being good to say.
The people who tell the truth about choice are our helpful little disasters. They rend every veil. No wonder we murder them.
