Bro live with me in this cursed mortal plane bro
Let us see with eyes that are joined...let us see, let us have ears to hear
How is it possible to have so many days pass without memory? Surely, it was not meant to be this way. Surely, this is out of character with some larger design.
In The Idiot, the book whose marketing demographic I’m extremely in and which I’m currently reading and re-reading to fall asleep to like a favored sitcom, she describes, in passing, a life in which she is writing constantly in her notebook, noting the time and day, “as if to mark the time somehow.” Extremely autismcore and I love it, I relate. For whom? I remember when I was 11 that I started keeping my obsessive journal, and copying my emails, letters, and AOL instant messages into it, because I really believed it might be a book someday. I really did, I think. Was that insane and delusional of me? Well, yes, but childhood is about playing with toys and being delusional. Let me LIVE! Was it, in a sense, right, because the practice and years of experience I gained through that reflected some larger truth about me writing books in general? I DID write a book. Does it matter that it was just for myself? No. It was to help me survive, is that not the best reason there is to make anything? Obviously, nobody was going to want to read my 11 year old journal, but would they want to read things that I wrote, or would the belief I had as a child just that someone cared about my thoughts and that finding some feeling of control or safety or stability in writing them was enough, believing that I was important and worthy of thought enough? Why else do people do it? What’s the point, anymore, I ask myself? The point is: remind yourself you’re here, and note what is happening, both the beautiful and the horrifying. It might help.
Cicadas, I think, rising their percussive song in a slowly ascending and descending wave outside my window, interspersed with the squeaking of brakes from trucks, and the clanking of people with carts on the sidewalk, some of whom are collecting tin cans — I assume for the few cents you can get in recycling them. Some in sunhats, some in neon vests. "Go around" is a separate verb from "go" in Bulgarian. It is also “to tour,” kind of, I think? To go on a little trip in the form of a walk. Excellent concept for a verb.
I got out at 42nd Street Times Square at the Golda Meir plaza or whatever it's called (APARTHEID GIRLBOSS), and kept on my mask as I walked toward 43rd street. A girl on the subway had done that thing where she rushes around the car, alighting small business cards on each seat that explain that she and her family had a terrible accident, they need medical treatment and donations, with the Venmo handle, and then people give her cash. I picked up the card and slipped it into the left pocket of my backpack, wanting to carry it as a memento and maybe donate later, but I forgot that the second half of the endeavor involves going back and picking up the cards, which are presumably part of a limited set, and then I had to sheepishly put it back on the seat and pretend to be fiddling with my phone. I didn’t have cash. A bearded man across from me, who got on at Myrtle-Wyckoff I think, fairly young, gave her a dollar, the only one to do so, surprising me. I listened to Chelsea Manning's book, which she reads aloud herself, in a kind of singsong, reading-aloud-a-children's-book way, which frequently irritates me, even though I objectively like her and the quality of the book itself. I think I recognize in her voice the need to distance herself from the content itself, the recent memories, to tell it as if a theory or a fairy tale. I understand this, I think.
I talked to a friend’s boyfriend who was some kind of big liberal lawyer, with big liberal beliefs. We were talking about capitalism — no really — and he was saying, it’s not that bad. It’s actually empowering, and not the worst thing. It gives people the opportunity to self express through buying things. He really said that. With a kind of calmness that, lately, makes me feel as if I am losing my mind. Is that a Yale thing, or a rich people thing, or a law school thing, or both, to be the type of good at logic games where you find nonsensical little routes to sounding "right" in a respectable and authority-coded way even if the core of what you're saying doesn't correspond to truth or the way life is actually lived in any meaningful way?
I suspect that it is. I didn't even bother to bring up, in my bafflement, my shock, the very logical reality that, even if you see shaming people for consumerism, for online shipping, for Prime Day, for iPhone factory workers in China jumping out the windows, as an unproductive shaming, or as a “hysterical,” or as unimportant, that doesn’t matter. It is not a cultural issue? Or a matter of woke leftist shaming? We simply cannot keep creating, consuming, and shipping objects in the escalating pace we've set as humanity anymore, because we will very quickly, as almost all scientists and current reality have shown, cause the earth to be unlivable, curse ourselves and our children to a depleted planet, and in many parts of the world it is actively unlivable already. But of course, liberals dislike darkness, they are offended by it because there's no way to put it on a cute hat or into a slogan, and it makes them feel bad. YOU, the bringer of the "darkness," which is to say the facts from the real world (lol sorry that sounds kinda Jordan Petersencore), become the "bad" feeling, people are put upon and irritated by your very presence, as if you are the bringer and causer of humanity's end, you are so NEGATIVE. A grad school professor I had once, a white lady “Arabist” (such a type, yes I am ALSO roasting myself, and yes I can’t believe people used to use this word lmao), said to this to us once, in a seminar, after we all unleashed unhidden thoughts about the state of fascism in the world, how corrupt it had all gotten (we were talking about think tanks in the city of Washington, D.C., the nation’s war capital, so like, she could be realistic for five fucking seconds.) “You’re all so cynical!” she blinked behind her glasses, somehow failing to note that by signing up to contribute to the idea of creating collective knowledge about the world, and specifically about one of the main sites of American imperialism and capitalist plunder, we were actually being incredibly idealistic, to decide to be there. To want to discuss it, while paying them.
You are so cynical. For the crime of wanting to live in reality and speak it freely.
It makes me wonder about “the law,” about, for example, environmental law, what kind of horrors and circular logic that must involve, as if to very fastidiously argue, dressed in a beautiful suit and sounding very charming and Obama-like and "articulate," that you actually think and believe, based on the evidence, that it's okay to take bread out of the oven after only five minutes, resolutely chewing the raw dough and calling it bread, as Sarah Miller puts it. The things you can't argue with, and the fact that so much of modern life is given away to a huge and specialized field of expensive thought that is dedicated, in large part, to magical thinking, to creating ways of arguing against reality and basic morality. People have to stay in "pre-trial detention" because it's "for public safety," sure, sure. How does someone, anyone with a basic level of education or humanity, justify this to themselves? Really, tell me.
(I suspect that the annoying answer is, as always, white supremacy, coupled with the fact that rich people cannot picture how poverty itself criminalizes your life, how Blackness criminalizes your life, how it could all be an accident, how just basic survival, for so many now, is an enormous undertaking. How would they know, I guess? Many systems exist to make it hard for them to know, let alone to try feeling what that might mean. It is too much, I imagine. These are new realizations for me — please don’t make fun. I know it seems obvious, perhaps, to some, who have the benefit of not growing up brainwashed.)
Pre-trial detention. What does that even MEAN? It means less than nothing, and reminds me of the scholar Lisa Wedeen, who writes about life under fascism and totalitarianism, under which dictators exercise control by, part, forcing people en masse to argue and recite worlds of nonsensical devotion (LONG LIVE THE LEADER, HE IS THE MOST RIGHTEOUS, HE IS THE MOST JUST, HE HAS 400 POUNDS OF PURE MUSCLE, HE KILLED A BEAR, HE IS GOD’S FAVORITE STRONG BOY) the dual purpose of which is to a. brainwash and confuse and b. humiliate and degrade. You are humiliated into submission by the fact of being forced to pretend, all day, and to pretend that you're NOT pretending, even worse. It makes people give up. It is very effective.
Many living in rich or liberal delusion might be idiots, but they are, unmistakably, more productive, less burdened, as most idiots are, because they aren't burdened with the ability or desire to see reality, and can therefore proceed more freely, can get the free gift with purchase, can relax at the yoga studio. Can cash the check.