A Slow, Crooked Path Forward, Toward Who-The-Hell-Knows

I don’t know that I’m ready to write much else since the thing I posted other day, but maybe I’m never really ready to write anything at all. And writing is what I do, for better or for worse; it’s how I engage with and interact with and challenge the world. My writing is a toddler’s hands: they reach out clumsily, grabbing stuff and shoving it in my drooling mouth.

So, here I am, and here I write.

Sensibly, or not. Cohesively, or not.

I don’t know what to do and I don’t know what to tell you to do. I’m only guessing at it. It’s purely me fumbling in the fog, through the dark. As always this place is for me more than it is for you. I can only tell you what I would tell myself in this moment.

I think first and foremost, you have to be okay with not knowing what to do. This cannot last, of course. Eventually we have to do something, we have to move forward, we have to take steps somewhere, in some direction. But it’s okay to just be all up in your what-the-fucks right now. We’re just days past the revelation of a huge reversion of our expectations and understandings of the world and people around us and it hasn’t even really happened yet. So it’s fine if you’re flailing. Or just staring into the void. The void welcomes your gaze, and the void understands.

I think it’s okay to not be okay. That’s true every day, for any reason, but doubly triply multiplicatively true now. You can just be Not Okay. Sure, sure, hashtag resist and all that, but also resist anyone telling you how you have to feel or cope or what you must do or how there are all these easy angry answers if you just look for them. I think it’s okay to sit quietly in the darkness and regard the darkness for what it is without someone telling you to turn on the light already. I used the metaphor a long time ago that there is a toilet on fire in the middle of the room, and sometimes it feels like no one else sees it. I think it’s okay right now to look away from it, to not want to sit and look at the fucking thing. And it’s also okay to see it directly, to stare right at it. It’s fine to point at it and say, “Hey, there’s a toilet on fire in the middle of the room.” And maybe we need to find others who see it, who say:

“Yeah, I see it too.”

Which means it’s important to reach out. Don’t be alone if you don’t want to be alone. (Alternatively: be alone if it’s what helps you and how you process. It’s not healthy for everyone all the time but sometimes, like I said, you just wanna sit quietly in the dark.) Community doesn’t always mean some big, broad-reaching coalition. Family doesn’t have to mean the people with whom you share blood. It’s good to extend a hand out of the darkness and see who else is there. And accept a searching hand in return. We’re going to need one another and that doesn’t mean needing everyone or being there for everyone, either. It just means reaching out to someone.

You gotta take care of yourself. Drink water, eat real food, try to exercise if you can. Brush your teeth. Floss. Shower. Seek nature. Seek people you trust and love. Be near art, make art, consider art.

It’s also fine to like, eat some fuckin’ ice cream, I dunno. There was an injury, a grievous one, and it’s okay to take a moment to not be perfect, as long as it doesn’t knock you off of a better, more essential path. I’m not saying like, “Hey, maybe cocaine?” — but I think you’re allowed a “sit on the couch and watch movies and eat a whole goddamn brick of Halloween candy” period, yeah? Day or two after a funeral no one’s like, “Hey maybe cool it on the lasagna.” Just eat the fucking lasagna. You’re in mourning. It’s mourning lasagna. You can be better next week. It’s fine. It has to be fine.

You can stay away from the news, if you want. The world will happen without your eyes on it. If your tooth is broken, no need to stick a screwdriver in it right now just to jiggle it around.

You can scream if you want to. I mean it. Yell. Howl. Primal shit.

Get an MMA dummy. Punch the fuck out of it.

Write a whole page of ALL CAPS ANGER. Or small caps love and hope.

Play Dragon Age: Dawnguard. It’s good.

Go learn a thing. A weird fact. Strange history. Learn about what lies at the bottom of the ocean. Learn how to make a better Molotov cocktail.

Find birds, listen to birds, do whatever they tell you to do.

This can be a period of radical, intense self-care. That can mean whatever it can mean. It can mean administrative shit like getting your vaccines up to date, renewing your passports, getting any healthcare done that needs imminent doing. A small act, “Oh, I need to renew my car’s registration,” can feel fulfilling. No, this does not change the world, but it feels good, it gives you motivation to do more, to steady and strengthen yourself for whatever is to come next — little bricks making up the house that is you.

(And hey, nobody hates a dopamine hit.)

Plan a trip. Take a drive. Pet a dog. I dunno.

Be angry or be numb or be sad. Be horrified, be optimistic, be pessimistic, be the light, be the void. As long as you’re still here, being.

Get off social media if it makes sense to do so. It’ll be here later.

If you’re still on it, maybe block wantonly. Don’t wade into it with silly, shitty people. They’re vampires looking to drain away your life, leaving you enervated and raw, doing little for you but wasting your time.

I also think this is a good time to resist easy answers about *gesticulates broadly.* We will be looking in the coming days for simple correctives, as if the bullet that killed our hope came from one gun instead of from a firing squad holding AK-47s. As if all we have to do is find the one magic thing to fix. But nothing works like that. Especially something this big, this deranged. The fallacy of the single cause is real, and for things like this, there’s never one reason, one answer. It’s ten things. It’s a hundred. I have long been fascinated with the discord and complexity found in cascading failures, and there’s no reason to believe that the sheer intricacy of human society is not subject to the will of such unpredictable waves of chaos and failure.

(That said, were I pressed to point out some of the big issues, I’d say it sure doesn’t help having a profit-poisoned media environment, a propaganda-poisoned social media environment, and billionaires running rampant without any checks on what they can say or do or buy. That’s a good place to start, and even there, perhaps you’ll find a few hesitant steps forward: you can remove from your life those mainstream media outlets who sanewashed Trump but who will now be championing the resistance against him. Give money to Propublica. Subscribe to the Philadelphia Inquirer or Rolling Stone or Teen Vogue. I do not endorse it yet because I’m only just poking around it, but Adam Conover seems to recommend Ground News, which would appear to provide glimpses of news narratives from varying partisan angles. Though it may also be a sponsor of his show, Factually, and in that sense may be a biased recommendation on his part. I don’t know!)

(Also, I can assure you the reason for the loss was not trans people or “the woke mind virus” or “women aren’t nice enough to men.” Do not throw vulnerable people under the tires of democracy just because you think they’re in your way. That’s how the other side talks and thinks, okay?)

I don’t really know. And it’s important to recognize, you don’t know either. We don’t know what’s to come or how bad it’ll get it. It may be worse than we expect or a little better, and it’ll almost certainly be stupider than we think, because fascism is surprisingly oafish, which makes it feel all the worse that it succeeds when it does, because of how fucking ridiculous it is. We don’t know why this all happened or what. We can only know that we are here in this moment and we are together in some capacity, and we will have to form or reinforce coalitions and communities with as much grace as we can muster, but right now, it’s okay to just sit in the darkness and regard the void and think about trees and Thanksgiving and somewhere you’d like to visit and an errand you need to run and a video game you’d like to replay. Just be good to yourself and then, by proxy, to those around you. The work will come. The work will get done. For now, breathe and think of birds.

* and perhaps weird pumpkins