What It Feels Like, Right Now

When I was in college in North Carolina, I flew home to Pennsylvania for the holidays. My mother and father were going through a divorce at that point (a divorce that should’ve happened many years before), and so my father had decided I had to spend my holiday weekend staying with him, not her, and given that he was paying for the plane ticket and such, I agreed. He was supposed to pick me up from the airport, but he didn’t.

His friend did. A guy I had maybe met once or twice before. I met him, went to his car, and once on the road this guy, a relative stranger, gave me shit because he was trying to hit on flight attendants in the airport and I “interrupted” him getting laid at the airport. (Note, this is pre-9/11, when you could just free range it through the airport even if you didn’t have a flight. And I guess this guy was thinking he could Get Some at the Airport Applebees counter, or some shit.)

When he told me this, I smelled the alcohol on his breath. And then I noticed his driving was, ahhh, not good. I realized he’d been in the airport, not just hitting on flight staff, but drinking. He was drunk. I was in a car with a drunk driver. And at that point, my options were minimal. Wrestling control of the car away from him would’ve probably crashed us. And he was certainly trying to crash us anyway, weaving in and out of traffic. Best I could do was buckle the fuck up and try to be calm enough so as not to rile this guy, who seemed like he was not the most stable individual.

Living here in America right now feels like that time.

Stuck riding shotgun in a car with a drunk driver.

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It’s hard to focus. It’s hard to focus on the things in front of me, that I need to do. It’s hard to focus on the news, because it’s not just one thing, it’s a hundred things, news like fire ants, like you stepped on their mound and here they are, swarming, and each ant feels meaningless in the context of all these angry fucking ants. Looking at my phone or computer or any connected device feels like tonguing a broken tooth–an electric jolt of pain but one that feels paradoxically satisfying, like if I poke the bad tooth, maybe I’m fixing it, maybe poking it makes it fall out and the pain will go away. Which I know is fucking stupid so then I stop doing it — stop looking at the phone, stop poking the tooth. But there’s a little rat scratching in the back of my head and it makes me wonder, what are you missing, what aren’t you seeing, remain vigilant, constant vigilance, there’s a great wave coming, a wall of fire, a meteor, a swarm of wasps, better look, better click, and then I look, and am rewarded. By some definition of that word, “rewarded.” My anxiety is rewarded because things are bad, and things are happening constantly. You take three hours off your Diligent Watch, twenty horrible things have happened. ICE stole your mother. Trump threw the fact-checkers in a pit. DOGE fired all the people who watch for plane crashes and tornadoes and pathogens in your food. Elon Musk smuggled a xenomorph aboard a SpaceX flight. RFK Jr is hiding a zombie bite. It’s all happening. It’s all coming for you all the time always.

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It’s hard to have hope. Hope is a thing with wings, the poet lady said, but its wings have been clipped and it thrashes on the ground looking for a way to get up, get out, go go go, but it can’t, so there it is, in the dirt, thrashing.

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Hope persists, though. Hope maybe isn’t the thing with wings but hope is the stubborn green thing, its stem-and-leaf pushing up through what seems to be limitless concrete. It finds a breach and it pushes. Pushes and pushes. Grows and grows. Hoping no one steps on it or sprays it with weed-killer.

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Sometimes you kinda forget. That it’s all happening. Okay, maybe you don’t forget, not exactly, but it drifts to the back of your mind where you can’t hear the chimpanzee screams and the clamor and the banging of drums. And in those moments, normalcy occurs, unbidden, uninvited. A gentle soft settling into an old feeling, life like a nice pair of sweatpants. Family dinner, a funny show, birdsong. Some emotionally-dysregulating version of Severance: your innie descends into the chaos mines, reading the news, feeling the fear, making plans, enduring calamity. Your outie makes dinner and tells jokes and dances to the playlist you built. Then the phone lights up, the elevator ding, and the innie rushes back in to see how flu and measles have combined to form the superbug, flusles, or how all the turtles are dead now.

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You know there’s ice cream and you know you shouldn’t eat it because a part of you desires to be in better shape. When the Secret Police come for you, you’re gonna have to run, and you can’t do that with a Body by Jeni’s, no, no, you must be lean protein, a gazelle to flee their nets, but also, it’s ice cream, and you crave joy, some joy, any joy, and who knows, we might not even have ice cream in a year, they’ll outlaw it, or tariff it so it costs $50 a pint, or your flavor choices will be Listeria or Ivermectin, so you say fuck it, and you eat the ice cream. Each spoonful is a little vacation. But later you feel bad and you wonder if the trade-off for joy was worth it when they catch you and throw you in the SuperDoom prison they built on the fucking moon.

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Yesterday I saw a bag of chips at the store that was $14.99. Beef tallow potato chips. This wasn’t Erewhon. The bag of chips was small. Things are stupid.

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Maybe it’s like turbulence on an airplane, you think. Just a bumpy unpleasant awful experience you gotta get through. But when turbulence hits it’s not because the pilot is a guy who doesn’t “know planes,” when turbulence hits they don’t disappear the ninth row people out the airlock because they “look different” and are “probably causing the problem.” Planes don’t have airlocks, do they? Whatever. My brain is spray cheese.

Maybe it’s a vaccine, you think. Maybe we need this ugly dose of What Can Be in order to avoid What Could Come. Then again we had four years of it the first time and somehow, immunity didn’t take. Maybe we fucked that up and now it’s a drug-resistant socio-political superbug. Or maybe the medical metaphor is wrong and the dude is just the antichrist. I wasn’t religious before but he’s enough to make me believe.

Maybe it’s good to look to history, you think. History goes in cycles. This is not the first Very Stupid Very Bad Time in history, and it will not be the last. Yet humanity continues on. A comfort! Then you think, yeah maybe it shouldn’t have because we seem incapable of learning from history. Sure, reading history is fascinating. But living it fucking sucks. The lesson is, we didn’t learn the lesson. The fuck do we do with that?

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Sometimes I think it’s climate change. That we’ve boiled the planet thanks to capitalism and it’s boiled our brains. And our brains are already a soggy dish sponge full of lead and microplastics anyway.

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Late-stage capitalism is fun to say until you realize it’s the same thing, mostly, as late-stage cancer. A disease that has progressed so far you can’t stop it now, you can just ride it out and find peace before *fart noise*

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Yeah, it’s like being a passenger in a drunk driver’s car. It’s also like working in an office building where new management just took over, and they’re a bunch of old braindeads and young dipshits and all of them are running around with sledgehammers and cartoon bundles of dynamite, knocking down load-bearing walls because “it’ll open the place up.” You think you ought to go work somewhere else but they also took over those buildings, too. They’re everywhere now, like termites.

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It does feel really stupid. It’s callous and it’s evil and it’s craven but it’s also very, very stupid. Clown-show, clown-shoe, clown-shit stupid. It’s like, at least once a day I’m all, these guys? THESE guys? THIS is what’s happening, and THESE fucking guys are doing it? Are you fucking kidding me? You couldn’t write this as fiction. It’d be too on-the-nose. Satire written by a concussed eight-year-old. Reality written by ChatGPT.

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Writing is hard right now. Releasing a book is hard. Promoting that book is, say it with me, hard. It’s not trivial but it feels trivial. Like performing a puppet show in the town square as the town burns down. It feels good to do it and you want others to feel good while reading it but you also know feeling good right now also feels somehow bad, and maybe that’s one of the most fucked up things of all. They didn’t take joy but they took the joy of feeling joy away, made it feel wrong and strange. Turned happiness into a hot stove.

Still, I write. I gotta write. Pay the bills but also because it’s an escape in its way. I like to say it’s an act of resistance, and maybe it is, because they certainly don’t want me or you or anybody doing it. They want to censor and steal and feed it all into the wood chipper of AI so it can sloppily spill all that artbarf out onto the floor and then they hire us back at half-rate or less, so we become the ones not making the art but instead scooping up the artbarf and pushing it into some kind of shape, some kind of digital particleboard. Like Dreyfuss in Close Encounters, smooshing his mashed potatoes into the shape of a mountain. This means something. But it doesn’t mean anything.

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Sometimes it feels like the pandemic. But that was better, in a lot of ways. Because we were all together in it, at least at first. Singing for health staff and staying home and whispering sweet nothings to our collective sourdough starter. But then we stopped singing and we politicized staying safe and we stopped feeding our sourdough starters and now the ghosts of those sourdough starters are really fucking pissed at us. Honestly maybe they’re the ones doing this to us. Maybe we stopped tending them and then they died and now they’re seeking revenge on us. Maybe this is a metaphor for democracy. We should’ve tended our democracy yeast goo better.

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One weird thing that gives me hope, real hope, is that for the last eight-plus years, I could drive around this area and I knew, I knew there were houses that you could count on to have all the TRUMP SHIT out. The banners and flags and crazy-person signs and rah-rah-rah, Dear Leader, Dear Leader. I drive around now and those houses, almost all of them, have taken down their Dear Leader shit. Maybe it’s because they know it’s not popular but I think for some of them it’s because they’re finally starting to see. Eight years of cult propaganda on their lawns, gone. I drove up through Pennsyltucky last weekend, a good hour’s drive, a drive I’ve made before. And I knew I was going to see a lot of gloaty-bloaty Trump shit on their lawns, porches, houses. I saw one. One house with signs out. The house was condemned. Half of it, falling down. Junk all over the lawn. Nobody lived there anymore, by the look of it. And even if they did, they didn’t.

It’s that. It’s the protests, too. Big protests. Just getting started. People are mad. Big mad. There’s a feral Philadelphia energy afoot. I do like it.

So that’s where I get hope. People are waking up. They should’ve woke the fuck up a while ago, but we started to pretend woke, being awake, was a bad thing, when it’s really the most important thing.

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Onward we go. Upward, we hope, but let’s remember, the wings are clipped. So it’s probably flat or even downward for awhile. Sometimes sharp drops, other times a spiral. Like a flushing toilet.

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The postscript to the drunk driver holiday story is, I got back to the house alive, the driver managing to keep on the road. My father was at home, also drunk. Probably too drunk to have picked me up. We had a bad, bad couple days after that. And before Christmas I fucked off out of there, wrote him a note that said fuck you, I was gone, and he could do whatever he wanted to do with that, cancel my plane ticket or cut me out of the will or whatever. At the end of the trip, he called me and told me he’d take me to the airport. He was nice in the car. Not drunk. Told me how bad drunk driving was and I should never do it — after all, my sister had been hit by a drunk driver a few years before, and it fucked up her leg permanently. He told me this with what seemed to be no awareness that he had sent a friend to pick me up drunk, but I also knew he was telling me it because he damn well knew he had sent someone to pick me up drunk. Sometimes we learn lessons, other times we don’t learn shit and stuff just happens, but we pretend we had it figured out all along and we hope everyone just forgets.

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Buy my book or I perish in the abyss, please and thank you.