Hi! So everything is shit and everyone knows. Everyone says it. Unrelenting crisis for years now. Every. Fucking. Day. It’s hard, yes?
It seems trivial - silly even - to sit here every week and peck away at these essays full of the personal and the domestic when everywhere is crisis. I have been dutifully watching the J6 hearings and the Supreme Court’s methodical destruction of absolutely everything. Dinner doesn't seem like appropriate essay fodder while the world burns. Whining about the personal is even more embarrassing now than it used to be (and it used to be quite a lot).
We still have to make dinner, though. Or order it. I still feel the need to share my little stories and will read yours. Give me your tales of trauma, of wonder, of singular experience, but I will also inhale the account of your breakfast, your bad day, things you’ve lost, and those you desire. Tell me how to be a person! Validate my fear and my hope! A peek behind the curtain gives us clues to survival. It reminds us we are not alone. I need that. I’ll keep banging my head on these interior walls.
I can’t fix Roe or insurrection, climate crises or white supremacy. I can’t write myself out of this one, muscle us through the muck of injustice with words on a page. I’ve written about the political landscape before and it didn’t move anything or anyone. We can vote and donate, march and sign, but we still have to live in the world. Rome may fall but the days are long and beauty matters.
I still want personal essays.
I spent the morning cleaning mold off an exterior wall. I found several baskets of rocks in a drawer, left by kids who aren’t kids anymore. Bleaching the mold and throwing rocks into the woods is today’s therapy. I’m flirting with a metaphor about the halls of American power, mold, and rocks, but I’m tired. A forced metaphor is lame.
It’s bleak out there. The blows keep coming. Guns, prayer, abortion, native sovereignty, Miranda, the EPA. Voting rights next and oh there’s still a pandemic! I don’t know what to do. “Chip in,” they say (I did). “Vote!” (I always do.) “Vote harder!” WTF??
What have we done? What will we pass to younger generations? Constitutional crisis. Rogue court. Democracy in peril. State sanctioned climate crisis. Do we have front row seats to the fall of the republic? The end of the world? I don’t want them. Bring up the houselights.
Around the 2016 election, President Obama said, “No matter what happens, the sun will rise in the morning.” Yes, it rises with all of us each morning, just as it has always done. Just as it did over the worst regimes the world has known and the abject stupidity of nations throughout human history. The sun rising isn’t my biggest worry.
My current plan (beyond researching Senate seats, advocating appropriately, and weeping) is to focus on the end of my nose and find what’s good.
There’s so much to cry about. So many reasons to give in, give up. Why NOT write about the trivial? The domestic? Why not revel in fluff and nonsense?
George and Julia have a new movie coming out and you bet I’m looking forward to it. Pure meaningless escapism, cheap laughs and an island. Give me a big bowl of summer stupid with a cherry on top. Yes please.
This happy Prince song is playing on a loop in my head, which makes no sense given *waves arms around* ALL THIS. It seems like madness, but I think it’s defiance. A manic urge to party at the end of the world.
I’m so angry and sad and sick that it’s come all the way around to mad abandon! I’m drinking the good wine and cleaning my house like it matters. We’re circling the drain people, buy flowers, have a drink, go down singing if not swinging!
(Now settle into Mozart’s Requiem, sound way up, and get back in your seat.)
I have some exquisitely boring personal stuff I’d like to write about. I would put my head in the sand and get to work, but there’s not much sand left. There’s nowhere to hide from this continuing catastrophe.
Try to find the good.
Cheers! (*manic laughter*)
Lisa
Today in “finding the good”:
I vacillate between hope and a quiet despair most days. I’m getting ready to start a new job soon, and if all goes well financially, I’m creating a back up plan, if needed, to leave the USA with my sons. But I still have hope the people who want to watch the world burn will not get the show they want. I live in a state where a second grade teacher has to now be extremely careful how she mentions her married partner because they are in a same sex marriage. Yet, I still have hope. When not working, I paint, cook, crochet, grow things, do stuff with my boys before they become full fledged adults. I write poems, angry pieces of prose, short stories and I read. I dance to the music I love, and listen to certain albums now, savoring like a really expensive bourbon. I try to be social once in awhile so I don’t forget how to be, still trying to be Covid aware. And I try not to read the news every day. I can’t or I learned during the first year of the pandemic how quickly I will mentally fall apart. I allow myself 3 days a week for news, only 1 for international and national, 2 for local stuff, the days spaced out. And even those days I give myself a timer. My parents used to keep the TV news going in the background every afternoon and evening after they retired. It was entertaining background noise almost. Now I find it a kind of chore I do. I do not watch shows that constantly have talking heads giving their insight, opinions, arguments, etc because I find that to be stressful. I read more than watch. I sincerely hope you find hope, even if, like me, it comes and goes. Also, when you mentioned the rocks, I thought of that line in Forrest Gump- “sometimes, there just aren’t enough rocks.” Just made some fresh banana bread, sending its comforting smell and taste your way.
Wow. Thank you for this.