Day 49 of 1456

Day 49 of 1456 in trump's America.

Merry Christmas.

When I was home this weekend with my family, I felt like I was in a bubble. A stupid, bright lit bubble where no one could hurt us. I think about the genetic draw I won – being Greek – getting a complexion white enough to fit in after 80 years of assimilation by people who came before me, but dark and swarthy enough that someone would believe me if I told them I'm not a W.A.S.P. And then I'd just be a pinch exotic. But probably still "one of the good ones", if I didn't make too much noise.

All my family is very well off, very well educated, and pretty well liberal without the effort, if that makes any sense. We don't have a lot of marchers in my family. No one got beaten by cops. No boat rockers. Everything under The American Dream we pretty much pass with flying colors. Hit all the marks. And I love my family very much. But I was also thinking of "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man". I've only read it once, so I'm willing to bet I didn't catch the right gist of it. But I think now about how frightening it must have been for the other characters to put up with Stephen Dedalus. Watching him float farther and farther away. Not knowing what he's doing or why. Being scared of what's in his head, and what he might do to himself.

I have this uncomfortable feeling lately that every tine I see someone important to me, that might be the last time I see them. My imagination's running away with me. Secret arrests in our future. Hate crimes. Not knowing. And I feel bad when I think those things. Like I'm doing the work for all these terrible people above us, who get something out of that fear and paranoia. It's what they want. It's what they've run on this whole time. Being scared does them a favor.

And how do you flip that switch back? How do you turn the corner? What's the only thing that can literally take hold of your innards and rewire your brain?

Carrie Fisher died today. I've made it a point to try to make these posts as objective as possible. Try to have no outside reference sometimes. But this is an exception I'll make right now, because it's worth it.

I thought so much today about what she meant to us at first. In Star Wars, it was just a character she played. Someone who you don't fuck around with who's also a girl. Before her in 1977, I can't really think of too many examples. And what Star Wars has meant to billions of people at this point, and the part she played in that. Think of that number. Billions. Over decades. Watching the exact same movie. But never the same movie, because there were billions of ways it has been seen.

A work of art has never once changed between partakings. But it has literally never been the same from the last time you partook. Think of that.

And remakes aren't a crime either. The human brain is going to take whatever lessons it can find from wherever it can find them. You literally cannot predict what one thing is going to do to one person. No matter how shitty or critically garbage you might think a thing is. You don't know the cord it will strike.

And whatever message was delivered the first time – in any work of art – did well that time. And it was everything we needed. And it meant everything to the people who heard it when it was made because they were the ones it was trying to reach. And they are beautiful. And a credit to our race and every part of it that's good.

But with Carrie Fisher dying, another point was made clear in my head.

In the world we're going to be living in – the one that started 49 days ago and will be inaugurated in 24 days – it's like the mental armory's turning to dust. All these artist who spoke for us and spoke to us are dead. It's been a holocaust of artistic talent, on every front, for a straight 12 months. And obviously it's not going to get better, whatever the fuck that means. Time strikes on forever. We will lose more people that created things that made us happy. That's a fact.

I wonder what the future would've looked like for us if we still had these people around to help our hearts, to make us steel for what we might have to do.

It's like all the fates conspired to not only vote in misery but also take away our ability to withstand it. Our Soul Generals are dead.

Art speaks to you. Art speaks for you. It tells us things we want to hear. It tells us things we need to hear. It tells us things we have to hear. Things we wish we didn't have to understand. Art drowns out things you don't want to hear. It vice-squeezes your blood vessels and shoots you in the head and you die. It puts things in a language you didn't know you needed to hear things in.

And so many of the people who died this year were so weird. So amazingly weird. Coke heads and cross-dressers and sex monsters and gross, rude, terribly immature and beautiful people. So wonderfully weird that the color gray makes me want to cry when I look at how stupid and useless their gravestones will inevitably look. Hunter S. Thompson had his ashes shot out of a fist-cannon with fireworks. That's close to what a dozen people who died this year deserve at their funerals – at least the first night.

Which brings me to my next point, using Thompson as an awkward ham-fisted segue. I've seen people whine about how unfortunate we are that he's not here anymore. That he'd be able to put this all into words for us. Maybe. He would've been 79 by now. You think he would've been able to do that well? I've bought every word the man's written down. Even the collection of his personal letters. I loved him. I still do. If you've read ten minutes of him, you can tell he's soaked in to my fingers if you read this stuff every week. I owe him so much. Gratitude doesn't begin to describe it.

But I'd also be disappointed if I kept on loving him the way I had been. Does David Bowie speak for you forever? Is there nothing you can do beyond the gifts he brought us? If the finger points to the moon, are you the monkey looking at the finger?

So much Weird has died. We have to cover the spread.

I wish all my dead heroes were alive. And we were all hanging out together. And drinking tea forever while we all pet cats and take turns flirting with Joan of Arc and Janis Joplin. But we're not. And we won't. That will literally never happen.

Many things are old now. It's the same story. The same hatred. The same racism. The same problem. People hating people who don't look the same as their people. But some of it's new. It's a new world. New words. Farther consequences. Bigger stakes. Faster ripples. More synapses connecting farther with more electricity. There will – without a doubt – be things and ideas and possibilities that the Old Gods could not have possibly put in to words in their wildest dreams. That's just how the species rolls. The only ones who could try to understand it will be the ones who were there for it. Ashes to ashes. Leave the dust in the dust. I know they had no idea what was going on around them either. If it had made sense to them, they wouldn't have made the art they used to try to make sense of it.

They spoke for us before. It would be unfair to them to ask them to do it forever. And it would be unfair to us as well. To expect that we could not reach the heights they pointed us toward.

To speak for ourselves now. We have no other option. Everyone else is dead.

Day 42 of 1456

Day 42 of 1456 in trump's America.

For my own personal reasons, 2016 was the year I learned how to get up after being knocked down. I'm not going to get into the details, because I refuse to let this turn into a personal blog. This isn't about me. But I feel like there's something in that. Thinking about everything that'll be happening in the next four years (at least), and thinking about what we'll need to learn how to do to survive that time.

How many of us have ever stood up against something single-handedly? With no one else in a room of people having your back? With no one in your vicinity who's there to help? To agree with you.

There was a psychology experiment. The Asch conformity experiment. Three black lines on a white sheet of paper. All the lines are the same length, except one. All the votes are actors who are in on the test, except one person, who's the actual Joe Schmoe. When the planted participants said "All the lines are the same length" – a socially agreed upon insanity – the Normal Guy agreed with them to a shocking degree. Between 40%-60% of the time. And then when one actor was told to agree with the Normal Guy – and reality – the test subject's conformity dropped to somewhere around 5%. This is the truth of the situation: how abysmally bad most Normal Humans are at standing up for what is Right, even when violence isn't an aspect of the disagreement. This is just black lines on a white paper. Think how bad those numbers are going to be if someone gets angry when you disagree with their insanity.

We think we know loneliness. We haven't begun to experience loneliness. Think when that shifts to suspicion.

Think about every time you've felt weird. Think about every time you stuck out somewhere. Think about what that will mean now that the people who are afraid of weird are calling all the shots.

Offend the boring. Your actual life is a rebellion now. May as well lean into it.

We think we've had to fight for our spaces before. That was just bald capitalism. They didn't think our weird was making money, so they didn't support it. Think what's going to happen now that they think they might get in actual trouble for encouraging our weirdness. What will they do: stand on creative principals? Now that things are worse? Do you know many producers or stage owners who would do that?

What in the last 18 months would make you believe for a second that The Right Thing has any kind of inherent thermodynamic energy to itself that just Makes It Happen? Everyone we've put in charge to help us has let us down.

What do we do? Stamped on every day. From every direction. But we know the alternative. I always have, for my money. All the accoutrements that a Normal Life might bring me wouldn't be worth having to go golfing on Sundays. I hate everything that smells even remotely of suburbia. I've been there half my whole life.

What would we do if we gave up this weirdness? What would we look like? What would the species look like?

So what do we do when the only person who wants to see what you have to offer is yourself? There is no ovation coming. No accolades. Nobody likes you. The only option you would have would be to just do the thing anyway. Whether or not people are listening would be the extra blessing. Which I think they always were, anyway.

Sometimes doing the right thing can actually be pretty fun. But I feel like we're entering a very real time now where it's not going to be, for a while. Or if it is, it'll be harder than before. For my money it's always been hard for me to Ignore Things Going On Around Me & Just Say Fuck It. I know I'm bad at it. But I know I was worse at it before I started creating art.

So Where We Stand:

Facts are on the defensive. On their heels and playing catch-up.

Emotions are running high. Bad ones. Some of them have slogans and secret poses.

Self-expression might be all we have left for the moment. They are emotional facts. Factual emotions. They are How You Feel. If you do them right, you can't lie about them. They're revealing something about you. And something that someone else can't do. Someone else might do theirs better, of course. But not yours. Yours are yours. Even if you don't have one more person in the room to back you up on them, they're still happening. You'd be the only one trading them away. For nothing, really. To get along with people who wouldn't like you anyway. And won't once they find out. A whole nation of them. The bigger voting, running, politicking parts that count, anyway. When you get down to it, the only part you get to control is When Will They Find Out. And they will knock you down. I guarantee it. And then no one will ask you to get back up again. That's not a decision another person can ever make for you. In fact, if they love you, they're even more likely to tell you to stay down. And you'd have every reason to. No one would fault you. No one could. You're the only one who'd ever have to look yourself in the mirror. And even if you did everything you could, and this ended in four years, it would come back. Somewhere else. Years later, maybe. Maybe again in our lifetime.

But you have to remember what it felt like to See Someone Make Something. And lock yourself into that feeling when you make something. And know that you're doing one of the only things our species is really good at: Following through with really bad ideas because we fucking feel like it. Somehow we're the only life form who doesn't have self-preservation in the Top Priority Spot 24/7. Fuck if I know what our #1 spot is. I've suspected it's whatever you want it to be. But there are these ugly guts that keep making us not shut up when we really probably should. And every person before us who Couldn't Shut The Fuck Up Sometimes was the latest in a long string of those people, the shock of recognition the whole scale of human history. Join their illustrious ranks. Lose your friends. Anger your enemies. Frighten your family members. Stand against an entire country now. Every day. Watch how many times they knock you down. Watch how many times you get back up. By yourself. It will number in the hundreds. The thousands, maybe. 1,414, by my count. From today, at least.

Offend the boring. Starve. Wake up tomorrow and do it again. One man art machine.

Day 35 of 1456

Day 35 of 1456 in trump's America.

I want to talk to you this week about something.

I promise I'm not usually like this all the time. I know you might think I am, if you looked at all my previous posts here. But I promise I'm not usually this manifesto-y. I'd hate for anyone to be worried about me after all this screaming depressive dreck. I just have a tendency to shoot off the cuff emotionally in all these. They're not really touched up much before I publish them, and if I'm being honest this is all mostly for me to purge my head out once a week. I look forward to it every time in the days leading up to it, and when they're done I do genuinely feel a lot better. I just wanted this little bit of a disclaimer, since next week we're coming up on the 6^th week straight of regular posts, which is when I promised I'd be sharing these a lot more publicly. Plus, I have a tendency to listen to Goddamn Epic Classical Music while I do it, which engenders a bit of Massivity in my writing, which I wouldn't blame anyone if they thought it was all a bit much.

And there's obviously a lot to talk about in regards to The Real World this week – every week obviously, this is the New World after all – electoral colleges, Russian & CIA conspiracies, wondering whether we'll have a functioning government at all, much less one that sucks rich banker's dicks on a 24 hour straight daily cycle. But those are just the realities. You can get a field report of bald bare-ass statistics anywhere you look, anytime you want, from far better writers than me. All I can do is say stuff, for me, that I haven't read or seen or heard anywhere else. I won't deny this is a selfish project.

I wanted to talk today about courage, and how I think I grasp and approach the idea. And whether it's weird or strange.

I think sometimes that courage is such a beautiful stupid thing. I use "stupid" not in the pejorative, insulting sense. I mean it's literally devoid of intellect sometimes, because it has to be. I don't think anyone would argue that occasionally you have to purge forward with courage without thinking of the consequences. Sometimes you have to run into the mess without being aware of your shame, the consequences, and What People Will Think Of You. If you're one of those people like me that "Thinking" always leads inexorably to "Doubt", then you might have to learn to stop thinking sometimes if you think you'll start doubting whether or not to do the right thing.

It's things like that which make me think of military boot camp. They grind your thought muscles down to nothing and leave you with reflex, then steer that reflex in the direction they want it, then give you the chance to rebuild your intellect if you feel like it. But your baseline has changed. It's all going to spring from a new undercurrent that you weren't running with before.

And that's one of the things I mentioned in an earlier post: if the learning when you were younger – mold-able – didn't include lessons on defending the weak, sympathizing with minorities, and basically fucking up the steel toed boot that wants to crush your face everyday forever, how are you going to learn how to do that? How to recognize it? What methods do you approach that with?

If you're like me, you probably have no goddamn idea. I didn't get de-escalation training. I have no idea how to correctly protect the innocent. I haven't even had basic military training. That description up there was just my best guess of the process. I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm not going to lie about that.

But I know what I want to do. I know what my first protocol is. If I see something, I say something. If I see something, I do something. These are obviously just words. I'm not going to pretend I am courageous. But I know if something starts happening in front of me, I don't think I can think about it. I'll have to go with reflex. And that's not much, I know. Unless you compare it to the alternative, which is nothing. I know my brain well enough to know it can't be trusted. If I give it an inch, it'll take a mile, and then it might be too late. Or I'll think someone else will do something. Or I'll think there might be another side to this. Or a thousand other tricks I know my brain can play on me to stop me from Doing The Right Thing.

So I wonder sometimes if "courage" is an actual thing by itself, and not secretly just an absence of a different thing? Is it "courage", or just "ignoring selfish self-interest"? Ignoring the part that tells you that someone else's problems are not your problems. Is courage anything different than just Sympathy You Act On? I really can't say. I'm not that smart.

Then there's the next kind of courage. The first was just "What to do if it's in front of you". This one is more specifically "Where to go to do something". There's travel involved in this one. Not far. Just across the street. But it's most definitely somewhere you've never been before. You can be sure of that. I can't go so far as to say that "pushing your boundary" means the same as "picking a fight", but I'd be dishonest if I didn't mention that's a possibility of these types of actions. And obviously not a physical altercation. I'm not condoning that. But I'd be dishonest if I didn't mention that's a possibility of these types of actions, too. Change is inherently chaotic. You don't know where it's going to go. You just know if it's happening. And the current situation is not something we can stay with. Either we have to go out and meet it, or it's coming to us. There's really no third option right now. I don't want to hurt anyone. I don't want anyone to be hurt. But we have to accept the very definite possibility that someone might be coming to hurt us and our friends. The vice-president elect has said that he wants to electrocute gay people. That's a fact. It'd be irresponsible to not keep things like that in our mind.

Let me say now on no uncertain terms that those facts do not allow us a first strike protocol. I have no interest lowering my soul to their violent level. But the only thing I've been talking about this whole time is how badly The Election blew my eyes to the back of my head. It's the literal definition of horrifying to me. My country did this to itself. This is not outside powers. I honestly think this country is the best thing human beings have ever come up with in some odd seven hundred thousand years as a species, and I just watched it contort and snap its own spine in half in order to shit down its own throat, and all these words have just been me trying to put that in to a shape for me to handle in order to walk forward again and try to do something about it. It was like watching the sun go out.

So I can't do anything like I did before. No one can. Not anyone who wants to fix things, anyway. The old games and tricks didn't work. Clearly. The petitions and the marches, the signs and the chants, it all got us here. Look at where we are. Look around you. Very carefully. Look at the sounds and the people making them. Look at the buildings and the roads. Look at the people and the shirts and stores and windows and everything. Look at everything you love, and everyone you love, and everyone that loves you back, and realize that the people who are in charge hate most of them. And they have resources. And they have money. They have lots of stuff. But they don't have numbers. They never do. And that's the thing we always forget. We have sheer unadulterated numerous overwhelming ability at our hands. We always have. And I still think people have a lot more in common than they think they do.

I don't know if we're going to be okay. And I don't know if we're all doomed. I do know we don't have a lot of help. I do know that – so far – the species has been through worse. But I also know that this time it can get worse than it's ever been. I can't lie to you there, either.

But I've been surprised before. Obviously. There's just so much power beating in these fucking hairless monkeys. You'll never know where they'll turn up. Not all, but most of their problems are their own fault. That's true. But they also came up with all of their own solutions every time. We've never been saved, that's for sure. But somebody got around to Trying To Fix It eventually. Earthquakes or elections, it was always humans that dug other humans out.

Day 28 of 1456

Day 28 of 1456 in trump's America.

I'm in a stranger mood in stranger days. We're on a holding pattern now. Again like last week. It makes you understand how hell is a logical fallacy: How could misery stay miserable if it's the same misery everyday for eternity? Eventually you get numb. Pain is entwined with shock. Once it becomes accepted, something is lost.

There's been so many levels of disappointment and horror, for every move that this man has made, every second of everyday for the last month that the entire machinery of Doing Something About It feels like it's died and shriveled. He keeps appointing war criminals to his cabinet. He keeps pissing off countries that have been waiting for excuses to crush us under their boot heels. People yell back at him on the internet and count that as Doing Something. This is not your racist be-gummed uncle at Thanksgiving that you can ridicule with a bon mot that goes over his head anyway that you can jerk off to later because you are just oh so clever. This is the president now. Baring a Christmas miracle, which – as I mentioned last week – won't even matter, since we'd still be dealing with his homunculi minions that he dredged out of the woodwork to win in the first place.

What's drawn my attention the most this week, for whatever reason, is the future that was stolen from us. Do you remember what it looked like? Do you remember what the term "post-scarcity" meant? It was just weeks ago. What would we do with ourselves and all our free time when 3D printers were plastic-crafting every single physical tooled necessity we could need as a society? Probably spend all our time enjoying our electronic self-driving cars taking us wherever we wanted to go while we waited for a Scrabble pouch spelled science genius to make us all free rocket ships to Mars for us, our children, spouses, and a sex robot for each of us. We were talking about Norway and their paid minimum income & progressive prisons which had no death penalty and were nicer than most apartments I've ever been in my life.

Now I feel like we're crossing our fingers and collating our forces to do our best to make sure things only back slide to 1992. I have a lesbian friend whose lover died before marriage equality was passed, and now she's shriveled and hopeless that she might lose the right to it all over again before she's even done mourning, much less finding a soul mate that won't earn both of them getting spit on in public, best case scenario.

Do you remember what the world was maybe going to look like if we just didn't fuck it up for just a little while longer? Now there is no proactive. There is only defense and reaction. We've been here before, as a species. We almost got somewhere different. Like, literally somewhere else. Literally another planet. Rocket packs and free house batteries and free college education and a livable minimum wage and a hundred other things that would've given a hundred sci-fi writers a hundred utopian erections.

Now we're worried about sidewalks. Trains and buses. Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu houses of worship, because fascists are literally the stupidest creature the living world that is mother nature has ever seen and their very existence is an argument against survival of the fittest as something you'd ever goddamn want to take advice from. These people have trouble tying their shoes because the velcro insults their daddies and pappies and farms and houses and jobs. They hear voices.

And I learned something this last week. Apparently my very existence as white man is the only thing that can get them to stop a hate crime in process. It's true. Think of it like this: Cum Stain on Legs has grabbed a hijab off a Muslim woman. Now a lesbian steps in to intercede. That's only going to make him more mad. But if a straight white male steps in, that might be the only thing that can shame him. My friend literally referred to it as "like being the manager who got called in". Think about that. This is not a leadership role, obviously. Nor should it be. Minorities don't need white citizens leading and designing the spaces for them. We've been down that road before. But if white dudes were muscle? If we were the only "species" – white straight allies – who could get the disastrous hordes to think twice before they rushed in and tried to fuck with these people behind us who were trying to make a place for themselves in the world?

Nothing so preposterous as "healing the image of white men in the world". I refuse to bear the responsibility for stupid decisions that people who look like me may have done. I'm only now and have only ever been talking about strategy. I'll be a white ace-in-the-hole in public.

We need to know where we all fit in to this. And the enemy is easy to plan around. They're racist, which is a disphemism for "stupid and predictable". They outnumber us, sure. But the bad have always outnumbered the good. That's not different. We just got lazy. We thought we'd finally crossed the finish line marked "21^st Century" with the rest of the modern world. Well, close but not quite. We're still 16 years behind, and we've got more cleaning to do, apparently. Besides, this should all be easy. They're not readers. We won't even have to speak in codes. Shore up, stretch your shoulders, and prepare your war paint and killface. We know how close we are to being a species. Something the universe can be proud of making. Because we might be all there is. And even if we weren't, it's important to be unique, in the galactic scheme of things. The only greatest sin is uniformity. And these pale, dead ghosts want it all to look the same. Just like it does when they look in the mirror. And there is nothing more boring and stupid than wanting everything and everyone to look and sound and think like you.

Entropy is not a forgone conclusion.