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.