There's so much construction happening at the moment and obviously that's a part of city living, but there's this voice in my head now which stands on recent globally catastrophic events (increasingly frequently this century) which is saying; 'why bother'
It whispers this now behind everything I do. When I get out of bed in the morning, when I wash dishes or vacuum or make the bed or read a book, or boil water for another pot of coffee presumably seeking an energy boost for some project. Every little ritualised thing now in my day is underlaid by this creaking skeletal voice, rising up from this crypt of existential doubt and dread (only very recently furbished), and also boredom (of all things), and it's refreshingly consistent compared to everything else right now. Always and ever the same.
Why. Fucking. Bother?
Like everyone I live in the barely habitable gutter between hope and despair in a rat's nest of junk food and netflix. I see and hear people moving around me, doing things, striving for things, torn between their own motivations and the objective intel around them that the aspirations they had are mostly meaningless now, desires constructed from a world that suicided around April. The new world, which is really just a default setting of morbid uncertainty that those denuded of infrastructural accoutrements already know intimately, those unfortunates that Badiou tallies as the remainders in a less-than-universal equation of Human Rights; yeah, the new world is a winter-garden and those desires and dreams which have motored me and others towards an untenable horizon of affluence are summer strains that will barely seed, and if they manage to sprout at all will certainly wither and die before budding.
Lol.
Individualistic competition and it's ecologically damning cultures of environmental abstraction/extraction are meeting a wall. My optimism about capitalism's 'end' though is tentative just because it's proven time and again to be a fluidly adaptive beast that can assimilate it's poisons and reconstitute them as strength and merit; even in lethal doses.
Whether or not the system regroups beyond this critical moment as a doubly insidious enslaving force (i.e. binding the poor to fixed precariousness and a spiritual shame of themselves despite their circumstances being mostly systemic; ignoring the red-flags of global warming and continuing plunder-for-progress as per the western fable of Growth with a Capital G), depends on these elections, depends on these next few years and whether the holders of the world's wealth are comfortable with both having kids and knowing that inherited wealth won't save them; that in fact the earth will be an arid unliveable ash-pile in the next few decades; that increased and lethally mutated virulence has been a long expected diagnostic of climate-change, that covid is a symptom of rising temperatures which scientists have a morbid hunch (more like an empirically supported forecast) is probably the merest tip of the iceberg.
If you're thinking of having kids right now you may as well just take a loaded gun into the delivery room with you and the second it breaches pop a cap in it's head, because essentially going full term is the equivalent only with an arduous middle-man; by 'middle-man' meaning adolescence and if they're lucky a noirishly hardboiled adulthood (but definitely not middle-age lol).
Bringing it back to the construction going on outside my window, driving a slow screw into both my temples with it's incessant industrial ambience; I understand it's election year and towards Christmas there's a lot more works going on because council needs to give the appearance of having sensibly spent it's grants etcetera, but Jesus fucking Christ that voice in my head screaming 'why bother why bother' is seeing cycle-lanes and newly smoothed curbs and wondering who the fuck is that for?
Like, it's the veneer of planning for the future, of fortifying infrastructure in the most cosmetic capacity because honestly it's gonna get another generation's fair use and then bye-bye.
And what's it like to be in high school right now?
What does it feel like to be in the middle of formal-ish compulsory training for a world that imploded overnight, no less as a cumulative result of our hubris of which secondary curriculum is a complaisant buffer? Does it feel like those last few weeks of school before the summer holidays when you;re there but not really, when everybody's relaxed and half the school's bunking anyway and teachers might share your smoking spot without batting an eye. Is it like that but a whole year of it, with an additional doom-aesthetic?
Are the kids okay or is it giving them ptsd?
I guess only time will tell.
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