Sometimes I think it would be easier to have been born into a rich white family with a sturdy lineage of inherited wealth to fuck around in while the world lurches into smouldering self-imposed ruin. Like everyone I feel more and more anxious the closer we get to the election, especially with Judith Colins sharing the same air as me; I really can't fathom that such a disreputable troll can get up in a public debate and say nothing of merit worth or even legibility, and somehow the fuck-nugget analysts can still say she 'won'. Like, I know we're in pretty deep in terms of American-influenced politic-styles, the post-Reagan politics as spectacle which we've come to know and love (gag), but do we really have to lean so heavily into it, even encourage it and normalise it for your average audience who might otherwise be persuaded to see beyond mere 'performances of strength' and actually engage with the words coming out of our politician's mouths? With America burning, what exactly is the obligation to sustain this commitment to sensationalist celebrity-styled political coverage?
I mean, look at where it's gotten America. They have an actual reality television star screwing their country into the ground.
I feel like I can barely see or think through my anxiety. I just can't imagine navigating the world as it is, as it's becoming, under the management of neoliberal assholes who cannot grasp that a system which presents economic well-being and keeping people alive during a pandemic as conflicted interests, is clearly a broken system.
I feel like starting sentences with I feel. Anything else feels too declarative, too imperative, too much of an imposition on reality; like maybe I'd upset the fates (who are already clearly exacting some terrible vengeance). I feel like I'm tipping into that 'magical thinking' Joan Didion talks about in her book about grief; the one where she has a hell year in which her husband dies and her daughter almost dies (or actually does die? I can't remember now) from a rare terminal illness. Is my anxiety right now so full-throttle it's approximating the same bodily disturbances of grief, which I definitely remember from burying my dad in my early twenties.
Or maybe it's not an approximation of grief, but real grief, and the bereavement is of a sort of innocence, a way of life or assumptions it was recently (maybe only tenuously this decade) still possible to make about the world; and even though the world before this year was still a confusing place the core-illusion (whatever it was) has finally collapsed. It feels like every year or so there's a certain 'loss of innocence', that this feeling is typical of the experiences of younger generations and how it feels to be in the world right now; just an unending procession of 'loss of innocence' moments to which we are becoming increasingly desensitised, until our ability to critically resist or consider each change is lessened, beaten into submission by sheer frequency.
Despair sets in, all the exhausting affects of grief, the free fall of depletion, of disillusionment, a type of negative surrender that has it's own sort of stark grandeur.
Feels like drowning but also strangely comforting to have such complete desolation. Oddly more satisfying than a stopping-and-starting incremental approach to apocalypse. When the catastrophe is this global and subsequently confirmed, not just the neurodivergent hunch of some hysterical conspiracy theorist.
