Coming out of lockdown and re-entering society has been rough. I’m speaking on behalf of everyone out there who I’m assuming have met the same existential difficulty of socialising in and around an exponentially malleable world, shaping and re-shaping in accordance with an equally fluid contagion. If we thought the vampiric fluidities of late-stage capitalism were bonkers enough, I feel like a pandemic has only reiterated the best and worst of our situation so that now, waking up every morning and ‘doing life’, is sans drudgery—instead, there’s a baseline of crippling anxiety. But also exhilaration. It’s like the most mundane things now are filtered through a funhouse mirror and splashed with bacterium invisible except for under black light (a virus like an unseen spectre, like the angel of death snatching Pharaoh’s first borns), like we went from living in a concrete world to the return of ghouls and spirits (Fanged Noumena) overnight; like the finale of Legend of Korra, a harmonic convergence which draws the veils of the physical and spiritual worlds together to unleash a Lovecraft-pantheon on industrial cities. That’s what being in a bar feels like now. So say I.
And this unholy pressure we get in December when summer brings everyone to a low boil, coupled with the usual end-of-year fatigue and financial disarray of vacation-time and orgiastic consumption, now paired cruelly with masses who’ve regressed to adolescent navel-gazing and social naïveté from our (horrifyingly) extended isolations. It’s a lot. It was always going to be a lot, but I’m really feeling now in this prickly coming-down-from-a-bag-of-speed moment that IT’S A LOT.
There is now the question of therapy which I have been humming and hawing over. Which I had actually decided against. But after weeping openly in a bar for, so far as I can remember (which isn’t much, and with difficulty), no reason at all, it’s a question I am putting to myself again. That said, perhaps the mean-average of ‘wellness’ and our expectations thereof should collectively pivot to accomodate the abject dissolution of security, of failsafes and fealty to a government which alleges it’s providence. I don’t personally have anything against with the way things work (not an anarchist or Marxist by any stretch), which most likely points to intellectual lethargy and desensitisation—definitely not masquerading my own apathies as a ‘cure’—but I can feel my most basic assumptions about the way things are organised shifting/sliding. This used to be an intermittent feeling but now I have it with me constantly, along with my phone and lip-care which I’m also never without. I’ve accessorised it, which I guess is how ideology works; ideology being the word for these very assumptions. Little facts that become the scenery in a person’s world-picture. Innocuous enough. But as anyone who exhibits their few critical theory books in the living room as clout-giving prized possessions will know, it’s the innocuous and the given which should elicit the most earnest interrogation. If only for the ambient influence of the innocuous, as constants which direct attitudes and behaviours in sometimes nefarious and clinically subtle ways.
I don’t make a habit of crying in bars . And yet I can think of three times I’ve done it this year. Does that a habit make? I’m doing a psychic inventory before this becomes an established precedent. Nipping it in the bud etc.
The current mess of misinformation is something gradually assimilating, becoming scenery and thusly expected of reality the longer we coexist with it. This is something we know. And yet what’s to be done? What does the insidious subjugation of a singular (mostly-)democratic narrative with exponential unverified tangents actually signify? Is it systemically closer to the plurality and impossible universalist-girding of the democratic project itself? Or is this a veritable red-herring, a mimicry or caricature of decentralised dialectics only. Meanwhile the content which this smoke-screening traffics—volubly advocated by libertarian defenders of ‘freedom’ who are pitted against a (mostly-)imaginary foe-state—undercuts it’s own assertion of freedom by espousing the primacy of certain identities over others, endorsing hate as the purest expression of an immovably reified individual liberty (which is mostly consumerist in it’s meaning). Cue populist violence and genocide.
Again, this is something we know.
As ideological scenery freedom is the very fucking worst set-piece. I hate it. Or I hate when it shuttles hate into mainstream discourse.
If I ever cry in a bar again I want it to be for reasons of national security. Just kidding. I don’t even know what that means. I just wrote it down because the words felt right together.
When I’m around my friends now I can’t help but find them all so beautiful. There’s this glitching logic I land in sometimes, when the third or fourth glass is working it’s magics, in which I hope that I’m as beautiful as they are—as tribute, as their due. This is obviously absurd and piggybacking lockdown-specific dysmorphia which I’m having a harder time shaking than I thought I would; naturally, after months of having nothing to do but scrutinise self. My most consistent relationship since August has been the one I had (have?) with my mirror. Thus completing a round-trip of juvenilia which started when I turned thirty (approximately, it’s hard to say) and which I’m consciously ending here, with our third and longest lockdown as an unfortunate accelerant, bookending a period of carnivalesque flail replete with flagellatory drinking and suicidal flirtations with straight boys. I’m consciously making disordered eating my lucky last notch in this nostalgia tour of teenage habits—which in hindsight I can guess was some kind of knee-jerk prophylactic against the brevity of my twenties (farewell to that decade of romantic misadventure and squalor—hello to a decade of erotic earnest and expansion, and hopefully more money than twenty-five year old me would’ve known what to do with). My friends are beautiful, or other people are beautiful, more so to me now than ever before. There’s also the livid contrast of proximal mortalities (death death death), more distant two years ago but icily near now, near enough my body is always prickling with it, constantly caffeinated with the inevitability of it; my sweet lovely death which can reduce any convoluted dramatics to manageable simplicity in an instant. Death as a luminous prime amidst fractions and decimals, a steel knife in a drawer of plastic spoons. Industrial-noise on a country playlist. Such a leveller, and by any and all poetics the only universal in thinly veiled pyramidal class-structures.
But even then, as pandemic times show, Death gets weaponised in the theatres of late capital—namely, experiences of death and dying varying relative to socioeconomics, access to healthcare etc. Accessibility blah blah.
It hurts to be awake because it feels like there’s more and more to take stock of, the act of centring in a single verifiable reality becoming a more difficult task by the fucking day.
If there is such a thing as freedom then perhaps crying in a bar—taking one activity reserved for private moments or ritualised in the coddling dark of a movie theatre, and placing it where it unanimously doesn’t belong—is an expression of freedom du jour. More so than misguidedly demanding volition around a vaccine, where any preservation instinct would decree a big fat yes to the jab and denounce exercising choice here as bonafide insanity. I mean, freedom is all very well. But what’s the point of retaining individual liberties if the terrain in which those liberties allege themselves is a ruin? It’s that difference between freedom to and freedom from, the tensions between rights and emancipation which might be adjacent in discourse but nonetheless remain crucially distinct. Like, freedom TO focusing on maintaining a periphery of action, tending the sanctioned rights of individuals as they navigate the fundamental curtailments of collectivity—and freedom FROM, when those curtailments produce intolerable affects and/or environments (which includes the pending disasters of our metabolically disrupted ecology) and emancipatory moves must be made. Anyone can see the rollout of a vaccine in response to a contagion is an effort towards levelling out a potentially intolerable reality, putting it in the camp of freedom FROM; because a lassez faire approach would produce an environment in which defending superficial rights would be neither legible nor desirable. I’m embarrassed for some of my friends up north, many of whom are VERY educated, insisting on freedom TO stances as if they were staring down the barrel of state violence and oppression. What a fucking lol. That said, months of lockdown has left me without the will or capacity to pluck up and persuade them back to a consistent line of reasoning. Chrimbo is pressurised enough, you know?
So at this point I’m just cutting my losses.
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