Lately, I have been a lump. It’s been snowing. The main highway I would take to get anywhere close to civilization had the worst multi-car accident in its history. I’ve managed to get from my house to The Region and back with enough Thanksgiving leftovers that I’ve not had to leave again. This means it’s been a waterfall of TV. This means staying under a heated blanket in my poorly-insulated fort.
I feel like one of the last times I wrote I hit a certain turning point in my capacity to feel anxious about not doing “enough.” Most often, sitting around doing “nothing” but scrolling, phone-gaming, and TV watching would fill me with a sense of worry or dread that I wasn’t out making money or filling out a frustrating and absurd job application. I’ve really started to bodily lean into a place that’s unconvinced there’s a genuinely more “meaningful” or “productive” thing that’s going to land me a persistent sense of accomplishment or belonging.My desire to accomplish is no less diminished. My plans for shows haven’t changed. I think I’ve just punctured the illusion about what exists on the other side of what I might do. The horrors and potential of the present are keeping me curious about what is or isn’t driving movement or thought patterns.
The image of a woman dying from an exploded ordinance sent by Russia is staying with me. I think it was an episode of either Frontline or 60 Minutes. A pianist, her clothes and hair flutter furiously before she takes a few steps, collapses backwards, and bleeds to death. Any musician will know the time, patience, and dedication it takes to be described by your instrument. A war criminal’s ambivalence and his country’s either ignorance or complicity will snuff it out, arbitrarily, in an instant.
Watching her die is sticking with me like when I watched beheading videos and these couple of alleged Mexican cartel members get chopped up by a chainsaw. If you’ve seen the extended video of the Ukrainian girl stabbed on the train, there’s a similar sense and tone. This moment of infinite, “This is it.” If you did the math on their lives, would you mourn correctly? It sounds like a weird or inappropriate question. But would tears flow for the loss of potential, or for the worlds of selfish negligence that sealed fate well in advance? The gangsters didn’t flinch or cry. No one rushed over to even check on, let alone try to help, the Ukrainian refugee.
“Yeah so I’m already dead, on the inside, but I can still pretend.”
The gangsters know the patterns of gang life. It’s not a surprise to them when it’s their time. One could speculate part of the reason they got involved in the life altogether was to speed things along. One doesn’t routinely risk their life when they consider it something vitally important to hold on to. Travis Pastrana dialed back is adventures dramatically once he started having kids. Do you practice your instrument so it’s singing the song you’d want played on the day you die? When you travel to dangerous parts of the world, is there an irrational thrill for every second you’re not next to be abducted or taken advantage of?
As a narrative-based creature, it’s seems, literally, the most important thing you need in order to survive is the genuine belief that life matters. Count this as another reason to be deeply suspicious, if not angry, about professed religious faith. You get to bypass perhaps the paramount obligation in service to the next life. Your animal instincts may auto-pilot you through a series of impulsive pregnancies and acts coded as survival, but you might not really believe, deep down, that you should be here. If enough people pass a certain threshold with that not-so-deep “secret,” I think you start to explain why so much of the world looks the way it does.
Specifically, when lying becomes the air you breathe, to the point where entire organizations rise up in service to propaganda. Why care about any given endangered species, habitat, or “forever chemicals?” Why define words like “rights” or “zygote” when you’re stuck violently campaigning for an insatiably ironic and impossible level of control over forces that have already sealed your fate? “Life” knows you don’t get to escape and you’re probably not getting a pearly gate. The bullshit artist that constitutes your sense of an individual self is chronically incapable of incorporating that fundamental truth.
If there was some kind of “divine goal” of consciousness, I think it would look something like eradicating the otherwise ambivalence that dominates the landscape. It’s not to pretend it isn’t there. It’s not to act like it can be actually erased. It would be a dance. It would be a celebration of the knowledge of consequences. It would be the building of a communal accountable ecosystem that correctly clocks who is out to kill us and stops them before we’re converted into units of their system.
