It's the end of the year and I'm marking time
“Americans can’t deal with death unless they own it.”
-David Wojnarowicz
My head fell down and could not get up this year. I can’t really say what it is or was. A creeping thing that starts to happen when you are no longer young but not yet old? Maybe I’m just more depressed, or acclimated to a new form of numbness brought on by a daily cavalcade of horrors.
I want. Yet, there are very few things to want.
It seems to me that most people I know, friends, acquaintances, family, have been struck by a particular malaise. I don’t think anyone actually believes in the future anymore, both as a concept and materially. The injustices, the contradictions, the horrors of daily life—all of it has piled up to the point where a new pattern of behavior has formed—a static, consumptive emptiness.
Some people have it good. There are fewer and fewer of them each day. They have jobs, some of which are bullshit jobs, gathering profits for venture capital firms, providing “services,” swirling money around like the grit at the bottom of a coffee cup. Beneath them, an underclass keeps the whole thing running, powered by cheap poisons that are becoming less cheap by the day.
The got-it-goods lie to themselves that their poisons are distinctive, higher in class, mouthfeel, flavor.
Class is a disease, a disease that infects its host and overwrites will, sense. Soon, it’s not a disease at all–it’s the natural order of things. There’s no alternative. Beep borp consume consume.
But more people are seeing the disease, and while we were ignoring it, it’s symptoms transitioned. Terminal. We can no longer square the world. We watch, slack-jawed. Innocent people get bombed in an open-air prison in Gaza; a COVID death toll of more than a million; slaughtered children at schools day after day after day; refugees drowning in the ocean; entire species going extinct in an instant; every cop shop in every city getting more money and more artillery; people, their minds gone, destroyed, screaming outside our houses.
We’ve built an idiotic edifice to worship and we’re not sure why we’re worshiping it. It’s incredibly stupid. The dumbest possible things seem to be happening to us and each of us is powerless to stop it. Poke your head up? Get it blown off.
Looking at any of this in the eye melts your brain. If you’ve got a scrap of humanity left in you, it grabs that little skin tag you’ve been noticing on the side of your belly and uses it to peel your flesh from your bones. It hurts. Better to be numb, better to be a baby with a memory of 15 seconds. Better to lash out, isolate yourself.
I can’t think about this—my dog is diarrheaing all over my apartment and I’ve gone bald.
My life has contracted and I feel so much smaller than I ever have. I have a job now where I get to help a little bit, though it’s a paltry swell of nothing in a sea of despair. Believing that it can get better, that we all can be better, it’s become so hard for me to see. Our society traffics in the Jim-From-The-Office false hope consumerist bullshit that covers an ocean of blood with a sheen of vomit and calls it progress.
When will we recognize that we belong to each other? When? That your suffering is my suffering, and mine is yours.
When has being a baby done anything for anyone? Does grief become less grief-y when you’ve done a series of mental gymnastics to prepare for it? This numbness and tiredness, it’s bullshit. It’s tedious garbage and I want none of it. I am owed. We are owed. The bombs and the death and the unending streams of meaningless objects that we populate our soured lives with are transforming us. And we deserve better.
To 2024. Quit fucking it up.