“The future's here, we are it, we are on our own.”

All my writing is rooted in feeling. Each week I am like a boiling pot of water that eventually experiences enough heat that I bubble up at a moments notice and cascade right out that pot and into this here notes app. How different am I from miserable 15 year old me? Well, I am a lot different, but we both still operate from that deep spring of emotion that courses through my veins and leaves me with goosebumps after listening to Jimmy Eat World’s Bleed American for the 99,999 time. Emo, yeah, I am. Still, after all these years, I am that clear-eyed kid, who remarked to my Dad, “What are you smiling about? There are people dying in Iraq right now,” when he came home pretending to be MR DAD USA the one time I had a friend over. Glob, fuck that appearances bullshit. I am not gonna be a bit actor in someone else’s live pyramid-scheme, small-business infomercial. 

I don’t know how other people are able to do it—you know the processing. It would be really cool to be in some uninterrupted ancestral line with access to my people’s stories that could provide some sort of road map for how I am supposed to navigate all this :gesturing wildly:. Instead, I had a family video rental account, little caeser’s and slurpees, the hit 1998 classic Blade, and the feeling that the whole damn world was moving on with out me. That’s about as a quintessential American story as you can find: a suburban lullaby in flyover country punctuated by the great horrors of wounded, lost people trying to raise a family in an eroding empire. I am still sifting through the ruins of the early aughts and the heady hipster days of the tens. I think my friend Hannah (of Mourning Light Divination) noted recently how healing form trauma is something that you may be doing your whole life. I feel that deeply as someone who is still processing 9/11, catholic schools, and family dissolution.

“In the suburbs, I, I learned to drive

And you told me we'd never survive

Grab your mother's keys, we're leaving

You always seemed so sure

That one day we'd be fighting in a suburban war

Your part of town against mine

I saw you standing on the opposite shore

But by the time the first bombs fell

We were already bored

We were already, already bored.”

Arcade Fire “The Suburbs”

I don’t know if I have ever really come back from my own suburban nightmare. That is a special form of quiet desperation where nothing truly happens, where you are strangled daily by the fear of failing and ending up stuck there. I saw a friend of mine, brain twisted by drugs, lose himself in that fear. He lost his tennis scholarship and his shot at a college degree. No one knows where he is anymore. Maybe he escaped and got clean. I hope he escaped and got clean. We lost Rusty to that suffocating normalcy—he slipped away in the night after taking too much of what he was taking. We all hoped it was an accident. I want to believe it was an accident. It’s why I left and haven’t been back since I packed up my mom’s house and drove out of town with a handful of keepsakes that are on my altar. A stone with my mom’s illustrations, camera, a glass heart I bought for her, and a bag of crystals—that’s all I have of that place anymore. My dad is there, but I will never go back. I don’t ever want to go back.

I am really not trying to overreact, but it’s just so hard to not get caught.  The memes, you know what the kids are producing, they talk about this phenomena of the millennials having no more serotonin left because of the number of epoch-defining trauma events we have lived through. Yeah, plagues, market collapse, and suicide attacks will make it hard to move on. I am sure Gen Z have the same problem of having your life chances cut at the knee caps before you even had a chance to get going. So, you know just for funsies, I subject my own master narratives of these time periods to a sort of vivisection. I think about who the bad folk are, because it’s helpful to lay blame on someone. I think about how it has effected my own security and stability. It’s the primary occupation hazard for sociologists to question, question, question until meaning keeps slipping, slipping, slipping into oblivion. So, I’m stuck in a degrading memory tape loop, not unlike William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, where I get farther and farther afield from reality with each repetition. Each memory degrades a bit from reality a little more as I run it back on the projector in my mind.

Here we are again writing about how my own direct experience is proving more meaningful to me in this drenched season of nectar we consider harvest season. A few weeks back, I wrote about how established bodies of facts, like science, hold less meaning for me as I age and experience life in bureaucratic apparati obsessed with producing facts and defining truth. Part of my return to focusing on my own direct experience is a rather explicit aim to de-educate myself, in Gary Snyder’s parlance, after opening that firehose of facts and finding the truth I was looking for about the questions I had about the world. I have enough situationally-important facts force fed down my throat at this point that I just can’t anymore. The hard drive is full and I would rather just eat a ripe peach and then go on a bike ride to see what height the water table is at. 

That’s why I just can’t with people quoting science journals about our plant and animal kin. It’s not that it’s not valuable. As long as it dazzles people into enchantment, I could care less. It’s just that for me personally my brain immediately starts to shut off when we start talking about the results of some study. I’m a casualty of information-saturation times. I use my brain like a hard drive for my job, so this is my rebellion. I don’t need to be a hard drive for you all. You all seem to like me just fine if I talk about my feelings and what I know. It’s also a mute point for me. I don’t need to know scientifically that trees talk to one another to know that trees talk to one another. Wouldn’t our time be better served just like sitting under a tree watching clouds than conducting a study to “prove” plant communication. But, I will stop myself before I get too far down into a rather abstract lament about the inane nature of how our society is structured and how this is all made up.  Maybe most of our societal problems would be solved if more people just wanted to ride a simple pedal bike to a spot and eat some ripe fruit.

I will be honest, all this discussion is me just warming up to talking about what I really need to: The Suffering (TM pending). For some reason, when I am stretching my brain out to write about THE SUFFERING, I gotta talk about being emo and how I am sick of people telling other people to feel. I mean that writing is still valid , but I just need to write about how hard parenting is in 2023 right now. I am again writing of Lily and I’s difficulty with child care. This time the person helping us out with Juniper during the week had to leave a few days early to start their new job, leaving us back in the full time child care scramble for a week. Look, it’s fine, ultimately, I used my paid time off (again privilege) and helped take care of my kid. We got to cuddle and watch Despicable Me in all its formats. But this is America. We are always left scrambling, because we are on our own..to raise our kids, feed and cloth ourselves, to keep a roof over our heads. We have to cut ourselves into nine million pieces to try and be an employee, a partner, a father. There’s not much left after that. My brain is fried sitting here writing this. This is America, where you or your kin could may not come home ‘cause of a hate crime. This is America, where you “you get caught slippin’” and your done. This is America, where our politics are trying to force a live experiment of a Hobbesian world view. That’s why our art BURNS SO BRIGHT, because the threat of death is ever present.

You couple this deep friend brain, available at a state fair near you, and the larger generational problem with information saturation and you get paralyzed. I know that paralysis. I sat in front of a computer gaming for hours on end to deal with it for a few years. Now, I just focus on my little projects, building a world of my own choosing. I have these little goals I am working towards in the little specs of time I have and I work toward them. This week the balms were arranging dye pots for yarrow and cochineal dyeing, watering my plants, weaving a gift for my new bike shop, and getting to ride my bike. Those helped me keep myself going while the world was on fire, predatory capital assembled voltron to try and scavenge property rights from fire victims, and I was reminded that I too am on my own. It’s the small things created with my hands that keep me from really getting unhitched and spinning off my axis in this collapse. Again, the meme-zeitgeist is shown to hold simple little bits of wisdom:

“The future's here, we are it, we are on our own.”  Grateful Dead “Throwing Stones”

So, I find solace in song. This performance from 1987 is quite chilling, because of how matter of fact Bob Weir is in his delivery. It feels like this realization that we are on our own in the face of societal failure to address large scale social issues is a recurring theme in our society. In Bob's time, it was the threat of nuclear holocaust in the cold war, the beginning salvos of climate change, and over six years of the decimation of the social safety net with Reaganism. In our time, its the resurgence of a cold war, climate change’s real disasters, and a fully decimated social safety net. Funny how much can change for the worse across 36 years. Yet, I find solace in the fact that this isn’t new, that its still “all too clear that we are on our own,” and we gotta build our own social safety net to protect, feed, cloth, and house each other. I have faith in the real progress that we have made in learning how to form collectives on our own that are dedicated to mutual aid and assistance.

Welp, I think that’s all the emo I got left in me. I’m gonna go ride my bike into the sunset and hope a monsoon doesn’t get me.

Thank you, as always, dear reader, for showing up and caring about this little project. It is one of life’s great joys to be closing in on the 1 year anniversary of writing an essay every week. As part of that celebration, we will be going paid with this essay series. The first paid essay will arrive on September 3, 2023. In the lead up to that, I will provide y’all information about how you can subscribe so you don’t miss any of my stories. The format will be 1 free paid essay every month and 3 pay-walled essays. Subscriptions will be 7 dollars a month or $70 for a year. This roughly equates to a double shot of espresso ($2.33) an essay to read the weekly essays. I hope you are interested in coming along and find my unique brand of off-the-wall storytelling useful to bring into your life. I would be glad to have you along for the ride, dear reader.

All my best,

James

Thanks for reading, Hoss! I appreciate you spending a little bit of your time in my corner of the interwebz. I hope you have a great day. You can subscribe below to get all free stories right to your inbox.