Simply agitating for a more equitable and less predatory organization of society

God that is such a good joke. hello IDIOT

The economy of it. It reminds me of a passage from A Creature Wanting Form that goes like so:

Kids aren’t especially funny although when I was young my sister who is still the baby even though she has children of her own by now that are older than she will ever be in my memory used to tell me she had a joke for me and I’d say ok what is it and she’d say she could only whisper it to me so she’d come in close and look around conspiratorially and say poo poo and I always thought that was a pretty good one.

Then she’d lean back in and say here’s another joke.

Someday decades from now you and I will no longer be especially close although we will still love each other in our own way.

I thought that was a pretty fucked up thing for a seven-year-old to say to a guy.

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I had been sick for a couple of days last week feverish and chilled and incapable of experiencing joy although that third comedic effect item on the list wasn’t exactly novel so I took a Covid test or two that came up negative and not long after was like oh right. I experienced the very dumb epiphany that a person can just at any time for no reason become ill in the very standard manner that had fallen out of fashion there for a few years.

On the morning of Thanksgiving I woke up feeling like a bowl of dog piss and it was negotiated that I would stay home instead of heading down to dine and commune with my beloved in-laws and I felt something like loss mingled with excitement at least in part on account of the potential Kevin McCallister scenarios.

More than any of that though I felt relieved of a burden considering how eating-based holidays like this are a driver of exceptional dread for people with my whole deal.

Every holiday is eating-based I suppose but this is the big one. The Super Bowl of binging.

The normal Super Bowl is also the Super Bowl of binging but you know what I mean.

So instead of feeling morose that I’d be spending the first Thanksgiving of my long life alone it felt like a reprieve in that I would not have to eat and eat and eat right there in front of my wife’s cousins and God and everyone.

One doesn’t have to but one does anyway you know? How you drink deeply and lustily when it’s an open bar.

Then when that brief high wore off later I remembered that I would have to at least eat a little bite of something at some point and that we didn’t have anything in the house besides expiring vindaloo. Over the top of the lack of food if I’m honest was the absence of anything to drink which was an amateur mistake on my behalf in terms of preparedness. One of the first things they teach you as a Massachusetts townie is which days the package stores are closed on account of the Puritans’ centuries old shame.

Also how you can’t buy scratchies with a debit card.

After a couple hours of football sloth I walked up to the corner store and thought I’d buy some of the disgusting holiday flavored Polar soda waters they have out now and then sneak a six pack into the transaction like a nervous teenager disguising his condoms but they got my ass instantly and rudely to be frank as if they saw me coming a mile away and then it was like now what so I went home and drank my Polar Soda Pomegranate Champagne and started calling around figuring maybe the Chinese places in the area would be open and then worried I was racist for thinking that.

Eventually in my research I saw that this Frank Sinatra-ass suburban golf dad steakhouse with the $45 filet with the $13 green beans and so on was in fact open and so feeling somewhat better now health- and outlook-wise I drove twenty minutes over there along the stretch through the seasonally desiccating marshes and found a seat at the bar next to a fifty something couple that looked drunk enough to be planning on fucking each other when they got home but also drunk enough that they might be too drunk to follow through with it by the time they got there. Also drunk enough that they were one hundred percent going to break a glass before they left. I ordered a Negroni that came out at roughly a half a pint and then asked them to bring me a plate of Rhode Island style calamari that arrived presently with the hot peppers and the marinara and the half of a lemon inside of a mesh thing places like this do for you so you can squeeze it all over and I poked my fork around the dish to give the gin something to contend with inside of my fucking guts. All of a sudden I wasn’t sick anymore.

It was unclear to me if I was underdressed here in my standard costume. Half the people were millionaires and half were going to be dead within two years and looked like it.

I turned to my phone and read a thread by this person here that went something like:

This thing on the US Right where queer people and Leftists are routinely labelled as "groomers" - i.e. as a direct physical predatory threat to children - is the project of defamatory social re-classification you get as reactionaries move toward exterminationist social cleansing. A hundred years ago in parts of Europe if a large number of priests started giving sermons about Jews killing Christian kids or poisoning wells, people knew it was time to run. The institutions of "conservatism" start systematically lying about groups people are already socially authorized to dislike, painting them as the immediate threat. Whether anti-Semitic Catholic priests or the Republicans and their grifter economies.

…and then it went on for a while more after that but this was the salient point for me:

“...systematically lying about groups people are already socially authorized to dislike…”

That’s a sentence that put some things I’ve been thinking about into focus. It has always every single day that I’ve been alive been socially acceptable to either mock or villainize or place a target on the heads of people simply agitating for a more equitable and less predatory organization of society.

Even expressing such a wish for a better world has always been seen as de facto comical. The musings of a hybrid goofy romantic/would-be authoritarian in the way that the right always characterizes their enemies as both weak and all powerful at once.

Then I had a cup of corn chowder that was thicker than crude oil and must have been two thousand calories and hated myself for it and I read another tweet that went something like:

“In America, victims of mass shootings aren’t even guaranteed thoughts and prayers anymore.”

…and that seemed profound to me but now a couple days later thinking about it again I don’t think it’s true I think the thoughts and prayers are still being proffered it’s just that the right has given up on the pretense of lying about what those thoughts and prayers actually consist of.

You can speak clearly about what you believe and want to happen to your political enemies when you are on the right in America but you cannot do so on the left. You have to be cute about it. Always but even more so now.

I’ve been thinking back to this talk I had with Kim Kelly a couple years ago on the case for the left arming themselves apropos of nothing.

I know you are a supporter of the left arming themselves. I’m open to hearing arguments for that, although I’m really, really anti-gun. Let’s say we armed ourselves to push back against the feds taking over cities. Wouldn’t we just get immediately smoked? What is the point of even having my shitty little gun when they come in with the tank?

That’s valid.

I know it’s a complicated topic, but please explain it all succinctly within two minutes.

Well I can give you my perspective at least. Nobody who isn’t already too far gone to reason with is thinking about mounting any kind of standing army or militia or pro-active offense against the state. That’s just asking to be blown to smithereens. In a lot of this discussion around arming the left it’s not an offensive posture, it’s a defensive one. For example, if twenty of us showed up trying to scrap with the cops, that’s twenty funerals. It’s stupid. But if we’re at a protest and twenty of us are there open-carrying, not causing any issues, just establishing a presence, the cops are going to act differently when they try to come toward the protestors we’re trying to protect. I say that because I've seen it in multiple situations in multiple cities. In Charlottesville before the real bad things happened, there were a bunch of us in a park with a perimeter established by this group called Redneck Revolt, which has disbanded by now. There were hordes of roving Nazis everywhere, but none of them came into that park because there were people outside of it like, nah. They were a deterrent.

The cops don’t respect anyone who isn’t a cop. It’s a dark thing to think about, but when you’re there and you're armed you're placing yourself closer to their level. So they see you as more of a person. You’re not as much of a target. And that gives them pause. Maybe it won’t keep them from brutalizing everybody, but it will make them think twice about it. It will make them maybe think a minute about their strategy instead of cracking everyone’s skulls. It’s more of a buffer than a threat the way I see it. There’s also the fact that a lot of these leftist gun organizations are white people. I think this is a way that people that have that privilege, who might not immediately be brutalized by the cops… When you can put yourself between black and brown people and the police, and they know they have to, if not respect you, but at least take a minute to kind of consider things, you’re going to make yourself more helpful.

I don’t have any grand delusions about any of this. I don’t think if shots were fired anything good would happen. You never want that to happen. If you show up somewhere with a firearm that is an automatic escalation, and you need to respect that and understand what that means. You should never want violence to happen. Your whole purpose being there is to make sure violence doesn’t happen. Maybe there are other people who see it differently, but I would not want to work with them. That’s dangerous and stupid.

People who hate guns... I totally understand. Why wouldn’t you hate guns in this country? Honestly being in Charlottesville shifted my perspective on it. It was like, ok, the only people protecting us that day were these other leftist people with firearms. The only time I felt safe was in that park. Obviously things went south, but it wasn’t their fault.

As much as it sucks that there are millions and millions of guns everywhere, I think understanding that they can be used in a way that isn’t necessarily bad would be good for the left to, if not embrace, but think about a little bit. The Black Panthers were right about a lot of things.

When you put it that way. Whether we’re armed or not, if they wanted to, they could still get our asses, but they might think twice I guess.

A couple extra seconds might save a couple lives.

I am not going to get a gun to be clear only in part because of shit like this.

People in homes with handguns more likely to be shot dead, major study finds

Researchers find ‘zero evidence of any kind of protective effects’, with women at particular risk

The GuardianGuardian staff and agencies

Then I read some of this story about how tumultuous the Colorado Springs murderer's childhood was and thought hm me too but I just got into comic books and loud music and exercising instead of going out and killing everyone.

Just now I went and looked back at some notes I had taken when I was talking to my mother a few months ago so I could get answers to some questions my therapist wanted to know about my childhood and this part stood out:

"He sat there with a gun to your head. I don't know how much you remember. But you lived in a trauma-filled world. He never physically abused you. He was abusive to me. But as a result our household was full of definite trauma. He was gone shortly after the episode with the gun. Continued to terrorize home. Burned down house. Police constantly at the house. Does a two year old absorb that? Maybe?"

Maybe.

There was a crash and a squeal and sure enough the couple next to me had broken a martini glass and the veteran bartender in his vest and bowtie who was gagging for the shift to be over so he could go see his own family came over and said don’t touch it I’ll do it sternly but kindly and then they left and drove home to wherever it is these people drive home to. Guess we'll never know if they ended up boning or not. I don't know how to know that.

The biggest hunk of martini glass was jutting out of the sopped bar mats like a jagged rock formation. The type of thing you could kill yourself with if you weren't careful.

I drove home myself and realized I was missing my own family at this point all of my family family I wasn't even going to see one way or another today and I read a bunch of the typical tweets about Thanksgiving Uncles and it dawned on me I was lucky to never really have that kind of uncle. All me and my uncles ever really talk about is how insane my grandmother made us all and how cool it was to go see Santana all the time in the seventies.

I posted something to that effect and someone shared this video of Santana playing Soul Sacrifice at Woodstock and it just consumed me for the next hour.

This shit is so so nice. Every dude is five seconds away from collapsing but just so in the pocket and on the moon at the same time.

This is one of the best YouTube comments I've ever seen.

It would have been Charles Schultz' 100th birthday the other day and my pal Kaleb Horton reposted this article he wrote about Peanuts a couple years ago calling it "the longest-running meditation on loneliness, defeat, and alienation ever in popular American art."

That sounds dramatic and a bit revisionist, but it’s not. Case in point: a strip from September 18, 1994. It’s about Snoopy’s brother Spike, superficially a dog but really something more like a Great Depression-era boxcar hobo. He’s sitting in the Mojave Desert, next to a cactus.

He sighs, sits down, and asks to no one why he lives alone in the desert. Then he tells his story to a cactus. He explains that he was in a crowd, and the crowd asked him to catch a rabbit. He chased the rabbit out into the street, where it was hit by a car. “Oh, how I hated myself!” he laments. “And how I hated those people who shouted ‘Get him!’”

“So I came out here to the desert where I couldn’t hurt anything again. I’ve never told this to anyone before.” Then he turns and reminds us he’s talking to a cactus. “I guess I still haven’t.”

It’s one of the finest pieces of art ever to sneak its way into a nationally syndicated comic strip. It’s a story of grief, guilt, and yearning, told with perfect economy by a protagonist who will never be able to get away from his pain. Schulz ends the strip on a note of despair more befitting a Samuel Beckett story than a comic strip.

Then he goes on to compare Schultz and Kierkegaard.

Kierkegaard and Schulz’s similar backgrounds led to the exploration of similar themes. Both dealt with alienation and the pursuit of internal, individual truth. Both were concerned with the ethics of simply living as a human being on this planet. Both dealt in parables.

And both took childhood seriously. “Every person is essentially what he will become by the time he is ten years old. And yet you will find that almost all bear damage from their childhood that they cannot overcome even when they attain the age of seventy,” wrote Kierkegaard in his journals.

Schulz and Peanuts quotes Schulz as writing “we are all pretty much what we are going to be early in our lives. Our personalities and characteristics are established, usually by the time we are five or six years old, but the lids are on. We are like boiling pots on a stove.”

I looked back again just now at the talk with my mother and she said "It was from an early age. The last time you were comfortable in your body was maybe 12."

Somewhere around my seventh watch through the Santana video Michelle arrived home bearing plates of Thanksgiving leftovers and I thought nooo I was so close to pulling it off. I had this stupid daydream about not eating any of it. I pictured myself going to bed not having microwaved an overflowing plate of stuffing and bird drenched in gravy and potatoes and squash and green beans and roll after roll and it was such a nice little fantasy to live inside of for a little while. To be the type of person who wouldn't have to do that.

To be in control.

The great poet Bernadette Mayer has died and I'm thinking about an oft-quoted line of hers that she told to her students.

“Work your ass off to change the language and don’t ever get famous.”

Here are a few of her poems I like.