Note: I wrote this last night after reading a particularly realistic and therefore painful assessment of the world’s economic situation. This is the experience of late capitalism writ both eye-level and so large we can’t comprehend it fully.

Cracked riverbeds; pale adobe dust.

I have no more. At this point

it’s all dry heaving, sugar-bile

staining the back of my throat.

I can’t sing. I’ve got bad habits.

Maybe this will make me beautiful.

Maybe if I just own this I’ll be

mirrors, refracted, instead of tethered

to this awkward lumbering seething

pile of gristle, fat and bone. Maybe

you’ll want me. Want me for what?

Batteries improperly disposed of

are leaking into the groundwater.

I have no more. Maybe you won’t

get close enough to the facade.

Maybe we’ll be evicted. Maybe

we will remember. Maybe there is

worth in the scraps. Maybe we are home,

constantly grasping.

Even as someone who’s been involved in lifelong social and political activism (from the ‘kids’ rights’ newsletter I drafted in elementary school on upward), it’s surreal being able to see the impact you have as an individual on national politics. I spent the last three days of the campaign on the ground in Indiana, and though there was a considerable amount of groundwork already laid, obviously (some of which I’d helped with), standing at that poll on Tuesday talking to one of the lawyers about how 86% of our precinct had voted had a very visceral, emotional impact on me. Yes, the country was headed in this direction; yes, it was a bad year for any GOP candidate (go read that Newsweek 7-part series about the election, by the way). The accidental intersection of time and space and personal whirlwinds is a very strange place indeed.

The other defining moment that will stick out to me from this past weekend is the afternoon I spent talking to a 41-year-old (black) man (one of my fellow canvassers) at length about his job (working the night shift at UPS) and how it plays into his sense of self and about his participation in politics (“This is the first election I’ve registered to vote in because this is the first time I feel like I’ve had a representative candidate to vote for”). His story is where the heart is for me. People who felt isolated/disenfranchised from and disengaged with civic action (for good reason) are becoming active – that is a huge, huge step in the right direction.

We live in a liminal country now. We have made history, but we also have a long way to go (after all, California passed Prop 8; it looks like the legal challenges have merit, which gives me some hope, but still). I will stubbornly never understand how the continuing struggle for human rights is not equally important in all cases, though I do understand choosing one’s battles.

A and I were talking today about process vs. product, the theme that (as many of you who have known me a long time) has ghosted so many of my moves and thoughts for the last fifteen or so years. Has capital so hollowed us out that we can only see ourselves in terms of what we can produce and how we relate to others?

I’ve been feeling like it’s time to revisit “Minima Moralia” for quite a while now; I’ve always meant to read it in tandem with Aristotle’s “Magna Moralia,” which it was written as a semi-response to.

For intellectuals, unswerving isolation is the only form in which they can vouchsafe a measure of solidarity. All of the playing along, all of the humanity of interaction and participation is the mere mask of the tacit acceptance of inhumanity. One should be united with the suffering of human beings: the smallest step to their joys is one towards the hardening of suffering.

Even though I know there are important things going on elsewhere in the world and that nobody really needs to read my thoughts about the upcoming presidential election – I am a predictable leftist, I’ve known who I was voting for from the beginning, etc. – I’m about to go cast my (early) vote and I know I’ll be holding my breath until all the ballots are in on Tuesday. It’s chilly, dead leaves are chasing one another and we’re all rushing somewhere.

This is the first time in my (relatively short) lifetime that this process feels like a movement to me (so said R. yesterday, and she was right). She voted yesterday, and she said that families were hanging around in front of the polling place taking pictures of themselves with their ‘I Voted!’ stickers. I can’t remember such a feeling of community engagement with politics ever before – it was something I nostalgically always yearned for. Before my time, never coming back, gone with popular anarchist stump-speeches and union organizing from within and politics as everyday life, not as marginal act.

I’m glad to say I was wrong.

I wonder often if there might be a slight trending toward ideals of conservation, community, idealism, progressivism – but maybe that’s my wishful thinking turning its face toward the sun. I feel like such things are a natural response to the kind of socioeconomic and environmental crises that we’re facing.

Of course, I’m also older and cranky and fed up with the idea of lifestyle as an organizing concept.

It’s difficult to resume something (even something as scattershot as a personal blog) after two years, but there is actually some continuity at work here (false blotch or not).

One of the last entries I wrote was about my Bubbe, who I think about several times daily but who is particularly present in my life in the fall. Yesterday, I threw away a coat that had some significant holes in the lining and was thus of no further utility, but before I threw it out I found her pin that I’d pinned to it ages ago. I held it in my fist like an amulet and looked up at my reflection in the glass – I have my young mother’s face and my young grandmother’s body. I’d spent so many years telling myself I wasn’t beautiful even though I always thought both of them were. That fundamental disconnect of self-perception that hangs between logic and emotional resonance has always been a stumbling block.

My drive for self-perfection has always led me to try to find comparative benchmarks, most of which are false hooks that pull me off stage left when I need to be centered.

I pulled a few pages out of one of my old journals the other day so that I could have a blank book in which to (rip it up and) start again. I do this periodically. It’s not the newness that I need to fold into my fist, it’s the consistent practice.

One year ago, yesterday, I arrived in this city as a resident.

Yesterday exactly would have been her 88th birthday. I ate apples and honey. Food is my last claim to a culture I was never part of.

The pain may ebb with time, but the loss never fills in.

It’s been a year of recognizable milestones in the lives of people who are dear to me – births, deaths, weddings, and so forth – the kind of things that get recorded by quill-scratch in the community roster. My own growth is less tangible, less earmarked, but it is substantive.

Human adaptability never ceases to surprise me.

Author’s note: When I left work yesterday, there was a ‘luau party’ happening in the lobby of my building. It filled me with some kind of bemused revulsion. I wrote this using that imagery/situation as an attempt to get at the hollow heart of the horrors of capitalism. Note the word ‘attempt’ there. Maybe this is overly simplistic and overly Foucault 101?

She’d been practicing her pasted-on smile all day in a cosmetic mirror so that it didn’t look quite like a photo-grimace; she had to have some semblance of authenticity, after all. She was on the clock.
She tilted her head like an owlet. “Wine or beer, sir?”

She was briefly glad that there was a solid bar, draped with cheap fake flowers (after the Event they’d go back in the storage closet until the dog days of next summer), between her and the executives. It was a rare one that didn’t raise his eyes from her cleavage, rest his elbow on the bar, give her his answer between yellowing teeth with a little fat salamander tongue. They couldn’t touch her, and she couldn’t punch them.
The executives were mostly male, Hawaiian shirts slightly unbuttoned, greying chest-hair spackling their pallid flesh; of course they were. Even the women, slightly uncomfortable in their sundresses, looked at her down the sides of their noses. She figured their patronizing glances were tinged with fear; they could have been her, might have been her, might lose their glass slippers and become her. Their privilege hummed with taut tendons, high vibrato.

“Louie Louie” distorted over the PA. Nonsense words. Harmless. Everyone knew it. It sounded like blurry noise to her.
In the corner, two of her coworkers were trying to set up a limbo stick. People on the edge of retirement acting like they were at a junior high school mixer. Pathetic, this tilt at innocence.

“Wine or beer, ma’am?”

Loud colors clashing. Inflatable, replaceable, fake. Everywhere the simulacrum of – she reminded herself – what may have been once an indigenous tradition. Was it ever? She didn’t know. She knew little about Polynesia. Did it matter what was real once?

She felt, all over, as if she would crack. What would leak out when she did? What kind of iron-black slime? The smiles were getting tinier and more brittle on her mouth as the evening wore on; she hated that she’d been roped into this, afraid she’d lose her job if she wasn’t a “team player.” Her heart exploded for the service industry. What did these (“Wine or beer?”) interactions enforce, if not the steel girders of a hierarchy that had and would exist no matter the firebombings, no matter the toxic hatred of the workers propping the whole thing up?

They all assumed she belonged to the catering company. She’d let them believe that. She’d keep what she did all day a secret, keep her intelligence, keep her dedication. She wouldn’t give these fools one piece.

The PA began blasting “When a Man Loves a Woman.” She teetered on the edge of frowning and raised her eyebrows to lift the drawbridge of her coffee-stained, well-lacquered-and-lipsticked mouth.

She knew how this would play out. They’d get drunk and the men would get more flirtatious and the women would get more twittery and sealed-off and someone would win a blender or something in the limbo contest and her HR director would pass out donation forms and information packets which would get discarded discreetly and she’d be the last one to leave, pushing the wooden bar into the service elevator, helping the janitors pick up the scraps of bright paper, and they’d do it all again next year whether she was there or not.

I bought earwig’s “under my skin i am laughing” out of the dollar bin totally unheard (with a bunch of other records, none of which were any good at all) at Joe’s Record Emporium in Rockville when I was 15. They released this one record as earwig, became ‘Insides,’ put out an inferior album on 4AD (in my opinion), and then disappeared off the map as far as I can tell. This record sounds like a combination of Low’s “Curtain Hits the Cast” and Jarboe’s “Sacrificial Cake” and I’ve never heard anything quite as creepy and gentle and honest and sad. Just for a Day has mp3 links and a good entry on this record.

I dig it out of the collection every year or so, and I lay there last night with my studio headphones on listening to it at two in the morning when I couldn’t sleep and the last track came on and I remembered very vividly how perfectly it described me when I was that age: so prickly and full of rage and pain and the deepest sadness that I felt would never be filled.

I don’t like it when you look at me. I feel awkward, ugly. There’s blood on my clothes, sick in my hair. I know that you’ve only come here to gloat but just open your mouth and I’ll jump down your throat. I wish you liked me. I wish you were scared of me. Don’t be helpful, it’s too hurtful.

There were so many points in my life where that anger and sadness just got too heavy, where I literally couldn’t carry it any longer because it was killing me and I just would let it slide through my hands as if I was driving very fast on the highway and I’d left my heart sitting on the top of my car while I refueled and whoops, there goes that pain left behind me like an oilslick, maybe. I can’t imagine clutching so tightly to it any longer just because it’s familiar.

How we make music mean so much to us, you know?

Sometimes, the only thing to do is lie face-down in your bed in the dark cool comfort of your room with Gurdjieff on your stereo and a pile of magazines and books beside you (you have digested some words; you are more productive with your own in this case); your cheek resting on your crossed arms like some kind of bodily Gnostic icon; your eyes are closed.

I used to do this because I was sad and scared. Now, I do it because I am no longer sad and am comfortable in my body to lie luxuriant for a few minutes. Funny how context changes everything.

Out of step/with the wor-rrrrld.

I seriously feel like Unfrozen Cavewoman these days, or maybe some not-so-senile old bat who has been cooped up in her house since the sixties. The old grey mare, she ain’t what she used to be. Culture baffles me. (Or maybe it’s just too easy to understand? At any rate, I don’t relate to much of it.)

I don’t feel like I’ve stopped relating to the important people in my life, or being able to empathize/identify with folks in general, but the social organization thereof?

I suppose this is what comes from doing my own thing, playing by my own rules. I haven’t ever achieved this level of just-not-giving-a-fuck-about-things-that-aren’t-important-to-me before, so I’m chronicling this phenomenon for my own good. It isn’t bad at all – in fact, I see it as a pretty positive change. If there is objectivity, I appear to have achieved it at least for use as a tool in certain situations (as per Book Club discussion last week).

Of course, of course, situations and perspectives change constantly, and I may find myself back in the thick of things soon enough. Still, this is an interesting – and different – vantage point I have right now – good for writing.