Or, I’ll never be a real writer, not really, probably
I don’t even know where to start with this; I don’t even know what “this” is, when I write the word. I was going to write about my first trip in 3 years — I went on my first trip in three years!! — and all the things I found, out there; but every time I flip open… uh, anything… all I am met with is the anger.
I don’t know what to say about it, and I’m marginally protected by the surety that nothing I have to say matters at all. Like, who cares. One more furious person (white/male/queer/rich/Canadian) amongst multitudes, with almost all of the others more impacted by this (there’s that word again) than I am. “This” is more the idea of it than anything that will actually change about my life; the boiling, furious rage of it. “This.”
There’s been a lot of “this” in the last bit, hasn’t there. We seem to be lost in a perpetual daisy-chain of “this.” An endless cosmic circle-jerk of “this.” A human centipede marching slowly to the drumbeat of its forced ass-to-mouth gorging on “this.” There may be no “there” there any more, but there sure as fuck is a fuck of a lot of “this.”
The cognitive dissonance of wanting to just post about my garden’s tiny, perfect beets; and Thor; and how the Volume, really, really looks worse than the eternally-maligned green-screen of the Attack of the Clones era. When I know I’d have to feed those meaningless missives into the machine that also continuously regurgitates every single shattered shard of “this,” this real pain, this real terror, this real, humiliating “of course”-ness of this particular moment in this particular endless fading autumn of the world. Well, nope. Not I.
So it is with a kind of relish, a kind of holy humility, a kind of how-the-fuck-are-any-of-you-even-sane-right-now amazement, that I open the “READ ME!” label in my gmail, and find that there are so many women out there still doing it.
Ann Friedman’s still doing it. Pointing at my eyes at questions of Hot Regression Summer and what it means, or maybe just this meme about Side Character Summer. (I wish I could; I truly wish I could. I am not a side character this summer, or I would. I’d side character the fuckkkkkk out of 2022.)
Griefbacon’s still doing it. Fucking wish anything I was doing it was doing it as well as Helena Fitzgerald. This fucking piece — a draft?? weird and unfinished?? — broke me entirely in half.
Isobel Wohl’s still doing it. “If you get your kicks from getting no kicks, it is all kicks all the time, and no kicks all the time, at once. You reach an apotheosis: no guilt, no shame. If you eat the flesh that unmakes flesh, are you even eating?” How the fuck do you write something that good? About GRAPEFRUIT
Scaachi’s still doing it. My lady, she never stopped. Fuck the Rock. Honestly. Fuck that guy. I, too, am sick of hot people.
Not a woman, I know — that I know of, anyway — but holy fuck, Dan Rather is still doing it. Tough old son of a gun. A humanist, and sharp at 90 in ways that I am not, at 45. Dan fucking Rather. You want to see what a learning mindset looks like? Look at Dan Rather.
And here’s me, with my Jane Foster Thor twavatar and my Instagram full of action figures. I don’t even know where to enter the conversation, a mousy old man hanging out near the window at a party.
I dunno. I’ll finish this another time. There are actually a few things I learned out there on the horizon, that weren’t about action figures, or lightsabres, or stranger things. Something about the salt in the blood and the turn of the world as the sun sets over the sea. Till then, I have an excuse: I’m not really a writer, not really. Not yet. Not like everyone out there still doing it.