April 19th, 2023. It’s home.

(last night a friend asked how I was doing – I told him I was stressed about closing on the house and he said “funny, all my white friends have told me they’re having a rough day cause they’re buying a house, or they had a rough day at work, or they’re depressed – and all my black friends say they had a rough day cause they got evicted, or they almost got shot” – so yes, that’s helpful – I should be glad I’m in such a comparatively good place in my world, so the following is PROBABLY a self-indulgent, whiny post, but … it’s MY DAMNED JOURNAL!)

It’s Wednesday morning. The morning we close on our house. The day that most people say is the first day of me being a homeowner. The day that my more cynical self, the side of me that I need to stifle if I want to enjoy my Life, says is the last day of my Life debt-free. Today I sign paperwork that says that a bank owns this house, and I’ve got a long-term contract to buy it from them. According to the terms I’m going to sign today, that would require me to Live 6 months past the national average Life expectancy and eighteen years longer than my father did. I cannot stop thinking about these sorts of numbers.

I hope that in two hours or so I feel different about this. Or at least, sans the tension of acquiring the house, I can just go back to thinking about the upside to this. We’ll have more money in-pocket on a monthly-basis. The house is “ours” and equity and stability and etc.

But homeownership seems the antithesis of everything I wanted. It feels like the final nail in the coffin of the dream of the traveling singer/songwriter. The statement of truly rooting myself in a world that I’m steadily more and more horrified by. Hell, maybe I’m horrified enough that I don’t WANT to go out and meet lots of people on the highways and byways of America anymore? Fortunately, part of that dream also relies on the LONELINESS of highways so at least my soul knows there’s romance in the mileage if not some of the faces…

And the world’s got me DOWN today. On a personal level, the cat’s been sick, lethargic, OFF since Monday. He’s trained me to his pattern and though he doesn’t seem miserable the broken pattern has got me worried. Him not being where I expect him nearly gave me a heart attack.

And the news today? Oh boy.

I used to Love conspiracy theories. I reveled in their complexity and in how OBVIOUS they were when you put the pieces together… and then I grew up a little and simply enjoyed the strangeness of them. I got a bit older than THAT and enjoyed their crystalline networks, beautifully complicated but very brittle with logical fallicies easy to chip away at if you weren’t blinded by the simple DESIRE TO BELIEVE. Finding pop-culture conspiracy theories spouted by people who had incorporated them into their personal mythologies became terrifying reminders that not everyone could distance themselves from enticing fictions though : the neighbour who’d somehow started believing the plot of Die Hard IV was stuff he’d read on the news, the otherwise stunning dancer and visual artist who KNEW the truth about chemtrails, the hoops artist who moved to the midwest to avoid radio waves, the college roommate who opened the windows and brushed microwaves out through the door with our broom. It’s easier when at least there’s laughably bad science to point to.

But somehow I’m buying a home in a strange America that actually beleives a lot of the above. Fringe is front and centre and I’m putting down roots in an America that seems to be weaving a bigger picture of the second-coming of slavery by another name. I’ve long wondered how Right Wing America can be so obsessessed with “closing the border” while also turning a blind eye to how reliant so many businesses have become on the cheap labour pouring through it. What sort of plan did they have for replacing the servers and dishwashers, the fruit pickers and day labourers, all so abused by our current system that insists they stay invisible?

Oh – get the poor kids workings. https://gizmodo.com/iowa-senate-approves-bill-legalize-factory-child-labor-1850348003

Somehow that connects with the current demolition of abortion rights. Have more poor kids. “Allow” them to work longer hours on school nights. Let them work in the bars and serve alcohol to ensure THAT chain of addiction. And make sure they are “allowed” to work for lower-than-minimum wage. https://www.1011now.com/2023/01/31/bill-would-lower-minimum-wage-nebraska-minors/

And after 3-5 years of working hard in their desperate, dead-end jobs in failing education systems that undermine their capacity for critical thinking, with struggling kids of their own, what’ll be their golden ticket out of it all? Maybe all of the above can help with the pipeline of young, poor kids who’re needed in the military. It FEELS well orchestrated. Demonized, alienated, controled. Legally acceptable chains of indentured servitude (both in and out of the privatized prison system) and military service.

Paranoid? Maybe. But as “he was on my doorstep so I shot him” stories become daily occurences, and the most promising defamation case for Fox being held accountable for their lack of journalistic integrity gets reduced to a cash settlement, as some of the most optimistic people I know decide to abandon the country. I’m putting down cash-money roots in an eighty-year old house in Baltimore and I’m having trouble with seeing the good in it this morning. I’m having trouble seeing the out. I’m having trouble seeing the way forward, the way UP.

I’ve been filming videos with 70-90+ year-old African American artists. They’ve seen bad, bad, bad times. And they’ve seen the world get a lot better. I want them NOT to see the world get worse again.

Those women that I’m filming, they talk about changing the world in increments. Through marches and calls by moms to elementary schools. Two sisters, one self-proclaimed optimist and The Other One: they both say “you’ve gotta be the change that you can be”, but one says it with a smile and one says it with a sigh. I think I’ve got two sisters in my soul right now. One saying that being aware, creating safe spaces and running them, bringing people together through music and in communities and TALK matters and means something. The other says that I’m just a complicit part of something great and horrible, because I’m only the change that I can be, nothing more.

And so I’m about to buy a house. And my cat’s sick. And I don’t know how to face the world. And it’s a stunningly beautiful day. And my father died 18 years ago tomorrow.

It’s complicated.

It’s home.