Nightmares. MAKING Kristen make eye contact with me. It means something. It means everything. It means *I* mean nothing. I’ve known it for a long time. I throw my glass in the sink and leave and snap awake because I know what she’s REALLY saying. Heather hiring the band she wants and I sit at home. Old. Too old.
I snap awake.
Still old. Feeling it recently. Have no right to it. My friend Paula is 80 and recovering from a bad cold. She says SHE never felt old till this week. That’s 30 years from now.
It’s grey as foretold and foreboding and gloomy and dare I say it looks like it might just rain. Looking out the window, forgetting it’s March, there’s a feeling like it must be almost a hundred degrees outside with soul-crushing humidity and thunderclouds on the horizon… but no, it’s just the calm before the storm.
I hear we’re supposed to be getting insane rain today, but even good weather’s just chaos. We’ll see what turns up.
In theory I’m recording Rebecca Berlin today, playing the Lair tonight. But part of me sort of hopes the lights go out and don’t come back on. After the beauty and strangeness and musicality of the past couple of nights, part of me feels like spending the day in silence, waiting for the winds to howl.
Or maybe that’s just the news.
I’ve been thinking too much this morning about the nature of revolution, and how today is not a day where I see any future in it. For years liberals have been permissive, and “conservatives” have been patient, but the former is destined for failure simply because the latter have no empathy. I think that may be the dividing line. They cannot see themselves in others and have no empathy beyond their tiny, defensible selves, and it’s always easier to organize and cohere in smaller numbers, especially when you know who to hate. It’s okay to hate THEM. Imprison THEM. Send THEM back where they came from.
This isn’t a coherent thought really, but it comes from growing up on the playground and ceding ground to bullies because you know you just get in trouble if you fight back. Watching friends who grew up on the streets knowing you died if you didn’t. Somehow the teachers never listen to “he hit me first”. Somehow bullies never care who invaded who. They just care about fawning respect and staying power.
I keep reading all these posts about how you “simply” don’t yield power to fascism. That they simply expect you to obey and so you don’t give permission, you don’t listen, you don’t just do what you’re told (or perhaps that sentence should be “you just don’t do what you’re told”) – somehow never grasping the irony that that’s exactly how we got here. A whole Trumpian culture of simply ignoring rules, treating them as if they do not apply, and never doing what you’re told. And not understanding that that’s what society IS. Having rules so we don’t have to have guns. Following rules so we don’t have to shoot one another.
We’ll have court orders and he’ll have troops, and I do not see the way forward because, like another friend says, by the time you need to start shooting, it’s too late to learn about guns. It’s the reason I wanted to at least learn the basics. By the time you NEED those self-defense courses, it’s too late to learn about twisting arms and getting out of chokeholds – you are now being raped.
And that’s not an acceptable metaphor, I know. But watching America slowly being stripped and bent over as a huge crowd gathers and applauds thinking it’s just another Netflix crime drama, salivating because it’s great TV…. Yeah, this is the kind of thing I’ve ALWAYS turned off because it’s too disgusting to watch.
Kristen’s up. Turning on the lights. Nothing’s failed yet. I guess it’s time to face the day.