I’m afraid for my friends. Saying your prayers is all the rage these days.
David Keenan, “What Then Cried Jo Soap”
Never have I ever held a sanctimonious smile while the doomed youths in the horror movies lined up one by one to die, and even less so now. Never have I ever said “Don’t go in there” and meant it, because I’ve been outside that door and I opened it too. No reason other than it was there and I was there and I needed to see.
Driving from Baltimore to Silver Spring would have been uneventful but for my car’s sudden lurch and all those lights coming on. The haze that had engulfed New York City the day before was all over now. Sickly green plumes of smoke swirled down across the foliage, settled on streets in thin sediment. I noticed a lot more parents and children traveling together than before. A father and his daughter, both masked. A father and son in an eighteen-wheeler. A mother and son and daughter, struggling. A father and son, unhoused. Maybe I was keeping an eye out for parents and children and so actually noticed, maybe there really are more families on the road now.
Anyways, my car creaked and swerved and kicked me like an animal and I had the sudden wild thought that all the apocalypse novels were right in that at some point cars just stop. I would have talked myself out of it, but there were other cars stopping, too, all of us shuffling into the Maryland Welcome Center wayside with our proverbial heads bowed and our tails between our legs. I juddered into a parking spot and turned the car off and just got out.
Another father and son. This father was one of those white men with a headset like a trucker would have, except he wasn’t a trucker at all, and one of the prejudices I’m working on is against white men like that. They look too much like cyborgs and they always look at me like I’m dirty, but then I also need to sit with the idea that maybe that’s just their RBF. Nothing to do with me at all, even if I am all inflamed from allergies and smoke and sleeplessness and all this unsaid whatever. Nothing at all.
When I was twelve or so, my dad had me read Foucault’s chapter on Panopticism in Discipline and Punish. While the reading itself effectively ruined my brain forever, what struck me most was my dad’s preface to the chapter.
“Just so you know,” he said, “Foucault doesn’t trust language for shit, and he writes like it.”
Neither do I, Mr. Foucault. Neither do I. You can’t imagine (or maybe you can) how many times I’ve tried to use language for something real, only for the real thing to crumble before my eyes, and I’m helpless to stop it. This is usually when I’m speaking and there’s so much out of my control. Is my hair falling right? Are my eyes puffy? Is there a waver in my voice? And you. Are you already predisposed to a different conclusion? Does my “I want” look too much like your ex’s “I want,” and therefore my mouth becomes a wall before it could ever be a bridge?
The future feels impossible when the sun’s gone out. This is a truth universally acknowledged by the West coast, of course, but it’s a bitter new shift in reality for the East, and so soon, too. There had been one day back in May when I woke up in Bemidji to the saline-and-brimstone scent of the Canadian wildfires I’d been reliably informed had eaten someone I love’s home. I ran errands until my head pounded. The cold was a new cold. An aluminum blanket. Something external forcibly wrapped around me. Not the gradual cold of the winter or spring or the cloying warmth of summer. A blanket or a backhand.
As the smoke overtook the East Coast, Apple announced their new VR headset, Apple Vision Pro, a clunky pair of goggles that aim to replace your phone and monitor with an overlay that “seamlessly blends” with your surroundings to help you stay present. While I was reading up on it at my best friend’s behest, one of my other best friends rolled over in bed, pressed a hand against the window and groaned, “Why would they take away Outside? The best part of summer? What’s the point of summer if there’s no Outside?”
This week, I had a little crisis of faith about moving to Baltimore. It started when my friend there said something that made me feel kind of weird and then the smoke came and everything went haywire.
I still managed to tour at least one apartment. The apartment building used to be the Bank of America Headquarters for the entire country back when the entire country was small and improbable. They still have the vault, but there’s midcentury modern couches and fake plants in there and you can sit in the dungeon, presumably, and chill. That was the big sell of the apartment building. How you could just chill. It was like a child’s idea of what a grown-up should live like, with a 24 hour fitness center, a pool, multiple communal game rooms, a free arcade, and a cavernous basement basketball court that doubled as a bicycle hangar. Their leasing agent led me down hall after twisted hall until she stopped in a placeless location that felt both wet and sterile and said, “If you never wanted to leave this building, you could just… not leave. That’s an option. We’ve made that an option.”
You need to understand: this is why I don’t mock the doomed. All this Island of the Lotus Eaters shit has me compelled. I almost want to lease with them just to have something to cry about. Or somewhere to hide, you know, if the cabin pressure changes and the oxygen masks fail to deploy.
Not that I’m really the type for such a building. Like I said, the future feels impossible, but, conversely, in the wise words of Janis Joplin, “Tomorrow never happens. It’s all the same fucking day, man.” And today my skin is sloughing off until it isn’t, and my lungs are stoppered up until they’re not, and I love you in a way that looks like martyrdom until I don’t and that’s that. This crisis of faith isn’t about me. It never was. It’s about this smog and those children and the way my car weeps when it really shouldn’t because it doesn’t breathe.
There’s really not much else to this little blog post. Only that, on the road, I’ve felt the urge to “blog” more. I remember being a kid and hearing “blog” for the first time. That ugly new word every literary writer turned their noses up at until they were dependent on it. Now everything is “content,” pronounced CON-tent, but seems hellbent on the opposite of its twin, content, as in contentment. So, having gotten my displeasure at those two words out of the way, what am I trying to say?
My English professor said we only communicate when we want something. I remember repeating him to someone who I’d classify as “chronically online,” although even that epithet means less and less the more difficult it is for us to go outside, and the person immediately shut me down with “that sounds manipulative.” I calmly explained, you know, it’s not. It’s intent. Am I talking to you because I want you to buy me something? To pay me? To give me a free dinner? To sleep with me? Or do I just want to check in on you? What’s the purpose here? Where do my desires lie?
I finally got my car running for the fifteen minutes it took to get from the rest stop to my auntie’s house. The ABS light, the brake light, and the traction light were all on. My cruise control engaged and disengaged in erratic blinks. Every parking spot in the rest stop was taken and everyone looked afraid. I’d been to the bathroom: a man was crying before he flushed the toilet and I scurried out for fear of him knowing that I knew. The narrow road curved on endless and all the trees seemed an unbroken photograph of what the settlers called “virgin forests,” encased as they were in so much haze. Untouchable. Frigid. My car murmured. My car cried. I made it out. Everyone on the highway passed me by with furrowed brows and deep frowns and I pet the dashboard, saying, “Easy, now. Easy.”
The molten sun bled like a cracked egg dusted with paprika for one shining moment today. I thought “There’s God” and then I thought “That’s fucking stupid” and then I thought “No, I need to savor this.”
Maybe that’s what I want. God, sure. So many of us do. But more than God, I want the next move to be the best move. I want there to be room on the board for me to mark it. I want the sun and the moon and all those innumerable stars. I don’t want to hide away in some upcycled vault when the pale horse arrives and the rivers run red with blood. I want to live. I want to go outside. I want to hold your hand one more time before you tell me you’re serious about someone else and you’re sorry but that someone just isn’t me.
I want a stay of execution.
I want to stay.
loose ends:
I read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road just before the wall of smoke hit us. My friend Charles said they avoid McCarthy because they worry his “innate conservatism” will come through, and it did and it does. I still cried. I didn’t expect to. Shortly before reading that, I finished Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, which I vastly preferred, and has definitely been informing my always-maturing ideas around love and death.
Now I’m midway through Paul takes the form of a mortal girl, by Andrea Lawlor, which my friend Kiizh recommended because Paul apparently reminds her of me and they wanted me to see that. I had a mini freakout about it because 1) Jesus Christ yeah we’re the same person and 2) our road trips (Paul and me) briefly mirrored each other, which reminded me once again of A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists by Jane Rawson. Then again, EVERYTHING reminds me of Wrong Turn these days.
I was trying to decide between “Holy Roller” by Thao and the Get Down Stay Down and “What Then Cried Jo Soap” by David Keenan for the epigraph of this post. I settled on What Then because I’ve been listening to that album on loop lately. I think it’s such a masterpiece. Still, these words have infected me:
I’ve got minds to ease and thoughts to think through,
Holy Roller, Thao and the Get Down Stay Down
I’ve got words to keep and lies to make true.
Also, “I want love in the aftermath.” I do. I also misheard those lyrics the first time I listened to that song. I thought she said, “I want love and its aftermath,” and it resonated so deeply because, well:
Oh, and, final note, I keep mixing up “epitaph” and “epigraph.” I suppose they’re one and the same in the end. Books and graves. Books and graves.
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