Armed to the teeth in an abandoned theme park

On Kristi Noem, yet another road trip, and the little fascist that could

Did you miss me? Are you sick of my travels yet? I miss me. I’m getting sick of my travels.

I’ve driven across the country maybe three times since I last updated you. I moved out of my beautiful Bolton Hill apartment on May 29th after living in the new house for a good two months, pretty much. That same Thursday, I drove up to Ithaca to load my little wannabe Subaru up with my future brother-in-law’s worldly possessions, step one in my ongoing quest towards reconciliation after he ended up being saddled with moving all my shit out of the Coddington House just two and a half years ago.

Lately I’ve been making smart decisions with dumb consequences. Does anyone else feel that? Like you’re—to use a shorthand from my TV writers program—Doing the Obvious Thing, and it goes wrong somehow. I’d booked a flight from Baltimore to Seattle before I realized I was going to be driving the kids out of Ithaca, and instead of canceling my flight, I just switched it over to Minneapolis for negative two dollars (thanks Southwest) and sat pretty for the weeks leading up to our trip.

Of course, I found out my father and his partner were driving the whole way from Minnesota to Seattle. Brief pause while I entertain the fantasy of myself continuing the caravan with them, stopping in Browning to bother Jake Arrowtop and his family, waking up on Flathead Lake and getting my tires replaced in Spokane. Right now, my flight’s delayed by about an hour and forty-five minutes, a fact which wouldn’t pitch me this close to the edge if not for the miasma of paranoia, thin-lipped smiles, complicit police officers, and Kristi Noem’s puffy face on every monitor around me, telling us the new rules we must capitulate to are for our own good and the good of our country.

My 89-year-old grandfather, my dad’s dad, drove me to the airport in his sparkly blue pickup truck, a gorgeous machine that usually lives in his garage. But the little red sedan he keeps referring to as “a thousand dollar car” is giving him more trouble than it’s worth, so he’s run to the shiny past to field our future. Police SUVs for the city of Blaine flanked the highway as we hit the road, running parallel to each other. Grandpa chuckled mirthlessly.

“Hoh, they’re really out here today. They must be hurtin’ for money.”

Yesterday (June 4th, 2025), ICE completed a bunch of raids with the assistance of the Minneapolis Police Department, a claim MPD denied until the last minute. I witnessed some of the dregs, two policemen pulling up on a brown man in a yellow raincoat as he was crossing the street. They made him show his identification and explain himself. He complied. He was an American citizen. He was shockingly calm. They clenched their jaws, shifting from foot to foot, considering. They let him go.

My grandpa told me over coffee this morning that some of the ICEmen were wearing patches for white supremacist groups.

Driving to the airport, he said, “It feels how it did back in the sixties, with the Ku Klux Klan gaining more power in response to the Civil Rights Movement.”

“Are we gonna be okay?” I asked. It’s a question I ask my elders more and more these days. They used to have a different answer. Now, they look out over the roads or at the wall.

“I don’t know,” they always say.

He rolled down the window and hollered out, “Police ahead!” at the cars behind us, before leaning back in and snickering, “No.”

“Good thing these trucks are going so slow,” he said, “else they woulda gotten everybody.”

We talked about Kristi Noem. He called her dumb for getting all dolled up to stand in front of the concentration camp in El Salvador. More and more these days, I think about the world Louise Erdrich created in her novel, Future Home of the Living God, which I wasn’t keen on when it first came out and have since revisited with a grim comprehension. When I first read it, I was infuriated by how passive the protagonist felt. Now, in the position of protagonist in my own dystopian life, I understand. They sneak in enough glossy, surgically altered Aryan blow-up dolls to tell you bad news, you start to lose momentum. That’s where we’re at, I feel, in the novel. Turning on the TV and seeing your old anchors replaced by younger, or artificially younger, Barbies and Bratz repeating the same alarmist sentiments with bloodlust in their big blue eyes.

In line for security, I watch white families with their hackles raised, rubbernecking at Asian kids and Hispanic fathers. I wonder if they really are staring, or if I’m staring and assuming they’re staring. I wonder if my paranoia is painting the world a worse color, or if I’m being paranoid at all. I wonder, too, about the rise in hatred I hear so much about. About the shot-reverse shot of the murder of Jonathan Joss, stories trickling out as journalists work overtime to find some fault in him that earned him his death. Outing his husband, interviewing his neighbors, but taking the police statement at face value.

It’s weird. It’s all so fucking weird. I know queer people are annoying, God I know that, but I don’t get how being annoying is a death sentence now. Does that make sense? There’s no political compass anymore, it’s all just… extremes.

Back to the guy crossing the street, for a minute.

Everybody loves to share that post about “If you’ve ever wondered what you’d do during the Holocaust, you’re doing it right now,” but we share it because we believe we’re the exception. That we would act, or that by acknowledging our moral superiority over this imagined “you,” we are somehow rescued from our own complacence. I’m relieved, in a sick way, that the man in yellow was a citizen, because what would I have done if he wasn’t?

Any grandstanding or last-standing I might do for a stranger would be swept away. We’ve trained ourselves—or rather, we’ve been trained—not to care about one another. Years and years of massacred children with no restitution, no confronting of the milieu that led to their deaths. A few downed airplanes and the easy way out—blame D.E.I., our brand new PC slur—and here I am, back in the air on a Southwest Airlines flight to Denver. Praying to God I won’t fall, but not really giving a fuck about “we” until I swallow my pride and talk to the people around me, talk to strangers. Even then.

Someone said Americans don’t care about rising fascism because we ourselves are fascists.

When I was younger, I always thought it demoralizing, how many post-apocalyptic narratives follow that whole Western expansion arc, radical rugged individualism, Rick Grimes armed to the teeth in an abandoned theme park, trying to track down his cheating wife because she’s his property. I even shut down my brother (a horrible moment he doesn’t remember) when he wrote a short story about a famine turning cannibalistic when the bunker-dwellers start to panic, telling him we should write stories of hope, stories of goodness.

He burned that draft and I don’t think he’s written anything since.

In the past few years, I’ve seen the contingent of my generation the older Twitter millennials once disparaged as “puriteens” age into full bloom puritans. I’ve seen would-be radicals proudly identifying as consumers and fighting tooth and nail to shut down any signs of deviance within the “queer community,” doxxing transsexual women and doing bad faith reads on every chick’s hornypost until they felt confident enough to call her fake, or a predator, or both. I’ve seen theyfabs push out trans women from queer housing and claim a sacred yonic power, wounded in some way by their own ugliness and the ugliness their mothers beat into them, turning those wounds out onto women they call men. I’ve been told to my face my own manhood is a betrayal, that for the sake of our safe space, I must relinquish it or face repercussions.

And I’ve been a terrible man. I’ve lorded my own perceived perfection over my duchies and fled the consequences. I’ve apologized profusely but I know it isn’t enough. Because I can see him—it—the little fascist within me who relishes in safety. I see him in my promise to return to the woods and grab my gun if shit hits the fan, a promise troubled the longer I stay in Balimore, falling in love. I see him in my car, my locked doors, my wary, searching gaze, waiting for something awful to happen, knowing-fearing I won’t rise to meet that moment.

Or will I?

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For the past six weeks, I’ve been in the 10th annual Native American Media Alliance’s TV Writers Program. I’m supposed to film a video testimonial of what this program’s done for me when we’re finished. I wonder how close I can dance to grievance before they call me “ungrateful?”

We’re almost at the finish line with it, and I’ve never felt worse. It’s a fellowship (which means free) but it’s a huge time commitment. I promised not to attend any auditions, be on set, or do anything but this program.

We’ve been trained, through years of economic downturn, to tune out one another when we talk about how hard up we are. So I won’t tell you the truth. Not here. I won’t tell you about my financial situation, or my lack of employment, or the feeling I have that I’m more of a hemorrhage than a human, draining my parents’ pockets with my constant crisis until our whole world breaks. I won’t tell you how much my confidence masks a gnawing, growing sense of unease, of no longer wanting to be in my own company. It’s not imposter syndrome—I know I’m cool/smart/hot—but it’s not not imposter syndrome. Instead of feeling like a fake writer, artist, whatever, I feel like a fake person. I feel like a stack of unpaid bills and growing debt wearing a suit of flesh, waiting to collapse in on my own numbers. I won’t tell you about my dreams, the dream or delusion piloting me: that somehow, some way, this is all gonna work out. That I’ll be in a much better position tomorrow, or next week, or next month. That in a year, everything will change, again.

And I will tell you this.

Everything has changed. Everything.

Just since the start of this year, I’ve signed a contract with an agent (is that a social faux pas, to tell you that? I still don’t know) and made serious headway on my novel, which I got a huge grant for. I’ve gone to Sundance Film Festival and seen my younger self projected on a wall at the Baltimore Museum of Art. I’ve been on good sets and bad sets. I’ve made “fuck you” money doing absolutely nothing and made pennies doing work that really matters. I’ve nosedived and come up, nosedived and come up. Some would call that flying.

There it is, then. The source of the delusion, the delusion keeping this biomass alive.

It’s this delusion I worry the fascist wants to protect. That he’ll tell me to focus on myself, on my “career,” before I focus on my fellow human beings. I can hear him cocking his shotgun every time I consider a life lived in virtue, but hearing him, seeing him, I can maybe take my power back. I can maybe balance what I have with what I want, what I pray for and what I fear the most.

Driving across the country, I worry we’re already in the end times. There’s all these empty zoos and tourist traps, no cars in their parking lots, no people out here, really, at all. Everybody’s in their houses, on their phones, even when they’re driving. Sun-bleached billboards advertise businesses that have been closed for years. The other day, I cracked open a fortune cookie and inside, instead of a fortune, there was a token giving me a 25$ line of credit to an online gambling app. On the back of the plastic ad, written in fortune-cookie font, it read: TAKING THIS CHANCE WILL CHANGE YOUR FUTURE. The worst part? I almost considered it.

Baltimore helps. The artists I’ve met help. It’s necessary for me to remind myself I do not exist without other people. NAMA has only been tolerable because one of the people in my cohort is an old friend, someone I’ve grown inexorably closer with as we’ve endured our shared burden. I’m broke as shit, but so is everyone, and in this way, we’re freer than we think to make beautiful things. Stories of “goodness” and “hope,” sure, but also weird, deplorable, frightening work.

I guess that’s where I’m headed with all of this. You know, by now, my stance on art and artists. Art alone will not save the world. I’m not some powerful sorcerer just because I can string together a coherent sentence without the aid of AI or draw a picture (though lately I’m feeling a lot smarter than the average bear who asks Chat Jeepy Tee for everything from homework help to romance). Our lives as artists are only as big a threat as our numbers allow, as the strength of our messaging and the power behind our punches.

And I really need to kill that little fascist.

Postscript

I wrote the above on June 5th. In the week since, ICE has intensified its raids, the Administration has sent active military troops to Los Angeles and spoken of “liberating” the city from its “socialist” leaders—

—and all of you have stepped up. Me, I got Covid. I slept. I dreamt. I woke to a radically altered world, one which, in fire and fury, has the potential to burn us all clean.

There are more of us than there are of them. We must hold each other close during their violent death throes.

The gods will win and the devils will lose.