If we don’t post it, it doesn’t happen.
Oh, I wanna be free of this––
––Bastille, “Way Beyond,” Wild World
I keep fantasizing about hiring someone to set up an Instagram for me, but my drive to get everyone else off Instagram is still stronger than my FOMO.
Too much is happening. You agree. Too much is happening, all the time, all at once, and we keep having to triage ourselves. Where do I put my shattered focus? Who do I look at, support, ignore?
What’s happened in the several months since I last spoke to you: I got a sizable grant from Netflix and flew to Hollywood for a luncheon and to get the volunteer hours necessary for the other half of said grant. I met my heroes and they were kind to me. I got pneumonia and finished my first semester at the University of Baltimore with all Bs and one A minus. I hired a personal stylist because the way I dressed myself for the LA Skins Fest awards ceremony was so deeply ass, I had to do a hard reset on my wardrobe, like, bad.
There were things I wanted to write you about. I had a piece I was kicking around called “I am not a tboy,” where I intended to talk about my experiences as a cis-assumed man who, as of late, has been pressured to “feminize” due to my choice to keep my hair long and my lack of proximity to the relatively-new third gender known as “tboys.” But bullshit annoying queer stuff feels small and unimportant amid our current crisis of impunity––the knowledge that, for whatever reason, we’re all living in a world constructed by rapey white supremacists who get to fulfill any whim they fancy without much pushback, while the rest of us have to contend with the fallout.
After LA Skins Fest, I wanted to write about the cultural paranoia that was the “Pretendian hunt,” which went from an endemic social illness to a rabid frenzy overnight, after Tom King published a piece about the revelation, late in life, that he’s not actually Cherokee. NDN Facebook became even more of a cesspool as everyone took up arms against each other. No one was safe. Not even me, as it turned out: the Native American Media Alliance posting my fugly testimonial video (on-purpose shot from the “Potato Angle”) invited comments of “pretendian descendian” and “pretendian scamer……” which I took in stride, because any readers of this blog know I am, begrudgingly, an Indian, and cannot change this fact no matter how many times you people (derogatory) piss me off.
But it was the frenzy that intrigued me. How close it is to the politics of borders and belonging that govern ICE’s racial profiling. My dad called this out on Facebook recently, only to be raked over the virtual coals. I wanted to write about that, but instead I’ll link Dave Treuer’s latest for The Atlantic, “Who Gets To Be Indian –– and Who Decides?”
All the while, AI took over our lives in a wave of mutilation. As I say, I’ve been off Instagram, I abhor TikTok, and X: the Everything App can suck my balls, but Facebook I use for Marketplace and to find out who’s still alive. For the past several months, though, it’s been a nonstop slop fest, with fake news going viral at an alarming rate from content farms whose locations range from Australia to Malaysia, all in the same melodramatic tone of voice. You know what I’m talking about, the:
He didn’t just speak truth to power.
He bucked the whole system.
Or whatever. The overabundance of synonyms, the spacing out of every sentence to ape the “poetic” Instagram captions of yore, the periods meant to denote that this is a very serious, very sincere post, we swear it, this is real and it happened, we promise.
If that’s what we’ve got going for us in the Bad Future, you can count me out.
So I haven’t been posting. I’ve been writing, sure, mostly just to chip away at my novel or polish short stories for submission or work on screenplays or––
But I haven’t posted. And you haven’t heard from me. I got an even dumber phone, the Sunbeam F1 Horizon Bluebird, which I might have to send back (a second time) because the speaker is rattling, but it’s done wonders for my mental health. Don’t worry, I still know what’s going on. I know how bad things are. I’m just not plugged in 24/7, keeping myself apprised of every shred of content and memetic collapse. Instead, I call my grandparents. I ask them how they’re doing.
You know we’re from Minneapolis.
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