Stasis Quo

I heard Marc Maron talking to someone in the last week or so, Judd Apatow I think,* and the other person in the conversation, the non-Marc-Maron one, was pointing out a well-worn point about the Einsteinian temporal dilation effects of having and raising children. He might not have actually worded it that way, this person whose name nor quote I am sufficiently agitated about to confirm, but the point was that, for the childless, existence can be a sort of stasis, an extended period of learned, opted-for sameness that shields one from galloping stampede hooves of the bearing-down Pale Rider; basically, that it's possible to feel like you're standing still, existentially speaking, by not doing anything different enough so that you feel the landscape of time whizzing by you, an option that doesn't exist if you have children who insist on a) continuing to grow and develop into adults right in front of you, and b) occasionally asking you questions about who Wally Szczerbiak is. Well, it doesn't have to be Wally Szczerbiak specifically, just anyone who used to exist as a passive function of your consciousness in any way and whom you had forgotten you'd ever heard of. I'm sure the Germans have a great word for "the sudden rush of realizing the unexpected breadth of the passage of time by being triggered into nostalgia for something you didn't remember you'd ever known." The short way to say it is that there are pictures on the walls of babies--my babies--that, when I sleep, sing a subliminal tick-tock chorus that won't let me forget the eventuality of my own death.

Sometimes it's not children, though. Sometimes we're confronted with the task of catching time's arrow as it's shot directly at our unarmored breast. History is a great stand-in for procreation in a cognitive-development pinch, specifically when it moves at such a hyper-spastic rate of speed, you can feel it ripple the very air, like the portentous WHOMMMMMMMMM! in the trailer for a Christopher Nolan movie. We arrive at these watershed moments so incredibly rarely, where the seemingly indelible markings of what feels for all the world like permanence (or at least intractability) run off, wan and diffused, into a gutter after an intense, but unexpected, rain.

When the routine of the day is allowed to perpetuate itself, to mask the contortions of social and historical transmogrification as they happen at a low-light level that is either foreign or non-violent, neither of which register in the cones and rods of American historical vision, it's no small comfort to order the world into the largest possible category of this-is-just-how-it-is. That's why it's all the more jarring when the little bits of incremental change band together, bow up and, out of nowhere, kick the everliving shit out of the status quo, like a Terminator sent here from the present to destroy what we thought was going to be the boring and repeatable future of homework, basketball practice, working lunches, Thursday night blog postings, etc.

I was in my mid-teens the first time this really hit me, when geopolitics as I knew it was blown apart, just like that in the passive voice,** in a couple of thrilling weeks, months and years at the dawn of the 90s. I would be lying if I said I didn't not only, yes, miss the certainty of imminent nuclear annihilation, but struggled for a while to find something suitable to replace its necessary role in my emotional life.***

These watershed moments of forced re-evaluation and recalibration are thrilling, no question, but also a little terrifying. It's like having one of the legs of the stool you're sitting on being slowly sawed away at only to all-at-once finally give way, leaving you to, in an undignified panic, reckon with the reality of your own full weight.

It's been a long time since 1989 and, forgive me for the blatant math here, somewhat less time since 9/11/2001, but I'm starting to feel like we're living in a moment where history is speeding up. The Cold War doddered along for like 50 years before finally unravelling. But it was only five years between the passage of Proposition 8 and the confirmation of its nullification by the Supreme Court, allowing gay marriage in California in line with similar validations in other states.

And instead of letting us catch our breath before the next thing, we've been punched in the collective face by a tragedy, knocking us into another totally unforeseen and unforeseeable (in my view anyway) watershed as we seem to be finally--finally?!--coming to an honest reckoning with what seems like the Civil War but is really just the public code-language of racism instituted, like hobo signs, out of the impotent rage and fear of the undeniable legal (and eventually social) triumph of the Civil Rights movement. I never once, not ever, imagined that I'd see Southern Republican politicians thoughtfully reconsidering the damage done by symbols like the Confederate battle flag to Americans in any constituency blighted by their non-historical display. I mean, holy shit, right? I made a conscious decision last year to take a trip through the South, partly for pleasure, and partly to provide myself with some kind of countervailing context to my impression of that part of the country as implacably hostile to so, so many niggling little things I'm into like human dignity and American national survival. I was able to take in the landscape and the food and experience the people, but the culminating visit to the Martin Luther King sites in Atlanta only served to further depress me by exacerbating the perception of a silent, stalemated war for the animating soul of my country that would only ever be solved with (more) bloodshed.

Southern politicians of good conscience can now openly say "yeah, now that you mention it, Confederate symbolism does seem kinda specifically agenda-y..." And now I'm anxious, because if that presumed unalterable constant can be changed, what's next? And don't say "gun laws" to me, because despite the whole tone of this post, some things will always seem beyond reasonable (or even unreasonable) hope.

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*I can only say for sure it wasn't this guy.

**Caused less by the courage of the risen oppressed and more by the invisible hand of American Freedom as an abstract concept, I've been told. A lot.

***Yes, with Cinnabon.