I Feel You

I'm honestly not sure what to do here.

I know the big watershed event of 2021, the epochal changement signaling a final socio-historical shift into something ostensibly less (to borrow a phrase from cultural anthropologists) totally fucking shitty, was supposed to be the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. And that was really good, let's not get it wrong. I cried and everything! The prospect of a government that doesn't give a shit if I pay attention to it is an endorphin explosion of novelty and relief that cannot be undersold. We have to have the presence of mind to revel in it before it starts to feel normal.

But we weren't rid of the Trump presidency when he was sworn out, we've found. The ghost left the body when that dipshit got booted from twitter the first week of January. When I say everyone's life has been measurably better since then, I'm not just being a beta libtard cuck,* there's, like, science and shit to back me up. Trump people are impervious to science, I didn't forget, but the beauty of objective truth is its stubborn continuance in complete indifference to the perception of the observer(s). And the objective truth in this case is: I feel better.

If you've been reading this blog over the last few weeks,** it hasn't been apparent that I've felt better at all, but that's only because you're relying on my words to convey my feelings, which, you should know by now, is so dumb, come on. I've been blogging for like 17 years now. If I've proven nothing else, it's that this space is almost exclusively a dumping ground for panic and dread and sometimes movie/TV reviews where I talk about how popular culture causes me panic and dread.

Sometimes how we feel about something is not apparent in the moment as it's overwhelmed at the time by how we feel about something. That seems like nonsense, but that's only because you haven't heard me flesh the idea out yet, after which you will be certain it is nonsense.

If having kids teaches you anything, it's that most things are unlearnable. Like you'd been exposed to people and social situations and emotional challenges in your life, but the elemental, evolutionarily basic struggle to keep a human child alive and not screaming*** is a klieg light on the human soul, your own and literally everyone else's. All of your experience in life to that point not only has not prepared you for the challenge, in almost every way it has un-prepared you for it by selling you this bill of goods about how people's behavior is an insight to their emotional state. Babies don't get mad or sad. They look that way, but seeming is the trick that proves they were sent here by the devil to confuse us. What they are is hungry or tired or in some way partially covered in their own shit (ideally still contained in the designated receptacle-barrier garment). They lack the communicative skills to express that, so what you get is caterwauling rage unrestrained by a formed superego. It's confusing and upsetting but, once you get the right amount of therapy and maybe a few consecutive nights of decent sleep, informative.

Adults ostensibly should be better at this, but we're really not. In a lot of ways, our ability to reason and express only tangles things up by offering us the options for emotional deception (inward and outward). There are several billion-dollar-plus industries (psychology, psychopharmacology, daytime television, informercials, etc.) devoted to the decoding of this secret internality or in punishing us with social segregation in the cases when it fails entirely and we punch out a stranger at a ballgame for wearing the wrong hat. At that point people get way less interested in whether or not your aggression is a pre-emptive manifestation of your fear of abandonment.

So I've been twitchy and grouchy the last few weeks, even in the wake of the inauguration, but I'm realizing now that that was more than anything the inertia of four years taking its sweet time coming to a stop. The train had built up a lot of momentum, hooning through the increasingly featureless desert-scape of my psyche, over all that time.

Now I realize, at some point in the last few days, it had finally... just stopped. And I hadn't realized it until Trump made some kind of stupid and literally meaningless public statement that gullible and thirsty journalists picked up and published for no earthly reason and... nothing. No pacing, no face-scrunching, no muttered swears, not even a wry head-waggle. It's not just that there's peace now, I was able to retroactively recognize it had been under the surface for weeks. Despite every sign to the contrary.

And I can do things like think and breathe. All with a mask on still, because some things are still plenty fucked up. But like the vaccines, the de-programming is here and it's starting to take.

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*Except in all the other ways I am by default

**And if I look at the tracking stats Blogger provides, hello to all my very real friends inexplicably and almost exclusively from Russia and India!

***The two are related. How do you think the hyenas find you?