wow. What a year. every time it didn't seem like it could get more disappointing and bleak, there was more disorienting trauma piled high on our plates. It feels ignorant to the suffering of people through history to say that these are unprecedented times. Pain, subjugation, war. These are not new things. They aren't even recent things. But the sense that much of human culture is eating itself alive does not escape me. The sense that we are expected by the rich, by the powerful nd their lap dogs to just accept mass death and total control as simply the way things are feels more perverse than it has before.
Knowing that there is a kind of long arc to the moment we are in now that traces itself back several centuries, it can just feel like too goddamn much. I have certainly retreated to a kind of mutated 'ignorance is bliss'. Rather than one of pure neutrality I find myself thinking "I know it's bad but reading about it won't help anyone anywhere!" Which is embarrassing and kind of anti-curious. I just don't know where to keep my eyes. Which atrocity deserves my attention this week. Should I focus on my home country and its surprisingly quick and robust slide into a new kind of insanity fascism? No truth! Just guns and no healthcare! Or do I expand my If there's some positive spin to my lackluster participation it is that I refuse to be an informational disaster tourist.
Speaking of hopelessness and loneliness, its been a very hard year in those arenas. That was also another hallmark of this year, isolation, the winnowing away of social bonds. I suppose the nature loneliness is at odds with comprehending that one is amongst great ranks of others who feel very similar. I feel by in large friendless. I don't have many people to talk to. I have hardly anyone to hang out with. No one I can ask to hang out with really. I've felt dead and stagnant. Not moving in any direction. Trapped in these morbid chambers of material and emotional disease. I think about pivoting one way and I come up to a sheer wall. I either don't have the money or I don't have the relationships so I've had to just bare it. Take the isolation. Take the sense of crushing isolation, the traumatic baggage of my youth, the sense of powerlessness. Of agony. In this year, like many years, I thought of killing myself. In my lonesome desperation I turned to death. It probably won't be the last time that happens. It's been a hard year. But every time I needed to, I took another step into another day and I am better for it.
The largest inspiration for writing this was trying to frame some positivity around the year. I'd like to mark this as the positivity line. We're going positive from here on out. I was laying bed. Lamenting things. And then it hit me. I did some cool shit this year! Stuff happened! As much as it doesn't feel like my life has evolved. Like I'm going nowhere fast. I did things. And I'd like to list them out. I'd like to celebrate them and revel in the shards of achievement that I've accumulated.
- I became a paid and published writer in 2023/22. It might have been at the tail end of 22 but through the early months of 23 I was writing freelance for the Keene Sentinels ELF magazine, a fluff piece factory that paid me 50 bucks an article. I'm not sure how many articles I wrote. It wasn't many and they weren't the 'serious' shit I wanted to get up to, but I leveraged all the opportunity I think I could. And I made a few hundred untaxed dollars along the way.
- I put out a record on a record label! Sure I've been putting records out on my own for a long ass time but this was the first time someone liked my stuff and put there stamp on it. To support my art in some small way. I didn't get a shit ton of gigs or tour full time or sell a buncha records or anything. But it came out. And I have labelmates whose music I love and respect. That feels like a real victory.
- I played a show in Keene for the first time. It always kind of stung that I never played a show in Keene. And I got payed! and a bunch of my friends came. It was awesome. I had gotten fired from a job like the day before so that hundred bucks saved my fucking ass.
- I wrote the first draft of a screenplay. I got an idea for a movie, took a month to write it, wrote it, and sent some copies to some friends. Here's hoping draft two is kick ass and I can get an agent and sell that motherfucker for some stone cold cash.
- I wrote a bunch of poems I like a lot. I want to make a little zine of poems so I put a bit of work into writing poems that I liked and while they are all deeply scary and sad and violent they are my poems. I wrote them and I love them. I feel as though I have a developing poetic voice.
- I got poems published for the first time! I took a shot and emailed a blog called High Horse Press and they wanted to see some work of mine and they liked 'em and well I got published for the first time. What means the most is the words of encouragement they gave me. What they wrote about me on their Instagram was spectacular and so special. That was the real victory.
-I wracked up a lot of rejections from literary journals. And that, my dear readers, means I'm trying.
I don't think I really moved the needle this year, more often than not it feels like the voices in my head telling me I'm a loser, that I have no life, nothing to point toward as my own, is by an large right. But I did some shit. I tried. It's still so scary and harsh here in America, it feels like we are a long way off from care for one another. There are so many layers of demented thinking infecting life now. the normalization of death, the scarcity of empathy. There are men, hunkering into dangerous and isolating logic all over, I see the videos on YouTube. Crazed and lonely they record podcasts and YouTube shorts talking about how many fully loaded magazines you'd want for a firefight. That's how you think when you are alone and have only so little to protect. you think 'well I'll just kill whatever problem comes up'. And I know seeing these videos of these men preparing for firefights they will eventually seek out is scary, and I also know thinking of them as 'the enemy' only makes the version of things they're pulling for more likely.
We are too days into the new year. I have some idea of how I want to move forward. I'm not sure how I can build more robust and trusting relationships. I know I need to. We can only make a world more worthy of our humanity if we do it together. Failing that, I know there are people out there fighting for human dignity. Every day they do the unsexy work, the most important work. There is possibility in the bleakest of times, especially when things feel like they are breaking. That's when you get to make something new.
Love,
bye
