The title of this blog is starting to feel less metaphorical.
Until a little over a hundred years ago, we thought you could cure things by bloodletting. This occurred to me last night with bloodied fingertips from flossing a particularly angered area of gum. We know now that bleeding out bad blood doesn’t fix things, but metaphorically I think they were on the right track: sometimes, to be healthy or to approach health, you’ll bleed along the way.
Call it a response to perceived helplessness, but I’ve been trying to live more healthily lately. As of yesterday. Don’t get me wrong—I’ve been told by others, some of whom I actually trust and believe, that I’m my own worst critic, and often excessively so, and I have a penchant for anxious hyperbole. That is to say, my health isn’t bad, per se; there are things I just want to do better, and I have habits that die hard, or linger in a lifelike liminality between active and dispensed.
Work sucked yesterday, for a blend of reasons both valid and in-. Come 4:30, freedom time, I was in dire desire for a beer or three, but I convinced myself to drive to the gym just to see what would happen. I proceeded to attend a successful and restorative jiu jitsu class, go home, eat healthy, bathe and moisturize for maximal integumentary integrity, read a short story, and fall into a relatively unstrained sleep after one of those creepy (but evidently effective) guided sleep meditations.
There’s no real lesson here. I tend to believe most of us know the solutions to our problems, and that their perseverance is not owed to the simplicity or evident nature of their solutions. Simple doesn’t mean easy—truly, some things seem harder in relation to their simplicity. Try not to think of a white elephant, et cetera et cetera.
So I’m trying to be healthy.
Simultaneously, it seems insidious to write one of these things and to focus only on my corporeal health, and the musings that arise in relation to it in typical navel-gazey fashion, with everything going on. With everything going on. How vague and safe, on the off chance my employer or a potential employer were to ever read this. The handcuffs aren’t even golden anymore, either. They’re not even bronze. If you knew what I made an hour, the best response I could hope for from you would be a pitiful laugh. Don’t go to art school.
Anyway.
Every uttered word is inherently political—if not through what it signifies directly, then by what it negates or avoids through omission. To not talk about the rambling orange McElephant in the room would be just as political, today, as it would be to talk about him. So, the anxiety I feel about writing political shit here is somewhat inevitable, as anything written here will inevitably be political. The only evitable thing, in this situation, is cowardice.
It’s a product of the sweet, intellectually anesthetic environment of social media algorithms that it always feels like the vast majority of people in my life aren’t happy about what the deshelled crab in the oval office is doing. But then you remember that a majority of the people in the country voted for him and that he increased his margins in every single voting demographic. The juxtaposition between what feels evident based on online consumption and what is can enhance this growing feeling I’ve noticed, at least within myself, that I must be insane.
I’ll admit it – I thought Kamala was going to win. There were massive problems inherent to that too, but they weren’t of the comical, borderline unbelievable variety that we have to contend with now. I wrote one of these journals on election day, and thinking back on it, it already feels naïve. Naïve in the way a child is naïve when he asks a doctor if something that will very obviously hurt, and hurt badly, if it’s gonna hurt. “Is it gonna hurt?” Puppy eyes.
I haven’t reread the essay back and I’m not going to do that to myself this morning, but I vaguely remember talking about the pervasive effect technology has on our ability to humanize each other, and I probably paid lip service to how bad social media algorithms are, and I probably tried to go for this semi-contrarian take that no matter who won, we’d be fucked. But now I see that that was a preemptive attempt to soften the blow of a Trump victory—an intellectual copout, a means of coping now, thinking, “well, Kamala would have been bad too.” And strictly, I guess we’ll never know the full extent of how bad she could have been, but my imagination strains to think it could be anywhere near as bad as it is now, which is why I voted for her in the first place.
This is the biggest reason I don’t speak about politics in here, at least explicitly, very often. It feels like a goddamned funeral. But for whom? I won’t sit here and pretend the disastrous effects of all this will be felt equally. We all know they won’t.
I’m not sure if he ever thought it would be applied in this way, but Fernando A. Flores (on instagram @f.a.flores) has a story called “Nocturne from a World Concave” in which a fictionalized version of Frédéric Chopin in Mexico City goes on a surreal quest to retrieve his piano, which has been seized by customs. Chopin is unwell – he has a pervasive cough. The line I’m thinking of, which I believe is spoken by the narrator, is that Chopin “laughed at the cough.” The story, and the collection it comes in (Valleyesque, 2022) are excellent. But the point is, “laugh at the cough” became something of a mantra for me, or at least a North Star by which to navigate. No matter what I was going through, I tried to inhabit this stoic, borderline spiteful perseverance encapsulated in the idea of laughing at a cough that will eventually kill you if nothing stronger gets you first. And while the tide of my mental health has risen and fallen, with various peaks and valleys since, that sentiment bolstered me through some pretty low valleys.
I’m finding it impossible to laugh at this cough, so to speak, though.
I have a friend, a good one, who in many ways is my opposite. Where I am severe and serious, he is light, comedic; where my work is lazy, often feels inconsequential, and takes place in an office, his is frontline, often life or death, and of the utmost importance; where I get lost in reveries and let the siren song of nostalgia create entirely unbridgeable berths between what is and what could have been (primarily in my career), he is entirely focused on forward momentum, on what comes next. And while, like any human being, he has been known to indulge negative emotion at times, he doesn’t let it flatten him like, at times, it has felt like I’ve let myself be flattened.
When I think about politics, and where we are, I try to think about what he would say. Or, if I have a specific question, I just harass him over text. His input is less bleak than mine, and his relative hope remained rigid in the face of a semi-drunken and lightly-nicotine-fueled oracular tirade of mine for the ages last week, in which my cynicism and doomerism knew no earthly bound.
While I respect and admire the tenacity of his hope, I was dismayed to find, driving home, that it hadn’t created any more within me than what I had showed up with, which, it goes without saying, was pretty minimal. That’s not to say that my hope is his responsibility, either. If anything, I see it as a failure all my own.
So, I’m trying to be healthy. By that, I mean, I am trying to maximize behaviors within my immediate control that will promote health because, as those of you who know me well already know, my health is a fickle, tempestuous son of a bitch sometimes, occasionally to the point of threatening life. It’s the only area of my life, at least recently, that feels within the bounds of my control.
I also imagine there are people out there who, reading this, would scream at their phones or laptops at me that there is work to be done, that my hopelessness is completely maladaptive and unhelpful, and that I’m pathetic for sharing it publicly this way. My anxiety at this fact is mollified only by the hollow reassurance that people like that are most likely not reading this anymore. But to those people, who I greatly admire, who see the world’s problems and feel a responsibility to fix them instead of a hopelessness about them, I would ask: do you ever feel resentful of the responsibility, the one that seems to be held particularly by artists and younger people, to save the world?
It’s also strange to realize that the last time things felt politically stable to me, i.e., the end of the Obama years, I was a relatively immature if intellectually active eighteen-year-old. Because of this, the feeling of relative peace is clouded now by an uncertainty: was that feeling of stability owed to the ignorance and naivete of still being a child? Were things really better, or was it just pre-covid, pre-Trump, pre-the mild soul-deadening effect the monotony of adult life has on hope, pre-, pre-, pre-?
The obvious answer is: it’s a little of both. Obviously it was more stable in the sense that norms were adhered to more closely, the national conversation was constrained by stricter guidelines of formality and austerity, and the idea of Trump holding an actual office of government was still seen, by many, as an impossible joke. But weren’t the seeds that grew into this hell plant sown way back then too? Is our current situation not explained by the evil of Trump republicanism as well as the failures of liberal democrats to ameliorate the material concerns of massive swaths of the voting public?
Isn’t Trump just a symbol of a growing, cancerous mass of resentment and vengeance against performative, often hollow liberalism, that is now enabling a rapid fascistic rise of an anti-human tech class of oligarchs? Has his brand of politics not transcended individual political iconoclasm, morphing instead into a multiheaded hydra?
Was that enough buzz words for you?
I don’t know. I don’t feel confident in much of anything anymore, related to this stuff. And trying to write anything that doesn’t explore the current situation feels just as bad as writing something that explores it badly, or, more charitably, inadequately.
I wrote a story the other day, a full draft—something I haven’t done for like, a year. Having finished it, now I remember why. The story doesn’t approach anything related to current, topical reality aside from this general thrust of arguing that the written word has failed, and continues to fail, to improve reality, continuously losing to the worst, most anti-intellectual impulses our country can muster.
Real uplifting stuff.
But I think part of the reason I can’t seem to write anything politically relevant is that we live in an age that demands unsubtlety. How do you resist what’s going on with subtlety?
Good art demands subtlety, I think. To fully express the anger, feelings of impotence, and wishes that things were different than they are now in a story would make something about as subtle as a brick.
Or, my faculties as an artist aren’t such that I can do so with any subtlety.
So, if you excuse me, I might crawl back under a rock for a while—but while I’m there, I’ll be sure to floss.
matt nilsen 