Where We Are Now.

fuuuuuuuuuuuck

When I shared my thoughts and nervousness on election night, I sounded more sure that this was where we would end up than I actually was. I guess my young (white male, presumably very straight) neighbors, who were singing triumphant patriotic songs I’d never heard late into the night, gave me some glimpse of where this could go, and it went there.

I don’t think I’m in the habit of sharing my menstrual cycle with you but I’m on my period this week and that has always been a cataclysmic biological event. The combination of navigating these results emotionally, dealing with hard-ish core anemia, and remaining a Professional Instructor Who is Well Aware That Some of My Students Voted for Trump — well, it’s been taxing to my system. I worked out today, but I didn’t go to the gym. I stayed home and lifted my own 15-pound weights while bawling and screaming to my workout music. REALLY screaming. Horror-movie type-shit. And crying like the final survivor in a Hollywood action sequence.

The release was overdue.

I’m freshly showered and changed into lounge clothes and it was both a relief and deeply sad to realize the extent to which, when I went home after class to eat lunch, I couldn’t go back out there. I could not face them, deal with them, the mass of rural Americans who voted for Trump. When I found out that Dorothy Allison died the day after the election, I crossed my Enough line.

A profoundly bright spot: Ian’s uncle, the artist Fred Wilson, has work in an upcoming exhibit at the Met: Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now. We’ve been invited to the guest-only pre-show reception, an opportunity like none that’s ever graced my life before. I had hoped we would have reason to come together in relief at this event. Now, we’re coming together in solidarity.

As much as I appreciate the cardinals and thrushes of this region, I have never been more ready for some tough New York pigeons with dirty wings and missing toes. I have never been more eager for the sounds of a populated city that doesn’t expect anyone to eat dinner between 5 and 6pm. I don’t think I’ve ever been in the position to give as much of myself to any specific place as I’ve given to Milledgeville, Georgia, and I didn’t realize until half-way through that first scream that I am fucking spent.

Most likely, you are too. Even those of you who aren’t in the US (and I appreciate your readership more than I can say) are well aware that what happened on November 5th is going to have global repercussions and we can only begin to imagine what they might be. Trump seems to have, if anything, gone crazier, and surrounded himself with even more dangerous cronies.

Ian and I won’t be flying to New York, we’ll be driving. The airport is two hours away from here and Atlanta’s airport has to be the most frustrating airport in America. I’ve bonded with strangers over how exhausting and maze-like it is, how bereft of any half-way decent food (which is an act of aggression, considering that Atlanta is a superior food paradise). We’ve decided that seeing parts of the East Coast we’re not familiar with will be more relaxing than the drain and baggage-expense of air travel in 2024, and so I might be returning with some unexpected Road Chronicles, reminicent of the essays I wrote from a string of motels across America when we set out from San Francisco in the summer of 2023.

I don’t have words for what I’m feeling about a country that once allowed my parents to open the first coffeehouse in New Mexico on the strength of a vision and Business degrees from a college that few people think about, and allowed the gifted artists who staffed that coffeehouse to pay cheap rent by working reasonable hours at a hangout they loved and spend the rest of their time working on their paiting, drawings, music, plays.

My years in California taught me that many of America’s most gifted artists — by which I mean talented people with something to really say — are working too many hours between too many jobs to develop the talents they have. Our publicized well-funded books/music/etc. are being produced by people with much less to say, and it shows in a cultural landscape that has not — for some time — served the purpose of challenging established ideas. Historically, American literary, music, and cinematic icons have broken the world open, let in notions, forms, and powers that had never unfolded quite that way on the page or the screen before. We haven’t done that on a grand scale in a very long time.

Art is, I think, a useful organ by which to assess the overall health of a country. America has long been a nation that refuses to take care of its artists, and the chronic symptoms have been critical long before November 5. That’s not to say, “What did you expect?” Because I didn’t expect this. But I also didn’t not-expect this, because I’m currently surrounded by people who are convinced that Trump will build a strong economy and protect working-class people. Where anyone got the idea that this rich kid who’s had everything handed to him by his admittedly-abusive but certainly wealthy landlord father I have no idea. He’s successfully painted himself as anti-establishment when he wouldn’t suvive 10 minutes on the societal margins.

In my head I hold two conflicting truths: we are terminally fucked beyond repair, and there will always be reason to hope. I’m scared, I’m angry, and I’m also excited to see what we’re all going to do with everything we’re feeling, because if despair doesn’t overtake us, I think the possibilities are genuinely without limit. Despair will inevitably have its moments where it wins, but let’s do all that we can (for ourselves and for each other) to make those moments as temporary as possible. I don’t even know what that means, as far as taking action, but now is the time for finding out.

I feel like this photo of Ronald McDonald taken outside of a McDonald’s in Bangkok is somehow appropriate.