Figuring out How to Keep Writing

In the pall of recent events.

I feel like its time for me to start writing again but I have been trying to figure out how that ought to work for me, in light of the mood brought on by recent events. (the election.) For me, it is still casting a pall over everything. And the rough stuff hasn’t even started yet.

When I was in high school, I viewed my parents and their entire generation with unadulterated scorn. They seemed like judgmental, uncomprehending aliens from a planet that was too ridiculous to visit, even for bathroom emergencies. Their ideas, their political beliefs, their customs, traditions and behavioral norms all seemed drenched in a kind of make-believe and nonsense not worth taking seriously. Everything they stood for lacked either logic, compassion or creativity. It all seemed dumb, including their fashion sense and their diet.

This was me in those days: not really making the argument for progress in fashion that I imagined.

But turns out we had a lot in common. Same haircut. Same color palette and taste in clothes.Similar political opinions. Okay, yes…she had less frontal lobe which might be to blame for this particular choice of hat.

I vividly remember a lengthy argument with an uncle about how permitting dangerous, pollution-friendly business practices that contributed to destroying the planet could only be seen as a self-cancelling proposition. That seemed to be a point that was so obvious it was actually beneath arguing, not unlike the way there could be no rationalization for keeping another human being as a slave. How was he not able to see that we needed to prioritize the health of the planet over the selfish, short-range plans of people with a widget factory who just wanted to make a pile of cash quickly? How could he even think of taking steps that would destroy our home? So I stared at him in bone-chilling shock as he passionately argued that the most important thing, more important by far than the health of the natural world, was that big business continued to turn a profit.

From that point on, I could no longer see any point in talking to him. So I stopped. I never listened to the opinions of that uncle ever again. I stayed away from him for the rest of his life and gotta say…. I don’t regret it to this day.

And that, unfortunately, is how I am feeling again now about a whole range of things. Example: I woke up this morning and saw this in my e-mail stream:

And my thought was ‘ Don’t you mean meet them AGAIN? How about this time YOU meet them all over again if you want to. I know far too much about each and every one of them already. I met them and I met them and I met them during the run up to the election. And I also met his other identical brick-shittingly scary choices in 2016. I know far too much about each and every one of them as I have witnessed them being flayed, eaten alive and digested for purposes of opinion and humor for almost an entire decade. That this newest bunch may be even more aggressive and personality-disordered is, in some ways, a moot point. Their leader, you-know-who, has now been empowered by the Supreme Court to do whatever he wants without interruption. And the majority of the population of The United States of America knew that and gave him the thumbs up anyway. Since all those supposedly ‘good citizens’ and registered voters were fine with selling the futures of their own kids and grandkids down the river, I don’t know what can be gained by any part of the history of this country for me to allow them to strangle my soul thru force feeding me more of these details.

If, for some reason I want to main-line a straight shot full of unadulterated rage into my veins, I definitely know how to do it efficiently and with alacrity.

In other words after all these years, I am back to being that outsider girl in the weird hat from my high school who feels surrounded by vacant-eyed automatons. I never expected to be inserted back into a world full of small minded uncles again but, unfortunately, here I am. Once again, the prevailing values of the society I live in are making no sense to me. So I see no immediate alternative, other than looking for unlikely things to laugh at….and factions of smarter people inside the prevailing nonsense that still do.

If nothing can be done at the macro level, then until there is some kind of workable, counteractive strategy, ( like maybe the midterms, if that ever happens again) it’s back to focusing on the micro level. No reason to purposely inhale the horrible details of people I do not admire just because someone somewhere is trying to earn a living by convincing me to click on pointless written pieces full of infuriating reasons to feel angry that offer no recourse to a solution.

I admit I am haunted by worry that this plan is myopic and has the ability to turn me into ‘a Good German’ For those of you who are unfamiliar with that term, it is an ironic phrase with which I was raised in post WWII America. It referred to the German citizens who did not support the Nazi regime, but remained silent or did not resist in a meaningful way. The term was also used to refer to those who claimed ignorance of the Holocaust and German war crimes. These smiling, seemingly civilized but camouflaged people were a scary untrustworthy by-product of WWII Germany. I contemplated and worried about the very idea of them for a long time.

So in order for some form of Good Germanitis not to be what I am prescribing, I guess we all need to see how events over which we have no control play out. It’s hard to imagine tuning out the deportation or placement into some kind of camps of millions of the people around us. I guess it remains to be seen what that moment will require. Until then, my plan (to the extent that I have one) is to continue to focus on what is meaningful to me. So back to volunteering at the Wildlife rescue. Back to looking around for peer groups who are doing work I admire in the arts and other places that still makes sense.

This being alive and living among human beings business never stops being tricky. And the truth is, I have always had trouble figuring out what to write about and when. Here is a video I made the last time I found myself drowning in this alluvion. (Yes, I said alluvion and yes, I pulled alluvion out of the thesaurus. The other side has the full-out monopoly on mono-syllabic stupidity. So I am heading even further into the opposite multi-syllabic direction.)

I guess, summing up: as long as there is still a world that matters to me, outside of the insanity that is sure to envelope us in January, I guess you will find me there looking for things I can still find funny or interesting. And if it all gets too crazy …well, we’ll all have no choice but to cross that bridge when we come to it.

Meanwhile, here is another video I made a few years ago that is also seeming more appropriate suddenly. When I made it, I was thinking about how the cartoons I watched during my childhood all seemed so depressing and nihilistic to me because I could see the same two or three trees and/or rocks going by every few seconds. So I rearranged the rest of the cartoon to fit my template. I realize that the German voice over doesn’t work at all if you actually speak German. ( But I don’t. It is Peter Lorre from the movie “M.” )