Earlier tonight I found myself walking through an empty grocery store, holding a wine bottle by the neck as if I expected I'd have to brandish it. I'd love to tell you it's the first time my body has improvised a weapon without consulting my mind. My hands know the right shapes, the right heft. I have avoided violence as a rule, but my body calculates constantly. It's like I downloaded experiential wisdom from some ancient former life. I carry iron in each pocket and have forgotten the weight.
Five minutes earlier in the parking lot, I'd passed a pack of meathead crackers, sharing a brain between them as is so often the case. They'd locked their lifted, immaculately clean and overpowered truck, and had giggled like glue sniffing schoolboys when a 150 decibel foghorn had shaken the parking lot and scared the dinner out of half the people working in the front of the shop. Casual sadism, no doubt a family tradition for each. Inside I passed eggs on clearance, but thought better of it. These idiots usually know cops’ first names.
Not fifteen minutes later pulling out of the gas station I saw something shudder in the corner of my eye and it took me half a minute down the road to realize it was a human being trying to sleep in a tattered blue sleeping bag with a suitcase for a pillow. Somehow sleeping under stadium lights in a gas station parking lot in the dead of December was the best option. This is not a society. Normal is a meaningless word. I see more of it every single day, and have no better insight as to how to assist systemic, exponentially increasing poverty.
How in the hell, I ask you, is this the lighthouse of the world? Where, in these newly dead cities, is the fabled American dream? Did it ever exist, or was it just a perfect grift that finally ran out of steam? Hundreds of thousands dead and dying, millions facing eviction or starvation and even now being screamed at to work for the machine or otherwise being shamed for doing they have to do to simply exist in this rigged fear farm that gnaws our bones from inside. America got the plague, pretended it didn't exist or at least wasn’t as important as fucking shopping, and let everything that didn't serve the empire perish. One day there will be nothing but Amazon, Wal-Mart, and tent cities. We're killing the poor, the old, the kids, every speck of diversity. Soon the only jobs will be soldiers cops and morgues.
The horror of America isn't just that it's dead. It's that we're still expected to keep its corpse in motion. The emperor has no clothes, and the empire has no soul. We are citizens in name only, driven by arcane forces to grind the stone that crushes us. No dignity, no stimulus, no meaningful reform of any kind, literal Alzheimer patients making the laws for generations they can't possibly understand in a future they'll never suffer. Once you finally see the rot beyond the veneer, you never leave the verge of rage.
I need you to hear something. Red and blue are not opposing sides. Neither of them gives a hot shit about regular people, period. Red and blue make purple. Purple is the color of royalty. Why? Because once, before we turned the planet into a sweatshop, purple dye was only available from one species of mollusc that lived in one part of the Mediterranean Sea. It took almost ten thousand of the little things to make a gram of the dye. Only the "royals" could even experience this color. Then, as now, a small group of ridiculous people thought they deserved the most special thing because they were blind to the humanity of the people around them. The inbreeding and access to standing armies may have contributed. Purple then became the color of the religious elite, again, the "special" people who talked to God, as if God isn't vibrating in every atom of this astonishing universe. But I digress. The point is that neither "side" is yours. They don't work for you, however hard you might work for them. They tell gorgeous lies, and they never deliver, and they never will. They work together to keep the purple flowing out of your blood and into their bank accounts. Incidentally, the reason purple is cheap now is because it was accidentally synthesized while somebody was working on quinine. Everything is connected.
I hate that I'm this cynical but it's informed cynicism, dammit. I was born in Cape Fear Hospital, but I was raised in Hope Mills. I try to keep that symbolic shift in my heart, but I'm only able to make enough hope for my vicinity, day to day and second to second. I can manage perhaps a candle's worth of light these days. My spotlight is flickering, and might burn out. I no longer hold real hope for this nation, if it is even such a thing anymore. What hope there is lives with the individual. Wake up from the trance of the dead and redefine what life is beyond the programming you've been beaten with since your first breath, and then shake the next person awake when they're ready. COVID-19 isn't the only thing spread person to person, and it isn't the true target of all these dress rehearsal dystopias either. They aren't doing this to keep us safer, they're doing it to keep us asleep and contained and plugged in because this all runs on our blood and essence and compliance. There's a reason these metaphors come up so often in fiction. It's the only place you can talk about it.
2020 has been a syphilitic dog in heat from Hell humping every hole we have. I have been lucky because I am a natural shape shifter. I have taken the forms I've needed to from hour to hour and day to day. I leaned into the chaos in a field where that was an opportunity to do a little good, and that is what has kept me from the brink of absolute shrieking madness, but if this all goes on as it has, one day the chaos will be overwhelming. One day my hand will reach for whatever it needs in a moment of horrible clarity and it will strike the mark and things will never be the same again. We have come full circle, and learned nothing.
I pray, every moment of my life, that I am wrong. Another world has always been possible, and I beg each of you to unplug and invoke it. May this nation-sized corpse prison and all its impurities burn away in the funeral pyre of an empire that never deserved a second of power.
