2020 you rotten turd
november 29, 2020
it’s too early for me to be awake. i definitely didn’t go to bed 8 hours ago. i was having god awful dreams so i didn’t want to go back to sleep. sometimes living in there is better. sometimes living in there is not better. it’s funny for me to think that not that many years ago my average bedtime was not too far on the clock from my recent average wake time. age/occupation/health/pandemic are all likely contributions to the change, but there’s still plenty of evidence i should shy away from calling it “maturity.”
do grown men have nightmares? i mean grown men who do not have ptsd. apparently yes. and bad juju and bad times. lately we see evil and hear evil and speak evil. there’s plenty to go around. so, dream it too. which really is fine. worse things have happened to better people. worse things are happening to better people right now. this weekend boko haram carved up at least 110 people like thanksgiving turkeys in a nigerian rice field for the crime of…working in the rice field at the wrong time.
clearly worse things are happening to better people. i’ve taken to saying things like that frequently. maybe i like that in a world of uncertainties it’s a thing i can say that is guaranteed to be true at any time i say it. and i like being right. maybe i like that it’s a good reminder of how insignificant my own sense of misery is.
“For the first time I noticed — as I would notice repeatedly during my ordeal, between one throe of agony and the next — that my suffering was taking place in a grand setting. I saw my suffering for what it was, finite and insignificant, and I was still. My suffering did not fit anywhere, I realized.” — Yann Martel
or maybe i like the better people/worse things talk as a sort of roundabout towards self-righteousness. pious self-effacement. and so here is one of the problems inherent with these can’t sleep/self-analytic chapters: once you’re in the spiral it is positively always possible to find a way to frame it so that you’re the bad guy.
“Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education — least in my own case — is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my own head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right now in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.” — David Foster Wallace
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so let’s get down/back to earth. in this 2020 version i think the earth is still awesome, but there has to be a way to parse that from what i think of something like the “world.” the earth is awesome. the world is…eh.
the end of the year articles have not begun to surface yet but i reckon it’s not too early to try to ponder what 2020 means. people are still throwing around “happy new year!” at the end of january. for having invented time, humans are quite poor at using it. there might be a recency bias at play but i’m near to positive that those of us alive right now will be grappling with that question — what was 2020? — in a way that we won’t necessarily be doing about other years for quite a while.
sadly, it’s difficult to not have that national malignant tumor come to mind. that pathetic man-child that we’ve done ourselves the gross disservice of promoting and obsessing over. there’s a needle to thread that has to do with acknowledging all central and tangential consequences while also devoting cognitive space to moving the fuck on.
it’s also difficult to reflect on 2020 without staring at piles of sadness and shame and human indifference to suffering. the rich got richer and a lot of people died that didn’t have to. those things happen every year to a point. 2020 just did a nice fat line of coke before tackling the task.
and so the jaded man becomes more jaded. the first thing i passionately cared about in a global sense (so, nixing if the vikings/twins/pups had a shot at a title) was genocide in darfur. at 15 i became fascinated, awed, and truly dumbstruck that such mass murder could happen and the world would watch. i am no longer awed or dumbstruck. if there was any question about modern society’s concern for human suffering, all questions have been answered. there are over a million uyghurs detained in concentration camps, prisons, and forced labor factories in china right now. all in 2020 while the great world spins and we become more addicted to “progress” and “technology.” yuval noah harari calls the agricultural revolution something like a trick played against humans. it’s worth the time to read about why and apply the same lessons to the technological one.
“In every personal ‘Covid,’ so to speak, in every ‘stoppage,’ what is revealed is what needs to change: our lack of internal freedom, the idols we have been serving, the ideologies we have tried to live by, the relationships we have neglected.” — Pope Francis
the earth itself begs for us to quit heating it and we shrug. the pandemic ravages the old and the poor and the united states shrugs. here on earth in 2020. me subscribing to that fermi paradox thingy logic that we must not be alone has me wondering if on some far away planet some thing is looking through some great telescope and saying, “look at that shithole planet!”
or are they saying the opposite? from far away in either time or space do we seem to be doing quite well, all things considered? because one thing that’s very, very difficult for humans to grasp is that there is nothing inherent insuring our stability. we hear all too often about cycles of history and we get stuck assuming their permanence. there’s no law of nature that the wheels won’t one day radically fall off. there’s no thing inherent to our species that says things will get better. i happen to believe most days things can and will get better. that people will choose it. but there’s no law passed down that makes it so, no matter which altar of delusion you worship at — god, progress, science, capitalism, etc.
which brings me to maybe the only thing that can be reconciled when looking back and leaning forward: how to put one foot in front of the other. that’s basically it. the whole shebang. the only fucking guaranteed things you have are your present and your mind. and you are only guaranteed those things until you’re not. it is incredibly difficult to hold that thought.
i’ve convinced myself in other times of life — of lost sleep and bad dreams — of something like a mantra definition of truth; i.e. something is true if it evokes the right response. it’s a dangerous concept if taken too literally. another blatant lesson of 2020 being how delicate the truth is. but it’s important to have some ability readily at hand to convince the self that putting the next foot forward itself is an act of progress and self-establishment. of existing and mattering. it’s with this mantra def…fuck it…this faith that the shit storm might actually be made to pass.
i suppose we all need to have a little bit of that right now. we all have to think in some way that getting through to 2021 will be good. at least gooder. that we’ll enjoy next summer more than we did this one. that we’ll go to more concerts and see our friends more and see real progress. that by waking up and continuing to use our present and our minds we’ll make it all more likely.
if you have doubts you should certainly carry them aboard. without doubt there is no such thing as faith. faith exists to bridge the gap forward from where your boring, anal, wholly insufficient human ability to simply reason ends.
which might all sound silly and probably is. even the tomorrow version of me might think this was a pathetic misfire of thought and time. and it’s silly to analyze time based on a relatively arbitrary calendar and silly to place any meaning whatsoever in the tally of years since christ. remember, i’m not well rested and the winter sun is slowly rising and i haven’t had my coffee yet. but we’re a silly species playing silly games. act accordingly.
good riddance 2020. we won’t be needing you much longer.
