Post-Election Zen
Happily Wandering Across the Flat Circle of Time
I voted for Kamala Harris by mail, in a safe blue state, the political equivalent of eating shredded cheese straight from the bag at 2 AM in more ways than one. I used to be a swing state dirtbag, now I’m an empty calorie voter. On the big day I came home from work and went to the movies. I swore off election night coverage in 2016. Hypertension comes for nearly half of all American adults. I’m in no rush to get the advance preview of the condition. Time, as it turns out, really is a flat circle. But walking the same path doesn’t have to mean stepping in all the same dog turds. When we exited our movie, a decent chunk of the people I’d gone with immediately pulled out their phones and dove headfirst into the seven stages of grief. This does of course raise the question as to why they went to the movie in the first place. Didn’t feel the need to ask, none of my business, but the question lingers.
I didn’t need my phone to clock the state of the race at roughly 9:30 EST on Tuesday, November 5, 2024. There was a certain ashy taste in the air. It persisted the day afterwards as I walked to collect my lunch. I could at least identify the origin at that point. I walked two city blocks and passed at least four people smoking. One of them was a woman on a park bench who looked as if she’d been crying. I can’t say I know why she might have been crying for sure, but I can guess. Donald Trump is gonna be the 47th president of the United States. Time is a flat circle.
In my little blue pocket the atmosphere of mourning is impossible to ignore. It’s in the dull gleam of the eyes and the knitting of the eyebrows, in the plumes of cigarette smoke and nicotine vapor, in the overheard conversations and half-glimpsed phone screens. The day after the election I went to the gym after work. It was busy. They’d turned off the AC for the season and it was eighty degrees Fahrenheit outside. The atmosphere was steamy. A neat correlation with the mood. The heat is on. Yet I am at peace. The despair hasn’t gotten into me yet. God willing, it won’t. But I’ve traveled through these times which so many around me seem to be finding so difficult with almost uncanny peace and calm. I feel zen, to use the westernized, secular, advertiser-friendly meaning of the term. It’s a feeling I feel the need to reflect on, before it passes.
“Let Fall The Scales From Your Eyes”
Perhaps zen isn’t the term. I’ll entertain that possibility for those seeking to cure their bad mood by spreading it around. Maybe “fugue state” is more accurate. Just kinda drifting along. It’ll hit me one of these days and my head will explode like I’m the guy in Scanners. All the more reason to write this now, when I feel strangely happy in the midst of it all.
If I had to isolate one factor, one individual domino which has toppled all others and left me with a sense of almost eerie calm, it would be this; he won the popular vote this time. It was unambiguous. There’s no walking around the margins of it this time, acting like it was all a fluke, grumbling about the electoral college, feeling like the will of the people has been disrespected. We’re stood right in the middle of it. We cannot lie to ourselves. We wanted this. The math at every level reflects it. In a moment of such revelation, when all the excuses are burned away and the clarity of who we are, what we are, and what we want is laid bare, how am I meant to be anything but happy? The truth is freeing. In knowing ourselves, we grow. Growth is painful. It’s a struggle. That struggle is life.
God, isn’t it beautiful? America got four years of qualified but uninspired professional government and decided, overwhelmingly, that they wanted the queeny game show president back. They wanted the memes and the goofy photo ops and the tweets. The rotating cast of cabinet members getting fired in spectacular fashion. They wanted their favorite sitcom dad pulled off the golf course and back on set. We’re like Renton in Trainspotting, taking a hard look at our circumstances, consulting with the fellas, and making the “...healthy, informed, Democratic decision to get back on heroin as soon as possible.”
The only control so many people will ever experience over their lives is the ability to fuck everything up at will.
Infinite Recurrence
We’ve been here before, have we not?
I didn’t take part in the national day of mourning in 2016 either. I was a nineteen year old undergraduate and annoyed that I had class. Other people were getting class off, why not me? Suppose my professors just wanted to go to work. Eight years hence I understand why. I woke up, had a brief conversation with my fiance (who’d also shunned the TV news coverage to read comics in her pajamas (she’s so wise, dude)) and went to the office. No one brought it up. We had a meeting. I went for pizza. I saw the woman crying on the park bench, smoldering dart in one hand, smartphone on speaker in the other.
I suppose that’s the ground on which I build my little zen garden. Familiar emotions. I find myself looking back, reminiscing about that magic time between November 2016 and January 2017, remembering my favorite subplots from a few of the wackiest months I can remember. Remember Hillary Clinton’s prolonged exile in the woods, encountered by random trail walkers like the Blair Witch? (Is Kamala gonna give us a sequel? I hope she does.) Remember when Jill Stein was gonna save us all by doing the recount in Michigan? Remember Peter Daou and Verrit? How about the “Rogue White House Staffer” Twitter accounts? Remember game theory bass guitar man Eric Garland? Remember when Louise Mensch was reporting that Steve Bannon was getting the death penalty for treason? (She’s pro-life and reporting that gave her no pleasure!) Remember noted hentai aficionado Kurt Eichenwald?
Hell, let's re-hash. Any of it and all of it. I’m feeling nostalgic. Anyone up for another January Sixth? Though granted it’d be more like the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear (remember that?) C’mon, picture that. Capitol cops getting bludgeoned with signs that read like “I am in favor of common-sense reform negotiated and passed within a reasonable time frame” by guys wearing Deadpool shirts. I’d go! I’d stand at a reasonable distance, in my weed-gummy mind palace, sneaking slugs out of the ol flask of Knob Creek. Head for the subway when they roll out the tear gas and find a bar where they know how to pour a Guinness properly. Nero Claudius had the right idea after all. If Rome’s burning anyway why shouldn’t he play the lyre? What’s he supposed to do? A rain dance? You may as well hope for a time-traveling fire brigade. Ain’t no cavalry comin, bubba. Dig in, get comfy. It’ll pass. It all passes, on a long enough timescale.
They Can Only Hang Me Once
I’m privileged in all of this, of course. I do all right, in economic terms. I own and operate a penis. I am white and blonde enough to appear on a Nazi party propaganda poster. The imminent violence of the state will not come down on me. Not at first. Probably not at all if I keep my mouth shut. The horrors to come will be done in my name. I have the luxury of digging in and waiting for things to pass. I have the option to collaborate. I like to think it’s a temptation I’m capable of resisting.
Most are not so lucky. It is the suffering of the powerless and the marginalized which will inevitably rouse me from my happy apathy. I’ll have to start working the problem at some point. It’s what my father taught me. There’s an appropriate time for emotionality and I don’t feel the need to mock grief or disrupt dread anymore than I already have. But life will go on and in living we will face the struggle, face it in sober, serious terms. Guerilla warfare fantasies will not feed the hungry, house the homeless, treat the sick, and welcome the unwanted. The latest bombshell report from the New York Times or CNN or MSNBC is not going to gain the potency of Watergate. If the past eight years have not taught you these things I cannot help you. We will help each other or we will fall beyond all mortal help. So it goes.
I’ve never been one to entertain the worst case scenarios. It just strikes me as uniquely useless self-flagellation. If the jackbooted thugs from the dreams of a thousand nervous Redditors break down my door, torch my library, and send me off to beta male death camp then I suppose I’ll die. That’s never been in question anyway. It’s gotten closer in the time it took to write this. It could happen tomorrow. I could schedule this essay for tomorrow morning and die of a monoxide leak tonight. My doctor could find tumors in my stomach lining that would have me gone before the inauguration. The Airborne Toxic Event could sweep me from my home and puff pesticide waste products into my lungs. Death buying a little timeshare in my blood, tissue, offal. That’s really the size of it. That’s the genesis of all the fear and loathing of ourselves, each other, the times in which we live. We’re afraid that what we do or fail to do at the ballot box will kill us all.
It’s easy to profess that you’re somehow immune to the fear of death when the gun barrel isn’t leveled against your skull. But I do live in a nuclear targeted area. I’ve said for over a decade, long before my arrival in my current residence, that if I ever see the mushroom cloud over the horizon, I’m walking towards it. I didn’t run the world into the ground and feel no responsibility to stick around past the fall of man to fix it. Maybe I’ll run frantically from the rising pillar of flame, desperate for one more day, one more hour, one more beer, one more hug from the woman I love. There’s no way to know until the day your number comes up. Then there are no more lies.
All the Evil in the World Doesn’t Have to Be Your Problem Right Now
There are little deaths we also fear. Deaths brought on by shrinking possibility and opportunity. Dying communities as friends become strangers. Life itself losing meaning as human rights come under attack. Deaths of dreams. We distract ourselves from the big death by hyperfocusing on the little ones. Each man and woman a Pandora’s Box in reverse. We open ourselves and swallow the great oil slick, each terrible thing our personal responsibility. The sins of one man, one woman, one nation, being reflected in all of our ledgers.
It’s no way to live.
Don’t treat your life like one of those prissy Formula 1 drivers, following the perfect line for the perfect lap, every minor imperfection in the operation of your vehicle crippling you completely, losing you thousandths of a second which will drag you forever off the winning pace. Life is like NASCAR, a superspeedway race at Daytona or Talledega. We do the same things over and over but how you run your race is what matters. Rubbin’s racin’, you’ll bump and get bumped. The big one will hit and it might just knock you for a loop. But you can nurse that thing to pit lane, duct tape the fenders back on, navigate around the cracks in the windshield, throw a fresh set of tires on and get back out there. I wanna finish upside down, backwards, and on fire, brakes worn down to little smoldering nubs. I wanna crawl backwards out of the smoking wreck, salute the crowd and say “Man! What a ride!” I wanna saunter up to the Pearly Gates looking like Griffin Dunne in American Werewolf in London, half my face torn off, cracking jokes, asking St. Peter if they let plastic surgeons into heaven.
We obsess over the micro in modernity. Lap times. Tenth of a second splits. Percentage points of improvement. Minute-by-minute updates. Microtrends. New man made horrors beyond our comprehension. We lose sight of the race. The long game. The beauty of the broader picture. I am not preaching against technology. I am not telling you to stop caring. I am suggesting, politely, that you need a break. Take some time, see some people, read more fiction, have a cheat meal, eat dessert. The callous, bumbling evil of the machine grinds on whether you count the individual bones it grinds or not. Dedicating a life to bearing witness to atrocity deadens you inside. It makes you hate people, and hate is infinite. When you think we’re all scum, how can you hope to advocate for even the most innocent among us?
We know very well what it is we fight against. Take some time and rediscover what you fight for.
So well done! Xoxo