I am listening to Dresden Dolls and remembering when I thought Amanda Palmer held a lot of promise for the world music, sitting in my old apartment in Macon, GA, tired from first or second year teaching public school, pouring myself a gin with lemon juice, and waiting for my future ex-wife to arrive from home hawking payday loans on car titles. One of my four cats would be curling around my legs. I would only really be home on weekends as I taught night school at a community college and high school during the day, living in neither city, so I spent a lot of time in my car. When I was home, I would drink to cut the stress and play with my cats. I rarely saw Sarah, my wife at time, during the early evening as our working hours were sometimes in conflict.
Tired of the call to prayer and grading sixth grade papers, I go back to Bush’s America in light of Trump’s America. Except in many ways, the dystopian elements of English speaking north America seemed consistent as I only lived in the states for one and a half years of Obama’s formal presidency, leaving in summer of 2010. I have watched it from abroad, largely unimpressed, working on different things, and becoming more and more radicalized.
Coming back to the states is strange. I enjoyed the time I spent in Utah. The marches right now are both hopeful and limited. Hopeful in that many people care, but only in opposition. I am left with nostalgia of the personal, podcasting on MMT and Marxism or ancient philosophy, or the limits and promise of dual power. I started this thinking that one I would be a literary scholar or a writing pedagogue, and now I have a different dream.
Mark Fisher died this week by his own hand. Mark was not a friend, but I respected him, wrote polemics both for and against him, and work with an imprint he helped put on the map. I miss him. I am only 36, and he was only 48. He is gone. Another in a litany of lost people I interacted with in the past year. I faced my own morality two years ago, and could have lost Khristian, my partner of five years.
This isn’t going anywhere because I am not sure where I want it to go. The times are changing, and I am remembering other hard times. I have seen much, much worse since my years struggling in my twenties.
Here’s to the brave new world. It was time for a change. It is always time for a change. It is coming for me personally, for the US politically, and for the world in myriad of ways. It always is, but right now, it is obvious.
Symptomatic Commentary 