EPISODE 419: MANIC EPISODES

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

Hi! Happy Mother's Day! To all the mothers out there, may you have a day filled with sunshine, family and always more wine.

How do you deal with preparing to travel? By which I mean, I do not deal well with preparing to travel. Somewhere along the line someone entered one line of code in my operating system that only activates when it registers that I am within 48 hours of leaving, and it’s almost impossible to root out probably because it’s just two words: EXECUTE ALL.

So yeah, anytime I’m about to travel it’s suddenly the right time to rewrite the article that’s been sitting on my desktop, and finish the research on another, and finally type up all those notes that have slowly been torn away from the legal pads in my backpack by the constant insertion and exfiltration of my computer from the same space, and now sit at the bottom of the bag in these little tightly rounded shreds of debris. And God this room needs a cleaning, and I’m not planning to pack these shirts without ironing them first, am I, and I really need to catch up on Barry because everyone is talking about this fifth episode like it is Something Really Special and while I’m there maybe I should check out this Chernobyl mini-series or finally start to watch the second season of Counterpart?

Also, there are thank you cards to write, emails to send and um, er, dear, this newsletter is not going to write itself.

You thought the monster was out there? Nope, not so much. He in your head, Boo.

This is a pattern I’ve noticed for years now, maybe decades. And you know how they say self-knowledge is like picking the lock on the cage you’ve put yourself in, now you can finally fly free little starling? Well it turns out that’s only the case if you actually decide to leave it, rather than continuing to fly around the tiny space you’ve been in insisting, Hey, in this space I know what to expect!

So yeah. My room is pretty spotless (for me), but of course I won’t be here to enjoy it as I have about an hour until I’m supposed to leave for a plane that’s going to take me away for about ten days. ++ A real Yahoo headline from yesterday: “What did Missandei Mean When She Said Dracarys on ‘Game of Thrones'”. Yahoo journalist, please.

This season has been such a rollercoaster. I can’t really believe that we finished with Cosmic Existential Threat to Everything already and now we’re going to end on AP Politics with Professor Cersei Lannister. (There is a test on this exam, and you will know you passed it if you are the last one standing. PS You are going to fail it.)

It all seems so banal in the wake of That Time Jack Frost Ice Death Tried to Take Us. Truly, with the exception of Cersei, why are they all still fighting? Dany, take a breather for a minute, mmkay, while we lock you and Sansa in a room together to work some stuff out.

I now pretty much fully expect things to end very sadly. Which maybe means they won’t. But wow. It’s all pretty depressing stuff right now. Is anyone finally going to be free of all this petty awfulness, even just for a little while?

And don’t even get me started about this:

Seriously one of the saddest moments in the entire run of the show. And I don’t know how to feel about the fact that I really do feel that, when this is a series that has featured so many horrific acts of violence.

Fun things to think about on long plane flights GO! ++ A lot of stuff about grief and being lost and the quest for freedom slipping across my radar these days, like UFOs piloted by Absence and Tears.

Like I was reading this great article about a new amnesiac assassinista comic Eve Stranger, where the writer argues that being an amnesiac is actually liberating, in the sense that for the first time you truly get to build your identity yourself.

Which lead me with the author down this whole rabbit hole about how no matter how free we think we are, our sense of history and self is always partially conditioned by things we’ve been taught by others – our society, our family, friends, schools, churches. And at times that has meant that we’ve been taught facts that actually aren’t true both about the world and ourselves; and also that other things that are true have been hidden from us. See: a million high school debate speeches about state-mandated school curricula (which inevitably mention China and/or Nazi Germany). This author basically contends that we’re all sort of amnesiacs anyway, and just don’t know it.

Or another take: We’re all basically sleeper cell units for the prejudices of the society and/or family that raised us, slowly taught triggers that will cause us to instinctively hate or love certain groups when activated. Which may sound super dark, except knowing it is an opportunity to see those crazy certainties from the outside, look them over and realize they are not us, we do not have to abide by them.

++

And then Sarah Jaffe had this whole thing on grieving futures that have not come to pass:

Part of the last year has been, for me, figuring out how to see a future for myself that looks very different from the one I thought I had figured out. I was talking with the estimable Kate Aronoff the other night about grief and climate change, and how part of grieving is learning to imagine different futures. Part of what you mourn, when you lose someone or even something (a long-term job, a home) is a vision of the future that you had spent time building, a future that now can no longer exist. For a long time after the death of my father I could not imagine a future at all. I simply had to keep going, to assume that if I kept waking up in the morning and kept making it through days, I would begin again to see a future that I could build for myself.

Which she goes on to point out is why telling people it’ll all be okay is bad bad bad. From the perspective of what they have lost, it won’t actually. That version of okay is over forever. There will be others, but they are not the same. “We must grieve that world even if we feel silly or guilty for it. And then we find our way forward. We have to--we don't have a choice.”

Her big question: “How do we go through this process collectively, and make it political?” That is, if we as a community are faced with this massive change coming, how do we create a way for us all to go through that process of grieving and liberation together (before it’s all kind of too late)? She says it’s the stories of others that have helped her: “Of course no one could build my path through grief for me, but I was helped immeasurably by people who shared their stories of how they made it through, sometimes close friends, sometimes people I barely knew but who had been through it.”

It seems a pretty potent question for Catholics right now, too. We’re dealing in the States with this broad experience of grief and loss that is deep and fierce and so so important; but it seems like it’s getting bottlenecked by authorities who either don’t want to face the implications, that their own visions of their future are not going to work out so much, or that think the proper response is just some new set of policies.

Which is sort of like being on the Titanic after the iceberg and suggesting new iceberg-protection policies. I mean, yeah, it’s good, people should definitely do that, and thank you, but may I now draw your attention to the freezing water pouring up the stairwell? Because that may not turn out so well.

Jaffe also had this great thought: “Nostalgia could perhaps be understood as thwarted grief”. She argues that the 2016 election was pretty much What Happens When We Don’t Get to and through Grief. It's interesting. ++ Then I realized the song haunting my week, LCD Soundsystem’s “Someone Great”,is despite being the kind of song I would like to dance to right now and might actually in the airport which oh God is a place I should be going to soon is actually a song all about dealing with loss. (It’s a great song. You should listen to it.)

And also I got to read about gravitational waves, which are what happens when two black holes (or similarly massive cosmic things, like Streisand and Midler) collide. The effect is so powerful dramatic that it creates ripples through spacetime (aka that cool fabric you and I and everyone everywhere everywhen are wearing, you can’t see it because it’s super sheer, but trust me you look amazing in it), and those ripples have affects like causing time to slow down in certain places or speed up -- if you had an atomic clock here and another one where one of these waves hit, the time on each clock would no longer be the same, for real! -- or making the position, direction or velocity of things change.

Which sounds terrifying and let’s hope it never happens, right, even if it would help me explain why I am going to be late for this flight. (Scene from a movie I want to see: A guy is driving on a highway, and looks on his GPS and suddenly is puzzled to discover the distance to his destination suddenly getting farther and farther away, really fast.)

But then it turns out these waves are happening like ONCE A WEEK somewhere in the universe. And so instead of being frightened I’m just sort of amazed at how incredibly strange and varied the universe is. And I wonder what kind of crazy stuff we’re going to find when we finally get out there.

I don’t know if Kirk is really a lab, but McCoy is such a terrier.

++

And then finally there was this great article on getting lost, which Laura Olin highlighted:

In Lithuania, to get lost while picking mushrooms is a common enough occurrence to have its own word: nugrybauti. You achieve a state of nugrybauti when the thrill of having spotted choice edibles slides into uneasiness, brought on by the feeling that the forest has changed around you. Your sense of direction scampers off, and you trudge around aimlessly over moss, under branches, and around the skirts of spruces, lost—until, much later, you are back on a familiar path, though not where you thought you’d be.

It’s also a term for losing track of the plot of a story, a la when you’re writing a newsletter and you had this idea you wanted to share and then you’re at the end and you’re talking about Lithuanian mushrooms and who is going to Yahoo wondering about Dracarys.

And I wondered: A) Could weak conversational storytelling sort of be like face blindness? Like rather than some sort of rudeness on the speaker’s part a kind of condition, they just can’t make the connections other people seem to make so easily?

And B) Is it me or is there something kind of liberating about the idea of wandering for some kind of tasty food to the point that you get entirely lost?

++ LINKS ++

For Comic Book and/or Comedy Lovers: A wonderful thread about comedian Paul F. Tompkins’ favorite X-Man.

For People who Find Reaching a Certain Age Anxiety Producing, the Brimley/Cocoon Line is for you. (Or if you want distraction perhaps this.)

And for People Who Find Wearing or Seeing Certain Hats Anxiety Producing, an LA writer goes to one of the most over the top California of California cafes wearing a MAGA hat and what he discovers there is actually kind of great. (We’ve got a lot of issues, but we’re also doing better with each other than sometimes we think.)

Or, in the words of Steven Universe,

I don't need you to respect me, I respect me;
I don't need you to love me, I love me;
But i want you to know you could know me,
If you change your mind.

I think I’ll let Steven play us out. Be good to yourself. And gentle. And maybe cast an occasional positive vibe in the general direction of people who are grieving or lost in forests or can’t stop doing things even when they need to get on planes.

And when you find yourself there, maybe take a look around. There’s a lot of funny things that turn out to be gifts.

Take it away Steven.

(PS I know my images were very dog/animal-themed this week. This is totally unintentional and almost certainly a sign of just how much the Ghost Ghost got to me last week...

I can only imagine what horrors Thrones has planned for tonight, when the story's main opponents are now two women who identify so strongly with their motherhood. *watches with hands over eyes*)