On Complicity

Kyle Rittenhouse got off. The trial transfixed me. I tuned in, impulsively, during Rittenhouse's testimony, and kept watching it live, daily, religiously, until the verdict came in. I even had it on during the days and days that the jury was out, when nothing was happening, when the coverage was limited to a fixed, screensaverish shot of the county seal above the judge's bench. I didn't want to miss a thing. I'm not sure why. I don't usually follow these hyper-public trials. I'm have no interest in our ancient cultural obsession with the dissonance created by a young, attractive woman committing a grisly crime, feel no captivating outrage when a different but equally young and attractive woman is dismembered by her boyfriend-rapist, am honestly grossed out by our sick delusion that any given verdict will help to redress or ameliorate centuries of institutional evil or serve as a symbol of our movement towards a more just and equitable society. But this trial got me. I was hooked. I was fiending.¹

Maybe it was the contrast between the chaos of the night of the killings—the ink blot ambiguity of the events (with the glut of footage of that night, of the shootings themselves, somehow only enhancing the sensation of being shown a flipbook of amorphous shapes and being asked, by a man whose job it is to rule on your sanity, your fitness to participate freely and safely in polite society, the threat you pose to yourself and others, "What do you see here?") the sense that somehow, if you could only see the facts and implications of this case clearly, you might also gain some insight, some clarity into the opaque chaos of the last year, five years, decade, two decades²—and the goofy slapstick of the trial: the curmudgeonly, scenery chewing judge, the affected folksiness of the defense, the tone deaf slickness of the DA, the technological incompetence of everyone involved as a running gag, Rittenhouse's schrodinger tears. My warped brain craves this sort of dissonance. It stimulates me. It distracts me.

I don't know how I feel about the outcome of the trial, can't weigh in on Rittenhouse's guilt or innocence. All of the fatal actions (by the living, by the dead) were made rapidly, on instinct and prejudice, without time for reflection, within the blindness of bias and belief, within myopic and terrified minds, within a larger context of myopia and terror.³ It's entirely believable that Rittenhouse thought—or felt, intuitively,⁴ as everything seems to have happened faster than the speed of conscious, deliberate thought—that his life was at risk. And it's also completely believable that Huber and Grosskreutz and, yes, Jumpkick Man, operating in that same myopic moment, under their own preprogrammed assumptions, thought they were intervening to incapacitate an active shooter. That the fundamental difference wasn't the rightness or wrongness of their assessments, but the fact that one of them was an impulsive teenager with a comically powerful firearm.⁵ And this is without reflecting on Rosenbaum's motivations: The impenetrable black box of his mental illness; the accumulated resentments; the constant disconnect between his thoughts and desires and vicious, concrete, humiliating reality.⁶  (I left the following contextless quote in my notes for this section: "synapses misfired—but Rittenhouse didn't.")

To find conscious, calculated choices (if such a thing exists; if anything resembling free will exists) you must travel back the chain of causality to moments of peace and safety, and all of those choices were (apparently) entirely legal. The choice to take a semi-automatic rifle into a city in the throes of profound civil unrest to protect a used car dealership is an absurd one, a bizarre decision that's impossible to rationalize if you value safety (your own, that of others) above ideology,⁷ but it's also one that our justice system offers no direct recourse for, cannot act or comment on. The jury's decision can be agonizingly considered and legally correct and still offer no moral clarity, still tell us nothing about what is just beyond the claustrophobic confines of pure legalism. So there's no relief here. No hope of a satisfying outcome unless you view jurisprudence as a team sport, justice as a function of partisanship.

And yet this is so much better than any alternative humanity has attempted. We're hungry for the lynch mob; its simplicity; its certainty; its finality; its diffusion of responsibility.⁸

********

Alec Baldwin killed a woman with a prop gun. He says he didn't know it was loaded. Conditions on set were a mess. Most of the crew walked over the oppressive work environment. There are accusations of negligence, accusations of sabotage. It sounds like a real mess. I haven't looked into any of it too closely. I'm not actually interested in the reality of the situation. I'm in pursuit of a metaphor.

The prop gun is the metaphor. There is no such thing as a prop gun, just an unloaded one.⁹ Every gun is a prop gun until it's fired. Kyle Rittenhouse's¹⁰ gun was a prop gun until it wasn't. Ideology reduces every real physical thing (including guns) to props. Ideologues love to call each other cosplayers and they're right; they're all right. It's all costuming, all stagecraft: the art of making fantasies feel real, of overwriting the reality with the fantasy. They're all right until the prop gun becomes real; no: they're right until the moment of realization that the prop gun was always real. And after that: on the stand, before the judge, crying real (?) tears.¹¹

********

Earlier this year I planned to write a piece about the COVID pandemic called "On Miracles." The basic premise would have been this: that the collective human response to COVID was essentially miraculous if you started from the position that humans are inherently myopic and selfish, always operating in a cloud of limited information and motivated thinking.¹² After all, we created a vaccine in record time and there was a widespread (if reluctant) willingness to social distance, protect vulnerable populations, and generally make personal sacrifices to halt the spread of the disease. Not bad for a fundamentally benighted species. Not bad at all when viewed from the perspective of history.

I didn't get far. Delta hit. There were fresh restrictions and complications. It became harder and harder for me to separate the performative from the real. Whatever clarity I thought I had about it all evaporated.

Ultimately, I only wrote some brief notes. I've pasted them below. They're not encouraging:

We're desperate to assign complicity. Airborne virus maximizes complicity. Personal losses. Keep constructing narratives that make me responsible. Want to kill myself. Counterproductive.

Unwilling to give each other credit for things done grudgingly, things done under mild social duress, things done without relinquishing improper thoughts or incorrect beliefs. We refuse to forgive bad ideology, even in the face of good behavior. (Parable of the two sons?)

********

COVID has hit my parents' church.¹³ It's not the monolithic plague I imagined. Instead it's incremental, persistent. One or two families will get sick, and disappear from mass for a week. There's rarely an explicit confirmation of illness. The gossip mill fills in the details. Then, normalcy. A week, two weeks, a month of nothing. Another family vanishes. Sometimes there are prayer requests. Other times just uncertainty and speculation.

Most of the congregation, my mom included, will not get vaccinated. I'm told it's because the vaccines were developed and tested using stem cells from aborted fetuses.¹⁴ I'll leave it up to you to decide whether this is pure myopic silliness, people risking their health and safety out of false belief and conspiratorial paranoia, or if there's an honest moral calculus here, if they understand the possible costs (up to and including their lives) and are still unwilling to compromise with (what they perceive to be) evil. (Or is it the prop gun again? Ornamental until lethal.)

One man is dead. The only confirmed kill for the virus so far.¹⁵ He died a week before his daughter's wedding. He was a big guy. He had cancer. There were risk factors. There were comorbidities. He was a goner, regardless, but: He would have been at the wedding were it not for COVID; he would have been present, in the flesh—I can't comment on any other way he might have attended, might still have attended—to witness the marriage of his daughter were it not for COVID.¹⁶

There was another close call: An old lady. ("Probably around 80," my mom guessed.) Showed up at the church a couple of years ago, homeless. Said she spent some time in jail in New Hampshire after being arrested while protesting in front of an abortion clinic.¹⁷ A QAnon true believer who once talked to my mom at length about how Trump was actually still present, Biden was dead, and the Clintons were in jail.¹⁸ One day she didn't show up to mass. Another prisoner went to check on her. She had COVID. She was in rough shape. She was taken to the hospital against her will. A priest gave her the last rights. She checked herself out the next day. She's fine now. Made a full recovery. She told my mom she took Ivermectin. (I'm only reporting the facts on the ground. An anecdote retold, retold.)

********

I'm making up the weekly shopping list. (This is what I do now. I do chores for my parents like, like—can't think of an artful way to say this: like a fucking child. Whatever, whatever. The shopping list will be the least painful thing I write this week.) I comment off-handedly to my dad that we seem to be buying a lot of chicken feed. He says you have to feed them more during the winter because they can't go outside to forage. They stop laying too. "This is why the Amish slaughter all their chickens around this time of year," he says. He sounds envious. I bet he would do the same were it not for my mom. What a horror. The gentle, peaceful Amish and their annual utilitarian holocaust. 

But of course I eat meat, and understand the far greater horror of factory farming. Had an ex who was a vegan. I remember telling them¹⁹ that I'd like to go vegetarian, as one does in that situation, but didn't have the willpower. Maybe someday. The relationship lasted four years. Someday, as CCR predicted, never came. 

I made soup with the remains of our Thanksgiving turkey, at my parents' request. I remember dredging the carcass out of the pot, picking through the broth for stray bones.

********

My mom has asked me to find Christmas presents for my sisters, my sisters' husbands, my (living) aunts and uncles, my cousins, my (living) grandparents, [redacted], Rudy,²⁰ the parish priests, and a family from church with seven or eight kids who my mom has taken to (affectionately, spitefully) calling her "foster grandchildren." It's a daunting task, especially for a narcissist who hasn't spoken to many of these people in years and who never took an adequate (or even polite, really) interest when I did, but I'm not complaining. It means I can guiltlessly add my name to the tag. My bank account is basically empty. I'm broke, and the affiliated feelings of terror and shame are growing. This will buy me some time. A reprieve, not a pardon. Debt or death will have me yet.

My sister is first. She has an Amazon wish list. Easy. While scrolling through, trying to find three presents that roughly add up to the amount I've been instructed to spend,²¹ I'm discomforted to see a book about prayer and another about grief. I'm not expecting this. I was anticipating the usual mix of trail guides, hiking and camping supplies, and tiny home paraphernalia. Those are still there, but I become fixated on the items that don't fit. My sister isn't religious. (Wasn't?) I don't really know anything about how she processed (is processing?) the deaths of our grandmother and our aunt. I haven't spoken to her about it. In my infinite selfishness I hadn't even considered that the pain of last year might lead her to reevaluate anything, that it might change her in any profound or lasting way. Frankly, I hadn't thought about her suffering at all when it wasn't happening—as it so clearly was with her face flushed (so red in my memory) and her turning off the camera to cry when our parents told us, on the zoom call (of course), that my grandmother had died and then, again, when they told us that my aunt was terminal, and then, the third and final time, when the news was simply that she had passed (and my dad then, finally, not angry anymore as he had been [at the doctors, at the reality] but so sad, so heartbroken)—before my eyes. Soon I'm pacing around my room, distracted, foggy, manic. And then I'm typing this. Struggling to type this.

********

As I work my way through this document, writing, editing, patching over holes, hoping to finish it before Christmas, trying to shape it into something just coherent enough to publish, I discover a bunch of sentences scattered throughout, standing alone. They all appear to be false starts, failed attempts to begin the same paragraph, a paragraph I ultimately never wrote. I'm putting them all here. An exercise: See if you can finish my work. Use your imagination!

I thought I had a moral epiphany. It was a simple one, befitting of a piece written (and hopefully published) between Thanksgiving and Christmas: I needed to stop being so fucking selfish.

The possibility of justice. The possibility of absolution. (For me.)

Will this guilt ever leave me? I'm tempted to make a full confession of my sins, to provide a bulleted list of every transgression my mind/soul/conscience/pathology won't stop ruminating over, won't let me forgive myself for.

What good does it do to tell someone, "I'm sorry." To say, "I feel guilty all the time." 

The extremes of my cowardice. My aversion to simple conversation. The possibility that I would have said the wrong thing, that my awkwardness and impotence would triumph. (Better or worse than saying nothing?)

How can you obtain absolution for 37 years lived in near complete selfishness?

Here I am, trying to author myself an exorcism again.

********

My unvaccinated uncle with asthma has COVID.²² My grandma called my dad yesterday. Said she couldn't lose another child. My dad is getting his booster now. Asked me to schedule an appointment for him.²³ He hadn't planned to before. My mom is still unvaccinated.

I hesitate to include any of this, because it seems uncomplicated. It verges on a kind of lib-liberal preachiness that I abhor, even though it's a fairly direct, unadorned recounting of recent events. My pretensions chafe. I think of my audience and gag. Forgive me, reader—No, fuck the "reader" affectation. I'm worried. I'm scared.²⁴

********

One of my favorite moments from Dave Chappelle's recent standup special, The Closer, has nothing to do transphobia (or its absence) or social media discourse or any of the other controversies that the comedian has gleefully leaned into in recent years.²⁵ It's about his reaction to being diagnosed with COVID ("I felt dirty. I felt gross.") and realizing that careless mundane actions ("I had been walking around Texas touching doorknobs and shit, hands all moist; tipping niggas with cash: 'Here take this to your family!") were suddenly, retroactively consequential. The punchline: "I must have killed thousands of people."

Louis CK told a similar joke when [redacted] and I went to see him in Reading, PA²⁶ this November.²⁷ I wish I could remember it word for word. There's no point in retelling a joke poorly. The jist: given the choice between killing grandma and changing our daily routines, we chose to kill grandma.²⁸ Recording the show was strictly prohibited. We were told to put our phones in our pocket and leave them there until the show was over. Otherwise we would be asked to leave. It was a nice experience. Nostalgic. Yes, there were a few COVID jokes, some allusions to his scandals, but mostly it felt like any other CK standup set. One of the few experiences I've had since last March that felt like a true return to normalcy. [redacted] and I stopped at a soul food restaurant before the show. Ate fried chicken and ribs. Pure comfort food, all of it. 

Louis just released a new standup special. I haven't watched it yet. The title: Sorry.

********

I make the last minute decision to attend an Expat reading in New York City, the final reading of the year.²⁹ At the time, I'm blocked. Can't finish a short article.³⁰ Doubting myself, everything. I feel like I've reached a complete intellectual and creative dead end. I'm stagnating, rotting. I'm fantasizing about walking away from all of it: Misery Tourism, the dumb fucking substack, all my projects and obligations, real and imagined, the entire god damn lit community. 

So: New York. I don't know if I went to reaffirm my commitment to literature or to give myself an excuse to abandon it or just because I wanted to force my calcified brain out of its habituated thinking and towards ... whatever. Or maybe it was more benign, less selfish than that. Maybe I just wanted to meet Derek, Gabe, Michael, and Manny,³¹ four people who had played a huge role in building my faith and confidence in all this shit that I was then losing faith and confidence in.

I take the greyhound to New York and the subway to Manny's apartment. I wish I took notes on the ride, so I could incorporate them here, but I didn't. Too nervous. What's the cliché? Butterflies.³²  

When I get there, everyone is so gracious, so kind, so welcoming. Great company. Great conversations. We talk about literature, politics, our families,³³ the dreaded lit "scene," experimental films, Kanye, and on and on. It's wonderful.

And yet, and still: There's the profound agony of occupying the same physical space as other human beings, social anxiety, social dysphoria. The feeling of constant, pervasive shame and embarrassment. Humiliation. Manny asks me if I want to MC the reading. I narcissistically agree. It's on a roof. It's cold. I'm shivering, making bad jokes. I mispronounce someone's name. They correct me. I apologize. I contemplate throwing myself off the roof. I'm relieved when Manny suggests leaving the afterparty early. I convince myself that this is another world that I could never feel fully comfortable in, where I could never truly belong.

"When were you last in New York?," Derek asked. I forgot then, couldn't answer, but I remember now: Occupy Wall Street. My political disenchantment. Ugly memories: the hands raised with their wriggling fingertips, the authoritarianism of false (forced?) consensus,³⁴ the rigidity and rudeness from all sides, the complete indifference to and disinterest in messaging or outreach or organizing or even the basic question of how the millions of people outside of Zuccotti Park, who were anguished and suffering during the recession, who were growing disillusioned and desperate, might see when they turned their attention there, briefly, in search of hope, the creeping realization that almost everyone here was here because they were an narcissistic asshole with a personality disorder who needed change because they were too inflexible, too obnoxious to change themselves, the creeping realization that this was true of me as well, and above it all: the nausea of sudden understanding that real systemic change would never come, even though capitalism really was profoundly cruel, profoundly broken, viciously selfish, because we were ourselves too cruel and broken and, above all else, selfish, to do anything but antagonize and alienate each other.³⁵ 

"I came with six of my friends," one guy told me. "Everyone else got disgusted and left. I don't blame them. It sucks. But I feel like I have to do something."

The only place available to sleep was next to a trash can and I woke up multiple times in the night, mistaking the sound of discarded bottles for gunshots. By the end of the second day, I was standing at the edge of the park, looking at the police line, entertaining fascist fantasies: the cops storming the park, killing everyone, slaughter, oppression, catharsis.

New York City is Hell in my imagination.

********

God damn it. I was writing. Here in the back seat of the car, tearing away at a paragraph that will almost certainly be relegated to footnote status in the final version of this piece, if it's ever published at all.³⁶

We're on our way to my uncle's (not the one with COVID) Christmas party. He lives outside Albany. A four hour drive. The first half hour or so was silent, but now my parents are angrily discussing COVID restrictions. My concentration is shattered, fucked. 

Dad was tense before we left this morning, punchy. Urging us to hurry up. I don't blame him. He's the only one who drives. The burden of this trip is disproportionately his. Still, now everyone is on edge.

They're talking about the Amish market near my sister's house in Maryland. It's been shut down because the state performed an inspection and discovered that none of the employees were wearing masks. My mom says the restrictions are unconstitutional. My dad says they should hire a lawyer, sue the state. "They might not look like it, but they have fucking money."

"Fucking Alec Baldwin, if he had an hour of training with a firearm he wouldn't have murdered someone." Somehow the topic has evolved. My dad mentions an interview Baldwin did with George Stephanopoulos that I haven't seen, hadn't heard about before now. "He's using the gang banger defense. That's what those fucking gang bangers say, 'I didn't pull the trigger it just went off.'" He continues. I transcribe what I can. Miss a lot. "George Clooney, who's the most liberal motherfucker, he's coming out against [unintelligible] saying it's impossible that it just fucking went off." My attention drifts, but not productively. "... Trying to do the thing on the cheap because he wants to make a few fucking bucks. He's a millionaire and now he wants to make people feel sorry for him because he killed somebody." 

Now it's quiet again.

We stop for gas. The lid covering the gas tank is frozen shut. My dad tries to pry it open with a screwdriver. The cover pops off instead, leaving an exposed black scar on the car's surface. "Motherfucker!" My dad opens the rear passenger side door and throws the cover in the back seat. He gasses up, accepts defeat. Says he'll have to fix it later.

A commercial on the radio actually uses the phrase "a new, trendier version of pizza." I'm flabbergasted. I hate it when reality makes a joke that would make you groan at its hackish obviousness if it were in fiction. The pizza in question also is made from "non-GMO certified ingredients." There's some conflation of trendiness and health and moral responsibility at play here.  It doesn't even sound like the restaurant is nearby. The Mississippi River is mentioned. Why am I hearing this? How am I hearing this?

"There's no constitutional right to recess." The topic is now how my mom should discipline the kids in her class. She teaches at the school owned by their church. One of her students has started stealing. He took a bunch of small toys from the class prize box (the carrot; the stick being outlawed even in schismatic traditionalist Catholic schools). "These kids are rough. They're tougher than you or I are. You're not going to break them." The subject progresses the task of cleaning the church, which the students and teachers are apparently neglecting. My Dad muses sarcastically on the logic of procrastination: "Why wipe your ass? It's only going to get dirty again."

The more fragmentary sentences and paragraphs I leave in this document, the more tangled the knot becomes, the more oppressive it all is, the less hope there is for relief or absolution. Under the television in the house where I grew up, there was a massive tangle of cords. The plugs for the TV, VCR, DVD player (eventually), NES, SNES, Genesis, Master System, N64, and all their controllers and peripherals where lost inside it, had to be extracted painstakingly, laboriously, every time (or so I remember it). No pleasure, no joy until the cord was traced back to its source, unwound, extricated, one loop at a time, weaving the plug in and out, as a child, with all that tension and anticipation turning to frustration, to fury—How did I not break those cords, tear them apart; how did I not hang myself with one of them?

Dad is praying the rosary aloud, accelerating. Mom joins in.

My Dad and my uncle talk about my grandmother. She decided at the last minute not to come, said she wasn't feeling well. Upset stomach. Nausea. Something like that. On the phone she had told my father how much she was looking forward to the party, how important it was to see family while you still had time. My dad talks about how she had terrible postpartum depression after one of my aunts was born, how he (enthusiastically) missed a lot of school because she asked him to stay home and help her take care of his sisters because she couldn't get out of bed, couldn't handle it. My dad and uncle commiserate about their own experiences with antidepressants. 

I was on Zoloft for a few months after I had a breakdown and took a semester off from college, but that's an entirely different story and I loathe writing so much right now. Too much for a footnote. Too exhausted for another fucking footnote. I quit as soon as I was back in school and no one was watching. Haven't taken anything since. (I used to watch The Simpsons in syndication religiously with my sisters on one of the three Canadian channels we got that wasn't in French. One of our favorite lines: "We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas.")

My dad went back on them when my aunt's cancer returned. My uncle has been off them for a decade. "They saved my life," he says. He's a veterinarian, a partner in his practice, has a beautiful home, watercolors on the walls, pond in the backyard. "It's just bad brain chemistry," he says. "That's all it is."

I'm standing off to the side, silent, despairing.

On the way home, we stop at a shockingly upscale rest stop in Glens Falls. Metal "I <3 NY" sculpture outside the entrance. Floor to ceiling windows. Interactive touchscreen maps of the Adirondacks. Vending machines stocked with local soda brands in glass bottles. (My root beer is a little bitter, mostly bland. I miss corn syrup.) In the center of the building, suspended from the ceiling, is a chandelier made of interlocking (synthetic?) deer antlers. I wish life would offer me less symbolism and more meaning.

********

At some point during the two months I've been haphazardly dumping my thoughts into this document with complete disregard for my future editor-self I apparently wrote the following (bad) poem:

my belt

coiled

on my

bedroom

floor

like

the snake

in the

garden

the temptation

is always

the same

********

I have been going to church with my parents, as a favor to my mom, as a condition of my continued status as a homed (read: not homeless) person.

I spend most of the mass composing sentences and paragraphs in my head³⁷ or staring at the wooden crucifix that hangs over the altar. I'm fascinated by the crucifix. Not (only) because it's morbid, but because it's the rare religious symbol that captures (and emphasizes!) a moment of god's complete absence: God the Son is dead. God the Father has absconded. ("My god, My god, why have you abandoned me?," Christ cries out on the cross. For once, I hear him.) The heavens are empty. Earth is forsaken. The faithful and faithless, for this ancient second at least, are on equal footing, equally bereft of hope, equals in abandonment.

I've left two unfinished notes in the document here. The first: "Great religious art: Silence and Doubt." The second: "Religion forces our attention towards a space where there's neither signal nor noise. Why center the vacancy?"

There's a catechism class after mass. I attend one with my mom while my dad (an usher) helps to tally up the week's collection. I'd like to say I was distracted, bored, anxious to get home, but no: The priest has my attention, my desperation. I'm a captive audience in every sense of the term. I have no power to leave and no desire to leave even if I had the power. I'm consumed by guilt, fully aware of the emptiness of a life lived in pursuit of my own deluded (demonic?) impulses and empty, pathological desires. I'm ready to renounce sin, to denounce this world and its principalities and powers. If he told me to don a hairshirt, take off my belt, kneel there, in front of the congregation, in front of my parents, and self-flagellate until the blood running from my back stained the rough, prickly fabric and all I could feel was the itch and the lash, the itch that could only be scratched by the lash—I might have done it. I might have done it and then have gone straight to confession and unburdened myself of thirty seven years of uninterrupted evil. 

But he doesn't ask that of me, of course. Instead he talks about the creation of the world. They're studying Genesis now. His explanations and interpretations are muddled, feel incoherent and wrong to my ears, offer me no insight, bring no clarity (spiritual, moral, or otherwise). He gets a big laugh from the crowd when, after reading "male and female he created them," he adds "and nothing else." At one point, while talking about how god gave the earth to man to work and subjugate, he goes on a rant about environmentalism and global warming activism. I'm deflated. Not because I expected him to have different politics, but because of the crassness with which those politics were mingled with doctrine and faith, because of the enthusiasm with which those politics were received. Are these tired partisan talking points really so much more compelling, so much more inspiring, than the (presumptive) word of god, even to fanatics, even to zealots?  I came looking for salvation and he offered me the culture wars.

********

I've had the "Dark Night of the Soul" Wikipedia entry open in a browser tab for nearly a week. I haven't read it yet.

********

I had a dream last night that I was back in school. It was Catholic school this time, I think. I remember feeling self-conscious because I had failed the previous semester, or dropped out. Our GPAs were listed on the blackboard, but I couldn't quite read mine. I was asking myself why I re-enrolled, thinking about how much time I would lose, wondering how I would be able to do the things I wanted to do now. We changed classes. The teacher of this new subject seemed harsh, cold. A girl sitting next to me kept trying to talk to me. She showed me a book she had read. Told me I should read it too. I really didn't want to talk. She put the book on my desk. The teacher yelled at both of us for interrupting the class. I wanted to explain that it wasn't my fault. Didn't. The girl starts talking again. The class gets rowdy. The teacher loses her temper and slaps the girl who won't shut up across the face. There's a big purple bruise on the girl's forehead. (Or is it on the teacher's forehead?) Suddenly I'm livid. I'm standing. I'm telling the teacher that she's not allowed to do that. I'm in the hall, headed for the principal's office. I'm at the receptionist's desk outside the principal's office. I say I need to talk to the principal, that I saw a teacher assault a student. "Assault?" Her voice is concerned. I say the teacher slapped a kid. "Oh." She seems relieved. This wasn't the kind of assault she had in mind. I sense that she thinks it's no big deal. The principal comes out of her office. I start to explain to her what happened, but another teacher (not the slapper) appears at the desk and tries to bribe the principal to ignore me. I see her hand the principal three one-hundred dollar bills. The principal examines the money and accuses the teacher of trying to con her, says that they're just three one dollar bills with extra zeroes penciled on. They both laugh and play it off as a gag. The principal leads me into her office to hear my complaint. I wake up before I can explain anything.

********

We were hit by the same storm front that tore through Appalachia, spawning tornadoes, annihilating homes and infrastructure, killing over 100 hundred people. We got off easy. Rain. Ice. Wind. A tree blew down in our backyard, just behind the woodshed, and knocked loose a single board. The glass-topped picnic table blew over, shattered. Slapstick.³⁸

I remember Hurricane Katrina. I had just returned to college. It was oppressively hot. I was friendless, sitting in the dining hall alone, watching New Orleans drown on TV, the looters and foragers, the murders on the freeway, the chaos and neglect at the superdome, dreading the start of the semester. And then the hurricane moved north, lost power over dry land, and some small part of it made it to Potsdam, NY, to me, bringing so much soothing rain.

********

I go to a church potluck with my parents. The Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. You're supposed to bring an appetizer and a desert. I make brownies. My mom buys a vegetable platter at Walmart.

There's a procession before the potluck. The priest asks if my dad and I will volunteer to be bier-bearers. I hear "beer bearer" and imagine myself unloading a keg from someone's trunk. I'm bewildered. My dad agrees for both of us before I finish processing. We'll be carrying a statue of the Virgin Mary. The statue's base is nested in a wooden platform with four protruding poles. That's the bier, I guess. That's what we'll be bearing.

The procession begins inside the church, besides the altar. My dad, myself, and two men I've never met each take a pole. We lift her awkwardly. It takes time to get her balanced, to make sure no one is holding her too high or too low, tilting her too much to the left or the right. We never really figure it out, but the procession begins regardless. We have to be careful not to knock her head against the doorway on the way outside. It's cold, windy. The wind blows a box of synthetic flowers out of a compartment at the base of the statue. I catch it and hold it until the priest takes it from me. We march down to the cemetery in the dark. We just missed dusk. People are holding candles. Everyone is chanting in latin: "Ora pro nobis" ("Pray for us.")  My apostate ears almost hear "no justice, no peace." My hands are freezing. My arm is falling asleep. I keep resting the wooden bar against my shoulder so I can lower my arm and shake feeling back into it. The virgin lilts. I'm afraid the wind will blow her over like the flowers.

I spend most of the procession looking up at the virgin. Her crown is chipped. Some of the plaster is gone and rebar pokes from the top of her head. Her face is empty, vacant. (Now, in the present-future, I have a powerful desire to type "her eyes were painted on"—but of course they were!) I wonder if this is what inspired awe in the Middle Ages. Or maybe it's my capacity for awe that's exhausted. Too many video games. Too little remaining serotonin. 

The procession ends in the church basement. We move the virgin to a crêpe-paper-covered table.  We eat. There are paper sombreros hanging from the support columns. One of the parishioners dresses as Saint Nicholas (note: not Santa Claus!) and hands out presents to the children. He's accompanied by Black Pete, punisher of delinquent children, portrayed by a young, skinny guy in full blackface: pitch black facepaint, afro wig, bright red lips, the real fucking deal. This, I confess, inspires awe.

The priest reads the children a Christmas story while their parents gossip. All of the sombreros have been torn down by kids and are being worn, played with, shredded. I'm suddenly overwhelmed by sadness. There is so much I'll never have. Basic, universal things I've closed myself off to through my cynicism and fear. They start setting up for a children's concert. We get up and put our coats on, leave. When we get home, I lay on my bed and play Cruis'n Blast on the Switch. I fall asleep, eventually.

********

My father and I drive to my aunt's house. He needs lumber. My sister has asked him to make her some shelves for Christmas. Building materials are still scarce. The neverending pandemic. The supply chain. Etc. Etc. My aunt has been building a house in the Adirondacks in the midst of all this. They've been taking down trees, planing lumber. There's a sawmill involved. A lot of equipment I don't know or understand; that I fear, honestly. My father, uncles, and any visiting male cousins are constantly roped into the project, the heavy machinery, the noise. I've never been asked to help. They know.

Just before we reach her driveway "I Believe in Father Christmas" comes on the radio. I turn it up.

Along the side of the driveway is a pen where a pair of pigs are housed, lingering near the fence as we pass. I avert my eyes. Look off into the woods on the other side of the car. I know their fate. Don't want to risk a moment of empathy. My aunt and her boyfriend (?) are localvores, increasingly into living off the land, a sick, stupid fantasy that my father entertained at one point too, that helped inspire him to move his family away from the northward creep of southern-upstate suburbanization and into the boondocks; the first trauma, the original sin, the one act that, if reversed, might have saved me. Or maybe not. Fucked if I know. It's a satisfying story though, one I've been telling myself for thirty years. It's easy to see the move as the starting point, the beginning of the years of poverty and domestic rage, the hiding in the stairwell while my dad, who is so much better now, screamed at my mom about the money he couldn't earn and the house she couldn't keep, the long, freezing winters in a poorly insulated house, the neglect, the dead pets and livestock, the vicious hicks at school, the growing isolation and resentment, the violent teenage fantasies, all of it terminating in anxiety and despair, four years in college hiding in my dorm room, terrified of socializing, getting straight A's for nothing, and then the disillusionment of grad school, which my emotional fragility and deep antisocial distrust made so much worse, and I couldn't write anyway, couldn't even finish a single paper anymore because the tension between my brain and the page was so high, and then back home again, and that was still hell, and the eight years in New Hampshire and that dumb faggot defrauding his employees and clients and volunteers and wife just because he was a fucking hick from rural Maine who couldn't admit to himself or his family that he was a dumb fucking hick from rural Maine and a faggot to boot and so hanging himself and fuck the rest of us, I guess, and then me in flight again, after the bullshit with New Hampsire Catholic Charities, which, I'm going to write a letter to the Boston Globe one day, I swear to God, whose name I'll capitalize, just this once for emphasis, and ... And then, me, just me, getting everything I could have wanted (the unconditional love, the money for nothing, the little bit of literary notoriety, the community of artists, the beautiful climate, the sensation of finally being seen) and greeting it all with absolute, unmitigated, vile selfishness and then 2020 and all the dead I loved and sinking deeper, deeper into myself while [redacted] tries to talk and then to scream and then to throttle reason into that vacant corpse on my bed, watching YouTube videos, playing Tetris 99 once a day, to complete his quests and then threatening suicide (again) when it was all falling apart, and now I'm back home again and it was good for a while, against all my expectations, in contradiction to the full weight of history, a time of small reconciliations, incrementally proccessed grief, and the slow but gratifying grind towards catharsis, but it's winter now (almost) and it's always dark and I am still single and unemployed and living with my parents and can't tell myself a believable story where any of that changes, so how good could it really be?

When we park in front of the house, my aunt's boyfriend is outside, butchering a pig. Its corpse is suspended from the raised bucket of a front end loader, legs splayed apart. ("Don't make a crucifixion comparison," I tell myself as I write.) It has been skinned, mostly. I saw or heard or read somewhere that without the hide the body of a pig looks a lot like the body of a man. I can now personally attest to the truth of that statement. There's a mostly extinguished campfire, ash and low grey smoke. I watch from a distance. There's a puddle by my feet: blood and melting ice. 

I turn away and walk into the yard full of wire pens. The noise of chicken and geese. Trying not to slip on the icy patches in my clownish pink and green vans. I stop in front of a pen. There are no animals inside, just a kitschy windmill lawn ornament: a cartoon pig with wings. The wind picks up and the wings spin.

1. This must be how people felt about OJ. I was too young to appreciate that trial. The White Bronco Chase happened on my 10th birthday. I remember watching live coverage of it (distorted by static; we only got one American station reliably and often just barely; the Canadian stations weren't covering it, didn't care). This memory doesn't make sense to me. It was my birthday. I must have gotten a couple of new video games. Shouldn't I have been playing them? I don't remember my parents forcing me to turn the Super Nintendo off so they could see OJ's glacial flight from the LAPD. Why would a ten year old watch this shit voluntarily?

2. Because my generation has been conditioned to trace everything back to 9/11, regardless of its significance or insignificance. We need a new universal interpretive lens. Maybe we should give Columbine a spin.

3. Including, possibly, the instigating decisions: Jacob Blake's decision to flee from the police and the officers' decision to shoot him in the back.

4. And intuition, of course, is a pathological liar.

5. Don't assume I'm making a statement about gun control here, assuming that responsible gun ownership is an oxymoron. One time, years ago, while my parents were away from home, I went into their bedroom with the intention of retrieving my dad's handgun from his underwear drawer and blowing my brains out. I found the gun. The trigger lock was on. I didn't know where the key was. (Maybe it was with him.) My plan was foiled. I'm still alive.

6. How close did I come back to becoming a Rosenbaum back when all of my grievances, all of the disappointments and cruelties I suffered, were rationalized through the lens of radical politics, tinted by the additional lens of profound psychological sickness.

7. And above cars too, I guess.

8. The other day I stumbled on the Wikipedia entry for the so-caled "last lynching in California." (It wasn't). A pair of men were hanged by a mob for the kidnapping and murder of wealthy department store owner's son. (They were very likely guilty, for what it's worth.) Even the governor was complicit. Before the lynching happened, while it was still a hypothetical lynching, he promised to pardon anyone who participated in the mob. Don't assume powers or institutions will protect you. Sometimes it’s only rote commitment to proper procedure that keeps our instinctual evils at bay. (Or maybe it really is just all the same old class war bullshit playing out eternally. Maybe the young, angry socialist me was right and the man I am now is simply disillusioned and confused, mistaking the fog for the road.)

9. I'm compelled to repeat myself: I'm not writing about gun control, not writing about gun control.

10. This is the last time Rittenhouse is mentioned in this piece that was initially, ostensibly about his trial. My priorities changed. My obsessions changed.

11. I almost capitalized the "j" in "judge." Thought better of it.

12. I did a twitter poll on the topic. My position lost overwhelmingly.

13. Katie, if you read this: First, thank you for subscribing to my Substack. I appreciate it, honestly. Second, please don't tell the parents that you know about this church COVID shit. I've been sworn to secrecy. I was explicitly told not to say anything about it to you or Jenny. I understand you're worried about Mom. I am too, but please spare me the headache of bringing it up. Nothing you say or do will change her mind and all I want now is peace, to lay in my (not quite childhood) bed and turn the dimmer switch on life down, down, down until I fade away completely. I don't want to be fighting with my parents about some hopeless, dumb shit like I'm a teen again. Let us all die how we choose. In my case: quietly.

14. I wasn't sure about the veracity of this, but it appears to be true. It's also likely true of many other vaccines and treatments, since stem cells are so central to modern medical R&D and have probably saved many more lives than those lost to abortion (even if you believe abortion to be murder)—But! This footnote wasn't about passing judgment or assessing hypocrisy. It was supposed to just be a clarification of facts, and, after all, we are constantly asked to assess how much of the evil that surrounds us, that's embedded in every system we depend upon for life and livelihood, we're willing to be complicit in. We all draw different lines. All of those lines are irrational.

15. At least within the congregation. There have been others in the larger upstate NY tradcath community: an elderly priest, a man and his son from Glens Falls, perhaps more I've forgotten.

16. My aunt would have made it to her daughter's marriage too, were it not for COVID. It was planned for summer 2020. Had to be delayed because of the pandemic. Is there a way to stop viewing everything through the lens of your own personal guilt and grief? This is someone else's pain. Why can't I just let them have it?

17. "They don't usually just arrest protestors for nothing," my dad speculates. "She must have done some serious shit."

18. My mom, who believes that Trump only lost in 2020 because of widespread election fraud, described her ideas as "pretty crazy" and "wishful thinking." (How much of what I believe is fundamentally silly and self-serving? I'm not trying to make fun of my mom here. Maybe she's right. Maybe I'm the one who's confused, lost.)

19. Are you as tired of this affected evasiveness about my sexual orientation as I am, reader? I forget why I even started this. You probably imagine you know what I'm hiding and from who, but it's not that, reader, it's not that. And it's not something worse. It's a gag, a game. It's a con. Knock over all the cups and there's no ball underneath. And I've already got your five bucks in my pocket. Watch me smirk. Watch me run for my life.

20. Sorry if I spoiled the surprise, man. Do you want an eShop gift card or something? Give me a hand here, I'm shopping for like 30 people.

21. This I won't disclose. This I can't disclose.

22. My uncle is fine now, apparently. Got treatment fast. Antibody therapy. His oxygen levels were lower than they should be, but he was never hospitalized. He's back to work now. I haven't spoken to him. He hasn't talked to my grandmother. ("He's embarrassed," she says.) She talks to his wife, other family members to get the scoop. All of this information is not secondhand, but third (at best).

23. Update: This never happened. There were no appointments available before we're leaving to visit my sister in Maryland for Christmas.He decided to wait and schedule an appointment after the holidays. We'll see.

24. The virus is getting less deadly, more transmissible, right? The common cold is common for a reason. It's the natural evolutionary end point of all disease. The optimal state of being if longevity is your goal. You can live eternally as a small nuisance, a minor inconvenience. You will be tolerated, integrated into lives where you're unwanted but accepted, and not eradicated, never eradicated. I want to be small, small, small.

25. This is what leaves me ill at ease about the Chappelle special: He's been subsumed by the discourse. Yes, I know that standup is topical, always has been topical, is at its incisive best when it's topical. But. But (in my mind, straining to justify its own hunches and prejudices) there's a difference between monologuing on COVID and the murder of George Floyd and devoting the better part of an hour to refuting the criticisms of twitter activists and thinkpiece writers. This isn't about punching up or punching down. It's about whether you're swinging on a real flesh and blood opponent or an inflatable dummy. (Don Quixote or Don King.) There's a loss of the perspective that great comedy should give. Great ... [This is where I was interrupted. See below.] Chappelle slides into the quagmire himself instead of dragging his audience out. Yes, Chappelle does outright say at one point that twitter is not real life. But yet he gives it so much time, so much unearned attention. (Here I am, criticizing Chappelle for a loss of perspective and look at this fucking document. Christ. What's my point?)

26. One of his stops on this tour, his second "post-cancellation," was literally Peoria.

27. This is my second time seeing Louis live. This footnote exists only so I can link to my article about the first.

28. I disagree! As I said before, I think most people were remarkably willing to make small sacrifices. But there are few things more intrinsically embarrassing than arguing with a joke.

29. Rudy and I were invited to a reading in July. Manuel offered to advertise it as "Expat X Misery Tourism." We debated going, but chickened out. Rudy's dad had just died. I had moved home a few weeks before. Shit was going on.

30. The article in question is still not finished.

31.  Derek Maine, Gabriel Hart, Michael McSweeney, and Manuel Marrero. It felt weird to use their full names within the text itself.

32. I hope the great lepidopterist will forgive me for my lazy prose.

33. Gabe tells a hilarious anecdote that I can't do justice to about his ne'er-do-well uncle getting wasted off aftershave at a family Christmas party. I talk about my uncle who went to Vietnam and smuggled an M16 back home in pieces. Derek talks about the bottle of wine he and his wife bought on their honeymoon that they planned to drink on their 10th (20th?) anniversary. He's sober now. Says it'll be just as gratifying to watch her drink a glass.

34. I'm reminded of Isabel Fall. How a mob ostensibly motivated by a desire for safety and inclusivity birthed a viscous feedback loop of endless, reciprocal cruelty. One of her principal bullies is back, enthusiastically announcing their inclusion in a collection of queer mech stories. The fucken irony. My feed is furious. The cycle restarts. Hate is a perpetual motion machine.

35. Is there a parallel here? I feel our coalition of literary outsiders is collapsing. I'm afraid that a schism is coming, that I will be forced to pick sides, that I may have already chosen my side through silence and inaction, that someday my only allies might be those that I refuse to disavow. I'm nauseated by the thought that our tiny, nascent literary movement might be stillborn, suffocated in the womb by a conflict of personalities and identities, by our narcissism and prejudices. And I will be just as guilty, as complicit, as anyone.

36. It's the paragraph about my ambivalence over Chappelle and the discourse. Go on, see if I left it in, even though it has little to nothing to do with the topic at hand (the agony of guilt). I bet I did. Vanity trumps all. Nah, it's not even that. It's utility. It's necessity. I have to use every word I can squeeze out. When game is scarce, you use every part of the animal. This isn't some noble savage bullshit. It's stark fucking necessity.

37. I even write some of them down afterward! I cannot deny: In this way, at least, church has been good for me.

38. Climate change discourse is back. I'm indifferent. Not because I'm skeptical. I'm prepared to defer to authority on this topic, in spite of my latent contrarian impulses, mostly out of deep selfishness: the topic, in spite of its catastrophic import, doesn't interest me enough for me to research it, so I don't have the resources to make a devil's advocate case without looking like a moron. So I nod and demure on the topic of doomsday. The truth is the more global a problem becomes, the less responsibility I feel. The more completely and irrevocably all of creation is threatened, the fewer fucks I am able to give. I've read—and I'm sure you have too, reader, since my only audience is other authors and most authors have been forced to read Arendt in college to fulfill humanities or poli sci prerequisite—about how totalitarian governments facilitate atrocities through the compartmentalization of responsibility, how people are individually willing to contribute towards monumental acts of murder and destruction as long as their role is sufficiently small and isolated. But that's not what's happening here, or, at least, that's not the whole of it. It's simply that the whole god damn world, all of human civilization, all of nature, as an abstraction, seems completely and irreparably evil to me. The thought of it all being annihilated seems morally righteous to me, or, at least, like a welcome final conclusion to billions of years of suffering and want. Yet, the thought of a cat being struck by a car is so viscerally horrible that, if I felt I could get away with it, I would blow the driver's brains out, even if I knew it was an accident. Wait, is this the same thing Arendt described after all? I don't know. I loathe philosophy.