"To fall all the way down/ like an empire/ into a kingdom of guts"

 

How to know if the end of the world is the end of the world. 

How to distinguish between 

the experience of my mid-40s and how that causes a funny melancholy and a new sort of smell and a body that feels like I'm constantly melting into my mom's limp, her bad knee--

and what is quite obviously a different new time that we are all in, a possibly very, very bad time. 

Even though of course I know that so many groups have persisted in worse conditions--. 

Or. 

As I type into this software, I'm training an AI in human grief of the Proustian type. Of the tech-dystopia type.

"[O]ur own Dark Age, were it to develop, would be luminous: luminous with neon, cathode ray, with green screens of countless monitors functioning autonomously in some postlinguistic semiotics, determining every aspect of our lives, shaping not only our decisions but our very choices. Yes, a dark, an incandescent dark, that would have no further need of those very creatures--ourselves--who'd first wired its circuits and set its screens aglow. Haven't we already entered that age, that shadow, the edge of the terrestrial eclipse?" That's Gustaf Sobin; thanks to Jeffrey O'Malley.

No further need of ourselves.

Will things go on and on so long that my kid's suffering will be prolonged? Will my own suffering?

Babies being born inside of plagues, born into slavery, born into a war, born into it all. I know.

And how I am unfairly dismissive of younger people. Oh I know so plainly how unreasonable is my inner and pleasure-bringing curmudgeon. 

But how to negotiate these new anti-material realities. 

Emily Greenquist writes me that "the National Archives is looking for volunteers who can read cursive to transcribe historical documents" and I am filled with horror that seeks its purchase on contempt. 

Phil and I have only had stick-shift cars for eighteen years. In fact, we've only had two. We use a machine until it's a "kingdom of guts." We drive manually.

I like the brutal cold of a real winter.

We still listen to radio stations in the kitchen.

We use a sewing machine sometimes.

In our apartment, we can hear the downstairs apartment's shower running. I'm sure that they hear ours, too. I'm quite certain that we all hold off on showers when we hear the others'--the pressure is sensitive; we are all sensitive to it. The real physical presence of the water. An almost vegetal movement through the pipes. The world closer to the world.

How Loulou's friends marvel and gawk at our ice cube trays, our manual roll-down car windows, our bad plumbing that necessitates a plunger nearly every day, Loulou's refurbished i-pod for listening music instead of a phone that streams some server-farm nightmare-fuel of pre-curated, algorithm-convenient songs. Sometimes her friends are shocked at how we live. Their shock fills me with contempt.

Loulou wears a blue hoody that Phil's dad bought him in 1998 and a green one that my mom bought me in 1999.

They were not better times. I know that. Do I grieve for my gone-youth (so stupid that when I was younger I thought that was stupid) or for the way that the world is now utterly un-real, disgusting, hyper-driving into a non-human time?

I feel sick and enraged when I step onto my bus or into my train car and every face is buried in its mindless, earth-destroying scrolling. Even worse when I walk into a classroom and no one is talking to anyone else.

The new-ish Cure album has Robert Smith rock-synth weeping and I'm there: 

It's all gone, it's all gone
Nothing left of all I loved
It all feels wrong
It's all gone, it's all gone, it's all gone
No hopes, no dreams, no world
No, I, I don't belong
No, I don't belong here

--even though I think I'm indeed a little young to be there.

No world.

Jeffrey tells me that someone asked if he was ready for the end of America and he resolutely said yes. 

If Phil and I didn't have a kid, would I be ready? Is this all just bougee bullshit that spurs my anxiety? 

But isn't having a kid a valid and possible path of the enormous ongoing project looking into the human capacity to express love?

Will these anxieties seem foolish to me in twenty years? When I was 25, I thought my agonies were real. They're nothing to me, now.

What I am waving at, gesturing at? I don't remember being held but I remember holding my own baby.

The difference is nothing. 

The world is ending and I am in middle age. The world is not ending and our daughter will have a satisfying life. The world is not ending and I am in middle age. The world is ending and our daughter will have a satisfying life.

Sarah Minor: "Many examples of the writing that survived human history reveal that humans who could write and develop technology to preserve that writing believed they were living at the end of the world."

No world.

Sometimes, the only place to go is on to our enclosed porch, at night, with frost on the inside of the windows, my ugly work jumper hanging on a nail so it won't get too wrinkled before the next "serious" meeting I have to attend, loads and loads of lesser-used books stored on a giant shelf, a tiny clock I installed during online COVID days: 

I like to blow my weed smoke into the frost and onto the jumper and I like to listen to "Baby, Be Simple" by Feist. And I like to look out the back windows into the snow in the yard and the snow on the garage roof and the endless river of traffic on Western Ave.