brief encounters

brief encounters

Well, we made it through to the other side, and I must admit to at least some feeling that Saturday morning in Philly, where I learned the result driving down the street with my windows down and heard a whoop from the corner and cheers went up all over. A feeling, mostly, of relief. It was like every muscle in my body that I didn't know was tightened let go at once. 

Since then I've been nothing but tired and I wanted to write to all of you from this side of a desperately needed break. I haven't taken one in so long, it feels like--there is something about a break that isn't procrastination or depression or grief-led unproductivity but a deliberate decision. Fuck you, I'm gonna do nothing for ten days but exactly what I feel like doing. I'm going to be alone (well, with this elderly dog) and have a stack of books on my Kindle that I may not read, audiobooks on my phone that I may not listen to, new blank notebooks that I may not fill. Who knows? 

I audiobooked Jenny Odell's lovely How To Do Nothing last winter--that feels like both a million years ago and like it just happened, pandemic time being what it is--and then I think pandemic time made me take a lot of her recommendations unintentionally. A lot of walking, taking pictures of flowers (and yes instagramming them, shut up) and going to bed early and thinking consciously about what was going to be the best way to get through a day.

I want to do nothing to recharge myself--not for more work at the end, but because I don't even have the energy for the people I love right now. And also because rather than charge back into the burnout-inducing lifestyle I've lived the past few years, I want to rearrange my life. 

Rearranging decisions will come soon enough (I sort of don't have a choice). But the other part requires more consciousness, I think. 

I spent much of last week reading my book out loud, recording the audiobook, and so exhausted at the end of the day that I crawled into bed around 8pm. It was a beautiful week in Philadelphia and I felt bad that I wasn't spending the evenings having outdoor socially distanced meetups with friends before the inevitability of winter, lockdown, whatever set in. But nevertheless I had no energy for it, and the only thing I could think of was the way pandemic time also made me feel, painfully, like I was losing something every time I failed to savor a possible moment. 

I've been thinking for a while about the strangeness of human interaction in a pandemic, the way each time I see someone it feels fraught, loaded, life-changing and so so precious. The way I considered, before meeting someone this fall in London, whether to try to talk out a complicated not-argument we'd had the last time or whether to just sit there in his presence, making jokes and sharing stories and realizing that the normality of those moments was what I'd miss when I left again, when we were locked down again. That the fraught-ness was pandemic time as much as any jagged edges between us. 

But I can't help feeling like there is a crisis to be resolved each time. I think, each time, what if it's the last? What would I have left unsaid? It feels necessary to spill my guts, to be honest about my flaws, to be honest about what hurts. When it's difficult to see a future that has in it even a handful of "normal" moments, the temptation can be to load every moment with a meaning that may be a weight it can't bear. Or needn't, actually. 

I'm considering the fragility of connection. The past few years have brought me so many heartbreaks, moves, losses piled on top of (one of) the biggest loss(es) (my father) plus pandemic and its heightened, bowstring-taut stretched awareness of the fragility of life itself. Grief makes you think about death, that's an uninteresting conclusion, but maybe also the lack of grieving rituals embed that thought further, Inception-style, into an obsession that twists your whole life around that little spinning top. 

I need to center myself in order to center myself. (The two uses of "center," in social-justice terminology and then in somatic terminology, spending some time thinking about me in order to actually be grounded and able to react to things with some level of equanimity and fairness.) I have to be centered in order to not overload every relationship with things that will drag it down. I have to be centered in order to see what comes next, and to see how I broke things, and to understand repair. To love you I have to love me more: again, a cliche but one that nevertheless feels real in my bones right now. 

After all, every interaction is beautiful and important and special. Every time i make a choice to spend time with someone, it is a conscious decision that they bring something to my life. Or it should be--rather than the semiconscious decision to thumb my phone out of slumber and let the stream of twitter hit me in the face, where even though I have curated my feeds there too I still see the unfiltered nature of the beast. The one-on-one contact that pandemic time brought meant that I spent time thinking, who matters most? And when I managed, despite it all, to make a couple of new friends, those felt special, too, worth maintaining, worth opening up to. 

What is socialism, after all, but a world, as Orwell (yeah yeah I know) wrote, where human beings love one another. That is the first step, he wrote, and like Marx and so many others he refused to envision what comes after that. But pandemic time has accelerated a thing that I was already writing into my book's conclusion, the feeling that  "if there is one thing worth doing with our brief, flickering lives on this dying planet it is loving other people, attempting to understand them across a space of difference that will always contain mystery no matter how well you think you know someone."

I miss a handful of you down deep in my chest and guts and bones right now and if I haven't answered you enough or have been distant it is because I need to take care of myself so I can return to being able to take care of you, but it is also because I have never been good at asking for what I need until I've fallen apart, and usually not even then. 

Know that our brief encounters mean something to me, and if they are never enough it is because we have never got enough time in this world for what matters, but maybe we can fight to change that together. 



Writing

Instead of taking an assignment for the election, Michael Whitney and I just went out with his camera and my notebook and made a thing for ourselves, but you can read it and look at it too.


Podcasting

After the election, what next? We asked smart people. Belabored 210. 


Troublemaking

I was part of a panel on goth communism for the wonderful folks at Bristol Transformed, who did a whole series of panels around Halloween about the spooky and the socialist. It was great fun! 


And my dog: