SAN FRANCISCO LOCKDOWN DAY #3
i haven’t been to the gym in almost a week but i’m going to go back to dancing in the streets again. so funny… i’d written X1 at KPOO that those days were over. that was another era i wrote, like i know anything at all.
and so when the sun comes out later, i will take a bath and go dance on the median at potrero street outside walgreen’s or somewhere on my way to trader joe’s. or maybe OUTSIDE trader joe’s, to cheer up the staff.
i haven’t had this much energy in years. when something doesn’t feel right or like it’s doing any good, i lose muscle. i can’t force myself to do anything if it doesn’t make sense in my head my gut my musculature.
but finally the world’s terror, despair, and existential chaos is actually making me feel calm. it’s sort of like when you know someone hates you but they’re smiling sweetly and lying to you but you’re trapped in the surface fantasy bullshit of regular people daily life, and you pretend. but the dissonance causes a cancer rot black hole. /
until one day the other person snaps and tries to run you down on the road and NOW you’ve got something you can work with, and now what is outside and what you feel inside makes sense.
THAT’S THE WORLD TO ME NOW AND I FEEL CALM.
well, not calm. assured like i wasn’t insane and imagining it after all. talk about feeling gaslit by the entire world.
thank god that’s over.
nothing will ever be the same again. i haven’t been outside or dancing but i feel more alive and focused than i have since I Was So Sure About Everything in my twenties.
—
James took over my reading of Ross Douthat’s “The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success,” published by my alma mater, Simon & Schuster, and printed in the States. i actually checked because this book reads not like they printed it in China and waited months to clear customs.
it reads like he just wrote it last week because James told me he said something about if a pandemic comes, no more virtual reality.. just plain old REALITY will come back.
whew. / maybe this lockdown is like the world detoxing off crack and heroin and coming back to some sliver of Real Life. the fantasy is all mine as i didn’t read that part, i’m only brutally paraphrasing; i devoured his “Sterility” chapter late in the night before the morning of the lockdown in san francisco, and that one chapter alone spoke for so much that i’ve been floundering around, trying to find the words to add to my existential caterwaul.
i know Douthat had just started his book tour when all these lockdowns happened, so i don’t know where he is with promoting this book. but it’s the latest book i’ve been reading as i try to figure out HOW THE FUCK DID WE GET HERE. that’s my new hobby.
Douthat’s chapter on “Sterility” speaks to my disillusionment with “kids-as-accessories-on-my-way-to-having-it-all” Feminism and how i feel bilked with us ending up with …all THIS. a dead culture and where Douthat made me realize i may never have to write to clarify things to myself ever again (ha!), was when he mentioned the american thinning out of family to stray ends of dead family lines… and we americans are supposed to be chill with this and hand it over to a new level of immigrants come in to take over when we got nothing.
that was beautiful. with one line he deftly killed off that propaganda where Democrats=Kindness because they want cheap labor they can exploit and fuck the ones who’re here and struggling.
i read the new york times to see why all these white people are losing their shit ever do da day about Trump. i see how they virtue signaled by endorsing Warren and Klobuchar (sp?), and it was cynical as fuck. the Times IS nothing but cynicism. i used to admire that Grey Lady and when my old friend Kim Severson went to work there it was as if she’d made it. / and she even had a kid! she did some Metoo stories and i was sad.. .”et tu, Kim?” because the Light Butches will be slated for extermination next if this virus doesn’t re-route this shit / as James said, “everyone wants to be white / even gays.” gays were now as white as everyone else and the fight for actual fairness and equality for all but the elite was over…
hardly.
so imagine my glee when found Ross Douthat’s column. i didn’t know he was brought over from The Atlantic as a token conservative. but i use such words carelessly, casually because they mean absolute NOTHING.
in my hobby of finding out How We Got Here, at Chris Hedges’ suggestion in his apparently-now-former column on Truth Dig, i read “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America,” published in 1961, i think. or ’62. one of those dates. anyhow, i know that we are separated and comparmentalized so that THEY MAY TELL US WHO WE ARE, WHERE WE BELONG.
i hope that during this lockdown, you go through the shakes in the fetal position, and make it back to yourself. get curious again…
anyhow, so Ross Douthat may be “a conservative” but he writes deeper than a cute, pat article. i haven’t made it past that “Sterility” chapter, which i think is only the SECOND chapter.
but it’s IN me as i cogitate my own love letters to the daughters out there i will make MINE, as i didn’t have children of my own–Douthat’s chapter cut or fucked me deep there in the pussy. hit me RIGHT there in the “knowing.” / because i regret having all that is Woman taken away from me in the service of some bullshit faux “equality,” but has been my un-doing. a lot of our un-doing. and to no holy end.
if we Weren’t Here, Where We Were, i might say otherwise. i feel bamboozled by a whole lotta crap. and a Capitalistic Bullshit Feminism is one of ’em. it’s just a way of becoming the maids for rich white ladies. the kinds who’re the wives of people who run the New York Times. the kinds of women who started out bending over and thinking of england on purposely pinned under sweaty humping men like frozen paralyzed bunny rabbits having out-of-body experiences where they run the shit on the low.
that’s my riff. that’s got NOTHING nada to do with Douthat. / this is no book review.
this is just me showing you how i intensely school myself and do works in my own little world on the low, where the whole world is on lockdown like we’re little kids who can’t go outside in the rain.
everything’s different.
and thank god.
i couldn’t take the bullshit too much longer.
now i know what to do. what i was born to do. vaguely… i’m stumbling in the correct direction. that is all i know. when i wake up early and am excited…
yeah. this is MY time here on earth. mine. it’s beautiful.
so as i plot the rest of my life on earth, i am planning the love letter i am going to write to my new baby daughters who’re up next for some intense loving and attention. this is me using all my accidental carely exhibitionism for GOOD.
the love letter i write to the daughters i did not have myself, it will guide me and keep me focused. the ego takes over in us leos in us PEOPLE and can make cheap shit of everything.
that’s why i know Bernie is a STATESMAN. look at his eyes. he’s not doing this for his ego. i think it’s a form of torture. but Jews know all about transcendence of pain and agony into beauty and love.
my pops says, “The Jews invented humor.”
he’s right. /
maybe that’s why i was obsessed with making BAGELS yesterday. i boiled ’em in barley malt before baking but i made ’em flat and small because i thought they’d rise more in the oven.
my odd homage to the Jewish People as i try to start our own underground thang on the low in this new era of WE’RE FUCKED IN AMERICA as all the rich scoop up the last of everything with their routine Zero Percent Interest jubillees. i got the inspiration for teaching the kids sewing from my dad who had it first.
when my career/tour/life was going tits up in 2011, he was fixing old sewing machines he’d buy at thrift shops, and drop the fixed machines off at battered women’s shelters so they’d have an economic means of freedom from depending on abusive people. and after having so much fun sewing my own costumes for the tour (more fun than the tour which was like a prolongued colonoscopy for months), i decided, “I WANT MY OWN ECONOMIC FREEDOM FROM THE BULLSHIT OF A LIFE IN THE ARTS,” and never looked back.
the Jews got into the money biz because they were on the run all the time and needed business that they could pack up and travel with.
GENIUS.
so for me as an artist, it’s ALL about owning the means of production like Gandhi preached. i don’t care if he’s also complicated and dared himself to not be a pedophile by sleeping next to a girl, whatever. the Means of Production thing and not fucking everyone and the world over is a much better idea than paying everyone ELSE to offshore your assholery so you can claim godlike innocence.
no more.
EVERYTHING’S DIFFERENT.
anyhow. so today i’ll dance out on potrero and go shopping.
good luck on finding your way back to yourself at this most magical of TIMES.
lockdown. / don’t waste a drop!
x