Writing and Submitting
The progress on Crazy Unconscious Days is slow at the moment, but there is progress at least. I have a feeling this will be a shorter novel than what I’m used to writing these days. The Palace of Winds and Far Nineteen came it at around 120,000 words, The Poisoned Moon is about 80,000 words. CUD will maybe land at 60K, or about the same length as The Evolution of Shadows. Progress is stalled on my never-ending essay on craft and the state of literature in late stage capitalism, or whatever you want to call this thing I’ve been working on for twenty years and can’t seem to land. Jenn has suggested that I use it to start a Substack. I’m not sure about the whole Substack thing. Everyone seems to be doing it, I’m getting in late, and on top of that, I’m not sure I want to write much more than this monthly update post on any kind of schedule. But I guess we have to hustle now to even have a chance, don’t we?
Reading
This year feels like the never ending Kansas Notable Books committee. It started two months earlier than the previous two years. There was a new facilitator, who resigned from the library about halfway through, and now we’re working with a new-new facilitator. It’s keeping me from reading what I want to read, and, as always, it’s a struggle to read some of the submitted books. On my own, I’ve been trying to read Shy by Max Porter, Zorrie by Laird Hunt, and A year of Last Things by Michael Ondaatje. There’s also that stack of books I brought back from AWP that I want to dig into because they all promise to be much more entertaining than the majority of books put out by the Big Five publishers.
Watching
Lately, I’ve been watching my phone. And I hate it. To coordinate anything with people, use the phone. Meet new people? Phone. Get the news? Phone. Bored? this was never an issue until I had a phone. Before the phone if I didn’t have anything to do, I’d sit down with a book, or play some music. Now, bored, anxious, and restless have merged, and I end up soothing and exacerbating all three with . . . you got it . . . the fucking phone. I can’t even remember what I watched besides Star Trek, again. Endless rewatching shows is, of course, I sign of anxiety. I guess I’m not coping well.
Listening
Last month I added a lot of new stuff to my music list with my Apple Music subscription. Iron Maiden, PJ Harvey, Bikini Kill, Van Halen, Pearl Jam, Foo Fighters, Echo and The Bunnymen, Bush, Primus, The Black Crowes, Nirvana. I also outright bought a few things. The most exciting has been the album Settle Down In a Guest Bedroom by The Cavves. There have been a lot of great Wichita bands over the years. Someone’s bound to get noticed eventually.
Podcast
After an unannounced month off, Jenn and I are back in April. A new show will be released soon.
Thoughts
Anxiety and isolation. These seem to be more present in my life than they ever have before. I have to remind myself that the rightward, authoritarian drift in America is made up of a minority of people. They only seem larger because the media is hyper focused on them, and because the most public face of it is an orange colored criminal clown who smells like ketchup, shit, and grease paint who has never been held accountable for anything. I feel like something traumatic is coming our way, and the truth is we need the disruption. Part of the reason we’re in this position is because of complacency. Now, I’m not blaming any one segment of American society for being complacent. We all were, from top to bottom and side to side. It’s as if we’ve been that proverbial frog in a pot. The financialization of everything, enshittification, chokepoints, and genocide. Those in comfortable positions failed to see that not everyone was comfortable. Those that were uncomfortable opted to endure either out of a misguided sense of building character or learned helplessness, and didn’t or couldn’t agitate for their own relief.
Several universities have done studies that show the wealthier a person gets, the less empathy they have for others. Wealth then, generally, and extreme wealth specifically, makes a person a psychopath. And then, instead of recoiling in horror at these psychopaths, we turned them into demigods. We swallow the bullshit line that the wealthy are somehow better, smarter, wiser than the rest of us and we then give them more rope, which they, being psychopaths, have used to hang us instead of themselves.
The other path to psychopathy is religious zealotry. I grew up in the Lutheran church, and my maternal grandfather was a minister. I left the church because of the nascent, budding zealotry of Christian Nationalism that I saw way back in the 1980s when I was a teenager. I looked at other faiths on my way out. It’s always funny to me that when I tell people I left the church they act like I can be persuaded back. It’s offensive. I’ve compared religions the way people compare durable goods before I decided that I don’t need an organized hierarchical religion. What’s worse is that a lot of ostensibly, left-wing liberal Christians act exactly like the internet douche-men who respond to any criticism of men with “not all men.” I posted a comment on Threads a few weeks back about leaving Christianity when I was a teen because I saw then nascent, budding dogmatism of Christian Nationalism even back in the 1980s. I was a bit shocked by the number of defensive responses that basically amounted to “not all Christians.”
When you’re presented with a box of snakes, you have to act like ALL of the are venomous. That approach is what women have to do when it comes to men. It’s what black people have to do when it comes to cops. Are there good men? Yes, of course, but a good man looks no different than a bad one at first and so it’s wise, prudent, and safe for women to approach all men as if they’re harmful until that man proves he’s not. Are the good cops? Sure, maybe, but if a black person wants to survive an encounter with a cop, they have to act as if all cops are potential street executioners.
Are there good, tolerant Christians? Sure. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt when some claim that there are… but until the so-called liberal left-wing Christians do something more than tell me “Christian Nationalists aren’t real Christians” or “Not all Christians” are moralizing, homophobic, transphobic, anti-woman crusaders, then I’m going to assume they’re all out to turn our country into a theocracy.
You see, deep down, I think the left-wing liberal Christians are enmeshed in the same kind of complacency that a lot of Libertarian white men are enmeshed in. Libertarian white men have the luxury to play political purity games and throw their votes to hopeless third party candidates because their status as white men is not in jeopardy if one or the other parties wins an election. The system was built by and for white men. Democratic control or Republican control doesn’t fundamentally change their lives, or threaten their status. So, they can make stupid pronouncements like “Biden’s a Zionist so I’m voting for Kennedy.” Kennedy can’t win. But Trump can. Of course, if Trump does win, the straight white Libertarian man’s world won’t change that much. However, the lives of black people will change drastically. The lives of women will change drastically. The lives of gay and trans people will change drastically. Our chance to ever vote for a third party candidate out of puritanical spite will disappear completely.
And the same dynamic, I think, is at play among a lot of left-wing liberal Christians. They may not like Christian Nationalism, but as long as they can pass for straight white obedient followers of Christ, they’ll be okay in “The Republic of Gilead.” Their lives won’t change much in a Christo-fascist state as long as they don’t argue.
It’s time that 2,000 year old agrarian religions stop having a bearing on the course of the world.
A Wandering Road 