These Two Gods Walk into a Bar...

These are strange times. If this is news to you than there is a raft of memos that you have missed, dating back to when the orange man began campaigning for office. You've either been in a coma or I want some of the drugs you've been taking. Climate change...okay, don't go away. I'm not going to read you the latest menu of completely avoidable stresses in our world right now. You don't need that. Nobody needs that.

Personally, I haven't been able to listen to the news for months. Every time I take a chance and leave the radio on, when the news anchor speaks, my brain launches itself against the back wall of my skull, and not in a fun, mosh pit kind of way. It's painful. I had a short conversation with a friend about our present days. I wondered out loud if mankind had ever experienced anything similar or if I was merely feeling precious and ripped off. He replied by suggesting the World Wars. I agreed, but as I went away and chewed on this, I felt my brain screaming, throwing virtual coffee cups and jumping on virtual hats. We know better, don't we?

Don't we know better? Didn't we learn?

It's not a big secret that my own days are rough. I'm still trying to sort out my footing around some monumentally challenging chunks of life (what kind of fuckwad tells you you're not funny?) at the same time as the world spins down its remarkable coriolis toward, whatever.  The black dogs keep hogging my bed, so my sleep is fitful at best. I sleep with the window closed because the sound of morning traffic sets me on edge, but that means that my lungs are full of black dog farts by morning. There is nothing more toxic. When I wake up, I make myself get up, open the window and take a deep breath; 

Oh, goodie. Another day.

I take a swab of the news from Twitter, The New Yorker, and set about trying to be okay with it, but I can't anymore.

Our world is excruciating.  Really, this is stupid in the most vibrant definition of the word:

Marked by lack of thought, reason, or wit and what don't you get about climate change and oh-my-god-you-elected-fucking-Trump.

And in which book does it say, 

The racist ass-hats shall inherit the earth?

Humans, who can be startlingly lovely, creative, breathtakingly beautiful, can also be monsters, here, in Syria, and sprinkled throughout the world – and why we have this chummy relationship with Saudi Arabia is, well, how many ways can you say hypocritical? 

 

On the whole, mankind prefers change to happen glacially, often with some archaic violence: Chess, but with live humans because we're not mature enough to use our words. Even the risk of our planet's demise has to be strung out, because, you know, there's that economy of unsustainable, moronic growth to consider. I'm sure that in a decade or two, when we're all sitting in a culvert eating grubs, we're going to laugh and laugh and laugh. (Do any other women have the urge to call these bone headed men out and send them to their rooms until they get their testosterone sorted out? And I'm talking about from all over the world, and in every religion.) 

God help you if you call anybody out on anything. I mean, how is it that we still have drive-thru's? Is it not a simple, pretty obvious idea to NOT run your car while you're waiting for your doughnuts? People love their blinders, and their warm duvets-of-complicity, except now, it's inconveniently too warm for either.

I know I'm not the only one struggling with this. I have stepped in to support friends brave enough to risk vulnerability in this zeitgeist. 

I get it.

I feel it.

I can taste it.

It's all over my floor and hurts like Lego when I walk on it.

Recently, I stopped at the Quaker Meeting House (yes, my actual roots) to have a talk with God, who I am pretty pissed with, by the way. No sooner had I sat down on the steps than this car pulls up, a man gets out with a set of bagpipes and begins playing in a clearing on the lawn. The timing was impeccable.

Okay so God, or whatever, has a sense of humour. Very funny. But what to do?

Seriously, what to do? What do I make of this?

Well, to be honest, I don't even want to be here, but people get all excited and uncomfortable when you say that. The only reason I'm still around is that I have two amazing boys, young men now, who I am bonkers crazy about. I would do anything for them and am pissed that the world is in the state that it is around them. If I hear one more person toss out some, 

"Well, there's nothing you can do about it," 

and my special favourite,

"Oh well, that's all in the past," 

I will shirt you in public. 

 

Maybe that's the key. Maybe a sense of humour is exactly the thing. This is absolutely the time for agency, but instead of fighting and marching, perhaps we need a more creative, less timid approach. Perhaps your idiot, neanderthal friend who throws his fast-food garbage out of his car window needs to have his head shaved oddly and his beard filled with gum.  The complicit moron who buys flats of Nestle bottled water could learn by having Twizzlers shoved into her tailpipe and be forced to sleep on a bed of Dunkaroo's.  And Mr. Gadget-Pants, who uses his leaf blower instead of a rake, should have the damn thing filled with flour and cooked peas, and the whole community of local bagpipers show up and play for him incessantly until he screams "uncle." 

If we can change simple minds about simple things, then perhaps we can slowly rise to consider not being dicks to each other on a broader, global scale.

Right?

Maybe?

I am putting my therapist through her paces. I also must offer her a nod to my still being here. We've covered some rough ground and I would not be surprised to find her showing up in a sweat suit and cleats soon, because instead of trying to normalize this life, I am bent on sensing and feeling the raw, clear clues about the direction of the world and my place in it. 

This is not business as usual.

To accept and feel compelled to normalize this clenching, grasping world scenario is, I think, an act of the fiercest delusional lunacy. Talk about drinking the Kool aid!  I can't bear to resign myself to simply enduring. My brain is not wired that way, and the black dog farts would suffocate me. If I can somehow find an opportunity to wake people up and bring us together in the midst of all of this bullshit, then I will feel useful; like I had a tiny victory despite the odds. This is a tall order. But if you've met my kids, then you know why I need to meet it. 

Everything else is meaningless.

 

Everything.