I’ve spent the bulk of my 41 years wanting to die—my current streak of over five years without a twinge of suicidal ideation is unprecedented. I’ve lost a not-insignificant number of my friends, acquaintances, and larger community over those years—suicide, homicide, overdose, car accidents (including cyclists killed by motor vehicles). Cancer, AIDS, and other terminal illnesses. Friends dead because they ended up on the streets or in the joint or back and forth between the two. If this sounds cold or clinical, it’s because I cannot approach this amount of incredible grief in immediately emotional terms or I will buckle. I can remember very little time in which I haven’t felt leaden with the fact of it: death as more a part of life than life.
I struggled with language around it until earlier this year, when I interviewed the wonderful Rayna Russom, who referred to our lives lived in US gay and queer clubs specifically as “sitting in a fucking broth of the dead”—not just in the present and the immediate past but also in reference to the original sins of the US, indigenous genocide and African enslavement, and to those who were killed on the job while fighting for labor rights in the warehouse spaces in which we party, to those gentrified out of their homes by the boutiques and cafes that inevitably follow any arts scene in which there is a critical mass of white people. She’s right—we’re all soaking in it, all the time.
This awful year, in stripping the last vestige of illusion from the machinery of neoliberal capitalism, a Bathory machine that runs on blood and grinds bones to dust, isn’t just a plague year. We are dying from COVID itself and the poor executive responses thereto, and dying from lack of access to affordable healthcare, and dying because of imperialist military interventions and apartheid projects, and dying from wildfires, and dying from lack of potable water, and dying from the mental health problems exacerbated by our exceptionally brutal new order, and dying because of evictions, and dying at the hands of police, and dying at the hands of right wing vigilantes empowered explicitly by the ruling party. The grief leaks through in all kinds of ways. It is so immense that I find myself crying in all kinds of weird places and at weird times, seemingly unprompted—I always have to remind myself that there are any number of reasons to grieve at any point in time.
And on top of that, we lack the ability to grieve collectively the way we usually do, with touch and with presence; a Zoom wake is better than nothing, perhaps, but god, it feels bleaker than bleak. (I have attended multiple ones this year. Fucked.) I have ordered babkas online to be sent to people because how do you mourn without food? The only person I have hugged in months is my girlfriend, who I get to see every other weekend, as if we have some sort of custody agreement with … ourselves, and god, am I thankful for even that.
Underneath that grief runs a current of anger, also too strong to touch directly—anger seems too mild a word. Fury. Fury at this unjust system, at those who architected it and those who perpetuate it and those who exacerbate it, those who are so invested in their own power that we die and die and die and die and die to make that Bathory machine churn on. This rage and grief are nothing new, but now I have nothing but to experience it 24-7.
I look for the light, I do. I am a realist, because how else would I have beaten the odds to survive to this point, and part of being a realist is knowing that you have to find moments of hope even in times like these or your whole self will curdle and become unuseful to any kind of revolutionary moment. I focus on the small everyday things that I can do, and I make stupid jokes, and I eat food that makes my body feel good, and I feel immensely lucky that I have a roof over my head (albeit a roof that’s falling apart) and a steady paycheck, and I try not to fixate on little shitty interactions that could easily metastasize. I listen to music all day because it’s my job, but also because I haven’t stopped loving it and finding comfort and connection in it.
I try to learn every day. It’s been hard for me to do my usual intense non-fiction reading because my attention is so shot, but in the last month or so it’s been possible again, and I have welcomed its routine so thankfully. I think about the fact that I have so much love around me and I think that if it is possible for me, a Notoriously Difficult Person, to love and be loved by so many—that is hopeful. The incredible legacy of activism in Chicago that I feel fortunate to be a part of inspires me every day. My comrades and colleagues inspire me. At the risk of sounding like I am fetishizing youth (I am not), what Black and brown youth activists have done in this city in recent years through a number of autonomous organizations of their own is overwhelming and incredible, and just running support for other people who need it is a big part of what I do these days.
I don’t really have a good way to close this out. I hate, hate, hate self-help shit and would like to boot anyone who tries to give you pithy advice on how you should live your life into the sun. I think I maybe just wanted to write this because the grief and the rage are so all-consuming right now I don’t know what else I could write about honestly. Someone said to me recently that it was hard to make small talk because nobody’s ok right now and I said something like, dude, if any of us were ok it would mean we were insulated from all of this and that would be deeply fucked up?
The struggle continues. All hands on deck, this week especially. There is fighting for survival and then there is giving up, and despite my own best self-sabotaging efforts I don’t know how to do the latter yet.
I didn’t recommend music in the last newsletter, but I should have.
Here are some records in current heavy rotation.
Aluna, Renaissance
Bbymutha, Muthaland
MJ Guider, Sour Cherry Bell
Silent Era, Rotate the Mirror
Josh Johnson, Freedom Exercise
Public Eye, Music for Leisure