Keep howling, bitches.
It is one way to remember to breathe.
Well, it’s finally spring.
I’m supposed to be writing this book, about my thru-hike. I am writing it, but slowly. More slowly than I’d hoped and planned. I’d set myself an aggressive timeline and I fear I won’t meet it, because my attention is fragmented. Fragmented attention is bad, of course. It’s unfocused. It doesn’t get shit done. It meanders. It’s not hustling and goal-oriented. It’s not a deadlift, it’s not free-climbing el capitan. Once I described living through my despair by saying it was like free-climbing el capitan in a rainstorm. Clinging to the side of a cliff while the rain pours down, the rain that wants to wash you away like the itsy-bitsy spider. First thing in the morning the Long Trail is criss-crossed with spider silk, not from spiders building their webs but from their travel. They pass in the night, on the breeze, and you come through in the morning and cut the silk with your trekking pole, or close your eyes and walk through, until it is stuck in your eyelashes. Everywhere you look, the world is glittering with the passage of the spiders. I know this paragraph doesn’t make any sense, it’s not focused, it’s not getting shit done. Sometimes that’s what I need, though.
I need to keep howling, and sometimes it doesn’t make any sense.
***
I have been painting a lot this week. In the “fine art’ sense. I don’t think I’m very good at it. When I rented the studio of course I had grandiose aspiration. I would become an Artist. I would be a Writer. I would be an Activist. I would be all these things. But I don’t believe I’m a very talented Artist. I believe I’m a talented writer, but not a disciplined one. I believe I am a lazy, indifferent, merely wanna-be Organizer. In fact, I’m a wanna-be everything right now. I have no value in the world, I do not earn enough money to count, I’m too old to birth babies, too crazy for anyone to want me to. I am too old to be hot, I am too depressed to be useful.
Lucky for me, what I am is not really relevant. There’s just what I do.
I don’t think the paintings I’m making are very good, but I’m making a lot of them. I am not writing the book as quickly as I could be, but I’m writing it. I’m not doing as much political stuff or sure enough that it’s useful as I’d like to be, but I’m doing some stuff. I’m pushing ahead, as best I can, through the anxiety and the fear and the horror and the rage. Through the despair. I could just lie down and die, and I often want to, and I spend more time than I’d like just … nothing. I still spend more time on the internet than I would like to spend. I hate my phone and I pick it up anyways. Also, I howl.
I think about taking up smoking again. I love cigarettes. I love nicotine. For what future am I preserving my lungs, anyways? I put in another order for two more cases of imported biodynamic wine from our wine guy, because I like biodynamic wine and I like funky cheese and if I must live under this regime I will drink the wine and eat the cheese. I plan another summer hike, same trail, other direction. If we are to live under this regime, we must live. We must go on living even when friends cancel trips to the US because they don’t want to cross our borders, even when every day comes a new insult to our intelligence, to our freedoms, to truth. We keep howling.
Some days I feel like I am being crushed. I vibrate with rage. I call my senators to leave messages about how they should get rid of Chuck Schumer. “Hi, me again, but seriously, fuck that guy. He’s not up to the task before him.” When I call my rep an actual human answers the phone. “Rep called Mahmoud Khalil’s actions ‘despicable,’” I complain to the human. Does rep know that many of his Jewish constituents are also against the war? What actions is rep referring to that are ‘despicable’? Don’t you think that calling someone ‘despicable’ is a convenient way to legitimize their deportation? I don’t like the tone.” Human is polite, says will pass message on to Rep. Thanks, I say, I will keep howling.
Other days I forget to breathe. I take long walks with a friend, we take pictures of weird stumps and note the graffiti. In Allston, the various communist parties have been busy with wheat paste. It’s festive, bright red, everywhere you look. In my art studio I post Timothy Snyder’s twenty lessons On Tyranny. I like “practice corporeal politics” a lot. I try to go to things in person. I put my phone away and look people in the eye on the street. “Let’s meet IRL,” I say to people. (Let’s meet IRL, I say to you.) When I am walking around town taking a picture of a vacant lot or a crushed eyelash curler on the sidewalk, I am forced to breathe, because my body needs the oxygen.
When I am dancing with friends, I have to breathe, my body needs the oxygen. When fucking, I have to breathe. My body needs the oxygen. The lesson here would seem to be that if I cannot breathe, the last thing I should do is sit hunched over my computer, reloading the news again and again. The news does not make me remember to breathe.
In order to truly howl, we must breathe. Take deep breaths and keep howling, bitches.
***
It’s spring, the whole world is humming and things are growing even now.
Heather Havrilesky tells me that “falling to pieces is another way of rising to greet the sky.” I am falling to pieces but I keep howling.
Here's what I think is true but only our actions can prove: the Trump regime is a Cybertruck, meant to look aggressive and intimidating, a bully car, but also one sloppily made to low standards, one that falls apart as it goes, with pieces that can be yanked off by hand. It shouts that it's strong, but it's weak. It shouts that we're weak but we can be strong, together.
Here’s a really useful essay on Organizing, that I especially like because it gets at this fear that I have that I’m not a real Activist or a real Organizer, that I haven’t read the right books yet:
The first secret is that organizing is simple.
The second is that you're probably already doing it.
There are thousands upon thousands of pages, infinite books, chapters and zines, innumerable podcasts and videos telling you how to get started organizing. Many of them are helpful, but many more of them function as gatekeeping disguised as help. They are full of specialized jargon or ominous warnings about the law or advice on how to manage internal conflict or long thoughts about money and pros and cons of being non-profit or ideas about how to build particular kinds of internal structures.
And all of those things can be helpful, even necessary, at various points in the process of building a project, but the aggregate effect of the discussion is to make organizing seem like something inaccessible to all but the most dedicated or hardworking people. It's intimidating as hell! Look at all those things you need to know! Reading such texts the inevitable conclusion for many people would be "this isn't for me, I can't do this."
The essay goes on, of course, to reassure each of us that we CAN do it. With suggestions. It’s worth a read.
Another thing that is worth the read is this summary of the decision of the judge who ruled against the Executive Order banning trans people from the military, complete with the best quotes. I love me a scathing judicial decision. It is how a judge howls.
***
One thing that helps me is I won’t watch or listen to any of those guys anymore. Not Trump, not Musk, not Vance. Not their spokespeople. I will not listen to or watch things in which I even might have to hear them speak. I do not need to hear the shit they say or watch them saying it to act against it, and I do not consent to be subject to the noxious stream of verbal abuse and lies that they projectile vomit every time they open their mouths. I don’t even read 90% of their bilious written statements. It doesn’t serve me. It’s abuse, and I want to expose myself to as little of it as possible. I don’t want that shit worming its way into my brain, mutating in my nightmares. I do not need to see or hear it to acutely understand that it is happening.
I fill the air instead with the sound of my own howling.
***
Yes, it is happening, and it is very bad. Oh, also, I don’t read the New York Times anymore, not for my news, because I think it downplays the bad, and I don’t think it is helpful to downplay the bad. I read The Guardian instead. The New York Times is not fully reporting the news, and it is not fully reporting the direness of the situation we are in, and what it does report tends to be a week or two behind what the Guardian has reported, so The Guardian it is.
Yes, it is happening, but the crocuses are coming up, nonetheless.
I still believe in democracy, in solidarity, in truth, and in love. I still believe in the crocuses and the biodynamic wines and the itsy bitsy spider. I still believe in dancing.
I’m reading a book series called The Burning Kingdoms, by Tasha Suri. In book two one of the main characters goes to a library in search of knowledge that will help her in a very bad political moment.
Another character asks her what she is doing:
“Sometimes it is necessary to act and plan, simply to know you're still capable of it," she said. "To assure yourself you are still fighting, even if your circumstances do not alter."
(They are attacking the museums and the libraries. We must not let them succeed. The American Library Association is fighting it. “Remember professional ethics” wrote Snyder. The ALA did. Neither Columbia University, nor Paul, Weiss seem to have remembered, but the librarians did. The librarians are howling. )
I still believe in libraries. I believe in education, I believe in scathing legal opinions. I believe in me, and I believe in you too. Howling together.
***
I saw this on bluesky today:
They will continue to tell us that someone got fired, deported, imprisoned, beaten because they did something wrong. They were criminals. Their actions were ‘despicable.’ A photo was found in the trash can of a group chat that suggests they might harbor sympathies. We can’t fall for this. They are lying to us, shamelessly.
Some days I can’t breathe. Some days I want a cigarette. Some days the wind howls in sympathy with the howling inside my heart, grief and rage for all we are losing, but I will not merely be a prophet of our destruction, I will open my mouth wide, howl at the moon, howl at the crocuses, howl for my freedom and yours.
Keep howling, bitches.
Solidarity <3