10 THOUGHTS, ALSO PROBABLY WRONG

This is dedicated to my mama, who LIVES this fact: "the creative actions of a free person are a gift to all"

Back when we were rowdy 40-somethings, we would sometimes throw a real party outside our then-tiny house. There would be hay bales everywhere, a good band that might camp in the field beyond, just enough grilled meat on some table in the dark, and a scattering of dogs underfoot. My architect dad would infamously dimension every last bale placement and circle of stones for the fire, and then hector the kids to build it. Their wiry little selves barely outweighed the bales they shifted, or could carry the ladders they climbed, but there was prep stress in the air, the architect was no softie, and they found a way.

One late night when the band was done but the dancing was not, I had the bad exuberance to dance slam our good friend John Eichhorst right off the elevated dance floor we built that year, onto what I had imagined was a sweet big bed of straw surrounding. The two of us were launched in the air for a moment, and then landed on our backs so very hard. No sweet bed of straw awaited–just a garnish, really, a flaxen sprinkle over dirt. We lay there stunned and still side-by-side in the dark taking stock, the way you do when you’re scanning for injury before moving. John would later learn his ribs were broken, but that night we scanned alright and were soon laughing. We reached for outstretched hands, and rose with care.

Right now feels like that first shocked slam against the hard ground. Like we all lay stunned and mute in the dark taking stock last night, this morning. This time, there is real injury.

I thought I would never be so wrong again, as that Sunday afternoon in July when an American president withdrew from his race for reelection and endorsed his Vice President. I had been a grandstand yammerer of great ferocity against such a move. But when the joy of the change crawled right through me, the news bypassed the ol’ brain pan and suffused every last cell with how good and how right it was. I felt tied by the vagus nerve to millions of others hearing the same, like a shining ribbon of sweet discovery had whipped its way around the country and through all of us at once. Well, not all of us. All of us.

That summer wrong gone so lavishly right, made me swear off strong opinions of any kind, on any topic, for the next months. I enjoyed the wide eyes and fresh morning air of Beginner Mind, as the Zen book of 1970 called it. But I was sure back in the I Thinks by November! Every smartest person I trusted to watch the data and call it, namely Tom Bonier, Joe Trippi and Simon Rosenberg, said yes, keep doing the work, nothing’s won yet, it is very tight, but. They said we’re winning but we haven’t won yet, that sort of thing. They made Field (the work of voter registration, voter identification, and voter turnout) sound determinative. The edge and the momentum were ours. They thought we would win. I thought we would win. All of those drive-by MAGA mostly men giving me their cranky thumbs down and worse in Philly, would be overswamped and overcome by the joy and determination of us many actually voting.

I am not here now with news or What Happeneds, only sensations. This new full body wrong gone wrong, is very different from the summer’s golden ribbon. I am stunned to silence while I feel through my depths looking for relevant capacities. Searching and mute, it’s like patting for tools, matches, maybe weapons, in a dark basement with a new rumbling upstairs. If I didn’t love young people and want the world to keep happening, this would be easier. I need an approach. I can’t walk around randomly processing all over other people like they need it heaped on top of their own, especially the young ones.

So my ten probably wrong first thoughts are these:

1.        Go to first principles: Think of others. Are you stronger or less hurt by this than someone else? Be actively kind, garishly generous, or just sturdier than you might feel, for them. Practice on your family first. (Example: My equally aghast and distraught father and I had just been talking about what our family’s approach to this dark event was going to have to look like. He left, then reappeared with a hot second cup of coffee and set it carefully down beside me. He left again, and reappeared with a baked good on a plate! We yelped in our very first mutual discovery of tiny delight post-November 5^th 2024: No one’s stopping us from being super nice to each other, all of us. “Can I get you something else???” he asked, now greedy for more good feelings. I look forward to practicing this in the wilds, not just at home.)

2.        Stay sober if you’re sober. (Stay active if you’re active, healthy if you’re healthy.) Don’t let nation-state events change your decisions about your own health.

3.        Speaking of decisions about our own health: Talk openly and personally about women’s bodies, health, and maternal planning. With a national ban coming, help everyone you can develop and resource a plan for continued access to contraception, Plan B, life-saving care around miscarriages or ectopic pregnancies, and access to the care needed to give birth to healthy babies. Pretend we all already live in Texas, and help people you know make contingency plans accordingly.

4.        If tribal, then tribal. Take every good liberal slogan you ever heard about stronger together, more in common than what divides, don’t judge–listen, and let’s use them exclusively on our own tribe, not theirs. Our team lost. Their team is not our team. I will focus on my own tribe. It is not perfect and could sure use heavy reform. But we have been transfixed by the other tribe for 9 years, on the MAGA tribe, on the GOP tribe. I am shifting my focus. Let’s get stronger not for electoral reasons or cycles this time, but for our own well-being and thriving survival. Let’s focus and get stronger within our own families, our own neighborhoods, our own towns, our own counties, and our own states. Let’s focus and get stronger across our own sister blue states and blue urban centers. Let’s exalt and strengthen the best of our own leaders, work on fixing what gets so stupid about progressive excesses, and accept leadership responsibilities ourselves large or small. Let’s do all of that within our own tribe and against theirs. More enlightened and strategic folks will differ here, but I will not spend another minute trying to understand the MAGA tribe except as it helps me defend my own against them. I may be dumb as rocks about a lot of things, but their identity is not my identity.

5.        Art, art and more art. Smash your phone if you must. But let’s go forward more alive, less machined, more right here, less zombied. Before 2006 brought us the pocket devil limpet that latched to our faces and wrecked the world beyond it, there were centuries of books read and written, drawings made, dances learned, sculptures risen, sweaters knit, music played in living rooms, amateur theatrics and household crafts. That’s not nostalgia, that’s just hours of life x human effort, together. My mom raised me steeped in such artists and craftspeople and performers. There must be a way now to live honestly, not in retreat, but with our brains and hands intact for each other. Not abject and lit before the machines. If we must lose our country, let’s at least rebuild and retake our shared consciousness. I will know less but understand more. I will read and think and speak in long-form, not scroll to the bottom of the dark sea with eyes sealed to screen and an anchor in my mouth. I will be a human of this century, not a mark for today’s feed.

6.        Be drastic. If the world is going to be this unexpected, then at least make use of that same freedoms yourself. If you and yours have the basics of health, safety, and resource at least for now, then: if you have a very different way you want to be, or place, or people you want to be with, or absurd thing you want to learn, do it. If 2020 didn’t teach us radical volatility, then let 2024 do the job. If you want to wear white robes and study Sanskrit, as my dad’s ol’ buddy Russ Riviere was doing hitching on the side of the road in Stinson when they first met, do it. If you want to eat cereal for dinner and watch 2 years of lectures on the Ancient Greeks for a month, do it. If you want to pick up trash on the highway for a year and see what you see, or offer free babysitting to a young family, or perform trumpet on a sidewalk or invite a housing-stressed young person to share your home for free, take risks and try it. All bets are off, and the creative actions of a free person are a gift to all.

7.        God. Whatever your practice, belief, or upbringing, be it atheist, Catholic, hippie Buddhist, Jewish, astrology over wine or metaphysics at the library, or you’re just a nature-lover with god moments, make room for the pursuit of those bigger, deeper sensations of universal connection. The greatest revenge on the forces of shitty-ness that just prevailed would be a galloping degree of plain old spiritual growth among the beaten. Us.   

8.        Funny, but not sardonic. It is natural to discuss the dreadfulness of right now with a Lavrov-ian har har, that Russian way of joke-not-joking about terrible things in a cynical manner that half-laughs just to steel gird everyone against feeling. It is better to feel. Stay innocent. There are real routes to funny and we will find them, but sardonic is the poison waft of breath from a heart that can’t breath. Say your feelings like a child until something is actually funny. Dark humor is still on the table, wholly, but that’s somehow different from sardonic.

9.        Dogs, coffee and chores are NOT in Project 2025. I will decide to put my full attention on what is right in front of me. I will not let the abstract vacuum of distant everything suck each moment away half had, as it did intermittently for the past 9 years of threat and spectacle. This dog, this sunlight, the work I must do, none are in Project 2025 this morning. I will be with this dog, this sunlight, and the work I must do completely, until I am not. The back rooms of my brain that were teeming with fascists and fury, will be empty by effort and choice, and will fill again but at times of my choosing and with intent. “Mind Your Head” says an old bronze plaque salvaged from a sailing vessel in my sailor dad’s studio. It’s what we’ve got, feed it well.

10.  Love.