Time Out and Other Sports Analogies I Hate
It’s a little hard to watch this lip sync video from a year ago. There is a life in my eyes that I fear is gone now. I feel as though I have aged eons since last March. I feel as though my experiences of this last year have officially marked the end of my youth, and although I’m looking more and more the part of an elder I feel as though I am nowhere near capable of that role.
I made this video back in late February of 2020, right before the pandemic, while housesitting in Seattle, adorning myself with the treasures the house owner had collected in her travels around the world.
I like lip syncing because I can’t sing. Well, I CAN sing, but when I do it I find that I sound nothing like Adele so why bother. This is one of the many downsides of a fame culture, it can destroy our confidence because we compare ourselves to ideals we can never match and so then we stop doing things, like singing, that are essential to keeping our human-ness alive. EVERY ONE of us needs to be singing and dancing and grooming one another (yes, grooming — most primates spend hours a day grooming one another which builds strong social bonds) WAY more than we currently are if we are going to ever come back to the essence of our species, an essence that would never dream of living in such detached, short-sighted, careless, ugly, destructive ways.
So I had made this video to help me process the blow of recently telling my best friend that I couldn’t talk to him EVER again. I know, I know, it’s all very dramatic. I’m a double Leo, so.
For years I had been in love with him, and sometimes even told him so, but he didn’t feel the same way, but he also didn’t want to lose me as a friend so as the good people pleaser this culture has trained me to be (especially as a woman), we kept being best friends despite the unrequited love that tortured me, because that’s what he wanted — even telling me that our friendship was in danger of being ruined by my pesky romantic feelings.
I really didn’t want to ruin things, I remember even thinking “I’m being selfish in wanting more.” And I figured the feelings would just give up at some point if I persevered.
But they didn’t.
So I had to do one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do and tell one of my favorite people, the only person I think I’ve ever been in love with, that we can’t talk or see one another anymore.
He took it hard.
It was all terribly sad…..
BUT at the same time it also felt so unbelievably empowering to just goddamn say for once that I wasn’t getting what I needed and then actually leave a situation that was not best for me, which is something we are not trained to do by this culture (especially women). I’ve wasted many many years in partnerships where I was not getting what I needed but didn’t know how to leave. There are so many women in the world — perhaps the majority of women — who don’t have the luxury of saying no, who physically cannot leave shitty (or worse) situations, and here I had lived over 4 decades with this luxury and barely used it.
~ ~ ~
I had found the perfect song that expressed what I was feeling after essentially breaking up with my best friend: ‘Something About Us’ by Daft Punk, but covered here by Pomplamoose:
It might not be the right time
I might not be the right one
But there’s something about us I want to say
Cause there’s something between us anyway
I might not be the right one
It might not be the right time
But there’s something about us I’ve got to do
Some kind of secret I will share with you
I need you more than anything in my life
I want you more than anything in my life
I’ll miss you more than anyone in my life
I love you more than anyone in my life.
But by the 3rd take or so, it started to lose its original meaning for me.
I wasn’t talking about us as in “he and me” anymore. That “us” was fading to the background, or rather….it was being swallowed up by a much bigger sense of us, an us that was encompassing the larger unrequited love that all of us — all living things on Earth — are experiencing right now to some degree.
~ ~ ~
New findings say that so far this year, more than 430 Manatees have died in Florida’s waters, triple the amount from this same period last year.
It seems everyday a new study is released stating very dryly just how much nature is being lost and how toxic the environment is becoming.
But it should be clear by now that all these studies, all this cataloguing of the destruction of LIFE, is completely ineffective at changing the dominant culture from one that takes to one that aims to give back, from one that cuts Life down to one that strives to add to the complexity and diversity of Life.
How about conducting a study as to why all these studies don’t have any impact on our behavior whatsoever?
All this “information” we keep gathering and gathering simply is not ever going to move us to do what is needed to stop ourselves from complying with the violence of this taking culture, to move us to stop those doing the most damage, stop those who are holding us hostage, those who have given us all hopelessly incurable cases of Stockholm Syndrome.
Seriously, how many more studies do we need?
It’s like we are studying and studying for a test that never comes, that we are prevented from ever taking.
But don’t you see that we were BORN READY to take this test?
The longer we live within this sick demented dysfunctional culture the less prepared we become.
It’s now or never!
Each day we wait we will be LESS ready.
You’ll never be more prepared for this test than you are RIGHT THE FUCK NOW.
We can’t wait for the test to come, because the dominant culture will never ever ever ever schedule it. Their game plan is to keep us passively occupied with evermore studies until the clock runs out. The clock has already run out for so many species! Over 60% of Nature has been obliterated since 1970! We need to call a time out!
The point is that I fuckin’ hate sports analogies!
The point is that when horrible heartbreaking information is poured out without a strong chaser of letting ourselves FEEL it, followed by an even stronger chaser of COMPASSIONATE CONCRETE WAYS IN WHICH TO RESPOND then we will never ever generate the kind of culture necessary to defend all Life on Earth. Heartbreaking information is useless if we are not ALSO provided a way to mend our hearts. Once our hearts see that no action is being taken to heal itself then it just starts to scar over, making it harder and harder to penetrate. Without the heart driving our actions we can’t have the kind of experiences that lead to wisdom. Feeling what is actually happening to us is what makes us wise, not simply being informed. Information is only the first step. But maybe we wouldn’t even need information at all if we could just let ourselves FEEL what is happening and let our hearts take over, let our animal selves run wild again.
As Chris Hedges reminds us…
“Knowledge does not lead to wisdom. Knowledge is more often a tool for repression. Knowledge, through the careful selection and manipulation of facts, gives a false unity to reality. It creates a fictitious collective memory and narrative. It manufactures abstract concepts of honor, glory, heroism, duty and destiny that buttress the power of the state, feed the disease of nationalism and call for blind obedience in the name of patriotism. It allows human beings to explain the advances and reverses in human achievement and morality, as well as the process of birth and decay in the natural world, as parts of a vast movement forward in time. The collective enthusiasm for manufactured national and personal narratives, which is a form of self-exaltation, blots out reality. The myths we create that foster a fictitious hope and false sense of superiority are celebrations of ourselves. They mock wisdom. And they keep us passive. Wisdom connects us with forces that cannot be measured empirically and that are outside the confines of the rational world. To be wise is to pay homage to beauty, truth, grief, the brevity of life, our own mortality, love and the absurdity and mystery of existence. It is, in short, to honor the sacred.”
~ ~ ~
“If you are going about your day-to-day life as normal, you are a climate denier” ~Dr. Tim Hewlett
Even if you have a cognitive sense of just how bad the Earth is being ravaged and negatively altered by industrial civilization, you are still operating out of some level of denial. Because if you let yourself truly feel the heaviness of it all the time you “wouldn’t be able to function”. That is what I hear a lot. But maybe it’s time we stop “functioning”, because the functioning we are referring to is in relation to the artificial systems we live by, NOT in relation to the systems of Nature. This “functioning” of ours is destroying Life on Earth.
When the pandemic first hit, some of this “functioning” came to a halt and just like that Nature started to rebound. You remember, don’t you? How loud and robust the birdsong was? But fuck birds because THE ECONOMY. We can’t just put our lives on hold for birds, right? This is exactly what we must do. These “lives” of ours are not good lives, they aren’t really lives at all, because unlike the lives of every other living thing on Earth (with the exception of domesticated plants and animals) our industrial lives give so little (if anything) back to the living matrix of Life. You would need to live hundreds or even thousands of years of purely giving back to the Earth to even begin to make up for all the damage your birth into this industrial culture has caused.
We must shake off the propaganda of these man made systems and come to the profound yet practical realization that we owe NOTHING to governments, to “our” country, to banks, to financial institutions, to insurance agencies, to the economy, to this entire society at large.
We owe EVERYTHING to those humans (and non humans) most exploited by this shitshow, to our ancestors, to those of us who are still living in right relationship to the environment, to Nature, to the Earth, to those defending Her with their lives.
How in the hell can we shift our “civic duties” and “responsibilities” from that which is fucking everything up to that which is most deserving of our allegiance?
That John Lennon quote “Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans” needs to be augmented to…
“Life is what dies while we’re busy carrying out the plans of Empire like good little obedient storm troopers who are led to believe they are as special and unique as friggin’ Luke Skywalker.”
Is it “your” plan to destroy the living shit out of the only planet we know of that has life? Is it “your” plan to kill off Manatees? No, of course not! Then why are you doing this? Because, better to be inside the Death Star serving Empire than be outside it as one of its targets. But if we learned anything from Star Wars (and I don’t think we have AT ALL) it’s that as powerful as the Death Star is, it has a weak vulnerable point, which Luke Skywalker is able to hit with one little shot that destroys the whole damn thing in an instant.
We must find the weak spots of this Death Star we live in and take it the fuck down. But we will never be able to do this if we cannot start to help one another to break free from the hold it has over us. How do we do this? I don’t know but I think it involves really letting ourselves FEEL how devastating the destruction of the planet is, to actually fully GRIEVE. It is in this grief where “the force” lies. Without the force Luke couldn’t have hit his target. He had to let go of the safety of his technological instruments. We must start to give up the safety that Industrial Civilization provides us, because that perceived safety has a grave cost: manatees perishing, coral reefs bleaching, koala bears losing their home to fire, kelp forests collapsing, monarch butterflies dropping, the Gulf Stream slowing, poverty increasing, the pyramid of human hierarchy widening its base.
But no, our narrow focus for change predominantly gets corralled into trying to make the Death Star more fair and just and “inclusive”….But it’s THE DEATH STAR! It’s not designed for any of that! It’s designed to kill and to scare and to seize power & control.
These political and economic systems aren’t broken, they are working EXACTLY how they were designed to work. As Noam Chomsky said in the documentary ‘Requiem for the American Dream’….“In the United States there are PROFESSED values like democracy. But in a democracy, public opinion is going to have some influence on policy. And then the government carries out actions determined by the population, that’s what democracy means. Its important to understand that privileged and powerful sectors have never liked democracy, and for good reason: Real democracy puts power into the hands of the general population and takes it away from them.”
This so called “democracy” of “ours” wasn’t designed to truly be democratic — not at its birth, not now. As Chomsky points out, after the surge of civil outcry throughout the 1960’s, those in power were worried about an “excess of democracy”.
James Madison, one of the main “framers” said that it must be set up so that the constitution “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority”. He felt like if the poor are given too much say then they will just take over. One strategy to ensure the masses don’t organize and take what “belongs” to the rich is to reduce democracy, but do it in a way that makes it still seem like democracy is thriving. Another strategy is to reduce inequality, aka throw the people enough bones so that the placated masses don’t rise up. But over time those in power have experimented with just how little bones they can throw and still keep the mobs at bay. We’re now at the point where a Democrat controlled federal government has given LESS stimulus money to LESS Americans than Trump did.
Trump cut the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. But Biden’s plan is to raise it back to only 28%. This is called the ratchet effect. Any perceived “improvement” is never back to the original baseline, the baseline is in a constant zig zagging down, setting the bar lower and lower until the bar is buried and the rich are dancing on its grave.
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” ~Carl Sagan
Something called the Trilateral Commission put out a report after that string of “too much democracy” in the 1960’s entitled ‘The Crisis of Democracy’. Many of the people who worked on this report staffed the Carter administration (but Carter was supposed to be a good guy, right? Remember: There is no such thing as a good president, only bad ones and worse ones). It was the dawn of a new era of bamboozling where the opulent didn’t really have to worry anymore about throwing tons of bones to the people (to stave off revolt by reducing inequality) OR stress themselves over how to reduce democracy (without the public noticing) in order to keep their power. They just figured out that all they had to do was re-organize the economy instead — by giving big banks, financial institutions and corporations more unchecked power. This was the start of unprecedented wealth transference from the masses to the rich. Less and less did the rich have to actually produce something (and what they did produce they outsourced it to slave countries) in order to make a profit, now they just had to move money around in these elaborate unregulated money games that they designed and could change the rules of at any time.
No amount of pleading in the streets or signing petitions or voting will be enough now to sway those in power. Why have we accepted that swaying those in power is our job? Why is it just accepted that those in power will always be in need of swaying? It’s demeaning and fruitless to keep begging them for extremely basic services that would improve people’s lives. There is only one job at hand now for the masses: Not accepting these systems in any form, and figuring out how to organize ourselves to do this. We can’t do this as individuals, but sadly the groups and organizations currently available to us don’t hold the values we do as individuals, something gets lost as outrage tries to scale up….
“Lamentably, it is a historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.” ~MLK
It’s not like most of us like any of this clusterfuck, but we see no way to stop it. We keep waiting for someone else to start it. Reminds me of this scene from Arrested Development…
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” ~Frederick Douglas
The depth of our acquiescence has come to this: One of the first things Biden did once in office was undo the ONE good thing Trump had ever done. He reversed Donald’s executive order that put a cap on insulin prices.
Seriously, what will it take for the nicest sanest among us to storm the castle and demand at the VERY LEAST that Biden not be worse than fucking Trump. You know you are in hell when your diabetic friend is forced to say “I miss Trump.”
And hardly anyone is going to call Biden’s shit out because he’s “not Trump” even though in reality he is continuing on with much of the same crap that Trump did…but Trump was just building off of what Obama did. All Biden has to do now is just try and look busy until the next changing of the imperial guard. How fitting that the word “Bide” is in Biden’s name.
Here is Webster’s definition of Bide:
1) to wait for
2) withstand
3) to put up with: tolerate
4) to continue in a state or condition
5) to continue in a place
Remember, Biden said it himself when he assured the rich before the election: “Nothing will fundamentally change” if he is elected.
I really do hate to spend even one more precious breath on pointing out how shitty ONE individual like Biden or Trump or Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk is. It pains me to see so many smart caring people spend so much of their lives on social media tirelessly going after horrible figures like Biden or Trump when that energy could be re-directed to figuring out how to take down the systems that produced and celebrates these turd people.
Trump losing to Biden is like ridding your house of rats only to find that you have a pretty bad termite infestation. And in fact, the only reason the rats were even able to infiltrate the house was due to extensive structural damage caused by decades of undetected and ignored termite damage.
And we can argue and argue about which pest is worse. But it doesn’t actually mater what kind of pest is plaguing our house because guess the fuck what? The whole damn house is on fire (and somehow freezing and flooding at the same time).
But using house analogies and metaphors to talk about the ecological crisis ultimately will not work on us. Because the Earth isn’t a house on fire or a sinking ship.
The Earth is our HOME and She is plagued by too many houses and ships and cars and wires and smokestacks and pipelines and drainpipes and mines and asphalt and monocrops and factories and shopping centers and cows and plastic, so much plastic (which has increased enormously since the pandemic).
House culture is destroying our Home.
The house (and most modern buildings) should be viewed as a symbol of separation from HER. We spend over 90% of our time indoors (this stat is from before the pandemic).
We can’t use industrial language to talk about these problems, because these references are the SOURCE of the problems.
And my house pest analogy is also a shit analogy because both rats and termites have inherent value in maintaining a healthy biosphere, a healthy HOME….it’s the house that doesn’t, it’s the house that reframes rats and termites as “pests”. But it’s the mother-raping house that is the real pest! The termites and rats are only trying to reclaim our houses for the sake of Nature! But we shoot the messenger, or exterminate the messenger, with their message of “Your modern house is an abomination, so we’re taking it back.”
So industrial humans say “our house is on fire” when talking about the problem.
But Indigenous peoples say “our mother is dying”.
Indigenous peoples refer to Earth as Mother because that is their experience of her, they didn’t say it to be poetic or some shit like that, but because they live in a way where it is obvious that Earth is giving and maintaining and nourishing Life. We no longer have that direct experience. What we have is a bunch of temperamental, manipulative, neglectful, gaslighting evil step fathers and no mother. Growing up without a real mother and with one unstable stepparent has given us abandonment issues, developmental issues, behavioral issues. We are crying out for attention. We either lack confidence or are over confident to mask our insecurities. You could say we are all acting like children and need to just grow up but until we get a chance at having a healthy childhood we will never be able to grow up. And that phrase “acting like children” is problematic as well because children in a healthy culture do not act this way. We’ve just accepted that the unruly unsavory “bad” behaviors of toddlers and children and teenagers are “natural” when they are merely responses to being deprived of essential conditions that the bulk of our ancestors had when they were growing up.
We are so afraid to just name what it is that is really wrong.
In all these countless studies documenting the demise of Her, they don’t dare EVER come out and say that all of industrial civilization — the mining, drilling, large scale agriculture, travelling, shipping, production of non essentials, consuming, and all the governmental and economic systems keeping this shit going — ALL of it, MUST STOP RIGHT THE FUCK NOW if we are to even have a chance at saving what is left of the living world, saving what is left of our own humanity that is in danger being driven to extinction well before we are physically gone.
On the heels of the Manatee study I mentioned earlier was yet ANOTHER study stating that over half of Florida Manatees were found to have glyphosate in their bodies. Glyphosate is the “active” ingredient in Round-up (the most commonly used pesticide in the world) and is a “known carcinogen” and Endocrine disruptor. The main source of the glyphosate in these Manatees is from the farm-run off of the industrial growing of sugar cane. This study, and any reports on the study, make ZERO mention, not even a trace of a hint, of proposing that maybe just maybe we as a society, at the very fucking least, think about maybe REDUCING our consumption of sugar (a 100% NON-ESSENTIAL product). We have to just start saying this shit and stop pretending like we aren’t going to have to give up A FUCK TON in order for Manatees and countless other species (including us) not to succumb to a horrible fate. To lose an incredible creature like the Manatee because of candy and cupcakes and sweetened coffee drinks is so incredibly dumb that I don’t even have the words. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere about the true sweetness of life but I’m too tired to figure it out. But no, either nothing will be done at all, OR some bullshit “solution” will be proposed that says we can have sugar AND manatees! — A literal have our cake and eat it too deal. Anything so we don’t have to give up sugar. Because sugar helps us deal with living in these shit systems. I’ll admit it’s my main drug of choice to dull the pain.
We are just in such deep denial of what needs to happen.
It’s good to remember that denial is really just a form of grief. Denial can only exist where there is something TO deny. Something painful.
So it’s time to come to terms with the fact that this country, this culture, our entire industrial existence, is DEAD.
It was dead on arrival, but its festering corpse is continually propped up and postured.
The Bidens and Trumps and Bill Gates of the world will continue to fuck this corpse, while pimps grow richer and richer with each thrust, and the poor sex workers are further abused and exploited.
This corpse needs to be burned at the stake, its ashes mixed with the most polluted waters and we shall paint our faces with the sludge so that when we look at one another we remember, as Arundhati Roy says…
“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”
Yes, if we are to get back in touch with all the ancestors who knew what’s up then we must first break the curse of being haunted by these infernal “founders” who are still controlling us from beyond the grave with their bogus, arrogant, petty, stupid as fuck systems masquerading as the height of human excellence when it’s all designed to overcompensate for male fragility and jealousies.
This country, this culture, this fake life of ours is DEAD.
It’s way past time to bury its animated cadaver. To lay its cold naked bloodless body in a shallow unmarked grave and cover it gently with the richest soil we can find, teeming with the small hard working decomposing micro-organisms, who will see to it that it be recycled, reborn, reconciled. It’s the small ones of this world that create the most renewal out of death, and it doesn’t get much smaller than a virus.
~ ~ ~
Today, March 19th, is the one year anniversary of when I first realized I was probably sick with the Coronavirus. I still can’t believe it, the odds of getting it at that time were so low! I never did have a test or anti-body test confirming it because they simply weren’t available when I needed them.
I wasn’t that sick at first. It wasn’t any worse than a bad cold, which I felt relieved about at the time. I had some chest restriction but nothing that required going to the hospital.
But then….I just kept not getting better.
Weeks passed and almost daily low grade fevers persisted.
The tightness in my chest remained.
My sense of taste never fully returned (still).
Months went by and I grew more and more fatigued.
My thyroid stopped functioning.
I became extremely anemic.
My Vitamin D levels plummeted.
I had a headache that never went away.
I became ultra sensitive to light and noise.
Sometimes by heart would race for no apparent reason.
I developed insomnia, something I never had before.
I stopped dreaming and crying, two things that had defined the person I was.
My eyes went haywire, making it hard to read.
The worst symptom for me is what is euphemistically referred to as “brain fog” (sounds charming, like your mind is taking a scenic tour of the misty English countryside) — I couldn’t remember things, concentrating was difficult, when I would write there were a milion typoos.
Then I started to realize there were others like me who were also not getting better after their initial infection. Online support groups sprung up. Our condition was named ‘Long Haul Covid’ or ‘Long Covid’. It’s estimated that there could be at least 8 million affected by this in the U.S., some say it’s more like 10 million.
Doctors were baffled as to why this was happening to some people and not others (and still are baffled for the most part).
But I think I might have a theory to explain some of it, maybe.
The average person who suffers from Long Covid is a woman (me), age 44 (I’m 43) with no serious pre-existing health issues (me).
44 years old: Hmmm, maybe right about the average age that the average woman in this below average culture has lived long enough to clearly see that Wow, it really fucking is a fucking man’s world and Gee, how much of my fucking time and energy has been expended on trying to keep afloat in it? How much of my personality has been formed by the subtle and not so subtle messages I have received from day one that I am less than a man…BUT at the same time I am expected to do more and care more than a man, but get less pay and less credit than a man.
But this shallow culture will NEVER consider how our personal, collective and ancestral trauma, as well as our emotions, can affect our physical health and even manifest as illness.
I remember being near a T.V. when actress Carrie Fisher’s mother, Debbie Reynolds, had died less than 24 hours after Carrie did. The news said that Debbie was in good health and that her cause of death was “unknown”. Really? Do we have to do that? Are we so afraid of the mysterious magical miraculous forces coursing thru absolutely everything that we can’t admit that maybe just maybe Debbie Reynolds died from a broken heart, from losing her only daughter and best friend?
~ ~ ~
Shortly after I had made this lip sync video last year, I met someone new, thru facebook. The strong attraction I had for him really helped me get over my feelings for my best friend. Or it was more like the juxtaposition of the different feelings I had for these two people made me question if I really was ever in love with my best friend, or if I even knew what love was, or if I even knew anything at all. Good stuff.
The thing with the new guy didn’t pan out because I can’t seem to give this shit away when it comes to any bloke I even remotely fancy, and any feelings he had for me got pushed aside for stronger feelings he had for someone else. It had started out with such promise, such intensity and connection, but at some point I could feel it leaving him and felt helpless in how to keep it from slipping thru my fingers. I didn’t even get a chance to make ONE single lip sync video for him! But what can you do?
Well, what I didn’t do was say what I needed to say when he dumped me (dumped is a strong word because we weren’t really together, not in the way this culture defines togetherness, but tell that to my heart because it sure felt like getting dumped).
And because I didn’t “speak my truth” (barf, I know) at the time of dumping, March 19 (which happened to coincide EXACTLY with starting to feel sick with Covid), I think this may have contributed to my Long Haul Covid development. But of course science would argue that’s preposterous. But just because science can’t “prove” this doesn’t mean it’s not true to some degree. It’s just like what Terrence Mckenna said about science trying to explain the creation of the universe “Give us one free miracle and we can explain the rest.” But it’s that miracle, that mystery that gives us that special spark. A spark that keeps us small and humble, a spark that keeps us in awe, in reverence, that gives us much needed perspective. That keeps us human.
~ ~ ~
One of my favorite thinkers on this subject, Dr. Gabor Mate, had worked many years in palliative care and he couldn’t help but notice that certain personality types got Cancer. This led him to his life’s work of studying the mind body connection, which this over-compartmentalizing culture denies exists. He wrote a book about his research called ‘When the Body Says No’. Gabor had observed that many of his sickest patients were chronic people pleasers, worriers, overly self-less, and overly positive.
What’s wrong with being positive you say? Nothing, as long as it doesn’t keep you from reality. As Chris Hedges points out in this short film ‘American Psychosis’…
“Optimism becomes a kind of disease, where you have this cheerful optimism in the face of utter catastrophe and you plow forward based on an optimism that is no longer rooted in reality. If hope becomes something you express through illusion then it’s not hope, it’s fantasy.”
From ‘When the Body Says No’…
“We have seen in study after study that compulsive positive thinkers are more likely to develop disease and less likely to survive. Genuine positive thinking — or, more deeply, positive being — empowers us to know that we have nothing to fear from truth. “Health is not just a matter of thinking happy thoughts,” writes the molecular researcher Candace Pert. “Sometimes the biggest impetus to healing can come from jump-starting the immune system with a burst of long-suppressed anger.” Anger, or the healthy experience of it, is one of the seven A’s of healing. Each of the seven A’s addresses one of the embedded visceral beliefs that predispose to illness and undermine healing.”
Gabor’s 7 A’s of Healing are:
1. Acceptance
2. Anger
3. Awareness
4. Autonomy
5. Attachment
6. Assertion
7. Affirmation
“Emotional competence requires the capacity to feel our emotions, so that we are aware when we are experiencing stress; the ability to express our emotions effectively and thereby to assert our needs and to maintain the integrity of our emotional boundaries; the facility to distinguish between psychological reactions that are pertinent to the present situation and those that represent residue from the past…… Emotional competence is what we need to develop if we are to protect ourselves from the hidden stresses that create a risk to health, and it is what we need to regain if we are to heal.” ~Gabor Mate
I just wanna stop right here and say that NO ONE is to blame for their illness, at least never entirely. We are all just trying to survive within these wretched systems and are doing what we can to maintain some semblance of sanity and equilibrium. But sadly these coping tactics too often just cause more insanity and imbalances that then get “normalized” or labeled as something wrong with us personally…instead of calling out what is really wrong.
“Settling for the view that illnesses, mental or physical, are primarily genetic allows us to avoid disturbing questions about the nature of the society in which we live. If “science” enables us to ignore poverty or man-made toxins or a frenetic and stressful social culture as contributors to disease, we can look only to simple answers: pharmacological and biological.” ~Gabor Mate
The manner in which this dude dumped me was shitty and careless because let’s face it we are all pretty terrible at communication and expressing ourselves because we are not really taught to because if we were then things wouldn’t have taken such a terrible turn for the worse. The existing paradigm requires that we not be clear nor express ourselves in healthy ways. Broken, insecure, unheard, traumatized people are easier to control and sell shit to.
When he dumped me it was a blow to the gut. I was hurt, I was outraged, I was confused.
But I didn’t really express any of this at the time, not like I should’ve.
I just clumsily and weirdly tried to be a good sport about it, mixed with some passive aggression. My basic tone was “Oh well, that’s OK, have fun with your new lover!…cough *mistake*.”
Now of course I’m not blaming him (cough *much*) for how sick I was to become. I had reverted back to my old conditioned ways in that moment. Yes, it super duper sucked that he didn’t want to be with me because I know by now how rare it is for someone like me to find someone I feel I have a strong connection with. But it was more that I did not stick up for myself, or call out his bullshit hard enough. I was too nice. And that didn’t help me or him.
And I really do believe that this contributed to the way the virus took hold of me. My body said no when I couldn’t.
Eventually (meaning almost an entire year later, lol) I did tell him recently what I should have said at the time of dumping, in the form of an email. I had 2 different friends read it to gauge how insane and or mean it sounded. One friend said it was maybe going too far, the other friend said it wasn’t going far enough so I felt like it was about right.
I did not expect a favorable response back, but I wasn’t doing it to get what I want, but to finally SAY what I needed to say in order to release these emotions.
I don’t think he was able to hear any of what I was saying, it only seemed to activate his own wounds and insecurities, which I do feel bad about. He’s made it clear to me that it’s weird and crazy that I would have such strong feelings for someone I only knew for 3 weeks and only “met once”. But he didn’t use the word crazy, he instead called my feelings “concerning”, lol.
Call me crazy….or I’m sorry, call me “concerning”…but I still really like the guy! (Doomed am I, lol). He’s great. He’s broken and messed up from living in this culture just like the rest of us but also really great, like we all can be if we are given the chance and the right conditions and incentives to be great. Our greatness is lying dormant, waiting for that one thing to call it to action. Often we can be great in one regard but be a real dinkhole in other ways. That’s just how it’s going to be as we transition (IF we transition) away from these horrible systems that have done such a terrible number on us in ways we don’t even realize yet.
But I guess I just need to find a new guy who will erase my feelings for this guy and then in turn that new guy will also reject me as they always seem to do, and then I’ll have to find someone else I have even MORE intense feelings for and on and on, each new guy helping me move deeper and deeper into the pain until I transcend it all and don’t need anyone ever again!!!
I don’t care how “enlightened” one seems to be, you simply cannot transcend the root need to feel love, to feel belonging, to fell understood, to feel deep connection with others.
I think that often when we talk about transcendence it’s just code for pain aversion. Entire religions and convoluted philosophies have been born out of how to avoid the pain of living in societies that deny us of so much of what we need to be our best instead of being born out of figuring out how to actually stop that which is causing so much suffering. Merely adjusting ourselves to the suffering, and calling it “grace” or “enlightenment” or “non-attachment”, is just avoiding our emotions and not honoring the power and authority they have. Unless the goal of say Buddhism is to make it so Buddhism isn’t needed anymore than you just get stuck in the high falootin’ pain aversion techniques masquerading as spirituality.
And I really don’t think it does any good to take the stance of “I don’t need a man!”. Of course I need a partner, that’s just the bare bones of what I need!
I need meaning and purpose that isn’t dictated by this culture but by the REAL work that needs to be done at this time.
I need a diet that actually sustains me AND the land, not one that requires the enslavement of animals, plants and the poor, that requires the degradation of the soil and the desecration of the water.
I need REAL community, one that is actually rooted in true interdependence. Most so called communities require outsourcing from a host of other worse off communities (human and non-human).
But if we try to get all of what we’re missing from ONE person that can be very problematic, which is what most of us are trying to do I’m afraid. Relationship writer Ester Perel points this out in her book ‘Mating in Captivity’….
“Today, we turn to one person to provide what an entire village once did: a sense of grounding, meaning, and continuity. At the same time, we expect our committed relationships to be romantic as well as emotionally and sexually fulfilling. Is it any wonder that so many relationships crumble under the weight of it all?”
It’s good to point this out but we can’t stop there. It’s like there’s this attitude of this is just how it is so make the best of it even though it really sucks, instead of this is how it is and we need to fucking change it pronto before everything gets completely murdered to death and we completely lose the last sparks of humanity in us that still give one shit about all this murdering!
It ultimately never does any good to adjust oneself to such horrible systems as the ones we live by. And I don’t blame or shame anyone for doing this but MEANWHILE: murder murder murder murder murder murder.
But the thing is, we can say no and stand up for ourselves all we want, and we should, but if it’s all only within the context of this abusive, manipulative, gaslighting, uncaring, psychopathic culture then our work will never be done because the culture that deprives and denies us of so much of what we need in order to be true humans, true Earthlings, will just keep creating the conditions for dysfunction. We are going to have to REALLY go after this culture at some point with all we got — not tweak it, not reform it, not plead with it, but effing DESTROY it (maybe start with fucking daylights savings time for fucksake!). We must destroy it before it destroys everything including what’s left of our integrity, compassion, empathy, humanity and willingness to fight for Life itself.
We are going to reach a point where it will be impossible for all of us to keep avoiding the pain of what is happening to the Earth and to our fellow kin and to our own bodies. We must face the sadness of our lives.
“For some time the mental habits may linger in spite of the new vision, the habit of longing for the known past and fearing the unknown future. When you know these are of the mind only, you can go beyond them. As long as you have all sorts of ideas about yourself, you know yourself through the mist of these ideas; to know yourself as you are, give up all ideas. You cannot imagine the taste of pure water, you can only discover it by abandoning all flavourings. As long as you are interested in your present way of living, you will not abandon it. Discovery cannot come as long as you cling to the familiar. It is only when you realise fully the immense sorrow of your life and revolt against it, that a way out can be found.” ~Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
~ ~ ~
I don’t know what I would be doing now if I hadn’t gotten the virus and wasn’t still sick with Long Covid. Most likely I would be mainly focused on my premier lip sync website, ‘Loose Lips Sync Ships’ that I was going to launch.
But I do know that I’ve written more over the last year than I ever have (because I simply can’t do much else), and hopefully I’m getting better at it. I have 3 different books I’m working on. The bulk of this essay is taken from the one I’m calling ‘How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Virus’.
Being laid up has given me a lot of time to observe and think and feel and ponder, and I know this is a rare luxury. Most people simply can’t afford to do this, this fruitful nothingness. I owe this luxury to my wonderful loving parents who have supported me in every way possible over the last year, not once making me feel like I was making it up (which so many long haulers have had to deal with from friends, family and doctors).
As much suffering as the virus has caused, I wish we could shift our perspective from hating it to seeing it as what it looks like when the Earth’s Body says NO.
There seemed to be some hope in the very beginning of the pandemic that this could really help us get our priorities straight and usher in a new dawn for humanity. But a year later it has become apparent that we did not learn much, if anything. The rich used it as an opportunity to amass even more wealth (U.S. billionaires gained $1.1 trillion). And it only exacerbated racism and inequality.
It could’ve gone so differently, it could have been seen as a gift, a wake-up call, but instead the very forces that caused the virus won out and are now stronger and more consolidated than ever, and have more control over us than ever. Her body said “No” but the “OH YES WE WILL” of these bamboozling systems we live under was louder, and eventually drowned out the birdsong that had returned, re-filled the clearing air with smog once again, and filled our eyes with even more screen time than we had before the pandemic. Before this insidious YES started in we were beginning to maybe remember again…. Remembering things that our ancestors were steeped in.
If you haven’t seen the film ‘Yesterday’, it’s about this mediocre musician who isn’t making it in the biz but then this one crazy night, just at the moment of a worldwide power glitch our guy gets hit by a bus and this somehow magically protects his consciousness from being hurled into an alternative reality caused by the glitch. In this new world, everything is pretty much the same except that the Beatles never existed. When our guy realizes he is the only one who has ever heard of the Beatles he starts passing off all of their songs as his own, and becomes a big star. He gets away with it until a couple people show up at one of his concerts with a sign that says ‘John, Paul, George, Ringo’. He thinks the gig is up. The people find him back stage. He’s afraid they are going to expose him as a fraud. But they just want to thank him because they thought they were the only ones who remembered the Beatles and since they weren’t musicians they thought they would never get to hear the songs again.
I couldn’t help but think this film was a metaphor for all that we modern humans have forgotten or are forgetting, and those who do remember the songs that bind us to one another and to Nature are falling by the wayside.
But it’s not just humans that are forgetting. As more biodiversity is lost, animal populations become fewer and sparser. The Regent Honeyeater, a once common Australian bird, has been reduced to less than 300 individuals. Researchers have found that as their numbers dwindle so does their song culture….
“In healthy populations, the song of adult male honeyeaters is complex and long. But where the population is very small, the song is diminished and, in many cases, the birds have adopted the song of other species. Sadly, this makes the males less attractive to females, which may increase the chance the regent honeyeater will become extinct.”
Humans will go extinct not from climate change, or rising seas, or pollution, but essentially from a lack of culture. We need it as much as we need food, water, and air. Without a healthy robust culture, humans view food, water, and air as not part of them, but as totally separate from them, as products that come out of faucets or can be bought at the store or even more removed places like Amazon.
When watching the film where no one had heard of the Beatles, I couldn’t help but think about real beetles. About how they are disappearing, about a world where no one has heard of them. Beetles are the most numerous kind of insect. There are 350,000 known beetle species.
The rate of insect species extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles.
In the last 30 years, the biomass of insects has decreased by 80%.
The total mass of all insects is falling by 2.5% a year. At this rate there will be no more insects within a century….that’s if it stays at that rate and doesn’t accelerate.
Only moths and butterflies are disappearing faster than beetles are. The dung beetle is declining especially fast.
Insects are the essential workers of most ecosystems. They are the food source for so many other animals like birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians. They are essential for plant pollination, and are important decomposers and nutrient recyclers. Without them, so much of life on Earth simply isn’t possible.
Yesterday, all our troubles seemed so far away, now it looks as though they’re here to stay.
We squandered a great lesson held within the virus. We wasted a perfectly good crisis, maybe because it simply wasn’t painful enough for enough of us. Or we simply don’t have a culture of actually feeling and processing pain.
Thich Nhat Hanh has this great bit that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately…
“When I have a toothache, I discover that not having a toothache is a wonderful thing. I had to have a toothache in order to be enlightened, to know that not having one is wonderful. My non-toothache is peace, is joy. But when I do not have a toothache, I do not seem to be happy. Therefore, I look deeply in the present moment and see that I have a non-toothache, that can make me very happy already.”
Of course it’s natural to be relieved that the pandemic seems to be lifting. But with it, so goes our toothache, and nary a few of us are as mindful as ol’ Thich here to hold the concept of “non-toothache” with us, guiding us to live more present more grateful lives.
The vaccine, although it will no doubt save human lives (affluent human lives first of course), will also do us an absolutely abysmal disservice by re-enforcing the belief that science and technology will save us. It’s just sweeping our messes under the rug. Just staving off the inevitable.
As of today I am now eligible for the vaccine. So far not that many people with ‘Long Haul Covid’ have been vaccinated, but those who have, about 27% are reporting that they feel better after receiving it. Some say they feel the same, some say they feel worse. Some say they felt better at first but then relapsed back to feeling crummy.
I honestly am struggling with whether or not to get the vaccine.
And I know this will sound crazy, or “concerning” to most, but I’m worried that the vaccine will make me feel better.
I’m worried because I don’t know if I have what it takes to hold on to the memory of being sick, or if that memory be enough to push me to do more for this dying world.
Right now, my sickness is serving as a constant reminder of what happens when we push nature to Her limits.
I wear it as a kind of badge of dishonor.
But then I think, “Who am I to not get the vaccine?” My abstaining is riddled with privilege, like choosing to fast while others starve.
Listen, I’m not trying to be a hero or martyr or something, I’m just trying to keep it real! It feels like one thing I can do to get back to reality. So much of our industrial lives are so detached from reality. Just look at something as simple food! — It’s so removed from it’s source by the time it reaches us. I’m not going to stop eating, but I can stop this one thing.
And I don’t want to blame or shame anyone for getting the vaccine.
I’m just experimenting with saying no. As Eminem says “you only get one shot”. What if I just say no?
To say no to even some of the insanity of our modern lives helps keep the toothache, which reminds us of the larger aching the entire planet is feeling. There really is so much we can say no to. We must start a culture of no.
Anytime we can jolt ourselves and others out of the confined limits of what we are allowed to say no to we must be brave enough to do it…
Like John Oliver does in this clip (starting at about minute 4:00)…
Observe how uncomfortable Jimmy Fallon gets. Why? What does he have to lose? Even if Jimmy let John Oliver and Alexa talk about how horrific Amazon is and he lost his job, he would be OK, seeing that he’s a millionaire. Speaking out against Amazon would be an honorable way to get fired, he would be applauded. But I don’t want to give John Oliver too much credit because he’s also a millionaire, and he got that way by being very good at disseminating information in a clever humorous way that feels too much like entertainment and not nearly enough like a call to real action.
And anytime a rich white guy is praised for being “woke” it’s probably a good idea to follow it with a strong chaser of a black radical feminist speaking her mind. Some facts: Black women in this country have 90% less wealth then white men. Over 90% of land in this country is owned by white men. Jimmy could use him fame and money and power to lift up voices who aren’t just calling out shit like John Oliver tried to do but people who are in the thick of it, like her …..
What we need now is anything that jolts us away from the prescribed normal, like that we saw in the behavior of Stephon Clark’s brother after Stephon was murdered by police in 2018. Remember? Here he is invading a Sacramento city council meeting and jumping up on the Mayor’s desk. We are conditioned to call his behavior crazy but from the spirit’s point of view it’s completely appropriate.
We’re just so not used to fellow humans acting out from the spirit that we find it jarring. But if we saw it enough we would come to see it for what it is: The Truth.
Stevante Clark, seen also here on this CNN interview, is displaying a very important kind of expression that is exceedingly rare in our tamped culture, what Reinhold Niebuhr called the “sublime madness of the soul.”
Reinhold wrote “Nothing but madness will do battle with malignant power and ‘spiritual wickedness in high places.” Without this madness, “truth is obscured.” We must stop pretending, must stop denying our spirits from expressing themselves! They are royally pissed! Niebuhr said that Liberalism “lacks the spirit of enthusiasm, not to say fanaticism, which is so necessary to move the world out of its beaten tracks. It is too intellectual and too little emotional to be an efficient force in history.”
And the madness in me asks what have I done to deserve to get better?
I know just hearing me say this is creating tension or sadness or even anger in you right now. You want to tell me that’s ridiculous or that I don’t deserve to be sick, or that I need to get better so I can fight harder for the dying Earth, or that I’m being selfish even, or endangering others.
My life already takes so much from others, from the Earth. No, not as much as Jeff Bezos or John Oliver, but taking is taking.
If enough of us can say no, or if enough of us can use the energy of our life — a life that is maintained by a taking culture — to take down this culture then maybe we can get somewhere.
“Every human being is a raindrop. And when enough of the raindrops become clear and coherent they then become the power of the storm.” ~John Trudell
We surely don’t have to become ascetics before we act. That’s impossible as long as these systems we live by are in tact.
Globalisation and capitalism has created such convolution and complications ……
~ ~ ~
My doctor wants me to go to a new Clinic that is opening up here in Columbus, Ohio for those struggling with Long Haul Covid to find out why we are sick and how to treat it.
It’s hard for someone like me, who has spent years immersing myself in studying the ecocide and grieving over it, to go to a place like I’m assuming this clinic will be: Another institution that focuses on symptoms and not root causes. I’m just not that interested in diving into the medical causes and treatments of my disorder, or any disorder really, if it’s not also held with the tragedy of that what really caused me to grow ill.
It’s really ALL I want to talk about.
The virus didn’t make me sick. Our entire way of life did.
Some would say I’m choosing to suffer by not trying to get better or not getting the vaccine, but I say I’m choosing reality. We must choose reality when we can. I would say that by continuing to abide by these artificial systems is choosing to suffer.
I’m not NOT trying to get better! I just want to give my body a chance to do it on it’s own. Just like we need to give the Earth a chance to heal Her body.
~ ~ ~
As the song I lip synced says “It might not be the right time” and “I might not be the right one” but you and I still must try and create conditions so that those that come after us have a much easier time being the right one for the job of stopping this monstrous industrial leviathan from eating everything up.
I will close by saying that I, like you, don’t know what in the hellfire I am doing. And those that do know what they are doing are dwindling and this should frighten us. There are so few of what we would call true elders, true wisdom holders. And tragically the coronavirus has taken a heavy toll on them. Indigenous peoples around the world, like those living in the Brazilian rainforest, die of the virus at twice the rate as much as the general public. But so very much is dying with them.
One thing I do know is that we cannot keep going on like we are or we are in grave danger of forgetting the words to the song, and the melody of life itself. The song may go on without us but we have to ask: Why wouldn’t we want to keep singing if we have a choice? There’s so much that doesn’t have a choice right now. Not Manatees, not songbirds, not dung beetles, not the most exploited impoverished humans — humans that would kill to have my sob story.
Our bodies, the Manatees’ bodies, the bodies of trees, the bodies of water, and the Earth’s body will all continue to say no even if most of us can’t seem to muster up one little syllable. This choir of No will only grow louder and louder. We can’t plug our ears forever. Either we join this chorus or assist in its silencing.
Also, you can’t say no if you’re dead.
Chris Hedges reminds us…
“As Hannah Arendt wrote in ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’, the only morally reliable people are not those who say “this is wrong” or “this should not be done”, but those who say “I CAN’T.”
I’ve been walking over to a nearby park in the evenings to listen to the Spring Peepers (a kind of frog) singing in a small vernal pond in the middle of this big field. So far I’ve been the only one in this city of over a million people there to hear their song. Everyone is too busy making plans I guess.
Let them remind you that we belong where we can clearly hear their chorus over the beeps and bells of our modern lives.
***Also, you’ll be glad to hear I have reunited with my best friend. We are closer than ever. We talked it out, we grieved together, we made garlands (which always helps), I slapped him (which helped more than I thought it would). We had to go thru all that to get where we are now. It’s nice to know we have something between us that can withstand all the drama and trauma of this toxic culture. I hope you, dear Medium subscriber, have this something as well. Thanks so much for listening. This one was a whopper!
