Reality Checkpoint

an unscheduled report

U.S.-Canadian border

hey friends - you know how it goes, sometimes the world shoulders in and messes up the best laid editorial plans - I’ll pick up with part 2 of *checks notes* next week. xo M

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This is just a missive. An alert, maybe, or an alarm. A report.

Just now I looked up the word report; sometimes I discover things about words that I didn't know I needed to know, or a word's rarer usage or subtler meaning hits just right.

No such luck this time - just the same old thing, a word that can be read or used in a number of ways. Report (/rəˈpôrt/, v.) - might mean "a spoken or written description of an event or situation, especially one intended for publication or broadcast in the media,” or "a sudden loud noise of or like an explosion or gunfire."

Take your pick.

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I started jotting something down in San Diego, skidded east along the border, made a note or two outside of Tucson, took a photo of barbed wire against some heaps of sand and a clear blue sky, hit high winds just north of Albuquerque and hung onto the wheel with Luna Moonbat on my lap, who basked and dozed, wrapped in a too-large coat.

I watched the temperature fall as I drove across the Kansas state line, thinking about the fact that the veil between the truth and what we want to believe, between comfort and the way most of us live, between safety and freefall, between having enough and having nothing at all, is very thin, and as the spinning world to which we're just barely hinged at the heel gathers speed and centrifugal force, people are losing their shit.

Arizona

We interrupt our usual essay for a brief report from the emergency underground check-on-your-friends-while-the-empire-falls system.

Today, as the little boys who sit on the world's largest stockpile of nuclear weapons and control the global economy, respectively, got in the very public pissing match that we knew they'd get into sooner or later, a military source sent me a message just as I was sending a message to a reporter who works in the belly of the beast.

You ok? I wrote.

No, the reporter replied. lol.

In came the message from the military source.

Hey lady, it said. Just checking on you.

I'm over here watching as the world actually burns while the boys in charge whack at each other with nuclear sticks they don't have the faintest idea how to wield, I wrote. You know, living the dream.

lol, the source replied. nice.

While it's easy - and probably not a little tempting - to get swept up in yet another social media- and media platform-driven groundswell of hysterical groupthink fueled by equal parts schadenfreude and fear, I wonder if, as people exult in the public collapse of the bromance between two lunatics who and I cannot stress this enough are functionally in control of every meaningful lever of geopolitical power, we'd do well to remember the last time people got so excited about the swing of the political pendulum they forgot to peek in on the man behind the curtain and were truly, genuinely surprised when a groundswell of giddy good feeling and smart jokes somehow weren't enough to check the rise of authoritarian rule.

Up at the Canadian border, the sky was soot-smudged, grey and dingy with wildfire smoke all week. The lungs close in when you walk; the water when you wash your face at night runs black. The sun burns bright red, boring a hole through the haze. I was camped not far from where large swaths of the Boundary Waters - more than a million acres of pristine wilderness - were on fire.

I told a friend the other day that I’ve been in or near natural disasters with statistically inappropriate frequency of late, and we laughed. I mean, what are the odds of me being in North Carolina during hurricane season and getting caught in a hurricane, and in L.A. during the most recent fires in a state that’s known for generally being on fire, and in Kansas during - get this - tornadoes?

What are you even doing in Kansas? a colleague gasps on a call. Isn’t that where that one movie - you know -

The Wizard of Oz? I ask, glancing at the Scamp in the rearview as it rocks wildly, trying not to get torn off the hitch in the howling wind.

Yes! she says. Isn’t that where it’s set?

Indeed, I say, watching a distant funnel cloud twist east to west across a field. I glance west just in time to see another one beginning to form.

What are you going to do? she frets.

I roll down the window, stick out my tongue to test for the taste of metal - lightning - in the thick and crackling air.

What am I going to do about what? I ask.

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People tease me. Where on earth is Carmen Sandiego? They shake their head at my silly solo lady shenanigans, my madcap nomad antics that keep getting me into all kinds of scrapes, the frequent brushes with violence and risk. Where do you find these guys? they ask, exasperated. How do you always seem to be in the wrong place at just the wrong time?

I laugh along, slap my knee. Haha, right? Joke’s on me!

Violence and risk are part and parcel of life on the road.

The epoch during which humans roamed the earth is quickly nearing its end.

I’m not courting danger. Natural disasters aren’t chasing me.

This is the world. This is how it is.

Kansas

I don't know how many times in the past few months I've heard the phrase "What are we going to do?"

I feel a need to briefly break that sentence down into a few of its constituent parts.

Problem No. 1: 'Going to.'

This problem here is the inappropriate use of the future tense. The question posed is a problem in part because of the implicit belief that necessary action will take place in the future.

It implies a future in which necessary action can take place.

It implies a future in which reality is recognizable as such; furthermore, it implies a future in which that reality is at least partially shared, upon which shared reality, however partial, humanity can at least partially agree.

It implies a future in which actions such as might have been necessary and possible in the past continue to be possible and relevant. It implies a future in which the actions that might have been taken in the past, but were not, will still pertain.

That is not, for the record, the future we face.

Problem No. 2: 'Do.'

This one's a little trickier, because it begs a question by way of an implicit clause. The implication is that the listener - the person to whom the question is being posed - understands the interrogator’s aim. It assumes the listener knows what the person who's posed the question is trying to achieve.

What are we going to do - about what? What is the aim, the intended outcome of this doing we're going to do? What are we trying to do?

Save the world? Save ourselves?

Comfort the afflicted? Afflict the comfortable? Comfort and exonerate ourselves?

Stamp our feet? Wring our hands? Pretend that's enough?

Or is it time to acknowledge we didn't do enough when it needed to be done and now the time for doing the things that could have been done has passed, and there are more urgent questions than oh my goodness whatever shall we do demanding our attention at this time?

A few weeks back, I attended a talk given by a neuroscientist. As soon as the baroque, effusive introduction was done and he was given the floor, he stated that his area of scientific expertise was not, in light of widespread global chaos and political instability, active genocides and escalating wars, rampant starvation and unchecked infection, lack of preparedness for the next pandemic or anything else that's plainly coming down the pike, catastrophic wealth inequity, climate disaster, et al, of particular interest even to him, and ceded the floor, saying that as long as there was an opportunity for a room full of people to speak with one another about how they are responding, how they could respond, how they, we, as a collective might respond in meaningful ways, he was going to make sure that opportunity wasn’t missed.

After a brief pause, someone asked, "What do you see as the most important step that could be taken, given adequate organization and support?"

Without hesitation, he said, "Obviously, wealth would be taken from those who hold it by any means necessary and redistributed equitably."

A pause; then high-pitched nervous laugh rippled through the crowd.

From the back, a voice joked: "Well, besides that."

The neuroscientist sat stone-faced in his chair, hands folded in his lap, and looked around the well-heeled room.

People shifted, cleared their throats.

Problem No. 3: 'We.'

To which 'we' does this question refer?

One fundamental flaw in the question (what are we going to do?) is the assumption of shared experience, shared belief, shared goal, and under that lies the the bedrock of logical fallacy on which the whole rests: it falsely assumes the existence of a uniform, hegemonic, unanimous, or even loosely allied we, rather than the if/then opposition that the word has, through common usage, come to imply.

We now presumes an opposing, uniform, hegemonic, vilified them.

We the people.

Wyoming

As I write this, I'm in four separate conversations with people who are losing their shit.

By 'losing their shit,' I mean they are suffering. I don't mean they are 'crazy.' I don't mean they 'aren't handling things well,' or that they are failing in any way. I mean that they are suffering and that is causing them to lose their shit.

(This just in: a text from someone who was was losing their shit yesterday who woke up today and checked on me to see if I was losing my shit.)

I'm not. But I know why she asked, and I'm glad for the question, because people have been suffering and struggling and losing their shit for years and a lot of them are tired of saying the same thing - We're struggling. This isn't working. We can't make it work. It isn't going to work. We need to do something. Something needs to change - while Nero fiddled and Rome burned.

Believe me when I tell you those people are tired. Their patience is worn down to nothing. Their ability to respond with grace to the cultural groundswell of handwringing and indignitude is limited at best. They may lack the willingness to respond at all. They may be busy doing triage on their own lives; they may be checking up on friends.

What they are not is surprised.

While there is no way to brace yourself for an empire's fall, there is a way to look around, to anticipate the danger and evaluate the risk, to batten the hatches, to strengthen connections, to let people know that you see them and hear them, to remind them they are not alone, to pave a pathway to some kind of future, to imagine a way of being in the world at the end of the world and beyond, to begin weaving a net to replace the net that too many people thought they'd never need, to say Hey, friend, I see that you are losing your shit and that is reasonable and fair; and since I myself have still got a handle on my shit and do not anticipate losing it completely before noon, how about I send you lunch, and after lunch, when I lose my shit, you can give me a call?

This, too, is a kind of love.

When did so many people forget how to give the kind of love and care that is the substance of human connection itself, the love and care that they expect and feel entitled to receive?

Northern California

I'm thinking about what matters.

I'm thinking about the people whose lives are in fact on the line, about what they’ve told me as this tide has rushed toward us over the past few years, about what they've done to keep from completely losing their shit.

They have sewn costumes for their kid’s role in the high school play in the room where they stockpile liquor and water and shelf-stable food because liquor will be a sought-after item regardless of whether the American dollar is worth a good goddamn.

They have gone to happy hour with friends and had one too many and been reminded that before all this, after a night on the town, they woke up and took some Advil and felt ok by lunch, rather than struggling out from under a heavy hangover and the suffocating weight of true despair, getting dressed, and taking the train back to work to report on life in hell.

They have changed their diet and their exercise routine: an expert in wartime survival said I might not be as cut, but I want to have that extra store of fat for fuel when access gets cut off and supply lines go dry.

They are wondering - I am wondering - whether there's purpose, meaning, utility in chronicling an empire's fall.

Some are looking for a way to leave the country. Some have already left.

Some wish they'd left 10 years ago, because now they need to and can't.

Some remind me that the oath they swore was to defend this country, not cater to the whims of a puppet government of fools.

I've said, I feel like I'm watching a wall of TV screens, each one showing a separate reality, like security cameras trained on different doors.

They've said, You are.

When I've asked what matters to them now, they've said My children. My friends.

The oceans, the mountains, the air.

Beauty. Poetry. Songs.

I've asked them what people - what ‘we’ - should do, can do.

If we’re talking in person, they glance at me, then away.

If we’re on the phone, the line goes silent for an uncomfortably long time.

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Could do. (Modal v., affirmative)

Could have been doing. (V., present perfect continuous)

Could have done. (V., past perfect simple)

Syn. ‘failed’

U.S.-Mexico border

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