More about suicide

Yeah, yeah, again. But you’re supposed to write what you know, right? Well, I’ve been fixated on ending my own life for most of my life, and if I’m being honest, suicidality is one the few things I can claim expertise in. And anyway, I talked more to my shrink about it, so there’s new shit to report.

Apparently being suicidal is generally considered traumatizing. I guess that never occured to me, but it makes sense. What I don’t understand, though, is what that means for me. If I had these thoughts and seriously considered ending my life on and off since the time I was 9, is it actually possible to get better?

The therapist answered yes, of course, because what else could she say? To be fair to her, because I do actually think she’s great, what she said was that I can actually still build something of a fulfilling life. I may never actually recover, but it is possible that I could someday look back on my life and think that maybe it was worth it. That would be nice, because as it stands now I can’t say that, and that has been fucking me up.

That hit me maybe a few months ago. I was walking to the train when suddenly a voice in my head told me plainly “it hasn’t been worth it.” The voice was right. If I had to do it all over again I think I would definitely kill myself. My happiest moments were when I was left alone and I could just stare at my computer or my tv. Hardly worth the rest of it.

So that’s what I’m working on with my shrink while the world burns. It helps to take breaks from the news, but that’s a privilege that many can’t afford, so doing so makes me feel guilty. There are people in Puerto Rico without power or drinking water. There are children in cages. If I can’t do anything about it, do I have the right to look away? Shouldn’t I at least bear witness to the brutality that enables my relative comfort?

It reminds me of the book Age of Iron by JM Coatzee, where the white protagonist resolves at one point to light herself on fire in a futile protest against the apartheid regime in South Africa. Choosing such a violent death shows a lot of anger, not only at the regime, but also at herself for her inability to change anything. As some one who has fantasized about violent or at least painful ends I can relate. There’s a certain kind of inwardly focused rage that, when it doesn’t erupt in self harm, is channeled into gruesome fantasies like self immolation. At times I would be afraid to handle my kitchen knives it was so intense.

The protagonist doesn’t kill herself though. Instead she opens her doors to black activists, contributing what little she can to the cause of liberation. This is the conclusion I came to as well. In terrible times, the only hope for redemption is to hurl yourself into a project to try to make things better. Give whatever you can of yourself. So now I just have to quit wallowing.

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Current books and things

After Black Marxism I decided to give the Divine Comedy a try. I got about half way through the Pugatorio when I decided that I didn’t much like it. It might be the translation, but the deeper I get into the book, the less likely that seems. I guess after a couple hundred pages of looking up biographies of Dante’s contemporaries to understand why Dante put them in hell it got a little old.

So I put it down, hopefully to go back to it later. In the meantime, I read a couple Marx essays: Critique of the Gotha Program and Wage Labor and Capital. Both of which are important works. Wage Labor and Capital seems to be the germ of what later became Capital, and so is worth reading for that reason alone. It also convinced me that at some point I need to take the dive and actually read Capital. We’ll see how that goes.

Gotha shows Marx in yet another doctrinal fight, this time with devotees of LaSalle. What’s interesting about Gotha is that it is one of the few places you will see Marx actually elaborate on what he thinks the future communist society will look like. Lenin based quite a bit of his arguments in State and Revolution on this essay. I may need to read that again to see how accurate he was in his interpretation.

I also started reading The Weird and the Eerie by perennial favorite Mark Fisher. It looks promising. Not much I can say about is as of yet. Right now he’s talking about Lovecraft, and his application of the weird in his fiction. Will report back later.

On deck is James Baldwin’s Another Country, because if I don’t read a novel soon I am going to lose my goddamn mind.

More later.

I had wanted to say something about the massacre in Gaza, but it’s a little late now, and I feel like everything that needs to be said has been said. It was a horror show that puts on full display the fascism of the Israeli regime. That it attracted so little outrage in this country is telling, and a bad sign for the future.

It is no secret that there is bipartisan support for Israel in the US. Even Bernie Sanders, who was one of the few Senators to say fucking anything about the recent massacre, had to “evolve” considerably before he saw he saw Palestinian life as something worth defending. Like Goldman Sachs and Saudi Arabia, there is no way to vote against Israel.

But more telling perhaps is the publics relative indifference to Palestinian life. It has become clear that if people are seen as “other,” they no longer matter to the American public. Consider: What was the big news last week? Roseanne losing her stupid show, right? It was all over the media. Fuck, the New York Times had 3 op-eds about it the day after it happened. By comparison, the release of a Harvard study saying that there were almost 5000 deaths in Puerto Rico as a result of government inaction after hurricane Maria went by barely noticed. More people died in Maria than did during the 9/11 attacks and the reporting of that fact was barely a blip on the radar. Do you even need to ask why?

We are so capable of writing whole populations off it is terrifying. That talent of ours will come into use by our government as climate catastrophes and the wars they cause get worse. Pretty soon it will be people amassing on our border, and our troops gunning them down. The government will describe our victims as a dangerous horde. Animals.

Delusions, great and small

At some point during elementary school I became convinced that my parents were trying to murder me. Their methods varied over the years. At times I could tell by the way that they looked at each other over dinner that there was cyanide in the lasagna. Other times, my healthy fear of drano convinced me that it was laced into my bath water, or later rigged somehow into the showerhead.

A therapist asked me directly when I was 12 if I thought my parents were trying to kill me. I was shocked, and said no, of course not. He said it was a common thing people like me believed. To this day I don’t know who “people like me” are. I did decide that he knew I was lying though, and that he could read my mind. He was the first of many with these powers.

At that age I was living in St. Louis, surrounded by born again Christians at the height of the Satanic Panic. My friends and their parents would tell me that roving gangs of satanists were kidnapping and killing children. It was a national– or maybe international– cabal that perhaps extended to the top levels of power. Heavy metal was involved somehow, but it was in a way that was never clear. Perhaps they were something akin to evangelists: spreading the good news of Satan to impressionable youths.

These things were not just repeated from church pulpits and by believers, they were also reported on by daytime talk show hosts, like Geraldo and Oprah. They would regularly have police officers and “survivors” on to talk about the satanic menace, lending credence to outlandish claims.

My parents were liberal college graduates. They didn’t believe any of that nonsense. But they were trying to kill me, so why should I trust them? They were probably in it with the satanists.

It’s easy to see delusions for what they are in hindsight. Now, as an adult who bathes his brain in antipsychotics on a daily basis, I can see that my parents don’t secretly hate me. With an education and more coherent politics, I can see the satanic scare for what it was.

Although group delusions are messier. Especially those like the Satanic Panic, where you have people making a profit off of them, or powerful groups encouraging them to advance their own fame or an ulterior motive. But more on that later.

Some modern delusions are easy to see for what they are as well. Take for example #qanon. If you are unfamiliar, #qanon is sort of a unified right wing conspiracy theory, tying elements such as pizzagate and Benghazi with a global satanic pedophile network that implicates everyone conservatives dislike. The idea is that Trump is aware of this evil cabal, and is working with law enforcment and the military to bring them all down. Indeed, proponents claim that many high profile arrests have been made in secret, and that we are only months away from the big reveal where they finally get their country back.

Obviously, this theory is too out there for mainstream conservatives to touch and not look silly. But it isn’t hard to see the benefits of it. #qanon allows right wingers who supported Trump to convince themselves that, while they haven’t seen any material improvements in their lives since the election, the administration is still fighting for them. Not only does it reassure them, it reduces them to the role of passive yet fascinated spectator; they are committed Republicans, but commited to an idea of politics that is necessarily divorced from any kind of public participation other than voting. Everything important that is happening is happening behind closed doors, behind heavy layers of secrecy. It isn’t even safe for you to know what’s actually going on. The only thing you can do is show up at the voting booth to vote against the evil doers.

#qanon, obviously, can trace its heritage back to the Satanic Panic, and in many ways benefits the same people. It crafts a similar type of citizen–paralyzed, yet commited. Those “brave” enough to report on the conspiracy earn the complete trust of their followers.

I think our countrys attitudes towards global warming could be classed as delusional as well. Obviously, people who have decided that the UN, NASA and the entire global scientific community is lying to them certainly count. But the liberal idea that climate change is just another issue, and all that will be required to save us will be another Democratic president has to count as delusional as well. As more and more studies have shown how bad things are, it becomes ever more clear that the half measures taken by the Obama administration and other liberal politicians are simply not enough. The much celebrated American way of life will have to change radically, and soon, if we stand any chance at survival. And yet nothing is changing, because half the country thinks climate chamge is a hoax propagated by the Chinese, and the other half thinks Joe Biden will save us by rejoining the Paris Agreement. Like #qanon and the Satanic Panic, these delusions inspire a passivity that works very well for the people in power.

My personal measure of whether a false belief is dangerous or not is how it affects the life of the believer. If a person believes that god talks to them and tells them to love everybody, maybe that’s not such a bad thing. If god tells that person to kill the neighborhood housepets, then it becomes a problem. All of our collective delusions at this point are threats to the survival of the species. I wish I had something inspirational to tie this up with, but I don’t. We are in grave danger and we don’t even acknowledge it, because we are, as a society, deeply ill. And no amount of brain meds will help.

Bread reveries

My therapist told me I should be baking bread on a regular basis, because apparently my “whole face lights up” when I talk about it. It was good advice. I made one artisan loaf and it put me in such a good mood that I was worried I was hypomanic. She told me that I just wasn’t used to happiness, to the point where it actually felt uncomfortable to me. She pointed out that it had been a long time since I actively pursued something that brought me joy. True enough I guess.

This was the first loaf I made. You could make it without the herbs and come out with a delicious loaf of white bread, but why would you? It’s great toasted with soft butter, and its amazing in a grilled cheddar sandwhich with sauteed onions and apples. I’m a vegetarian, so I can’t say for sure, but I imagine the herbs would make for a phenomenal chicken sandwich. An easy recipe to make, if time consuming.

The next recipe I tried was the French bread out of the Joy of Cooking. It was ok. It came out tasting pretty good, but the appearance was somewhat lacking. Part of that was my inexperience rolling out a baguette, and part of it was that it didn’t brown properly. Maybe a problem with the oven. Other than that, the flavor and texture were good, just not great.

Tomorrow I hope to try out the French bread recipe out of The Enchanted Broccoli Forest by Molly Katzen. I had done this one before years ago and at came out wonderfully. I’ll also be using a friends baguette pan that has small air holes in the bottom of the tray in order to increase the crunchiness of the bread. It should be great.

I don’t know why this makes me so happy. Maybe it’s the yeast: The feeling of shaping a living thing with my hands is profound. I don’t believe in psychic energy or anything like that, but you can feel life when you touch it. I used to work on a seafood department in a grocery store, and I got to the point where I could sort the living and dead clams and oysters just by feel. There’s just something in a living thing that responds to touch.

It may not be enough to ultimately keep the gun out of my mouth, but it doesn’t hurt, and a little joy once in a while is worth something in and of itself.

Just checking in

I guess this is more of an emotional weather report than an essay, but I did want to just pop my head in and say that I am in a surprisingly good mood. I made bread last week at my therapists suggestion, and I have to admit it made me feel better somehow. No idea. She told me that my face lights up when I talk about bread, which makes sense, because I’m a big fat guy who should probably be thinking more about limiting carbs rather than eating them, but fuck it. Emotional well being comes first

The fact that I haven’t been too disappointed with what I have written in the past few weeks is kind of encouraging, too. I miss writing regularly. It’s not something I’ve done in a few years, so to have an outlet for it is helpful. For a long time I had a pen pal, and she was the outlet for most of my thoughts. We kind of stopped talking to each other, so not only was I down a good friend, but I stopped writing as well.

The other big thing this week was that I stepped away from Twitter. I think this might have been important for my mental health. Before I stopped I had no idea how poisonous it really was, and how upset it was making me. It’s an endless stream of vitriol and horror. Because of Twitter I have seen graphic violence on sometimes a daily basis, and I was using it so much that the main page is burned permanently into my phone screen. Fuck that platform.

It has been strange though. I feel like I’ve been depressed for so long that happiness becomes an uncomfortable feeling to me. For a few days I was worried I might be hypomanic. Thankfully, my inner dialogue is still toxic as hell so I think I’m fine. As long as there’s that voice in the back of my head telling me I’m a worthless piece of shit who should kill himself, I know I’m ok.

Been reading a bit more lately too, though the book, Black Marxism by Cedric Robinson, is slow going. It’s brilliant and enraging though, and I feel like I’m going to talk a lot about it here. In fact, I’ll probably be talking about it a lot even when I’m talking about something else.

Anyway, just wanted to pop my head in say hi. I’ll have more in a few days.

Peace

War and Baseball

I’m writing on April 14. Last night the United States fired missiles at Syria. I could talk about the legality of the strike, or the fact that attacking Syria is part of what the Pentagon has referred as the long war. I could point out that there is no peace party in the United States, that Clinton also advocated air strikes against Syria last year, and even went so far as to suggest a no fly zone during the campaign. But honestly I’m just fucking tired. Instead of reading up on the strikes, or going to yet another anti-war protest, I’m sitting here watching baseball, the sport Americans turn to when they want to pretend there’s something good about their country.

Nostalgia is a form of dishonesty, and baseball is an extremely nostalgic game. It’s a game that’s seen as harkening back to a more innocent time. But anyone with a sense of history not clouded by myth knows that baseball was born in a time of segregation. Hank Aaron, one of the best to ever play, had to start his career on a team called the Indianapolis Clowns. Longing for the “good old days” of baseball is as racist as wanting to “Make America Great Again.”

I’m still a fan though, even while I recognize what taints baseball is what taints the rest of America. Call it escapism. It’s a four hour game with endless stats to memorize, players to cheer for, and regional pride at stake. Watching it, I can pretend baseball is somehow separate from from the rest of our corrupt society. In its exceptional moments, it is magical, not of this world. I can pretend things are ok.

But nothing is ok. We are feeding our children poisoned water while we rain hellfire on the children of others. Our state security forces execute black men in the streets at an alarming rate while a little over half the fucking country has a great deal of trust in the police. And now we are again lobbing missiles into Syria and edging closer to a direct confrontation with Russia.

I don’t know what to say anymore. I’m at a loss. It is clear that no peaceful action can stop the imperial war machine from doing whatever the hell it wants. Protests, even large ones, failed during the lead-up to the Iraq war and they won’t work now. Petitions, letters to your congressmen, will be ignored. So what do we do?

War has become part of the very nature of the American regime, and it will not change until this regime is overthrown. There is now way in the immediate future to vote it out. It will not succumb to reason or appeals to it’s better emotions. This has been shown over and over again, and putting full faith in reformist measures at this late date is an abominable mistake.

This is not to say that some attempts at reform are not desirable. But they have to be worked for within a broader vision of building popular power in order to transform society. Working for, say, a 15 dollar minimum wage is not only good for workers, but also shows those workers what they can do when they come together.

Change may very well come, but it won’t happen soon, and in the meantime the war machine will grind on. More people will die. More of our basic rights will be taken away. And we will sit on our asses and cheer for the home team.