Oh, Lord. Kumbaya.
Perhaps my finest work.
May 28, 2017
A Post-Mortem of Sort’m
It’s been two weeks since I put down the sign.
Mostly, what I feel is relief. I was on the subway today, and I thought about what it would be like if someone got on the train humming and carrying a protest sign, and then started singing loudly about the President to/at another passenger.
I thought, “That would be really fucking weird and disruptive.”
I usually write in my notebook on the train (when I’m not carrying a sign), and when people come in with music, or a spiel, I’m instantly annoyed at the demand on my attention. It was hard, today, to convince myself that *I myself* had been the disruption, walking around with a sign like a LaRouchian — not even a nice, Jehovah’s Witness-style, professionally printed sign! A handmade, grey-at-the-edges, I-probably-have-impaired-judgment sign!
About ten days ago, a white supremacist killed two people on Portland public transportation when they tried to defend Muslin girls from harassment. I thought of myself. First, I went through the primal emotional arpeggio — shock, horror, grief, disbelief, and anger. Then I thought, Holy fucking shit. That could have been…
I was walking down West 79th Street one afternoon in March, and it was sunny and warm (unlike today, June 6th). A man in his late sixties saw me coming towards him and clapped both hands to his face with surprise.
“What are you doing!” he said, rushing over to me. (You can fill in the Upper West Side older white guy voice.) “There’s crazy people all over the place!”
He wanted me to hide the sign. He meant well, and I appreciated it.
I said, “I know. I talk to them all the time.”
I didn’t cave to the fear, okay? I caved to the logic. I caved to the math, which pointed to the statistical likelihood of my luck running out. I caved to the odds, and I’m glad I did. I’m walking away from the table upright.
It’s counterintuitive, but I find that the closer we slouch towards the long-foreshadowed meet-cute of shit and fan, the calmer I’ve become.
When I was 19, I was mugged at gunpoint in my neighborhood in Brooklyn. As soon as I realized what was happening, I threw my wallet away from my body and fell down into the crash position, curled up with my arms over my head.
I heard my boyfriend get hit with the gun, and at that moment I was confronted by the unhappy knowledge that I was a true coward, because I couldn’t lift my head to say something, or to catch his eye, to be with him somehow in the last moments of his life, and possibly mine. And I was so angry, I felt so cheated. Like, I’m only 19! I can’t DIE! No FUCKING way! NO!
Nobody got shot that night. I have lived to the ripe age of almost 48. I’ve spent the past 8 of those years watching environmental annihilation, waiting for the effects to catch up with us. Post-Sandy, I have kept two weeks of food and water in the house at all times, and a small go-bag that includes a first aid kit and headlamps.
I never went full prepper, though. I know myself well enough to know that I’m not cut out for sod bunkers or machine guns. When the zombies come, I’m planning to stick out my arm and get chomped ASAP. You and your band of scrappy survivors can cling to life in the post-apocalyptic hellscape; I’ll be over here, gnawing on a human femur like it’s a turkey leg from Frontierland.
I don’t want to die. It took years for me to be able to say that, but now it’s true, at least 98 percent of the time. I’m not “ready to die,” in the sense that I still love living, and there are many things I still want to do and see. But I’m ready for death in a way I wasn’t when I was 19. Just in time, too!
I’m not succumbing to fatalism over this latest nuclear threat. In 1980, when I was 11, we were told we only had a 33.3 percent chance of making it to the year 2000 because of nuclear proliferation, and here we are now, in the Year of Dear Lord We’re Fucked 2017.
But this holocaustic turn of events has allowed us all a chance to freshly, viscerally, contemplate our mortality, and in doing so, to evaluate the meaningfulness of our lives. What better purpose could my last hours be spent pursuing?
I find life to be intensely meaningful, overwhelmingly so. My sense of awe and gratitude only increases as I get older, like my appreciation of nature, and my appreciation of people. I’ve lost the ability to be bored — anxious, yes, but bored, no. The problem is too much poignance, coincidence, possibility; too much to marvel at in one lifetime.
All I want now is to tell people I love them. I want to apologize to everyone I’ve wronged, and I want to forgive whoever feels they need it from me. I only wish: 1. I hadn’t been hurtful to so many other people. 2. I’d spent more of my life snorkeling, and 3. I’d eaten more candy. My one regret, if I was mugged at gunpoint right now, would be that I’d miss the chance to see my nieces and nephews and all my friends’ kids grow up.
I know this sounds morbid, but it feels life-affirming to say it. It’s the antithesis of the suicide notes I wrote in my (relative) youth. And I can get away with it today, because we’re all under so much duress. But I don’t say this because I think we’re all going to die tomorrow. I say it because I’m alive right now.
(To read Kumbaya, Motherfucker in chronological order, click here.)