Entries tagged with slowpocalypse

Current Mood: cerebral
Current Location: the present

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Chaos and Possibilities (a Preview)

( On Journaling... ) The vast majority of the social sciences as we know them are so steeped in "Western" hegemony that studies will be impossible to replicate under other economic, cultural, and technological circumstances. Seeing the present moment, vis à vis pandemic(s), war(s), and corruptions(sss), as roughly an apex or precipice culminated on everything that came before (and with very little room to go anywhere but down), we have a unique birds eye view if we take the time to appreciate it. We have way more information about humans than has ever before been accessible, and we are at the peak of human understanding before it either crashes back down or is handed over to computers to process on our behalf (or hell, maybe both). Why not try to use this purview to leave something behind that is beyond ourselves?

( Something that might help the next great society avoid some of our hubris and failings... )... but there's no academic hub I can find that pulls it altogether and says, "This is how human relationships and cultures reflect their material relationship with time." I don't think it could help being metaphysical (even spiritual), but then the emergence of sciences are rarely the cold, calculating laboratories we bias today.

Anyway, if you know any good books on sociotemporality (whatever its authors call it), let me know?

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: DFW

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The Ethics of Pandemic TV

My media consumption has absolutely shifted throughout the pandemic. I was pleased early on when shows were put off for the safety of cast and crew, disappointed when most resumed, and utterly devastated when most of them opted to not address the pandemic in a meaningful way. It was almost as disappointing as finding out that there was no surge in people having sex in public during the initial lockdown (What were they going to do? arrest you??? actually... probably, yeah...). Here's what I'm finding:

Animated shows are great. Whatever universe they're set in, you know that the technology exists for this project to be created and maintained with minimal gatherings, but since fantasy settings are common they literally don't have to address the pandemic if they don't want to. (The only show I've seen do an episode was Bob's Burger, and it was through metaphor, and it was one episode out of a season otherwise consistent with prior seasons.)
Fantasy shows get something of a pass (computers help a lot), but I also find it difficult to engage some traditional plots: Apocalypses, Big Baddies who are confronted by one or several rag-tag heroes, pandemics (including zombie movies, maybe especially zombie movies) all feel pretty dated at this point. Turns out the horror lay within us the whole time.
Timeless shows: some shows are deliberate about not being set in a specific time period, or have enough flexibility that it doesn't feel so far-fetched. I still worry about the casts, but I happen to know that many professional sets are requiring frequent testing from their performers and that brings some comfort. (OMG, I just realized: is traditional porn still being filmed??? Anyway, Leverage mostly gets a pass because it's such a comfort and because it gets @flamingsword to visit.)
Anything contemporary must recognize the pandemic. (I turned on last season of Grown-ish and quickly decided I just couldn't do it.) Worse yet, will I EVER be able to go back and watch those shows?
The more they address the pandemic, the better. I know shows were creating DURING the pandemic, but I haven't seen any yet. They'll either really miss the mark or hit too close to home. Honorable mention to those episodes of SNL that were all filmed from home, that was a golden era. (I've honestly only seen one show that addressed the pandemic in the plot: The Good Fight, which had a really hard time tying up the previous season's lingering loose ends, going some politically relevant new places, and including plots about the *cough*short-lived*cough* pandemic and its *cough*aftermath*cough*, but at least it fucking tried. They showed lawyers in 5-figure suits wearing masks for fuck's sake.)
History, though, can be tricky. Early on I read up a bit more on the Wiemar Republic and Ancient Rome, but I didn't want to see them depicted dramatically (or even documentary-style; instead, I watched both movies about the Fyre Festival, some pre-pandemic stand-up, and that FX series about the history of Pride... at least until I got stuck in the 80s because I can apparently only hold space for one pandemic at a time...)

No show has been perfect so far, and I'm not sure that they ever will be. What matters to me is where art changes after this -- really changes. I'm starting to see the difference in music finally. Here, have a playlist.

Current Mood: determined
Current Location: DFW
Current Music: Ziggy Stardust -- David Bowie

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Inversion Delight

Today, I heard a song on college radio called "The Virus", released by Shaina Shepherd last summer. It is frenetic and timeless, familiar and in-your-face. I haven't looked over the lyrics or origin other than the one listen, but it really filled out a mood for me today:

Holding back is exhausting.

Now as someone whose entire success in life can be traced back to the decision to embrace sobriety back when I was a preteen, thus setting me on a path of experimentalism and life-hacks so constant that even my close friends are sometimes surprised/put off, restraint is kind of my thing.

Not all restraint. Strategic restraint. Like things intense and have a family history of addiction? Swear off substances before you ever try them. Similar concerns about penetrative sex? Wait for someone special (even if you're not very good at knowing what constitutes "special" at 18). Feel like someone who's into you is a little too into you? Slow things down until you know more. That kind of stuff.

I often say that relationships and communication might be my "special interests", but the tool through which I develop them are perpetual analysis and adaptive restraint. My feelings about a situation don't matter until I know what's at stake, what the risks are, and where my room to maneuver lies. But the goal behind it all is that I like to get to a point where I can relax and just FEEL things, unconstrained. That's how I like my communication, my friendships, my sex, my music... And I have more than once noticed that I could invert depression if I just let myself express grief as celebration of what was had rather than mourning what was lost.

18 months into the pandemic, this song helped me realize I'm tired of holding it all in. I'm ready for music that conveys the devastation with captivating humor and intensity. I'm ready for news that doesn't balance, research that doesn't prevaricate, conversations that move each other, and criticisms that matter. I'm especially ready for these things to take the place of all the touch I've lost over the course of this summer and the realities of pandemic life.

Obviously, I can't be out-and-proud all the time and about every subject, but I think I'm going to find ways to invert the grief of these apocalyptic events. Because if I don't find something to celebrate I just might fall apart.

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Location: DFW
Current Music: Desperately Wanting -- Better than Ezra

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Intentions for the Next Lockdown

Revisit the Tao Te Ching. This is the closest thing to a sacred text I know, but a few months ago I started to find flaws. Rather than exploring those flaws and developing a yes/and attitude toward it OR outright rejecting it and contemplating why I didn't see or recognize them sooner, I just kind of set it down and haven't looked back. And I think I need to be more deliberate than that.

Rake up a bag of leaves a week. My ambitions are not great, but I would like to keep the invasive bushes out of my front yard and continue to bag up the several years' worth of leaves that have accumulated (many of which were brushed off the roof last summer and did more harm than good to my yard). I should also decide what to do with all the decorative rocks I pulled in the spring.

Game more (as long as it is relaxing). Maybe I'll get to Final Fantasy 2-X or maybe I'll just poke around the old NES/SNES games on my partner's Switch. There have been phases of my life when I did some of my best thinking/healing with a controller in my hand. You can't bootstrap consciousness by thinking two thoughts at once, but historically I have been able to bootstrap inner peace.

Listen through my CD albums. I recently reorganized all 300+ and found many that I'd forgotten about or missed because my previous system centered favorites (which made sense at the time; I was not in a good place and I needed my music to be consistently affirming and my decisions easy).

Create randomly and affectionately. I'm trying to be a little less project-oriented and bring playfulness back.

Cultivate laughter. I really want to emphasize humor right now. I simply know no other way through this.

Current Location: DFW
Current Music: Indian Summer -- Jai Wolf

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Stuff I Meant to Do During the First Lockdown

Play through Final Fantasies 2-X?
Code into Roam

my Master's thesis*
my subsequent publication(s)
my presentations and/or notes

Print copies of my thesis & send them to places I want to work
Watch through my DVDs and get rid of a few
Complete (or reboot) my ambitious MP3 project
Start a YouTube channel
Start a Patreon
Start writing letters by hand
Explore publishing my autoethnography/memoir
Read up on Womanism & other theories*
Organize my academic sources*
Read more books*
Get back into art*
Voice acting lessons
Dance more
Learn to sew a button back on a shirt
Go through childhood toys and sell them
Clean out the garage*
Rake all the leaves*
Overhaul the yard*
Adopt an exercise regimen

Guess I've got another chance now...

*indicates some amount of progress was made, but not even halfway.

Current Location: DFW

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In Medias Tardapocalypsis

It's starting to feel like the walls are closing in.

COVID case at the kiddo's new school on Day 1.

My partner's sister, a nurse, has now tested positive. She has a kid who is still too young to vaccinate.

But mostly, I'm still not used to how deserted the future looks.

Not to get all metaphysical, but I typically have some vague sense about where I'm headed in the future. It's not that it's ever been all that accurate, only that it had been consistently useful. My relationship with metaphysics is often what I call "falling down the right flight of stairs", that going through the motions of where I thought I wanted to be actually lands me exactly where I was needed to be, however far aflung from my intention. And in late 2019, I developed this weird vibe that my future stopped existing past the early months of 2020. I told everyone it was a "death card event", because when I tried to describe it as "on the level of a major death" and not "on the level of a Death card", people got upset. My instincts were more nuanced, too: I had gotten excited about the prospect of finishing grad school around the same time, and when I had to delay I somehow knew that all of the fun and logistics of graduation would disappear. Either I walked the stage in December of 2019 with full regalia, graduation photos, the works... or I didn't celebrate at all.

What's funny is I didn't even make the connection with "death card event" right away when the pandemic set in. It was months later when I put it together. THIS was the thing I couldn't see around. THIS was the thing that was so big it would change everything in my life -- even though it didn't. It changed everything AROUND my life. My pandemic life, even in lockdown, hasn't changed all that much from graduate school. Stay home a lot, try to make meaningful work that gets noticed, hope that it leads to gainful employment... someday...

And now here we are, 20 months after my sense of any future evaporated. I spent the first half of 2021 plotting to get hired out of state and bail since no one was taking the pandemic seriously anyway, but that was my own anxiety, seasoned with the trauma of Texas' catastrophic power failure in February. I knew the pandemic wasn't over, I was just angry and felt helpless.

I still struggle to see more than a few weeks out -- making intentions rather than plans -- and to find my motivation in all of it. I know some things that helped last year, but to the extent I can extrapolate anything (whether it's logic or instinct or esoteric voices whispering in my ear) I am certain we have yet to see the worst of it. And since my family is stable with minimal involvement from me, I can't tell whether I should be using this time to brain-hack myself further (my general habit up to this point) or to just de-center any sense of self. Maybe I just need to be present more than I need to need to do anything.