There is a book by Michael Byers called Percival’s Planet. It’s a great book and I recommend it. One of the characters believes she has a big hump growing out of her head. No one else can see it. She goes through her life with this hump and makes sure it doesn’t get bumped or hit and it is very vulnerable and painful, like a big bruised thing. (At least that’s how I remember it.) That is how I feel having a kid. I have this vulnerable thing to carry around all the time and it’s attached to me and it gets hurt easily. I can never escape it. I have to learn how to live with it. I can never fully relax again.
Enter a conversation with one of my husband’s friend’s last night, Mr. Doom. I had taken a 6-pack ring out of the recycling bin and told my husband it wasn’t recycleable and then I cut the rings apart so they won’t get caught on any animals. You know, how we learned how to do in high school. Mr. Doom started talking about how NO plastic gets recycled, that the petroleum companies want people to believe that plastic is recycleable so they can sell more and make more money, and these companies have been propogating this lie for 30 years. And there’s a big garbage island in the Pacific. You know, sounding the alarm hardcore for the planet. Everything he said made sense. But it also made me look into an infinite well of Oh shit, and, very easily, panic. I said, how do you live your life knowing this? and he said, it’s good to know and talk about it, because no one does. He said the only thing to get us to change our evil ways is some sort of CATACLYSMIC event.
So now I am living with that hump too.
You know what, I thought the stupid pandemic was enough. Why do I have to think about another horrible worldwide shitty thing? Why can’t I/we have our nice lives back? So there’s no happy future to look forward to? We are all fucked? I have been having more and more thoughts about how bad capitalism is, and how it’s all about the almighty dollar. I have had a sense of Big Dread since the 2016 election. So the planet crisis is real and no one is doing anything about it.
And, on a related note, David Sedaris said something so true and so chilling on the Conan O’Brien podcast. They were talking about school shootings, and the question of How many more people need to die before something changes was brought up, and David said If we cared enough about it we would have done something by now. If we cared enough about it. We don’t care enough about innocent children being massacred. Who are the people who are in charge of that and why are we letting them keep whatever horrible thing this is in place?
I have to admit that I’ve just recently gotten into Stranger Things and I am very nostalgic for that time period and the eagerness and honesty and support of kids of that age. And my son just started middle school so I am very tuned in to bullying. So the upside down and the lurking evil really resonate with me right now.
Are You Kidding Me? 