everything impossible

Someone I was subscribed to asked last week “where 300 million Americans are” while the US government goes fully fascist, with Trump launching into WW3 or 4, etc. I channeled my reactivity into unsubscribing.

I for one am pretty low-functioning since the car wreck five months ago. The PTSD has kicked in hard also since the “new” war started, but really has been ongoing for a year now since Gaza’s ceasefire fell through last March and full blown genocide began unabated. And now with the unprovoked attack on Iran, I just can’t keep up with anything at all.

I don’t know where to begin describing how toxic it is to live in the States right now. Homelessness and the netherland of housing insecurity - couch surfing, etc. - are norms now. The No Kings “3” rally at the end of the month feels obnoxiously pathetic. We’re all sick of liberal smokescreens, but no one really wants to go black bloc or yellow vest with MRAPs and sound cannons and tasers and guns and lawless impunity for killer cops. I’ve had too many concussions now to even get near a billy club.

People have at least begun organizing a little around the egregious ICE criminality that harkens back to Nazi brownshirts terrorizing people. I drive two hours for solidarity gatherings when I can - but could not get the nine hours to below-zero Minneapolis. Even that feels dated since the latest tsunami of death war bullshit propaganda nonsense and insanity beyond words. Twenty years ago a wise foreign friend said when the US attacks Iran, it is finished. And I think she was right. But when and how does the empire, the great and little Satan (with its rotten coalition of colonizers and cucks), finally fall?

One must steel oneself in apolitical denial to keep teaching the youth, selling shoes, managing the therapy business, etc. My partner’s daughters are feeling it hard, jammed in small apartments, meds failing, rent overdue, ICE fears lurking, working three jobs. I will drive out to help my partner move her dad across the country this month, as his money’s about gone and Parkinsons has him at the next stage of full care needs. There is a tie-in to covid shots I can’t even get into now.

So this is the fuck how things are here.

I try to cook the meals at least while my partner holds down her two jobs, and I try not to be too demanding myself with all my shoulder pain and lawyer BS and financial chaos and existential rage at the baby eaters in charge. Without the farm job, it’s nearly impossible for me to self-regulate. Everything fucking sucks in every direction. Frankly I am ready to finally leave the US. There is no remedy here and life is unsafe.

I just took a retreat-to-the-woods day to get my head clear enough to begin to formulate a plan for getting out - out of the rust belt for starters. It is relationaaly complicated to do so, to even determine where responsibilities and solidarity lie. But there is something enlivening stirring in me around sovereign freedom and leadership, an oxygen mask that feels precious to hold onto. I even had a moment of inspiration for a small but essential nonviolent public action I need to just do.

Amid changing conditions, plans I make fall into obsolescence within days. The summer Palestine tour director is waiting for me to commit or bail this (last?) week, and I just sit and stare at that impossible decision - the money and the war and my nerves

everything impossible