I've stolen so much time, I'm in debt I will never repay.
Anytime I'm writing here, I'm stealing time. I ought to be stopped.
We drove out to somewhere near the coast today, and I paid $10 for the
privilige of parking in a crowded gravel lot at a farm that grows corn &
sunflowers. No one was there to see the corn of course; everyone was there to
pose beside the sunflowers or run about them with their dogs, or, like us, to
show them to their children.
Our child was impressed, at how tall and bright they were, at how they were
growing in thick rows with dark tunnels running between, at their thick stalks
adapted to swivel the blossoms to track the sun. She was impressed at the maize
too, shouted "That's yummy!" in passing.
Spouse E turned to me in the car today, after we'd squandered some money at
Target on coffee to brew later, and asked whether he was stopping me from doing
the things I wanted to do.
"What would I be doing?" I asked.
"I don't know, going to festivals and movies and stuff?"
But there's no blame for that. There's just not enough time or money for me to
complain about how there's never enough time or money.
Spouse H is out of the medication that helps him remember to eat regularly and
check our child's diaper and respond when people ask him questions and stuff,
but he's having trouble getting his doctor to convince his insurance company
to pay for said medication so today he was just kinda trying to cope with
withdrawing from it.
I think my big selfish desire is basically to spend one week as an independent
adult with enough money and time to do just, like, whatever I want. A movie, a
bus to New York, sleeping in a cheap room with free coffee somewhere, sneaking
out early to watch the sun rise over the East River. I feel a lot of guilt when
I think about things like that.
I've listened to "You're High" by Agar Agar far too many times lately.
I'm thinking about someone to whom I haven't written in far too long. If I could
sit down and just write stuff — more stuff than I've written here — I'd want to
write to a couple other people on tilde.town too; I've been browsing your feels
in the stolen moments just before I deposit my own. I believe in you, ~joniwoni.
I hope you get that apartment, ~staplebutter.
* * *
People talk about how messed up U.S. politics are lately, but the mess in the
Capitol Building and in the White House is symptomatic of a long-disordered
society. It started out less than two-hundred and fifty years ago with slavery
and genocide, and certain things have not quite changed. It was not so long ago
that the National Guard were called whenever a strike broke out in the factories
or the mines and we've all still got scabs and National Guard troops in our
heads. We got *Brown v. Board of Education* but the establishment of private
schools and migration of Concerned White Parents means in many places the
schools are still *de facto* segregated. About 60% of people polled after the
Kent State massacre in 1970 suggested that the unarmed students brought it upon
themselves by protesting U.S. military action in Cambodia, or by being near the
protest. And today the survivors of high school shootings are openly mocked or
accused of fabricating their friends' deaths by a not-insignificant subset of
the political commentariat.
That took an unplanned and very negative turn. But the truth goes marching on,
and eventually decay cracks open every fetid edifice of lies, and what lies
within is inevitaby exposed to harsh light of day. Let it be so.
