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Well, that’s an improvement.
Only one lost day, between this entry and the last one.
And even with such a minor gap, it’s surprising the Hell that the inactivity unleashed on my psyche.
I honestly felt like I was going to be productive yesterday. It was imperfect, during the day, partly because I decided, after delaying about a week, to finally, finally, try to pump up the super fatty weird European tires on the bike my kind stepfather Greg gave to me. And it was amazing how stressful it was, attempting that, though I succeeded in the end. It really brought home how fragile, inflexible, and fearful I’ve become, or rather, am at risk for becoming. I’ll choose to look at it as a mere blip that only needs to be stretched, like tight muscles, ligaments, and tendons after a night of sleep before the big game.
First off, that bike. Geez. Why make the nozzles on bike tires so complicated? Were the ones we grew up with really that bad? And while I’m at it, you darned kids with your music get off my lawn!
Anyway.
The bike comes with a special “pro” hand pump. And it has an attachable tube tucked inside it, with two ends for two different, equally crazy, non-traditional pump spigots. First I didn’t realize it had a tube that wasn’t already attached to the pump, so I got enraged that this rod of a pump seemed to be designed to fit inside the damned spokes, with me having to jam my fist into those spokes and pump within the triangular space. When I finally realized the hole at the end of the rod that the pump air was coming out of wasn’t getting into the tire via the weird nozzle with the gear-like dongle at the end, I found the hidden tube and screwed it on. But I didn’t realize the dongle thingy (which the instructions gave a name for which was a crazy new elitist biker cultist word I can’t remember) had to be loosened first. So I felt like I was trying to pump air into a brick wall. Which is why the built in pressure gauge in the pump immediately read, like, 100 pounds per square inch. PSI, for you semi elitist biker cultists out there.
When I finally figured THAT out, I realized the thingy with the dongle would unscrew from the base. Leaving a huge hole out of which all the soft tire’s air would gush in about five seconds. I tried turning it around. Then it got stuck in the pump and I spent half an our with a wrench and a butter knife and a prayer and my teeth trying to get it out again, all the while panicking because I thought I’d broken some crazy expensive shit.
And when I finally got it out and screwed it back into the base, and spent 20 minutes hand pumping 1000 pumps of air into the giant tire and tiring my shoulders out, left and right… I took the pump off and the middle dongle thingy came with it, exposing the giant hole, and letting out 10 of my 20 minutes of exhaustion air like a long, dying breath.
So I tried to screw the middle contraption back in, tighter, and pumped for another 10 minutes.
At which point I tried to remove the pump again, very carefully so as not to let the air out if the elitist middle crapdoodle came out…
…only for the elitist middle crapdoodle thingy to get stuck again in the pump again…
…only to be removed by exposing the giant hole again and letting all 20 minutes of pump gust out. At which point I felt like throwing the bike out in front of the passing pickup truck with fat tires, a Trump flag, and presumably an ignoramus in the cab.
But I didn’t.
Instead I said hi to my friendly (because I’m white) Trump-loving neighbor, who is the apartment Mr. Fixit and who was proud of my effort, and then wrenched the goddamned middle thingy tight as a priest’s butthole into the gaping hole I wanted to permanently plug. And then I pumped again for another 20 minutes, almost passed out, carefully removed the pump…
… and the middle thingamajig stayed put.
Then I pumped for 10 minutes on the back tire, having learned the ropes, and with no incident, I was good to go.
I just wish I’d felt pride. Alas, as usual, my failures bring me pain while my successes (apart from writing) rarely bring me pleasure.
Anyway.
The bike ride was nice. And when I got home I had a lovely chat with my housemate uncle about politics and sports and Death, and ate dinner because I wasn’t feeling sharp enough and I hoped that, as with the day before when my uncle had bought me a black bean burger while watching sports, I’d feel great later. Alas it was not to be.
And the result? More horrible dreams about feeling tired, worthless, and despised.
Good Lord what a snowflake I am.
And while I admit that today I did cave and start the late-started day with some “Civilization Revolution” videogame joy (I completed a game of all-science, all-wonders, total military victory in record by-1550 time), things got better. Part of it was the weather. Cool, post-Spring-rain fragrant air. Lovely walk. Nice photos taken. Productive shopping at the food co op, where, alas, masks are once again on the mandate menu.
Oh. I woke up this morning to find a small pan, which belongs to me, out on the kitchen table. I’d left a film of olive oil on it, on purpose, last night before putting it in the cupboard. And when I saw it out this morning, I feared my uncle had done it out of passive aggression. Luckily when I saw him this evening, he said that wasn’t the case. He’d meant to text me. Just to make a kind point.
And with a third (third!) dose of chocolate and caffeinated tea, I started to feel good.
Upstairs. To read some of Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” Just a few pages. To the end of chapter one. The main takeaway? Ilyich apparently died of his mystery illness… after days and days of shrieking pain, and at the age of, you and my soul guessed it… 45.
My age.
Ugh.
And then it was on to the real gold. And I think I need to make it a primary focus. I started, for the second time since last Summer, a magnificent audiobook/dramatization of George Orwell’s “1984,” read/performed by Steve Parker. Coincidentally, the name of one of my other two uncles, and the most emotionally repressed one. Boy is it a spectacular performance of a biblically (lowercase “b”) book. Parker’s voice, his use of it, and the sound effects. So, so, so striking.
And I really started to wake up.
I can hardly begin to express how perfectly the book constantly captures so much of the fascist angling in human Psychology. All the terrifying stuff going on in America right now. As I’ve said before, it’s like Trump, and his sociopathic grifter ilk, read it and used it as an instruction manual. Not that Trump reads. Or even listens to audiobooks/dramatizations. Maybe if it was a movie. But even then, he’d just watch the violent and torture parts.
I listened to chapter one. Maybe 40 minutes. And even just that small slice. Boy what a megadose. What understanding. The mind numbing way terrible products like gin and cigarettes are called victory gin and victory cigarettes. We are going to be doing so much winning you will get tired of winning! And the insight into incels, with sexually suffocated, repressed anger main character Winston Smith wanting to rape, torture, and kill the beautiful young woman who he thinks a virtuous party Anti Sex League member… who would never have sex with him even if she weren’t, because she’s beautiful. And how the Inner Party member O’Brien, who later turns out to be the agent of Winston’s destruction, his implementer of torture, is so perfectly skilled at drawing out Winston’s thought crimes. And how the “2 Minutes Hate” is such a perfect distillation of what I call the “angasm,” the combination of anger and orgasm. The desire for a unified community to have an “other” to want to destroy, to define itself in opposition to, to bond itself together by demonizing. And how stupid and malleable anger makes people. And how raging anger can easily be turned against anything a smart politician might want. And how “thought crimes” are such a great representation of that idea about narcissism that I love: that it turns other people into extensions of the self, like hands and feet, which one expects to obey one completely, and which one gets so enraged at if they betray, but which one so desperately wants complete love from. And… how old age and death will always steal the body away like that, piece by piece, and how that… implacable rage can turn old people with power, like Washington politicians, into agents of vindictive fascism. Democracy be damned, because… hands and feet don’t get a motherfucking vote.
Sigh….
Winston. The great crime he commits? In chapter one? Which opens the door to his thought crimes, his destruction? Writing in a journal. Having his own thoughts, and not being a mere instrument for Big Brother and the Party. He’s a hand, or a foot, plotting it’s betrayal of the “human.”
Also… the three contradictory perfections of the Party’s motto trilogy:
War is Peace.
Freedom is Slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
Side note: I’ve been working on my “code switching,” in texts. Altering my language, to suit the medium. The context. And apparently, in texting, one should not complete a text grammatically correctly. With a period at least. Maybe with a question mark, or exclamation mark. But apparently ending with a period, to “kids these days,” with their music and who won’t get the HELL off my lawn… is borderline rude. If not psychopathic.
Anyway.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strengh.
Think about those for a minute. In deep ways, work to apply them to Donald Trump, to the current Republican cult, and to MAGA.
Those forces want their followers to feel like their at war with Democrats/liberals/immigrants/minorities/etc. And you can see the… meaning that falling for that brings to the gullible. The… peace it brings them, in the midst of the fear and anger. The peace of meaningful clarity.
Those forces hate the free press. Freedom of religion. Freedom of pregnancy. Freedom of marriage. Freedom of language. To them, those who have those freedoms are slaves to… well, name it. Communism? Socialism? The Deep State? The elites? Disney?
And those forces absolutely do not want you to have knowledge. Knowledge is dangerous. How many tried and true Trump supporters have been trained to never expose themselves to the information that would show them they’ve been tricked into a bubble of lies? How many trusted Fox News to tell them what was (or wasn’t) in the Mueller Reports? How many want you to hate the free press, aka the vital Fourth Estate of Democracy? How many are trying to ban an accurate teaching of History, of sexuality, and of racism? How many want you to ignore facts, or believe there is no such thing, and instead to go with your feelings, to “do your own research” without any critical thinking skills or any understanding of what makes a source reliable? How many want reality to be… as excitingly real as professional wrestling? And how many will demonstrate jaw-droppingly obvious willful blindness and self contradiction, in order to continue to believe what they want to believe? To not have to risk the loss of their impassioned, war-mongering community?
Anyway.
And so on.
And so it goes.
There’s a reason Kurt Vonnegut is often compared to George Orwell.
To be continued….