options for the end

It was so warm on Friday and I had worked too many hours already, running out of time to walk all the way to 45th or take the bus. Somehow it was almost three weeks into January and K said she was happy to see me, and I returned the sentiment.

When I’d paid for the carrots and radishes and sweet potatoes and bread, we talked of goals and ways to live at the beginning of the year. I demurred, I’m sure, although spoke generally of what I’ve tried to hew to these past weeks - all too tedious to detail, but certainly impressive to me. We are getting strong, remembering to eat, loving more, squirreling away money.

Then we got to the weekend and I remembered things I had forgotten and should not have. Looked up our alders and how they voted last week, resigned of fucking course or relief.

I want to gather people to learn about tea, A said, but really as a way to be alive. We circled back somehow to remembering the things we do are here to try and stay alive, at least for others, at least to keep strength to remain doing things. Between then and next Friday, when I will try and return, we will know what has come to pass, and we will continue to try and do what we can because we already do know what will come to pass, and will not know how we will have met it until then.

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Which is to say I have been wanting and thinking about writing a newsletter and there is no way to do so on this Sunday without the acknowledgement of what is. I cannot and will not and mostly, hopefully soon wholly, tell anyone how to live, or analyze it or keep it in my head. When I say this I mostly mean what I assume are people over the internet and their own chains of platitudes or belief in systems or hand-wringing or public despair. These are all in their own ways effective mechanisms. All I have are my own. We will wait and see where our twains meet as the days and weeks pass.

I have been thinking a lot about the poetry of Daniel Borzutsky, and have a mind to go find one of his books tomorrow between meeting up with a neighborhood collective to distribute books to little free libraries and I’m not sure what else. To be not sure seems to be my best strategy. Or rather, to be not sure, and know the worst is possible, has been possible, is not unique to any land or person or place. I do not know. I want to even refrain from writing about conversations I have had in the past few days, because I feel very little trust. I am having conversations about the reality, which is the worst case scenario, and I am trying to listen and prepare.

“Lake Michigan” is his book of poetry about a prison camp at the edge of Lake Michigan in Chicago. We live in a city once home to a black site in an old Sears warehouse in Homan Square. We live in a city where trans women disappear. We live in a city where we are able to vanish unhoused and poor people for a week for the good of the Democratic Party. Something for your poetry, no?

Perhaps this a poor choice, and yet. I could sit around reading what seems like well-meaning people on the internet make observations about a facist figurehead and play by play each numbing, awful move and some smug satisfaction of whatever bullshit comes from the ceremony of Monday, or odd and well-intentioned directives to encourage progressive white people to have faith in the immigration system and that these will be “arrests” and not “raids”, and that the fear of people who are targets is something we need to mitigate, because the emotion of fear is somehow the worst enemy, which, I cannot for the life of me understand - the policing of the diction of cruelty serves only to soothe people more than once removed from it, and if you do not feel a level of terror, somewhere, some place in you, perhaps remain lucky and make no assessments about the fear of others- anyway, aside from this, and whatever else I am being served up out of my own choosing on one of the last platforms I hang out on, I could actually just read fucking poems instead.

Hopefully soon this will all not be kept in my head. I think I can solve my own problem here. I think I have already started.

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Of course we are afraid of cruelty. The remnants of it live in our bones.

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Maybe I had thoughts about the social media discourse this week too, but instead also just remember I lease my own time. The likelihood of anyone giving a shit about my writing or work on any platform has less to do with the platform and my participation in it (truly, I have seen very, very little evidence to the contrary, which I acknowledge is my own inability to game it or interest, frankly). People will give a shit if they have time or want to or their window for interest and my willingness to share all align. This has been in many ways a comfort, and yet, I still sadly want to believe otherwise.

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I was in the car with my pa a few weeks ago when someone was jaywalking across 1st Ave where there are 8 lanes of traffic between the old dog track and the woods.

This guy, my pa said.

I think, I said, 2025 should be the year of minding your own business.

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In any case, he will be 75 this week, and just spent a few days in the hospital. He is an Aquarius, which either means something or doesn’t, but I like to think the weird air sign in me and him align. And truly he has made a life of minding business, or keeping things to himself, or moving between worlds.

There is a world in which I, selfishly, worry something is so far gone they dig through the rolls and force him out, back, whatever, too. It seems unlikely. It is selfish to have this fear. In any case, it would be other people, not very far removed from me.

I have been asking people if they have phone numbers memorized. I think maybe it is time to really remember what phones are for, despite who may be listening in. Maybe that could be more useful than the exhaust pipe of the pronouncements and villains and whatever else is happening emanating from the screen and over a-ll our pores. I’m not saying you should memorize phone numbers. I have to keep phone numbers in my head, not proposals for anyone else on how to live.

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There are other things I am doing. If I get past all of the two weeks of January that’s passed, and I keep doing them, maybe I’ll report back. I did my first ever live lit thing stone cold sober (I argue high school forensics does not count). I am off a med I took regularly for ten years, and I have many thoughts about it, and that will maybe come out in a newsletter soon. I have library books and intentions. I’ve made a lot of soup. I fostered a dog. I flipped the mattress.

I don’t know what I will write about. There are pieces started and drafts and they all just felt sort of not what to write today. These are not profound thoughts. There have always been different ways to live I have chosen or not chosen, mostly mundane. This part of my life just seems like something to be prepared for, even with all the not knowing, and the cognitive eroding fact that it will be urgent and rapid, and slow and never to leave. It never really left in the first place. I was gifted the fortune to not carry the duty of remembering, of not forgetting, and maybe I will be gifted the task of not forgetting, again, in a world that is not so different, if I remember to read poems and the lives of others, if I can do anything in my power to listen and move.

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Here is a link to “Dream Song 17” by Borzutsky. I would read it with some amount of caution, as it may not be for everyone. Here are the lines referenced in the title of the newsletter:

It’s like this in a lullaby
for the end of the world:

The options for the end
are endless

But this is not really a lullaby
for the end of the world

It’s about the beginning
what happens when we start to rot