Lunch Rambling

 

My dad, when I would not infrequently try to pull some shit, would express to me that he didn’t care so much about the fact that I was lying to him so much as the fact that I was lying to myself. I would ultimately be the one, he would note, to carry around the burden of mendacity, internalizing it, recognizing that if I made one exception, chances were good I would make another, & another, & so on. It was an effective message.

I think also of when I was the musher representative on the Yukon Quest board. Calls would last over four hours & eventuate in the production of absolutely nothing. They did not spur any change. Everything that was mentioned was offered up as a sort of totemic straw gift to the goddess of context—since we were supposed to be talking, everyone talked. When we all hung up, no one seemed to do a goddamn thing. It was & remains a sheer wonder to me that anything every happened at all.

I am thinking of these two things while once again dumpster diving in the headlines. I am wondering if there are vestigial threads of humanness in the monsters running the country. I wonder if they think the cleverness of their rhetoric is effective. I wonder if they’ve loved, or lost, or been snubbed, or celebrated a small victory, or stopped in their tracks to watch a grey owl in flight or listened on their back porches to swaying tree branches. I wonder if fragments of music bring them to tears, if lines from poems stir unnamable urgencies in them, if they tremble at human touch sometimes. I wonder if they sit & watch their children lost in imaginings & feel suffused with love. I wonder if they feel the first drop of rain when the clouds have gathered, roiling over the hours. Do they hear language as music? Do they sigh at the end of a long day? Look up at stars? & who buttresses them up, & holds them, & tells them it will be okay, & how do those people feel, riddled with the depth of that kind of lying?

I fear that the charade of certainty, even if (especially if) crafted in the syllabaries of hatred, is the only thing to which we lend credence anymore. But we all know that we all of us don’t know. Why isn’t that okay? Why can’t legislation proceed from the fundamental, shared experience of navigating the absurd depth of life’s mystery instead of trying to cover it up with threadbare flags & failing caricatures?

I looked at when I’ll be able to run for governor, out of curiosity. I was thinking about being on a debate stage & how I would be stuttering & so scared & would probably start crying, & then I was thinking that everyone should probably be doing that anyway, if any of it matters. Governing, legislating, making choices for wide swaths of the population—it should be intentionally emotional, vulnerable work. All of these fucking people in the government & all of the constant vitriolic horseshit & all of the pointed, stupid critiques & all of the bluster & bombast—how did that become even remotely passable as governance? Who goes home proud of themselves after all of it?

Remember how if you don’t pay attention to news & you start to see humans out in the world being humans, you can find everywhere in evidence our humor & our compassion & our impulse for community? Remember all the strangers you ran into in weird places who brightened your day? The couple dancing next to you at a wedding for someone you barely knew? The hiker sitting there with her dog just enraptured with the landscape on a trail? Every one with their hearts in their chests full of  longing, their bodies aching after somewhere or someone or something. We are all such incomplete wrecks & we are so ceaselessly beautiful for it. That's worth remembering. 

Good job being a good human, whoever you are.

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