Dear Diary,
Last night, in an attempt to escape this nightmare, I took a few tries at sleep, but ended up reading Baldwin while I sobbed into my unicorn-shaped pillow. During one of these attempts I had a waking-dream. I dreamt I walked, very casually, into every home in Chicago and took a sledgehammer to their fucking TV screens, face straight as a beam. Black confetti sparkling their living rooms, littering their bowls of snacks. Cancelling the spectacle of men wearing false senses of security in bright colors banging into each other, presenting each one the gift brain damage while it rains poisonous fire and cold metal on the most loving, steadfast groups of people for no reason other than that they dare to exist in the same proverbial room as whiteness.
“But this cowardice, this necessity of justifying a totally false identity and of justifying what must be called a genocidal history, has placed everyone now living into the hands of the most ignorant and powerful people the world has ever seen: And how did they get that way?”
I am so tired. The white lady in this Foxtrot just said “the world is our oyster!” to her friend who is clearly visiting because he called the El the subway. And I know she didn’t mean anything by it (do they ever?) but there is no sense of comfort that comes out of an American’s mouth that doesn’t have blood baked into it, and the willful ignorance is giving me -cidal feelings, very prickly, do not touch. My mind keeps running into the wall of “why am I alive?” and I don’t have an answer. And that’s freaking me out because for a long time I had convinced myself I had all the answers. I don’t even have words for what I am feeling, it is beyond pain or understanding, but thankfully it is not numbness. That lack of feeling is the death of everything and if I get the taste that everyone else seems to have been dosed, I may fall in. I haven’t taken painkillers in almost 10 years, but times like this: times where I am expected to go work at the threshold of care and policing, where people are concerned about celebrity and bright lights amidst projected carnage, 30 mg of Oxycodone could put me out into that floaty feeling. That feeling that left me and my fellow kid-junkies staring at the colorful glare of the T.V. bouncing South Park or Tosh.0 (I used to be a prick) while completely dissociating us to the carnage of whatever day in America it was. The sun came up very slowly then. Now I won’t even take my Ativan, because no one should be allowed to turn away from this, not me, not anyone, and the sun is taking for-fucking-ever. And fuck big pharma til I die, anyway. Instead, I am having a beer at 1 pm.
Cars still pass by on Milwaukee Avenue, kids still being pushed in strollers, dogs still being walked, assholes still ignoring homeless or otherwise undesirable people. There’s another wall in my mind, labeled “when does it end?” and “how can I make it end?”. There’s only one door on these unscalable walls and it’s painted with red words, “kill yourself?”.
Even my keen grip on magic can’t make me understand and I refuse to forget. All I want to do is do do do go go go. But where? To what end? Into whose arms? Times like this remind me there’s plenty of magic in evil.
An angel walks onto the blue line towards O’Hare cursing, god bless her. She’s got the right idea. The performance of sanity in Chicago is particularly icky lately. I miss New York for this, alone. I feel like I’m the only freak for miles, sometimes. Too often. I am returning to my decolonial practice of wailing in public. In bigger cities it usually doesn’t cause a stir, but in a city full of the suburban mindsets (get me the fuck out of here), I can make at least few folks very uncomfortable, and I revel in it. I am a glutton for attention yes, but also, Black, gay, raw emotion needs to be witnessed. Not pain, emotion without a clear cause. Emotion not harming anyone, just there. And not on a T.V. screen either.
I know that we have the power to stop this, because the killing is directly tied up with our consumption, more acutely our overconsumption and our willingness to be lied to. But literally how the fuck do EYE get them to care? In a time where even “leftists” are closet Nazis, what the fuck is a lonely bitch to do?
I think people fear repression more than organizing itself, and that is evidenced by Atlanta. Sometimes I call it Little Israel in my head; not to damn it, but the similarities are uncanny. They’re not even similarities, they are the same thing. IDF, KKK, APD, CPD, NFL, CNN, ALL OF IT FUCKING ALL OF IT I WANNA
I am an urban planner whose dreams were crushed by the understanding that I was setting myself up to be a puppet. I am an investigative journalist gone stale for the same reasons. So what did I become instead? A drug addict, of course! And as sobriety’s scary ass knocks on my door louder and more frequently, these dreams liven back up, but again: what is a lonely (sober-curious) bitch to do?
How depraved the American population are to find any sense of community, closeness, or entertainment at bright-lit, plague-disease-ridden, feudalistic, corny sports event. I can’t see the light at the end, but I pray my children forge it out of fire. It’s dark, but I’ll still see it through.
What I Read This Week:
Decolonizing Pathways towards Integrative Healing in Social Work by Kris Clarke and Micheal Yellow Bird (free pdf attached)
Queen Solomon by Tamara Faith Berger (just a heads up this is one of the most depraved and crass things I have ever read, thoroughly enjoyed and hated tbh)
On Being White and Other Lies - James Baldwin (with annotations by me)
I kind of timed leaving the country really perfectly. Next week’s post is paid as fuck, friends. Get into it. Or we can trade!
I am going to go touch grass just far enough from home and strategize what my part in this can be and reflect on how indigenous peoples’ uses of the lands and the strategies of the Zapatista can repave the roads of my heart toward something like generative healing work, or whatever crawls toward me. See you next week, see you outside.
—Jupi
another.... banger
made me go back to my journal from 2017 (search notes app) coz it reminded me of this time I was sitting on the subway and this distressed elder black lady was saying something to herself over and over again so I leaned it to catch and it and you know what she was saying it was "what is true is that we are watching genocide and no-body's complaining"