The Covidian Age, part 2: There is no up or down.

20.

There’s death in the air, and I don’t know if it’s me or our country or the era or none of these, which is another way of asking, is there some kind of pattern to things or is everything random? 

21.

I know two people who took their own lives in the past two weeks. Chicago had over 800 murders this past year, the most violent in its history. The pandemic has killed over 830,000 Americans, and continues to ravage the unvaccinated. Both of my sisters got Covid.

22.

And, Meat Loaf died.

23.

Meat Loaf was old when I was young, a strange hybrid of rock n’ roller and old-school crooner, drawn to operatic emotions and acting roles in cult films. I saw him first in Rocky Horror Picture Show as the motorcycle rider chainsawed by Dr. Frankenweenie in an orgiastic blast of blood. I was ten years old, and completely bewildered. I saw him later in Fight Club, he was middle-aged and overweight, in many ways the butt of the movie’s jokes, but also providing much-needed humanity and grace. He starred opposite Patrick Swayze in the forgettable trucker B-movie, Black Dog, and has a cameo with Val Kilmer in the druggy crime picture, The Salton Sea. His singing voice was marvelous, powerful yet vulnerable, and if his songs are cheesy—many of them are—I think he articulates young lust/young love as well as anyone. I don’t ever choose a Meat Loaf song, but if one’s on, I’m always happy to sing along. 

24.

I read Ill Will, Dan Chaon’s superb literary horror novel which is the most unsettling book I’ve read in years. God, it’s under my skin. It follows a psychologist suffering from the death of his wife and the aftershocks of a tragedy from his childhood, attempting to be a father to his two sons. One of his patients thinks there’s an unseen serial killer working in the state, and convinces the psychologist to investigate it with him. It’s a wonderful, nightmare-inducing read, a major work from one of our best writers that will make your skin crawl.

25.

Chaon returns to an idea over and over: Parts of the brain knows things that language can’t understand. It makes me wonder if my cluster headaches aren’t some kind of warning or premonition. 

26.

Speaking of headaches, Beth sends me to a sensory deprivation session—where I float in a dark water buoyant with epsom salts. The ultimate in relaxation. The water is warm. I float naked in a timeless and colorless space. I hear a single voice, a child’s whisper: there is no up or down.

27.

Ill Will has this very device as a crucial plot point. I visit a sensory deprivation tank the same week I’m reading a novel that utilizes it. It’s eerie. 

28.

Is there a pattern to things or is everything just random?

29.

Here’s one more. I made veggie meat loaf last week, with lentils and quinoa and celery and carrots. It was delicious. The next day, Beth emails me news of Meat Loaf’s death. He had died right around the time I was mashing black lentils in the food processor. Dumb, yes, but also strange. I never, ever make meat loaf.

30.

The brain knows things language can’t understand. 

31.

Trump loyalists remain devoted to their leader, despite the fact the he bilks them at every turn, and says even more outlandish and racist things in public. I find it fascinating that his supporters—a group which includes some of my friends and family—aren’t embarrassed by his mendacity, his vapidity. He’s an avaricious poltroon, and I don’t get how they aren’t at least a little sheepish about his flaws. This past weekend, he proclaimed in a speech in Arizona that white people aren’t able to get vaccines. This is utterly, provably, and dangerously false. Are any of his hardcore supporters even the least little bit ashamed?

32.

Beth and I see Licorice Pizza in the theater. I’m intrigued by the movie’s strange logic, but Beth hates it. She rants as we make our way home. Here’s a smattering:

33.

Beth: That was just so boring. There’s nothing there. At least Old Boy made me angry. I would watch Matrix Resurrections again before this. That was at least ridiculous. I have no time for self-involved crapola like this. It was just there. That scene with Sean Penn and Tom Waits was just endless. And what was up with all that running? It’s Rushmore gone terribly wrong. I want two and a half hours of my life back. This is the Emperor’s New Clothes; anyone who says they like this movie is a fucking whore. And, no, you can’t put this on the blog.

34.

One of the best books I read last year was When We Cease To Understand the World by Spanish author, Labutat. It follows real-life scientists working in physics who, in their research on subatomic particles, begin to doubt the very stability of existence. They each find the world to be constantly shifting and following no set of rules. It’s a stunning hybrid of fiction and biography that reads like a lean Thomas Ligotti novella. Here’s a line following one of his scientists unraveling from the intellectual strain: 

35.

“He came to believe that dreams were not proper to human beings, but missives from an external entity he called Le Reveur, who sent them to allow us to recognize our true identities.”

36.

It’s chilling, brilliant stuff, marbling the discoveries of Heisenberg and others in with dark epiphanies into the nature of life.  

37.

Here’s another line: “Even scientists no longer comprehend the world.”

38.

Labutat and Chaon are channeling the zeitgeist, the semi-hidden cravings of our collective desires. We are slipping into an era of bewilderment. 

39.

Perhaps that’s the point of Licorice Pizza. There’s no real cause and effect in the world, just events that seem to be connected. Parts of the brain know things that language can’t understand. Even scientists no longer comprehend the world. Meat Loaf is dead.

40.

There is no up or down.

The Covidian Age, part 1: A brief reintroduction, two obits, six dangers, and some other miscellany.

1.

Well, here we are. 20-motherfucking-22. We’re living in the future. And here you are. You’ve landed on the newest iteration of my blog, a kind of running diary.

2.

A brief (re)introduction: I’m married, I have three daughters, I work as a public school librarian, and I’m 44 years old. I’ve outlived Jesus, the Emperor Claudius, Elivs Presley, and Ted Bundy. I’ve written some books, including last year’s The South Never Plays Itself, and have three books in the pipeline. I watch too many movies. I read too many novels. I have a migraine condition. I live in Chicago. I write all the fucking time. I’m haunted by my childhood. I grapple with my southern Baptist upbringing. I’m a vegetarian. I wish I listened to more music. I’ve been drawn to darkness since I can remember, but I’m always fighting for the light. 

3.

The first iteration of this blog was Covid-19 Diary. It involved movies, my childhood, the editing of The South Never Plays Itself, and little funny interactions with my family, but included my often brilliant restaurant ideas, oddball bios of forgotten people, strange memories from Pensacola, brief summaries of my unpublished novel manuscripts, and other bits of ephemera, with withering asides from my wife. I exalted in the isolation early on, finishing up manuscripts. The second iteration, The Post-Covid Blues—and god, the unintended irony of that title—was supposed to be about my reading life and my childhood memories of my cousin Keith and promotional events for my book, but slipped into the drudgery of news and politics. I wanted to keep things light and airy. I failed.

4.

So here we are. The third iteration. 

5.

“Does every new universe constructed have to be nice?” Philip K. Dick wrote that.

6.

Sidney Poitier died. Here’s a brief obituary: Sidney Poitier, one of the great movie actors, died today, at the age of 94. He got his first film role in 1950 in No Way Out, playing a doctor attempting to save the lives of two racist hoodlums in a tense little drama. He radiated power. He was obviously a star. He played every role with watchful dignity, blazing one trail after another. He was the first black actor to win an Academy Award (in 1963, with Lilies of the Field), and the first black movie star. He starred in action movies, dramas, westerns, war pictures, and comedies. He directed and produced. He carried the burden of being a black star in white Hollywood with humor and resolve. Everyone likes Sidney Poitier, and it’s easy to forget how magnetic he could be onscreen. He was always good, always strong. Consider his turn as a rough, distrusting delinquent in Blackboard Jungle, how he scrutinizes with his eyes, holds tension in his shoulders. And then there’s that famous slap in In the Heat of the Night, when a white racist slaps Poitier and Poitier slaps him right back. It was incendiary then; it remains powerful now. He was Mr. Tibbs, Homer Smith, Noah Cullen, Luther Brooks, Roy Parmenter, Buck, and near the end of his acting career, Thurgood Marshall. What a wonderful career. What a wonderful man. The world feels sadder, heavier, meaner, with his passing. 

7.

Peter Bogdanovich died. Here’s a brief obituary: Hollywood lost one of its visionary directors when Peter Bogdanovich died. A writer, actor, and producer, Bogdanovich, like the Cahiers du Cinema critics he so admired, started out as a film critic, and a very good one. He was an early champion of Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, and Orson Welles. He adored classic cinema and interviewed all of the studio directors, befriending many of them. He matriculated through the Roger Corman film school. Corman gave him some equipment and an absurd shooting schedule, and threw in the actor Boris Karloff, who owed Corman two days. The resulting movie is Targets, a razor-sharp low-budget picture that is sharp, witty, unsettling. He then made three astonishing films in a row: The Last Picture Show; What’s Up, Doc?; and Paper Moon. They are brilliant, sparkling, funny, melancholic, wise movies; I would stack them against any other director’s best films. But Bogdanovich had a self-sabotaging streak that began to assert itself. He broke up with Polly Platt, the brilliant writer/costume designer who helped him shape and conceive of his movies. He made duds. He butted heads. He lost his way. His ego ballooned. The wunderkind director lost almost everything, but he kept making movies. At the end of the 1970s, he made one more great film with Saint Jack, an overlooked little gem about an American trying to run a brothel in Thailand. But after that it was decline and despair, his towering talents wasted on mediocre projects. He ended his career making knock-off remakes for TV, misfires, and two flat attempts at recapturing the old fire. But he never lost his love for cinema, his admiration for the great artists, or his mentorship of new directors; both Noah Baumbach and Wes Anderson considered him a mentor. His book, Who the Devil Made It?, remains an essential piece of writing for film buffs. He leaves us with a handful of masterpieces and yet another Hollywood cautionary tale. 

8.

I re-read Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, a bewildering, oddball, terrifying novel of alien drugs, hostile corporate takeovers, and splintering realities. 

9.

If you read his work a lot, which I have, you begin to see patterns. Of domestic betrayal. Of moral cowardice. Of corporate infighting. Of rampant capitalism.

10. 

He is one of the key writers of the 20th century, absorbing many of the political lessons while processing the ramifications of technological advances. He saw reality itself as a social construct, even a weapon in the wrong hands. He captures the bewilderment, disassociation, and schizoid strangeness of living and breathing in late-stage capitalism. He predicted the self-replicating weirdness of the 21st century, and reading his old novels often feels like they were written in the future about our current time. 

11.

And we are living in bizarre, perilous, times. Covid remains a daily reality, killing the unvaccinated, and wreaking havoc in hospitals, schools, restaurants, and businesses. Omicron is so contagious, experts are saying 1 in 20 Americans has been infected. And there is yet another variant on the way, most likely a combination of existing variants that scientists are calling Delticron. As of today, over 830,000 Americans have died from Covid, a shattering number. Right-wing nutjobs continue to call the pandemic a hoax, even as the mouthpieces of their movement are humbled by the virus, and many of them have died. 

12.

And yet it’s just one danger among many. Here are the others, as I see them: 

13.

Danger number one: the rise of fascism in America. Fascism concerns itself with myths over truth, feelings over facts, and an autocratic leader who believes he is above the law. The January 6th coup attempt—and, please, let’s not mince words over what actually happened; Trump sicced his followers on Congress, attempting to overturn a legal and fair election through intimidation and backroom deals—is the end of the first act of American fascism. I’m terrified of the second act. It can happen here, and almost did. Obsessing over the past—attempting to fix the country in amber—ruins the possibility of a future. 

14.

Danger number two: our angry earth. Don’t Look Up, the idiosyncratic comedy cum eco-horror movie, has dredged up a lot of anger. A lot of critics missed the movie’s raw and savage rage at our collective irresponsibility, our refusal to change even a few small things to save the planet and the entire human race. It’s a personal piece of celluloid, highlighting our absurd situation. The basic science of climate change hasn’t changed since the late 1970s, yet millions of Americans insist that the whole thing is a hoax. 

15.

Danger number three: civil war. A lot of historians who specialize in Eastern Europe are worried about America, and with good cause. We won’t have another 19th century war with clear sides and delineated states, we won’t have warring armies in the field, but rather ever-increasing political violence, including kidnappings, assassinations, gangs of roaming blackshirts, terrorism, car bombings, and more. That’s where we’re headed, and it’s mostly due to the Republican playbook of extending their minority rule. 

16.

Danger number four: newly minted tyrants duking it out on the international stage. The re-emergence of nationalism—an ideology based on blood, race, symbols, and myth—across the globe feels suspiciously like the early 1930s. Putin remains in power while offering no vision for the people of Russia, and enriching himself on a grandiose scale. China is rattling sabers. Hungary has regressed. Ditto for India and Brazil. The immigrant crisis from the wars in the middle east is escalating the problem. We are in deep shit. 

17.

Danger number five: tech overlords and the destruction of any sense of shared reality. In 2021, Zuckerberg offered us a new facebook initiative called Meta, which is, in essence, a crude version of the Matrix—where we trade momentary pleasure for privacy and freedom—which really should scare the shit out of everyone. Tik Tok wields incredible influence with millions of children, something I’ve witnessed firsthand. In the school where I work, we are often at the mercy of Twitter trends, many of them pointless and destructive. 

18.

Danger number six: racism. Racism is an existential threat, warping our politics and deranging our solutions to social problems. Like gremlins, it sneaks into the corners of our collective psyche and causes all manner of mayhem. The first step in unraveling the racist superstructure is admitting that it exists. And a lot of Americans refuse to take even this simple step. Refusing to see thingsas they are is a recipe for disaster. Blindness to American history leaves us vulnerable to jingoistic myths. You can love your country and recognize it has flaws. But subscribe to blood myths and racist symbols, you’ll drown in your own bile, and you’re pulling the rest of us down with you.

19.

Me (to Beth): I’m calling the new blog My So-Called Wife.

Beth: That’s the funniest thing you’ve ever said.

Me: I’m not calling it that.