THE DARK TIMES TIKI BAR

We haven’t even made it to the stupidest month yet, and we’re already having to ride the level of NOPE here like a mule with an abscessed brain stem. Cling, good thighs, cling. The world and its events got me prepared to plant my face, large complaining tuber it is, into the frozen dirt of our yard and just hope it sprouts something better when the sinking bog of these times thaws out.

Thawing: that process upon the sagging, peeling countertop by which you find out the roast is of course freezer-burned after fourteen months in the basement and smells vaguely of vinyl; that time of terrible learning, when all you had wanted was the sensation back in your winter-numbed digits and WELL THEN YOU GOT IT.

Yes, I want to check out. I don’t want to think about sociopaths doing whatever they fool-well feel like to our deeply imperfect but largely well-intentioned governance systems because a critical mass of Americans have gone full-on Stockholm Syndrome with their superhot abductor, Unchecked Capitalism.

There are so many reasons I could claim legitimate distraction: in a word, norovirus. In a word, twins. In a word, homeownership. In several words: my home is turning to slime mold by a confluence of grime, laundry, smeared food, and the endless plastic chowder of modern childhood.

Within a ten foot radius of my carcass right now alone there are forty-eleven reasons for me to shift my attention away from the greater parasitic harm of the unhumbled, inhumane, undeveloped psychic tantrum-wads burrowing their way into the organs of our presumed basic American humanity.

There’s no “but.”

Before I continue, I’m going to place a full stop after “modern life is hard.” Like, for everyone. In myriad ways. And, of course, exponentially/systematically harder for some groups than others.

It all falls under the genus WTF, in the sense that homo sapiens are supposed to be hunting and gathering for a few hours each day, tossing back some communal nuts and berries, maybe a nice strip of dried antelope, and then gossiping around the fire until we get a lil sleepy. Things aren’t shaking out the way our brains were built to do this life.

There’s no but to follow any of that. There are, however, some Ands.

AND… waiting and seeing what exactly the foaming thrash in the murky water actually turns up before diving in, especially if you’re not a trained croc-hunter, is not a failure of your own humanity. It is the good sense not to join a melee without knowing anything about its nature, or how you can best assist, if at all.

One time my husband and I witnessed a truck crash into a brick building, and the extremely difficult thing we found we most needed to do was stay out of the way. There were others on the scene, emergency services had already been dialed, the people speaking with the pinned but conscious driver clearly had experience with emergency medical situations. Our role in the moment, which we felt real stupid about for sure, was to move out of the way.

Later, for me, it was to let my memory of the shocking sounds (speeding metal hitting unmoving concrete) inform my estimation of my own meat-bag’s limited resiliency, and to let that conclusion inform how I behave.

Which is to say, it got my ass to be more alive, which includes but is not limited to asking more genuine questions, flirting with cashiers, listening to better music, maybe laughing a little more at the stuff my kids do, and loving, more fully and goofily, what I love.

These reactions didn’t do squat for the driver of the truck, but they are still an outcome, and one which, though I flatter myself, may have made the world an infinitesimally better mosh-pit in some way in the meantime, while those qualified to tend to car-crashes and their aftermath did their work and, I believe, the driver survived.

AND…mind the fractals. There are ways in which, necessarily, the temperament, the behavioral profile, of this country show up in our living rooms, our shopping carts, our bedtime routines, inside our own brain-buckets. I’m not here to tell you to make the “smarter choice” at the store, some Xtra-privileged moral-analgesic grocery selection. If you have the funds to shop selectively in a way that you believe may help train the system to respond to what you actually care about, by all means go ahead.

But don’t let it become an anesthetic against your interconnectedness with the scrum.

I really despise the fact that “the orange man,” as my children call him, thinks in a zero-sum way. That his primary and perhaps only sandbox moves are the shovel-yank and the pile-knockdown. I loathe the fact that he believes that something good for someone else necessarily means something bad for him, that more for another means less for himself. I shudder to think what this pathological limitation will mean for Americans, and thank Justin and Claudia for being the adults in the North American sandbox.

But stopping there, merely despising the despisable behavior at the top, and failing to own it where it seeps into the ecosystem of my own mind, only sets up further alienation, the kind of splitting and othering that leads to impasse and dehumanization, even cruelty, on the larger scale in the first place.

I have to own for example that I have taken into my heart the same trick that infiltrated the orange man’s consciousness, that trick of the disappearing pie pieces:

—for behold, I have stopped to sneer at the twentysomethings on the IG, cursing their perfect skin as though it took anything away from whatever I have to offer;

—for lo, I have swallowed my neighbors’ far-cleaner homes as bitter pills, pronouncements of my failures in life by comparison, rather than the gift of ease and enjoyment they clearly offer.

—I have even, on occasion, visited upon my children the suffocating grip of Achievement, if only inside the trash-compactor walls of my brain (while, blessedly outside of it, they take scissors to the new wicker organizer boxes and poke bits of food and jewelry down the vent).

I have let myself be tricked into believing I am separate from the community of people who live all around me, because #busy or #suburbanhousingarrangements or #Imnotgoodatthisparentingthing or #Idontlikexyzaboutthem. I have allowed the cattle-chutes of modern life separate me out, sever me from other people, sort me into an external “productivity” flow that benefits [WHOM??], increasingly relying on algorithm-dictated portals to a few curated forms of connection. (Some of these are great, but do not a social species make).

I guess what I’m saying is that if you feel a) there’s nothing you can do about the horrors of the current unfolding American reality, and b) isolated AF, well then, perhaps attending to the latter is the answer to the former.

The truck of leadership has hit, or is in the process of hitting, the building of our country, and let us assume that like me you are not among the trained first responders. Our job, then, I propose, is to look inside ourselves to see what healing may be possible to prevent the ground-level spread of the fungus of the soul that has carried us to this national moment.

If we take the example of my rosemary plants, it is quite clear at this point that mildew spores are unstoppable, and simply trimming away the tips where the infection is visible, over and over, not only fails to get rid of the epidemic, but eventually mows your plant down to a crusty nub. You have to bathe all the leaves, even the real good-looking ones, in the vinegar-spray of the understanding that leaves, like people, do not operate and cannot thrive independently.

That may be the biggest American Mistake: to believe in the “independent person”, to believe in the myth of the isolated individual in the first place, and then go ahead and make that figment into the highest, most desirable form of living. In American life, the less you need from anyone else, the more successful you are understood to have become.

That shit is going to do a real number on a brain evolved specifically to need, and bask in, the help and connection and skill and company of others. In my experience, the more help and togetherness I have been able to accept, welcome, and even actively solicit, the happier and more fulfilled I have felt.

We could start with a tiki bar.

Like my neighbor-friend, whom we’ll call Justin, who texted the other day to invite us over because “drinks are on the house at the tiki bar in my basement.” His family doesn’t watch football, but he thought that the Superbowl might be a good excuse to get together and go to the basement to enjoy elaborate and frightfully tasty mixed booze concoctions while the children beat each other up instead of us. They have two young kids and basement gifted with a bounce-house by the grandparents, a basketball hoop, several scooters, and the kind of floor across which things may actually roll (as opposed to our possum graveyard of a basement, with its crumbled-tomb flooring).

After five soul-crushing years of being actively prevented from socializing either by viral pathogens or children who have not yet decided that what other people think matters, a basement tiki bar party sounded not just great but transcendent.

In fact, it sounded quite like the cure for all that ails us. Not just my family, but our country. Can you see it? The trajectory?—

Woman is beaten down by circumstance / Country is beaten down by circumstance.

Woman believes she has failed in all important areas / Country believes it has failed in most important areas

Woman hunkers down to just survive whatever mess she’s cultivated / Country, likewise

Woman gets norovirus / Whoops OK no idea what’s up with country anymore, just trying not to die

Everyone eventually appears functionally basically recovered, but the will to live went out with the ninety-sixth load of laundry / Country is… WHAT?

Woman is about to set fire to her house to ensure the norovirus goes down with it / Thinks maybe she should get a match out for the country too.

THEN—Neighbor texts. Neighbor likes making tiki drinks.

And suddenly, there is, after all, a fundamental benevolence to the universe, detectable in the interplay between cinnamon brandy, pineapple juice, and a somehow smoky rum at Justin’s tiki bar.

It is a goodness detectable in Justin’s voice, as he acknowledges with ease that his kids engage in likely something close to the amount of contrary, annoying behavior as yours do; also in his eyes, which you follow to the kids, and watch the pretty little urchins throw themselves over couch-backs… they are sometimes gloriously entertaining, after all, at least in this moment…

It is mappable in Justin’s story of how he gets gardeners and homesteaders together, like, in person, just to talk. That’s it. And they have no social media presence, because he wants… the thing, that human thing. The people. Together, with other people. No branding or announcing or trying to achieve or get anything at all— just the company of each other, and whatever they might say, face to face. There are about forty of them. This is a real thing, happening.

The basic benevolence of the universe is detectable, too, in this moment, in the voice of Justin’s wife [we’ll call her] Susanna’s voice. She is a probation officer, and loves what she does, at 38, because, she says with a sincerity completely devoid of moral superiority— it is in fact filled with the clean, clear note of a terribly lovely honesty— “I just think people who have been in trouble are people. I like getting the chance to treat them like people, and seeing what that does for them. Some of them come back and tell me it changed their lives.”

Treating people like people, how it changes lives. Humanity.

I’m not saying we gotta love every mofo we meet. I just think treating people like people is the way to spray the heart-fungus out of the plant.

I, for one, need to start with myself. If I can’t treat myself with basic humanity, including allowances for mistakes, regrets, uncertainty, and limitation, I hardly stand a chance when it comes to others, or the psychic ecosystem that builds its web up to the terribly visible overstory.

What gentleness can you practice upon yourself, what help can you allow from another human today? Which offer of togetherness can you accept, and with how much of your sweet, sad, pissed off heart? That, I think, is the first job.

dancing on pavement ice, February. Video still by HGD