NaBloPoMo 2020

This is pretty much my mood today.

Does this mean I am advocating for violent overthrow of the U.S. government? Absolutely not.

For one thing, I’m about 30 years too old to think violent revolution sounds like fun. For another, who is doing the violence?

The forces that would like to keep this country enslaved to the idea of white supremacy are far better armed than those of us who’d like to have a society that benefits all. I find their lack of faith in a system that was designed by people like them for people like them fascinating.

One of those indicators of Americans’ lack of skill with systems thinking is our inability to grasp the concept of “enough.”

How much is enough?

I make a rude amount of money for someone who grew up in a pink-collar household where we did the switching the checks in the bills envelopes on a regular enough basis for me to notice as a child.

I make enough, in fact, that because my wants and needs more oriented to my upbringing than to something you’d see on MTV’s Cribs that when I want a book I don’t really have to worry about what it costs. Yeah, the cable bill stings but in my situation the alternatives aren’t any cheaper so I grimace and pay it every month.

Grasp the fact for a minute that I have enough to be thinking in terms of what my totally-optional-to-survival-entertainment costs me every month instead of worrying about balancing paying the rent against buying food or hoping that I can cure that cough with off-brand cough medicine I bought at the dollar store so I can avoid the hospital bills associated with COVID treatments.

Do I want more? Absolutely. I would love to have enough cash that instead of putting on outside clothes and sitting down for my job later this morning I could work on my fiction, actually for once get some exercise, and mop my mother’s floors, which I haven’t done since August because I work about 60 hours a week.

I’d love to be stupid rich. The kind of rich that doesn’t have to think about the bills because you never see them. You have someone handle that for you.

The kind of rich that has the chauffeured car drop them off at General Aviation at DCA instead of taking the hit on Daily Parking and hoping there are some spaces on the second level near the B terminal.

Of course I want to be that rich. Anyone who says they don’t probably also lies about masturbating.

Abraham Maslow created his hierarchy of needs in 1954. I met this idea about 40 years later in psychology class in college.

If you look at American society objectively, we act as if we are all functioning in the bottom two layers. We act as if we have the trauma of never having enough safety, that our physiological needs go unmet on a regular basis.

For some people in our society this is true. To see that, though, to compare your situation with someone else’s and realize what you have meets your needs and then some, you have to be functioning up at the top of the pyramid.

No one ever gets to the top of the pyramid fully. No one.

Sure, rich people have their physiological needs and safety needs largely met. Money buys a lot of things after all. That love & belonging layer and that esteem layer, those are always problematic. For everyone.

Until we stop thinking about enough as the top of all of these layers and start looking at these needs as slices, we’ll never be able to see that people who don’t look like us and don’t think like us deserve to have their slices just the same as us.

We still don’t have a declared winner for President. Notice I said “declared” because the place the winner will be decided is in the courts.

I still have faith in the system. To a certain extent, it was designed for me.

This is what the digital front page of The New York Times looked like this morning when I got up.

And this is what the digital front page of The Washington Post looked like about forty minutes later.

Each of these looks about the way I expected. Because, really, did anyone expect a decisive, clear message from the electorate? In 2020 the year of nothing being certain?

Anyone who has been paying attention knew this was what we’d wake up to. And here’s the thing about knowing: Humans have an almost infinite capacity for self-delusion.

In its most benign form we call it hope. The thing about hope is that it is dangerous.

See, people are basically lazy. We want eat all the cake and have six-pack abs without going to the gym. Take a pill and learn French. Have a democracy without doing the work.

The map looks like that the day after a presidential election that will, I’m betting, be the largest voter turnout in modern history, because we brought this on ourselves.

The myth of Cassandra says she was  gifted by Apollo the power of prophecy, and cursed by him that her prophecies would never be believed. And why was this?

Because that gift of prophecy was something Apollo promised her in return, as the Encyclopedia Britannica says so demurely, “if she would comply with his desires.” It was only after receiving the gift and then refusing to give Apollo “her favors” that he cursed her with being disbelieved.

Americans, in particular, don’t like unpleasant truths. We ignore them. Just as we ignore the cancer this country has had since it was founded, the cancer we see played out in the media and on those maps today.

We treated our democracy as background. We expected it to last, to just keep going and going, blissfully, perhaps willfully, ignorant of the fact that there were forces pulling levers and pushing buttons and playing the long game.

This result was entirely predictable. Entirely. Yet to say that would be “negative” or “unhopeful.”

At least curmudgeons are rarely surprised.

America has been sick for a long, long time. Now that its finally dying we, and by we I mean white people, are starting to pay attention.

Election day 2024, assuming we still have an election, is November 5th.

Americans are breaking voting records in every state and territory. Early voting numbers surpassed 2016’s early vote count in most places by October 22nd, according to the Washington Post. In Texas, early voting numbers are more than 100% of the total vote count for 2016.

That’s a lot of people voting.

I admit I participated in GOTV efforts for the first time this year. And it was a struggle for me. Vote Forward had a program that was perfect for a pandemic:

• print a form letter
• personalize it by hand with your story of why voting is important
• sign by hand
• address the envelopes by hand
• mail on the selected date

It was a struggle for me to write the 50 letters I did not because my inner cynic kept laughing and drinking gin and telling me expect the worst. The struggle was trying to articulate why voting is important.

Maybe it’s because I was born and raised in Washington, DC. Maybe it’s because my grandmother was a news junkie before the 24-hour news cycle was a thing. Seriously, ask me about our Super-8 home movies of JFK’s funeral which she filmed while watching it on TV. This is how I ended up having one of my earliest childhood memories be Richard Nixon’s resignation speech. Maybe it’s because I spent the Reagan years watching my mother and my step-father go to the polls and cancel each other out.

No, it was a struggle for me because I don’t understand how anyone fails to see that voting matters.

Americans aren’t taught to think systemically. It benefits those with power – rich, white men – to keep us thinking tactically.

Systems thinking requires strategy. It requires stepping back to see what levers can be triggered now to get a desired result a decade from now.

This type of strategy is how anti-choice, anti-abortion forces won the culture war; being “prolife” requires a lot more empathy than most of these people show when it comes to the social safety net.

These folks saw that controlling the language would buy them at least a decade, maybe more, to position themselves politically to pack courts with conservative judges and legislature with people sympathetic to their cause.

Voting matters because it is participation on the long game made visible.

Voting matters because the people who control your city council control your quality of life – everything from how frequently your trash gets picked up to if your street gets plowed when it snows to whether or not developers are allowed to fake their density numbers to get building permits.

I said in 2017 that the 2020 presidential election didn’t matter. It was a broad, sweeping statement, and not entirely wrong.

The 2020 election matters dearly. But how much better would our lives have been for the past two years if we’d understood the system, if we’d paid attention to the damage not caring about how state legislatures look or who is in Congress could really do?

And, assuming every single race in the country turns over to the Democrats, how much of a mess will we be left with because we paid no attention to the smaller races earlier?

Voting manifestly matters because if it didn’t those people in power wouldn’t try so, so, so hard to make sure that people who don’t look like them don’t vote.

The great thing about stories is they have endings. You know when you start them that in so many pages, minutes, or hours the characters will get a resolution. It may not be a happy ending but at least it will be some sort of ending to at least that one brief set of events and changes in their lives.

My year started with spectacle in Pasadena, CA. TGF and I did the traveling Christmas. First to the in-laws for the actual holiday then to Los Angeles to visit with friends and with them cross off a major bucket list item: The Tournament of Roses Parade.

Started in 1890 by the Valley Hunt Club as a way to showcase the beauty and fine weather of Southern California, the Tournament of Roses Parade (aka: the Rose Parade for everyone else) was a precursor to a day of physical tournaments that included jousting, chariot races, foot races, polo, and tug-of-war among other activities. The planners decided to have the parade entrants decorate their carriages with fresh flowers and the rest, as they say, is history.

Every single thing on a Rose Parade float must be organic. Usually this means flowers. Often it means seeds and grasses and using plants in a way that astonishes me every year.

This trip, this event, was enough of a bucket list item that I rented a high-end camera and lenses to go with it, protected it on not one, not two, but three airplane flights before I returned it to the equipment company.

The parade was as amazing as I wanted it to be, loud and fun and making friends with strangers and bonding in a very long line for coffee at the Ralph’s by the parade route. Even more amazing was getting to see the floats up-close and personal after the parade was over.

And the floats themselves…so much creativity. Gorgeous flowers that if you don’t get to smell if you, like me, simply watch the parade every New Year’s Day on TV. It was a warm day in the sun with good friends. What a great way to start a new year.

The theme for the 2020 parade was “the power of hope.” We had no fucking idea what was coming.

On January 4th we got on a plane at LAX at god-awful-o’clock. When we got off the plane at DCA just in time for rush hour I was sick. And I stayed sick until the middle of February.

And for the record, no, it wasn’t COVID.

There was no high fever, no loss of the senses of taste and smell, and all the coughing I did was a direct result of the rivers of mucus running down the back of my throat every time I approached an angle that was even vaguely horizontal.

I had a nasty bacterial infection I’d probably been incubating since before we left for the holidays, and that I probably caught (or shared with) one of my draw-mates from curling as he had all the same symptoms and required the same antibiotics and timeline to get better.

Lots of snot and two courses of antibiotics later and I was ready to take on the world.

And on February 24th at 11:45 my work life fell apart. CoolBoss (I call her this because this is how she would have labeled herself. She tried so hard to be our friend.) announced she was leaving, Friday would be her last day, and our team was getting split up.

Half the team would go to Nerd Director and the other half, which included me, would go to Empire Building Director.

Tomorrow: Part 2 where we talk about justifying your existence, micromanagement, mind reading, and moving the goal posts.

It’s November. I should be writing a novel.

I’m not.

Instead, I’m going to try writing here. Every day. For a month.

It’s going to be tough. My job in a design group at Large Financial Institution – because yes some time in the last two and a half years I went corporate (more on that later) – almost evenly divides between attending way too many meetings and (re)writing documentation for a design system that is only partially finished.

When you add the amount of writing I do for work to the pandemic to the dumpster fire that is the 2020 presidential election, I’m not sure I have anything left to create stories.

And honestly, that feels really shitty.

It feels shitty because it comes on top of months and months of news coverage about how bored people are at home and how everyone is baking bread and learning crafts and finally mastering the guitar and becoming fluent in French.

I just finished watching Julie & Julia primarily because I am also feeling disconnected from my senses. More later on that too.

For now, I can only promise there will be words. That’s the best I can do.