FFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUU-

I start a sentence, delete it, think half of a thought, hate it, rage at my own incapacity then eyeroll at the narcissism of being upset about being inarticulate when a genocide is happening. It’s like writer’s block except not for prose, for the basic fucking construction of comprehensible meaning, but then, what right to demand that this, of all things, be made comprehensible?

I find comfort in quotes from Brecht and Propagandhi then wonder if I’m using this familiar art to disclose the world to me or to stylize it to make it palatable (well, less nauseating anyway) - of all the artists to turn into mere comfort, what an insult to do that to them. Of all that’s happening in the world, what an insult to focus on an offense against art. Complaining that there’s no right living amid the wrong life is just another way to life the wrong life.

Maybe this is the vicarious trauma of having more conscience than power in a time of great evil, that thought too breaks up in the echoes and the feedback, a voice chiding that concern over this distress is misplaced priorities, like crying about a stubbed toe at the scene of a car crash. Relief only comes when I can shut off part of my mind, have my thoughts without thinking about them, focus on just weeding the garden, petting the cat, making a pot of tea. Then I notice the relief, remember where it comes from, turn back on the second order thinking, feel disgust with that urge for relief. Brecht: A smooth forehead / Points to insensitivity. He who laughs / Has not yet received / The terrible news. It’s not that the news hasn’t been received, it’s that nothing but terrible news has been received, in such quantities that it’s hard for good news to matter.        

Here comes the chiding again - oh all the news is terrible? The flower garden, the cat, the tea, you enjoy those less because you live in dark times, of course you do but would you elevate that to a worthy distress? In the face of the terrible news you worry you've been insensitive, as if sensitivity would matter?  N-no it’s not that, I sputter in reply, once again going round in the loop - and it occurs to me it’s not block, not so static as that word implies, it’s a loop, a stasis through motion, tires spinning in mud.

It’s not always like this and when it is like this I feel guilty that it’s not always like this. The chiding once more: your guilt and distress, your garden and tea pot, all irrelevancies, like the urge to catalog them. Nothing is tenable. Kierkegaard: do or do not, you will regret both. Heartache like a hangover, “no way to hold my head that didn’t hurt,” sick from drinking in just an ounce of the realities of life - “life” - in the hellscape. Wittgenstein: one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound.

This... this shuddering, block, loop, whatever it is, it passes, recedes, like work stress when a low dose edible kicks in, I’m grateful and try not to wonder if that’s deserved or if it will last. Marx: what is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal. Maybe what’s happening is that humanity hurts in inhuman conditions? Marx again: The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. That is, humanity is conscious awareness, animality is consciousness’s dissolution, and certainly I can see the appeal. Speaking of edibles, I sure wish I had one now, Jesus Christ! And I’ve noticed how the ads for them tend to make the shutting off amid hellscape a selling point. Nothing can’t be commodified, I guess, at least nothing they don’t eventually bomb the shit out of.

A final thought (or a first thought, heh): I don’t feel this way when the students are encamped successfully, I didn’t feel this way in the Floyd rebellion. Maybe this loop isn’t life in the hellscape but rather isolation in the hellscape, an accidental falling into liberal individualism? I’m unsure but the abstraction is enough to be comforting and sometimes certain kinds of uncertainty can quiet the mind.