Project 25:365 (March 15-April 16)
Updates as the world burns
There’s a lot happening. It makes sense to be overwhelmed and fall behind when the future is as uncertain as it is at this moment, the radical reshaping of the world when the fundamental structures of society—laws, due process, consideration for other people—go poof. We don’t know what’s going to happen to the nation or the world, but we know for certain that it won’t be the nation or world we grew up in.
I’ve been giving my students all the grace I can possibly muster.
And yet—I’m mad at myself for missing days and updates for Project 25:365. I’ll get over it, but I meant to do this yesterday. There are so many things I meant to do yesterday.
On March 30, apparently I was feeling a similar way.
What a nice little gift I gave to myself that day. What a privilege to look back a few weeks and see confirmation that I’m not hallucinating today. This shit has been hard and will continue to be so.
That’s probably why my Alarmed Men returned in recent weeks. The fact that I’m up to 15 of them is a little dire, but they have been a boon for my mental health. Every day for the foreseeable future, I know I am going to be alarmed. Probably terrified and rageful and hopeless, as well, but certainly alarmed. So, some mornings, I draw a little man to absorb the hell I know is coming.
I apparently had rage on March 21 (I refuse to check the newpaper archive to remember why). I had rage on a lot of other days in the last month, too, but that day I needed to flip someone (myself?) off. I mean, obviously, fuck Donald Trump. Obviously, fuck the anti-American monsters who voted for him. Obviously, fuck the enablers, bankers, Congresspeople, CEOs, selfish capitalist idolaters who facilitated the destruction of the very concept of America. But also, fuck me. Fuck us all. How did we let this happen?
It’s probably not a surprise, either, that I continued my weird post-apocalyptic fictional memoir. I love the end of the world. It soothes me. I don’t know what’s happening to these weird people, but they’ve kept my interest for over 8,000 words, so they’ll get to the Big City yet. It just might not be what they were hoping for (sound familiar, MAGA?).
I also wrote a little homage to my grandmother, my dog, my dad, and my ears.
I have yet to be disproven in my thesis that making things is better than breaking things.
I hope my students at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis this summer agree. I will be teaching “Writing about Music,” and I’m very excited. It’s not up on the website yet, but here’s more info. Spread the word!
