019: The Weekend Before

The squeaking we are all hearing right now is the last sucklings of air into the collective buttholes of Americans, clenching as we head into the most monumental election of our lifetimes This Year. Because what this year needed, was a nail biter to the end. (Yes, I know by Historical Metrics this should be a landslide For The Good Guys, but turns out “history” isn’t actually law, and even laws aren’t real useful when they aren’t enforced by the gatekeepers.) 

No less than millions of words have been written about the possible scenarios, so I’m going to avoid adding to the Helvetica junk pile of hot takes. But it’s certainly difficult to act like there is another conversation worth having as a collective creative culture while the world is equally literally and figuratively on fire. It seem forever trite to avoid the Big Things and attempt to talk about anything other than *EVERYTHING BAD*. So as chaos and tears have engulfed the beginning of the decade, maybe a conversation worth having is how to document the history happening right now. 

OK, so how do we do that? Where do we start? Fuck if I know. I just wanna survive the year and watch the entire series of Disney’s Bonkers on Disney+ like a normal mid thirties dude when things get bad. Adulting is on NO ONE’S dance card this year, but the harshness is we all need to pull up our pants and clock in to maturity. 

 One of the few coherent thoughts I’ve jackhammered out of my concrete brain this year, is that we have been attempting to write this experience as if it is over. We all want to be like “I did this during this.” Almost like we are editing our personal Wikipedia entry. But the fact is none of us are important enough to have our Wiki’s edited in real time. We are still living through the trauma of Life Now, and we may not even be halfway through this period of turmoil. Some of us, and my heart hurts realizing we as a society are actively doing this, are just getting started with the traumatic experiences that will shape their next decade, and maybe the rest of their lives. 

Perhaps it’s just my circle, the elder millennial tribe. But it seems we haven’t really gone through a long term trauma as a country in our lifetimes. Desert Storm was a blip on the radar as far as wars were concerned. 9/11 was a bad Tuesday, but we all watched the next New York Yankees game and moved on relatively. The economic crisis made our parents sad but was solved quickly by the cool black president. Something something Afghanistan, I think Sacha Baron Cohen made a movie about that. 

My point is, perhaps we are in The Shit for the long haul for the first time as a generation. The Great Depression ran for more years than The Office. Hitler was in power longer than Eleven was alive when Stranger Things premiered. We are used to things happening a such an elevated clip, that we are unable to process the fact that we realistically are barely in Act One of this current storyline. Thus we have this unimaginable amount of creative guilt that “it’s been shitty so long now and we have nothing to show for it”, when we are dealing with a situation larger than we can even imagine. The fact that we are beating ourselves up for this, is a boulder size amount of bullshit. 

How we as creatives will get through this, is entirely unique to the individual’s circumstances. I know people who have given up and gotten “real” jobs, I know a photographer who closed his studio after 16 years and is selling everything, and I know a handful of people who are having some of their most productive years ever. The range of the human experience of our current issues are vast, and so unique to the person, we can not, and should not be comparing output to each other.

I guess I am writing to a Proverbial Me outside in the world. No matter where you are, you’re exactly where you can be given the circumstances. We are not done fighting this battle yet, your work can wait if it needs to be. Or you can dig into it if you believe, Chances are there is someone you know needs your presence more than your art does, and that’s ok. In fact, that’s a grand gift, worth more than your output could ever hope to be.