I am catastrophically behind schedule on one of the most important books I’ve ever written so naturally instead of working on it today I wrote a semi-comedic essay about nothing specific that is somehow extremely relevant to modern life. [CW: events of World War II]

Nothing is true. All is permitted.

Hassan Sabbah ‘The Master of the Assassins’

You know if people are things around the house? Like someone’s a couch, someones’ a tv, someone’s a ninja blender.  I don’t mean what they do, like being the blender doesn’t mean you like to cook, it means you’re versatile but kind of noisy and high maintenance.  If you’re a tv you always know what’s going on, have all the tea and are prepared to spill it.  If you’re a couch you just chill and sometimes people find small change in you…

Me, I’m a mirror.  I do what you do.  This is different from being a people pleaser where you do what people tell you.  I think it has a lot to do with having moved a lot when I was growing, which meant I’ve been the new kid in class twelve times.

Think about that: I had to make new friends at school twelve fucking times.  And I had to, I couldn’t just retreat into books.  I’m not an introvert. I feed on the spiritual energy of the living, I mean of other people. Yeah, that’s what I meant.  And having to suss out new sources of not-shitness every fucking year was a lot of work.

So I mirror. I act like the people around me as much as possible until some of them accept me as one of their own.  Which meant my friend group at school usually looked like the cast of Napoleon Dynamite. 

Not now.  I have hot friends. Old, but hot.  Major dad bods. 

It’s funny, I get so much motivation from seeing the bodies of fit young trans men, and for a while I thought they were so fit because they were men but no it’s because they’re young. I’m old, at least on the internet.  Not write Facebook comments in all caps and sign off with best wishes, Will  old, but I grew up without computers having more than an occasional role in my education. And I went to some expensive fucking schools among that dozen I attended.  In fact, and if you know you know and perhaps this goes a long way to explaining my personality, I went to Montessori. 

Not just for preschool but for another four years after that.  Like a lot of alternative education Montessori gets a lot of stick for being a bubble of privilege that renders children unfit for the harsh realities of modern life.   And there is that, but also there’s also the bit where modern life fucking sucks, and you shouldn’t try and fit to it.  You should want to dismantle parts of it to render it safer and kinder. 

You see, none of our choices are inevitable.  Nothing we are doing now in this world of ours is inevitable.  The legislative branch of government, the middle managers of government—congress, senate, the people who craft these violent bureaucracies—would have us believe that whatever their program is, it’s inevitable. 

To quote my late friend Mike, the cabbie from Yonkers, get the fuck outta here

Despite what they say, we can in fact do anything we want.  We’re choosing to tear the earth apart and then fuck the pieces.  Our actions are choices, not fate. The entire planet cannot be held hostage by revelationists and the billionaires who mouth their rhetoric because it keeps us stupid and starved. Like what the fuck is this shit?

So I’m really enjoying the current trend towards unionization. For three decades I’ve sat and watched liars destroy the reputation of trade unions.  More exhausting bullshit, more rhetoric in service to mammon.  But the people united will never be divided, at least not in a permanent sense.

This is why I don’t believe in dystopias.  Other than the one we’re living in, but dystopia assumes a totality of control that no leaders have ever successfully maintained.  People will want to say Russia but a) they keep losing and b) even if we collate a thousand years of Asian history, it’s a fucking eye-blink to the fifty thousand years since humans invented culture.  

And that’s why dystopias never last.  Invention.  We are the most pernicious, curious, don’t-press-this-button button pressers to have ever crawled out of the primordial ooze. Terry Pratchett had a bit about the button that ends the world, that you could hide it in the deepest cave guarded by dragons with a sign over reading DO NOT TOUCH and before the paint was even dry someone would push the fucking button.  

We are pernicious.  It means we wear down all defenses, break boundaries by devious intent. Like Oskar Schindler.  No one should have resisted the Nazis, yet there were dozens of people like Schindler, not just the famous ones. Hundreds, thousands of people lying to the cops, lying to the SS, protecting their friends, in some cases protecting complete strangers. Dying to protect them. Dying to save them, even though the Nazi machine must have looked unstoppable.  Yet everywhere, wrenches in the works.  I’ve heard a possibly apocryphal tale that some of the scientists employed by the Nazis to beat the Americans to the invention of the bomb maybe weren’t trying as hard as they could have been, a high-water mark for quiet quitting. Escape after escape. The French Resistance movement. People who looked the most wicked form of totalitarianism in the face and then kicked it in the balls.

Nothing is inevitable.  Except I think our freedom is.  All of us together.  I don’t want to destroy anyone.  I want the tinfoil hat crew to put down their tiki torches and leave their mama’s basement and come out into the light with us. 

The rainbow? It’s made of light.  Don’t think of the beam that enters the prism as white.  It’s simply light, too bright for our mortal eyes, which is why we have rainbows.  If there were no colours, no difference, there would be nothing to see.  But we see rainbows.   

I don’t want to destroy the far right. I want them to notice the harm they’re doing to their own souls and then stop doing it.  I want everyone to feel safe and honoured.  If we resist you, refuse you, it’s because our safety matters more than your cringe reaction, your hurt feelings. What I truly want is for you to look at those feelings, find the hurt that’s keeping you from being fully alive, and let it go.  It’s not us that’s making you sad. It’s not the queer people around you living their lives that hurt you (at least I goddamn hope not.)  Something happened, and I know you’re scared to look at the damage, but being alive is a fucking gift.  You might not get another chance.  You’re can’t spend it turning your wounds inside out and rubbing the filth on everyone else.

Tough love here, but grow the fuck up.  Own your wounds.  Sorry, but you’re going to have to feel your stupid fucking emotions.  Start by letting go of the idea that people who feel deeply do it for fun.  We do it because we can’t help it. 

I sometimes hate how much I feel. It’s hard to talk to my loved ones about difficult shit because I feel not just my pain but theirs, and my goddamn people pleasing (there, I admit I do that too) means I’ll do anything to stop them feeling bad, including apologizing even when I don’t think I’ve done anything wrong. I cry a lot not because I’m weak but because it makes me feel better to have it out. 

If you still feel too manly to cry, consider that if you cry hard enough it feels like you’re puking. If you’ve ever really cried, over someone’s death, over your dog’s, anytime the tears are the least of it and you can’t even tell if you’re screaming?  That beats you up from the inside.  Dealing with that takes strength, dude.  Really feeing your vulnerable emotions is like skydiving—you just gotta go with it, bro. It’s scary but you’re going to feel better about yourself for gritting your teeth and taking the leap.

Feel the feels. Take the ride.  Grow as a fucking person, because the world owes you nothing.  You have to give to get.  Or god/dess help your soul.