I moved away, started doing other things. My whole childhood was like one big visit to that little town. Think about all the millions of people who never get more than twenty five miles away from where they live. The world is burning; face it, there is no single aspect of the natural world that is not either severely depleted or going that way. But it is easier, for most of us, to move away from areas that are unsafe or ugly, and find a new place to live.

That little river was getting better for a long time. First, before people came, the river was just a river. Then came the mines, and trappers, and town, and water treatment plants, then the dams, the fishermen, the rodeo. And then it was cleaned up. The mine tailing are putting less lead into the water, the rodeo is gone, the dam is getting old, and there are fewer fishermen around. In ten years the population in the area is supposed to double.

Now, suspend your disbelief for a moment and imagine that I lived my life like virtually every other person ever born on this planet: within a short distance of where I was born. I would need that river, for water, for food; If I was really lucky, I could use the river to grind grain. Would I have ever put mine tailings into the water? Would I have built the rodeo? Would I have trapped the beavers, or built the dam?

The difference between living in an area and visiting an area comes down to this. Inhabitants of an area accept the limitations imposed on them by the environment surrounding them, while visitors take what they can get easily and move on. There is an additional feedback loop, as inhabitants leave behind garbage and detritus that forms and shapes the environment around them. All of this has certain implications: we live more modestly in the places that we actually inhabit, and more lavishly when we travel, we care less about the environment in areas that we are only visiting, more when we live there. The internal combustion engine, and the freedom it implies, removes the boundaries set up by ecosystems, making people more able to ignore environmental impacts.

The little river will become another casualty in the war against the natural world. The fish will die, and then the trees, and then a processing plant will be placed at the spring, in order to make milk, or bottled water, or to feed crops. Perhaps the water will be divirted at great expense to run towards Las Vegas or some other desert boomtown. I might move north, find a place that still has a creek so that my kids can play like I did, and then they will remember the little river that they used to care about, and whine about how things arent the way they used to be. Hallmark will make a card with a picture of the river on it, and some guy will pick up the card for his girlfreind, cause he thinks it’s romantic. Might as well be a picture of a graveyard.

I’ve been grinding my gears.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been working away at this introductory entry. Only, that’s a lie. I’ve barely written a word.

What I have been doing in the past few weeks, apart from (nominally) my job, is reading other peoples’ blogs, listening to sensationalist news stories on NPR, surfing Wikipedia, printing out articles by radical feminist intellectuals, and folding and unfolding and reading and rereading and refolding them and sticking them in my pockets and getting drunk and scribbling mad notes on the backs of them, watching DVDs, laughing, psychoanalyzing my masturbatory fantasies, eating too much, eating too little, meeting new friends, making phonecalls, reading books, making jokes, listening to war stories – figurative and literal and sometimes involving decapitation, playing tourguide, playing Rock Band, having long processy conversations with my partners about consent and violence, walking gingerly, watching giant balloons ascend, crying, sleeping, having strange lucid dreams, lying in bed and staring at the ceiling…

When I have thought explicitly about writing this entry, it’s mostly been about how the hell to articulate my sticky political situation. I am a radical activist who believes in social justice in the abstract. At the same time, I am a sister, daughter, cousin, partner, lover and friend who has a visceral desire to protect myself and my loved ones from the damage and degradation we sustain daily by living within the current oppressive system, who just wants us to be safe. And who, simultaneously is an extremely privileged white, educated, able-bodied, upper middle-class, cisgendered American woman whose actions constantly perpetuate that same system of oppression – largely by being in active denial that the system even exists, much less that I am culpable in its existence.

All three of these “selves” have power. Each one has an agenda. And they wage constant war against each other, changing tactics, shifting alliances. Their battleground is the inside of my head; it is my body, inside and outside; it is my intimate relationships, my family, my community, my country, the world, the mutable past and the inchoate future. And one of the most powerful strategies each can employ is to convince whatever faculty controls my actions that it’s the real me. That other ways of being are illusions, bad habits, dysfunctions, daydreams…

And they are. Every one of them. And they’re real. Every one of them. So the battle rages on, and it roars around my skull, and there are lots of words, and questions, and screaming, and demands…but there aren’t many answers. Especially lately. So, lately, I don’t say much.

Instead, I’ve been paying more attention than usual to aches, pains and ailments that I’ve probably been ignoring for years. Not all of them physical. Some possibly imaginary. I’ve been having inchoate thoughts about the even more inchoate future. I’ve been thinking about family, holidays, community, class politics, responsibility, racism, power structures, identity, authenticity, money, magic, activism, academia, St. Petersburg and vegetable gardens even more than usual. I’m pushing the boundaries of things to see where they are. I’m demanding more gentleness in places where I’m toughest. I’ve been trying to reconceive my relationship with my body. I’ve been staring at myself naked in the mirror a lot. I haven’t had sex in over a month. I’m not sure I’ll ever go to Grad School. For three and a half days, I seriously considered buying a house. Then I realized that, OBVIOUSLY, the right thing to do is throw all previous plans to the wind and become a Chemistry teacher for poor middle schoolers in New York!

Dot dot dot…

Of course, that’s not the thing to do. It might be a thing to do. But it’s not The Thing To Do. Because the thing to do, for me, is write. It always has been. From the time I was a child, even before I knew how to put letters on paper, I’ve been writing every day. All I’ve been doing for the past few weeks is write this entry – even though I hadn’t put a word of it down until just now. All I’ve been doing for most of my life is write. I don’t even know yet what I’ve been writing, but I have damn well been writing it, because I can feel it living in my blood.

And if there is any possibility that I can make a more valuable contribution to the human community alive than dead, then whatever else I’m also doing, I have to write. Which means I need to treat myself and my community with care, and respect my health – not just physical – so that I’ll be in good enough shape to write. Because, no matter how good I am at it, or how insecure I am about that ability, for me, it’s write or die. (Which probably means, since I have write whether I’m any good or not, I should probably work on being good at it too. ) Writing is the thing that keeps the gun out of my mouth.

But it wasn’t until recently that I figured that out.

And it wasn’t until just now that I said it aloud in a public forum.

Wrote it aloud.

Why did it take so long?

Because if I believe that hard in myself as a writer, then that makes it real. And if it’s real, it has power. A lot of power.

And that is fucking scary.

But now I need that power – because I’ve chosen a side in my war against myself. Which doesn’t mean my internal battle won’t be a long-haul, tooth-and-nail, knock-down-drag-out fight – possibly for the rest of my life. Still, I’ve chosen the side of justice and meaningful communion with other human beings. I believe that it is real, and I am going to fight for it, and the most powerful way I can fight is to write that self into reality.

Starting here and now.
But how?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the inchoate future…

But radicalism is about returning to the root.

My brother gave me a clue. Yesterday, he scanned and sent me a hundred pictures of us as children – six and eight years old. In those photos, there were no answers. There were a hundred thousand markers of privilege and damage. And there was innocence, silliness, safety and love.

What I remembered, as I struggle to relate to the fractured world by relearning to relate to my fractured self, is that real love cannot coexist with violence. If I want to love my eight-year-old self scribbling happily on Christmas morning – which I do, oh god, I really really do – then I can’t hate the body I see naked in the mirror today. I can’t hate any of the bodies around me or any of the minds that inhabit them. I can hate the system of institutionalized violence, but I can’t hate any of the people trapped within it, which is all of us. I can’t even be quietly complicit in other peoples’ hatred. There is no middle ground. I have to actively resist all manifestations of hatred with every fibre of my being.

And I don’t know how to do that. I was raised, mired in privilege, to not know how. And anything I might learn, I’m brainwashed every day to forget…Which means I have to write it down.

As long as the question is how not to hate, and as long as I don’t know the answer, I have to write every day about what I don’t know. About what I’ve learned. I have to write with other people. About what’s unclear. About where we’re struggling – because I’m not the only one. And maybe, someday, there will be days when we do know some things. And when we know things, we have to write those down too and share them far and wide and read the things that other people know. Because everyone knows something, really, about how to love instead of hate.

Really, there is no war.
The war is the illusion, the bad habit, the dysfunction, the daydream.

What is there really?

There’s this:

P.S. I do believe in fairies.

Recently, the topic of my grim, heretical worldview, has started to raise conflicts with my friends and family. This always happens when the first Christmas lights go up in stores. Those lights are a sign that dissent is not to be tolerated.  I am at my most impotent in these moments, when the plastic bones of the malls show through their concrete exteriors. Most of the year, not having any money makes you a hero of the working class, but at Christmas, poverty, even the student’s false poverty, makes you an unwelcome outsider.

Additionally, turns out Christmas tree sales usually go up when the economy is down, as do big-box discount retailers. Christmas tree sales go up because when people cannot afford a lot of presents, they want to focus on the tradition itself, get back to basics. Meanwhile I start to get the urge to hit my head on something

Look, it’s true: cutting down a few Christmas trees is not the end of the world, and neither is spending millions of dollars on cheap plastic stuff. But it kind of sucks. It kind of sucks that the world that we have chosen to actualize depends on buying stuff, and that getting back to the heart of a tradition involves cutting down a tree and watching it slowly die in your living room. I would choose a different world. The basic idea, that people want to be creative, to do important work, to have strong connections to friends and family, none of these things requires a system of poverty and wealth, or the boom and bust of floods, famine, and war.

The rule of white, land owning men, as in the early stages of the U.S. nation, was a type of abuse. The exclusion of women from civil society was, and still is, a type of abuse. The treatment of African Americans is a type of abuse. Ultimately, a great deal of the relationships that form our environment qualify as some sort of abuse. Finding a way out of those relationships is mostly about re-imagining what type of world we live in. This is my project.

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My beliefs changed since my childhood to include a more encompassing perspective of the world. The reality of the world, not the beliefs I held, has helped reshape my opinions. However, belief has also changed how things appear. Somewhere in the middle there is a balance between how we perceive the world and how the world shapes our opinions. More and more, I find that I am in better balance with the world when I construct my beliefs to represent the information I gather from the world. The real molds the beliefs more than the other way around.

From a scientific set of beliefs, the “real” are things that can only be proven within thee method. This technique of evaluating the world has brought many changes to the world. Letting the evidence weigh more than what previous ideas have held has given more weight to concrete facts. The world has presented much evidence to reshape the ideas of what a super hero can be, something more tangible to practical crime fighting. The idea of one person being better than an entire police force is difficult to buy into. But, it is plausible that some situations require an act outside the traditional procedures that would give people the appearance of supper hero qualities.

However, there is much outside of the scientific construct that influences our lives. A belief to live is a large hurtle that often defies science. Counter factuals to the pragmatic world can hold a lot of weight. There are numerous stories out there that tell of how adventurers who make it out of a deadly situation when the odds were stack against them. A specific case to me that hits home is a family friend who is 98 right now. A few months ago it appeared as though death was eminent. One thing that hospice provided was a scribe for her to write down her life stories. This action alone gave her the belief in life, and has now curbed death until her tales have been told.

The trail and error of life has taught me that being a supper hero is not like it is in the tales kids are told. My belief to change the world has morphed into something different. Underlying there is still a hope and a belief, but the way in which I feel I can alter the world has been changed. I can no longer be a supper hero, but maybe, just maybe I can do supper things within the constraint of the real world.