Oh my barbaric Ninotchka
What happened to summer?
Some causes worth your monetary consideration this month: TENI, MASI, DRCC.
A lot has happened this June. Unrest, hate, accusations, apologies, hopelessness, hopefulness, blog posts, disappearing stories, walls of text, strategic silences, flag-planting, death, illness, doubts, machinations, orchestrated campaigns, the kitchen sink. And we still have a few days left in this usually jubilant month. This usual run of trickling work weeks and fast-paced weekends. A few days ago, forks of lightning broke night skies and rain didn’t follow. The morning rhythm of metal spoons tinkling delph and the kettle clicking off during its gurgling boil is often joined by the tappings of rain and the swarm of car wheels outside meeting wet tarmac. That airshow zoom and fade. I’m not hearing birdsong. At this stage, The Abyss could happen. Contact could happen. Mars Attacks! could happen. Me acknowledging the noise is coming from inside the planet could happen.
I’ve been fine these past few months. I had some practice after spending a huge chunk of last year not being gainfully employed, waiting for a surgery date and writing a dissertation. I processed a lot of emotions alone at dining tables. I also lived abroad for a period in my early twenties and the people I regularly physically talked to amounted to a slim number – not a circle, more like scattered dots on an XY graph. That sort of experience stays in your hair, like arsenic.
However, this month was scratchy. Every day exhausted me. The causes of the protests, history’s most popular children’s author becoming a mascot for intolerance, the failure of industries to protect the women operating within them, the struggle victims of crimes face when seeking resolution. I’m not personally or professionally affected by the open wounds. I have and continue to live a blessed life. I’m this close to praying over my food.
Watching people having to endure a pandemic alongside exposed emotional wiring has made a mockery of summer. Climate change already changed the goalposts, but now bad people have caused a sort of trauma hurricane.
In an effort to pull on my mental galoshes during this what-the-fuck fugue, I finally completed a task I had left in the fridge for far too long. It had a spiky white potentially murderous mould. Annihilation spores. But not to worry, I doused it in bleach. I released the hawk. And then for some reason, I decided to do some more admin gardening and logged into Tumblr and deleted most the accounts I set up and only used once or twice. The emails associated with ownership were eating at me. I laid waste to the projects I wanted to start, complete, make mine. The cultural outputs with which I identified. Phosphorus intense love for movies I haven’t seen in a near-decade. Watch this, the most delightful moment in cinema. Curios I stanned before I knew the verb.
I recalled the YouTube project The Lizzie Bennet Diaries – a vlog which retold Pride and Prejudice and handled the casual cruelty of Elizabeth towards Lydia really, really well. I always maintain no modern heroine is likeable when the prototype is actually a bitch – and that’s okay. Can we end the unlikeable protagonist debate? The implication that some variation of Pollyanna is the default leading lady for whom we all turn pages is the Building 7 of cheap cultural reportage. Just stop mentioning it.
At intervals I had pangs of ‘dear God, what were you thinking?’ and then I remembered that 2012 was a really weird time to graduate. That cliché about all your cells dying and renewing over a number of years and making a technically new body doesn’t account for mortification. That stuff lingers. It’s the mistake in the knitting pattern you’ll always notice and the eagle-eyed will bring up at parties. But there was a sort of beauty in all that frantic confidence, that plotting for world domination and yearning to be at the centre of a sliver of change. I wish that ambition on everyone.