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I stared out the window as he began to tell me everything he knew about computers. I could tell his greatest need, or mine, was to sit alone in a park for an hour and be as silent as a stone.
because I hated therapists and had never seen one.
Why?
Some things remain mysterious even if you think about them all the time.
Had taken steps never to get better at cooking, throughout my long, bumpy career as a woman.
I never much understood the point of the world of men. How they fed off each other. How they motivated themselves. I mean, I got the purpose, but I navigated that world the way an astronaut would an alien landscape. Trying not to breathe the same air. Which was impossible, of course.
I would never know what information they conveyed at the urinal,
A kind of scam, but also like detective work—figuring out how companies worked instead of how they said they worked. Found the security gaps. Sold the fear of security gaps.
We lived in a generic version of reality.
I became a wrestler because I loved a certain kind of aggression born, in part, of joy.
Like bears are always injured, exist in that state, I was always injured.
But to me back then … that was a state of being. To be joyful was to have the signs of having stretched myself, and injury told me who I was supposed to be, just as soreness told the older me now.
You had to make the client feel insecure to force him to be secure. Reflexive security, most of it. A
“Using ‘us’ when thinking about the environment erases all the different versions of ‘us,’” Silvina once said. “Many indigenous peoples don’t think this way. Counterculture doesn’t always think this way. Philosophy, knowledge, policy exist that could solve our problems already.”
That month the southern white rhino and a species of pangolin had gone extinct. Wildfires in five countries meant animals were crawling to the side of roads to beg people speeding by in cars for water. People were poisoning vultures and shooting bats out of the sky, scared of pandemics. To care more meant putting a bullet in your brain. So, like many, I had learned to care less. Silvina called it “the fatal adaptation.”
Even if some birds could now winter in Southern California due to climate change. It was still too long a migration for too small a group.
This stutter-step of disaster after natural disaster was just a blip next to LED lights, driverless cars, a possible end to poverty through gene-edited crops.
Strength lived in my body so directly back then that I could mistake it for armor.
knew how activism became terrorism—in part, the shifting goalposts of changed laws.
“Yeah—she’s hitting it out of the ballpark. Thanks for keeping her on the straight and narrow.” All these dead words we used.
We could do drones well, but we could not stop pouring plastic waste into the ocean.
The sense of being motionless once at altitude. Outside of time, outside of history. Even with weather delays, in first class you could almost forget the world was fucked.
realize he was just saying and doing all the things his father had said to and done with him. And I had a vision, down through history, of a series of dad-robots saying and doing the same things and other sons and daughters
The fact that the repressive tendencies of our leaders helped our profession.
The truth we never uttered: that the Republic could become a husk and our borders a quagmire of death and discomfort … but this only strengthened our job security.
I’d bought into systems that despised me.
“We have killed so much that perhaps we thought killing a little more wouldn’t matter. If it could save us for another year, another five years. Out of sight so we never saw most of it. Or, if we saw, we disbelieved the extent or it had already happened. Like roadkill. Like an accident. Not purposeful, or the purpose having fled.
This descent into speculation. As if the systems that I used, and that used me, deformed her.
How you’re drawn back into your own shit no matter what the distraction.
must love what has been damaged, because everything has been damaged. And to love the damage is to know you care about that world. That you’re still alive. That the world is alive.
Worse things than cattle led to market. Worse things than being reduced to a piece of taxidermy. But how much worse and why? Did the amount of suffering matter? Did wild or domesticated matter? We interfered with all, left nothing alone,
what I had borne witness to wasn’t just a minor miracle but, in fact, a moment that would replicate only another hundred or another thousand times. “That in the history of the world, a naiad hummingbird would only come to the ground to drink a finite number of times before they no longer existed.
How many of these run-down properties did Vilcapampa companies own? Too many, but maybe if you had that much capital, the small stuff became forgotten. Best way to live off the grid: in the amnesia zone of large corporations.
Drove through a grid and grief of traffic so predictable it lacerated me now, when I wanted to go fast and reckless. We all expected the slowness, even if it didn’t slow us down. All of our minds drifting there together alone.
Imagine there comes a day when all of that, everything you’ve created, is gone. It’s not because it’s been discovered or thrown away. It’s because the person you imagined it with doesn’t exist anymore.
As an analyst, that raised a red flag.
Daangling mod
A lack that nagged at me: never mention of any pets. No dog, cat, or even hamster.
While stocks remained bullish about the future even as the window for reversing climate change had shrunk to an unreachable dot.
“Democracy is not enough because it is never really Democracy. The -ism that will fix this has not been written down because it exists in what remains of the world beyond us and we cannot read that language.
me? These needs and wants, these paranoid fears that half the time were actually something. But usually not worth the victim knowing the truth.
“The truth is, the only way we save ourselves is to get to the end faster.
No way to find within my father the things I had needed from him—because they had never been there. Not withheld. Never present.
Extinction of P. omena is attributed to habitat degradation. Extinction of H. sapiens is attributed to destroying its own habitat. There
Do you know how many secret drones lacerate the sky these days? They’ll outlast us all. Form their own civilization.”
“My, the things we worry about at the end of history. No.
As he beat me senseless, at least one of us had begun to understand that history would wash over us indiscriminate, like the gray-green, the green-gray dawns and dusks. That so little would matter.
sometimes powerful forces pass through your life that speak to you but, in the end, keep their own counsel. That they wash over you like an extreme weather event, then are gone. No analysis can fill in the rest.
“Landscape isn’t fragile. It’s what we impose upon it that’s fragile. We must be ruthless about the foreground. We must trust the backdrop. Do you know how to do that? Can we trust in that?”
One hundred years. What is the world like now? What is the world like after the end of the world? Is there a hummingbird, a salamander? Is there a you?
