Echo Chamber
Most, I think, haven’t the fortitude for- Shit like we’re living through. To process it nor to even passively exist through it and it’s created a state of existence for many that’s hell, that shatters some of the hardiest of nerves, that has us wondering throughout any given day, “What the fuck now? What now? What’s next?” Though others of us gleefully holler to bring more on, that it’s what they’ve been waiting for, dreaming of, striving for, praying for, lusting after. That which is “next”. Or, at hand. When, in auditing one’s own memory of some past epoch, even in the most interesting of which, someone like me is left wondering when things changed, when – though the heat got turned way up at times, then – couldn’t one just shut it down and out of mind and retreat into someplace or some way of getting through a moment and live as though their world wasn’t about to end? Am I recalling it right? Or is it some kind of manufactured memory that was never any less hard to get through than today?
Half of the people I know are in echo chambers, refusing to come out. I can’t talk to many whom- These are the people, I wail, with whom I need to speak dearest. I need to tell them I worry. I need to tell them I’m hurting. I need to discuss the serious with them. They can’t be bothered. Meanwhile, as this is going on, some one of them’s gotta talk to me, but I’m too far into the river for reaching and nobody’s bringing me back. Whose perception is clear, correct?
This is the frame in which I pause for a sip of tea and- I dunno. It’s exhausting. All of it. Will the other shoe drop? We liberals dwell in the expectation of it to drop as the far right yearns for Armageddon.
“I don’t follow,” she said. Confessing that, anyway, I’d become too opaque for her to feature.
She wasn’t into the theories I espoused that warned of shit like coup d’état’s and jackboots and bonfires where her books used to be. Unlike me, she wasn’t seeing swastikas everywhere she looked and freight cars being marshaled strategically across the country. She didn’t like him, didn’t much care to listen to him. But was it really as bad as all this? And wasn’t I really only being paranoid and a bit melodramatic?
I explained that we’d hired an administrator, not a king, and I wasn’t any part of that “we”, anyhow. But she rolled her eyes and excused herself as the clock indicated it was time for her to catch her stories.
“Nothing works in a timeframe like that, anymore,” I pointed out to her, but she shrugged it off and sank into another place.
Hang on; lemme get another slug of this Assam.
They’re scraping the very names of federal organizations from above their entrances and- Some of us are looking on, wondering of the rest as to what we’re getting ourselves worked-up about. The “they” in question being unsanctioned by the legislature nor were they ever voted in to the shit they’re doing. Files are being raided of their sensitive data while some cheer it on, but this isn’t anything to celebrate.
It's 10:24 p.m. I imagine it’ll be another sleepless night. My body’s ligaments and tendons are being turned to bone. I’m looking at a near future of crippling pain. I’m feeling it now, not being able to get comfortable-enough to sleep through a night, left to lie there with all these notions going through my head, envisioning the oncoming date in which they finally do it, finally rig up a fire in the Reichstag and give themselves the last excuse they need to tear us down.
I mentioned this to someone, recently, who just laughed at me, but one day, that someone will be the last fucker they shuffle off to Guantanamo and who’ll be left to dream of a true America, then?