On a good day...

Even on a good day I have a hard time planning for the future. My future, any future. I've never been especially convinced that me, the country, the planet is going to last much longer, so I have, for....let's call it 50 years at this point, not really done much in the way of increasing my longevity or security. Kids, let this GenX poster child show you how to live life by the seat of your pants, and for a little bit, it's fun and exciting. Then is excruciating and confusing, and now? Now it's just day after day of WHY? Why bother? Why this? Why now? My mom would have been 81 today, and in the last months of her life she made it crystal clear she did not want to be around post-80 years old. Physically, I totally get it - having your skin suit just deteriorate in real time is a bummer. That said, I do have such a morbid curiosity about how terrible things are gonna get, and also how much longer these moron Americans who were born post cell-phones continue to ignore the WEALTH of historical evidence around them and just wander mindlessly into the AI void as the planet gets hotter while the servers clunk away sucking resources (water, primarily) that humans need. I am kind of obssessed with the amount of footage that is available from 100 years ago now. We are the first generations to be able to know what people looked and sounded like in real time. It seems to just have launched us in to a loop, and I find it fascinating. For thousands of years, people went about their lives never having their likeness really out in the world. Sure, if you were super wealthy, or a notable figure of some sort (your Mozarts, your Lois the VIII, that sort of thing) there would be paintings. Or random sculptures of people, wall paintings of general life - but did Steve from 1482 ever have a clutch of drawings on parchment of his wife and kids and what they did on that picnic in June? They did not. Even just 200 years ago, it was linoprint and handbills to communicate. News in newspapers was at least a day old, if not longer. Now, we are assaulted with constant information, constant reminders of all the lives that are going on around us, and this inordinate pressure to post our representation too, or be lost in the mix. I spend a lot of time now walking the dog in the nearby cemetary, and I think a lot about what happens there. Already, I can track the people who visit immediately after a burial; but there is one older Asian woman in a white SUV who parks almost every weekday at what appears to be her son's grave - she's almost always there when we typically walk at 4pm. I visited his headstone on the weekend when she was not there and he was interred last year. There are graves that are 75 years old that appear to never have flowers. Graves that are 15, 20 years old that get fresh flowers periodically through the year (holidays, obviously). It makes me wonder what the point of the markers is, really? Because, sure, 100 years later, someone could be walking their dog and look down and say "Huh, wonder what ol' Rolf did for a living?" and then moves on. Not many people will be in a cemetary regularly like me (or maybe, in this new reality people will look to these places as safe spaces away from traffic and random chaos). So you would be recognized as being someone who did exist, for a minute, by someone who had no idea who you were. I like to imagine a scenario like in Ricky Gervais' show After Life, where his daily visitation of his wife's recent grave leads him to a friendship with an older woman who also does a daily visit with her husband who had passed years before, and yet she still stopped by to say hi, but had also had moved on and found a new partner to share her current life happens in the real world as well. Is that important? Have we ever shared with our family stories about other people's names and existance, if we never met them, or experienced them? That is what history is made of, after all, and it almost feels like no one is interested in history any longer. My mom will vanish from memory when we are gone - I guess my nephews (at least 2 of them, who were lucky enough to spend 5+ formative years with her) may occasionally reference her, and probably in much more favorable light than I referenced her parents. Ok, that's not entirely true, I generally have good thnings to say about my Gramps, but Grams? Yeah, oddly not so cheerful. I remember her though, and can still tell stories and remember her voice (sort of). It's weird though, because we didn't own any footage (or at least any I've been able to see, the old tapes my mom held on to wouldn't play in her VCR) of them, so all of the experiences we shared are all just memories in our heads. Dreams, really. Did those things happen? I read old journals and sometimes I can remember the events, but not always, and recently, names of people do not ring bells. Things you think you'll remember forever fall away, but some stuff sticks forever, and it's not the stuff you expect. I wish to hell I could remember details of being on Serbian TV, you think that would have stuck, would have been a big deal. Of drinking beer under the Eiffel Tower, of what the Norwegian Ferries felt like. What the streets of Arhus were like. Oslo. More of France. I am thankful I have the photos I do, and that my eye was drawn to ephemera, but I also wish I had more of a journalistic eye and had taken more photos of places and people. Anyway. My head lately feels like it's going to explode, and that's not just figuratively; the Afrikkaner refugees being greeted by the Deputy Sectratary of State? Relocated to IDAHO? So now we are just recruiting Nazis because they are trying to cleanse this country? Fucking terrible humans. Clearly this administration is trying to use every hour of the next year convincing all of us who value kindness and creativity and diversity (yep, I said it) out of the country on our own dime. If that doesn't work, of course they will eventually come for us too. I mean me, thanks to the Student Loan takeback, I'm back on the precipice of not having social security, and being garnished for my last 5 years of working. Classic American Republican bullshit. I just do not, and will not ever understand the fear of people who vote for this oppressive control in their lives. I've never understood it, this need to be told a story to explain why bad shit happens - it seems crystal clear to me that most bad shit happens because of human greed. Greed for power, greed for money, just greed to be the person who has all the toys. The one who always wants the ball. It always comes down to that shit.