I woke up unwillingly early, and I had them bad.

From the Latin hemicrania (“pain in one half of the head”), from Ancient Greek …

In fact they’ve plagued me for days. This time the word popped into my head (I heard it first in Obrien’s novels again of course), and it’s now two o’clock in the morning as I fight back at last.

Fighting back. I turn to my feed for support, and I found this, posted only an hour ago.

Chase Woodruff
is angry and he thinks you should be too

A ‘podcast extra’ from the excellent On The Media show.

Woodruff was Let Go from his job about the same time as me, and he’s pissed, but not because of it exactly.

This is the living heart of what he had to say.

Anger has gone out of vogue in american journalism …
All of us are taught how to hide how we feel …
Taught to associate incivility with lack of emotional maturity and intelligence

Journalists have a responsibility to honor that anger, and failing to do so and failing to wield it against the powerful … has led down this road where people feel like their anger isn’t being heard …

I do believe that my megrims have something to do with that sense of voicelessness.

There’s something twisted and ironic about that. I do have a voice, strong and pure. And even a half-ass outlet for it, here.

Woodruff had a full-assed one, but it’s been cut down to size by the failing state of the alt-weekly where he practiced journalism for money.

So he took his anger and self-published it. He spilled, for free.

http://chasewoodruff.com/stay-mad/

They died because we live in a country that makes a sick 72-year-old woman work to survive.

If we don’t (address the righteous anger), if we keep running from rage and calling it wisdom, one day we’ll look back and realize that it’s stopped chasing us, because somewhere along the way we stopped believing in our own power to change anything at all.

What he’s describing is the pernicious paradoxical spiral that I’m experiencing as the megrims; it’s already happened.

I’ve dropped into a fatalistic acceptance of our death, individually and collectively as a democracy, and even as a species.

There’s nothing I can do to change the fact of my own death, or that of anyone I love.

Over the last decade, I’ve started to believe that the same is true about the high end of that too. I think the reasons why we’ll end ourselves as humans are hard-coded into our faulty DNA, and that yes, there’s nothing we can do to change that.

I can love Greta Thunberg for her resistance and her anger, without believing that her beautiful fight-back will … work. And I do. Dis. Believe.

What that leaves is the middle ground, of the death of democracy, and here my rage has an outlet. This is why I regress into writing about politics too often.

I don’t believe that Our Revolution has any chance of saving the democratic experiment from death either, especially not after it was pragmatically betrayed, twice, by the Sanders candidacy.

Death of the self, death of the species, death finally of the cultural ways we have left to deal with any of it.

Sorry to be such a Debbie Downer, I wish for my sake as a writer and yours as a reader that I had a way to see it differently, and share the hope of that view.

The question as it has always been is: Oh Fucking Great, So Now What?

The unsatisfactory answer is essentially the same too, for me.

I keep a journal without aspiring for it to be any kind of journal-ism, and pour out the tragedy and anger and megrims through it.

I spill, therefore I am.

The souls I keep closest, beyond the ones with whom I share decades of personal history, are of two kinds.

There are those who still believe that effective change is almost and barely possible, like Greta, and Michael Moore. I don’t share that fundamental belief any more, but I still want to share it. I let them fill me once in a while with false hope, like a drug, to keep going. Kicking that habit will be essential, for the project of dying free, but for now I can’t get by without them. Sort of like the nicotine, some days.

Then there are the souls who are broken like me, like mine. This is what I love Scott Carrier for. He does what I do. He starts projects and abandons them. He puts out attempts and they often fail dismally. But the work is there as evidence of something vague. It generates a little income sometimes too, or patronage at least, and that keeps him going … going.

Success eludes him, and me.

Sometimes it’s beautiful, too.

I wore his t-shirt to my ‘exit interview’, a sketched design around the white letters on black: Home Of The Brave.

Irony and bliss amen.