You ever get to that weird place, where you start to see the cornerstones of your childhood from a wildly different perspective? Like when you’re eight years old and hiding out with the Little Mermaid in her cavern of thingamabobs and she’s like, Maybe he’s right, maybe there IS something the matter with me. I just don’t see how a world that makes such wonderful things…could be bad? all while holding a fork, and you’re like, YESSS! A mermaid thinks we’re cool! Join us!! And then all of a sudden you’re 45 and can’t unsee just how very, very bad a world that makes forks can be, and now you’re screaming, Oh shit! King Triton tried to warn us! RUN ARIEL, RUN!!

I wanna be, where the people are
I wanna see, wanna see ’em dancing

Do mermaids cry under the sea? If they do, how can you tell? Lately I’ve been doing a lot of what I like to refer to as Open Air Crying. Everything else appears business as usual, but tears are streaming down my face and I just let them. It’s wildly liberating. People cry for all sorts of reasons. Tears of joy and love and happiness. Tears of sadness, pain and loss. For me it’s been the weird mixed up entangled ball of it all. Big ‘ole Earth tears.

And I’m not trying to hide any of them, regardless of their origin story or my current situation. I don’t feel the need to interrupt the process or wipe the evidence away. Maybe someone is reading this right now thinking, well that explains it.

Sometimes I’m even not fully aware it’s happening, they glide down familiar grooves, registering like a warm breeze. I’ll read a small note or tune-in to a little something that harmonizes with my head and ope, trickle trickle. Or I’ll internalize lyrics to a song I’ve been bee-bopping around to for years, I tend to feel music before I hear it, but when they click, BOOM, face rain. Or I’ll overhear a stranger compliment another stranger walking down the street and whoops, there they flow. That’s all it takes.

Rather inexplicable until I considered it’s possible I’m holding a baseline level of tears of constant sorrow for the state of humanity every single day, that all it takes is one more drop of any kind to overflow the vessel. And I’m beyond appreciative the drop that triggers the waterfall derives almost exclusively from joy.

The more generic and automated the world becomes, the more darkness revealed, the less ashamed I am to openly emote. People are meant to feel things. One might even consider it a cornerstone of humanity. But humanity has always been a bit confusingly robotic, so many people following the same basic path that I had to squint to see. This entire blog was born over a decade ago when I was in dire straits, desperately needing an outlet to say my piece even if no one heard. To put my best foot forward, even if no one saw my pretty shoes. A Hail Mary of sorts, to help explain Me to Myself, why every time I came to a fork in the road, my first instinct was to bushwhack a new path, unimpressed with the multiple choice options presented by society. A heavy penchant for the TBD. You know. The OTHER fork. Not openly offered and rarely discussed. At least it felt that way back then. We’ve come a long way since 2013. Or maybe we’re exactly where we’ve always been and it’s just a perspective shift. I don’t know. The more I know, the less I truly understand.    

You know those AI (probably) generated images where you’re looking at a beautiful scene, then they zoom way in on the globe on the desk or zoom way out to the entire city and you’re presented an entirely different but equally intricate visual experience? A picture in a picture times infinity in all directions. Kinda like the 1978 mosaic cover of The Talking Heads album More Songs About Buildings and Food made up of 529 distorted polaroids of the band members making up a bigger distorted image of the band.

What if Earth is somewhere in the middle of The Zoom? Zoom In on the micro-level and spend a whole day in A Bug’s Life. Zoom Out to the galaxy and WE become the bugs. What if Earth itself is a petri dish? And we’re (you + me & the bees & the trees) the microorganisms some entity MUCH bigger than ourselves is studying. Pulling levers. Adding variants. Making hypotheses. Tracking scientific outcomes. Or whatever they call science.

I don’t know. Maybe we’re all characters in someone else’s video game, but most of us are NPCs (non-player characters). And the goal is figure out who the “real” people are.

I’m not the only one jumping down these rabbit holes. Bugonia hit a little too close to my headspace. I unplugged my TV shortly after and gave it a makeover. Gotta keep my head straight with how much fucked up shit is actually happening.

Also, when you jump down the rabbit hole, you’re bound to encounter a lot of rabbits, which is how I’m explaining the excess of city bunnies in my neighborhood this year. There’s so many even Fred barely registers them anymore. Because this is where they live. Down in the rabbit hole. And they are so unbothered by our presence, I’m not even sure they see us. Maybe the whole ‘hood is digging deep. Speaking of. Remember SimCity? The open-ended city-building game from the 90s? Be the hero of your very own city as you design a beautiful busting metropolis! No end goal, no end really, progress doesn’t reach a conclusion, am I right?

I’m including the description because I don’t think you will click on the link and I need you to read it:

Gameplay

SimCity titles are real-time management and construction simulators. Across most titles, the player (acting as mayor) is given a blank map to begin and must expand the city with the budget provided. As the city matures, the player may be able to add government and other special buildings (such as a mayor’s house or courthouse), depending on how large the city is. 

Proper management of the city requires citizens to be provided with basic utilities (electricity, water and sometimes waste management) along with public services such as health, education, safety, parks and leisure facilities. These are provided by building relevant buildings or infrastructure, with each building covering a circular “range” in its vicinity. Inadequate funding of these services can lead to strikes or even urban decline.

The primary source of income is taxation, though some income can be generated by legalizing gambling or placing certain “special” buildings such as military bases or prisons. The player may make deals with neighboring cities to sell or buy services, as long as a connection is made to the neighbor for that service, such as electricity cables. The player may have to deal with disasters, such as fires and tornadoes, or fictional crises such as monster attacks.

Aside from a monster attack (depending on the monster), BOOOOORING. You guys. Seriously. Ariel would be wildly disappointed to find out this is what people with legs are walking around doing. Feels like a huge waste of legs. She gave up her voice for this? I mean tell me what is the point of coming home from work to play a game of fake work? Making fake money through fake progress. In a fake community. Dealing with fake disasters. If it’s work you crave, maybe that time and effort might be better spent building real community and doing real work with real rewards, financial or otherwise.

I struggle to comprehend the appeal to anyone. It’s like life without any of the bits that make real life worth living. The entire being ALIVE part. I mean we live in a world with electronic pets, which also grosses me out. Don’t get it, don’t want to, not interested in a debate. It always ends with: get a plant. But I do understand addiction. I spent years building out medical software programs based on the ever changing criteria for behavioral health, an entire semester creating a campaign for Gamblers Anonymous, and I always seem to be within arms reach of someone addicted to something.

In 2020 I got real got by this Two Dots game. What started as a distraction recommended by the New York Times became a daily part of my life I forgot was happening. The point of the game doesn’t really matter if you’re not familiar, just know it’s a game made for phones. Over time it became obvious I would win only if the program wanted me to. Sometimes I’d have like two more moves and they’d call it with confetti, move onto the next level, leaving me to wonder WTF happened. Don’t steal my success.

On the flip side, sometimes they’d make the levels so impossible to beat, you’d become convinced the only way possible was by forking over actual money for little treasure chests with magical tools. I caught onto that pretty quick, but joke’s on them. I don’t mind playing the same level 4000 times. I will bore you before you bore me, little bots. I’ve hiked myself into a meditative state wearing the same clothes and eating the same food every day for over four months straight. Twice. I don’t need to win, I’m here for the distraction. But then they started offering a free booster box in exchange for watching an advert, which in the dark-dark times, I did. Probably a worse choice, looking back. You know what they say about time. Like I said. I was deep in it for a minute.

^{She gave me this copy of her dad’s comic. Found an old basement frame and hung it up at The Museum in the kitchen above Billy, obviously.}

Anyway. To understand the current state of our world, all you have to do is observe a few cheap iPhone game advertisements. I watched so many of these in awe and horror. Like the one featuring a scrappy looking woman and little kid and you have to choose whether to give her a bed or warm clothes, or repair a broken chimney or a broken window, with a snowstorm whipping around, and no matter which one you choose, the elements break through and the family suffers. And sometimes there’d be this douchey-looking rich couple tapping their feet demanding rent as they checked their Rolex. Sheesh. What happened to little Mario hitting a question mark popping out a mushroom head and becoming big Mario?

Then there’s the generic farming edition of SimCity, where the basic concept is to work work work, (which translates to circle circle circle with your finger) so you can grow grow grow to make your farm bigger and your equipment fancier and maybe get yourself a farm hand or two because its all about the money money money. This one made me laugh. My previous partner turned forever friend grows my vegetables and all I could think about was farmer Mike coming in from a long day of tractor work and cuddling up with his phone to play this stupid farming game.

Like any overachieving child, at first I tried to do as much as I could in the seconds they forced you to watch to qualify for a free booster box. The moment I realized what I was doing, I started making the farmer run around in circles. Or bang into the side of the barn repeatedly. Or trap him in the fence corner with a pile of money. Anything but be productive. YOU SEE THAT, WHOEVER IS WATCHING? Those were some weird times.

They murdered a baby in Mississippi a few weeks ago when like 20 officers showed up responding to a shop-lifting call in a Walmart parking lot. The diapers were paid for but if that’s your first concern, you’re missing the point. Go back to Square 1.

A noise complaint in LA left a woman without her two year old puppy. Because police shot him too. Bernedoodle, a breed notorious for being gentle loving family dogs. Can confirm, I know one named Betty (see below). Jameson was wearing a Knicks jersey, just celebrating a historic win with his mom.

They arrested 15 Minnesotans for showing up for their neighbors during Operation Metro Surge. But let’s be real, for political dissent.

They sentenced people protesting the Prairieland concentration camps in Texas from 30-100 years in federal prison. One for moving a box of “leftist literature.” A box of zines. So obviously not for what they did, but for who they are.

Fuck the patriarchy.

One more time, for the people in the back and also my Dad: ANTIFA IS NOT A DOMESTIC TERRORIST ORGANIZATION. It means Anti-Fascist. As in, against fascism. There is no leader, no headquarters. It’s a movement. An ideology. A way of life. For people who care about their neighbors and don’t want to live under an authoritarian regime. So yeah, I guess by that definition, it probably IS the largest threat to the current regime. Meanwhile, they not only pardoned but wanted to financially reward January 6 rioters, and rich white men are still molesting children while the world turns a blind eye. They’ve arrested more people for touching the peeling paint of the reflecting pool in DC than for the atrocities in the Epstein files. I’d argue not a single person has been held accountable for the most notorious sex-trafficking operation in our lifetime.

But hey, the World Cup.

These are the heavy things I carried around weightlessly in my modern day Care Bear satchel this past weekend as the world kept turning, business as usual. They were with me on my early morning walk to the Farmer’s Market, in search of flowers for the Museum. And driving out to the big dog park, where all the dogs seem to match their owners, just like they say. I dropped them on the chair next to me while eating al fresco at Umami, served by a woman who recognized me from last week when I came in with a mutual friend. I left them at the door of the pop-up mobile art camper my new friend Jo curated based on a comic her Dad created in the 90s about an alien who makes a kid with a gorilla, which I only explored because the skate shop wasn’t open yet, a place I discovered existed last week through my friends Janet and Josh, a “retired” tailor who recently sold his shop space to Mouse whom he met at some point making a few fits for the Madison Roller Derby and this is how you build community. 

I stepped out of 608 Skate holding a piece the artist named “Inspire” thinking next time? I’ll leave with actual skates. My ears were greeted with the unmistakable melody of the saxophone coming from the cozy shaded nook of Willy Street Park. My eyes settled on a sign for Make Music Madison. And two steps later, for the upcoming neighborhood festival, Fete de Marquette. The world is on fire, still the music plays. Walking home I marveled at the beauty poking through the heavy darkness in these magnificent tiny ways, leaving a steady trail of earth tears in my wake. I think Ariel would like this part.

If you look for it, I’ve got a sneaky feeling you’ll find that love actually is all around.