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Jun. 25th, 2022
So much scariness
Jun. 25th, 2022 06:26 pmOne thing I keep thinking about is how long-haul this business is, and how we'll absorb it, and crowds will stop gathering with signs like it's the emergency it is, and I'll switch this new icon back to something else, and things will continue to erode.
This morning I watched a short film from the 1940s about film preservation. It'd just been on TCM. It was pretty absorbing, and a bit amusing, postulating about "our grandchildren" (a group of white boys) learning history in the future (February 1, 1999) from old film. Had some other good stuff too. But one thing that struck me, when it was showing footage of the big San Francisco fire, and then of the movie that used the footage to base its sets on, is how it feels like it would just figure if "the big one" came now, or soon. Catastrophic stuff is rampant, and looming.
A trans friend told me a couple of years ago how her struggles with depression are tied to the backlash and invigorated hatred. And that was a couple of years ago.
Even a little thing like the %age of critical reviews at my job (not reviews of workers---reviews of articles, which we edit), in the context of life these days, whispers at me as if it's part of an overall scheme.
Plus it's hot. And COVID's dropping here, slowly, but it ain't going nowhere. And I'm old. Older. Older still.
I used to be pretty closety about some of my fears for queers. Like I would be selective about who I'd tell, in the pre-gay-marriage days, that I personally would be hesitant---out though I am and have been since youth---to register a domestic partnership with the government. I'd sound like a nut, to most, pointing out that Germans did that in the 1920s, and then that info was really handy for rounding up folks, and proving the pink triangle was called for.
But, you know, I was also reading about transhumanism yesterday, after a coworker brought up the book Islands of Abandonment, which she recommends, and that led to talk about the post-humans films/series and book that a former friend was way into, and turned me onto one example of. The fascination with our oblivion is interesting. In there, anyhow, somehow I ended up looking at a Sara Teasdale poem, "There Will Come Soft Rains", which got at the same kind of imagining, more subtly. And the wikipedia page about it (linked to in the previous sentence) pointed out how its being written in 1918 placed it at the flu plague time AND smack in the middle of the Great War, and when she'd been reading Darwin, who'd just been getting out there. And also when the Sedition Act had made it illegal to say anything bad about the government.
Also the other day in the park I blurted out a thought aloud, and laughed heartedly, and then thought it should be in a song. So maybe it shall.
Back home soon, or soon-ish--- the library closes in an hour. Too late to go to ACE to look at the slidey window screen to make me feel more confident about Shamus Amos and that one window. I'll probably cave and order the better-looking one online. Lowes wasn't stocked with what I wanted either, and screw Home Depot and its greater contributions to right wing shits. I hear Menard's is even worse.
This morning I watched a short film from the 1940s about film preservation. It'd just been on TCM. It was pretty absorbing, and a bit amusing, postulating about "our grandchildren" (a group of white boys) learning history in the future (February 1, 1999) from old film. Had some other good stuff too. But one thing that struck me, when it was showing footage of the big San Francisco fire, and then of the movie that used the footage to base its sets on, is how it feels like it would just figure if "the big one" came now, or soon. Catastrophic stuff is rampant, and looming.
A trans friend told me a couple of years ago how her struggles with depression are tied to the backlash and invigorated hatred. And that was a couple of years ago.
Even a little thing like the %age of critical reviews at my job (not reviews of workers---reviews of articles, which we edit), in the context of life these days, whispers at me as if it's part of an overall scheme.
Plus it's hot. And COVID's dropping here, slowly, but it ain't going nowhere. And I'm old. Older. Older still.
I used to be pretty closety about some of my fears for queers. Like I would be selective about who I'd tell, in the pre-gay-marriage days, that I personally would be hesitant---out though I am and have been since youth---to register a domestic partnership with the government. I'd sound like a nut, to most, pointing out that Germans did that in the 1920s, and then that info was really handy for rounding up folks, and proving the pink triangle was called for.
But, you know, I was also reading about transhumanism yesterday, after a coworker brought up the book Islands of Abandonment, which she recommends, and that led to talk about the post-humans films/series and book that a former friend was way into, and turned me onto one example of. The fascination with our oblivion is interesting. In there, anyhow, somehow I ended up looking at a Sara Teasdale poem, "There Will Come Soft Rains", which got at the same kind of imagining, more subtly. And the wikipedia page about it (linked to in the previous sentence) pointed out how its being written in 1918 placed it at the flu plague time AND smack in the middle of the Great War, and when she'd been reading Darwin, who'd just been getting out there. And also when the Sedition Act had made it illegal to say anything bad about the government.
Any meaning of our existence, the article sez the poem says, exists only within us.
And you don't have to pull back too far to see that we aren't all that, compared to what we think we are. Or what we are to us.
I dunno. I'm just typing. But I think I like Sara Teasdale more than I thought I did.
Also the other day in the park I blurted out a thought aloud, and laughed heartedly, and then thought it should be in a song. So maybe it shall.
Back home soon, or soon-ish--- the library closes in an hour. Too late to go to ACE to look at the slidey window screen to make me feel more confident about Shamus Amos and that one window. I'll probably cave and order the better-looking one online. Lowes wasn't stocked with what I wanted either, and screw Home Depot and its greater contributions to right wing shits. I hear Menard's is even worse.