Tired of Rooms (Week Twenty-Two)

This week my mother called me from Pennsylvania, where she lives with my father in a long-term assisted living facility (meaning they have an apartment but full-time medical care is available if they need it). A first-wave feminist, she's spent a good portion of her life protesting, marching, and consciousness raising, and she -- along with a few of her left-leaning friends, who are definitely in the minority -- have been meeting to discuss ways to help with the election. One of their ideas was to put a notice in the community newsletter, which goes out to all of the residents, saying that they would be happy to assist anyone interested in absentee/mail-in voting by either 1) helping to get a ballot, or 2) helping to fill it in. There was no mention of voting for a particular party. As with everything in that goes in the newsletter, the notice had to be vetted and approved by the management of the facility, which is subsidiary of a corporation located somewhere in the midwest. You might (or might not) think that a non-partisan message about voting would not be controversial in the United States, but my mother told me that several residents complained to the management of the facility and to the corporate headquarters, saying that it was 'too political.' She was worried: could she get 'kicked out' of her facility? It dawned on her that she was in many ways at the mercy of a corporation, and I couldn't disagree. I told her that I doubted that anything would come of it, but that I understood her impulse to 'tone down' her political convictions when interacting with her neighbors, which of course is how we are taught to operate in a corporate workspace. When your livelihood (or housing) is at stake -- or even if it feels that way to you -- you learn pretty quickly to filter what you say for fear of offending others, particularly those who are (or seem to be) connected to the power of the institution. I felt bad for my mother, and I felt bad for our country.

In the twenty-second week of the lockdown, I often felt overwhelmed by alternating states of futility and complacency. I saw a tweet in which a member of Congress wrote about his disbelief and anger that the USPS was removing mailboxes, to which someone responded: you should write to your Congressman! (Or something to that effect). As I watch the dismantling of our democratic mechanisms, I'm not sure how to respond. It's like we need ongoing demonstrations across the entire country (world) for at least the next year, and who's going to organize that, much less participate? So many of us are living under excruciating pressure: to make money, to stay healthy, to take care of children (cats). We go about our lives with the expectations that our representatives will fight for our interests and that our political opponents will to some extent respect the law. But that's not happening, and nobody seems capable of stopping those who don't follow the law. There are pockets of hope and resistance, but the leaders of these pockets are themselves marginalized by their own institutions (e.g., AOC's sixty seconds).

Much of the time, life feels incongruously normal. I wake up, I go for runs, I spend the day working (more or less: there are no bright lines in the lockdown), I watch television or play guitar or read a book. I sometimes talk to friends. And this normalcy, when I juxtapose it with the outside world/my Twitter feed, is jarring. It makes me feel a little guilty for what's happening, not because I support it in theory or in practice, but because my participation in (an increasingly bad) society somehow makes me a participant. But this realization brings with it nothing but a sense of futility, because I *have* to participate to live. In some ways, it's the fundamental flaw with a system that requires people to make a choice between working and starving. In my new fantasy government, nobody would be forced to work. (There would also be no billionaires.)

On a less dire note, this week I did make a discovery about myself -- and specifically my interest in music and running -- which was the result of recording a new song. The song has two instrumental breaks, during which I played one of my all-time favorite drum beats, which (in my mind, anyway) has roots in 1) The Velvet Underground (and specifically the song 'What Goes On'), 2) The Modern Lovers (and specifically 'Roadrunner'), 3) Bedhead (and specifically 'Living Well'), and 3) so much of (early) Stereolab ('The Seeming and the Meaning' or 'Jenny Ondioline' among many others). Anyway, what I realized listening to this beat is that it captures a kind of mood or energy that I associate with distance running; it's not exactly soothing, but is tranquilizing; repetitive and energizing, like it pushes you into this almost mindless state of motion that you want to last forever. It's like a dream state in which you are moving through a landscape that is shimmering and electrified. Here's the song:

And the link.

Recording notes: Recorded and mixed with Cubasis 3 on an iPhone 8. I stretched my iPhone's memory to the outer limits with this song and -- to make it work -- had to delete a few tracks (I probably didn't need them). I was excited to use a Rickenbacker 12-string on the instrumental sections that I bought twenty+ years ago at the height of my obsession with the Byrds.