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new things to love in a dreary new world
Thursday, November 10 2016
Today was another day in that bleak world we now live in. Initially, even as early as the night of the returns, it had read plausibly as a nightmare from which I might awaken. But at this point the nightmare was too elaborate and logically-consistent to be a nightmare. But I was making some progress at coming to terms with it. Last night I'd had to use some helpful mindfulness exercises (learned at the recent organizational retreat!) to clear my mind of panic-inducing thoughts, though today I didn't initially resort to any substances to help me through the day.
But then Gretchen headed off for Philadelphia to meet up with a class at the University of Pennsylvania, where her book Kind was being studied, and I decided to have a beer for at noon, which coincides with the beginning of my Pacific-time workday. It didn't really help that much with my stress levels, and mostly just made me feel tired and weak. [REDACTED]
When one has been through an experience as horrible as what happened on Tuesday, it's good to develop new attachments in the dark dreary new world one now lives in. So I watched the first episode of Black Mirror, a non-serialized British series depicting dystopian aspects of our increasingly-technological present (and near-future, presuming there is any sort of future). It had come highly-recommended from Susan and David. The first episode is deliberately shocking; the Prime Minister, in hoping to defuse a hostage situation involving a popular princess, is forced to have sex with a pig on live television. (I might've spoiled it for you there, though at no point as I watched it did I think he would not be having sex with a pig.) I don't know that I love Black Mirror, but I'll give it a few episodes.
Another new thing I've been enjoying has been a song entitled "The Apple Never Falls" from Radars to the Sky, a sort of poppy variant on the shoegaze/noise-punk idea. The lyrics and bass are loud while the relentless wall of guitar is contained in a tiny sonic space. I'm a sucker for an icy back-and-forth between a male and female vocalist (a sound pioneered in "Don't You Want Me" by the Human League), and that's probably the thing I like most in "The Apple Never Falls." Furthermore, the lyrics seem to be about dealing with stress by drinking alcohol, which was precisely what I was doing when I first heard this song on my SomaFM Bagel Radio stream.
Later I began watching the 2015 horror movie The Witch, which is set in a convincingly-empty and forbidding New England landscape in mid-1600s (actually it is filmed in a remote part of Ontario near Lake Huron). Obvious emphasis was placed on getting language, agriculture, and ecological setting correct, though the language was so archaic that it was good that the copy I had came with subtitles (even though I could not turn these off). I've thought about how terrifying the alien landscape of New England must've seemed to the Pilgrims, something this film did a great job of capturing.
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