Aaron M. Fortkamp

It does no good. I don’t spend a whole lot of time on social media but I try to stay updated on the news, and the news comes to me from social media and YouTube and the actual Apple News app, which is as scrollable as any social media and filled with the same dread-inducing headlines, albeit with a touch less self-righteous snark. Usually. Looking at you, Huffington Post.

It does me no good, to do this to myself. It changes nothing in the world besides my own brain chemistry. I don’t spend an inordinate amount of time, at most 15-20 minutes at a time, or up to 30 if there’s a particularly lenghty John Oliver segment. The thing I like about John Oliver, usually, is that he tries to end each intimate dissection of a horrible problem I had only been vaguely aware of before with a call to action, quite literally saying “So what can we do?” in a reassuring… ish tone. Increasingly however his answer to his own question is: not much.

I knew all of this was coming already, back when we elected this monster again. It depressed me like hell then, and it depresses me like hell now. I wrote about it at the time, trying my best not to exaggerate how bad things would get, to be blunt and realistic about the disaster, but now I’m wondering if I wasn’t pessimistic enough. (I really didn’t think he would try a war. But it turns out dismantling democracy takes some time, and he [or more accurately, the psycopaths he listens to these days] is/are getting a little concerned he might not ride out the Epstein wave as well as they’d all expected. So he might do a goddamn war in the meantime, as a distraction. Send a few thousand poors to get dead, that’ll shut em up about the kid-fucking for a while.) None of it surprises me, informs my world view, or changes my outlook or behavior. It’s not useful information. I use none of it. I used to write about it, some, but that impulse has dried up because the world continued right along its merry apocalyptic way which made me feel like all I’d been doing all along was shouting at a wall, alone in a room with no doors or windows.

It did nothing, hence, it does nothing for me, to keep filling up my cup of rage and distress and stress, and anxiety! Oh my god that’s the word for it, is anxiety, because it’s not like anything excessive terrible is happening to me personally, this is all just concern for the world at large, for the country, for the increasingly worse effect it all has the lower down the economic ladder your descend. I don’t know what middle class is anymore but I’m probably almost in it, maybe even just qualifying, plus I’m white and cis and male and straight and really all the things this fuckhole patriarchy deems valuable, and my son is at least two of those things and should prove smart enough to take care of himself in adulthood, and really aside from the shitty natural environment we’re leaving for him, he’ll probably be okay when all is said and done, even if this upcoming war turns into culture of war and he ends up getting drafted or whatever, over ten years from now but please understand that the omnipresent, daily effects of this shitbag in power and the shitbags surrounding him will be felt for decades, and some of them permanently, even then my son will probably make it through his military service with minimal danger to his person and forever get to eat for free on Veteran’s Day, it’s fine, he’ll be fine.

None of my current emotional state over the state of affairs can even really be categorized as mere ‘worry,’ because a) I’m not worried it will happen, it already is happening, and b) I’m not worried about what will happen to me, for the above reasons, and also, living under the Damacles’ sword of student loan debt for two decades has kind of numbed that particular nerve. No, this is anxiety, in its purest, most useless form. It does not affect the way I vote, it does not inform me on how I can better the situation. About all it’s done is give me a few GoFundMe campaigns to donate to when I’m too overwhelmed by it all to remember or care how much student loan debt I have. (Here’s a thing I used to think mattered: I used to try to convince people of how disastrously large the income gap has gotten, typically using sports metaphors. For example, what if I went to an Ohio State football game [which is ridiculous on its face, don’t get me started on their ticket prices] but after the game was over I looked under my seat and found a dollar. And then I looked under the seats on either side of me and found another dollar in each place. And the seats beside those also had a dollar. If I walked the entire football stadium and every single person in attendance had managed to drop a dollar for your boy, I would then and only then be able to pay off my student loans. (All for a couple of degrees, by the way, with absolutely no financial return, zip, nada, none.) Then guess what, suddenly I look up instead of down and realize the entire stadium is actually under a seat itself, inside a much more massive stadium but with exactly the same layout as the one I’m in, and beneath every seat in this giant stadium? Another stadium, just like the one I’m in, literally, just like it, beneath all of the seats in all of those stadiums is, you guessed it, another dollar. Now, suppose one… presumably very large person was able to take the time out of their giant schedule to walk the giant stadium and check under all the giant seats and, in turn, check under all of the regular-sized seats in all of the regular-sized stadiums under all of the giant seats. And they keep it, that person. All of it. Who knows if they even have student loans?? Well, point being, if you hadn’t heard, Tesla, in all their infinite wisdom, just approved a pay package that will give E. Musk 100 of these giant stadiums. And he’s not even all that giant, himself, really.)

See, does that—is that doing anything for you? Like at all? If so, you probably already agreed with me, if not, how did you make it this far in the entry, first of all, and second, WHY DOESN’T THAT BOTHER THE FUCK OUT OF YOU and third what is the point of me… not writing it, that part is admittedly a touch cathartic if only due to its futility, but why think about it at all, why has that been in my brain for days, stressing me the fuck out.

So, I give up. I give up! I can’t do it anymore. I mean I totally could, and just remain miserable, but if I can convince myself that missing out on the most current atrocity means nothing to the world, actually, then maybe I could get back to writing, to creating, to enjoying things, to savoring experiences. To living. I don’t feel like I’m living a real life, right now. This is more like sheltering in place, except it’s all the time so I have to keep walking around and shopping for groceries and parenting and washing dishes and such lest we starve to death. But everywhere I go it’s like I’ve got an ear out for the next explosion, as though my ability to gauge the distance realtime will affect the body count.

I have to figure out how to write more. How to create more. Model and animate more. Record… at all. And my anxiety is crushing me, whenever I try. Abbey mentioned to me the other day how ridiculous it is for someone to offer the medical advice of “you need to lower your stress levels” to a parent. Especially a parent of younger children, who are biologically fashioned specifically to invoke maximum stress upon their caretakers, so they learn what behaviors are safe and what are dangerous.

Well, Facebook ain’t my baby, so I’m kicking it to the curb.

Getting a strong sense of deja vu in writing this, because I know I’ve written something like this before, specifically to swear off social media. But that was what, fifteen years ago, probably. Surely I mean it this time.