musing without thesis

It occurred to me the other day that one of the reasons that I don’t blog more is because I lack essay-ful things to say. I am pondering without a thesis. Most of the blogs I read now are Substack newsletters, and most of those newsletters have clear, explicit thoughts: they are articles, written with clear purpose to instruct or explain a concept, often times commenting on the current sociopolitical landscape and our in/ability, as people of conscience, to deal with the horrors of latestage capitalism. And I love reading these newsletters — I subscribe to them, after all, and I’m even a paid supporter of a few of them, so appreciative I am of these authors’ perspectives and their ability to distill the general zeitgeist down into reads that resonate.

Which is why it feels so hard to sit down and blog: gosh, it feels so fucking intimidating! So many of my favorite bloggers write essays that make me think “wow! I’ve been feeling exactly that way, but didn’t have the words for it and they just…they really, really put a pin in the feeling perfectly!” And then I’m sitting here, thinking about the vast galaxy of all the things I want to say and share with the world and the vastness of it all feels enormous and singular, like a night sky so full of stars, satellites, airplanes, and ambient light that it is hard to see much more than just that big, encompassing darkness. No details, no theses, just a big blanket of sky.

Other times, I will be thinking of a distilled thought but my first instinct will be to just write that essay as a zine. Making zines is what I do. They’re my bread and butter, my creative home cottage, my raison d’être. But, that being said, I was a blogger before I was ever a zinester. I’ve kept space on the Internet for going on twenty-three years now, and most of that time it has been in the form of blogs. I’ve played web wordsmith, first in handful-of-sentence micro-updates on hand-coded Geocities websites, and then on to Livejournal, and finally over here on my (sparingly updated) hand-coded WordPress site. The instinct to blog feels as integral to me as the instinct to zine, and let’s be real… they’re probably the very same instinct.

I just want to ponder, to ramble, to share thoughts that read more like a perzine and less like an essay. One of my favorite bloggers does this every week; Raechel Anne Jolie’s Radical Love Letters Substack reads like a letter from a friend, shedding light on her week, her triumphs and struggles, and all the ways the big stuff and the little stuff made her feel, coupled with the occasional deep dive essay and the ever-present list of reads and watches and loves. Why not just do the same and post my own radical love letters to all y’all? Why not?

I drew this little parade of creatures as a Valentine for my niblings, and I feel it fits here. Drawn while listening to Defiance, Ohio: “Nobody really wants to know the future/We just want to hear, ‘You’ll be alright,’/and we’ll be alright… the radio plays a familiar song: ‘you are loved, you are loved, you are really loved.'”

So, here it goes. An experiment in musing without thesis. Last week stretched and stretched, and I spent so much of it bundled up inside, because Kansas City was the bullseye of a winter storm that gusted in with subzero, dangerous temperatures. It was dangerous to walk anywhere more than a few blocks. And since most of the neighbors beyond my block eschew their responsibility to shovel their sidewalks (boo! hiss!), leaving the house would also mean walking through calf-high snow, to boot. I was trapped inside. Time felt like it slowed to a stop.

Sometime last week, I deleted Reddit off of my phone. Sometime last month, I deleted the Instagram app. For a while now, social media had started to feel more like an opiate than a tool or connective web, doom scrolling to distract myself from the horrors that I learn about whilst doom scrolling. The lovely friends I’ve made on Instagram are still there, and I read their posts and send them comments and messages in my sanctioned hour or so of mindless interneting on a desktop, in stolen work-break minutes. I used to be scared of leaving instagram because I was scared I would fail to hear about a local show and miss out and experience terrible fomo, but in the time I’ve been away, my friend Nat invited me to the David Lynch tribute at Stray Cat and I had enough time to get tickets before they sold out (it was strange and wonderful in the way all Lynch things are)… I discovered Tanka Ray has reunited (holy shit!) and bought tickets to their first show back this May, opening for the Effigies… and I added two different folk punk shows to my calendar. Like, it’s fine. I’m not missing shit. KC could still do a better job (in my humble opinion) of getting the word out about shows beyond the metaverse, but instead of complaining about that into the void, I’d rather… do something about it? Maybe I’ll make a brochure of upcoming punk shows that I distribute in my neighborhood? Maybe I’ll make a Freakscene account or start a Discord channel?

This week, the weather hurtled into spring. Snowdrops are blooming in patches of grass near the sidewalks and I’m going on walks just to wander and the sun feels blessedly warm. I find myself quoting that Mary Oliver poem to myself, the famous one about our one sweet, precious, wild life, and I ask myself if what I am doing in the present serves to fulfill me. I feel like I can do so much right now, a post-thaw motivation. Getting off of the doom scroll gives me some of that drive, helps me dream of ways to create better systems of communication with my communities, and frees up my capacity to help other folks’ make zines: teaching folks, sharing skills, helping people tell their own stories, and creating moments of community and connection between zinesters. I know my strengths and capabilities and I know that while I can’t dismantle this shitty system we’re under (nobody can, not single-handedly, but apparently if you have enough money, you can dismantle a bunch of government social service agencies at the drop of a hat and the people supposedly in charge will throw up their hands and shrug… but I digress!), I can build a life worth living. I can make my little slice of the world better.

Anytime I feel hurt at the state of the world, I try and turn that anxiety into action. I’ve found it is better to do than to dwell in panic. But even through action, the hurt that remains is when I can’t find a way to quell the anxieties of some of my loved ones who I can see are hurting, ruminating, stuck and tired with anger. (“You know it scares the hell out of me when my friends think they have nobody to lean on…”) How do you remind someone that, even if it all won’t be okay because evil people have too much power, that we can make every day better and worth living? Our little, beautiful lives embroidered with joy. The future is uncertain at best, but for now, our lives can be beautiful, even if they try to convince us that their ugliness is inevitable, as they threaten us and try and make our lives so much harder, rougher. We have each other, we have resources, we can carve out a life for ourselves in the short time we all still have that is worth something.

I’ve been letting more Mary Oliver play on a loop in my mind, a different poem, one that is quoted far less often, but one that is just as good and true: “I was so full of energy. / I was always running around, looking / at this and that. / If I stopped / the pain / was unbearable. / If I stopped and thought, maybe / the world / can’t be saved, / the pain / was unbearable.” The stanza bounces around in my head like a mantra. Or, translated into the language of punk, it becomes Against Me! repeating on a loop in my mind: “push back, push back, with every word and every breath. What god doesn’t give to you, you’ve got to go and get for yourself.” This world isn’t gonna heal on it’s own. I will remain indefatigable in my pursuit of happiness because is there really any other reason to live than to feel joy and connection and to ponder and wander and explore? To create beauty and to live authentically and to make each other’s lives better? If I stop and think that maybe the world can’t be saved, that joy isn’t worth it, the pain will be unbearable. So I push back, push onward, let myself ramble, get to the good, no stopping, no turning back.