I have been writing this annual post celebrating a handful of people who have achieved the impossible and miraculously failed to suck over the last twelve months for almost a decade now and I have little intention of ending this New Year's ritual any time soon. Even my shrink agrees that it's a healthy thing for a perpetually angry anarchist to do.
However, my obsessive-compulsive disorder will not allow me to ignore the fact that for several years running I have begun this list by observing with some astonishment that somehow this past year was even more brutally soul crushing than the last and this looks to be yet another ritual unlikely to change in the near future.
Just think about it, dearest motherfuckers. We've gone from Donald Trump being elected president on a promise to ethnically cleanse your local Walmart to his replacement, Joe Biden, somehow sucking bad enough to get that orange asshole reelected in a landslide to do what he failed miserably to do the first time around and make this car wreck country great again. But wait there's more!
Just when you thought that the pandemic was the pinnacle of government facilitated catastrophe, Israel launches a genocidal war on everything brown that moves in the desert with the full financial and rhetorical support of both halves of our plutocratic duopoly.
...And just when you thought that bourgeoise America had finally tired of watching their police strangle one unarmed Black civilian after another on live television they decide that the pigs have become the real victims here and gave those swaggering welfare scroungers a raise.
...And just when you thought that the Wallstreet swamp flooding Wahington had provoked one crippling recession too many for middle American voters to stomach, MAGA populists put the richest man on earth in charge of reigning in government corruption.
Pardon my Esperanto, but what in the holy Jesus fuck is going on here? When did CNN go from being geopolitical Videodrome to an episode of The Twilight Zone with no end? I'm actually starting to miss ISIS. Maybe they'll run a candidate for 2028 that's just marginally more palatable than Kamala Harris.
I'd kick the TV out the goddamn window again but it's the one thing distracting me from the fact that the only thing more heinous than the news right now is the raging volcano in the mirror.
This year brought me closer the brink of total madness than I even thought possible when my gender transition ended up unlocking a Pandora's box of repressed childhood trauma that erupted into a raging circus fire of psychedelic flashbacks, epileptic-style seizures, and freshly raped multiple personalities, not to mention the near disintegration of my long struggling Queer rural found family.
I really don't mean to make this yet another story that is somehow all about me, but I can't ignore the harrowing parallels between my own descent into the ninth circle of hell and the Western world's journey into the merciless maelstrom of its own existential abyss.
Even beyond my own weird genre of emo-gonzo journalism and the paranoid delusions of grandeur that fuel it, this all feels eerily connected and fuck your mother, why not? I have long posited the radical theory that so-called mentally ill people like me are merely emotional weathers vanes so sensitive to the greater trials and tribulations of society that our own neuroses flare up in concert with the flames Rome.
All the voices in my head seem to be singing "Gimme Shelter" in perfect harmony right now, with rape and murder just a kiss away and the screams between the chatter on the evening news filling in the chorus quite nicely.
Could these really be the end times, the decline of the west, the second coming, the fourth turning, the kali yuga, the age of Ozymandias? Could the gloomy prophecies of the Book of Revelations and the Unabomber Manifesto finally be upon us? Or have I simply snapped beneath the weight of a world run wrong by cabals of pedophile priests and baby killing oligarchs?
I honestly couldn't say for sure at this point but either way the only thing close to a constructive solution that I can come up with for such ills, be they societal or mental, is to fight and to fight like bloody fucking hell. We must fight like the few people who managed the small miracle of not sucking in this the Year of the Vacuum, 2024....
We must fight like the young pro-Palestine protestors who have hijacked campuses complicit in genocide across the country and across the world this year. Tens of thousands of debt besotted children have embraced the wrath of their Boomer parents by launching encampments and occupations at some of Babylon's most prestigious diploma mills. They have glued themselves to the streets, shutdown parades, hectored Christmas tree lightings, and haunted clueless oligarchs like Joe Biden on the campaign trail.
They have taken post-adolescent petulance to epic heights not seen since the height of the Vietnam War and they have done so selflessly with the simple mission of not allowing their elders to forget that that isn't red wine staining their fingertips, it is the blood of children. For this unforgivable fit of empathy they have been evicted, suspended, fired, beaten, maced, imprisoned, universally vilified, and tarred with the vilest labels imaginable and they're still screaming the names of the innocent at the top of their lungs from the steps of a university near you.
We must fight like the pissed-off Muslims and Arabs of this country who refused to turn off their conscience and fall in line behind the Democratic Party simply because they say nice things about Mohammed before bombing and starving his children across the globe.
After forking over literal tons of deadly ordinances to an increasingly unhinged and openly genocidal regime in Israel, the Democrats essentially dared a nearly invisible minority in this country not to vote for them against an orange supremacist who spent his first term throwing anyone on a prayer rug without a Saudi permission slip out of the country. These people responded by running a hajj around the ballot box with their middle fingers in the air, giving Kamala Harris and her clueless handlers a humiliating defeat that they begged for on all fours.
And yes, at the risk of being added to another dozen government watch lists, I say we should fight like the Shia militias of the Middle East who form the only armies left willing to fight for their brothers and sisters in Palestine even if it costs them the lives of their own families.
Ansar Allah, Hezbollah, and the Popular Mobilization Forces, all impoverished and poorly armed militias made up of men considered to be heretics by the kind of Sunni fundamentalists elected to govern the Gaza Strip. These bearded barbarians have brought down a driving rain of Soviet-grade artillery and homemade drones upon the combined forces of Pax Americana who built the Israeli Frankenstein out of body parts robbed from Holocaust graveyards in order to make their own declaration of 'never again.' No more Nakba's without a price.
We must all fight and we must fight with hands and fists and teeth and claws because pacifism does not provide a sufficient response to industrial slaughter.
However, we must also fight like the great unknown American nonvoter, close to 90 million of whom chose simply to disengage the plutocratic theater of the American election circus by withholding any form of validation for a system that contains no more legitimacy than it has empathy.
We must fight like the millions of equally invisible undocumented Americans who have come to this country, crossing invisible lines drawn and redrawn by racist gringos in both parties, to build thriving economies that boom completely off the grid of state facilitated capital.
We must fight like the legions of underage gender outlaws in this country, some 300,000 and growing, teenage iconoclasts reinventing their world and building new identities from scratch that reflect the divinely eccentric contents of their souls even while the Supreme Court condemns them to medical apartheid and violent hate crimes in compulsory school bathrooms.
And we must fight like the screaming voices in my head. My dearly beloved alters, Max, Agnes, Ophelia, and Mona. These jagged pieces of me that an organized crime ring dressed like a church tried to banish to the darkest corners of my subconscious through years of systematic abuse only to have them return to me thirty years later as individuals every bit as sentient and autonomous as the one preaching to you right now. A church tried to destroy a girl in a boy's body, and they created five.
As hellish and unspeakably violent as this year has been for my mental health, those girls, my girls, are the best thing that ever happened to me because they are me and they have afforded me the ability to be me authentically than I have ever been before. I am a collective that exists in eternal resistance to tyranny. Together I fight and so should you.
Not to win but to redefine ourselves as something that cannot be defined by authority. We must oppose the tyranny of our modern dystopian prison state on every front imaginable, in every way possible, including amidst the banality of our day to day lives. Sometimes that means doing something as bold as picking up a brick in a crowd of cowards and sometimes that means doing something as simple as telling our own demons, "Fuck you, I won't do what you told me..."
If this really is the end of the world as we know it, then we must go down swinging wild because that is the only way to build a new one. We must fight like we don't suck because we all deserve better.
See you fuckers in the Thunderdome. Drop the goddamn microphone.
Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post
* Get Me Away from Here I'm Dying by Belle & Sebastian
* Darklands by the Jesus & Mary Chain
* As Soon as You Can by Twin Shadow
* Epic by Faith No More
* Sea Swallow Me by Cocteau Twins
* Lithium by the Polyphonic Spree
* Shove by L7
* Sing Me Spanish Techno by the New Pornographers
* Killing in the Name by Rage Against the Machine
* Changes by David Bowie
