Note 73: Back from blasting beer bottles from a rooftop in Hell's Kitchen

It's been a bit quiet here since the holidays and the advent of the new world order.

Truth be told, I've been in a bit of an existentially depressive funk since the election last November. I was prepared to be finished with all the stupidity, venality, and malice associated with Donald Trump and his enablers. But instead I found myself whisked away to a timeline that took all the bad parts of the last time we dealt with this, and magnified itself in ways that I was fundamentally unprepared for.

I expected a long and protracted fight as Trump attempted to dismantle the civil service, but I didn't see DOGE coming. I expected Heritage Foundation flacks who authored chapters of Project 2025 to be appointed to fill the administration's leadership ranks, but never imagined that Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Kash Patel would make it past a Senate confirmation fight. I expected ICE raids, but not gleeful ASMR videos.

The world stopped making sense on January 20th. I was prepared to see the dismantling of the post-WWII order, but I never expected to witness the worst of America driving that process in idiotic and malice-filled ecstasy.

The one image that best captured what I was feeling comes from 2019's Uncanny X-Men #11. At that point in the mutant soap opera, Marvel editorial was preparing for Jonathan Hickman's Krakoa soft-reboot, and the company pretty much gave writers free reign to do whatever they wanted in that lame-duck era of storytelling. Most of the writers pulled together the atrocious Age of X-Man story line, where most of Marvel's mutants were pulled into a pocket universe. Matthew Rosenberg used his remaining issues of Uncanny to try and tell "the last X-Men story".

At this point in the comics, Cyclops had been dead for a few years (the less said about Inhumans vs. X-Men, the better), but he is resurrected just right after most of the mutants had been shunted away to Nate Grey's fever dream. He wakes up in a world dramatically different than the one he died in, and goes looking for his people, only to discover that the world at large thinks that they're all dead.

The rest of the issue continues with Cyclops attempting to make sense of the world, ending with a call for any remaining mutants to join him at the ruins of the Westchester school, with the full knowledge that every bigoted group of humans who went after mutants would show up as well. It was less a call to find his people and more of a suicidal last gasp where he could take as many bigots as he could manage with him.

I'll circle back to this point in a minute.

In this timeline, I've gone back and forth on how to make sense of it all.

Do I...

A ... try to take each change as it comes and make a continuous series of mental adjustments as things change?

B ... or disengage long enough to mentally reset, and re-engage with the world as it is, and adapt the mindset of a new visitor, the same way I'd have to adjust to traveling back in time, and making sense of where/when I landed.

I was never a fan of the first option, mainly because of the dread that I'd subconsciously find ways to normalize the insanity around me, and become co-opted by it. The second option ("the Cyclops option", if you will) seemed to both be a bit healthier (mentally) without eroding the principles I held, and that's pretty much how I've been dealing with the past couple of weeks. Avoiding the emotional outrage as much as possible, with a plan to re-engage after the first 100 days.

Has it been working? Not really.

Now, I can say that my thoughts haven't drifted toward the explicitly suicidal end of the spectrum, but I have astonished myself with the number of options I've come up with to practically or literally martyr myself with the intent to go out doing something worthwhile.

I'm going to skip over the literally bin, as anyone with a sufficient imagination can probably picture the same schemes that have run through my head. On the practically side, these schemes are ones that would land me in prison: trying to start a Blue State tax revolt, designing and running an influence campaign against the people who give folks like Musk power (e.g. finding ways to dox Musk company and DOGE employees), or many other (illegal) things against those who deserved it.

Getting back to our ruby-quartz friend, I felt like the world I had known was dead and I wasn't seeing the point to this new one. It's been like waking up in the Biff Tannen timeline every morning.

Now, let's be clear that when it comes the crap sandwiches served over the past few weeks, I'm way in the back of the grievance line. I haven't...

• ... had open-season declared on me because I'm a sexual minority.
• ... been fired from a job because an ignorant fool looked at me - and not my work - and declared me a DEI hire, and wiped out my life's work.
• ... dealt with the unnecessary stress of losing coworkers - and fearing for my own job - just because Elon's DOGE Skibidi Boys think LLMs know how to do my job better that I do.
• ... had to lay off valuable employees because an octogenarian is too stupid to understand economics, and his tariffs (and threats) are wrecking my business.

That said, I do have a number of answers to #MAGA mouthbreathers' favorite question: What has the Trump administration done that's affected you personally?

My responses:

• Me and a few other folks have spent a good part of the past year working to launch a non-profit to improve the state of software in research studies. There are 80+ year assumptions we have to revisit, including whether it makes sense to do this in the United States at all.
• It's injected a ton of new uncertainty into my existing business that subcontracts on the social science and health research grants that fund American scientific research.
• It's terrorizing my friends who were civic-minded enough to work as public servants.
• It's terrorizing family members (in ways that I won't get into in this Note).
• It's led to me severing a lot of ties.

I'm going to cop to some responsibility on the last point. What I'm primarily referring to is abandoning Facebook (and its tools like Messenger) when Mark Zuckerberg decided that he'd rather pay protection money to Trump to get a seat back inside the tent. I understand why the beta twerp made the decision - but I decided to not be a part of the project to turn his site into what Elon turned Twitter into.

Another aspect of the social "turtling" I've been doing is recognizing that I have family members and folks I like (and even family members that I like) who are so far removed from the chaos that's been unleashed that they lap up stuff like Elon's government-wide e-mails and DOGE's indiscriminate firings. Maybe in some time, I'll circle back to them and reach back out to see how they're doing, but I just don't have the emotional energy or patience to deal with the political equivalent of YOLO Jackass wannabes at this point in time.

So, that's a quite a stream of consciousness for you. A snapshot of what's been going on in my head lately. That said, the title of this Note begins with "Back", so let's get to that part...

This weekend, I had the good fortune to read Ash Deza's Only the Living Feel Remorse.

Nominally, this novella is a ghost story, but reading it, I experienced an odd feeling of déjà vu. What the story is really about is the guilt and grief that the main character experiences after making a series of bad choices and mistakes. While I wasn't the one who made the mistake - I voted for the other folks - the grief part stuck with me and I realized that I've spent the past few weeks grieving the loss of the world that was. It manifested itself a lot like losing Scotty this past summer - lethargy, lack of meaning, looking to get out of my head, all that stuff.

Much like typical monster story formula, once you can name the monster, and you figure out what you're dealing with, it has less power over you. Almost as soon as I realized that what I was feeling was grief, I felt a lot freer. To be clear, nothing outside my head had changed, but I finally managed mentally reorient myself into that more proactive stance that I've been missing much of the past year. Less of the Scott Summers above and more of his recent post-Krakoa incarnation.

Now, make no mistake - getting mentally reoriented was necessary, but it is not sufficient. We're nowhere near finished with the current shitstorm we find ourselves in, and like any large destructive storm, there's going to be work simply making it through, and there's going to be a lot of work putting the pieces back together or building something entirely new.

So, I'll leave you on that thought. There's a ton of stuff that's been piling up to do while I've been tying mental knots these past few weeks, and there's a lot more coming down the way. It's time to crack my knuckles, run a tongue over my canines, and Get To Work.