letting the bastards bring me down
You know what? There's a lot of surprising advantages to being gay, if you really think about it. One of them I've been thinking about today is the total lack of any biological drive to have children. Who the fuck wants to raise children in this shit? I mean, seriously?
Now, okay. There are plenty of gay couples who have a truly deep desire to have and raise children. I'm not sure they constitute a majority of gay people, however. They almost certainly don't. And yes, there are also plenty of straight people with no interest in children. But they certainly don't constitute the majority of straight people, either.
I currently have no less than four nieces or nephews who either have newborns or will have newborns by the end of the year. (I think there's only one still left to be born, if I remember right. I really need to get these dates down, for next year's calendar.) It astonishes me that any of them can imagine raising their children with any sense of genuine optimism. But then, I don't have any children, and actually having them changes people's perspectives. That doesn't change the prognosis of the planet, however. Or, more specifically, the prognosis of humanity's future. The planet will be fine, and will recover with amazing swiftness once humanity is out of the way. It's humanity itself we have to worry about.
And from an evolutionary perspective, intellectually, I get it. Humans evolved to want children. Those of us who don't, even though we are still part of natural variation, are outliers. No human being can be faulted for being compelled to procreate. It's literally what humans evolved to do.
There's still not much logic in it when you so much as look outside, though. Or watch the news. It's easy to feel relief if President Fuckwit loses this election, but even if that doesn't happen, we're still looking down the barrel of increased ecological disasters the rest of our lives. The difference is that President Fuckwit willfully not just ignores that fact, but goes out of his way to make it worse. The flip side is that if he is defeated, all we're looking at, at this point, is attempting to mitigate the inevitable. Democrats have also fallen far short of doing what should have been done by now we well. Just because they don't fall nearly as short as Republicans doesn't mean it hasn't still been a failure on all our parts.
I am generally a defiantly optimistic person, but in 2020, for the first time in my life, I am seriously contemplating whether it's even realistic to imagine living into old age as a possibility.
There's a scene in the notorious 1983 TV movie The Day After, in which a young woman gives birth, in the wake of a global nuclear catastrophe. It's a pointedly poignant and disturbing moment in the movie, where you look at it and think, Yeesh. I think about that scene a lot. Now, just swap out nuclear holocaust with ecological disaster, and that's the world we are actually steadily moving toward.
And make no mistake: the only way I'll retain even a sliver of hope is if Biden wins this election. Or, maybe, if even President Fuckwit "wins" (I don't believe for a second he could possibly win with any integrity or fairness, neither of which are concepts he even understands), if the Democrats both retain the House and retake the Senate—an unlikely scenario, but at least then Congress could be the "check" they're supposed to be and have utterly failed to be the past four years. But, facing another four years of this man? The Supreme Court, the unchecked corruption, the continued degradation of institutions already crumbling, the environment, the very air we breathe? Soon enough fair elections will be the least of our problems. In that scenario, it's all over.
I increasingly feel like it's all over no matter what—and if things go "our way," it merely postpones the inevitable just a little. We now have insane conspiracy theorists who genuinely believe the government is literally run by pedophiles, moving into the mainstream, getting elected positions. They think the wildfires are all "started by Antifa," which isn't even an actual organization. This country is full of legitimate morons, somehow getting a foothold. I need to stop thinking about it now, I can't deal.
At least I'll vote. With my brain. God, please, let enough other people do the same.
And on those incredibly uplifting notes, I guess I could update you about last night. Not that there's a huge amount to tell. I reheated the potato paneer dish Shobhit had made a ton of, with some frozen naans baked in the oven, and that's what we had for dinner—I had mine before Shobhit got home from work on the bus. (Side note: he took his car in this morning, it apparently did need a fix, luckily it was an easy fix, and it seems to be all good again.)
Once he got home, we watched Sunday's episode of Lovecraft Country, a show I have increasingly mixed feelings about. Last week's episode featured a nude scene with an intersex Native American person, and the show killed the person off within the same episode, thereby depriving both Native Americans and gender/sexual minorities of all the nuance the show has been giving the history of racism against Black people in this country. It just didn't really feel right. And then this week's episode featured a Black woman basically raping a white man with a history of sexual harassment in the workplace, to a literally bloody degree using a stiletto heel. What the fuck? Did we need that? Was that scene at all necessary? I'll keep watching for now, but for me the show is seriously skating on thin ice.
On the upside, I actually, finally, finished the library book I've been reading last night. I had started reading it on March 2, so it took me six and a half months to finish. 275 pages! It's not so much that I read slow so much as it was that I spent months never picking it up. We have a global pandemic to thank for that, but now it's done.
I was going to return it to the Central Library after work today, since I also had a DVD to pick up, but they closed curbside pickup today, again, due to the air quality. So there it is again: we can't have nice things. Because we can't fucking breathe.
Interestingly, the sun is actually cutting through on Capitol Hill today better than it has in days. It's small comfort though when I look out my window over at downtown and I can still barely see the skyscrapers through the wildfire smoke. I'd sure like to just be able to open the windows again. I mean . . . Jesus Christ. It's literally been a full week now. I have no idea what Seattle's record of consecutive days with "unhealthy" air is, but a full week is far more than I've ever seen in my lifetime.
[posted 12:33 pm]