Saturday December 7, 2019

Neighbors across the street waste the entire day — a day of blue skies and sunlight — leaf blowing. Imposing that sound, inflicting it on the neighborhood, the ones doing it thinking themselves “improvers.” They’re the ones fucking with the planet. That used to be a source of rage on the street where I grew up. An old man who lived down the street from my parents refused to stop leaf blowing, so an angry dude who lived next door stormed out, tore the device out of the old man’s hands and beat him to the ground with it. Police had to intervene. That was my parents’ neighborhood. Meanwhile I sit here passively in my present neighborhood, feeling the role of the one angered — but trying to breathe and relax my way through it, knowing it too will pass. Go for a walk, I tell myself. Wait it out. The angry guy across the street, Mr. Vigilante Justice of Tough Guy World: he, to me, is the embodiment of toxic masculinity and the authoritarian personality. As an environmentalist, I find myself viewing people like him as the Enemy, the Adversary. As one such man blows leaves, another wipes out a stand of bushes with a chainsaw. This is Trump’s America. Drive elsewhere and men buy records and walk dogs. Continue around a bend and there are cops blocking off streets, cars hogging streets, people out in the streets for a parade. Neon letters appear lit from within. The sound of my baby’s heartbeat. We are where we are. Perhaps it’s time to stop eating animals. How about books? Should we buy and read books? If so, which ones? Rebecca Solnit’s book seems interesting: Whose Story Is This? In general, the books in the “Current Events & Politics” section seem terrifying. But perhaps we’re not where they think we are, whether they be white men or journalists for Teen Vogue. What is one to do to overthrow fascism here amid a world thinking itself animated by the Christmas spirit? Perhaps it’s time to read Dante’s Paradiso. Everything I pick up at the local bookstore seems intensely allegorical — sometimes uncannily, frighteningly so. Yet in it all, I sense a spirit of benevolence.