Noodlings at the top of the nation
Our kid scored us a wondrously knotty, free cabin (due to her incredibly generous boss) by dog sitting this weekend up in the Minnesota arrowhead, so called because of its point, on the edge of the boundary waters canoe area wilderness. The wiggly lines are big freezing water. The top is Canada, about 30 miles away.
It’s great up here, woody, woodsy, homes sort of spit and hammered together .. log splitters and sawdust and 15 foot birch logs sit stacked in yards .. feral townies, pee-wees rip in front of your car on mini-bikes without saying sorry .. it’s a tourist magnet, but great. I don’t get why people craving the giant lake’s blurred horizon would knot together in a small town, walking their Yorkies. They don’t go farther. Up next is the Canada border and Grand Portage Band of Chippewa, and who goes there except people who live there, and odd itinerant case workers? Having worked with Grand Portage before, I can tell you: families are blessed, I was no savior, and life is multiply desolate.
If these tourists I saw today were spread out across Cook County, the black flies and mosquitoes could drain their bodies of red gold, and you’d see their fancy cargo pants flop to the ground. There’s a lot of blood changing owners, so it’s smart of them to cling together, Yorkies in their arms.
Not writing on Twitter or Substack deserves an explanation. No sooner did I kick this off a few weeks back with plans to post every day than I couldn’t even post once a week. Told myself to step away from the drumbeat of fury at nibble after nibble of bigtimers’ interest in “It Doesn’t Fit the Narrative,” interviews gone cold, invitations gone dry, podcasts never aired, and fresh contrarian soldiers popping off and getting erased from their careers, then making the same sensible arguments I made in 2015 and 2016 that ended my life as I then knew it. Watching these freshly dead, anti-woke corpses harping about the newest Wrongthink, and seeing The Atlantic and Fox and Bari Weiss and Glenn Loury listening, I just kept hustling my writing, sometimes shamelessly. I kept DMing pundits, getting a boost here, asking for a re-share, and not seeing it. Then I went into a fit of posts about chaos and murderous bloodshed around my hourly workplace, down the street from where George Floyd died, that bullets pierced a window in our ICU. I added that our adolescent psychiatric unit affirms 13-year-old transgender girls > boys, calls them “Nix,” “Failure,” or “Mistake” if they insist, and mandates that we pretend they ARE boys, non-binary, both or neither. I’m upset about the gender thing, sure. It’s hysteria. It’s a mind-virus. It spread the way blue hair spread, the sicker they were, the more convicted the contagion. Granted, my demographic is only sick kids, the sickest of the sick. Boots on the ground (in the units), we give the best care, and yes, I am biased. But I don’t have any skin in the game of transgender care outside of my direct care. I can’t affect anything, and it’s not my fight, and I’m not making it my fight.
I don’t have a fight anymore. No more bleed, no more lead. I was the first canary to go tits-up in the coal mine in February, 2016. No other white K12 teacher besides me called bullshit on Black Lives Matter. I was before Bret Weinstein and Jordan Peterson. I didn’t know we’d been lied to about Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, that neither of those dead boys were murdered. I just knew the school-to-prison pipeline started before the cradle. I blew the whistle on black St. Paul administrators’ violation of black kids’ rights, and it would shock parents, but I said it anyway. I could not shut my mouth for one more minute.
But how long can you post in fury? You can’t forever. Fury is the flip-side of hurt. Silenced, rejected, passed over, I fell into despair that we balk at, then clutch at rationale why we don’t feel as chipper as yesterday. It’s because, because, because. Everything is because. The horrors of evil in American cities kept me posting until I caved in.
Guess I was propelled and distracted for too long by real-time violence. Sharing finally repulsed me. I wanted to alert people, like I alerted people in 2016 to permissive mayhem, allowing a girl to give paid blowjobs to a train of football players. You have your threshold. Others have theirs. When I recently saw a black man electrocuted on the third rail of a subway, something caved in inside me. Just one horrifying thing out of many ultra-horrifying things, shootings, Asians kicked in the head, sidewalks filled with tents and some of them with dead, OD’d bodies. My soul retched, and I craved some quiet and beauty.
But I kept fighting and fighting, grabbing roots in a dark pit that gave loose the minute I clung on, and sank deeper into despair, reason paralyzed. You know you’re depressed when you can’t reason. If it’s really bad, you become an inert blob, spluttering incomplete synapses. You see death everywhere.
I just kind of fell into mud. I couldn’t watch one more brave contrarian lose her life and livelihood, the blood go flying, she gets printed and boosted, and she makes the same fucking revelation I made six and a half years ago.
I’m just being calm, hanging at midnight in a knotty cabin with a countertop of three different materials, sitting off Twitter, and checking in once a day. I can’t follow the wreckage. Sorry I’m self-centered; it’s not you; it’s me — my little bonfire. Plus, twitter threads angle sideways like sentence diagrams. Who cares about looking at what someone said back to some dude’s reply to something spicy? It all looks like the below to me, and I taught sentence diagramming! I loved it.
Above, Twitter subtweets to subtweets. Yeah no. I’d rather see Socratic circles of people showing others in a lyceum how to reason. Anyway, this ain’t that. This ain’t much. But it’s better than where I’ve been. Just trying to get better.