Angel hair, ice cream castles, feather canyons
The year that summer came late we wandered around in a permanent state of anxiety made bearable only by torpor. The rare sunny days seemed more precious for the glut of gray which spread itself out over the sky well beyond the date on the calendar where we had pushed past the rain of other springs, but the constant fluctuations in the barometric pressure kept us too confused and alarmed to fully enjoy them. The days grew longer as they always had but when we woke up each morning earlier than we were used to the dawn that was there to greet us felt at odds with the cool, wet weather all our tiny pocket forecasters warned us to expect until, apparently, the end of the season, and the brief bits of respite from the canopy of clouds that came towards the start of the evening seemed even more discordant for being so late in the day.
The news from the south was bad—the news from the south had always been bad, but this year it came in blasts of gleeful, calculated cruelty, where the cruelty was the purpose and the glee both cause and effect of the calculations. The news from everywhere was bad: War and rumors of war jostled for attention alongside all the absurdity and insistent idiocy we’d once hoped was merely an aberration but that turned out to be the order of the day—turned out to be a perpetual motion machine built of blunt and obvious fatuity which fed on its own empty, impossible promises and excreted sharp, spiky grievance that it immediately consumed for additional fuel.
While the rich and their aspiring observers starved themselves in the name of wellness, consuming only celery, and only then in juice form, the poor were offered the same assortment of empty calories as in the past but in prettier packages which pretended that the chemicals therein were somehow now more natural than they had been before. No matter whether you were rich or poor, glutton or ascetic, the scientists had confirmed that you were no longer able to avoid becoming a new kind of cyborg: one who was part human and part plastic. (All existence comes from water, and the prevalence of manufactured compounds that were now an essential part of your being made you very much like the oceans we had turned increasingly warm and inhospitable to life.) In far-flung corners of the globe animals and small children coughed up strange new infectious agents which wished only to spread themselves into the wider world and worked at finding their way onto a plane that would take them to the larger towns and then on to the cities of their final destination.
In those cities the men and women worked harder and longer at convincing themselves that what they did had benefit and purpose, because each day brought further proof that at best the things they sat around conference tables each afternoon discussing with a forced earnestness or self-protective irony were vacuous and bereft of value, but were in many cases actually doing great damage to what little worth saving was left. Those people who thought that they had joined industries which would change the world for good found themselves being paid for their part in making things worse, all in service to the financial benefit of the massive consumption consortia whose models were so laughably at odds with the promises of beneficence in which they once cloaked their avarice that when finally called out for their crimes their only recourse was to claim amorality in hopes that it would disguise their immorality. The managers and bureaucrats who made the metrics and checked the charts soothed themselves by saying they were trying to change things from within, since that made it easier to ignore their undeniable complicity in entrenching those in existing positions of power. The money helped too.
Those without the money tried to not think about the constant undercurrent of fear that the little of it they had would soon be taken away from them. Forget worrying about the future—even though that was still a higher-order worry, one that woke them at night from an already-troubled slumber and whispered, “What will you do when you’re too old to work? What will you do when there’s no work left for you to do?”—they were too busy trying to push away the worries of the next few weeks and months, which were reasonable fears at any time but especially now, when everyone knew we were rapidly coming up against another downturn, one which we were much less prepared to fight than the last one, which most people had never actually recovered from in the first place. What would happen? Would the burn-it-all-down instinct that had resulted in the feelgood-but-futile thrashing and kicking we had delivered to democracy mutate at last into something more violent and active, which made people finally start fires that were not metaphorical? Or would we continue along like frogs in the pot, gradually adjusting to more and more having less and less while those who had taken increasingly large pieces of the pie built high walls to keep everyone else out? The persistence of the frog analogy, which has been proven by biologists to be untrue, provides its own troubling answer.
So, as that summer started—even though the start itself was late—there was a sense that things could not continue as they were, but that somehow they still would, changing only by degree. Even the distractions felt dirty and contrived, and the obviousness of their contrivances meant they could no longer sustain their magic. When their tawdry misdirections became too blatant to ignore people found that, if they could not get angry about the structural injustice that made life miserable for so many every day, they could at least vent their displeasure once they realized that they had spent eight years watching a television program that turned out to be nothing more than a tale of elf incest supplemented with fantasies of violent rape tossed in to add the illusion of depth (and titillation). Displeasure was vented on a variety of triviality, and suddenly everyone was an expert on subjects about which they knew nothing. Actual experts were, if anything, more obstinate, beating their chests and loudly proclaiming the importance of their opinions as everything became both more trivial and more dangerous. The worst were full of a passionate intensity that somehow lacked all conviction (save for the conviction that what they had to say was full of meaning and any challenge to its authority was without merit, particularly if people from both sides of an issue issued the challenge). The best were only best when remaining silent, which was ineffective as a form of protest and unsustainable in an era where the only way to assert your existence was to bleat out your idiot opinion on whatever platform you found yourself shouting “I am here!” from. (The very worst people chose newsletters.) In short, everything was terrible and only getting worse. But, at least in the New York area, Saturday and Sunday looked nice. So it wasn’t all bad.