For the past few days I’ve been trying to master the long stare, which can be hard to do when you’re cooped up inside four walls for an entire year. This week, I’ve been sleeping in a cabin with a wide view of Mt. Hood — my dear old friend. I can see her over the top of my laptop screen, where I’ve trying to carve away any possible distraction so I can get some work done… before I go back home and… do more work.
Hmm.
It’s nearly been a year of pandemic — can you believe it? I keep warning my loved ones that March is coming, and March will mean a year of this, and I intend to have a complete and total mental breakdown. It’s a joke, of course, but I think it’s my bad-with-hard-emotions way of saying we should be really nice to each other.
I imagine every one of you reading this has had a moment (or a few moments, or many, many moments) during this past year when shit got real for you, and you lost it. I’ve had a few glorious sobs myself, the kind that leave that wrung-out feeling. The pandemic has made me much more acquainted with crying than I ever used to be. (Note: I took a training recently from the incredible people at The Dart Center, about the trauma associated with reporting in America right now. It did a lot of things for me I won’t get into here, but chiefly, it made me not feel so alone.)
To blow off steam now and then, occasionally Joe and I will grab some coffee and take an hours-long, looping tour around Portland, surveying all the places that have meant something to us. We’ve known each other since we were stupid kids doing stupid and mostly-innocent things. We’ll drive by The Old Town dive where we’d yell over the music to our friends late at night. The old Sellwood apartment with the checkerboard kitchen floor. The Piedmont house with rats in the basement where we’d stay up until all night with friends for no reason aside from the fact that we could. Cathedral Park. The vegan place we’d eat back when we were vegan. The fancy beer place from back during the fancy beer phase. Everything is a condo now.
On a recent loop, we were driving down 82nd, the last rays of the day breaking through 3 pm clouds. A new song started up on the radio:
That’s great it starts with an earthquake,
birds and snakes, and aeroplanes.
And Lenny Bruce is not afraid.
Eye of a hurricane, listen to yourself churn.
World serves its own needs.
Don’t misserve your own needs…
It is amazing how memories can hit you all at once. Usually, it’s smell that evokes my most specific memories. A whiff of school cafeteria cookies, suddenly riding on the air. My grandfather’s aftershave, out of nowhere. This time a song I’ve heard a million times hit me differently:
It's the end of the world as we know it
It's the end of the world as we know it
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine
I suppose I have been listening to R.E.M.’s 1987 album Document since I was in my single-digits, back when my older brother got ahold of the tape and the first clangs of “Finest Worksong” clanged forth from his boy-smelling bedroom. I doubt either of us would have understood what “Exhuming McCarthy” was about; it did teach me the word “acumen.”
Undoubtedly, the song that brought us to Document was its single, “It’s the End of the World As We Know (And I Feel Fine).” The lyrics have never made much sense to me, nor do I think that matters much, because it’s a song that delivers me a certain feeling. A feeling that — in a turn lane on 82nd — caused me to sob.
If you’ve ever seen the video for this song, it’s a completely weird one — for any era. It was discordant in how oppositely it seemed to represent the song. The track itself is bright colors and party riffs, fit for dancing in socks on hardwood, spinning in circles, not caring about what the downstairs neighbor thinks for 4 minutes and 7 seconds.
But the video is all muted colors. Solitude. A skinny boy, maybe 13, stands alone in a wrecked shack. One wall appears to have been ripped off by a hurricane or a tornado, the insides shredded and strewn about. As he sifts through the wreckage, the boy clutches an old black and white photo of a grandfather, or a great grandfather. Someone whose world ended long ago.
In the last minute of the video, the boy is shirtless, ribs sticking out. He’s holding a wide old school skateboard, and as the song spirals into its final minute, he stops sifting through wreckage, stops holding this old portrait and … starts practicing skateboard tricks in the house.
It was this last bit that was playing through my mind as I was losing it in my car: remembering what it was like to be thoughtless, innocent, unaware. How foreign it feels to let go, and how crushing it can be to think that none of us might never be able to lose ourselves again. Not like we used to.
Like any “good” cry, though, I let something go. And since then, I’ve queued up R.E.M’s song here and there to test my strength against it, to see if it wrecks me. And it hasn’t. It was just one listen out of three decades.
What hit me so differently that day was the out-of-control inertia ending part. It evokes the feeling of spinning in grass, blades between your toes, knowing you can only go for so long before you collapse, weakened but laughing. It’s a song about accepting that maybe you never actually had any control in the first place.
Lately, I’m trying to remember the times when I felt like I was spinning, ready to fall down laughing, despite all the bullshit life throws my way. I have little snapshots in my mind. The standing bar at Charlie B’s in downtown Missoula. Colored powder smeared on my face by a stranger during the Holi Festival, bhangra shaking the windows of a club. The front row of a Neurosis show in Portland. The front row of a Neurosis show in Seattle.
Or last summer, when I was walking a thin trail along a hillside of wildflowers near Mount Adams. A stranger emerged up ahead, but didn’t stop as he passed, simply shook his head in disbelief and declared “We are here! Right now!”
I got a good cry then, too.
I have a new essay about hanging out on the graves of dead feminists (yes, this is a thing I do) in the extremely cool Wildsam Pacific Northwest Field Guide. I have lived in the Northwest my entire life and I still learned so much I didn’t know from this little book. It isn’t one of those books that’s all about where to get the best ice cream or Thai food (there’s some of that), but instead it dives into the history of this place, it’s natural beauty and strange, and wonderful, people. I’m also proud to have my essay included along with other amazing writers at the back of the book: Emma Noyes, Smith Henderson and Marjorie Celona.
Next week, I’ll be doing a live virtual event with Crosscut, where famed journalist Bill Morlin and I will be in conversation with Mark Baumgarten about “Insurrection, Domestic Terror and White Supremacy.” You’ve gotta RSVP for it, which you can do at the link.
7. Offer Me Alternatives and I Decline
We should have good reasons to believe that better times are coming, hopefully.
I Love your work, Leah. I listened to your episode on the Lawfare Podcast, then I downloaded Bundyville and binged the two seasons in a week. Your work is very meaningful and very important, so I want to give you all my encouragement and support. Hang in there!
Love your podcasts and articles. It’s such a hard time for everyone on the planet right now. I’m in health care— and I want to cry often. But, shedding one tear would be so human and I don’t feel at all human these days. Your writing has been so real for me. I thought of you as I watched the insurrection on January 6th. What would Leah think? Did she suspect this would happen? After listening to Bundyville: The Remnant, I feared such a day would happen. Looking forward to your next article or podcast. Your insight and excellent perspective sets you apart from many writers. Take care!