Through The Dense Malaise
If there’s one thing I can say about the last several weeks as I’ve been dealing first with a gout flare, the worst since the first years ago that woke me up in the middle of the night feeling like somehow I had broken my foot in my sleep, and then the ensuing aftermath where I might be dealing with a gout-prompted bunion that makes me want to just cut off the entire foot, it’s that I no longer think I have the bandwidth to deal with the combination of the continuing fascist administrative blitzkrieg and the feckless, outright absent, or just plain backward Democratic Party response.
All of which sort of ended up the context for why the latest development at the Department of Health and Human Services since the United States Senate confirmed Wormwood as Mine Furor’s pick to lead the agency felt sort of resoundingly last-strawish for what might have been my last nerve.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is planning a large study into potential connections between vaccines and autism, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters, despite extensive scientific research that has disproven or failed to find evidence of such links.
The CDC's move comes amid one of the largest measles outbreaks the U.S. has seen in the past decade, with more than 200 cases and two deaths in Texas and New Mexico. The outbreak has been fueled by declining vaccination rates in parts of the United States where parents have been falsely persuaded that such shots do more harm than good.
It’s hardly a secret that I’m generally feeling like I have to put too much of the energy that I very much do not have into grinding my way through a world that doesn’t especially want me to be in it, or even understand why it can be so difficult, so you can imagine how the eugenicists taking over the direction of the Centers for Disease Control feels right about now. Nothing says you’re wanted like the government preferring people get measles and die than be born autistic.
To be clear, I’m not saying the above as any kind of indication that I’m actively thinking that I should not in fact be in this world. Just that I am tired of it feeling like a fight to be here, and if the latest gout flare has taught me anything it’s that I’m not entirely sure I have the temperament or wherewithal to add this or that physical impediment to mobility into the mix of things, when I ask for so little in the way of being able to get out of my house as it is.
(It’s even infecting the things I do for enjoyment, like reading. I’ve been having profound difficulties concentrating on Ajay Singh Chaudhary’s The Exhausted of the Earth during the day and Nghi Vo’s The City in Glass at bedtime. It’s as if my internal space is shrinking and being choked off to match the external one. I’m not entirely sure which I find more dispiriting.)
Anyway, the point of this is that I’m finding it increasingly impossible not just to keep up with gestures at everything but even to care about wanting to do so in the first place. I’ve tried very carefully not to turn my social media use into doomerism, and maybe it’s just the bubble of my own reduced capacity and capability, but I don’t see either how my own life escapes the cull or how anything around me escapes it either, and I’m finding that there’s very little to hold onto lately that gives me, forget about a reason, but even just the motivation to care.
It’s ironic, of course, that all of this is piling up just as I have a three-week (if not, potentially, four) gap without a therapy session, not that there’d be much of anything to do in these sessions beyond acknowledging that I’m not having an especially hopeful time of it. Although it’s true that I find it enormously helpful just to be able to stop for an hour each Friday to relate the happenings of the past week, looking deliberately behind me for a bit instead of just having all of those moments and hours and days piling up on top of me.
I get that it makes no sense to title this post with a lyric from a song that ultimately is about not losing hope, but right here and right now I’m living out the beginning of the song, not the end. I’m not sure I believe it’s possible to get anywhere close to that end. Not in what’s left of my lifetime, anyway.
Look, not to put too fine a point on it: I don’t especially like the idea of anything in my ass but if the price of getting off this fucking rock is anal probes I guess what I’m saying is I’d like some further information.
Yesterday I left for tomorrow
There was nothing after today
If another planet would take me
I’d be glad to go—Metric, “Stone Window”