#pretend to make this a semiannual thing

[batemanofficial]

time for everybody's favorite semiannual tradition: Jaime Bitches and Dithers About His Mother

fair warning this is just my stream of consciousness so it may be nonsensical and meandering but you knew what you signed up for when you clicked the readmore tbh so proceed at your peril

so real jaimeheads know how my mother is, but for those who don't let's suffice it to say that she is what i might call a "hands off" parent. it was made very clear to me throughout my childhood that my mother did not like children - just, like, as a concept - and only had me because she felt like she had to and/or as an experiment in animal husbandry.

now you may be thinking: "jaime, that sounds really harsh! surely you know your mom loves you." and you're right. i'm sure she does, in her way. but she does not like me, and she does not care to shield me from that reality. i don't know if it's because of something i've done, the fact that the reality of raising me diverted from her expectations due to the extenuating medical circumstances that defined my childhood, or just the simple reality that i possess the requisite chutzpah to tell her to fuck off when necessary, or some combination thereof, but the fact remains: she doesn't like me. simple as.

when i was a kid she always made it clear that i was not to grow up to be "weak" or the place any emphasis on my emotional wellbeing over my ability to reason independently, which has had the deleterious effect on my mental health that you might imagine, so im not going to dredge all that up just for the sake of airing my dirty laundry. but i will say that as a result of being raised with these imperatives, its still very difficult for me to articulate my emotions beyond "i feel bad about xyz" because i always equated "feeling bad" with being overwrought and weak and diverting my energy away from the things that needed to be done in order to allow myself to wallow.

all of the above considered, as ive been living with my parents again after college, it's all been grating on me in a way that i don't feel is sustainable anymore. i don't know if it's the fact that im medicated and can see things a little more clearly, or if living on my own for so long has given me a little more of an objective lens on this sort of thing, but ive noticed that every time i talk to my mom about something that's important to me (and im using the term "important" kind of loosely here, just insofar as whatever im talking to her about has some kind of bearing on my day to day) she either doesn't react at all or reacts with an affect that i can only describe as a combination of mild disgust and confusion. either way, she'll forget what ive said entirely by the end of the conversation. my mother is, without hyperbole, the single most self-absorbed person i've ever met.

i think people are fundamentally selfish at the end of the day, for good or for bad, but my mom just won't engage with anything that doesn't serve her. at this point, i don't feel like i can reach her on any level anymore, which is really what's bothering me. like i used to be able to at least make her mad, if nothing else, but now i just feel like an even bigger inconvenience to her than ive ever been. it's one thing to say i don't care what she thinks of me, and on a purely philosophical level i don't, but like on a purely gut-feeling level it does still hurt my feelings! but i don't feel like i can say that to her in any constructive way because she just doesn't accept that as a valid concern.

anyway. i hate that i can't achieve even a baseline level of emotional intelligence while in proximity to my mom. i just want my mom to be my mom, but the closest she can get is pretending to care and that sucks!!!! it coheres. it fucking coheres doesn't it. UGH

[sinrau]

Photo Credit: Noah Berger

Here’s a tiny thought that I keep having lately. Our World War, our moonshot, our great and defining impossible challenge? It’s saving human civilization. From collapse. As big as it gets. Unfortunately for us, so far, we’re not even trying.

You can tell me that you don’t feel it. But I think you do. Your gut knows that things are going badly, badly wrong. Pandemic, depression, authoritarianism, Arctic melting, fires burning. You might have an inkling by now that we’re living at the beginning of an age of catastrophe. Three to five decades of calamity are now before us. Your brain disputes it — it’s doing what it does, extrapolating forward on the basis of past experience. But that’s no good now. The old world is gone. The new one is here to stay: the one we’re living in now, where nothing seems right, everything’s gone topsy-turvy and chaos, uncertainty, and anxiety reign. Your gut is right, and your brain is wrong. You can see the end of our civilization from here, if you look, writ large in fire, flood, plague, drought, famine, poverty, despair. It’s not an illusion — it’s a warning to us, backwards in time, from futurity.

Let me say it again. This is our moonshot. Our World War. Saving human civilization from sure collapse, to the extent that we can. Yes, really.

What is it going to feel like if we continue on this path of not even really trying to? Pretending not to listen to our guts, which are shouting all that at us?

Like a kind of never-ending, accelerating pulsation of disaster. One that’s going to leave us weary, exhausted, and numb — because as one kind of catastrophe recedes, another will ignite. Often literally — like the wildfires that are sweeping California…while a pandemic rages…as a demagogue leads the nation off a cliff…and mass death is the new normal.

Let me explain what I mean by “accelerating pulsation of disaster.” Take the example of California’s wildfires. They’re the direct result of climate change. Hotter temperatures, hotter oceans, bigger storms, more lightning, drier vegetation — bang! A near certainty of historic fires igniting.

So California’s burning…again. Just like it was last year, and the year before that, and so on. In a few months, it’ll be Australia’s turn to be hit by megafires, all over again. They’ll be worse than last year, at least if we average it all over a decade or so. That’s because, of course, fire is seasonal. And as we head into the age of catastrophe, “megafire season” will become a part of our lives. The world will develop Fire Belts, of which California and Australia are becoming a part.

But not just Fire Belts. Also something like Heat Belts. The hottest temperature on earth was just recorded. And vast swathes of the earth are going to be uninhabitable without air conditioning in just a few decades — Dubai, Karachi, Mumbai. Summer by summer, the temperature will creep upwards, until, at last, it’s crossing the threshold of habitability. What then?

Then there are Flood Belts. While the pandemic raged, much of Asia flooded. The West didn’t take much notice — even though China’s largest dam is now at it’s limits. And yet the megafloods Asia just experienced are just like megafires — natural phenomena that are getting worse on a seasonal, yearly cycle. Within a decade or two, these floods will also threaten habitability.

“Habitability,” by the way, is a polite, anodyne way to say: the ongoing survival of countries, cities, societies, economies. Whole gigantic chunks of our civilization are going to simply melt away like the arctic ice.

Are you beginning to get what I mean by “accelerating pulsation of disaster” yet? As we head into the age of catastrophe, a new range of calamities will become our dismal new normal. They’ll recur, in cycles. Only each time the cycle spins, they’ll get worse and worse. Megafires, megafloods, pandemics, extinctions.

Take another example: Covid. Covid isn’t an anomaly ** — it’s part of a trend.** SARS, bad, MERS, worse, and Covid, world-changing. Many virologists were expecting a respiratory Coronavirus pandemic precisely because such a thing has been on the cards for the last two or three decades now, as respiratory Coronaviruses have gotten more widespread, become wider-spreading pandemics faster.

What’s the cycle of pandemic? It’s not a seasonal cycle, like flood or fire. It’s something more like — at least if take SARS and MERS as pointers — something more like a decadal cycle: every decade or so, a new respiratory virus has emerged. A decade or so from now, it’s probably likely we’ll be hit by another pandemic. Will it be worse than this one? If recent history’s any indication, yes.

So now we have a world that looks like this: megafires, getting worse every summer. Megafloods, getting worse every monsoon. Fire Belts and Heat Belts and Flood Belts threatening the survival of economies and societies.

All those disasters accelerate on a seasonal scale. But they intersect, too, with longer-scale disasters, like pandemics, which operate on decadal scales.

Or those which operate on even longer scales. Recently, evidence was found of methane deposits under the permafrost breaching. That’s really, really bad news. Methane’s one of the most potent greenhouse gases there is, and there are massive deposits buried in the ice. If they start to burst — think sudden, severe, probable mass extinction scale climate change. Then we have a complete rupture with life as we know it, over the course of a few decades. That’s not to say that will happen — but it is certainly to say the probability is now increasing year by year.

The accelerating pulsation of disaster. Life is going to feel scary, strange, dislocating, anxiety-inducing. As soon as this disaster ebbs — phew, the megafire’s over! — here comes another one. Now it’s megaflood season. Now it’s Covid season. Christ, now there’s a new pandemic. What the? You and I were born live at the very tail end of a golden age of human stability. That age is now over, and the transition into the age of apocalypse is going to feel deeply frightening. 2020 was just the beginning. It’s going to get much, much worse, before — if — it ever gets better.

As all those cycles of catastrophe, operating at annual, semiannual, decadal scales get worse and worse, ultimately, our systems will begin to buckle, and then break. Faster and harder than we think.

Think of California right about now. A wildfire is bad. A respiratory pandemic is really bad. But megafires during a respiratory pandemic? What now? They have conflicting objectives: quarantine and stay at home, versus evacuate and firefight.

Now think of the macro scale picture for California. Covid’s ripping the economy apart, causing a massive wave of unemployment, falling incomes, business closures — the vicious cycle of depression’s already igniting. Many States are heading squarely into fiscal crisis. They have far lower tax revenues — all of which leaves them less capable, in the future, of fighting things like…megafires and megafloods.

They then face a stark dilemma. To fight accelerating waves of natural calamity, fire, flood, drought, famine, then saps resources that are needed to invest in tomorrow. We fight that megafire, we try to build a barrier against tomorrow’s mega flood. There go all those schools, hospitals, universities, libraries, parks, roads, high-speed trains we wanted to build, expand, renew.

Simply fending off catastrophe will take a larger and large share of our resources. That leaves less left over to invest in the things which really improve people’s quality of life, whether healthcare, education, retirement, and so on.

What happens as a result of that? Well, people’s qualities of life fall. Depression and frustration and unhappiness grow. And the predictable consequence of that is more extremism. Discontented masses tend to turn to demagogues, who blame all of a society’s problems on hated minorities. The age of catastrophe will be a boon to tomorrow’s Trumps.

And yet even all this just takes to about the mid 2030s or so. After that? That’s when the real fireworks begin.

By about then, the limits of our civilization’s fundamental systems will have been breached. Insurance and banking systems won’t be able to cover the losses of burning states and flooded cities. They’ll go bankrupt, and probably demand huge bailouts. Those bankruptcies will have a devastating consequence. Not just the lack of credit, but a sharp rise in the cost of it. Translation, you’re probably living in debt right now — whether mortgage, credit card debt, car loans, student debt, medical debt, or all of the above — and the interest rates on all that are going to skyrocket. Somebody has to pay for the risk and costs of all this sudden catastrophe. And it’s probably going to be you, in the hidden form of paying massively more interest on all that debt you already can’t pay off.

As insurance and financial systems go broke, and the costs of accessing money and credit spike, huge waves of businesses will close. Most small businesses exist on razor-thin margins, from restaurants and bars to nail salons and hobby shops. When their rents double and the interest on their loans triples and they can’t get any more credit — at exactly the same time as their customer base is falling apart? Bang! They go broke, too. And all the millions of people they employ — small businesses are still the heart of the economy — are unemployed. The cycle of depression and poverty accelerates.

And now it begins to have real social consequences. Unemployed people don’t pay taxes. Less taxes means less investment. Less investment means impossible choices, dilemmas.

Societies with far, far lower tax bases have to make stark and difficult choices. Do we close those schools and parks, so we can fight those mega floods with a giant barrier? Do we shutter those lifelines for people, those unemployment programs, so we can fight those megafires? Do we shut down this public transport or retirement system, so we can pay for the research to fight another pandemic?

Most of them will choose the inevitable: the short-term solution. Better to have a city that’s not flooded or incinerated than to have a fine university in it, burned to the ground or drowned. So they’ll choose to literally firefight, instead of make long-term investments — they’ll have to. But that choice will absolutely wreck people’s lives. People won’t be able to send their kids to school, find decent jobs, access unemployment benefits, retire. They won’t be able to pay off those debts, at the precise moment interest rates are spiking upwards. They’ll go broke. They’ll grow desperate, afraid, enraged, anxious.

And all that will produce a massive swing towards demagogues. The 2030s and 2040s will be like the 2010s — the decade the world turned to a new wave of neo-authoritarians, from Trump to Farage to Modi to Duterte — but much, much worse. The hard-right wave of the 2010s was a reaction to failing neoliberalism. But the fascist wave of the 2030s will be a reaction to a failing civilization.

And then people will get really ugly. “They’re vermin!” cried the Trumpists of the 2010, about Mexicans, Latinos, Muslims. And yet there was a limit to what damage they could do. In the 2030s, there won’t be one. “They’re filthy vermin!” the neo-fascists will cry, of the scores of desperate climate refugees clinging to their shores. And they’ll just watch them drown, watch them burn alive, or worse, help it along.

If you don’t believe that, consider how ugly people got now — when all that was under threat was their middle class aspirations, living better lives than their grandparents. And then consider how genuinely violent and brutal they’ll get when the world is turning to literal ashes and dust around them. It’s going to be much, much worse than most of us think. The 2030s — the late 2030s, probably, will be a horrific time, where the worst of human brutality is on display, where terms like “climate genocide” and “mass crimes against humanity” become familiar once again.

How bad are things going to get? Much, much worse than you think. They are going to get absolutely apocalyptic. I don’t say that to scare you. I say it to raise a point. We have one chance to avert this near-certain future of fascism, apocalypse, calamity, and disaster, of flood, fire, plague, depression, upheaval, extinction — and that is to act now.

How? To avert all the above. We can invest something like a quarter of the world’s income now, and not have that future. That’s a lot, sure. But the alternative is not having a civilization anymore.

You’re right to object: “But we don’t even know how to do that! Invest a quarter of the world’s income in fighting climate change, pandemics, megafires, megafloods, fascism, by giving everyone education, healthcare, retirement, an income, by giving nature dignity and worth and nourishment, too — around the globe? Where would we begin?!” We don’t know how. We didn’t how to do any of the following things once either. Go to the moon. Defeat a virus. Stop bacteria from growing. Make a wheel, lever, axis, engine.

We don’t know how is the point. We have to begin figuring out how. Right now. There should be no other point to our global politics, economy, to our societies and cultures at this point in human history. Rescuing human civilization from sure collapse is the true work of now, the real job we are all here to do, and that we’re not doing it, or not allowed to, is why we mostly feel so empty, pointless, and defeated.

Consider all that a warning if you like. Or maybe a manifesto. The future is going up in smoke. It’s not going to get any better until and unless you and I make it better. Right about now, we’re not even remotely close to thinking at the scales or levels we need to, much less acting thereupon.

Our World War, our moonshot? It’s saving human civilization.

And the problem is that while your gut knows exactly what I’m talking about, your brain’s still disputing it, because all this is outside the current range of human experience. And yet the megafires burn, while the megafloods pour, while the pandemic rages, while the planet burns, the ice melts, the animals die off, while the lungs and limbs of life itself choke and grow feeble — and all that is only going to get worse, year by year, decade upon decade.

This is not a drill, my friends. It’s time to stop acting like it is, burying our pretty vacant little heads in Netflix-and-chill and Instagram envy and the latest gender pronoun and Fakebook friends. That’s all, history will rightly say, garbage for the human mind and spirit. This is it. We’re not going to get another chance.

Umair

August 2020

2020 is a Warning That Our Civilization is Beginning to Fall Apart

[humansremain-blog]

DISSEMINATION 6/1/17 

I’m continually haunted by the ghosts of who I could have been. 

 There are hundreds of versions of me swirling around and I’m responsible for the demise of each and every one of them. Most of them only had brief moments of existence, they materialized inside of my head, some only for mere seconds before I eviscerated them. Whenever I’ve engaged in one of those “heart to heart” moments with myself, those pep talks in which you attempt to reconcile with yourself and proclaim this to be the moment that you are going to break the cycle, during every single one of those moments I’ve willed into existence an improved version of who I could be if I just made some simple changes. But every time that I didn’t follow through, I essentially murdered that person before he could manifest. 

I’ve given them all the exact same eulogy. “It’s not my fault. This area is holding me back. These people are holding me back. This drama is holding me back. These politics are holding me back. These responsibilities are holding me back.” At some point, even I wasn’t buying it anymore. 

 I stopped pretending that I wanted better for myself and started pretending that I was already there. I gave up and settled into a mindset that allowed me to continually justify my lifestyle with vague anthems of “punk rock”, convincing myself that I was leading a fulfilling life by not being sucked into the “responsibilities of adulthood” while doing things “my way.” Of course, all I was really doing was failing miserably at life and attempting to disguise it with self-congratulatory bullshit. 

 (I still do things my way, the difference being that now I’m actually doing things.)

 Then one day, for whatever reason, after my semiannual heart to heart with a better self, something different happened. After the browbeating he gave me I went about my usual routine, setting out to drown him in a handle of rum. The difference was that this time he was still there when I woke up. So I tried again. Still there. Whether I was stepping out of the shower or changing lanes, wherever I made eye contact with myself, he was there.

 He told me that there was only space for one more body in my ethereal graveyard and he was clear that it was me who that hole was meant for who I was right then, one way or the other. It was time for change, and it was literally do or die. It was time to kill who I was instead of who I could be. The only way to do that was to take the next step into my future, at that very moment, as this new version of me, right then and there. So that’s what I did.

 It was hardly noticeable at first. The first few steps were heavy, but then they quickly got lighter. What started as a small change in my mindset, an acceptance of personal responsibility, slowly began to have a very real affect on my reality. My world began to change for the better. My health, my finances, my enjoyment of life, my personal fulfillment, it all improved exponentially. The more success I had the more I strived for more of the same. My new perspective left me wondering what else I could accomplish rather than wondering when the “work” would be done. 

Now when I look in the mirror, I quite literally am beginning to recognize my very real physical transformation into that version of me that wouldn’t go away. He’s becoming me, and I am becoming him. However, this has brought back into my memory all of those who came before him. What about that very first guy? The first one to sit me down and tell me that I needed to make some improvements, how much further could I be right now if I had just listened to him? Even the guy after him, or the guy after that guy? I’d be so much further ahead, so much better off. Even if I’d just listened to the guy who showed up just six months before, I’d be six months ahead of where I am now!



I suppose I shouldn’t dwell on what could have been, but it helps me keep things in perspective. Now I understand the reality of what I was missing out on. I can feel and see the self-transformation that I am capable of; the rewards of sacrifice and discipline. All of these ghosts are just reminders of how much I have to lose if I were to fall back into old habits. I have to continually beat to shit who I was before. I have to make sure he has no chance of getting back up. I’m going to keep kicking his head in until he starts to stink, just to make sure he’s dead.



If you don’t like where you are at today, then why the fuck would you be planning on doing all of the same things tomorrow? Stop patting yourself on the back for doing nothing. Stop justifying your failures as life choices. Stop looking for fulfillment in other people. Stop blaming your problems on anything outside of yourself. Fuck off and live!



Take your next step into your present, right fucking now as WHO YOU COULD BE then immediately turn around and 

                             MURDER WHO YOU WERE.

Throdle Vieda! Sean David Stoltenburg

[bluelricart]

College doodles dump | 1st Semester

Because i draw while bored in class

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