Sectional Healing 10/21: Empty Plastic Bags

This newsletter is called the Captain...

Oct 21, 2020

WRITE SECTION

There’s a scene from American Beauty where one of the characters shows a video he took of an empty plastic bag being artfully blown around by the wind. The scene is stoic and beautifully metaphorical if not a little heavy-handed in the attention and re-attention the movie pays to this sequence throughout.

All that to say, I feel like that plastic bag right now. I feel mentally suffocated by the world and life and politics and culture and social media all to the point that I just feel like an emptied out vessel that once housed maybe takeout food or something from Walmart but now is just totally and utterly vacant and is being blown about by anything and everything.

(REQUISITE CAVEATS)

To be clear, I feel like a real piece of butt meat even saying this because I am someone who really hasn’t been inordinately affected by any of the major events of this year. My job is good, my family is good, and other than burying an axe into my ankle bone, my health is good. So on a spectrum of people who have a right to lament and those who don’t, I’m AGGRESSIVELY in the region of those who have no real right to complain.

But within the selfish context of my own experience, I just feel like a ghost of a human waiting for the election to happen hoping that somehow the partisanship and hatefulness will die down, when secretly, I don’t think it will? Maybe just the urgency of it all will?

But it’s not like everyone is going to start being chill once the votes are cast. Shitheads are still gonna shithead no matter who wins or what the political calendar is like.

HOWEVER.

In moments like these, I keep thinking about how I don’t REALLY believe the noise I hear is what we’re all *actually* like. I truly don’t think most Americans are unrepentant butt sausages; it can just feel that way sometimes.

My hope is that for all the noise and animosity, those things are really just the product of a vocal minority being too rowdy and me being too online and that most of us, no matter what happens in a couple of weeks, will continue to deal with each other in spades of grace and scores of decency.

Otherwise, I’ll have to go full-on hermit and move to Iceland but we *just* moved so I’d really rather not.