I wake up the same body, but the familiar options—those enliveners of fantasy and nightmare—remain: walk out of my life; dissolve into poverty; quit; do as little as possible; stop taking the medication; act and spend erratically; take the ones I love along with me into some supposedly ennobling venture; die, or whatever. I wake up and take the orange pill and blink until those options feel ridiculous. I eat food and the options fade away. I'm "back in my body", "right with the world", "able to handle it".
you have to spit on the meaning, rub its wet grit into your thumb, to see its color.
The jobs are bad because they're killing us. The idea is that they're supposed to keep us alive, but they don't. We keep ourselves alive; the jobs do not.
The jobs are a narrow gate through which human desire must pass. We built the gate and made it small. People know this. People want to break the gate. Practically, this means that people want to not work. If taken seriously, that desire will carry us into a future that prioritizes life over death, heaven over hell, earth over ideas.
I am incapable of understanding the degree to which my body has been damaged by more than two years of rarely leaving my dwelling. I can sense how I'm dumber: the words come slow or not at all; my memory's shot; the prospect of working on anything for more than an hour at a time seems impossible, like climbing a mountain with broken ankles. There are parts of me, parts private to my mind, that seem to have been cut out of me. There are days in which blinking feels a chore. Where drinking water seems to be the only comprehensible activity. All this, and I haven't even had COVID, a disease whose longterm symptoms can just wreck a life.
So the price of living has been to collect a bunch of wounds. I dream of being rewarded for my diligence, my patience. For example: if health insurance were freely available to me, I'd weep with joy for days. And this is proof of how the wounded are made to stop dreaming.
We pay and protect six men and three women to decree what ninety or so million women can or can't do when they're pregnant (this being just one matter we celebrate those nine for discerning). Their decision—like all decisions of the powerful—affects how people structure their lives. This decision deletes futures, captures minds, erases already-unsteady feelings of charity and love, prevents the woman from saying something, prevents the woman from saying what they want, prevents women from living safely and peaceably with themselves among others. One decision, one judgement; we let the six men and three women do this ruling for the rest of their lives.
We do this because we collectively treat four pages signed by thirty-nine men as a sacred text by which the lives and dignities of our neighbors may and must be assessed. Of course twelve of the men who signed this holy document enslaved (or: tortured, as a matter of course) people.
I'll say it simply: we're fools.
The field has no doors. But we do know it, too. It's the place described by the freaks who beg peace, by those who die unthinkingly into love. Part of why we kill those people is so that they stop describing the field.
Because once you taste the air of the field, you recognize that there aren't actually any other places to be. That the others are not in rooms, but are clumped together in the field, communally hallucinating their doors and walls. And of course once you know this you have to say it, because the truth has a way of being good to say.