As I say repeatedly... it is a curse to know a lot about all of this. By no means everything, of course. But I think the reason it corrodes my mental health is that being Jewish and following these things provokes a kind of existential anguish that is hard to bear alone. So I am putting all this here and you can read it or not. The fact that nobody ever engages with my rants (although this isn't really a rant) tells me you probably won't read it. But I have to put it somewhere. I guess I do wish you would read it, just to know that someone did.

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First off — this was all so incredibly stupid. Well, everyone can agree that this means the other side was stupid, right? No. But there seems to be some kind of political or ontological choice in whichever stupidity you start with, and that should tell you immediately we are in the land of false dichotomies and Hobson's choice kind of thinking.

The compulsion of people to choose sides as though we are watching a football game, and then say things, empty things. Never fails to amaze me. 

Adam told us he was scared to be on the Harvard campus. People were yelling at him asking if he was a Jew. The shit people say at moments like this... it burns, and it stays burned in the brain, for a lifetime if not generations.

There was an entire country ethnically cleansed a few weeks ago — a hundred thousand people — and nobody on social media said a goddamn thing. Including me, to be sure.

That statement hits differently, by the way, depending on what "side" of this we are talking to. But it is as close to an absolute as I can come back to. Social media simply does not care. "A quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing." That's Neville Chamberlain, by the way. See how useful that history Ph.D. is? Anyway someone on Xitter actually started their post by saying "So I started looking around about this situation and..." like that is 100% the whole problem. People do not read books anymore. Everything is absorbed from this strange glowing box.

One of the people I'm close to at minyan lost a cousin to a rocket attack in Ashkelon. This was someone who was born in a DP camp in Vienna. That's how close history is there. It's not some kind of abstraction, click into and out of.

This has gutted me to my core.

https://marinakittaka.com/posts/2021-02-26-Good-Ol-Charlie-B

For our 10th anniversary E got me a video game player with Pac-Man and a bunch of other games. It was sent to us in pieces to be assembled because, of course, there is no need for any computing power for these games anymore. Many pegs and Allen screws later, I am playing Pac-Man every night. It was a good present. I think that secretly I have always kind of hoped someone would get me a video game for a special occasion.

Meanwhile, when E broke her hand they had to cut my mom's diamond ring off of her hand, and she said "I guess you can spend money on that instead of diamonds," so I knew what she wanted. :) I got her diamond earrings and they look great.

We went to a B&B that had a sheep farm and a big hot tub near New Hope. For lunch the next day we went to the city and had lunch at the Four Seasons. Pretty fancy for us. E was smiling and that was good. I think her FB post was at least partly for me because she wants me to know depression doesn't go away just because you do something nice. Tbh I feel like that was what I had been trying to tell her for much of 2020-22. But we understand each other and we'll ride it out.

Jo read E's FB post and sent her a lovely text saying that she is "really fucking happy you're in my life" and that probably was the best present she ever got. <3

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I am in an inexplicably good mood. It's some kind of combination of feeling good about gender stuff, reconciled at least about job stuff, and generally, perhaps, a determination to shake off the gloom. There sure is a lot going on.

* E unexpectedly got a gig doing market research interviews in Puerto Vallarta! This was via her friend Jenny, who also does market research and is kind of a wild child. They somehow scored what is basically a five day all expenses paid vacation with a day or two of work in there somewhere. This came out of the blue and E has never done anything like this before. She really needs some bubbly positivity in her life so this is really perfect for her. 

* Last night we met up with a couple we met at last year's Keystone Conference who stayed together through one spouse's transition. They were extremely nice and you pick up these small nuggets of wisdom hearing how people got through that. E is feeling about as good as all of this as she ever has, which means that I am too. 

* Does my mild euphoria make me daydream about coming out more broadly? It does. Some of this is just squaring my mind around the reality that yes, I am different, and no, it's not going away, and it is time... past time... for me to begin reframing life around this truth.

Another week has come and gone and little has changed. They are still working on the goddamn bathroom. It now has tile on the floor and most of the walls. They were supposed to come and replace the fixtures so we could have a working bathroom again, but that didn't happen.

Meanwhile, no word from the Cheerful Dutchman about the kitchen. Maybe my bad mood scared them off. "Here's your money back, we won't do the project after all." Or maybe at 8 am tomorrow he'll be here happily pointing out all the terrible things that will happen for the next 4 months.

I am reading The Counterlife again and it reminds me that in Roth's mind, Henry's rant that I quoted a few weeks ago wasn't the end of the story. Henry confides in Nathan again when a heart condition makes him impotent, ending his affairs. This starts a set of parallel story lines that can't help but resonate with me because he is describing my parents' and grandparents' world, and the arguments that they would have, down to the grain of the formica tabletops. The thing about Roth is that his interlocutors always get the best lines; his genius is in having his stand-in be the straight man for others' obsessions. Yes, I am thinking about writing again, why do you ask.

Some very naive part of me, despite everything, despite a lifetime of profound difference between us, hoped something good would come of this. It wasn't until I had my therapy session today that I started crying. 

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They shook hands in front of the terminal. Nobody watching would ever have imagined that once upon a time they had eaten ten thousand meals together, or that only an hour an earlier they were momentarily as close as they had been back before either had written a book or touched a girl. A plane took off from Newark, roaring in Nathan's ears.

"He did say 'Bastard,' Nathan. He called you a bastard."

"What?"

Suddenly Henry was furious—and weeping. "You are a bastard. A heartless conscienceless bastard. What does loyalty mean to you? What does responsibility mean to you? What does self-denial mean, restraint—anything at all? To you everything is disposable! ... Do you really think that conscience is a Jewish invention from which you are immune? Do you really think you can just go and have a good time with the rest of the swingers without troubling yourself about conscience? Without troubling about anything but seeing how funny you can be about the people who have loved you most in the world? The origin of the universe! When all he was waiting to hear was 'I love you!' 'Dad, I love you'—that was all that was required! Oh, you miserable bastard, don't you tell me about fathers and sons! I have a son! I know what it is to love a son, and you don't, you selfish bastard, and you never will!"

— Philip Roth, Zuckerman Unbound

My father was God and didn’t know it. He gave me
the ten commandments neither in thunder nor in fury, neither in fire nor in cloud
but in gentleness and in love. He added caresses and added kind words
adding, “I beg you,” and “please.” He sang keep and remember
in a single melody and he pleaded and cried quietly between one commandment and the next:
Don’t take your God’s name in vain; don’t take it, not in vain.
I beg you, don’t bear false witness against your neighbor. He hugged me tightly and whispered in my ear:
Don’t steal. Don’t commit adultery. Don’t murder. And he put the palms of his open hands
on my head in the Yom Kippur blessing. Honor, love, in order that your days might be long
on the earth. And my father’s voice was white like the hair on his head.
Later, he turned his face to me one last time
like on the day he died in my arms and said, I want to add
two to the ten commandments:
The eleventh commandment: “Don’t change.”
And the twelfth commandment: “You must surely change.”
So said my father and then he turned from me and went off
disappearing into his strange distances. 

(Yehuda Amichai)

I am reading this Greil Marcus book Lipstick Traces which is nominally about punk music but actually turns out to be a long explainer of Situationism. Marcus will have many pages about Guy Dubord and the Lettrist International, and then say, "as the Sex Pistols demonstrated..." in the most amazing way. I want to ask Greil Marcus (who is still around) what he makes of the fact that Johnny Rotten turned out to be a horrible Trumpist asshole. 

This is the central paradox of our time, I think — not just that our heroes have turned out to be terrible, but that the last moments in our culture where anything genuinely new occurred — the 1960s and 1970s —  turn out to look, in retrospect, like they paved the way for Reagan and Trump. In fact, of course, there were plenty of people pointing out at the time that these "revolutions" looked a lot like con games.