*****************************************

Rachelle: Really?!!

Rachelle: Wow!! Having Lyle Lovett like one of your Tweets is amazing! That must be a real feather in your cap!

Rachelle: I’m proud of you, Pickle!

Rachelle: Yes, of course I do.

Rachelle: He’s one of The Avengers, isn’t he?

Rachelle: The Jewish one.

Rachelle: The one who could turn himself into a plane that’s also a tiger.

Rachelle: Oh.

Rachelle: I thought one of The Avengers could do that.

Rachelle: And that they embraced all religions, that they fought for freedom of religious expression and each hero represented a great faith.

Rachelle: Oh.

Rachelle: Well, I guess I don’t know who Lyle Lovett is then.

Rachelle: Hmm, a musician.

Rachelle: No, none of those songs are familiar to me.

Rachelle: Just before my time, I guess.

Rachelle: Not a dig, Pickle. You’re just a lot older than me.

Rachelle: No, I’d say 12 years is a lot. Anything double digits.

Rachelle: What??

Rachelle: He was married to Julia Roberts?

Rachelle: You mean the guy who looks like a scarecrow/funeral director is Lyle Lovett?

Rachelle: Wow.

Rachelle: It’s true, personality does counts for a lot.

Rachelle: And yes, it is almost as if Julia Roberts liked your Tweet!

Rachelle: Aww, that’s sweet!

Rachelle: Well, if I’m your Pretty Woman, you’re my little Lyle Lovett!

Rachelle: Yes, my power skating class is over and I’ll be home soon.

Rachelle: With the wings.

Rachelle: Extra mild. Sauce on the side. Extra wet naps. No carrot stick taller than the others. As always.

Rachelle: It’s a little bit of a serial killer kind of order, you know.

Rachelle: That was auto correct.

Rachelle: I wrote “You’re a sweet kind of order.”

Rachelle: Well, auto correct works in mysterious ways.

Rachelle: Through a glass darkly and all of that.

Rachelle: Yes, you probably will start getting ads in you Facebook feed for serial killer things now.

Rachelle: Well, they say technology knows you better than you know yourself, Pickle!

Rachelle: Oh, I’m kidding, honey.

Rachelle: You’re no serial killer.

Rachelle: In fact, you would be the worst serial killer in history.

Rachelle: Well, your allergies to start. Always blowing your nose and sneezing. You’d be detected straight away!

Rachelle: And then there’s your general physical and mental weakness. Serial killers have to be on the ball! I bet serial killers get 10 hours of sleep a night!

Rachelle: Ha Ha!! I know, I would kill for 10 hours of sleep, too!

Rachelle: But look, the fact that you could never be a serial killer is a compliment, not an insult.

Rachelle: I know, these are confusing times.

Rachelle: The falcon cannot hear the falconer.

Rachelle: It’s from a poem.

Rachelle: I think the falconer is the person who dresses the falcon when they go hunting. Picks out the outfits. Not positive.

Rachelle: Anyway, see you in about half an hour! xo

The Dinosaur House, he calls it.

The weekends are full of families, and after an hour or so of exhibits, everybody typically ends up at the children’s play area. It is here where Jones’ transformations begin. He becomes a knight in chain mail. A dragon. A Sultan from mysterious desert lands.

A prism changing colour with the light, he is all glittering potential here. The rest of us, the parents, we sit down and exhale, ring the children like a campfire. Try to remember the plots of the lives we’ve been living.

It’s movement a kind of flight. Jones watches this impossible thing, it’s long, thin tail passing above like an airplane. The jellyfish are pink clouds that pulse mysteriously, belonging more to outer or inner space than this world we imagine we inhabit. Jones’ face against the aquarium window, his little finger prints visible as he watches a shark move indifferently past. The face is impassive, the blank eyes heartless and never in doubt. It moves through the water a kind of God.

Twitter was not at all what I thought it would be.

I envisioned a virtual water cooler where all sorts of people–many who didn’t work in an office– might get together during the day to exchange witty banter about what was going on in the world. I imagined a kind of democratic paradise, too, maybe like the ancient Greeks, a place where there was equal opportunity for everybody to be heard, and the quality of an idea was not contingent upon the status of the person bearing it.

Of course, it turns out that Twitter is a tire fire, and I simply could not have been more wrong.

Twitter and it’s 140 character cage, ( now upped to 280 characters ) did not spark conversations, it destroyed them. Instead of attempting to actually investigate ideas that you didn’t already own, people went on search and destroy missions, each Tweet a drive-by shooting aimed at a rival gang. Twitter was a weapon, a device used to amplify and distribute propaganda, and whenever a person was handed this weapon they immediately, without even knowing it, became a soldier in somebody else’s army.

Twitter was not a place you went to freely express yourself, it was a battlefield.

Just under a quarter of Americans are on this battlefield, and from what I can tell the preponderance of people using the platform would be loosely defined as a kind intelligentsia, those with sufficient space and security in their life to spend X-amount of time each day looking to make corrections in the lives of others. These people are driving the culture wars that are currently dominating our cyclonic news cycle, and that, in turn, is driving the political discourse. This means that the vast majority of Americans, more than 75%, are being led down a road paved by this influential, minority group.

Yet oddly, we seem more concerned about conspiratorial fictions then this beast in which we live.

No matter, the people behind Twitter know how dangerous and influential the platform has become, and in an effort to make it less pernicious, they’re now considering taking away the Like function.

Twitter is an obviously hierarchal structure, a place where status is measured by Likes, followers and retweets. The more of these you have, the more influence you wield. It’s practically a board game. The goal is not to learn about other people and their ideas, it’s about acquiring and exercising power. ( Exhibit A: Donald Trump) But it’s not the real world, not even close. The vast majority of humans live outside the gates of Twitter, yet they are directed and depicted, by those within. A technology that was meant to be radically democratic has somehow ended up being kind of totalitarian.

For instance, China is creating a Social Credit System which is intended to measure citizens social and business reputation. It’s a Black Mirror episode, a world in which everything you do is judged and catalogued by others, and it is upon that which your ability to function in society is dependent. In fact, Twitter had something very much like that which they called Klout, a complex numerical measurement of your influence. This is the unfortunate principal on which much of our social media exists, and if Twitter liberates us from it, they will be striking a great blow in a war most of us don’t even know we’re fighting.

In my imagination “The Internet” descended from the deep reaches of the universe and settled upon our planet like a mist. We began to interact with this powerful and mysterious entity without any real understanding of how it was going to effect us, or even if it was going to effect us. Most of us just assumed it was going to make things better, amplifying potential in a good, rather than harmful way.

However, it hasn’t exactly worked out that way. The astonishing gifts we’ve enjoyed have come with tremendous penalties, the primary of which might be a massive, unacknowledged mental health crisis.

I don’t know about you, but I have never seen as many declarations of anxiety and depression in my life as I now see on a regular basis online. It’s not at all uncommon for me to have multiple chat windows open at once, each one a conversation with a friend in crisis. This is highly subjective of course, and that people now have the means and social sanction to communicate their feelings might be something to celebrate, or, as my intuition suggests,  it could be something in the disembodied interactions we’ve been reducing ourselves to that’s causing this articulated spike in mental health problems.

It seems that the more we inhabit the abstracted realm of The Internet, the more certain we become of our beliefs. This is highly ironic to me, because we all know that amidst the spin and swirl of disinformation, fake news and uncanny algorithms, we should be as skeptical of claims to truth and certainty as we’ve ever been.

Take the White Power symbols that have been in the news.

As you may be aware, the symbol that you always thought meant “OK,” might now mean White Power.

This transition took place about a year ago on 4Chan, where it was conceived as a conscious lie. What I mean by that is that it wasn’t a White Power sign. The intent was to take an existing symbol and change it’s meaning, thus confusing the public and media and further eroding the idea of public trust.

Regardless, once this meme was in the blood stream there was no way to know what the use of the symbol meant. Did the person know it was a white power sign? Were they just saying “OK!?” Were they making a joke? Were they communicating racist ideology?

The first instance of this that I saw was of White House Advisor Zina Bash during a Supreme Court confirmation hearing.

Based on this image, people thought she was a White Supremacist.

Bash is of Mexican and Jewish heritage, and this photo that was widely circulated was a high resolution screen capture of a video, so she was in motion, not in a fixed, posed position. Claims that she was communicating a racist message seemed to me ambiguous at best. But people I know, like and respect saw this photograph, and others like it,

as crystal clear evidence of racist intent. Where I saw nothing but ambiguity, they saw none.

It felt like looking at the Neckar’s Cube, like some optical illusion was at play and the mechanics of our brains were prohibiting us from seeing the same thing.

There was simply no consensus on what was real. We were living two different stories when looking at the images. Where I was looking at what was directly in front of me, my friends were looking at circumstance, or perhaps subtext, seeing this single image as part of a much greater and evolving narrative.

Perhaps I am antique in my thinking, but when I see stories like these, I look for a kind of “courtroom proof.” If I have doubt, I am unwilling to prosecute the reputation and livelihood of the person being judged, even if they might still be suspicious to me. Maybe that makes me unwilling to act, and if so that is a sin I will one day have to answer for. Regardless, online a “thing” is true if it has momentum, if it supports the continuance of a passionately held belief, not if it meets some “clinical” standard of proof.

As our shared sense of truth and morality fall away– and disagreement leads to suspicion, if not flat-out contempt– we fearlessly share our certainties, but shamefully keep our uncertainties sheltered within, anxious that we’ll be attacked rather than supported by those whom we would love, and that, well that’s making us all feel a little jumpy and untethered.

A beautiful woman in a sundress,  her hair still wet from the morning shower, was trying to unlock a door. The sun was falling upon her, the wooden porch, the entire red brick face of the home. She didn’t have the right key and was struggling with the lock, with how her morning was assembling itself, and she tossed her head back in frustration. Tiny, almost imagined droplets of water were cast from her hair and caught in the sunlight, and everything seemed to stop for a moment. 

And then a raccoon, having slipped from night into day, emerged from behind a tree. With his detached animal knowingness he stared directly at us. Jones, astonished, squealed at the miracle, while the raccoon, keeping to the shadows, disappeared back into the night of some protective greenery. Up at the corner, at the mulberry tree and raspberry bushes,  so many berries had been crushed on the sidewalk that they looked like paintball splatters. There were berries hanging above us and growing from the earth beneath us, and it was like we’d passed into a different realm and were now moving through a fertile, green tunnel. As I was picking a raspberry for Jones, a woman sprinted by us toward the subway. Plugged into her iPhone, with a knapsack on her back and a briefcase in one hand, she was ready for the big meeting, ready to present the best version of herself to the world. She was moving fast, like an athlete who still retained her running form from college, days that had recently started to feel further and further away. 

An older man, immaculately dressed in wardrobe that looked from another century, ambled up the street coming to pass a college-aged woman wearing a bright yellow dress. Her face was still new, and she carried with her a pronounced, heaving limp that was mysterious and beautiful and sad, and when she smiled past us, there was the unexpected scent of clove cigarettes and skin cream. A butterfly then appeared and it was a sign. Perhaps a spirit guide, and Jones declared that we must follow it, and so we did– everything around us like still lingering dreams from the previous night, only now beginning to fade into the waking day.

the White House Press Secretary to President Donald Trump, was refused service at the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia based on “moral grounds.” The owner, Stephanie Wilkinson, simply did not want to serve somebody she found so politically offensive, and so she didn’t.

Since then the Red Hen restaurant in Washington, DC, which has no affiliation with the one in Lexington, has been getting attacked by both left and right on social media.

Keep in mind, this is not the restaurant that refused Sanders service. No matter, even after they explicitly stated that this was all a case of mistaken identity and they had nothing to do with the Huckabee Affair, people still demanded that they take a political position on the matter. The Red Hen responded by saying that businesses in DC are prohibited from discriminating against people for political affiliation because they are in a federal district. This wasn’t good enough. People still pressed them. Okay, we know you’re not the restaurant that was involved, and we know that you are subject to different laws and therefore don’t have a choice to make in the matter, but what if you did have a choice? What if you were the restaurant she walked in to? What would you do then?

And so it goes.

And now Donald Trump is tweeting furiously at the Red Hen in Virginia ( the right one) in the hopes of destroying their business.

The owner, likely seeing in herself a patriotic exemplar, stands by her act of micro resistance while the pitchfork and torch crowd– from both the left and right–gather, eager to burn some shit down.

So surreal and terrible and hilarious and scary.

It’s amazing to me just how quickly things are reduced to the symbolic. All the nuance, history, vulnerability and complexity that informs a person– or a restaurant, even–are swept to the side, reduced to little more than the baleful projections of a furious, roiling,  unconscious. The appetite right now is for enemies rather than friends, so if you’re caught in the public eye you become what that public needs you to be, not who you might actually be.

And so when I see Sarah Huckabee Sanders tossed about in the media, I think of Monica Lewinsky.

They really look alike.

 .      

I mean, they really do.

But beyond that, remember also how Monica Lewinsky was treated by the press and public? She was despised– crucified, by both the left and right, for the sins of Bill Clinton. Honest to God, I think it’s a miracle she didn’t jump out a window. But she survived, admirably, in fact, and it’s as if her ghost is now visible in “the perfect smokey eye” of Sarah Huckabee, and the antipathy that Lewinsky withstood is now being visited upon her. Both of them appear as privileged white girls, Beckys, really, and their ambition, greased by a system that favours people like them, propelled them right next to the most powerful man in the world, and this, this seems to be something our society simply cannot abide.

Ask Hillary Clinton.

And so these women rise up into the culture like cautionary tales. Reduced to cartoon figures, they float slowly above us, soft targets, while we, the rabble beneath cast stones and curses. If you’re a woman and your cultural centrality can in any way be traced back to a powerful man, you will be hated for it– by men, and by women, it would seem. This is America, and if you’re a woman and you fly too close to the sun, you’re declared a witch and you’re going to get burned, whether you deserve it or not.

**********************************************

Rachelle: Well, how do you know that?

Rachelle: No.

Rachelle: Really?

Rachelle: She pretended to retch?

Rachelle: Because you told her you liked her sneakers?

Rachelle: That is pretty extreme.

Rachelle: Was this one of the sorority girls who lives down the street?

Rachelle: The one who looks like Jennifer Lawrence?

Rachelle: I thought so.

Rachelle: And did you tell her this in a way that sounded like what you really meant was that you wanted to see her naked?

Rachelle: I see.

Rachelle: Yes, of course.

Rachelle: Look, I know you’re just trying to generate some light in this crazy, angry world, Pickle, I get that!

Rachelle: And sure, somebody has to help scantily clad sorority girls who are 30 years younger than you, feel like they’re making the right fashion choices.

Rachelle: Imagine if every time one of them passed by a much, much, much older man and he didn’t say something about what they were wearing? What would happen then? Their self-esteem might just crater and then who knows what might happen?! It could be catastrophic!

Rachelle: I’m not being sarcastic.

Rachelle: No, I’m not.

Rachelle: Nope.

Rachelle: Jesus Pickle, OF COURSE I’m being sarcastic.

Rachelle: It’s amazing to me how slow you are to pick-up on sarcasm!

Rachelle: Like at the park when that woman was complimenting how high you could go on the swings?

Rachelle: That was sarcasm.

Rachelle: And at the drum circle, when that man said that you “displayed a beautiful mastery over movement?”

Rachelle: That was sarcasm, too.

Rachelle: Oh honey, I’m sorry.

Rachelle: I am.

Rachelle: You’re right, sarcasm truly is the lowest form of humour.

Rachelle: Look,  it’s taking me longer than I thought here, do you mind picking Jones up from daycare?

Rachelle: Oh, I didn’t realize your group was meeting tonight.

Rachelle: I think it’s sweet that you guys get together and play Dungeons and Drama every month! Do you think you could let Jones join in? He’d love to dress up as Spiderman for it!

Rachelle: Dungeons and Dragons?

Rachelle: Oh, I always thought it was Dungeons and Drama.

Rachelle: I don’t know, I guess because of all the screaming and Lord of the Rings languages. Just seemed really dramatic.

Rachelle: Like an even nerdier version of Improv dramatic.

Rachelle: Whatever.

Rachelle: Okay, I get it.

Rachelle: It’s not a children’s game.

Rachelle: Very sophisticated. Very strategic. Good leadership training.

Rachelle: I’m surprised corporations like Google and Starbucks don’t use it as a training tool for their employees.

Rachelle: It really is a journey of discovery, isn’t it, Pickle?

Rachelle: Yes.

Rachelle: That was about 98% sarcastic.

Rachelle: Okay, don’t worry about it. I’ll pick Jones up, and you, my little Dragonborn Sorcerer, you have a great time playing Dungeons and Diggers! xox

It’s really just a big sandbox at our local park, but there are boulders in it and the children had carved little channels out of the dirt and filled them with water so that they’d become mysterious and winding rivers. It was the first warm day of spring, the first truly beautiful day after a very long winter, and Jones could not have been happier.

His smile first emerges in his eyes, quickly spreading from there into a wide, unprotected grin in which every tooth is made visible. Standing like that for a moment, he then threw his arms up and squealed– his joy a secret that must be shared—and began racing about Spooky Island in delighted circles. Our radiant beast, so fresh and hungry, so nourished by each day.

And not far away some other child’s parent was blowing soap bubbles. Catching the light and glistening, the undulating bubbles rose up and drifted just out of the reach of the children beneath. In their pursuit they sounded like chirping birds at a feeding, each one amazed by the miraculous gifts appearing around them.

In that moment it was hard to imagine anything more beautiful than what was before us.

Just a few hours earlier, in a different part of the city, a Van Attack had killed 10 people and left even more injured, and people were feeling weird. But nobody was talking about it at the park, nobody was on their smartphone looking for the latest update. No, it was as if a spell had been cast and all of us there were suspended within some magic bubble, one that existed beyond the reach of the actual. We spoke only of the world we stood upon, the world we could see, hear and touch. Anything else was too much, or perhaps even a sin, and so together we became the simple creatures we needed to be, and stood in the light for as long as we could before taking leave and returning back to the worlds from which we came.