Mosh Pit Apocalypse
From the drafts of my Iphone........
Beloved,
As we head into 2025, I am going through my drafts and expanding them. The style is intended to feel more like a quick raw jot and less like a stylized newsletter. Here is what I wrote right after the election. I’d love to hear your thoughts about the style of this letter-in-a-bottle to you.
XOXO Dani
Nov. 7th
Well.
Here we are.
The think pieces and the “what happens nexts” are all piling in. The quickness of it reminds me of street venders selling SuperBowl T-shirts. Both possibilities already queued up, just waiting on the final score.
What if we can’t “#resist” our way out of this one?
At 10PM on Nov 2nd, I checked the election results I found myself having very odd reaction. I looked at the absolute landslide of a victory and started laughing. I’m talking from the diaphragm, pitching up to a loud crescendo hacking, laughter. I think the technical term is maniacal. From the depths of my soul I heard a singular truth ringing out louder and louder until it reached my throat. That thought pushed out my throat, it’s fingers gripping my jaw hinges to propel its way out. I heard myself say out loud “There’s no such thing as a Good Person™️”
Let me explain.
This is not the first time I’ve had this thought. At this point I feel it so strongly it feels like a knowing. My first “adult” relationship was with an affluent international student. He was charming, handsome, and exotic. He bought me nice things, we looked beautiful together, and went out to dinner every Thursday. Strangers commented on how cute our babies would be when we dinned at fancy restaurants. I am sure that you’re imagining the type of couple archetype I’m describing-an IT couple. Everyone said I was the luckiest girl in the world to have bagged a “good man”.
One day, I tried to break up with Mr. Good Man. He explained calmly, rationally, that I wasn’t allowed to leave him. He dragged me into my room and bared the door. I rushed the door several times-just to get slapped down by someone twice my weight and size. Eventually I gave up.
Later. Much later, I asked the desk assistants at my dorm how he’d gotten in without me present, they smiled, big white teeth mocking me. “Oh he said you were mad about something and he was here to beg for your forgiveness! It was very romantic.”
“He’s such a nice guy.”
I did not smile as I hobbled away from the counter, wrists red and scratched up after my latest attempt to leave.
There’s no such thing as a Good Person™️.
All of us are just humans, who make decisions with the limited information we have available.
And sometimes, those decisions make us dangerous.
The idea that people can be intrinsically good or bad is also dangerous. In my opinion, it’s a failure of imagination. The Democrats lost because of a failure to i m a g i n e.
A distinctive lack of understanding that someone can be a tax paying, church on Sundays kinda guy-who walks into a booth on Nov 6th and vote for a rapist and serial adulterer. I bet he slept like a baby in his fancy cotton sheets.
So on election night I laughed a evil cackle on the election as I watched millions of Good People™️ make a bad decision-ones who consequences can’t not undone. As everyone and their mom tries to swing the New Democrats closer to the center or conservative right please know in your heart the following.
These people do want to see you dead. That’s not a fucking understatement. That’s not hysterical liberal thinking.
That’s cold hard facts. To quote Audre here, we were never meant to survive1.
If it’s not expiring due to lack of life saving medical care, then it’s a death of spirit. They want a reality where we’re all less gay, less radical, and more scared.
On the news people panic and wonder how we got here. Hang it up Sherlock the answer is RIGHT THERE.
There’s no appealing to the better nature of someone who voted for a rapist.
There’s no reasoning with someone who would deny you essential human rights because the cost of eggs are too high.
To be a minority in this country is to have a rich history and deep spiritual understanding that we’ve tried every single flavor of respectability to prove we’re not 3/5ths of a person. In times like these, I lean into that sacred knowledge.
There’s nothing we did wrong-that way simply doesn’t work.
Every day in this country I understand why every Black writer has a chapter about self determination.2
Stop talking to people who knew better.
You will need that breath for the times ahead.
They have already made their decision about how the next few years will go.
Have you?
Instead please start thinking deeply about how to stretch yourself in these times. To shelter and be held by the people who actually matter. Can you give your time, your money, your actual body and shelter? Make your decision about where to hunker down and push.
Then close your eyes and get to shoving.
Elbows out baby, we’re in the Mosh Pit Apocalypse.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/147275/a-litany-for-survival
Definitely think that this, along with ancestry, will be a continuing topic to explore in 2025.