To Go or Stay

To Go or Stay

Do I have a mind? Last night when I woke up at midnight my mind felt slammed up against my skull, spent very thin, an almost translucent skin, vaguely aching, around a hollow center. No solidity or reality, barely sentient protoplasm but not in a good way (there may be meditative states somewhat like this but this is something altogether different because there is no ground. Just an aching skin of self).

Insomnia. Awake since midnight after I went to bed before ten from being so very tired, my brain used up from the battering of the work day. What did I actually do? Nothing much. So many battles over the dregs of capitalist power. Those of us who have jobs because others don't are divided into camps, each of us maybe believing we are the ones who truly have the interests of the clients, participants, public assistance recipients, customers, or students, however you name them depending on ideology and role. I, we, of course "know" we are the ones who are truly on the side of the students. (How can it truly be on their side to spend hours figuring out how to penalize them for being absent or late? That's house slavery. Yes master, in exchange for my privilege I will whip the other slaves.)

The day of irrational work, doing work that shouldn't be done in the first place, at an endless meeting always about burocratic turf (who gets to rule, we who are designing the assessment model and see our jobs as supporting the programs we fund to succeed, or they who are in charge of monitoring the contracts and see their job as catching the programs fucking up). A day of being berated, verbally battered and abused by Xiomara for whom the whole world is a schoolyard or a dark alley, whose dominance patterns make her do whatever it takes to emerge alpha in every group, who has arrived at the picture of the participants (the language of her faction) as needing a firm hand, and the staff (again, her language) as needing perhaps a firmer hand still, that justifies her abuse...this day leaves me lying in bed invaded by that world, body snatched, used up.

With X it feels like I never win. I am forever the beta or the omega dog.

Right now having given up on sleep at 2 am, I've turned on my laptop. There's a stampede out of my frontal lobe; which thought to go with? There's not enough time for all of them. When I woke up at 12 I had writing thoughts I don't exactly remember now which felt clear and important.

They had to do with the tug between wanting to see the whole shape of this novel (if it is a novel), this personal ethnography, and diving deeply into any one place in it so it becomes as real as I can get it to become.

They had to do with whether or not it matters if I am a good enough writer to give myself the right to write ( or if the world acknowledges me that right) and simply deciding to write, or deciding to honor that old decision to write I made when I was a young person lying on the cold tile floor of the Amargura house in (now here do I write down the real city or the fictional city?) am I writing about me or about Marina?
But say it's Marina, on the floor in Los Santos
while my Father wrote (is it sermons or lectures?)
Who has the time to make artistic choices? Given the choice between actually writing and deciding I'd rather just write. And then I get to that drowning in my own thoughts stage.I think if I had time it would be different. But maybe that's not true.
Marina gets distracted from her writing by this thought: what if our species is already extinct? What if the revolution her generation could have made and didn't make was the critical one to stop the march of capital toward annihilation? She remembers Machi yelling at her, "Where is the revolution you were supposed to have made? The one you and my Father sacrificed my childhood to? The one he has now been disappeared for? Where the fuck is he? And why don't you seem to care?"
Thoughts of Ori curled her into a trembling ball. That was what woke her up. The image refills her eyeballs, she can't contain it and it vanishes: some image from a film of a man being tortured with electrodes, a man just seconds after his finger nails were torn off and before his eyes are gouged.
Machi's childhood sacrificed because we believed we would win, had already won, but at midnight, having avoided the nightmare by choosing insomnia, the thought won't leave her: what if our species is already extinct?
What if Machi and his child are condemned to drowning, or dying of starvation, or from having no water, when the favelization of the world and the rising oceans of global warming converge and millions, billions have to choose between cannibalism on mountain tops or drowning?
She doesn't want to accept these thoughts are hers. Her entire ideology is based on one truth: we have already won and it's only a matter of cleaning up a few minor details (the distribution of the wealth for one).
What does she write about? Which of the stories does she tell? When will she have the time to figure any of this out now that it looks like she's not yet able to escape wage slavery? Which is the mistake? To give up a living wage job so she has time to write, or to ransom most of her time for wages and health insurance? To go or to stay?