Luigi and me
Part one
At the end of the 2010s, I’m living in Los Angeles and losing my mind.
Living by myself for the first time since college, I am not getting over a breakup, but being blown through it backwards like Walter Benjamin’s angel.
At work I write a weekly company newsletter about Current Events. The newsletter is called Alex Explains the News. I keep it professional, against my nature, and politically neutral (if voice-y).
Privately I harangue anyone who will listen about the possibility that Trump will lose re-election and refuse to leave office; like Trump winning in the first place, this scenario goes unheeded in proportion to its plausibility.
I know few people here. I’m not in therapy. When I leave the apartment I’m alone in my car. Sometimes I’m alone in my car in the parking lot at Ralph’s, engine running, motionless, scrolling on my phone. Not for a minute: for much longer. For this I pity myself until I look up and see that I’m not the only one, which makes me pity everyone.
I know I should make new friends.
I stay home and read tweets.
Scratching an itch makes the itch worse. Worse than that, the relief from the first scratch is not matched by the second scratch unless you increase its intensity.
In this way, the more upsetting the tweet is, the better. Soon politically centrist opinions disgust me, then center-left opinions, and so on.
Ratchets only tighten. An anarchist on twitter explains, in a long 2019 thread I still think about, that everyone being radicalized by Current Events needs to understand that joining a movement against state power automatically invites state retaliation, like an immune response. Don’t be surprised if police harass you. You are being watched. For me that idea is flattering.
I’m starting to get literal heartburn, which I attribute to my coffee consumption. I replace the coffee with energy drinks from Ralph’s. Things worsen.
I discover that an acquaintance from high school, a gifted actor, has become a moderately popular YouTuber. His videos build a near-scholarly case that Trump is a full-stop fascist. Robert Paxton is quoted at length. Somehow, also, there are jokes. In a clever visual gag, his appearance in his videos is increasingly disheveled. In a non-clever non-gag, so is mine.
Faintly aware that the bottom is falling out, I wean off of energy drinks by ordering caffeine pills from Amazon.
The world increasingly fails to match my preferences. This increases my preference for failure.
An article by Malcom Harris explains that the United States is conducting genocide at the southern border. Life during genocide, he points out, “is not supposed to be worth living.”
Always on the lookout for reasons to avoid working, I begin to find my colleagues’ industriousness disgusting.
Even the most alarming tweets are losing their potency. Judgment at Nuremberg, the classic docudrama about the Nazi war crimes tribunal, is not available for streaming.
Immune response?
I discover that Judgment at Nuremberg is available, in dozens of tiny pieces, on DailyMotion, a fourth-tier platform presumably kept afloat by videos of ISIS decapitations. Over the course of many hours, I watch the fragments of Judgment at Nuremberg.
I learn that an anarchist in the Pacific Northwest has set fire to ICE buses and been killed by the police. I am listening to John Brown’s Body on YouTube and crying.
Zoom in far enough on one aspect of reality and that aspect becomes your reality. You’ve discovered the secret shape of the world. Like a fractal it reappears at every scale; like a fractal is it limitless. Functionally speaking, you are insane.
What happens next is cushioned, I believe, by inexplicable luck. My mom still calls me, for one. And two dear friends, fellow New York transplants, live nearby. They keep me tethered to the only reality worthy of the name: the social one, the world we share. These friends are immensely patient, even as my tethers fray.
In full lather, I write a gruesome edition of Alex Explains the News which seeks to raise the alarm of fascism amongst my coworkers. It is political, it is not professional, and it is… alarming. In my heart, this email will either get me fired or see me raised triumphant on executives’ shoulders as the new SVP of Being Upset.
In reality, I receive a cryptic “Nice email” from Kaitlynn and a “What was that?” from my boss. Alex Explains the News is over, and I still have a job.
I need to do something dramatic or I am going to burst. I’ve been nurturing the fantasy of punching Proud Boys long enough to realize that I don’t have the courage for it.
So I sign up as a volunteer with Never Again Action and begin training for a protest targeting the office of an ICE contractor near LAX.
When the organizer asks who among us is willing to be arrested, I am flattered by the question. I will be a “pleasure to have in class.”
I raise my hand.