crazy mystery catalog #10
01/28/2025
Life over here has been kind of a wallop-style succession of events that have been overwhelmingly doom-oriented. When I look back at the calendar to figure out when this season started, I might pick an event just to remember another that happened before it, and another before that. The starting line shifts further back into my past, leaving the acute zone, suggesting a broader condition. I thought I was more prepared to be tested than the average person, since I think about doom a lot. I thought I’d already heard the starting pistol and was ready to run. But there are still certain reflexes you can’t best or train, as well as cramps.
Wonderful things have also happened, but this has been an unusually compact time of casualties, losses, and grief. Some of these impacts have pushed beyond my default personal resilience threshold. Which has really annoyed me, because I thought mine was in pretty good shape. What else was the point of having a chaotic adolescence full of loss and strife? I thought that was spring training. I thought I’d be an all-star. Rest has been a project, and I’m still not exactly sure what it means, because I think what it is supposed to be doesn’t always work, and sometimes even perpetuates the problem, which I suppose is pain.
While you probably know a few of the headlines, you don’t need all the details. Not me. I need as many details as I can get. It’s a running joke now, with my new therapist (please clap), that I’m addicted to details. I can’t stop drudging them up, and but also-ing, free associating the hour away, though it doesn’t always feel so freeing.
To me it's though every little detail is not a distraction—rather, small pieces of everything. And how can I not think about everything? Isn’t that the territory we’re trying to cover? My visual of it is like dust fluttering in a sun beam, and we are there to, probably, address the areas outside of the light. Or even the placement of the beam. But I can’t help it. The dust is everything to me, and there’s just so much of it. If I wasn’t there to notice and catalog all these floating details, then what were they there for? Why else would this style of focus be my sharpest skill?
I wrote an essay last year I called “Primary Source Material,” which is mostly about being rejected in the attempt (or failure) of showing someone you want to love how you see the world. I wrote that in love or in pain, “my instinct is to collect.” When I woke up this morning, I thought about that sentence, and what that might make me. A person collecting dust.
There was something related between rejection, panic, and doom that I’d been trying to parse out. Just in general. Then I got kind of pummeled by iterations of those three, and I couldn’t even get the distance to think about them as just ideas again. They were too material, too close for consideration. Too on the docket of things to deal with.
Now I think the link has to do with the death of dreams. Sometimes you don’t even realize you had a dream until you watch it die. This is a feature of crisis.
There’s a difference between getting knocked down and getting sucked in (citation: Chumbawumba). I do try to transcend my own vacuum of panic, but am less sturdy against the suction of people who try to sublimate me into their own, especially if they have really good and—bonus point: scary—reasons. I often wonder what it would take, whether from my internal reserves (depleted) or for the world to get the message, to be free of getting sucked in, even when I am already knocked down of my own accord.
I’m self-conscious about talking about the storms too much, but the acute stress of them produced some apex moments. I was sort of thinking about moving when I got stuck in Hurricane Helene, and my trip was to do various, I don’t know, envisioning exercises (it was also to catch a break from a stressful year in LA—haha). When I evacuated, I was surprised not to feel like I was in another world, but rather like the world was now coming to meet me inside a familiar feeling. Under all that panic and destruction, what manifested in me, the once-dreaming visitor, was a feeling of rejection. Not from being unwanted or dismissed, but locked out of the future. It attached itself to so many past sadnesses, creating a blanket condition that recolored everything for a while.
When I got home, I thought, now’s really the time to recommit, to sink in, to remember what I love about being a transplant in Los Angeles. Which—in a way that is exclusive to its culture and its delusive geography, and is invisible to the naked eye when the city is taken at face value—is how it gives you dreams that it never even occurred to you to have before. After a while, you can’t even remember life without having them. This makes it so that even if you never felt like you gained anything by coming here, you know that if you left, you’d have something to lose.
So yeah. I stayed home, and it’s pretty obvious now how that didn’t solve the problem.
There’s that thing where people find it tedious, listening to others explain their dreams. Sleep dreams never are as captivating once they leave your own subconscious. I don’t mean captivating as in interesting, but captivating as in, they hold certain feelings, or like, pre-idea thoughts. When described, leaving the container, they flatten and lose shape.
I had a thought about abstraction, and how much of my struggle—the hurt and squirm that follow these critical moments of panic, even if they're not the end-all, even if they’re not my own—is that I’ve been wasting so much energy begging the world for permission to be abstract. I have felt as if the world demanded a story from me in order to have earned what I know to be true. Like when you get home from kindergarten with a new theory about the way the world works and your mom goes, “oh yeah? Well, who told you that?” God did, mom.
I feared without the badge of the story, the tale, the lore for merit, some authority could withhold my rights over a certain kind of intuitive understanding. I think that’s why, when I really feel like something integral is at stake—such as my career, or a romance, or my mental stability—I cannot stop myself from telling streams of anecdotes and vignettes that seek to illustrate some sense of knowing, of getting it. So just in case this is, indeed, the way the world works—that I need lore to be a legible person—I’ve collected some stories. As I always do.
In August of 2019, as I was turning 27, I was in Northern California on a reporting trip. On my drive back to Los Angeles, I decided to camp by myself for the first time. I didn’t grow up camping, and until I watched my best friend Olivia do it a bunch, as well as my friend Jasmine back home who backpacked solo around Mount Rainier, I didn’t realize that was an option for girls. I didn’t think it wasn’t, the possibility had just never crossed my mind. I’ve told this story a couple of times already, but basically, I went and spent the day hiking among the coastal redwoods and when dusk fell I made a bed in my car with the remaining daylight. After a few spot finding failures as the sunset raced me out of options, I finally parked behind a big rock off the side of the PCH, on top of a bluff above the ocean. It was loud and dark and a difficult place to sleep alone, given the constant disruptions. On the downslope towards San Simeon, whenever a car or truck drove by, I woke up, stomach growling with anxiety; not about any specific predator, but just as a response to my own primal sense of being unguarded. Intellectually, I found it exciting to be brave, but I thought then, quite seriously, that it might be time to get a dog. In this situation, there would be value in another body. Though there were a few other bodies in my life at that time, I only rarely felt that way.
When I came back home to LA, a few things happened (and this is where I start to get a bit dust-in-the-sunbeam about things). The first was that I texted Olivia that, though Big Sur was remarkable, at the end of the day, I honestly “preferred humbler landscapes.” It was just a joke at the time, but it felt like I came to my senses to admit that. I just prefer humbler landscapes. Places where God’s power and nature's indifference are just a bit more subtle. Like, I love lakes. Knowing this about myself affected my choice of ensuing adventures and ideas of life plans, if those are even worth having these days.
Another little thing that happened: after the five-ish hour drive back home, I backed my car into my driveway to unload. I was taking some deep breaths, adjusting back to the dusky LA light pollution and readying myself for reentry into a chatty house after all that time in silence. Then, I saw a little brown mouse crawl out from under my hood onto the base of my windshield. He had been hanging on down there the whole ride, just to end up so radically displaced away from his survival networks. Away from his colony, his family, his food sources, even his fair-and-square predators. He was now doing life one metered crosswalk away from Costco, in the land of pet cats, just spit out on a palm-tree lined street to seek success on trashday—and the bins wouldn’t be out for days. As I watched him scurry away to his unknown fate, the only thing that made me feel better was to think about Flievel, or, when I needed to be less naive, all the other predators that live in our midst, coyotes and hawks and mountain lions, who also need food, too. (As I’m writing this five and a half years later, my roommate just texted me that she saw a fire-singed coyote lurking around in the bushes out in front of our house, an Eaton evacuee. No kidding.)
Once I unpacked my car and got into my house, having not looked at the internet in a couple of days, I learned David Berman died. I liked the Silver Jews a lot, and that Purple Mountains record that had just come out was sublimating quickly into my life, mirroring what I was processing about the world I lived in, and sometimes uncannily soundtracking how I was acting towards people (I know, yikes). My roommate at the time, a good friend and guitar player, belonged to his extended musical orbit, and I first felt the loss as a heavy social event, before it felt like a bigger artistic grief. The end of an era kind of thing. I feel it more as the latter, now.
So, as I mentioned, this was all part of a reporting trip. That summer, I had just had a pitch accepted, and for me at 26, it was my biggest one yet. It was for a national print magazine that paid something like a couple dollars a word. This was going to be my big check for the year in a string of years where I didn’t make much money and had otherwise just convinced a small stable of rich men to pay my rent and health insurance, as if they were patrons of the arts. I didn’t make much art during this time, either. However, I felt this project would change that, and set me on a certain course.
My assignment was to travel all over the West to meet with various groups of self-identified climate doomers I’d found online, through forums, Facebook groups, and acolytes of a paper recently published by controversial British scholar Jim Bendell, called “Deep Adaptation.” I was to spend time in their community, examine their subculture, filter through their texts for truth, quirk, and fluke (and there were many of each), while examining my own millennial, frontlines-feeling position in what I began to call the doomosphere. The story began as a social mapmaking effort of people who get it, starting at the fringe. It was, in a way, a replication of the social process that has since patterned my life, the one I started around age 12, in Seattle, with music stuff. That’s when I first began mapping—in some cases, somewhat literally—the people who get it, starting at the fringe. It often held the highest concentration, even if they were on some other shit.
Doing my research in these online groups, I started to understand something about the doomer mindset, which wasn’t mine, but also wasn’t not. No matter who or what we thought was correct about the future, what seemed to matter at the time was that everyone there felt the same thing. It wasn’t just dread, but a kind of smug, and not totally invalid, courage towards contemplating worst-case scenarios.
I went to a meeting with a doomer group in Berkeley, where I listened to their elaborate theories of the human race going extinct within a generation. They shared very vivid, matter-of-fact visualizations about all the different ways their children and grandchildren would meet violent demise. They held space. They processed. They imagined everyone they loved, including the human beings they created, choking to death on smoke and ash. Heads hung, swaying with resignation. I recorded each member’s varying riffs on scorched earth fantasies, and then headed off to Big Sur to be alone.
The aesthetic of this subculture was familiar to me. Each of my divorced parents left our Catholic parish in my pre-teen years to join a non-denominational spiritual community that we all attended every Sunday. To give it credit, I find it metaphysically harmless, but it’s the same church network where Marianne Williamson was a pastor, to give you some idea. The vibe through word association: Lipton tea, popcorn ceiling, basement yellow pale tile bathroom, light incense (crystal shop scent, not Catholic mass flavor). Desktop gong. Not hippie—I would’ve loved it if the vibe was backyard chickens or Bolinas or communes or the Diggers, as culturally, my interests were already hovering in that realm (thank you, Arthur Magazine)—but rather, more pre-millenium New Age, aged yellow at the corners, meets sweeping West Coast optimism curdling into technocratic transformation. Self-published paperbacks. Prosperity manifestations and entrepreneurship. The Secret. Hope and change.
Anyway, my reporting trip in 2019 was one of those freelance deals where you front the travel costs on your credit card and invoice it all upon publication. A week or so after Berkeley and Big Sur, I flew to Utah to visit with a robustly attended doomer group in a town called Ogden. It felt ridiculous to get on a plane just to go think way too much about climate collapse and I did it anyway, just like we’ve been doing anything, anyway. When I flew into Salt Lake City, it was the first time I’d rented a car by myself. I remember that feeling really exciting, like I learned a new trick. I also felt self-conscious in a SUV, until I later realized nobody cared, or were maybe post-caring about that level of thing. I landed on a Sunday, thinking nothing of it, and was culture-shook by the Mormon monoculture. I was having a brand-new experience of America. I found a cool little coffee shop, on the top of the hill above the big temple, and when I walked in, they were playing the Purple Mountain record front to back. I chatted with the barista about him. I felt like we were on a tiny island.
I drove to Ogden and spent an evening with that doomer group at a downtown bar & grill. I ate onion rings, did a couple interviews, collected my material and any potentially evocative details about stuff like what it felt like eating onion rings while contemplating armegeddon with a group of armageddon obsessives. Utah is a state where social organization around an almost psychedelically imaginative dogma is the underlying cultural precedent, which gave me clues to why this group felt so organized in contrast to Berkeley. Someone took minutes and there were action items and follow-ups. The group, they said, was growing, and it was more diverse than I expected, not just in terms of identities, but perspectives. There was this semi-articulated threshold they let exist without policing it, and that was of people who still felt there was time left to do anything, and those who had accepted it was too late. It was obvious which stance was more evolved, in their eyes, but again, space was held.
A comfortably average, brick-walled bar & grill might not seem like the same kind of atmosphere as the spiritual center I grew up in, but there were echoes. A janky wavelength that whispered to the receiver at each end, like cans on a string. There was the rehashing of basic Buddhist tenets of acceptance and the nature of suffering, as it curdled around their various flattened outlooks on modern life and the possibilities of its radical upheaval. This particular groupthink produced both broad-strokes empathy and a limited perception of what the word aftermath actually means.
The rest of my trip was awesome. I booked myself some extra time in an off-season ski town half an hour away, in a nicely remodeled boutique hotel where I was alone save for one other family, with a ten-year old boy also named Dylan. Though I tried, he did not think I was cool. I spent the rest of the trip futzing around, ecstatic in my favorite kind of landscape: humble, but with mountains. I remember walking to the edge of town, pacing along a creek, talking to my mom on the phone about how beautiful it was here, how geologically speaking, it was my kind of place. I loved it especially in contrast to Big Sur’s overstimulation, knowing that so few people in the world would agree with me, except the handful of retirees I saw who stuck around here for summer and didn’t have to make ends meet in this seasonal economy. I met a boy who was studying similar topics as me in some masters program I didn’t really understand; we hiked, and laid on our backs at the reservoir, talked about that mushroom at the end of the world book everyone was reading at that time.
When I got back to LA, I finished my draft and, as it often goes, it was significantly longer than my assignment. My editor encouraged me to reserve some of the extra material for a book proposal, which I thought was a great idea, as it was validating that she had that level of faith in the story. So I had a lawyer look at the terms of the contract to see if I’d be able to retain the book rights, and when the fine print said no, I went back to my editor’s boss to negotiate. Mutually unflattering story short, this did not go well. My assignment was rescinded, and I never got a kill fee and had to eat all my reporting expenses. So I had all this material, but the wind was kind of knocked out of me, and I couldn’t quite catch my breath to further consider the book. At least my rent was paid.
By September, I slumped into a restless depression (my aforementioned roommate at the time clocked this then. When she took me out for dinner after I came home from Asheville last year, she referenced this time five years ago as the only other time she’d seen me “like this.” Yikes!). I kept leaving town, taking short trips, renting motel rooms for no reason, feeling like I had to hike real fast before it was too late. That’s how I always hiked (and did a lot of other stuff), but I went into turbo-mode. Growing up, whenever I left a trail at Mount Rainier, I always felt the need to say goodbye, just in case. Now, armed with further information, it felt newly critical. At this time, I was reading Mike Davis’s Ecology of the Edge, several of those pop-climate science best-sellers from the likes of Bill McKibben and David Wallace-Wells, and what I could muster of Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism, which I found to be both extremely accurate and perhaps too abstract for me. I had checked out a book called How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human from the library, but at that point was burnt out on thinking and was like, well, sounds like I can safely leave that to the forests.
Back home, I met another boy who was studying similar topics as me in some masters program I didn’t really understand. These boys just kept showing up, and I found them very captivating, even though I didn’t really get what they were doing. I didn’t think they really got me, either. Their projects were all very conceptual, science meets humanities. What stuck with me about these short encounters was to learn that I wasn’t just inspired, but jealous, of how abstract they got to be in these disciplines where they tabulated, took inventory, and sought out solutions towards the very real problem of “what we have to lose.” It is so embarrassing to admit, and I don’t know when I convinced myself of the idea, but I felt like only the boys got to be abstract about this stuff. If I tried it, it was some pathology. I felt like people looked at me like I needed editing.
In the world of writing for money, I did, though. In a previous piece for that magazine, my editor had, with real generosity and patience, basically hurtled me through a crash-course journalism lesson, where I learned on the job how to actually write a story. For all that I struggle against the requirement to have a narrative, learning how to craft one gave me a method for pinning down the abstractions that haunted me the most. Which was all that I wanted to do. And that, in and of itself, brought me to the notion that there was a way I could validate this fear with something real. I could go out in the world and find stories to tell that could, I don’t know, prove it to you.
Along with a group of other artists and young intellectual types and I think that guy or at least a bunch of his friends, I ended up involved in this group show at a gallery in LA that was about the Anthropocene. It was all very much At The Intersection of Art and Technology. With all this doom-writing material limp and dragging uselessly behind me, I tried to apply what I had into alternate formats. My friend Mukta and I made a zine together for the opening that contained reflection prompts about, essentially, who do you want to be during times of ecological crisis? I looked back on it recently, because we’re thinking of revising it, possibly reprinting it for an LA fires benefit thing, not that I expect a zine to make a big impact.
But when we got dinner the other night and she brought me a copy that I hadn’t seen since 2019, I got sad. I was expecting to see a more naive, more fraught, more flighty younger self on the page in need of an update. A younger, sillier me, trying her best to wrest grace from unknowns, but failing in a way that might be sweet, or charming. Instead, I just noticed I was smarter then. More brave and lucid. I was prepared in ways that didn’t last long enough to serve me when I needed them to. It all made me worry that going through disaster did not, by default, make me better at going through disaster. It was not a skill-building exercise. That every time, I just got weaker, as if all disaster had to offer was loss.
Mukta asked me once if I was disappointed, five years later, that my climate doomers story never got published. I said I wasn’t, and that I’d be embarrassed if it was; it felt so dated and grating now, like the terms climate anxiety and, well, Anthropocene. But looking back, reading a younger me forecasting current me who felt like brushes with disaster were my destiny and has since been proven right, I felt like I eked out a little bit of permission from that past. That before, those feelings I had about loss and doom and panic, about dreams being rejected by the future, were made valid by the stories that were to become my life. I didn’t even have to go out looking for them.
That art show happened about three months or so after I’d camped at Big Sur and started thinking about getting a dog. Losing all that income shelved the idea.
The week before the opening, I was up at my mom’s. She suddenly had this scheme to adopt a surprise dog behind my stepdad’s back, because they couldn’t agree on which kind of dog they wanted to get. I was like, “that’s really manipulative, probably not good for your dynamic,” but it sounded like a fun Tuesday, so I decided to play along. As I expected, it backfired, and at the end of the week, the dog was either going back to the shelter, unless he could come home with me. I didn’t really set out to get a dog that small, eleven pounds; I wanted a hiking companion, and thought a protector would be smart to have, given my interest in going to the woods. Camping solo gave me a new understanding about the practicalities of dependency.
But I loved him. Plus, I figured he would be cheap to feed, since he was so small he only ate about a cup of food a day.
So I drove back home as the two of us for the first time, stopping at my house briefly to change my outfit before the opening. I took the dog with me to the gallery, where his little body sat on my lap during a lecture that was something to do with machine learning and philosophy and other intellectual, abstract lenses towards the climate crisis that I didn’t fully grasp.
The months went on, and brought with them a series of world and family tragedies. Amidst all of that, I got to know the little dog, and began to notice his particular style of loyalty. Despite his big personality, he knows he’s small. I realized this also makes me more vulnerable; I’m the one having to protect him from predators. Without me, he is helpless. By the way he looks at me, and by the way he shows no interest in running away when the leash is off or the door is open, it's clear we both understand this. Not just that there could be doom out there for either of us, but that being helpless together is the opposite of rejection.
I had this set to send in the morning but just woke up randomly before dawn and feel like adding this story. Two weekends after the fires, I went alone to a screening of the David Lynch documentary, “The Art Life,” at the Philosophical Research Society (now that’s a place that very literally reminds me of my childhood church, no metaphors needed). I appreciated this emergency memorial not just for its opportunity to watch him talk about my favorite subject (living), but for the cadence of the film. How it matched the timing of his thoughts processing through, and how that percolating pace absolved me from ten frenetic days of panic, of looking at my phone for survival material, with no practical mechanism to filter out the rest. The movie moved no faster or slower than the natural speed of his mind. I thought, what a loving way to document a person, with the patience to witness how exactly they see the world, down to the pace at which the dreams emerge.
I dozed off during the second to last scene. I woke up to applause at the credits, and in a fog, wandered over to the esoteric bookshop. I meekly browsed the small Catholicism section, looking for any books about Jesuits because that’s who I think about when I think about helping people, which is what they ingrained in me that I was supposed to do in moments where I didn’t know what to do. Right before that screening, my friend Dan sent me a 9-minute long clip of David Lynch espousing the values of transcendental meditation, which was a lovely thing to watch, and it reminded me about working on a writing piece with my friend Sam last year, and how he had been thinking then about similar topics, also on the same chain of thought. Jesus, and/or transcending. Two really different methods of sinking in. Which, I sort of understand, is different force of gravity than getting sucked in.
I usually find accidental naps cumbersome and disruptive. But sometimes your mind does these small forced resets after periods of stress, I noticed. You don’t get any dreams from it, but you do get to forget what you were thinking about. It kept cracking me up in all of the memorials posted about Lynch, how frustrated he would become when asked to explain his art, as if words chopped off the feeling. I thought that was incredible, and mildly annoying, for someone so quoteable, so lucid when handling the words around abstractions. But walking to my car after the movie, mind half-blank in the bone dry air, I couldn’t have explained to you how I felt, which felt like a relief.
back to sleep,
