I have started a number of blog posts in recent weeks, most of them starting with an opinion on everything like declining childbirth rates, women’s health, blond hair, the economics of thinness and weight loss, layoffs, climate collapse, and all kinds of recent streaming media. Then I stopped all of these after about 150 words.
Do my opinions actually matter? Not so much. Are they any good? Meh. Do they exhaust me? Sorta yes, but nevertheless she persisted.
Leaving
My views generally snap to a specific grid. As I read through a stack of New Yorkers on an airplane last weekend, it was as if I was reading the Ur text of my opinions. And by extension, I could see the dotted line back to a liberal arts education. And there is an even fainter dotted line back to my degree in English Literature and Film Studies.
This is what I do: I see life as a sprawling narrative, written by a committee of contradictory, agenda-bound authors, and it’s my job to organize, interpret, and criticize it. And the bonus is to write about it.
Returning
On the airplane returning to New Mexico, all my New Yorkers now having been read, I spent the flight listening to a young man in the seat in front of me. He was describing, loudly, his gun collection, illustrated with photos on his phone, to the man sitting next to him.
Let’s call him Jarrod. He is 25, lives in Utah, and has 12 guns, several cameras around his property (two acres), two children, two German Shepherds (Atila and Kruger), a drug-addicted brother, and two sisters who work in healthcare. Under his baseball cap, I could see his strawberry hair; it matched his cheeks. Seated next to him was an exchange student from Taiwan. Jarrod was so excited to make a new friend he took multiple selfies on the plane with Joe from Taiwan. “My sister would 100% go for you, dude,” he cheerfully declared to his seatmate.
Gerald and I couldn’t have been further apart until he said this: “I think it’s too late on guns in America. Everyone is armed.”
Today, we woke up again to more mass gun violence. This time in Michigan.
Is it too late? Seriously, is it too fucking late?
If you’re in Santa Fe, I highly recommend the new exhibit DIRECT ACTION with works by Mexican artist Pedro Reyes at SITE Santa Fe. Free and open to the public until May 8, 2023. #endgunviolence