Coddled Memories and Grievances

A lovely day at everyone’s expense

Don’t think bad thoughts while she’s in your arms, you have the rest of the day to cycle through those. Neither of us have been sleeping well since the time change. Not our dog either, who whines then curls up next to our heads on our pillows. Hearing I’m awake too, my wife gets up from the couch and cuddles into me back in bed and she is good and warm but I start running through old grievances in my head and she rolls away. I tell her it’s for the best, that I was thinking of a bad customer I once had at work so she must have sensed it but then she said she had also just been thinking of a bad customer at her old job too. The indignities within the forced transactions we must endure haunt us in the in between. Survival is a dull panic, all to ensure we have enough numbers in our digital accounts to pay for things that come from places we’ll never see.

Then I walked the dog past other dogs attached to people I failed to say hi to. My wife went to work. I had no idea what to do with myself so after wandering around a library I decided against going into, I rode the 134 bus out to the Malibu Pier.

Los Angeles County is paradise around its edges. Winter depletion has been slowing my bloodstream but the ocean had no mercy in its energizing beauty. The defiant tide of the Pacific flowed toward the car-swamped highway blasphemously named after it (PCH) like a broom sweeping at the filth. Sea birds, fresh air from all that space without us, an outlet of wilderness despite man’s best attempts to ruin it.

On the wooden pier, I ate a cardamom roll and drank a lemon ginger tea as my phone battery lowered. Coastal fog diffused the sunlight into glare but made the water below the pier an aqua green. The waves were small but consistent and the longboarders greedily stomped up and down their planks at First Point trying to prove themselves adequate dance partners to their mother muse. Remembering one 4th of July how my wife and I were on this same pier while an earthquake rolled through in undulations. This time, I walked past a photoshoot that will be forgotten by future generations off the pier, down to the sand and laid on its scattered surface near a big fluffy white dog that relaxed alone under a beach umbrella while its human was somewhere out there.

I stuffed my phone deep into my backpack.

Do you ever feel like your algorithm isn’t meant to appeal to you so much as it is trying to torture you into regretting humankind? Knowing so much about the wide-scale terrors in the world makes it hard to find confidence in its future. The genocide in Gaza is a stain on humanity that will never go away. I dream about it. The impotent rage at not being able to stop it. It will never go away unless the same media who refuses to tell its truth grabs an even larger share of the narrative. Activists warn history will look back in shame on the atrocities but not if the imperial myths win out. How many families sat around a turkey last week for Thanksgiving? Against all precedent we hope our politicians will finally stop the inhumanity but they are compromised by lobbying money and possibly blackmail and an imperial agenda baked into layers of this nation’s capital equation. Our politicians won’t save anyone, they actually need us to save them from the corner they’ve painted themselves into. But will we? I’ve watched as the loudest mouths of my generation have gone mysteriously quiet. Will we? Not when we have these phones to sink into and thinkpieces to write and groceries to buy on credit cards while trying to survive in plastic excess.

We won’t do anything until more of us can agree on a reality in a world whose dominant forces encourage a surreality.

They say a radical thing to do is get to know your neighbors but I live near rich people and apartment dwellers contorted by the rich people. I’ll stop making excuses tomorrow. I leave the one bedroom rent controlled apartment I couldn’t afford on my income alone to walk my dog past a $50,000 a year private elementary school. I see fathers in Patagonia vests and shoes without socks, their trust funds rippling through the generations as they drop their kids off in unblemished 2025 model SUV Audis and BMWs. I walk past 10 million dollar homes that just took down their “Kamala Obviously” election signs. Security cameras trained on the sidewalks as my little poodle mutt meanders on lawns and between succulents. Olive trees are en vogue too, planted in front of most of the new builds after the tearing down of the previous generation’s perfectly good homes. I think of the olive groves destroyed in Palestine while each of these mature trees are tractor trailered in at tens of thousands of dollars.

In New York today, at a conference to tout the largest health insurance company in the USA to its shareholders, the Chief Executive of said company expected to bring in 280 billion dollars of revenue this year off human sickness, was shot and killed at point blank range outside the hotel. The shooter is still at large.

On the beach, reading a book about the hidden U.S. Empire, I felt relaxed. The sun poked through enough to light the pages. I remembered how as a teenager I slept on that same beach one night at my friend’s surf contest campout and how an older kid made fun of me for thinking a barricuda that had washed ashore was an eel. I thought of how it was the first beach my mom had taken me and that as a child it was impossible to manage sand on your hands while you ate.

The big fluffy white dog had a water bowl next to him. A man stood peeing into a chainlink fence next to the bathrooms. I trudged through the sand to go catch another bus home to walk my dog again. I felt good stepping through that spilling sand. There used to be more sand down there before the ice caps started melting but still, it’s enough sand to relax a wound up man marching through grievances old and fresh, for now. It is enough for now.