¡Viva la Revolución!

Dabbling, writing, and learning in my end of days

“Man, Controller of the Universe” by Diego Rivera

Classes started back up last week amidst ice and cold and all hell breaking loose. Over the past month, I’ve been in the holiday lull, getting too much of nothing and not enough of everything done when it comes to writing. My emotional bandwidth was stretched by America and my own personal everything, and, at the same time, my mind was over-rested. So like the mallard landing on pond water, I’ve stretched my wings and shored up my raingear for a bumpy and wet landing.

I blame the over-resting on the pottery, which holds an obsessive amount of my attention, but I am hoping to dial back from that in the new year. The pottery is a dopamine relaxant. A meditative joy that can be infuriating at times logistically, but doesn’t tax my emotions like writing does. Pottery is not scary. Writing is terrifying. However, hoping and putting off is bullshit nowadays. Speaking from the front end of my 50s, I have put so many things off that I’m still putting off, looking back on the years wasted in distraction, waiting for the right moment that never comes. Bless the individuals who have superior executive function and pursue what they want full throttle when they are young.

Dabbling has been my issue. Always dabbling in too many things instead of hyper-focusing on the one thing. I say this as I sit with another side quest to my right, a full box of poster paint to be explored for a future thing imagined. In my old age, I am getting better at seeing things through, but it’s rough now that time moves at warp speed. Shit takes time, and honestly, the more time passes, the faster it goes. It’s like when you are younger, and you see a person older than you or read a novel/ watch a movie about an age you don’t understand, and you try to imagine what that age is like, and then you get that age and go AHHHH, now I understand what I was seeing or reading about all those years ago.

I did get some writing done during the holidays and started working on the novel that (I think) will be my thesis. A fictionalized reimagining of my husband’s coming of age in Texas in the 1970s. It recently occurred to me that I have only two years now to get this thing finished. Now that I’m 20 pages in (ha), I think I can get where I need to be. This thing that is nothing more than an idea, some notes, and a chapter’s worth of writing, seems like a lot, and it is, but only if I don’t quit the dabbling. My first semester was focused on rewrites of my finished book, but the thesis novel is a whole other brand-new thing that begs for attention and hours. Add all the distractions, emotional and logistical, not to mention all the pots I have yet to make, and the two unfished quilts on the back table, and the needlepoint in the TV room, and this side quest beside me is burning a hole in my attention. And let’s not forget the doom scrolling and the armchair warrior-ing that comes with saving democracy one phone call to your representatives at a time.

I’ve been simultaneously reading two books by Nigerian-American authors— Americanah by Adichie and Death of the Author by Okorafor—both women and both solidly GenX. There are many parallels in the two books about class and race and economic disparity, and one is the ease with which things are for middle-class America in comparison to so many other nations around the world. Then it got me thinking about Karl Marx, who I will now paraphrase from stuff I found online because though I know these words somewhere in my mind, I am not savvy enough to vocalize at will, so please don’t run the next paragraph through an AI grader.

So, basically, Marx argued that because work is unfulfilling for the common man, workers seek compensation in their time off through consumption. Consumerism functions as a comfort to mask the harshness of life under capitalism, creating a temporary, illusory sense of happiness. People begin to associate commodities with social status, prestige, and personal identity rather than their practical function. Consumerism prospers by persuading people that they lack essential items, creating new, artificial needs to drive the sales cycle. This process turns consumers into passive receivers of “prepackaged images” and commodities, reducing their ability to think critically or act independently. As workers are separated from the products they make (which are sold for profit by others), they focus on consuming these products to find meaning. However, this creates a situation where the “production of too many useful things results in too many useless people”. Marx was not necessarily opposed to the expansion of consumption in itself, but rather to the capitalist system that restricts it to the elite and forces the working class into a cycle of “compulsive buying”. He believed that only through a transformation of the production system—not just reducing consumption—could true human development and fulfillment be achieved. And in his theory, the only way to achieve that would be a full-on revolution.

Phew. No harm in spouting socialist theory on an icy Tuesday morning, yes?

It’s hard to know what to do about the above as a person on the hamster wheel of America, because there is no way you can read the above and dispute it in this country. There are things we can all do, like cancel Amazon Prime. Don’t spend money at Target. Shop local. Not take your pet to a vet owned by a private equity-firm. Make your own stuff. Reduce, reuse, recycle. These Gen Z kids seem to be taking this more seriously than the millennials did, who were born in the boon of overproduction, global distribution, and ease. But who knows? They also feel rightfully apathetic and screwed by circumstance at this point, and who can blame them? It’s hard even when you’re trying to do everything you can because everything around you is urging you to do the opposite. A good friend I used to work with, who often had different political views from the other folks in the office, once rightly busted all of us because, as we moaned over climate change, we all stood around drinking out of our oil-based Starbucks cups. She was right as rain. It makes me think back to the Max Templin design from a decade ago that read “It’s pretty amazing that our society has reached a point where the effort necessary to extract oil from the ground, ship it to a refinery, turn it into plastic, shape it appropriately, truck it to a store, buy it and bring it home, is considered to be less effort than what it takes to just wash the spoon when you’re done with it.”

Where am I going with all this? I have no fucking idea. But I know all of this is connected to the future of humanity is some cosmic way. The political climate. Apple and Walmart and Jeff Bezos. Microplankton eating microplastics. Even my aging exploration of life. One thing I can control is not sitting in front of the TV and dying a comfortable death. I will make things until my fingers bleed, goddamn it! Will I do something revolutionary? Probably not, but I do hope that if the time comes, I will step in to help a fallen stranger or a kidnapped immigrant even if it means putting my life on the line.

And right now, learning itself feels revolutionary. So there’s that.