Romping through disconnect

How anyone really feels about anyone or anything is a mystery

The other day, I had a troubling experience. Something triggered me to think about someone I met in the last couple of years of my drinking. This woman, like me, was in and out of the local detox and 12-step scene and often sobered up for just long enough for the chaos she had created to subside. She was a Boulder native who wanted to be in the fashion industry; she had made multiple inroads in that area over the years, only to flash-flood every one of them into oblivion with alcohol. Her mother had lived on the streets herself as well as in, at least occasionally, subsidized housing nearby.

I did a Facebook search and happened upon a “Remembering” profile. I have not been on Facebook in years, but to my knowledge, these profiles represent profiles of the deceased. And presumably, Facebook goes to some lengths to verify reports of death of its members, given the chaos that would result from undiluted reporting alleged demises. This presentation, combined with the obvious high-risk lifestyle this woman led, make it very reasonable to conclude not only that she had died but that it had been a miserable end, maybe on a ventilator.

That the last thing she had publicly shared was a story in the local paper about someone else I knew who had died on the streets made it a solid gut punch.

I searched for clues about what might have happened to her, but turned up nothing. This didn’t tell me much; the chronically homeless can pass away without so much as a semi-generic death notice. More so now than ever.

This fucked up my day. I didn’t even know this woman well. I had spent maybe a total of an hour of my life talking to her. But much of that time had been spent around other people who are now dead and largely forgotten. Most of the people I remember who knew “A J” in the better moments she had, or at all, are also dead, although some are in jail. Anyone who reached the point I did with alcohol or drugs, and who was still using when covid-19 began to create impacts, suddenly saw already low five-year survival odds drop drastically. And most of these folks were semi-oblivious to it all, shuttling themselves around to wherever they could set up. Indoor spaces and the hours they were available became very limited in March of 2020.

I imagined this woman’s life having come to a ruthless and punishing end, and for a few minutes I just sat and wept. And when it was over, I wondered exactly why I was having such a powerful reaction to the passing of someone who was little more than a stranger. I’d only thought about her after seeing a name similar to hers on some website.

This story has a happy, or better, ending. I got in touch with a friend who spent years on these streets who has since gotten a bachelor’s degree and started a nonprofit serving the homeless (and battling the various ersatz liberals who have been proudly misgoverning the city for years). Jen knows everything that has gone on in the life of anyone either of us met before cleaning up our respective acts in somewhat rapid succession. So, not expecting much, I texted her with what I’d found.

Minutes later: “LOL. She has like eight Facebook accounts. She has an infant kid and lives at xxxx.” This was accompanied by a screen shot of a recent post by the “dead” woman from a different Facebook account. And Jen was right—this woman does have an astonishing array of orphaned social-media accounts, even by the standards of a chronic alcohol abuser.

The father is apparently not in the picture, and overall this situation doesn’t resonate with a high statistical likelihood of stability for mother and child. But right now, “A J” is in an environment where she can raise her daughter, whom she clearly loves. And she’s alive.

I don’t regret what I went through the other day in my misapprehensions. It was no different, obviously, than had I been ruing a real event, one connected to other similarly not just “sad” but excoriating memories. Over my past half-dozen years of not drinking, most of the terrible news I have seen about people I knew, and in some cases got drunk with, was true.

I think a lot of this is a kind of survivor’s guilt. I’ve stressed before that most people who accumulate the number of detox and emergency-department visits and drinking-related jail stints I did, and are past the age of forty-five, do not ultimately “make it.” Because I have, by one important standard, “made it,” feeling so actively hopeless so much of the time leads to a persistent feeling of doing something wrong by simply not trying harder in life.

Any single person dying young represents a loss of human potential. If you had seen Jen on the streets years ago, you would never have discerned anything in this person—usually seen insulting cops and everyone in sight in a bawdy Chicagoland squawk outside the King Soopers on 30th Street—besides the bleakest and briefest of futures. Not everyone who cleans up their act has Jen’s energy or eagerness to infiltrate and ruin lax or corrupt bureaucracies, but what she has done with that energy is incredible and far-flung and beautiful, even if she’s still constitutively obnoxious. We need people like these to fight.

Living in a world of factual confusion obligates a loss of human potential on a scale of billions. It is devastating. And this is exactly what the past few years have represented—an invisible, ever-tightening vise around the collective mind. And this has become especially pronounced in cities where an overwhelming fraction of the citizenry marches in lock-step with the most unscrupulous lies and inanities spewed into millions of American living rooms twenty-four hours a day.

Boulder has long been the kind of place where people seem to automatically believe that they deserve to take up space in shared areas just a little more than anyone else who threatens that stake. Many appear to think they deserve this by only a 51 to 49 margin, and they will not actually fight for it if presented with an outward elbow, but any win is a win. I suspect this ethos is mostly unconscious and a function of age and socioeconomic status, with nominal personal politics a non-issue; the same phenomenon exists anywhere in the country, or world, where well-off older people used to getting their way live.

Changes to public life since March 2020, while ruinous to civilization overall, have provided substrate for an interesting longitudinal observational experiment of sorts, or at least a years-long game of How Fucking Considerate Are You Really? (once the top-rated game show on Nickelodeon, I believe). Before I got off Nextdoor at least two years ago, I saw some of the most amazingly confident nonsense-streams about current and chronic events imaginable.

Nextdoor in general is a platform for the hideously blue-pilled, but the Boulder one is basically mayhem, a series of MSNBC and CNN transcripts shrieked through a million-watt ignorance-intensifier. I’m told the vibe to this day is mask indoors outdoors if you genuinely care, and get every ill-tested or untested booster for you and your kids if you genuinely care. As long as television is nothing but pandemic theater. people who watch it will believe we are living in a pandemic, even though virtually no one they know who’s died lately has died of covid. And no one seems to remember when barking in futility at the rest of us whose work brought us this batch of coronaviruses and then knowingly sold us on a series of false and dangerous remedies.

When I was less than one minute into a run today with Rosie that started at the East Boulder Rec Center, I saw a woman walking ahead of me in the same direction walking a Golden retriever. Though she was facing the other way, it was immediately evident she was looking down at a cellphone. Meanwhile, she was wandering one way across this 12’-wide path and her dog, which looked older than God himself, was pattering the other way, turning the retractable leash between them into a waist-high barrier. This was in the middle of the afternoon, with all sorts of people using the park and its paths.

I went around this assembly without complaint, but when I looked over, the woman didn’t even look up. Her ancient dog noticed and gave a game wag, but the woman, about my age, just kept gazing down and scrolling as she ambled dumbly along.

How Fucking Considerate Are You Really?

I see this behavior with sufficient frequency—and usually in people over 50, most of them women—that there is no doubt at all that the Boulderites who insist on extreme covid measures and the Boulderites who demonstrate almost no on-the-ground consideration for anyone but themselves share considerable overlap.

One way to respond to this is to yell “hypocrites!” and write off the situation as if everyone has chosen to reach their present suite of beliefs consciously. This is an excellent and almost guaranteed way to hate everyone. Another is to peg where this kind of seemingly astonishing cognitive-behavioral dissonance comes from, and to try to somehow frame at least half of this as a solvable problem.

I am herewith putting in my regular pitch for people to not read or watch corporate media. It (the pitch) won’t do much good. But I’ll offer an example of how shameless and sloppy the Washington Post has been lately about promoting a narrative at the expense of all internal and external credibility. I don’t care about the story details, I care about the lying, who’s doing it, and the power they wield.

The story on the left was published on December 20. Yet it contains a link to a story in the same publication published on January 8, almost three weeks later; as there is no mention of the Dec. 20 story having been updated, this could only have resulted from either magic or editorial depravity. Better yet, text forming the link in the old story completely contradicts the headline and the material around it.

Also note that the WaPo treats its readers as utter fools in other ways—it’s not hard to notice the shift from “little influence” to “minimal impact” to "no measurable impact,” but this outlet counts on its readers to simply see headlines and share the associated stories without reading them.

These viewers and readers are people who need to start wearing N95-caliber intellectual masks. Everyone who reads stories like these—and they’re in all the corporate outlets—unwittingly becomes a misinformation host, and anyone who shares it becomes a vector of direct damage to the American public.

I can remain infuriated for the relatively short duration I will have to suffer this, or I can cling to the idea that this horrible problem has an obvious solution, even if it stands no chance of becoming sufficiently popular: Do not tune your television set to any corporate news outlets unless you fully appreciate the extent of the theater you’re watching, and ditto for the popular press. I don’t know why so many people continue to trust media that are basically yelling at them, “Feels great to be lied to all day, eh?” but this maddening uncertainty is somewhat more comforting that believing that people are choosing to be idiots or assholes or vectors of misinformation and needless pain.

There is probably never going to be an end to it. but at least it’s easy to define and describe the one way this can possibly happen. We are completely screwed otherwise, and I won’t have the benefit of spilling “wasted” tears as often if the macabre mass-production continues unabated.