The World That's Coming

There’s something to be said, I’m sure, about what the spam of any particular era says about that time. Who amongst us fails to remember the time when almost every single spam email wanted to trick us into confirming our existence — not to mention our personal details — by promising untold wealth if only we’d believe that an African Prince was asking for our help? Those were happier, more naive years, when the counterfeit powers that be sought to take advantage of those political promises of “Hope” and “Change” by suggesting that we should dare to hope that our lives could change if only we revealed way too much about ourselves to a stranger. (Hey, he was down on his luck and just needed some help!)

Lately, though, I’ve found that the spam of today has two significant differences to the “classic” spam of the past. (Those quote marks around “classic” are doing a lot of work, let’s be honest.) For one thing, so much of it seems to be coming in as texts, rather than emails — am I the only one who’s getting multiple spam texts every day now? I blame the fact that my phone number is likely on several million lists after years of convention attendance — and, more importantly, it’s… sad now. Take, for example, this spam text I received earlier today:

Maybe I’m just too much of a sentimental old man, but there’s something about this message that feels like there’s enough backstory to fill at least a novella of longing, pretentiously and anxiously written by a first-time writer processing a recent love affair in the most self-indulgent manner possible. But it’s melancholic in such an inescapable way to me that feels fascinating. Is this where we are now, wondering about people we miss and wanting to hear from them?

I could be reading too much into these messages, of course; I am me, after all, and for every “I hope you still have the same number, I haven’t heard from you in so long and I was thinking of you” spam text, there’s a “I work for an employment agency and I’d like to offer you a job” one as well. Perhaps the real feeling out there is “economic and emotional uncertainty,” to which I’d respond, “I think that was my 20s, and my 30s, and a lot of my 40s as well, glad you all caught up.”

I should simply delete these messages, and not think about them so much. And yet, hours later, I’m still wondering about whoever came up with the above text and what’s going on in their lives for that to be their attempt to catfish us into disaster. Spare a thought for the spammers; it seems like maybe they’re having some hard times themselves.

It’s difficult to accurately describe my feelings this morning, seeing the results of the election. If there’s such a thing as “stunned disbelief that is also the realization that this was almost inevitable, mixed with the crushing disappointment in your fellow citizens,” it’d be that. As I said on Monday, I had a pit-in-my-stomach feeling things were going to turn out this way, but I was… I don’t know: I think, despite that, I was hoping that I was wrong and that I was too cynical about everything, and without even knowing it that hope was actually where I actually was.

I actually woke up at 3:45 this morning, stressed about what had happened while I was asleep, even though I went to bed with the dull certainty of the outcome. The first thing I did after checking the news was have a brief moment of depressed introspection and I shouldn’t say anything, and the second thing was to write what ended up being an op-ed on Popverse which was a letter to myself to remember to be kind and fight for the right people in the next four years. It was one of those, “when in doubt, write,” things.

I’m scared of what’s going to happen in the next four years, and beyond. I’m angry about the fact that 15 million Biden voters disappeared on the way to this election, whether through vote suppression tactics on behalf of the other side, or apathy on the part of those who are ostensibly “anti-Trump.” (Trump won a landslide this time out with 3 million voters less than he had when he lost in 2020; some Republicans really did abandon him.) I’m exhausted by the certainty that things are going to get worse across the foreseeable future, and in ways that I can’t even imagine just yet.

In 2016, Trump’s victory felt like a bad thing that was this great unknown. This time, I feel like we know all too well how bad the baseline is. This feels so much worse.

I’m terrified about the upcoming election. I have tried not to be, and failed, completely; I have talked to people smarter than I about why I’m merely doomscrolling and panicking in my head, and that the reality is possibly significantly better than I am imagining, and yet none of it sticks: I am convinced of a worst-case scenario purely because I have a feeling in the pit of my stomach that things are going to turn out badly.

Part of this is, I know, that I’m paying too close attention to the race at this point and getting lost in the weeds. This has been the most disorienting, most frustrating election season I’ve been through, which feels like it’s really saying something, considering 2020; it’s nonetheless true, and that too has added to the feelings of being continually gaslit by reality across the past few months, and especially weeks: how can things be a coin-toss decision after everything that we’ve seen? How can this still be as close as it seems to be, 24 hours out from ending?

That closeness — which might not even be real, but instead the result of people lying to pollsters, or polling being entirely flawed for any number of reasons this time out — is what’s doomed my mood about the whole thing more than anything else: the idea that, in a race between the two candidates where one is so clearly and obviously a danger to all kinds of core ideas of American democracy or even simple decency, there’s an almost even split in terms of support. Who are these half-of-the-country people who are okay with fascism and hatred so such clear display, and what is going to happen to them after the election, no matter how it goes?

I want my very strong sense of impending disaster to be wrong; I want to not feel that 2016 feeling again. But right now, all that I can say for sure is that I’m worried, and I want it all to be over.

One of the things that kept this past New York trip interesting was the fact that, try as I might, as exhausted as I may have been, I only managed to sleep past 5am once that entire week. (Surely, I reasoned, I should be sleeping in, in that 5am EST is just 2am PST, and yet.) In theory, I know that I should have spent that time reading something fun, watching shitty television, or some similarly mindless endeavor to keep myself from waking up too fully or testing my brain, and yet what I actually did every single time it happened was immediately get up to start working for the next hour before I went out and got myself some breakfast from the Starbucks around the corner from the hotel as soon as it opened.

Across the course of the week, I discovered the following things about this accidental routine:

1. 6am is an ideal time to go for a walk around New York, especially in October. The sun’s not up, the people are just starting to walk around for the day, and you get to see a lot of businesses set their shit up each morning. There’s a lot of hosing down the sidewalk and people singing loudly as they do so.
2. There are good “walking around New York at 6am” songs and there are bad “walking around New York at 6am” songs. I listened to a bunch of French hip-hop during those walks. (My hotel was just off 42nd Street, which is perpetually lit up by neon signs and an oddly wonderful thing to experience at that time of the morning when accompanied by French hip-hop; I recommend it to you all.)
3. Inexplicably, there were always people from my company up and around at that time of the morning. Every single morning. Even the morning when the show wasn’t happening and there was no last-minute prep to be done, I ran into someone outside who was waiting for a car to head off into the morning. Perhaps the most surreal example of this was running into the same person just before I got to my hotel room the night before, and then immediately as soon as I left the hotel the next morning; in both cases, she was on a journey between the hotel and the convention center.

As I’m writing this, I’m on the plane back from New York, unsurprisingly utterly exhausted, and also hoping against hope to get a full night’s sleep for the first time in eight days. Surely it has to happen eventually.