Writing, for me, is a way to work out problems. It’s a way to unpuzzle the world that feels knotted in my mind. To worry something is to fiddle with it. Writing lets me fiddle. On my more restless days – days when the accumulation of online news makes the world seem as though it’s burning up in a thousand small fires – I will jump from anger to beauty to frustration to poetry to despair. I’ll try to read, but my mind will be elsewhere. I’ll try to write, but coherence and cohesion will prove elusive. This is when I begin to believe that poetry doesn’t solve anything, and sometimes, it doesn’t even help as a distraction.
This morning has been one of those mornings. I tried to pay attention to the beautifully lonesome sound of the foghorn, but was frequently yanked away by intrusive thoughts. While all tangentially related, there’s too much noise to find a through thread in my thinking. The poem or personal essay I wanted to write was how I’m trying to allow for exceptions in my thinking; how as a person who avoids using the word hate, I’m finding so few other words to describe how I feel about the current administration and the people who enable, support, or profit from them. The long arc of history may bend towards justice, but it feels like it’s doing a pretty shitty job in the here and now.
The quasi-therapist, quasi-Buddhist in me tells me to find a new way or a new practice. My evening life seems to follow one of three patterns: I go to the neighborhood bar where I’m distracted from the outside world and have a good time; I stay home and incessantly scroll through the news and all its atrocities (sober, cheap, but less of a good time); I go out to a show or event and am distracted from the outside world and have a good time. Two of those options aren’t great for my finances, and the third isn’t great for my demeanor. The joke I keep telling myself is that this administration is driving me to drink. The justifications I tell myself are that by going out (either to the bar or a show) I’m practicing a form of self care. The hard way to go would be to learn to practice self-care while staying in – a television or a girlfriend might help with that.
Because I stayed in the past few nights, I consumed a lot of media. My morning knottiness was, no doubt, correlated to that consumption.
Some of my anger/frustration came from having watched the clip of Tr*mp storming out of an interview after telling a journalist that she’s either dishonest or stupid. He always calls women stupid (or fat or unattractive or mean). Remember when he said Megyn Kelly had “blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever.” He’s even worse to black people – usually calling them low IQ. He says so many awful things that we’re often quick to forget the previous awful thing he said. I cannot believe that this is the president of the United States. A fucking internet troll and a bully.
Some of my anger/frustration came from watching John Oliver’s recent episode about the hostile, right-wing take over of a small liberal arts college in Florida. The anti-woke crowd seems intent on breaking our institutions, erasing history, and making life miserable for others.
Some of my anger/frustration came from recent quotes from right-wing politicians. Ted Cruz saying Adam Talarico would never be considered manly (what the fuck does that have to do with governing?) or Dr. Oz saying god didn’t intend for people to watch TV and defraud medicaid (because OZ knows god’s plan?). Then there’s the twenty plus times since March that Tr*mp has said we’re a few days away from a deal with Iran (kinda like being two weeks away from having a healthcare plan).
Some of my anger/frustration came from the NPR story about influencers spreading disinformation about elections while also conveniently being paid by Kalshi and Polymarket (where people are betting on the elections). Good lord I wish the term influencer didn’t exist. So many of them seem soulless and entirely profit and click driven. They’ll say and do whatever they have to in order to build a brand and make a buck.
To top it off, I saw a post about a 2025 story in which a brainwashed manosphere teen intentionally ran over two girls, killing them. He turned out to be a fan of Andrew Tate who once said, “I saw a woman crossing the road today but I just kept my foot down. Right of way? You no longer have rights.”
That particular statement reminded me of a conversation I had yesterday. While interviewing for a job with an organization that works with domestic violence groups, I was asked what I think is the biggest trend or threat in the domestic violence space. Admittedly, I’m not steeped in that world. I could only speak from a broad perspective. I began with the acknowledgment that men are the primary perpetrators of domestic violence and violence against women. I said that my fear is that we’ve had an entire generation of men brainwashed by the internet and whose parents ceded parental oversight to algorithms. These men are awash in misogyny and manosphere culture. Not coincidentally, the misogynist-in-chief has been in politics and the public sphere spewing and normalizing hate for most of their lives. I hear these young men at the bars. I see them online. I don’t see how this is going to be good for society as they enter into more mature relationships – we can only hope that they grow or mellow. I don’t see how this generation of lost men is going to be good for the future of combating domestic violence, when they seem to embrace it. The woman I was interviewing with, who sounded like she might be close in age to this lost generation of men, sighed. Her voice turned and her demeanor shifted. She sounded almost defeated as though she knows the steepness of the hill ahead.
I’m sure there were a plethora of other things contributing to my anger-frustration-malaise-disappointment-funk of a mood. Overwhelmed with so many things deserving of a good fist shake, I didn’t know where to direct my energy or frustration. I took a walk.
I passed a friend along the way. He’s a computer programmer who geeks out and becomes mentally obsessed with coding problems. Briefly, I wished I had such a passion – maybe then this other shit would take up less mental space. I wrote a note in my phone: dilettante of the soul.
The sun was trying to creep through the flat gray clouds. The fog hung dense over the Bay – so dense that you couldn’t see the bridge or the mountains or the cities and towns across the way. There were moments of bliss: the sight of great blue heron taking flight, the sound of birds in the flowering brush, the smell of the sea breeze coming in. But even then, I kept thinking, “man, the whole internet thing was a mistake – it amplifies the worst voices and drowns out the best” or ” we need another Mr. Rogers to point the next generation towards kindness.” Outrage always outperforms sincerity. This felt like old man thinking. “Why in my day we walked uphill both ways.” We can’t put the genie back in the bottle – or the consequences back into Pandora’s Box. Worse yet, we haven’t learned these lessons and continue to screw around with AI as though there will be no consequences. As much as I want to believe in the goodness of humans, the grift shows that there will always be people (maybe a minority) who will lie, cheat, and steal from the rest of us.
As I walked past the mansions by the Palace of Fine Arts, I thought what I often think in the midst of such excess: it’s a rigged and rotten system. I wanted to buckle down (or cheat), make my millions and disappear. I wanted to go to Paris or Barcelona or the Amalfi Coast. I wanted to do the next best thing, which for me in San Francisco, is to sit in the alleyway by Vesuvio’s basking in the sun with a beer and book of poetry. None of those things were appropriate at 9am on a Tuesday, but the itch was visceral.
Back at my apartment, I wrestled with words – some of which made it into this post, some of which sit on a separate document. I tried to simplify things. The poem which still eludes me seems to be about how to love the world and sometimes hate it too; or how to grow more comfortable with my full range of emotions – allowing myself to use the word hate or to say, “no this is wrong, fuck that shit and the people who promote it.” The last thing I wrote on that scrap document: Primed for outrage, I feel exhausted. These times are exhausting.