All I Wanted Was a Pepsi
This political moment is making me crazy.
Hello everyone. I’m sorry it’s so hot. How depressing is it that it’s just going to be this hot forever? Actually, that’s not even true—it’s going to be even hotter! As is well established by our beleaguered scientific community, my infant daughter’s generation and the next several after hers are going to be dealing with increasingly hotter temps and other extreme weather events, leading to increasingly mind-boggling phenomena like roads melting and subways flooding and skyscraper-sized lizards that shoot lasers from their eyes emerging from the earth’s core. Alright maybe not this last thing, but then again…maybe?
And as if all that weren’t enough, it’s starting to seem more and more likely that for the next decade at least we’ll have to deal with the continued rollback of a century’s worth of relative progress expanding civil and human rights. We’ll have to watch as our institutions are crippled from the inside out by scheming toadies, as the most depraved and fearful version of so-called Christian values are legislatively force-fed to growing swaths of the population, as the last drops of any remaining goodwill and moral clarity pool on the floor beneath the desiccated corpse that was once this country’s most treasured and valuable asset1: its character. Thanks, Joe! Thanks, AOC! Thanks, Chuck! We thought the situation was serious when you told us democracy was on the line, but I guess it wasn’t serious enough to hurt an 81 year-old’s feelings over. A favor, though: If you’re not prepared to do that, could you at least present a compelling argument as to how in the fuckety-fuck you plan to not only beat the other person in the fall, but also not completely doom the countless downballot races that are in many ways even more consequential, ensuring as they do that the next generation of progressives can at least get a foothold on this shitpile you’re going to leave us with?
Oops!! Am I a bit caught up in our political moment? Actually yes, I am. Like so many of you, I’ve been mainlining Twitter and jacked into various political podcasts ever since the debate, at a consumptive intensity not seen since before I had cancer. And it all gives me the heebie jeebies — not just the facts on the ground, which are depressing as hell, but the fact that I’m so obsessed with them, that I feel compelled to endlessly comb and analyze the half-formed thoughts of various pundits and armchair knuckleheads (hello, George Clooney!), that I can detach somewhat and observe as those things bat the needle measuring my emotional weather into states ranging from sanctimoniousness to dejected to “Browsing Real Estate Listings in Portugal,” that it’s all curdling in a way that makes it painfully clear that THE WHOLE SYSTEM IS OUT OF ORDER, MAN, and, and, and…
(Side note: Am I the only one who thinks Suicidal Tendencies’ “Institutionalized” is, like, a perfect little four-minute simulacrum of Twitter and/or The Discourse writ large, sorta prefiguring in its charming 1983 way the waxing and waning spasms of the virtual town square, where it’s like one minute singer Mike Muir is sorta contentedly singing about just having a little space to work through his feelings (in public tho, cuz it’s a song/art (emphasis on art, here)), and then as he continues to ask for empathy and understanding, the asking becomes pleading and the pleading becomes imploring and before you know it he’s literally shrieking I’M NOT CRAZY! YOU’RE CRAZY!, but then the whole thing revolves around Muir’s desperate quest to seek at least a modicum of relief in that most potent of early ‘80s symbols of consumer culture, a Pepsi (“All I wanted was a Pepsi!”), but to be denied that by his parents (read: society), all of which mirrors the journey of today’s modern content creator, out there peddling ostensible vulnerability in exchange for commercial validation amidst a tornado of distortion and noise? Has anyone else pointed this out?)
Right, right, right, so look, here’s the thing: I was planning to write about this whole political situation this week, not so much the play by play of it all, cuz you can get that from plenty of better, more qualified sources (hello, George Clooney?), but the experience of it as someone in recovery, someone who’s Been Through Some Shit, and who as a result is trying to live a life that’s more intentional and generally sober, in the specific and also broadest sense of that term. And so as part of that intention to write about these feelings and this experience, I started reaching out to other folks in recovery to ask them about their feeling and experience of this shit, and those folks sent me some good, insightful answers, and then some other folks said they’d be up for chatting, but I was on a time crunch if I wanted to pull everything together for the post you’re reading now, and so, and so… I decided it made sense to take some time to think about what this could be and then make that thing (cuz this thing is not that thing). I figure that, sadly, no matter what happens in the next week—and oh man, it seems like anything could happen—those of us who find it hard to resist the temptation pick up our phones in search of “the dopamine hit of seeing a well-argued point I agree with,” as my fellow recovery substacker Ben TG told me, will still have plenty of reasons to do so.
And so even tho I just wrote 900 words about all of this, it’s not actually the thing I plan to write (or is it!?). That thing is going to be next week’s thing. (Q: When will then be now? A: Soon!) And speaking of next week’s thing, if by chance you’ve made it this far and feel like sharing your own personal experience of trying to be a good person while staying attuned to our political moment, then I would welcome your shares and may even include them next week. Here’s a survey with some specific questions you can answer:
Does any of this make any sense? I don’t know. Let’s try to figure it out together. Next week. Until then, I guess we should all get outside—oh but wait, it’s so hot. Damn.
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Healings is written by Garrett Kamps and edited by Tommy Craggs. Ayana H. Muwwakkil provides art direction.
Healings is about illness, recovery, spirituality, and related topics, and began in the summer of 2023 as a chronicle of Garrett’s battle with cancer. We make no guarantees that it will hold together, thematically speaking, now or ever.
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Ostensibly