Happy start of October, the official kick-off to SPOOKY SEASON and its delightfully artificial nutmeg and pseudo-clove scented horrors.
As if we hadn’t already descended deep enough into the bubbling cauldron of “making death feel kinda cozy in order to cope” over the past couple of years, now we get to rake the freshly rotting leaves of our dying forests while plotting costumes that simultaneously showcase and conceal our true selves.
AND we are compelled to pretend that all of that gothic emotional destruction is merely festive YET AGAIN. I guess that’s why we have candy. Sometime to soothe the fear…
But, oh yeah, modern doom sure does smell like a grotesquely bright-orange candle lit to mask the odors of our collective existential dread. We don’t need lye to thwart the noticeable rot of our crimes. We have Febreeze and White Claw. We live in the future, FER SHURE.
Wheee!
And so the topic of this newsletter is: You are SO cursed!
Absolutely and forever cursed (but you most likely already suspected as much, because you just can’t ignore the creeping chills that frequently tickle the base of your skull when you read up on current events and/or look in the mirror).
But don’t worry, it’s cool, because you’ve been cursed with some PRETTY SNAZZY things, if ya wanna get weird about it.
WHICH WE NOW WILL:
WIN ONE:
You are cursed to be alive at this moment in history.
We live in some interesting times, people, some VERY interesting times. And aside from the possibly impending doom they vaguely promise, how cool is that? We have the best medicine, the best tech. We have the best opportunities to fix and prevent future nastiness. We are richer (statistically) than any generation ever. We have the most power to do the most good. I was texting with some genius people and they conjured the new word: MEST, meaning: the best mess. Embrace the mest! It is yours to do with as you will.
WIN TWO:
You are cursed with the awareness of your own eventual mortality.
Most animals have no idea that they’re gonna die. I pet my dog and am grateful that she will never fear oblivion, for it is a foreign concept to her pure and perfect mind. But you and ME? Oh SHIT.
We not only have to plan to survive but plan for what happens AFTER WE CANNOT DO ANYTHNG AT ALL TO HELP. And so we open savings accounts for babies and plant trees (same thing, really) and recycle and make helpful gestures, and we hope that if anything outlives us, it is the ripples of our kindness and good intention across the galaxy.
But this is a gift and not a burden: we can save children we will never meet by gifting them a world we can never see, and so that gift is something impossibly grand for both the giver and receiver, if we opt to find a way to bother.
WIN THREE:
You are cursed with the omnipresent sensation that both everything and nothing is your fault.
The world’s burning? People are sick? Nobody knows what you do for a living? You matter not at all and yet, EVERYTHING you do contributes to the future? SAME. BOO.
We are both off the hook for and responsible for the death of all things impaled by the lures we did not cast. GREAT. If our our crimes are unattachable to our names, then our benevolences are as well. This is the freedom to be of generously anonymous service. Use it well.
WIN FOUR:
You are cursed to make decisions without all needed information.
Fun fact: nobody never knew everything and so did everything with lacking insights. You’ve done the best you can with the information available to you at the time. In other words: your calls were right, to you, at the time you made them. The only way to make your future decisions better is to know more before you even have to make them. Compiling random and possibly useless information is thus the only way to possibly make future decisions more informed.
So basically: There is no trivial fact to learn. It might just change your life decades alter. Read widely and happily, and never feel guilty about it. Guilty pleasures do inform virtuous actions.
WIN FIVE:
You are cursed to be the culmination of your many, many ancestors’ combined efforts.
That’s a lot of responsibility, right there. I love the fact that there are more of us dead than alive, because it means we (the living) are standing on the shoulders of so many: and we can see so much further than they could have ever dreamed. Think of all the things they figured out through eons of trial and error that you were simply and without fanfare, TOLD IN SECOND GRADE. Of course you should feel smug that you know and can work with as much knowledge and experience as you do.
WIN SIX:
You are cursed to own the future.
This is pretty much a follow up of WIN FIVE, but I gave it its own section because I don’t think we’re (collectively) as drunk with power as we should be. Not enough of us can look at the elderly holders of power and laugh at their impending demise.
WE, THE SPRY LIVING, due to the nature of time, decide where the fulcrum of Archimedes’ lever gets placed now. We decide how far to bend (and in which direction) the arc of history. WE DO. Nobody else, until we’re gone. This is YOUR WORLD. Time is a media and you are an artist and you don’t even have to be any good to be important.
WIN SEVEN:
You are cursed to live as a mutant.
You’re like, thirty-thousand bits of DNA different from BOTH of your parents due to so many influences beyond your control and understanding.
You are made for this world, for here, for now, and all of the kinks in your programming are setting the stage for you to own the future. That’s genetic power, people. You’re special and unlike anyone who came before you. There are MOST certainly gifts embedded in that pile of funky nucleic acids you call yourself—and they are YOURS AND YOURS ALONE. You made it to now and that’s a huge advantage, right there. Darwin’s theory is yours to flex. FLEX IT, YOU MAGICAL FREAKS.
WIN EIGHT:
You are cursed to think more thoughts than you can share.
No one will ever know all of your brilliant insights. No one will ever know all of your disgusting judgments. The fact that you can wander around, perceiving and knowing and understanding millions of ideas and only share a sliver of them is in your best good.
You live with an invisible editor who keeps you from being judged and damned, and that editor is privacy. Thank whatever god you’re into for the freedom to ponder all you like, and trust that it’s better that you think more than you can ever say. The thought police can’t entirely get you, and that is a win in your column FER SHURE.
WIN NINE:
You are cursed with the gift of hindsight.
You could have. You should have. If only you had. BAH! Now that you know all the details that could have helped you then, the only thing you can do now is apply those understandings to the future. You now have years of examples to apply to the future. The older you get, the more you know what NOT to do. That’s a very valuable set of data you can use as you progress through time!
WIN TEN:
You are cursed because you will never be as young as you currently are.
You have arrived at this moment full of experience and insight, and simply knowing that you can leverage all you have seen and felt, while ALSO knowing that time will only give you MORE proofs to negate and or amplify (in equal measure) in addition to what you’ve absorbed should be both humbling and empowering.
You do your best with what you’ve gathered, and hopefully, what you have gathered is material you can perpetually use.
Onward you go with the tools you’ve sharpened and the skills to know there are tools you haven’t yet figured out how to use. True youth is the embrace of hopefulness, despite understanding the vile hazards you’ve already overcome.
Enjoy the pumpkin-spiced details of this deeply-haunted season.
They say more about this moment than your nose can translate, while your recently experienced moments will haunt, in ways you cannot even imagine, the future.
And that’s pretty neat, isn’t it?