Just... so, so tired of it all.

Well... I dunno if the divination actually had anything to say to me last night. I guess I'm still too early in the process. Maybe I'll pick through this later and see if there are any connection, who knows.

I got the lovely present this afternoon of THE JMG telling me I was a liar for reporting on the level of danger antifa post to the average Portlander nowadays (i.e., none). I think I was prepared for it from every other source... Lord knows I've gotten it from almost every other source... but that one cut deep. I wasted 4 hours - dinner is cooking crazy late as a result - trying to compose a reasonable response to that allegation, leaning heavily on my personal experience from actually being in Portland, but... I think it's a coin-flip whether he'll even publish it. Fair enough, it's his blog.

But this is MY blog. So...

JESUS H. CHRIST. I'm SO tired of being gaslit on the Internet about what I can see with my own damn two eyes. Are the antifa innocent purity-pure victims of the big meany cops who do nothing but "protect protestors against fascists"? Obviously fucking not. They're blithering, coddled idiots who achieved nothing but a hollow victory for their Feelings (tm) and ended up killing a guy. The better-connected ones totally got a visit this winter in the family living room from a very nice gentleman in a suit who came to have a "conversation" about stuff 'n things. The less-connected ones are rotting in a prison cell which they'll never get to leave. Did they deserve it? Simply through the level of personal stupid, yep, they sure did. JMG is right that as they yelled their heads off about being "anti-fascist" they ended up precisely aping the fascists in dress and actions, in a hilariously chilling way. The establishment has handled them, though, restoring neoliberalism to its proper throne, and it would be a surprise to ever see their leaders in public again. The general public is in NO danger from them--not now, not then, and not ever again. And I'd just about come down on JMG's side, that however it was achieved, that's it's a good thing...

...and yet. A guy I briefly dated in college is possibly in that jail cell right now. Can I be happy about that? I can't - he was just a dumb kid. A stupid, stupid, reckless, underemployed little kid. It's so easy to try to be a hero. Not everyone got the memo that this age won't actually have any.

More to the point, this marks a new and menacing phase in the relationship between the idealistic Portland citizens and the police force which is tasked to protect them from themselves. Authoritarianism is on the march from all angles, bearing down on our society like a freight train. Last summer in Portland was a beautiful moment in a way - a brief moment of hope and solidarity, that maybe this inexorable process could be stopped or halted for a while, that we could go to the streets of our city and fight back against it, somehow... And then a guy died, and the whole world caught on fire, and all of the city's ideals choked and died in the smoke, too.

And - because it's my own goddamn blog - I'd like to specifically point out, here, that the guy who died? Was part of a group that DELIBERATELY ENTERED Portland, a city which was NOT their home, ARMED and BRANDISHING, to "face antifa," and "take back the city" - and didn't even utilize the element of surprise. He ended up being in the moral right, as do all who don't fire the first shot. But he absolutely played stupid games and won stupid prizes.

I'm not going to wave a flag that says "Boo antifa!" and pretend that Civilization Has Triumphed (tm) because the police chased down the antifa who DID shoot first, and executed him in a hail of 40 bullets in his front yard. Not even if he deserved it (he did). Because no matter what shallow take you have on what happened last summer (Antifa bad! Police bad! Trump bad!) the core problem of the age hasn't even been touched upon. And no, it's not fucking global warming, it's that NO ONE IN THIS MOTHERFUCKING CITY IS INTERESTED IN EVEN STARTING TO FIX ANY OF ITS ACTUAL PROBLEMS.

Bully for them, that they almost certainly yanked the antifa leaders off the street in white vans and took them to secret prisons. That was exactly the efficient solution I did NOT want our society to utilize, thanks! Whereas - reforming the police force's approach to minorities and the poor? Or figuring out soaring housing prices? Or adjusting our local economy away from its over-reliance on services? Or, maybe, something as potentially bipartisan as managing our forests correctly so fewer people die horrible deaths during our now-yearly fire season? Nope, nope, nope, nope, and FUCK YOU for CARING! That's the only message our local leadership has to deliver, though it is softened, I suppose, by all the layers of BIPOC differently-abled rainbow-colored rhetoric they can possibly pull over the top of it. And the people of Portland re-elected them all, despite the year's events, like good little sheep. As the children say nowadays... I can't even.

And... to make it worse... I actually tried to engage, online, with both "sides" at the peak of the event last year. Because I still believed that it mattered. Every antifa I ended up messaging with was both unbelievably stupid and frothingly anti-American. I mean, so am *I* most days, but I also recognize the reality of our current political arrangement! And there are worse things that remaining one of the more-favored territories of the empire... far, far worse things. Not that those idiots could recognize that. I backed away from those attempts pretty quick. The regular people protesting by their side, though, who were horrified that Trump had poured gasoline on the fire by sending federal troops either to perform an fascist military take-over of of our city, or haplessly blunder into a situation they could only inflame - I DEFINITELY identified with them. Honestly, I still do.

I also took on the right-wing - all those people, spurred on by that opportunistic weasel Andy Ngo, that crafted the narrative that what was happening in Portland was somehow The Beginning Of The Breakdown Of All National Order (tm), instead of a local group burning off long-standing tensions by busting up windows, spraying graffiti everywhere, and taunting the police with mostly non-violent but flashy actions... all of which was made super easy for them to do by the rest of the citizenry dropping their own city's public life like a hot rock, like it was always a luxury option for them. I guess it was. All the cute little restaurants and boutiques were replaced in a heartbeat with Etsy and DoorDash - shows you how much local pride Portlanders *really* have. People who would never dream of setting foot in a WalMart replaced every last household purchases with Amazon Prime one-day shipping, and virtue-signaled about it on social media, to show off what Good People they were - so CAREFUL not to spread COVID!! They still went to all those ridiculous marches across the bridges, though. Can't pass up the chance to virtue-signal, not in this town! All those people with the BLM signs in their window were happy to ruthlessly torture the local working-class people of color by forcing them to mask up in their own vehicles and do 24-hour delivery runs... but I doubt we'll ever have a city-wide conversation about THAT one, lol!

But, I tried my best, with what little platform I had access to back then, to tell anyone who would listen what I was actually seeing on the ground - i.e., the vast majority of Portland not actually burning, the problem really being the COVID closures keeping the adults home and leaving the punk kids alone to play - to help keep the narrative from being distilled into 24-hour looping videos of black-shirted kids setting fires in dumpsters. Not least because I was pretty sure that national public opinion was the only thing keeping Trump's federal troops from putting every last protestor in vans and "disappearing" them. If he'd been the Nazi most Portlanders were convinced he was, that absolutely would have happened. (Ironically--or is it?--I'm sure Biden wrapped up that particular job.) I couldn't march or protest with them - and in July, I desperately wanted to - because I had an actual family to support, I was the only one who'd kept their job, real shit like that. So I posted and posted and posted instead.

I don't know if I convinced anyone. I don't know if it mattered whether or not I did. I just know that I was never, ever, **ever** once in any actual danger from anyone or anything in the summer of 2020. And that KILLED me on the inside. Knowing that it's not possible to actually stand up for your own values - that you have to let them go, let them disappear from your own society possibly forever, because your responsibility to others outweighs them in the end - it felt something like the early Christians must have, when the emperors forced them to trample an image of their God. But I "ate bitterness" as the Chinese say and trampled on anyway.

And then two total fucking idiots got each other spectacularly killed, all that was potentially positive about the "movement" ended, the skies turned sepia as the forest mismanagement bill came due... and all these Portlanders I'd been putting my online reputation on the line for were just SO WORRIED THAT THEY MIGHT GET CANCER!!! To which all I could think was "Bitch... I've been to Beijing on a regular Tuesday... are you serious?" Fortunately the rural Oregonians know how to take care of themselves and they self-organized (while the state government did almost nothing, couldn't even keep us up to date on whether parts of Portland were currently in danger from a WALL OF FLAME or not) and mostly kept themselves and their animals alive. And my anger during that time was so black and so full of hatred that I stopped posting, because I was basically ready to skin alive everyone who DARED to post about anything, ANYTHING, that wasn't "How can we realistically and immediately change our forest management system to prevent this recurring living nightmare from destroying our beautiful home?" FUCK. GLOBAL. WARMING. AND. THE. THOUGHT-STOPPING. WAY. THAT. IT. KILLS. ALL. POSSIBLE. SOLUTIONS. IN. THIS. TOWN. I had to back off of my posting. I wasn't sure, any more, that people like this even deserved to be defended.

And then there was the election.

And then housing prices spiked to absolutely unheard of levels and the whole reason our family had made an incredibly expensive and difficult move to return here dissolved into smoke.

So... I moved on from that, more or less. I solved some problems closer at hand. I made a bid to move to Canada, which also failed, but I was OK with that. I've laid the groundwork for moving back to Seattle, which for all its (many) faults, has an actual economy and our more helpful relatives nearby. And I've come to terms with our permanent fall in class status. It's certainly not all bad! I've worked hard on reducing expenses and bulking up our savings and acquiring new habits and skills that will keep us in good shape as we face a different future than we originally planned. It's going well, I've generally processed the worst of it, and I'm just trying to enjoy one last summer in Portland - regularly visiting to patronize the local businesses that managed to survive their own city doing just about everything it could to destroy them. Trying to remember this moment, because this place will have too many painful memories for me to casually visit much after I've left the area. And... I'm not sure how much longer un-vaxxed poors like me will be granted this much freedom of movement, before we become the scapegoat for all the Good People's troubles. So I'm trying to enjoy the moment.

And then... an authority figure who I deeply respect--one of the very, very few--who hasn't set foot here in a decade, told me I was "lying" about the antifa, and that Portland isn't safe to be in.

I wouldn't dream of telling JMG that he was wrong about anything whatsoever which I hadn't SEEN WITH MY OWN GODDAMN EYES. I was here. He was not. I am here now. He is not. The antifa were idiots who posed no threat to anyone except the local and federal police who were required by contract to keep them from setting trash fires on the steps of the Justice Center, a few of whom ended up blinded by lasers (which the antifa SHOULD have been put on trial for, if the world was sane, and discredited *that* way) and the morons who publicly announced they would be showing up from out of town at the protests with guns to "take back Portland". Everyone who suffered due to anything antifa cared about *volunteered* to suffer - and it was damned easy to choose NOT to suffer (unless you had a police pension). The janitors, delivery truck drivers, construction workers, utility guys, street sweepers, and small business owners went into this city every day over the past 18 months and the worst that ever happened to them from antifa was some broken windows (buildings only). Nobody just doing their regular damn job needed to bring a gun to it - or if they did anyway out of an abundance of caution, they've never had to use it. I went on the train into the downtown every weekday morning and evening, walked several blocks to get to and from my office, walked around in various directions for an half-hour every single lunch break, and tried to report what I was seeing in forums every damn day, countering idiots from all parts of the political spectrum. I patronized Powell's books online when it was closed, and walked past their building to get tea at least once a week. Now it is open for customers again, and I have enjoyed browsing there several times, even with a mask on. "Too dangerous to visit" my out-of-shape ass. There's usually a line around the block from the door!! I have casually taken FOUR HOUR WALKS as of LAST MONTH right across the very middle of downtown, with garbage blowing every which way and the homeless restlessly wandering about the boundaries of the parks. It was fine. IT, IS, FUCKING, FINE, HERE. Especially compared to what it's GOING to be like - this is the motherfucking golden age!! See it now, see it quick, before the river of time sweeps it all away! That's all I wanted to say. But instead... even in a forum overwhelmingly populated by the last remnants of the sane... I got gaslit. Even **JMG** took the narrative he liked best from the national news, and just blindly assumed it was true.

I defended the city to him - one last time, I went to the ramparts for Portland - but I'm just... so, so, so... tired of it all.

Such is the Year of Our Lord 2021! Wheeeee!!!

I'll stay off the forums for at least a week, I think. I'm not going to throw a fit and permanently waltz off because one guy was rude to me - that would be dumb. But... if it wasn't JMG... at this point in my life, I'll be honest, I probably would do that. Because... this is just too hard to deal with any more.

It's doubly hard because I've blocked so much of the Internet already. Facebook, YouTube video essays, Netflix, the news sites I once read, the video game forums, most of reddit - all gone, for the sake of my mental health. And I know that everything online isn't real, and I'd be more than happy to block out even more. But... I have so few friends here, and so few options for real social contact. I can't just go off to a gardening group and chat about plants with other human beings, or whatever, like some plebe that has the right to enjoy their own damn life in a balanced and healthy way. Everything is being done over Zoom right now - EVERYTHING. Church, political meetings, gardening groups (!!), everything. (I fucking hate Zoom, I'd rather cut my own flesh.) Most Portlanders aren't even doing as well as me (such as that is) in psychologically integrating everything that happened last year. Everyone in this city is fucking traumatized, mostly by our garbage-fire media which screams FEAR FEAR FEAR about things that aren't dangerous, and provides less than zero solutions to what's ACTUALLY going to take us out, creating a constant background buzz of cognitive dissonance that gets covered over by every more FEAR FEAR FEAR. And as long as they all live in fear, I have to live alone. At least until I can get the hell out of this region. But... that's going to take a very, very, very long time.

I wonder, how many ways can a city betray someone who loves it? I'm hard-pressed to think of an aspect in which Portland hasn't fundamentally disappointed me by this point, but - the citizens here seem creative in that way, at least. They might yet think of something.

And I won't lie - when the pied piper finally comes to Portland, and the people on the edge of the city the Good People have constantly antagonized and overtaxed finally decide to gin up that Proud Boys caravan once more, smash in the Good People's windows, grab all their fancy slave-made electronics, and drive right out of town while it *actually* burns down behind them - part of me will be vindictively glad. But I will also weep and weep for this city. The news will break my heart. Portland was - is - *so* beautiful. Even if every new building they've thrown up in town over the past decade is hot steaming diarrhea from an architectural standpoint. Even if all ideas that might threaten the neoliberal Establishment's power in any way are fended off with a claim that the idea isn't "inclusive" enough, ruthlessly using the sacrosanct LGBT BIPOC etc. to make sure that that nothing ever meaningfully changes at all. Even if the people who are still allowed to live here are all wretched hypocrites, talking BLM out of one side of their mouths while they count their rise in home values out of the other. There was a dream that was possible in Portland for a long, long time - a deeper and more meaningful one than what Portlandia mocked. There was a community here that believed in their right to stay in this beautiful place, and their freedom - even if they couldn't define that term to save their lives besides ORANGE MAN BAD - and was willing to fight for it. But... they lost. They lost so completely that everyone here who didn't move in yesterday from California is still trying to work through how much and how fast everything has changed. And they're clutching as tightly to whatever they can still control as possible... and destroying the last of what made Portland great in the process.

And I'm working so hard to change my own way of life, and to leave behind past strategies and worldviews - no matter how I once cherished them - that aren't going to get me and my family through the coming age, and I was relying on JMG to guide me there, at least a little. And this just feels like such a low blow. Never meet (or exchange messages with) your heroes. Sigh.

You know... after all that... perhaps this is why the Me card for today was The Devil. I have too much attachment to Portland, a city that has betrayed me over and over again. I want people to see Portland the way *I* see it - the deep flaws, but also the heart-rending beauty. But I don't have that power, and never did. And Portland has all but kicked me out on my ass for all my troubles, being the worthless non-virtue-signaling poor that I am. I covet being truly a part of Portland, and have since I was a child - its why I moved here! - but Fate has already answered that desire with a very, very hard NEVER GONNA HAPPEN. I'm trying to let it go and move on... but it's hard. It's so, so hard.

Stability, from the Clubs card... actually, I see the connection to this one too. This morning we took a walk and had a delightful chat with a local volunteer who is sweeping our tiny downtown business districts, on her own time. She was making stability happen herself <3 She doesn't have time to roll the shopping carts that got left there all the way back to Fred Meyer though - but I do, and I'll take them there tomorrow myself.

After this mess blasted the majority of my afternoon... I did force myself to go shopping (late), and cook the meal I had planned anyway, even though it was finished an hour behind schedule. And... the family loved it <3 Perhaps that's connected to the Hanged Man - I was finally able to find some peace through self-discipline - I didn't just collapse with sadness, but met my obligations, even though I was barely able to focus. So the day, thankfully, wasn't a complete wash.

Hmm. Can it be, that I have some sort of talent for this after all?