On Shitshows
I’ve been trying and failing to write for the last two months. Some of it is simply normal life. Some of it is…the abnormality of the current moment, demanding, as it does, a heightened attention and the constant asking whether this fire needs to be put out or whether it can wait while we put out that fire, instead.
So not much writing, even though there’s been plenty going on. I’ve been juggling my time between working on building up the tarot business, planting a garden and tending to the land, and trying to obtain a visa so that I can be overseas for a bit until the US can sort out its proverbial shit.
Even when things aren’t this chaotic, there’s still a rhythm to the year. Even if all I had to work on was the garden, it would keep me more than busy enough. Spring and summer provide fodder for writing, but the time itself is better spent attending to the world. The things we see now are given time to develop and grow into something worth speaking on at a later date. Fall, or winter maybe. When there’s less work to be done outside and more time to be spent on craft and making lasting things.
So I haven’t really had time to sit and sort through everything happening to turn it into something worth reading. To sift through their shit and my shit and just all the shit. There’s so much shit. One day this will be fertile soil that the writing can emerge from. There are a thousand seeds. They are germinating. Some are even emerging. But everything is still just potential. Chaos. All ajumble. Today, it is mostly still just a lot of shit.
I got a later start planting the garden than I could have even though I planted it before the last frost date in Maryland. Everything warmed up early this year and the wild plants all got a good solid head start on the ones in the garden. I’ve spent more time cutting down and pulling up oriental bittersweet, Japanese stiltgrass, Virginia creeper, bindweed, and poison ivy than I have on the corn, herbs, and gourds I planted. I haven’t even got to the part where I put the beans, squash, sunflower, or watermelon seeds in the ground yet. Tackling the worst invasives — the ones that strangle, suffocate, and overrun the diverse, healthy array of wild plants — is a full time job in its own right.
I try to keep track of what I do and balance it out. If I pull up the bittersweet, I should plant some serviceberry, spicebush, and holly, so the birds who learned to enjoy the berries and cover will still have food and shelter. If I cut the stiltgrass, would it help control it better in the future, even after I’m gone, if I replace it with groundcover like running buffalo clover and American pennyroyal? I need to lookup what time of year they germinate and when they drop seeds, so I know what will grow faster than the stiltgrass and seed the ground before it does. Give those things a chance to establish themselves early so they have a fighting chance to replace the invasives. You cannot take with both hands. You have to take with one and give with the other. Ideally, what you give will be just a bit better. A bit more attractive, a bit more healthy, a bit more robust, than what you took. This is how you make something lasting that grows better with time.
There’s something bittersweet about planting a garden you will not be able to see grow to fruition. Every day I go out in the morning and again in the evening to check on my “babies.” My friend who is letting me take over her yard while she is too sick to take care of it herself laughs at me a little for calling them this. But one day I will have grandchildren. And I want to be able to give them something better than I had, and to teach them how to care for these things. For this world. So I keep at it even though this garden, this yard, is not one that will be mine for much longer.
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There are so many things to be done in preparation for an overseas move, and I know I’m almost certainly not doing them in the right order. You have to have money to do a move properly, and that is…well…trying to do it when you have a new business undertaking is somewhat at odds with that. I wouldn’t say the business is doing poorly, but it’s doing exactly as well as one might expect 6 months in. Which is to say that I am nowhere near being able to live off of it even if each month I do just a little better at it than the last. Not the most ideal time to apply for a visa that costs roughly $5500, especially when that is pretty close to the sum total of the money you have. But I found out yesterday that the visa was approved. I now have permission to live and work in the UK for three years. And so now I’m turning my attention to making that happen. I’m going to be listing Xelona the ambulance for sale. She was an excellent home and adventure while I finished my dissertation from her little red turtle shell. But I won’t be able to enjoy her in the UK, so it’s time for her to have new adventures with a new person. If I’m lucky, the money I get from the sale will be enough to buy me several months of time to find a steady gig while I continue to sustain the tarot business and turn it into something more robust.
In an ideal world, I’d be able to keep teaching in academia. In the current world, that seems unlikely, for so many reasons. Every time some well-meaning soul tells me I should just get a job in academia I have to take a breath. Remind myself of how little any of us know about things that are not our own tiny spheres of knowledge and experience. How could they know, I have to remind myself, that the UK and US have been following one another’s leads for several years in cutting back academic funding and programs, so there are fewer and fewer jobs to be had? That the devastation that the current political regime is wreaking on academia means more people competing for fewer jobs? How could they know that having a Harvard PhD makes you more attractive to a small number of institutions but actually makes you less attractive to the majority of them? Especially when there’s a pinch for jobs, and people get protective of their own when that happens? It’s hard enough to get a non-research teaching position in the US with a degree from a research-forward institution. In another country? As an immigrant?
But even if there were all the jobs in the world, what happens when no one wants what you’re offering? I don’t think it’s histrionic to say teaching, scholarship, history — all of these are currently under threat. A newspaper printed a “summer reading list” today that was clearly written by ChatGPT. It literally made up books to read. It made them up. They don’t exist. This, on the same day the CEO of DuoLingo claims AI teaches better than humans (but that’s ok, he was quick to add: we’ll still need schools to function as daycare). And it’s bad in the schools right now. Bad. Even the very best and most dynamic teachers I know are struggling like hell to weed this out of their classrooms where it doesn’t belong. Gets in the way of students actually learning skills and growing.
I wish to G-d more people understood how this technology works, that it can’t tell the difference between a fact, a thing someone said as a joke, or even two ideas that it put together on its own because they seemed statistically related in some vague way. It isn’t designed to know facts. It’s designed to create sentences that are plausible, which is an entirely different thing altogether. But our students are using it in droves, even after being warned that it can’t do the work they are asking of it. Why do they keep doing this to themselves? I don’t quite 100% know. I do know that a lot of people need to experience something firsthand before they can understand why it doesn’t match their expectations, which means that someone warning them the technology can’t do what they want simply falls on unhearing ears. (A phenomenon, I should point out, not all that different than all the people like our CEO with opinions about how someone else’s profession works even if they don’t have the first single whit of experience with it.) But the problem feels like it swings wildly between this profound overestimation of one’s own knowledge and a profound fear and underestimation of one’s own abilities, too. So many of them are scared of sounding wrong, and they think that ChatGPT makes them sound smarter. Others are terrified they’ll miss some sort of cutting edge technological boat. Others feel pressure to perform and feel short on time, their employers expecting more and more from them while providing them fewer and fewer resources. They fear losing their jobs. Regardless of whether its fear or bald ignorance, the result is the same. Corners get cut, and they get cut again and again until there’s nothing left.
All of this is absolutely devastating to any career path that is reliant on facts and truth. To teachers. To scholars. To historians. To journalists. It’s also devastating to anyone who relies on words to make a living, even if those words are supposed to be fictional. To writers and artists and publishers and fact checkers. It sends the message that having a product is more important than what that product is.
It feels like — and I am admittedly not sure about this — that there is a sentiment underpinning all of this that one has to first and foremost look good. Appearance becomes more important than substance. Truth? Fuck it. A well-turned phrase? Fuck it. Words that come from the heart? That convey emotion? That have something important to say? That ask the listener to connect to another person, form a relationship, even if only for a moment? Fuck ‘em all. The result of that desperate push to look good is a slow hollowing out of anything inside, a slow choking death of whatever it is that once nourished. It’s like picking things for the garden that are attractive even if they’re completely unsuitable. They acidify the soil. They shade out their neighbors. They offer nothing for native pollinators, provide no shelter for wildlife. Contribute nothing to the land even as they slowly drain it of everything that once made it fertile. But hey. They sure do make a pretty flower, amirite? And the Joneses have them in their garden.
I guess I really am a fusty historian and writer in my heart. I still think truth is worth fighting for. I’d still rather have something of substance than an expensive toy that does absolutely none of the things it promises. I’d rather wear an outdated jacket that keeps me warm in winter even though everyone else thinks it coarse. What do I care for the latest fashion made of silk spun by spiders so tiny that the perfect, rarified, subtle strands they produce is invisible to the eyes of us mere peasants? Of course I would still like to teach history and writing to students. But where are the jobs for the Luddites who think this anymore? Who still take the time to write their own words and think their own thoughts, however imperfectly? Who still believe, like absolutely naive, ridiculous fucking children, that keeping the embers of truth and memory and communication lit matters?
I still keep hoping against hope that I can make the tarot reading and historical freelance work into a sustainable business. Unexpectedly, I’ve found that reading tarot allows a more honest, less toxic relationship to truth than the one that emerges in schools, and definitely a less awful one than when one consults an electronic oracle like AI where the desire seems to be to want to give over the act of thinking entirely to a mystical black box. Tarot is different. It’s human and divine at the same time. It’s high mysticism but it’s also done by lowly schmucks with a bad reptutation from the powers that be. Am I a charlatan? A seer? Just some dude trying to make a living? That ambiguity walks a curious line that allows those consulting the cards to simultaneously suspend disbelief and maintain skepticism. The ambiguity in the cards and the sense that one is working outside the bounds of ordinary, daily human knowledge allows people to set aside their preconceived notions of what they know. It instills a humility and awareness that the answer may not be immediately obvious, that it’s going to require a little work to get there. But there’s also a sense of confidence that if one allows themselves to be open to possibilities, that if they want to know the truth, then that’s within reach. So the person asking the cards for knowledge pays attention. Looks and listens for clues. Keeps checking me out to see if I’m the real deal or full of shit. They weigh each possibility as to how well it does or doesn’t fit with what else they’ve been seeing going on in their lives and the world. It requires people to think, in other words. And it takes away the weird classism of academia and Science with a capital S, slides them right through that middle path where they neither overestimate nor underestimate themselves nor the amount of work that is being asked of them. And so they meet that challenge admirably.
I know that this business will not happen overnight. I’ll need a day job for my move to the UK. I can’t give up on that childish hope that I still have, though. The one that feeds both my own inner child and my future grandchildren. This idea that truth matters. It’s as much of a longshot as anything else I’ve been doing, and the industry feels like it’s on the ropes at the moment, but we’ll see what I can do about pivoting into a career in publishing while I build up the tarot on the side. A career where I can still tend the soil and plant the seeds that will keep truth, words, and history alive while we do our best to tend to the rest of the world around them so that they can thrive again one day. Do what I can to turn all the shit we’re surrounded by at the moment into something verdant and alive again. Because it matters.
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