The ocean is on fire

(I wrote this in about 45 minutes, read it through once, and I have no idea where to post it so I’m posting it here.)

The ocean is on fire. I have seen several versions of that sentence in the last ten minutes. All of them make sense and none of them do. I scroll past each one and I read them silently and aloud at the same time, forming the shapes of the words with my lips and tongue without putting any sound behind them, because when you say something you make it real so perhaps this is a way to try to reckon with it without taking that final step into an abyss from which there is no return.

I mean, there is no return, because the ocean is on fire.

The ocean is on fire, I say to my roommate when they come in from a double shift. They pull their mask off and they’re like wait, seriously? And I say yes, look, and I show them the looping clip which I was absolutely certain was CGI initially, except I was also certain it wasn’t, because we live in a Baudrillardian fever dream of simulation upon simulation without origin or end and nothing is real anymore, but I do feel like I should reiterate that the ocean is quite literally on fire.

People are making jokes about Cthulhu and they don’t really feel like jokes. If the Elder Gods are any kind of thing, their absence at this point feels, well, pointed. Like they’ve decided it’s not worth it. We’re taking care of the madness and ruination for them. They’ll wait it out, see if the next sapient species has anything better going for it.

Huh, my roommate says, and they grab some leftover curry out of the fridge and head off to bed.

~

I worry about magic. I worry that it might be real.

If I actually 100% believed it was real, I don’t think I would have started doing it. I was always the good kid, is the thing. I was the kid the D.A.R.E skits freaked out so bad it took me until I was in my 30s to try weed, the one who half expected to be grabbed around every dark corner by some indistinct figure defined only by vague all-purpose interchangeable Shadiness, and they would shove a joint or a crack pipe into my mouth and that would be it. Pedophiles roamed the streets looking for kids to drag into their cars. All I knew about the largest and most beautiful park in the area was that some girl got kidnapped and murdered there; the cop who came to talk to us in class told us about it in such ominous terms that I couldn’t help but be certain it was true. Somehow I dodged the Satanic Panic, but I didn’t need Satan to make the world terrifying. People were bad enough.

I now understand that most of that was a lie, and also there was a core of profound and nauseating truth.

They told us there were bad people. They were right. They just lied to us about which ones were the worst.

~

I have no idea how to write horror anymore.

I have no idea how to write science fiction or fantasy anymore. I have no idea how to write stories anymore. I haven’t really known how to write for a year now. It didn’t happen all at once; for a while after things locked down I was still writing. But it was like the second the switch got flipped, I was running on a highly limited supply of something, and nothing new was coming in, and eventually I ran out. I can still write, but it feels flat and fake and pointless. I don’t know what people want to read. I don’t know what I want to read. I kind of don’t want to read anything. This is a difficult truth to face when telling stories is mostly what you’re qualified to do for money, because you’re a bit short on options.

The thing is that this is all a refrain I hear constantly. We don’t know what to write now. We don’t know how to tell stories now. I believe this and yet I also don’t. It seems to me that many other people are somehow still writing, and that people want to read what they write. And I am still writing, technically, but none of what I write feels real. It feels bloodless and empty. It feels like I’m a grinder churning out grayish meat paste, the mashed-up pieces of an animal gutted and drained and rendered unidentifiable and unintelligible.

People say I don’t know how to write and I see people writing, and I say I don’t know how to write and I am writing, and I think what I’ve decided is that we are all writing and we are also not writing in any way we would once have recognized, because none of this is real, none of this is happening, and the ocean is on fire.

~

I think I was talking about magic.

A world full of cartoon villains is in some respects a magical world, because it’s a simple world, where everything is terrifying and dangerous but at least the terror and the danger makes sense. Do we ever stop to consider how comforting that vision of the world is? We should. Especially right now, we should. There’s a reason why people are falling into online stews of fascist doomsday visions. There’s a reason why people want to believe in a world of Satanic Pedophile Baby-Killers. That world they want to believe in is a world where you look at the ocean on fire and you ask who did that? And the answer is clear and concise, expressible in a sentence, a couple of words, and the solution is correspondingly simple, and probably doesn’t require you to do anything but post.

I feel like this is all a bit too on the nose but I also don’t know what too on the nose means anymore. What is the nose? Why shouldn’t we be on it? What’s the virtue in not aiming right for the fucking nose? What’s the use of subtlety? Why are we mistaking aesthetics for morality? This is a polemic now. I was talking about magic.

I was saying that I worry that magic might be real.

I tell myself that magic is a spiritual practice, because I don’t know how to reconcile belief that it might do something material and external to me with my own natural skepticism and my fairly strong bullshit detector. I get very impatient with a lot of people who do various forms of witchcraft. I joke often that I am the worst person to be doing what I do, and like the whole thing with Cthulhu it really isn’t a joke. I am.

I wrote that last two-word sentence and realized that it’s fairly ambiguous—am I confirming what I said about myself, or am I saying that I am in fact a joke? The answer is yes. I’m leaving it as it is.

So I do magic. I do it for a lot of different reasons. I remain openly agnostic about it but my dirty little secret is that I think it might actually be real—or I’m afraid it might be, in the way I’m afraid that when I’m on a plane, if I imagine the place crashing too clearly and too vividly I might actually cause it to happen. What I’m afraid of is that magic is real and that I will discover that I can use it to hurt people, because if that happens I genuinely don’t know how I would stop myself and I don’t know where I would stop, because the ocean is on fire.

Who did that? Who set fire to the ocean? A corporation. Okay, so who do I hex? Maybe everyone. Maybe hex the world from orbit. Maybe it’s the only way to be sure.

~

The Manhattan DA just criminally indicted a corporation and I don’t see anyone laughing wildly about that and I think someone ought to be, and I don’t think that’s naive. I don’t think I’m the crazy one here.

~

Or no, I literally am crazy. But explain to me what else I’m supposed to be.

~

I compulsively check the news about the virus and Portugal.

I check it because I am trying to decide if it’s worth attempting to plan a trip to Portugal for the fall, a trip I’ve been intending to take for a year and a half now. I badly want to take this trip, but I’m not going to force it if it really seems unsafe, because I am adult and responsible, so I check the news constantly because I’m going to have to make a decision soon, and maybe if I check the news more often something will change faster. Right now it doesn’t look good. If I had some idea of what spell to cast to make this trip more likely, I would, but I don’t think magic works that way, and also I don’t know how magic works and I don’t know if magic is real but I’m afraid it might be.

I check the news because I want to know whether or not I can make a plan. Making plans is a largely alien notion now; I’ve made a few but they’re all small and they have massive asterisks next to them. This plan, if it can be made, would feel like reaching the shores of the future and planting a big old fucking flag on the rocks. Not merely bold but reckless. Vaguely imperialist. The future has risen up and declared that it is not our land to conquer. We fucked up and now we don’t get to do that anymore.

Look, I just really want to take this trip and that doesn’t seem like a lot to ask.

But it is. It’s all a lot to ask. It’s all too much to ask. We have had to recalibrate what too much is. The entire planet is rearing its burning head and screaming that it’s all too much. Sit down. Shut up. You don’t get to take your fucking trip. You don’t get to do anything. You set the ocean on fire.

~

I swear if I could fix this by hexing enough people I would. Even if I’m terrified of who that might make me into.

~

I don’t know where this leaves me. Maybe this is all true and maybe some of it is fiction; maybe I have a roommate and maybe I don’t; maybe with some vestigial authorial instinct I was looking for some distance and it didn’t work and I didn’t bother to change it. I don’t know how to wrap it up, in any case. There’s no conclusion to something this incoherent. I don’t know how to write anymore and I don’t know what to write. Attempting to make a mark on reality strikes me as a questionable proposition at best. Plans for the future seem like utter folly. Yet somehow the whole nightmarish machine keeps on grinding. They will put the ocean out and go back to what they were doing that set it on fire and then something will break and it will catch fire again and the people who could actually do something will make concerned faces and concerned noises and that will largely be the extent of it. They will be very concerned about it, as we all die gasping, as we drown, as we starve, as we burn.

I hit a point in the last year where I stopped being able to hate people. Sometimes I feel like this is freedom. Sometimes I feel like all it means is that something inside me stopped working.

I am so afraid that the only way to make this better is to destroy it all, and I am so afraid that if something doesn’t change we’ll destroy it all anyway, only worse. Listen: If you study human history with any kind of honesty the only conclusion you can really come to is that sometimes there are no good choices left.

We tell ourselves that there are good choices, because the alternative is too horrible to contemplate, and I want to believe that, and I am a hopeful person, I am a person who believes in love and resistance and the power of the human spirit, and I am a person who sometimes even believes in magic, but also the fucking ocean is on fucking fire, and that isn’t even close to the worst thing that’s happened in the past week; it’s merely the most spectacular awful thing that’s happened in the last twelve hours. Yet it also feels like the illustration of something. It feels like someone is trying to make a point.

The ocean is on fire.

I’m going to bed.