I thought I was ready, but I am not.

I was going to write this week about Lanny, the Max Porter book I haven’t been able to stop thinking about for two years now (I always seem to come to his books several years late, it’s been out since 2019). I was going to write about place, and nondualism and how really digging into your place, really knowing a place, and observing it, and becoming part of it spooks the hell out of the normies. I was going to write about Max Porter’s dismay when the UK press read and reviewed the book as a “Brexit novel” which he discussed with David Naimon in his Between the Covers interview. I was going to write about how Porter’s Green Man figure, Dead Papa Toothwort, is made from human detritus and ill will, about how the book shows us back reflections of ourselves that we probably don’t really want to see — the detached father who works in the City and whose one love is his car, and his drive to the train, and his job in the city and his routine and being resolutely normal, and his wife the former actress still haunted by the trauma of giving birth, of being left alone with an infant in a suburban house, who channels all that rage and terror into writing deeply violent murder mysteries. I was going to write about “Mad Pete” the artist, who has lived in the village for years, whose work is esteemed but who isn’t intrusively famous and his lovely friendship with Lanny, about how rare friendship between adults and kids who aren’t related has become, and how Porter also dramatizes the way those relationships can be narrativized in the most insidious ways once something goes wrong. I was going to write about Lanny, the boy at the center of the story, Lanny who speaks to trees and is building a secret space where everyone can experience what he sees and feels out there, in the wood at the edge of the village. Lanny who is stolen by Dead Papa Toothwort and whose disappearance brings the village to turn on itself, brings the most boring, basic, recriminative storytelling into the novel. I was going to write about all this, and perhaps try to link to thoughts I had about this terrific interview with Rachel Kushner about Creation Lake, and the failure of revolutionary politics and how that manifests in this group of communards in the South of France, and I was going to write about Janisse Ray’s newsletter this morning, writing from Beloit College, my alma mater, and her discussion with a Poly Sci prof there about how environmentalism has forgotten place, has become de-placed and how Porter’s book, embedded in an actual place, dramatizes these issues.

I was going to write about all these interesting things but instead, I’m trying to cajole my brain out of the panic spin cycle it’s been in all week as I’ve been watching the nest egg I worked so hard for “lose value” as those who are supposed to be running the actual government continue to just rampage around and destroy shit.

I am so angry that I cannot think straight. I’m going to have to figure out some strategies, but for this week at least, I flip flopped between financial panic and furious weeding. I did battle with my overgrown lilac bushes. Poor things. I tried not to prune in fury, but I’m afraid I did.

The thing about having “retired” (which just feels to me like a fancy way of saying I quit my job to write full time), is that I have no income. I have this little nest egg I put together from all those corporate jobs that, while I didn’t actually hate them, were certainly not what I would have liked to have done with those 25 years. But I had to make a living. I wasn’t going to inherit anything and I’m not married and the only money transfer in my family went from me to my mother during those years when she only had Social Security to live on. I did all the mature things. When my novel sold for $7500, paid in two chunks months apart, it was made very clear to me that writing was not going to be a career. So I got a “real job” and lived very frugally and paid off all my debts and helped my mother and my brother and saved my money. But because there are no pensions anymore, and since until about 2 years ago you couldn’t even *get* interest on money, we’ve all been forced to put that money, the money we’re going to need to live on, in the stock market.

I grew up in the 60s and 70s, which means I’m fully old enough to have known people whose families lost everything in the Great Depression. My grandmother got married in 1935, and although her family wasn’t ruined, everyone, even the wealthy families like hers took a big hit. The prevailing wisdom of my childhood was that the “stock market is not safe.” It was pretty much considered gambling (which it is).

My first corporate job was at Cisco, and I got hired just before the Dot-com bubble burst. I had a pile of stock options, some of which I sold to pay off my grad school credit card bill, but the prevailing wisdom was that you should hold onto them because they’d “double and split every year”. When the bubble collapsed, I was left with a pile of stock options that were underwater by at least $20 a share. That was money that I could have used to have paid off my student loans right away, but I didn’t know that when they still had value. I thought I was being prudent. I thought it was “just a cycle” and surely, Cisco was a solid company, we made real things, surely the stock price would come back up. It never did. I watched those worthless options sit there and sit there and sit there until finally, they “expired”. They just went away.

Tech money. Sometimes it just “goes away.” Like the last third of my signing bonus stock from this last job, which they didn’t honor when they sold our division. To people like Elon, who run big companies like that, 20K doesn’t seem like enough money to get upset about. But on my current budget, that’s pretty much a year’s expenses. That’s a whole year of writing money that just “went away.”

I moved here 23 years ago in part to try to establish a place of safety in a world that was becoming increasingly unstable. I was mostly thinking of climate, but also of my own finances. I bought a very cheap house that I knew I could pay off. I fixed it up bit by bit, but it took years. I built a robust garden, that won’t feed us both independently, but it’s embedded in a larger food system that’s fairly independent. That Montana was an ag state, and one isolated enough to have had to feed itself in the living memory of people who live here was a big part of why I moved here. People know how to do things. Canning supplies were in every grocery store when I got here, and not because they were trendy. Almost everyone has a freezer — either for game, or for storing meat from local ranchers. During the pandemic, ranchers and growers made sure everyone was fed. One group of guys started the Producer Partnership to provide an easy way for ranchers to donate cattle, get them processed into burger, and distributed to the state’s food banks. Local potato producers showed up in Bozeman with full trucks, and just gave them away. Across the state, a lot of ag producers, cooped up during those weeks, put guardrails into place to strengthen our local food systems. That their first instincts were to make sure everyone was fed, to reach out to take care of our neighbors, that gives me real hope even as the state has been overrun with white flight Trumpists in the meanwhile.

I wrote for years about cooking and canning and foraging and putting food up over at https://livingsmallblog.com/. While I was never a “prepper” of the right-wing kind, there’s a lot of food in this house. I don’t know where I got that from, the compulsion to always pick up an extra bag of beans, another box of spaghetti, a spare bottle of olive oil. I mean, my childhood was spent lurching from crisis to crisis, but there was always food in the house. Or if there wasn’t it was because my mother was getting anorexic again and wanted me to go on a diet with her as a girl-bonding experience (but really, that didn’t come until high school or so, and I never really took it seriously).

All this is a long way around to admitting that all this prep I’ve done, all the paying everything off and putting solar on my roof so I don’t have a power bill and learning how to grow my own food and put it up and building this lovely relationship with someone I trust — none of this is up to the stress test of the COLLAPSE OF THE US GOVERNMENT.

I expected climate change. I expected forest fires and even thought about what we’d do if the Yellowstone dries up. But I didn’t expect us to have to do all that with no Forest Service workers! I did NOT have “start a war with CANADA” on my bingo card. CANADA?!? JFC. And although they’ve been threatening forever, I did think I’d be able to scramble my way into Social Security before they tank it. Jury’s still out on that one. I saved a lot of money, but I did not save enough money to live on for the rest of my life if the government steals my Social Security. To say NOTHING of our disabled friends and relatives. What are they supposed to do? There are no jobs for them. Every day is this relentless stream of bullshit you can’t possibly take in, or plan for, or be ready for.

I’m heartbroken and furious and terrified.

I’ll try to pull it together in the next two weeks so I can write something meaningful about materiality, and nondualism and nature and and shoring up our little ships against the tide of relentless cruelty and bullshit coming our way. But for now, all I have is: I thought I was ready, and I am very much not.

And while it feels whiny and slightly weird to send this out to you all, I do so in the hopes that even if we don’t have any real ways to change things right now, that if you too are freaked out, we can at least take some consolation in being freaked out together.