Tourists to the End

Letter from the Editor

Chandler Bing has been on my mind a lot recently.

Or—to be more precise—Matthew Perry and the sitcom universe which he navigated, and what happens when that sitcom universe has its sitcom apocalypse. Like a stand-up comedian confessing to being a serial killer or someone having a heart attack on SNL. Our illusions unravel.

Of course, our illusions are unraveling because a legitimate apocalypse is underfoot, and illusions cannot stand the unsettling of our world.

But also. Furthermore. To be clear. When I speak of apocalypse, I am speaking of an ending of things as they are. How the Mayans described the apocalypse or a Navajo understanding of the end of history. History never ends. It only has its psychotic break and then begins again somewhere earlier in the story. Maybe it’s agrarianism, or hunter gatherer with a smattering of bizarre tools that no one remembers how to make go anymore. It could also fragment, such that there are the Star Trekians living in orbit when it’s all Dark Ages down below.

Who knows?

And it is specifically because we are facing this terrifying unknown that our world has lost its ability to dream anything but the most derivative of dreams. (We are the proverbial deer in the headlights and we have just proverbially shat ourselves.) And this inability to dream new dreams is fueling the unwinding of things in an endless cycle of imagination abuse. As in… Our panic makes us unable to imagine any solution, and our inability to imagine any solution fuels our panic. That sort of thing. And somewhere in there, we start intentionally using our imaginations in ways they weren’t meant to because we’ve forgotten what they’re there for.

Spoiler alert. Imaginations are a tool to help guide you through the universe. Not a blow-up doll to replace actual human contact.

(You may argue that an imagination can be used however the imaginer likes, including like a blow-up doll human replacement, but I think you’ll find it’s like trying to make love to a blow-up doll amoeba. It keeps frustrating your intent.)

So. We have all retreated into our sound stages and are televising our reactionary beliefs to a readymade audience of our peers. Our media universe has compartmentalized. Mitosis has begun.

But then again, this is a schtick I’ve been doing since I was a six-year-old with a penchant for black crayon, and these days people seem to find it more offensive than before. They say things like, “How is now different? People are always predicting the end of things.” Or. “Nobody wants to hear that.” Or. “You can’t know, so why talk about it?”

But the point is that we do know. The world is clearly changing in a dramatic way. It has already begun. In the face of a looming climate crisis, nation states are eagerly reverting inwards and reverting to the playbooks of the authoritarians of yesteryear. Sure, Biden was elected, but the anti-democratic forces didn’t just go whimpering off to sulk behind bars like in some Scooby Doo finale. “If it weren’t for those darned kids!” We are as close to civil war as we have been since the last civil war. All of which is occuring in the face of a global pandemic that the USA (as per usual) is gleefully declaring on the retreat when it’s surging in various spots around Asia. One of which I happen to live in.

But why Matthew Perry?

Friends was really the second wave of 90’s television culture. It was preceded by such momentous cultural events as Seinfeld, The Simpsons, and Twin Peaks. These are shows that first aired anywhere from the latter half of ‘89 to the first half of ‘90 and are the shows that would come to define the ‘90s, and Friends merely took specifically Seinfeld and reconstituted it back into a more traditional sitcom framework. It gave a “somethingness” to it to a show about nothing, put him some heart, made everyone pretty, and boom—an instant hit.

In part also due to the general comedic skills of persons such as Lisa Kudrow and Matthew Perry, but its continued popularity is more because it’s gone on become the symbol of America most attractive both at home and abroad, of an America not yet attacked on 9/11, and an America that had not yet begun its 20-year war in Afghanistan, or its financial crisis of 2008, had not unnerved the world with its electoral decisions of 2016—regardless of which foreign actors were pulling the leg of the electorate, in the end, our nation state bears at least a little responsibility for electing the thing it did.

The unpleasantnesses of America in the 90’s were less glaring and obvious, although of course, still there. Fox News had not yet become an outlet for blatant conspiracy theories. Sure, Citizens United was passed, but the American economy was booming, so who cared that under the guise of our new “post-industrialist” reality, manufacturing was consistently being shifted from home to abroad, and specifically China.

Friends is the sitcom they will look back on. It captures both the blindnesses of the age (as in, both racially and socio-economically whitewashed) and revels in its own luxuriousness, like a Marie Antoinette of sketch comedy. The children of tomorrow will mostly be in awe of the wondrous ease of these godlings of the pre-apocalypse. (Assuming they can still access video content.) And Matthew Perry, in some sense, the shows brightest light, has fallen the furthest, as we all witnessed during the promo for their 17-year reunion—his slurred speech, million mile stare, and his tears. The state of Matthew Perry is the state of the world.

As Antarctica begins to unstitch itself and the GOP continues to play pretend dangerously, people are always telling me, “Yeah, but not in our lifetime.” My answer. Look it in the eye, friend. Yes, there is no way to prepare for the unknown, but you can look it in the eye.

But who wants to prepare for the storm when you can watch the cresting of the wave? The goal is not to survive. The goal is to be out in the sea of blades, the river of flames, and watching it happening when it does. Who wants to have the unpleasant task of trudging through the post apocalypse? But we all want to be tourists at the end of times.

We gave in to our guilty pleasures, said, “You deserve to treat yourself,” and played with a dangerous cynicism, announcing, “They’re all corrupt, so what does it matter anyway?” Our politicians postponed dealing with climate change until a more economically fortuitous time, a time which has of course never arrived. And now, our world is ending, but it all starts with the sitcom apocalypse.

Step away from the laugh track in your mind. Tear down the sets and let your cast of characters all die gruesomely from the most intricate of facial tumors. Execute the live viewing audience as the credits roll.

Because these sitcoms we call our daily lives are a kind of lens through which we see the world, and it is keeping you at your desk even as whole species of birds fall from the sky to litter the ground in their decomposing meat. The first step is always to take that first step. Leave the sound stages of your mind and all their pre-ordained causal events leading up to our ending.

The first step is to step out of the doomed world, and all its prolonged fantastical contortions, like a Ptolemaic pretzel of reasoning, or what happens when you can’t face what you have to face. The neuroses flourish, because the engine of progess that has been fueling human civilization in the developed West for three hundred years has broken down. The immoveable object has met the unstoppable force.

Again, to reiterate, it is not THE world that ends. The world does not end. It is our world. By which I might mean, “our American world,” or I might mean, “our modern world,” and possibly even “our human world” but we’re all hoping it doesn’t go quite that far off the edge of the coming cliff. Right?

Except we don’t know, because again, it’s the future, and the future is so delightfully unpredictable, but it’s safe to say something is ending, and for those of us in the middle of it all, it’s time to look our own private Matthew Perry in the eye and ask, “Who will I be in the face of the apocalypse? What sort of a person am I ambling towards in my current disheveled state?”

Or you could just stand still as the walls come tumbling down about you. Keep your head low and wait for someone else to do something? Isn’t that what tourists do?

Maybe it’s true that paralysis is a way of life. It is possible that a person could find themselves contorting into an early grave, but no is also an option here. Try being difficult for once. Or, as a recent article put it, Safety is fatal.

That article, published recently in Aeon, presents a comparison of how cells act in the petri dish, and looks into a specific example of cells reacting to diminishing resources to retreat inwardly. The cells at the center tend to die, whereas the edge remains vibrant and lively. Live on the edge, so there is no psychotic break. Step into the wilderness now.

But more than that, build communities you can rely on. If you truly want to be the tourists at the end of time, when you step out of your homes, you’re going to need to find the other tourists, and I am not referring to actual tourists here. Build a network of the exhausted and insane to whisper back what sparrowspeak you’re peddling. Find places that do not exist on any map. Otherwise, why bother even getting out of bed in the morning?

Of course, having already stepped round the curvature of the globe myself, I’m clearly already hankering for all of us to just get over our dainty selves and mutate, but that’s never going to happen if we keep getting tangled up in our sitcoms and other garbage of the otherwise infinite imagination. Untie the eyes, so you can see farther.

I’ve always been game-oriented, as in prone to make up rules and then follow them as if they were the bedrock of physics. For example, in my early thirties, I became obsessed with embracing my physical self, and worked manual labor jobs for several years to do so, most notably as a wildland firefighter and in a cannery in Alaska. (I know… What? Yes, I actually did this for this purpose. While in Alaska, I kept thinking of Prince Boris in War and Peace and how he finally discovered his bliss as a POW during the Napoleonic War.) What I discovered in Alaska specifically was that strength is really an expression of will. You can will yourself beyond the limits of your strength, and by so doing become stronger.

But do I see myself? Of course not. You think I’m some kind of guru who sits around polishing his third eye all day?

I make up systems like other people put together toy train sets, but it’s a hobby. I know that. But that doesn’t stop me from living my life by them. What would it hurt for you to try making all your major life decisions based on arbitrary systems of meaning? Because fact of the matter is that arbitrary epistemological systems are already all the rage, and they’re eating each other alive.

On the one hand, there’s the usual cast of characters. Those who peddled in conspiracies. The Internet. Politicians and their bad faith.

But the groundwork for post-truth (and forgive me if this comes off as insultingly obvious) was performed by the post-modern theoreticians in the 70’s and 80’s. Post-modernism, amusing scamp of the latter half of the twentieth century, that delighted in dethroning reason, was a common denominator from the wonders of magical realism to the post-truth and bad faith actors of 2016—as in, they all looked to yours truly like post-modern villains—the Ann Coulters, Milos Yiannopoulos, and of course, Trump himself.

The unpinning of knowledge from its previous mooring and claiming it as exclusively part of a power system that can challenged by divergent narratives created a world where all positions are relative. The extreme left of Critical Race Theory and the MAGA universe are each spinning our own tales in a battle where the rules of engagement of one side do not apply to the other and vice versa. We cannot interact if our basic assumptions are completely different, and so instead we perform battles that are entirely for the benefit of the viewing audience of our loyal supporters, letting loose meme mash-ups that pleasantly removed from even the barest semblance of logical rigor and create arguments that are blatant rationalizations and dare the other side to call us on our s**t, knowing full well that none of our people are going to listen to them anyway—at least, that’s the MAGA way—while the left spends most of its time shaming other members of the left that are not left enough, while the actual perpetrators of injustice live off in another world that is largely untouchable to them.

Post-modernism’s theoretical fracturing of reality has become very real all of a sudden. Why? Because we separated truth from the gold standard of reason, and now the truth is just what I say it is.

Point being that the first quarter of the twenty-first century is starting to look like a post-modern hangover, and what comes next has a lot to do with how quickly the world devolves. Despite the predictions of my peers, I suspect that devolution is coming quite close up onto our heels.

Why do I think this?

Societies do not need the ecosystem to come apart for themselves to destabilize. Societies are based on faith, and no one has faith in the future anymore. Which means our noble lies are coming undone, and there is nothing to take their place.

Am I sad? Am I crying? Do I think this is something to lament?

Paths are put forth through the forest. There is no lamenting the path. There is only making a choice.

In a sense, we now live in a world of seven billion distinct universes, each with its own physical laws and set of constellations. Tribes are forming, but are not being consciously created. We cannot fight this trend, but we can form tribes of observers, critics, historians, and artists who prepare for a more open-ended madness.

A world where there is no more script. There is only noise.

The future is indigenous. The future is primitive modern.

That is to say, indigenous cultures are flexible enough to handle dramatic changes, and to be self-reliant, whereas the ever-increasing dependency of the modern economic universe, with its infrastructures and specialization, is strained by even short-term shutdowns, as we have seen. Sure, modern technology and ideas will more than likely continue to be in circulation as a hodge podge to be pulled from, but the tenor of that world is turning sour, and it will be the small dynamic communities that weather this erosion. Beware the memelords and cryptocurrencies. As an undiscovered rap classic once announced, “Beyond this, dungeon.”

But why create avant-garde works on the cusp of the apocalypse?

Historically speaking, catastrophes have ushered in grand evolutions. The flooding of the Nile leading to the development of a more advanced agriculture and the creation of cities for example. Industrialization and capitalism have obviously failed us as a species, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s game over.

Increasingly, art and activism are becoming more wed to each other, and as the stylist I am, I fight against this. But I also cannot abide by the institutionalist hacks who sit there spinning out their PhD’s in narrative without any existence out on the ground of the dying of the world.

As you out there in the world of the Internet may or may not know, I currently live in Vietnam, and plan to spend the next five years traveling around the world by land and sea routes alone. I want to venture through our failing nation-states and witness what crises are to come, for (I can’t stop saying it) the apocalypse is here, and even if no one wants to listen to this dumbhead shout it out, it’s important to face the reality. Naming a thing gives us power over it. At the very least, it gives us options. Once you call a thing what it is, you can decide next moves.

But the question remains. Why bother?

—GBoyer

Vinh Yen, Vietnam, 2021