The apocalypse just got a whole hell of a lot more personal. It’s turned its face inside out and made itself into just one of the boys. It’s twisted your arm back and then back again—and back again—until the logjam of muscle memory is gone and you are nothing but %100 rubber, with a corkscrew of an appendage that twirls off comedically into the never-ending night. Welcome to Neverland.
The ups are very much going up and the downs are just around the corner, and they say that civil war is just around the corner, and Americans have always been good at cutting corners.
Neverland is a state of both never-becoming and never-having-been. It is the place where the future we dream of is a dream and the past we remember never was. It is a place where most of us live most of the time. And it itches.
Especially when we’re living through tragedies, and the tragedies we’re living are like a mirage that eats the young. It’s daydreams that run on crude oil. It’s a hypothetical that’s displaced the workings of the actual walking around one.
These tragedies that we have lived through as a nation and the tragedies we have inflicted upon the universe sit in our guts like a kind of rigor mortis of the senses. We have become deadened by the many decades of false promises. The world I am not in is truly vast, while the world of my making is like a deck of cards. It is only good for one game of solitaire.
There is no universe that is not wounds. The webbing of the abyss is a kind of scar tissue. Stars that are specks and galaxies that are a dusting of them. And the ghost dance continues to evolve and mutate through it all—into ever more virulent versions and permutations upon the townhouses and sitting rooms of the occultist suburbanites with the twisting lips and helpless grins—as their alibis turn haunted and their reconstituted coagulant grows dim.
America was always and forever going to be at a crossroads.
I have a memory of my two brothers fighting and me up high above in a cherry tree. This was in the backyard of a neighbor was half landfill and the younger brother, puny and slippery as a dancing fish, was full of an unconscionable rage—while my elder brother was always the voice of reason. On this day, the elder brother drew a line in the dirt. If you cross this line, I’m going to kick you, he said, and when his younger brother did just that, he downed him with a roundhouse. And a little boy’s down in an intricacy of limbs and squirming about in the dust by the trunk of the cherry tree before he was finally able to wrench himself to his feet again. And again my elder brother said, If you cross this line, I’m going to kick you. And it happened all over again. And again.
My two brothers are Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee. They are the union upholding the right path and the rebels with their guilty consciences hidden behind a forest of rationalizations. They are the moral path of virtue and the stubborn nature of the forever-fuck-up. They are God and Man. Truth and Spirit. Democrat and MAGA. One side was always going to win, but the other side will never forget.
China and Hong Kong.
And here we are. Living our best lives. Gnawing on our sleeves. Dreaming of some magical reawakening of the American Dream when in truth, dystopia has a kid by the neck, and your choices are death by drowning or death by other means of asphyxiation. As the climate crisis worsens. As economic disparity increases. As autocratic trends are trending.
We the people live in Neverland, and we’re dreaming our dreams on our backs and under our day stools, like a kind of infestation of our own homes. We are the rats we are trying to eradicate from the basements of the well-to-do. We are chewing our own hands off.
What do I mean by this? I mean that all people should be looking each other in the eyes and telling words that can be seen by other eyes. Our stories need to speak to everyone because everyone is at risk. We are no longer democrats and republicans. We are no longer us and them. We are only us. Every one of us is us. And we need to find our place in the ghost dance and sing our way through this final act of America, as America dreams itself ending.
*
I am a bird that was born without wings. I am the lone watchman in a herd gone berserk. I eat without digesting, for I am the one who can never see his dreams no matter how long he spends sleeping. But when are we dreaming and when are our dreams dreaming us? Where do we come to rest behind the eyes?
There is no clear person as presented, but there are tendencies we like to harp on in our hunting for things. I’ve returned to my home country from my years spent journeying into the jungles of Vietnam, and all I’ve found are the same paths leading round the same diversionary tactics and on toward a nowhere place where nothing is everywhere, and everyone wants a bit of it, but not until they come down on the price. We’re so busy biding our time for half price sales on these many nothings, that we can’t seem to find the time to do anything about anything, and everyone’s incensed but for wildly different reasons.
I have returned to idyllic New Hampshire and its heavy snows and whipping winds and enthusiastic teens who believe in everything with such straightforward devotion, whether their alliance is towards the left, the right, or the unknown. It’s a New Hampshire of utopian ideals and bucolic farms. It is a place where the world is less and the perfect place for society to reboot.
I am the sort of person that upsets others with my extreme opinions and tends to be called a pessimist and dogmatic in my daily discussions. I am someone who says, There is no stopping the wave. There is only riding the wave.
My stance is simple. We all need to stop playing the game. There’s a game out there, and you might win a round, but stick around long enough, and you’re bound to lose. Stop playing this game.
My other stance is, Keep things small. Shared ownership among a small group who put the survival of the group above individual survival. This is how you live through the apocalypse.
This is how you make it out of Neverland.
But I’m also a terrible example. Who is never in one place for long. Who schemes about a ‘database for the apocalypse’ one minute and the next minute is singing softly to some heartbreak in Vinh Yen. One minute, a person who is searching for the God in me, and the next minute, holed up and trying different beers I purchased down at Market Basket during my first store run in three weeks. One minute, I am the most reasonable of men, and the next moment…
But the game is real. And we are all playing. And history plays a part. And probability plays a part. And the game involves the end of an empire and the rise of the surveillance state. We are witnessing dystopia in practice, in its various laissez-faire and SOE forms.
North and South are conceptual placeholders. Like East and West. We see ourselves as Red and Blue or Communist and Capitalist, but I have heard the lilting morning talk of an Appalachian family on vacation on Tybee Island as they hack through their morning smokes, and I have seen Mao’s China turned the colors of America and watched as those colors go wrong. From coal country to uyghurs to Black Lives Matter, there is one equation running. The only variable is the degree of force deemed necessary to create the desired effect.
I call myself a man but there is a humanity I have yet to achieve, an understanding that is beyond this manmade shell, an awareness that only breathes when I am struggling to catch my breath upon the covers in a kind of terror and at the curtains of my apartment above the library looking out at a world turned white and the brilliant red berries of the holly glinting occasionally in the flurries of the snow.
*
But what about you? What will you do?
Are you getting an MBA and determined to make the failing world work for you? Are you abandoned and trying to start over with a stranger from the far side of the world? Is your body failing with every day or determined to make it this time? Are you a bitter shit? An arrogant fuck? Or just sick in your soul? Or all heart and no head?
There is a kind of compromise of the bespoke redecoration of man and memorandum—sort of elevated congregation exists only at the edges of the 9 to 5 we find ourselves swirling through as we reconstitute into the larger lard-based lifeform with its many facsimiles and impartialities. There is no more place for an honest grifter to settle down now as ever.
Which is why I’m writing the essay to you. Because the only one who’s ever going to change the world is you. And the only way you’re going to do that is if you start looking at the world with eyes that don’t know how to lie anymore. Whether you’re North or South or East or West, you have got to put it down, and instead walk towards a place we don’t know of yet, that exists on no map, that has no distinct location. This is also how you get out of Neverland.
I am in idyllic New Hampshire, but I dream of the Vietnam of last year. I flip through the polaroids of twenty some years ago and their many heartfelt expressions and questionable hair styles, and I remember worlds that are gone, that had an innocence about them, when our pessimism had yet to harden, and we made fools of ourselves on occasion. It was a time when you could spend years making a fool of yourself just because you were too stubborn to stop now.
I let the sounds of antiquity brush my inner ears with their quavering strings. Preferably it’s some country classic about feeding pigeons clay—or Tecumseh Valley—and pick out the moments when we grazed the edge of the horizon or played dice with heaven. There are moments when people are better than themselves, and they’re never the ones you expect.
While me. I am at this moment no longer of this moment, but in the depths of it. My brain has gone flaccid and along with it comes a sense that there never was a place for any of this in the first place.
“The human heart is something that springs up when pushed down, sometimes ascending and sometimes descending, sometimes the prisoner and sometimes the executioner. How soft and restrained and pliable it is, yet how firmly and roughly and sharply and severely it chisels and cuts. So hot it smolders to fire, so cold it freezes to ice, so swift that in the interval between glancing up and glancing down it has already twice touched points beyond the four seas. It dwells still like an abyss, it moves like the overhanging heaven—stampeding and haughty, allowing nothing to tie it down,” [Zhuangzi: The Complete Writings, p.91.]
My brothers battled in the dust that day, and what came of them was like an unspinning of that first moment. They were born on that afternoon, and I was born as the man who curls in the crook of a tree limb. We forget our many births and this is the undoing of our days. I pray to you but it is the prayer of a non-believer. I sing to you, but what I sing comes out as the garbled dreck of a songbird or a singing wasp.
Point being, there’s an equation and we’re in it, and where it comes out, nobody knows, but we know it’s nowhere good.
There’s a nothing to this place we are, but it still has got a weight and a character to it. It seems dead and yet still it moves. There is no moment when what I believe to be the case is brought into its own or time when it’s come undone, but we have to live through this uncertainty, and that itself is the punishment of being human.
Gabriel Boyer has been making up stories about himself for as long as he can remember. There was never a time he was not fully seated in his various delusions. He continues to delude himself daily. His latest release can be found below. You can read more about him here.
