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troubled sleep - by Brandon - sweater weather

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First, I would like to bring your attention to a title I acquired and edited. Open Up by Thomas Morris is a brilliant collection of surreal fiction that explores loss, family, masculinity, and the strangeness of contemporary life. It has one of the very very very VERY best stories I’ve ever read. It’s his American debut, and it would mean a lot if you checked it out and preordered. Coming 4/25 from Unnamed Press.

I grew up in a family of smokers, in a single-wide trailer filled mold and mildew. I grew up on a farm surrounded by trees and vines and plants in rich, verdant bloom. For eighteen years, that was my life. The black and blue whorls spreading over the ceiling and down the walls to the floor. The white fuzz bristling at the corners of the windows. The powdery black smudges magnified through the dust of the curio cabinets set unevenly on rotting floors. Sticky vinyl coming up and showing its resinous dark undersides. Ashes on the lip of the tub. Ashes by the television. Ashes on my bedspread. Soot from the wood burning stoves in the winter dancing in the light when we dumped the pan out to make room for more ash. The yellow-green pollen spread out over the benches by the side of the house, stuck to the window screens, plastering the backs of the fan blades in the box fans set in the windows. That same pollen dispersed over the kitchen table like flour for the chicken and the porkchops. The wind moving over the leaves of the kudzu in the gully and the stout valley by the road, the white flowers of the maypops and the yellow flowers of the melon vines, the leaves going white-green-white-green under the sun. That was my childhood.

I tell you this because it only took a short period of time, a few months, the length of a semester, to destroy whatever resistance or acclimation I had for all of those things in the air. You will not believe me, maybe, but it is true. In August 2009, I went away to college, and in December 2009, I came home for winter break, and suddenly, I couldn’t breathe in my parents’ trailer. I couldn’t breathe in my grandparents’ house. I couldn’t breathe outside. Everywhere I went, I sneezed and coughed. My eyes filled with tears and stung so bad. Everything burned and hurt. Even my skin grew sensitive and hot to the touch, as if something in the air were stinging me over and over, everywhere. I had come into contact with something abrasive, and that something was the air itself. Over the course of three months spent in a mostly sterile dorm, white cinderblock with one window, a prison cell more than a dorm, I had shed a protective coating.

When I got to college in August 2009 and took my clothes out of trash bags, my room filled with the smell of smoke. I thought it was strange because I am not a smoker. It didn’t click then but it does now, obviously. I smelled like smoke because everyone in my life then was a smoker, and I had grown up among them. My father spent hours at a time in my bedroom smoking and watching my television. He and my mother did not get along and could not watch television together. His presence irritated her to the point of violence, so he stayed low. This meant that all of my clothes smelled like smoke. I didn’t realize this because everything I smelled at home smelled like smoke. Thinking about it now, I wonder what my friends must have made of this. But then, we washed our clothes weekly and let them dry outside on the line, and so maybe the clothes I wore most often didn’t smell like smoke after all. But I had brought almost every item of clothing I owned then. What my mother hadn’t burned during my first abortive attempt at college a year and a half ago. And as I took them out, they smelled thickly like cigarette smoke. That should have been some clue to me. But it was not. The clue I mean is that it should have dawned on me then that smoke is not just air. It doesn’t just disappear. It is made from particles and those particles, having mass, having substance, do not just pop out of existence. They settle and stick. The way soot settles and sticks. Just because you do not see it does not mean it isn’t there. Like God.

Eventually, the clothes lost that odor. I went about my college life. I came home for winter, and I could not breathe, and I thought, Oh my God, this is horrible. Like I was being rejected by the very air itself. Not to freight that incident with too much symbolism or meaning, but it is also true that that trip back at the end of the semester was the end of something, the end of a version of myself. I had tried to go to college once before and had done a year at Tulane before I ran out of money. And I’d come home defeated and sad and—again, not to do too much symbolism—on the bus ride home from New Orleans, I got my wallet and social security card stolen. I thought I’d never go to college after that. I had to be convinced to try again in 2009. But I was convinced, and I did try again. But it was not without fear.

I spent a lot of time that first semester worrying about being kicked out because I had not been honest about having been in college before. I did well in all of my classes, exceptionally well, but I could not shake the feeling that I was cheating and being deceptive. Yet I did get to the end, and I thought, oh, okay, maybe I can do this after all. I got to the end and I went home, and I developed this profound and awful allergy to the air. That felt like an omen. Not at the time, I guess, it didn’t feel like an omen. I was sick, so fucking sick, I didn’t have time for omens. But a few months later, in the second semester, I realized that my fear was gone, and so the sneezing and coughing and awful burning took on the aura of a trial I had passed through in order to become a new version of myself.

Who I became later doesn’t really matter. This is really a story about the allergy to smoke. I had basically a month of winter break and I was not sure that I would survive it because literally, how could I? I’d be lying there wheezing in my bed in the middle of the day, and my dad would be sitting on a swivel chair not a foot from me, blowing smoke over me. When I meekly suggested that he smoke outside, he said, no, it’s okay, and he put out his cigarette. It lasted for five minutes before he lit the thing once more. I said, Please, and he said, it’ll be okay, it’s a cold.

It was not a cold. The only person with some sense about this was my aunt, who worked in a nursing home. More specifically, she worked in the nursing home part of the hospital. I had taught myself to read using her manuals and home guides. My cousin, her daughter, had also developed a bad allergy a couple years before that had caused her to lose patches of her thick hair. My aunt was very proud of this hair, as if it were her own, and she took great offense to it shedding. During the troubleshooting phase of the diagnosis, the doctor had given my cousin a prescription for some antihistamines. Half-way through the trip my eyes swelled shut and crusted over. She gave me the pill bottle and said to take one a day. I did this. It changed my life.

That sounds like an exaggeration, but it is not.

Here is another thing about my childhood. From a very young age, I have been plagued by nightmares and night terrors. I have incredibly detailed, incredibly mundane dreams about horrifying things. I like to blame some aspect of this on the fact that in my family, spiritual and supernatural matters are as ordinary to us as the chance of rain or the possibility of a tornado. We live astride a very narrow seam between this world and some other, stranger world in which God and the devil and spirits wage a constant and violent war for our souls. My family was incredibly frank about the spiritual world. I sometimes marvel at the way some parents fret over how to tell their children about death or about sex. I knew about the devil and the dangers of sin before I could even tie my shoes. I knew about Hell and I knew what might happen to me if I were to fall. As a child, I was told not to sleep on my a back because a witch might ride it and take me to the devil. I was taught my prayers and instructed never to point a picture of someone who had recently died because they might come for me in the night.

My family described frightening experiences of spiritual or demonic possession that I now recognize as being merely memory or flashbacks, but to them, these were wholesale spiritual visitations. Can you imagine being so alienated from the concept of memory that forming the image of a loved one in your mind feels like an approach from the beyond? This was particularly true of dreams. When a loved visited in a dream, it meant something ill awaited all involved. People would weep and say Don’t come for me yet, please, after such a dream, or even a memory. They would shiver and recount instances of remembering someone at an odd moment, as if this were a form of spiritual torture. It was the least Protestant spiritual experience imaginable, though we were steadfastly Baptist.

I had a very active dreamlife, most of it filled with scenes from the Bible or scenes from my life but inflected with the prospect of demonic harm. I’d wake up with deep scratches down my arms and back and legs and think that the devil had been sent for me. I would dream of being dragged down into hell only to wake into another dream and from that dream into another, so that there were moments when, falling and falling through the air, I’d really think that I was about to die. I do not have lucid dreams. The fiction is entire and complete when I dream. The boundaries of my dreams only front onto yet still more dreams.

The thing about sleeping on your back is real, by the way. I don’t mean that witches are real and they’ll come spirit you away. I mean that sleeping on your back sometimes produces apneic events. Apneic events are one of the most common causes of sleep paralysis, that terrifying sensation of feeling awake but not being able to move. A study in the 1960s and later sleep science studies showed that certain populations experience sleep paralysis at a much higher rate of incidence than other groups. The thing these groups have in common is high stress. For example, medical students in Nigeria and high school students in South Korea both show higher rates of sleep paralysis than their general populations. In America, the relevant group that experiences sleep paralysis at an incredibly high rate is, well, you guessed it, black people.

One of the characteristics of sleep paralysis is the crone or sleep paralysis demon. You will perhaps be familiar with it from the meme, involving designating someone or something cringe as a person’s sleep paralysis demon. Fascinatingly, the crone appears across cultures and across history. I am not a Jungian. But it is interesting that the ultimate manifestation of people’s sensation of total helplessness is a spooky, shadowy woman leering at them from the darkness. I bring this up because you can see how the crone might figure as the witch in the imaginary of Southern blacks. And how that higher rate of incidence of sleep paralysis—it is also hereditary—would culminate in the idea that you shouldn’t sleep on your back because doing so would summon a witch. We do not sleep on our backs in my family.

In December 2009, because my father would not stop smoking in my room, I started sleeping at my grandparents’ house next door. My uncle had recently married and moved out, so I slept in his room. This suited me fine because my grandparents had cable and I could watch Toonami at night. I was really into a program called Kekkaishi then. It’s about two neighbors who are teenagers and whose families have been fighting demons for generations. They do so by erecting barriers and using them like weapons against demons. Once the demons are defeated, the kekkaishi send them to their eternal rest. You will perhaps wonder where this is going. I was never allowed to sleep in my grandparents’ house growing up. I sometimes wondered why. Until once, I finally did. I woke in the middle of the night and saw a pale figure gazing down at me. The figure moved on. I felt hands on me in the middle of the night. I didn’t sleep there again until years later.

The winter of the horrible allergy to smoke, I slept in my grandparents’ house, in my uncle’s old room, and I tell you that every night, I experienced the worst dreams of my life. They could scarcely be called dreams, so continuous were they with reality. I had taken up sleeping on my back because my roommate did, and no witch had ridden me yet. I was in the habit of debunking old family lore then, I guess, and since I hadn’t been haunted in college yet, I thought, well, I’ll show those spirits. It was a mistake. That winter, I’d wake or seem to wake at 3AM and there would be a hand pulling the blanket from my head, gripping my shoulders, pressing me flat to the floor. I could not see, but I could see, in that way dreams operate, when you are both yourself and not yourself, both in your body, and not in your body. There was not a figure, but I could sense a figure, could almost see a figure. The logic of how my body was being handled by this voidal figure presupposed hands and feet. And I always had the sense of being pulled somewhere, dragged somewhere, as when I was a child and dreamed of being pulled into hell. Sometimes, the voidal figure was a relative and I could sense them. Other times, it was just darkness.

In later years, this would happen sometimes even when I was in my dorm. I’d accidentally sleep on my back and wake to a crone in the corner of my dorm, staring at me. Once, the crone sprinted across the room and shoved the end of her staff into my throat and I woke gasping. I think I must have been lucky that first term or maybe the smoke fucked me up so bad that I was never quite the same. But never were these dreams more powerful or more unrelenting than in those days at my grandparents’ house.

What I am trying to get at is that even in the best of times, my sleep was fitful. So when I began to take the antihistamines, it was a relief to slip into dreamless sleep.

That is how it began. I took all of those pills, and when I ran out, I asked her how I could get more, and she told me that they were prescription, but Benadryl from the drug store would do about the same thing. I was back in my dorm, free of smoke, but I had come to crave not just the relief from the sneezing and coughing and burning, no. Because I had learned something about the pills. They could make an excruciating period of time pass faster. Because I could spend that time sleeping or dozing. I have never been able to sleep when the sun is up, but with those pills, time turned liquid and spilled rapidly into the past.

You will think, why would you want your winter break to go fast? The answer is obvious, no? I wanted to leave the ghosts as quickly as I could.

For the last fifteen or so years, I have taken Benadryl almost every night. During periods of particular anxiety, I grind up two or three tablets and gulp them down. The sleep I have on the Benadryl is blank, fathomless. The dreams that come are still charged with some horrible darkness, though the logic of that darkness is less ostensibly frightening. As in, if I were to explain the dreams to you, you wouldn’t know they were scary. I’d have to tell you why they were scary. Though my dreams are still frightening to me, they issue from a deeper region of my fear. The Benadryl has certainly changed the texture of the dreams, taken some of the edge off so that I can, at times, almost will things to happen. There have even been moments over the last fifteen years when I’ve been able to tell myself, No dreams tonight, and wake to no memory or recall of dreams at all.

During hard periods, when I am seeking a particular obliterating black sleep, I take four pills. Oblivion comes swift and silent. That’s how I got through my grandfather’s death. Through a period of time when I had no health insurance and a chronic health problem to manage. During the Nazi activities of 2015 and 2016. During periods of emotional distress—break ups, friendship dissolutions, ugly arguments and spats, tough assignments, waiting to hear about applications and more—I sought the blankness of the pills. They have been a steady dark bridge over uncertain times. I don’t know when it transpired that I required them to sleep at all, but I did. This was fine in America because you can get them in any store. You can even have them delivered.

But Benadryl is not a thing you can readily acquire in Europe. This I found out only when I began to travel there the last couple of years. I sometimes forget to pack enough, which results in choppy, fitful, awful sleep. And a pounding headache that persists through the rest of the day. Benadryl is a very old antihistamine. It is mostly not encouraged these days because it induces sleepiness, the very thing I crave, and also can cause a mild amnesia. A sensation described a mental fog descends on many people who take it, and this fog can last hours after waking. It is also habit-forming both psychologically and physically if taken at sufficient quantities for long enough. Withdrawal is unpleasant—headache, dizziness, fatigue, fuzziness, nausea.

These symptoms might be familiar to anyone who is taking an SSRI. There is for this. Benadryl’s active ingredient, diphenhydramine, exhibits a weak inhibitory response in the uptake of serotonin. Indeed, Prozac, one of the first SSRIs was developed as a result of experiments and studies on diphenhydramine along these lines in the 1960s. Many early SSRIs descend from antihistamines. You can see the echoes in their structures. In nature, structure is, well, function.

Later, when I was pursuing a PhD in biochemsitry, I took a class called Protein Structure/Function, where we learned about the mechanical and structural basis of bimolecular function. Sometimes, people imagine that things just happen in nature and in the body. With smoke, they imagine it’s air you can see. With biomolecules, I don’t know, I guess they think it’s like, magic or something. But no. There is always a material basis. And where there is material, there is structure. That is how the world is fit together. Legos. What I’m getting here is that when I forget my Benadryl, as I sometimes did, a knowledge of chemistry is useful. Because you can find things that have the same active ingredients.

This summer, while I was teaching in Paris for a month, I was grinding up two, three tablets a night to sleep. I ran out of Benadryl. I went on Google and looked for analogs or compounds related to diphenhydramine, which I knew would be hard to get in Europe because, well, the whole brain chemistry thing. I found that there is a close relative of diphenhydramine, classed a different kind of chemical. This compound was Dimenhydrinate, which is a salt of diphenhydramine and a different compound. It is the active ingredient in many medicines for what the French call mal des transports. Motionsickness. In particular, it is the active ingredient in Mercalm, a medication for motion sickness. You do not need a prescription for Mercalm. So I went out to get it.

More accurately, I sent my friend Adam out in Paris to buy seasickness medicine for me. My French is better, but I like to make Adam speak French to Parisians. It’s funny. I took the medicine, my symptoms of withdrawal abated.

Over the course of the summer, I took a couple tennis lessons in Paris. It was cool and damp. It was my first time playing on clay. The instructor was tall, handsome. His hands were thick, and I wanted very much to impress him. But about twenty minutes into my lesson, I found I couldn’t breathe. I was wheezing. I thought, if I do not stop this moment, this very moment, I will pass out. I will die. He recognized it right away and told me to sit and to slow my breathing. Each time it happens—it does not happen often, not even close to often, maybe once a year, if that, once every couple years—I think of my cousin Brandon. I have two cousins named Brandon. But one of them died when we were teenagers. He died of an asthma attack. Just like that, gone. We are not, by nature, a family of asthmatics on either side. Brandon was an outlier. There was some talk that he had inherited it from his mother’s side. I grew up in a place that still talked about inherited traits like were in Russian novel.

I did some Googling after the tennis lesson and found that I’d probably developed some exercise-induced asthma and that was temporary. A short while later, I sent Adam on the quest for the Mercalm, the medicine for seasickness, so that I could sleep.

After Adam brought me the medicine, he said that it sounded like I had an addiction to the Benadryl.

“I absolutely do not,” I said as I crushed the tablets and took them and felt the immediate release of tension in my head. “That’s crazy.

A couple weeks later, I went to London to see the Sargent show. I also wanted to maybe meet up with a guy I had been texting. By then, I was course out of Benadryl and out of Mercalm. But I could get some sleep medicine from the pharmacy if I spoke to the pharmacist.

“This is dangerous. You must absolutely promise me not to take any more of this. Okay?”

I was alarmed at her alarm. She was treating me like I was exhibiting drug-seeking behavior. I was, of course, seeking drugs. But I thought, if this is how you treat addicts, wow, someone needs a sensitivity and diversion course. But I promised her I would absolutely not seek any more of the medicine. I bought two boxes. She asked why I needed two boxes if I was only going to take it for three days, and I think we both knew the answer to that question but I told her, Well, what if I lose one?

You know, I never did meet up with that guy in London. I did see the Sargent show. And the sleep medicine worked a treat. I slept deeply and with no dreams. I got on the train and went back to Paris and then back to New York and then to my apartment.

Do you know what I did when I got home? I chewed three Benadryl tablets and slept. When I woke, my headache was gone. The fogginess was gone. I felt I could see the world more clearly.

This was fine until recently. In August, I went to Stockholm and left all of my medication, including Benadryl, at home on my table. After a scramble, I managed to get everything except the Benadryl, which was not necessary for survival, but I did need it to live, if you know what I mean. But it was okay, I was well-versed by this point in tracking down substitutes. I bought a medication with the same active ingredient as the seasickness medicine I had bought in Paris. This medicine was for nausea, but I thought, well, same thing.

I crunched up two tablets and went to sleep. It was the first true sleep I had in Stockholm. I had been there for almost ten days at that point, I believe. I slept. And then, after five hours, I woke with a very strange feeling. I woke, out of breath, with a tightness pulling in my stomach and chest. I felt like I’d been filled with silicone jelly and everything felt so fucking tight. I went to get up, and a wave of nausea passed over me. The world tilted. My hotel room was dim and there was a pale light in the curtains. I stood. The world tilted further. I held myself up against the wall. Then, an upward lurching. I burped. I barfed all over the floor, clear, at first like spit, and then bubbles, like melted agar poured too quickly. I thought for a moment that I had somehow ingested silicone gel and now it was all coming out of me. Then more vomit, yellow. I panted. Gathered myself. I made it into the bathroom to vomit more.

I was vomiting profusely in Stockholm, all alone, in the middle of that strange period the Swedes call night even though there is still so much light in the sky, spilling across the bay.

I won’t tell you the rest. Suffice it to say, it was very bad for most of the night and morning. It was horrific. But it passed. I felt attenuated, but alive. I told a friend I wouldn’t be able to make it to his birthday party— the reason I had come to Stockholm—because I was sick. He told me it was okay, but I was texting him this from the car on the way over. When I appeared at the door, he gasped in surprise and then hugged me. I felt better for having gone to the party.

When I got home, I didn’t immediately go back on the Benadryl. I had been taking it for so long that the natural texture of my own sleep was foreign to me. I had so tried to outrun this native texture that I’d quite literally poisoned myself in a foreign city with no facility in the language, and if I had tried to explain to a doctor what had happened, I would not have known where to begin. So in September, I stopped. It was hard, but I stopped, not at all at once, but slowly. Down to one pill. Then half a pill. Then no pills.

The sleep was confused and harsh at first. I entered a loop of dreams uniquely painful to me. And then it gave way to other, more normal dreams. Dreams about friends and parties. Dreams about things I had said or done the day or week before. Dreams about the subway. About stopped clocks. About missed flights. About being stuck at home in the same place where I’d had those first, terrifying dreams as a child. Dreams about my mother. About my father. Dreams about my brother. Dreams in which I did things so singularly disgusting they will haunt me as though they were real things I did. Things about real things I did that were so disgusting they deform the dreams in which they appear. I have had many dreams over the last couple of months, and I have taken them all as they have come.

The other thing about being off the juice is that my natural sleep rhythm has returned. I mean the rhythm of the farm. Down at ten or eleven, up at six, seven. Early enough to catch my grandfather in the field. Early enough for the first and perhaps only cool hours of the day in Alabama. I’ve been trying to figure out what is so familiar about the quiet of the New York streets at these hours. And I think it’s that. The quiet. It reminds me of home. When I’d get up and go to my grandparents’ house to have coffee with my grandpa. Or with my aunt. I’d catch her on her way to work, and when I grew up, we’d have a cup together after she made it. Places and people and things that are lost to me forever because I will never return and they can never return, except in dreams.

Here is another thing that feels like an overdetermined symbol: increased use of Benadryl is associated with a heightened risk of Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. How about that. When people told me this, I thought, okay, but that’s a problem for my future self, and it’s not like I’ll remember anyway. And perhaps I won’t. Fifteen years, that’s a long time. I’m probably toast.

I don’t know what scared me so very much in that hotel in Stockholm, but certainly something did. That feeling of breathlessness, perhaps. I remember being asleep. And I remember in the deep shadow of that dreamless sleep, a voice saying that if you do not wake up now, you will never wake. And I remember feeling frightened at that, and wrenching myself up to find that, yes, in fact, I was breathless and not breathing and the world was off-kilter. I have had that sense a couple of times in my life. There was a time during the pandemic, right at the very beginning of lockdown, when I got home from my cancelled book tour. I was taking a plate from the microwave, and there just a little hitch in my breathing, a small gap in breath—that was all it took. I couldn’t breathe. I called an ambulance. They told me that I was very close to having a stroke. My pulse was incredibly high. They took me. It was not the last time.

When I was throwing up in Stockholm. And, okay, let’s just say, it was coming from both ends, it was so profoundly bad. When I was sick, on my hands and knees, retching in a position of perfect abjection, I thought of Adam’s words. “You sound like you are addicted.” And something in those words entered the bathroom with me then. I could see how I looked for the first time in a long time. Like in a dream. I could see how I looked to myself and when I ran back the sequence of events that brought me there, I thought, oh, at a certain point, Brandon, you were supposed to stop and you didn’t, and I had a premonition that if I didn’t stop then, right then, that moment, I’d never stop, and who knew how many bathrooms in how many hotels in how many countries I’d crawl into on my hands and knees to vomit and shit myself. It was not the lowest point in my life, and I don’t even know that I feel shame about being that sick. People get sick. Who cares. It’s not a moral failing to be sick. I think what I feel when I look back that moment is a sudden clarity about my responsibility to myself. Like, if I don’t want to do that again, I need to take some responsibility for my choices and make different ones. Not to attach a moral value to the choice, but to just say, okay, I would like for that not to happen again, let’s make some other decisions here.

The next day, my ribs were so sore I thought I’d cracked them. It hurt to laugh or breathe or move too sharply. Every gesture was a reminder of what had happened.

I still don’t know if I am allowed to say I was addicted to the pills. When I look back over the last fifteen years, I think, probably. I was raised by addicts among addicts to be an addict. I always imagined that I would be able to spot it in myself. I am very vigilant about this sort of thing. But that vigilance sometimes leads to harshness and judgement. It leads me to think with a certain vindictiveness about weakness in myself and sometimes those who have wronged me. It happened so innocently. It happened so gently. It happened with such a feeling of relief and the opening of possibility. How could it have been an addiction, I wonder. And yet—Benadryl is habit-forming. I know that. I knew that. Chemically. Intellectually. Physiologically. I knew that. But I couldn’t square that with what I knew addiction to mean emotionally, spiritually, which is to say that I couldn’t square it with being a victim of addiction, as I had been my parents’ victim and the victim of others. I couldn’t understand how I could be a victim of myself. Or that the Benadryl was taking something from me.

I was just sleeping well. Or trying to. What harm was there in that? And maybe there was no harm. Maybe the simple fact is that I was reliant on a chemical. And something happened to make me not want to be reliant on it anymore. That my reliance on it had brought me to a place and caused me to do things I did not enjoy and so I was seeking independence from the chemical.

On election night, I thought about taking the pills. That was how I got through other nights I wanted not to experience. But then, I thought about the hangover, the morning grog, the temporary amnesia. I thought about that and having to teach feeling as though I were wading through cotton, with a scrim between me and the world. There was a certain allure to that, sure, but more than that, I thought, how unfair to the people who rely on me. How unfair to show up compromised. How dare I? But also, unfair to myself. Not that it is a sin or morally awful to give in or to partake in substances. But you should do so because you want to. Not because you feel you need to. And not if it will make you hate yourself after. Instead, I turned off the internet and read Mrs. Bridge, a novel I am reading for book club. I listened to music and made a sandwich. Then I watched a movie, and at bed time, I read all of a Webtoon about a writer and a college student working to put himself through university. This will also sound like a symbol, but I promise it is not. The writer has insomnia, and the only way he can work or sleep is if someone is in the room with him. So he hires the student to whom he feels an attraction to be that spare body in the room. I didn’t pick it because of its themes or plot. I picked it because the men are both very attractive and the art is pretty.

I read the whole thing in one night, and then I went to sleep and when I woke, I woke as many of you did, to the horrible news of the results. You will perhaps not believe me. But I was on the NYT website the very second they updated it show that Trump had crossed 270 in the Electoral College. I mean, I saw that checkmark go live. One instant it wasn’t there and the next it was. I saw it. The page refreshed itself and presented a new reality to me.

I thought of dawn in Stockholm. The way the light spread over the bay and sliced into the shadows of the hotel’s tall edifice. That day when I woke with sore ribs, after I’d been so horribly sick. How one instant, it was still night and the next, it was day, how quickly, how swiftly, one reality replaced another. That’s what it was when I woke on Wednesday and saw the NYT change its face. I had come through something. And now we were all heading—we are all heading into something else.

I am scared like many of you. I am anxious. I do not know what it is ahead—certainly, there will be troubled sleep. One of my favorite meditations on sleep comes, cornily enough, I know, from Hamlet:

To die, to sleep—
To sleep—perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub!
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause

I have been thinking about these lines a lot over the last couple months. My thought about these lines is that the blankness of my sleep is but an illusion. And that just because I don’t remember the nightmares does not mean that they did not happen. It only means that there’s a version of myself I’ve abandoned out of fear, out of terror, out insufficient courage, and that I’ve had something taken from me. A region of my experience made inaccessible. Indeed, I think we are better like Hamlet, asking ourselves what we surrender when we seek oblivion and when we seek to escape from the nightmare present. Because what awaits us may not be the calm darkness we imagine.

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10,000 Long Covid patients on benefits, more may follow - DutchNews.nl

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We can't afford to keep giving people covid
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After Trump's Victory, the 4B Movement Is Spreading Across TikTok | WIRED

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The 4B movement originated in South Korea, and encourages women to opt out of marriage (bihon), childbirth (bichulsan), romance (biyeonae), and sexual relationships (bisekseu). Born out of protests against South Korea’s culture—instances of dating violence, revenge porn, and gender wage gaps are widespread—the movement has grown in recent years. South Korea has the lowest birth rate of any country, and despite government incentives, many women still feel the country’s patriarchal structure makes the cost of motherhood too high, and refuse to be “baby-making machines,” according to reporting from the New York Times.

Although it started in the late 2010s, the movement didn't really gain attention in the US until earlier this year. New York magazine published a long feature on it in March in which writer Anna Louie Sussman laid out the ways in which 4B adherents were, as Barbieri demonstrated on TikTok, cutting their hair and eschewing beauty products. “The blowback and fear that 4B practitioners experience underscores their conviction that Korea is still a frightening place for women,” Sussman wrote, noting the threats and attacks women, and specifically 4B protesters, receive.

Some creators who spoke to WIRED were already participating in the movement before the election. Dalina, who uses they/them pronouns and asked to withhold their last name for privacy reasons, was casually seeing a man when, they say, “he made a joke along the lines of like, ‘I considered coming inside of you.’” Dalina says at that moment their blood ran cold. “I thought, ‘Why does that sound like a threat?’ It's like, because it is a threat … He also knew that it was a threat.”

Since then, Dalina, who goes by @senoracabrona on TikTok, says they have sworn off romantic and sexual entanglements with men. Their video, including text telling women to look up the 4B movement, has garnered more than 130,000 views on TikTok.

With the election of Trump, and all the threats to reproductive rights and LGBTQ+ rights and misogyny that entails, women online seemed to be channeling the fear they felt into action in similar ways.

Barbieri says when she posted her original 4B video it was the result of something she’d been investigating for several months via her involvement in feminist spaces on Reddit, Facebook, and Instagram. After her post went up, she got several negative comments from men, but was surprised to find a lot of support, particularly from women interested in the movement.

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I told you so - by Sam Kriss - Numb at the Lodge

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There are two factions in American politics, and they’re not evenly matched. As everyone knows, one of them contains all the smart people, the academics, the professionals, the people who’ve read the studies, learned the science, educated themselves, who eat well and own nice things made of wood, the good little boys and girls who want what’s best for everyone. It’s not polite to say this about the other side, but everyone is secretly aware that they are—let’s be honest here—morons. Actual imbeciles, breathing through the spittle in their mouths. Glassy-eyed religious maniacs. Frothing adult virgins with their heads full of Y-DNA charts and built-up cum. Uncomfortably globular men who have unknowingly outsourced their entire sense of reality to Kenyan scammers generating engagement-bait with ChatGPT. If you talk to these people for even a few minutes, it becomes clear there’s something very seriously wrong with them. Instead of articulate speech, they produce a constant stream of meaningless drivel, mashed-up waste syllables, usually referring to some podcaster, political nobody, or minor advertising campaign that no one whose life is worth living has ever heard of. A good chunk of them have reverted to a magical, Stone Age account of the universe, in which everything that happens, including ordinary weather events, is part of a Plan set in motion by Them, to distract you. Distract you from what? It’s not clear, but the idiot’s eyes are constantly shifting around from object to object and screen to screen, darting with the terror of a primitive in a defensive crouch against a world he simply doesn’t have the faculties to understand. Because this faction is so stupid and offputting, its political party is deeply unpopular. In fact, it’s only won the popular vote in a Presidential election two times since 1988. The first time was in 2004, when the entire country was in the middle of a psychotic war fever, ravenous for blood, crazy in a way that’s difficult to imagine now. The Disney channel used to broadcast little idents of teen celebs, gushing about how much they loved the American flag. The other time they won was the other day. It wasn’t even close. Somehow, the imbeciles outsmarted the smartest people in the world. And I said this would happen. Not to gloat, but: I told you so. I told you so. I told you so.

Look:

One of my most foundational political beliefs is that while the winner in an election doesn’t usually deserve to win, the loser always deserves to lose. I can’t think of anyone who deserved to lose more than Kamala Harris.

According to the Democratic Party, the election they just lost in a humiliating landslide was the most important election in anyone’s lifetime, a last-ditch effort to protect democracy itself from Trump’s incipient authoritarianism. Out of the entire population, they could only choose one person to be their champion, to go head-to-head against Donald Trump and stop his new fascist cacocracy from becoming reality. The lives and welfare of millions—billions!—depended on their making the right choice. And who did they pick? One of the least popular politicians in the country, the goofy cackling woman who says things like ‘It is time to do what we have been doing, and that time is every day,’ who seems mildly but permanently xanned, who moves through the world like a pat of half-melted butter. For the Democrats to lose one election to Donald Trump by nominating an obviously terrible candidate is an honest mistake. Two, and something’s up. The question isn’t why Harris lost to Trump—why was she ever in a position to lose to him in the first place?

Kamala Harris is not an untalented politician. In fact, she’s a very good one, but unfortunately that’s all she’s good at. Her parents seem like they were genuinely interesting people. Donald Harris is a Jamaican development economist and one of only a handful of people to have received his country’s Order of Merit; the others include Bob Marley, Derek Walcott, and Fidel Castro. Shyamala Gopalan Harris was a Tam-Brahm from Madras who moved to America to research the genetics of breast cancer. Not exactly the kind of hardscrabble immigrant background that plays well in America, but it’s not boring either. The couple met through the Black Panthers. Cool! But maybe coming to America was a mistake, because in America everything is tinsel-thin, and in America even students of the historical dialectic can produce a daughter who goes around giving unrequited commencement speeches on what can be, unburdened by what has been. Kamala was not good at school, not particularly talented at university, and when she defaulted to law school she wasn’t particularly stellar there either. But at Howard she was pouting around with the girls at Alpha Kappa Alpha, which was apparently the swaggiest, brown-paper-baggiest sorority on campus, and at Hastings Law School she was the head of the Black Law Students Association. She was good at the game, making connections, leveraging them, getting ahead. After law school she spent a few years dating California political legend Willie Brown, and while it might not be fair to imagine that’s the only explanation for her political success, he can’t exactly have hurt. She got herself into enough of the right circles to jump from District Attorney to the Attorney General to the Senate. Her world kept getting bigger; by 2003 she was calling Willie Brown ‘the albatross hanging around my neck.’ By all accounts, she’s a charismatic schmoozer, but deeply tyrannical to anyone unlucky enough to find themselves among her underlings. In 2020 she ran for President. She can’t have possibly thought she would win. It was Joe Biden’s year, the result was already written, and she was a two-year Senator with no actual achievements to her name. But it was a smart move: raise her profile, make her talents known, and after dropping out she could leverage her way into some kind of juicy post. Keep on swimming, always upwards. She’s a very good politician.

The one thing missing from this story, though, is the electorate. Kamala Harris isn’t good with electorates. She’s a machine politician. She wants power, but not for any particular reason. It’s just that life is a game, and the point is to reach the highest level. Sidle your way into a series of darker and smokier rooms. When she ran for Attorney General in 2010 she secured endorsements from Diane Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi, but in the end she beat her Republican opponent by less than one percentage point—in California, which hasn’t elected a Republican AG in thirty years. When she dropped out of the 2020 Democratic primary, it was still 2019. She was polling as close to 0% as makes no difference, and had not actually contested a single state. But why bother? For politicians like Harris, the electorate are just another annoying hurdle on the road to success. And she was right. History intervened. Nobody knew it at the time, but it turned out that the 2020 election was held in the fateful year of 2020, which meant that Biden was essentially obliged to pick a black woman as his running mate. (A lot of people seem to remember him explicitly promising to do so, which he didn’t; he promised to put a black woman—any black woman, apparently—on the Supreme Court. This sort of thing was normal at the time.) Of all the black women available, Harris was the obvious choice. She wouldn’t make trouble. She knew how to play the game. She was a well-functioning part of a well-functioning machine.

The reason Kamala Harris lost is the same as the reason she was the candidate to begin with: the Democratic Party is allergic to democracy. It’s the instrument of a particular form of class power; its role is basically disciplinary. When it comes to an actual crisis, all it knows how to do is coil in on itself, breathe in its own fumes, suck itself off until completion. The party knew that Joe Biden’s brains kept running out of his nose and into his morning coffee, but they kept pretending until it was far too late that he was running laps around the White House lawn and solving new problems in theoretical physics in his spare time. They really seemed to think that people wouldn’t notice what was right in front of them, or maybe they simply didn’t care. And when people did notice, when Biden stretched his arm too wide at the first debate and all the stuffing came out, the party made sure his overthrow and replacement went as smoothly and as seamlessly as possible. No messy primaries, no ideological bickering, just a slick, stage-managed show. They’re very good at politics too.

Do you remember Brat Summer? I remember Brat Summer. It was genuinely amazing, one of the most bizarre mass psychological phenomena I’ve ever seen. Before a clock spring popped out of Joe Biden’s forehead on live TV, Kamala Harris was the least popular Vice President in recent US history. There were a lot of reasons for this, but I think the big ones are these. Firstly, she was already deeply unpopular—0% polls, remember—before she became VP. Secondly, she’d done absolutely nothing with the position except emit strange and incomprehensible bromides whenever she opened her mouth. But as soon as she became the candidate, despite nothing about her actually changing, her approval rating skyrocketed. It turns out that all you have to do is tell the Democratic base that they ought to like someone, and they’ll just start liking her. I think this is evidence of an extraordinary generosity of spirit. All of us, and me especially, could learn something from them. But it was incredible to watch. All these pols and pundits, who had been so stiff and serious in the gloom of the Biden era, suddenly breaking out in virulent lime green. Like a new tropical disease ripping through the establishment. Doughy old columnists transformed overnight into thirteen-year-old girls in shiny lipgloss. Ew. You’re, like, totally weird. Somehow this career politician, born when parts of Africa still belonged to the British Empire, turned overnight into some kind of snotty egirl. The New York Times printed the words ‘coconut-pilled,’ along with an op-ed about how she embodied the principle of ‘black joy.’ Sure, it was all vibes, but the vibes were good. In Gaza, they were lining up dozens of people in the courtyards of hospitals and crushing them to death with bulldozers, but that was all very far away. Wasn’t it fun, now that Old Man Biden was gone and you could play with your brand-new Kamala doll as much as you like? But for some unaccountable reason, among the general public, ‘Kamala: You Already Like Her!’ was not the brilliant pitch it seemed to be.

Hard to blame her, though; it’s not like she had many other choices. She became Vice President in a cultural atmosphere in which her historic status as a black woman was a potential vote-winner, in which you could bludgeon people into supporting you—or, at least, not opposing you—by suggesting that they’re bigots if they don’t play along. A lot can change in four years. Bigotry is actually kinda in right now. Another option would be to actually offer something to the voters. Some prospect that she could maybe make their lives better. That’s what Trump did: he offered an enemy to blame and the prospect of doing violence to them. Not a bad deal. Once I might have said that Harris would have won if she’d adopted all of my preferred policies. Socialise everything; denounce Khrushchevite revisionism. These days I’m not so sure that’d work, but it couldn’t have hurt for her to have adopted literally any policies whatsoever. Stupid thought. That sort of thing isn’t available to politicians like Kamala Harris. It’s not how the system works. The candidate doesn’t owe anything to the public, the public owes something to the candidate. You have to give them your love and respect and admiration and, crucially, your vote. Otherwise the monster wins.

Which is the line they reverted to, once Brat Summer faded into the dying time when the leaves all fall. Blackmail: democracy is on the ballot. Project 2025. The Republican plot to steal your pronouns. Fascism on the horizon. All of which might be real: Donald Trump exists within the purely instinctive life, a kind of wafting meditative state in which everything is possible. He can levitate a few inches off the ground; he is capable of extreme evil. Last time, he tried to overturn the result of a democratic election, which is extremely bad juju. But ‘democracy is on the ballot’ is an incredibly antidemocratic slogan. You have no choice other than to vote for us, it says. You don’t get a say in the matter. Whichever grasping freak we pick is your only option: now deal with it. It should not surprise you that a lot of people look at the offer you’re making, and decide to pass.

Trump will be bad. He probably won’t be as bad as his enemies keep screeching, but he’ll be bad. This is your fault. Once, when the kings of Israel sinned, God sent terrible empires to sack the holy city of Jerusalem, carry away its temple goods, massacre its people, and sell the survivors into slavery. Things have changed, but not that much. Now, he sends the king of the morons. You have sinned, and Trump is your punishment: whatever happens next, you will deserve it. You did not learn! The last eight years have taught you absolutely nothing: we’ve gone nowhere, we’re trapped in the same stupid loop, and now I’m writing essentially the same post all over again. You should have listened to the voice of the prophet, wailing in the wilderness, in the deserts and the unclean places, gibbering with the fury of the Lord. But you didn’t, and there’s not much left to say. Just that I told you so. I told you so. I told you so.

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Von der Leyen’s Cop29 absence sends ‘fatal signal’, say watchers

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MEPs express concern for EU climate leadership as commission head confirms she will miss Baku summit

Ursula von der Leyen’s decision to miss the Cop29 climate summit is “a fatal signal” and raises questions about Europe’s commitment to the climate crisis, observers have said.

The European Commission confirmed on Tuesday that its president would not attend the UN climate talks in Baku, which start on Monday. “The commission is in a transition phase and the president will therefore focus on her institutional duties,” a spokesperson said.

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It feels like we’re giving up
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It’s The Economy, Stupid (AKA Economists)

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It’s The Economy, Stupid (AKA Economists)

Over ninety-nine percent of economists did not predict the 2008 financial crisis.

The vast majority of economists were pro-globalization, by which I mean pro offshoring and outsourcing. They said it would be good for America, they were wrong.

China is predicted to wind up with over 50% of the world’s industry by 2030. Forget all the bullshit about great power competition. It’s over. There may be a war, but if there is one the West will either lose or the world will be destroyed in a nuclear exchange.

Back in the 90s an economist called Brockway liked to say “Economists are bad for your health.”

(If you like the writing here, well, support it if you can. There aren’t a lot of places like this left on the Web. Every year I fundraise to keep it going. Please Subscribe or Donate.)

Let’s bring this back to the election. I thought that abortion would be the election defining issue. Stupid of me. It was inflation, which given how much I write about it, I should have expected. Two tables from the CNN exit polls:

Abortion was the second most important issue. Inflation was , and people who voted for pro-abortion measures voted about 9% less for Harris.

Economists meanwhile keep talking about the : the idea that there is no recession, people just think there is.

Economists, as usual, are full of shit. They have a professional dependence on official statistics and refuse to realize that many of them don’t reflect reality. As I have written in the past, according to official inflation statistics the price of cards did not rise between 2000 and 2020. In another case, you will be happy to know that medical service costs are going down. Hedonic adjustments are completely out of control: prices are dropping, you see, because products are so much better now. (There are other finangles, this is the main one.)

Growth numbers are based entirely on nominal growth minus the inflation rate, as are real wage numbers.

I would bet that the US economy has been contracting since 2008, but since inflation is understated, it isn’t visible.

I would also bet that median welfare for Americans has been declining since somewhere between 1968 and 1979, though average might have been increasing till 2008 because of how much money was being shoveled to the rich and wealthy.

We live in a pretend world, and economists are the chief pretenders, the sycophants telling the Emperor how wonderful his new clothes are.

To riff on Galbraith, economists exist to make astrologers look good.

Economics, as a discipline, should be wiped from the face of the Earth. The less than 1% of economists who aren’t charlatans or fools are not enough to justify the harm economists do, which exceeds even that of MBAs.

As for Trump, we’ll talk more about the effects of his economic plans, if instituted, later.

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