Caution is as arthritic as adrenaline junkies prove it is when they disregard it and drive to the edge of a cliff to test their breaks. Each soul has her own way of pushing past her boundaries or tensing on the precipice of violating them, in the name of evolution or sabotage, and that reliable personal method can usually be detected as a pattern across one’s lifetime. A patter, purpose-driven, the implausible whisper-steps of children sneaking into the night to check on something— monsters, parents, the limits of darkness, the limits of hunger. Children in Gaza keep dying to or of the sound or frequency of bombs and missiles, limp yet frigid in their parents’ arms these tiny corpses might weigh even less than the bags of flour being begged for in feeding lines and online captions and gofundmes and hopeless regions of the digital or real prison cities when the offending army opens fire. Some of the humanitarian flour, outlaw hero dough, is found to contain pills when tested, crushed opiates. In a perverse way, a terrible, offensive way, this seems more humane than the flour distribution system that could end in rations or in being shot down arbitrarily by evil strangers who believe themselves mandated to kill. Administering forced euthanasia and a phobia of what might save you from famine as a more covert war tactic, is, at this point, an escalation we should expect of the IOF. A tendency is pathological if you cannot stop yourself from repeating it, even when you believe you want to or should or are asked to by law, God, or nature. The pathological killing machine marches on unchecked as do we, pathologically meek bystanders. The children play or collapse in white powder.
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In fourth grade, to instill in us a less doomed associative framework, our teacher had us carry around sacks of flour, name them, cover them, and animate them in some way to erase the brand and really get into character. I found the curriculum comical and a little humiliating, as someone who never really liked dolls or video games, disdaining both for the same reason, why would I simulate living when I can just go live using my own body, and hang out with my friends or learn something new in dance class. Another deterrent, a live-in cautionary tale, my mother was too obsessed with the dolls she’d had since childhood; it seemed like possession, and also somehow like protection, like she’d grown up with every memento necessary to be well-adjusted and all of them had betrayed her but kept her attached nonetheless, to the prospect of a trinket savior. And that they would never come to blows or terms, and just watched her sacrifice herself to sentimentality and obsession seemed crueler, the passivity of inanimate symbols we might love is a bit shady and dangerous for certain temperaments.
At nine, toting my flower child, we had already lost most of my earliest belongings as fugitives from domestic violence. You pack a small suitcase or two and go to a shelter to hide until it’s safe to fly away to a new residence. I would not grow attached to toys, which to me were suspicious plastic corpses scrutinizing me in my sleep, threatening to blow my cover. I had a chest for them, the toys accumulated after this, which was made of rainbow patterned polyurethane and made my room look like a billboard for a happy childhood. The day I turned ten, as if I’d reached some emancipation from pretending to be a normal kid, I nudged the heavy chest out of my room like it had been my number one oppressor and told my mom to get rid of all that junk. It had become my crusade to never fetishize fake drama or fake babies, and my sack of store-bought flour that might have kept a starving child alive a little longer in a distant universe, was to me a humiliation ritual I covered in a brown paper corner store bag in case god was watching me bend my will to such anti-intellectual scholastics.
Nonetheless, I did inherit an obsession with the protection of real children, the ones who become adults too young and are banished to lives of out-of-sequence performance. There’s no way to help them, or yourself if you are one, as help itself is abrasive and suspicious to these souls. Help has been laced with hard drugs or the normalization of strange rituals, forced or cajoled exhibitionism. You can only hope they grow up with an aversion to cults and abusers, and the kind of aversion that safeguards them against becoming everything that summoned and scarred them when they were most impressionable. I’m studying the history of child stars as closely as detectives study murder scenes, to find out where I died and came back to life to redevelop on my own terms. All in the past month: A Harvard-trained lawyer testifies before congress about her work with CPS, accusing the organization of being a glorified child trafficking cartel that must be disbanded. A concerned citizen of the Internet calls CPS on “Miss Shirley,” a four year old black girl who became social media famous for her perfection of the latest line dance, ‘Boots on the Ground,’ to such an extent that her family began hosting meet-and-greets which included strange men driving hundreds of miles and standing in long lines in the heat to have her sit on their laps, crying gleeful tears of sweet, lude, relief when she does. The boys in our class had to carry around fake newborns made of the rudiments of processed food too. Thou shall not worship idols, but your heart is lazy and you do, incapable of loving the world in front of you. The child idol is irresistible, a sudden messiah, a second chance at grace, a casualty of second chances.
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At a sleepover, also in fourth grade, watching a video cassette of Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker film, the host, (it was her birthday), started squealing when he appeared on the screen and got so excited she wet her pants. I remember being appalled, and wanting to leave. Not my type of party, sitting around cultivating an unhealthy obsession with one of those wounded children, now imitating manhood from that broken vessel, gliding around like a strung-up marionette. I’d have preferred to be the puppet master than him or a member of his rapt audience at the live performance the film captured, many attendees fainting and being carried out on stretchers and seeming proud of it. The room we watched from was covered in sleeping bags and sacks of flour, and smelled like cupcakes, popcorn, starch, and urine. Childhood was a failed experiment, saccharine and dingy with group think. I began plotting my escape.
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Finally, it was always midnight in my daydreams, always a slow ballad playing that I could write by while a kettle whistled and a tall nameless male figure brought me something hot to sip as I poured over letters, only half-noticing the interruption. Romance. Like a germ or a contagion, romance enters the consciousness and turns childhood to adolescence, and all of the ridiculousness of ‘upbringing’ becomes clearer. The so-called adults were either in love or terminally lonely, either professing love or hiding it in rage or control tactics— ambition. They were either too passionate about a craft or vocation to give anything else adequate attention, or pretending to be in effort to gain the love of a difficult or absentee parent. Another group was pretending to do everything in the right order like a would-be politician, married with 2.5 children by twenty-nine, divorced by forty-four. Another still was always in some all-consuming affair to avoid the patient self-reflection that might lead to real, sustained love one day, lost children. I took the bus to high school with headphones on, blasting Portishead or Billie Holiday and thinking, they aren’t really that different, one just uses abrasive chunky trip-hop beats where the other thrives in minimalism. Beth Gibbons imitates but never mentions Billie’s frail but fierce tremolo, and is trendy, while the other is Billie herself, an ineffable immortal mimeographed for the new age. This I found to be romantic, unclaimed muses reclaimed by time and antecedent like lost languages. These were the immaterial ideas I’d longed to play with when I was given toys and dolls, I wanted songs and radios.
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We can’t be the new adults, is a common digital refrain. It’s as if all of the turn-of-the-century kids who grew up having to stifle play with more serious concerns became adults, and all at once, on cue like a flock of migrating birds, began taking aimless vengeance on tradition. None of the men equipped to fight in a war, none of the women willing to stand by some man and cook and clean for him, likely because he is not equipped to fight or build anything with his hands and never wants to learn, likely because he was never given a cause worthy of fighting for or a sense of the stakes of his life, likely because everyone had settled on big egos and low self-esteem. And a mutual laziness toward deep affection made remedy scarce. It’s likely the man in the dynamic blames his mother for this and looks for women who remind him of her to punish. It’s more likely that those women are lifelong masochists, also eager to be disciplined and misapprehended, and see being chosen in that way as real validation. They might have a child together. Horrors are mundane, casual, for the new adults, both unserious and far too austere about themselves, guilty hedonists who get right with their creator by nursing addictions to both pornography and the gym, filthy liberal exceptionalism and very clean eating. If these contradictions lose their thrill there’s always a new therapist, a new diagnosis, a new life-affirming podcast, a new man, or at its worst, a new child to project one’s own inadequacies onto and save or sell out to absolve what’s been done to the self.
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A live performance by Summer Walker at a London festival, captured on one of the hundreds of self-surveillance devices held above the head in the direction of the stage, is the reason I’m thinking about any of this. She’s trying to sing her short interlude of a ballad, “Session 32,” but starts crying and cannot quite access the lyrics. The audience comes to her aid in unison, you don’t know what love is, if you don’t put up a fight. They aren’t just singing it for her, with intermittent help as she gathers a line or two herself and croons it into the microphone; they are praying it like a psalm, prying it out of the studio and into the open air where everyone in the crowd had known piercing heartache or a bout of hyper-fixation on a failed love-affair. The new adults, having been raised to be good consumers and fans, avid listeners to it-girls’ opinions and what and how to consume and love, themselves and others, watching and waiting to be told what to enjoy and denounce next; they have negated love with strategy and procedure the way bureaucrats might block a series of forms submitted in the wrong order, the way adulthood came first and the inner-child dominates the grown-up years, vindictive, selfish, reckless, unfit for social life but resolved to keep reenacting a scene from a high school dance until granted a speaking role, which is seen as redemption. The new adults feel about love how I felt about dolls and games as a kid. We have switched places. So that this scene is shocking and rare. The collective chanting of this stark broken-winged and bleating melody, in a crowd where black women are the masters of ceremony, renewed my faith in the new adults and my appreciation for the awkward refusals that turned me into one. I’d thought the whole demographic had become too callous and self-obsessed, but vulnerability still overrides these programs or hijacks them with propaganda for the prospect of something better. The you in the song is also the self, the generation, the algorithm-ruined souls who fight back by ruining one another with glitches in the program, the irrepressible hysteria of summer love, looping until it restores the user’s solitude and sovereignty, all sides standing accused and free.
The simulations I abide are music.
I feel like I should recall what happened both to my pretend flour child and to my Michael Jackson obsessed childhood friend, but I don’t. I found them both disappointing. I know by high school she was goth and an outcast who I’d see in the halls sometimes but never in classes. She had style, reticence, shame, and had hardened against popular song, becoming her own foil. When I pushed the toys out of my room the people I’d played with them alongside also had to go.
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Last week, three girls in fifth grade were arrested for plotting to kill a boy who hurt one of their friends by going silent. One would forge his fictitious suicide note, another would create a diversion, the third would wield the knife. I think the conflict began in a group chat, which can be a territory of shared and sustained psychosis if we are not careful, comrades turned co-conspirators. As the new adults, what series of examples have our romances and lack thereof set, our phone addictions, our phony attention to attachment, our displacement of play onto imaginary violence and savored dysfunction in gaming or film, song, and television? I think I was lucky my grade school cohort was in Michael’s trance and not a more convincing devil’s, being someone who never liked childhood games and longed for a real life, more substantial and meaningful experiences, I might have been in charge of writing the note.
Billie Holiday with her godson
Thankyou again for your thought provoking work. It puts into words many of my thoughts. I dont know if you have heard of a maori artist Stan Walker. When you see and listen to his music. You know there is a story of trauma. Someone like many artists who are responsible for their extended families. He has taken strength in his maori culture and faith.Moving from being a pop idol contestant and judge. To an advocate for maori lanuage in nearly every song. "i am".A song from the film about caste "Origin". Is skin tingling. As is the video.
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The throng of prototype cyborgs with their 'surveillance devices' (very nice) and 'algorithm ruined souls' (wow) have nowadays surely crossed the rubicon into the realm where the craving and fabrication of relevance holds all dominion except in those rare and fleeting instances when unmitigated love takes over to destroy their world in a moment of pure attention. Akin, maybe, to those witnessing the blood bath sacrifices before the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan. But then again, such musings surely pale by the reality of those suffering children cruelly and continually slaughtered by the world's most immoral and evil army.