We’re staying at a hotel tonight, or so has been the repeated line from higher perches than mine, as I don’t have the money in this relationship and I don’t drive either. In the normal course of life- even the abnormal course of life under quarantine- my lack of driving was no great hardship. I have legs and I am glad of their use; and before the quarantine, I had a rather good grasp of the public transport system. At the very least, I could get where I meant to when I meant to, and back home again in a reasonable time.
I wonder: will the bus stops still be there? The train stations? The bank isn’t, after all.
Some of the graffiti down lake street as we headed out: No Justice, No Peace; Fuck 12; George Floyd Presente!; Make Being Black Legal; Mama I Can’t Breathe. These are also the slogans that stuck. The only one I requested explanation of is the significance of 12, and thus why it should get fucked; 12 references an outdated police code for drugs, or perhaps a segment officers tasked with the apprehension of those selling drugs.
On our way out, I saw murals untouched by violence of any kind, unmarred by spray paint; I saw ordinary people, in their long sleeves and masks and gloves, with trash bags and brooms and a will to help; I saw the empty burned out husk of a store I shopped in last year; I saw USPS mail cars being loaded onto a truck of their own in preparation for evacuation; I saw police cars hiding behind concrete dividers, kin or kind to those seen during highway construction. It strikes me now that the police in that car perhaps think the concrete will protect them. It won’t; but they will still be surprised when it doesn’t.
I am outside the city now, and from the window of my room I can see the airport (instantly obsolete the day it opened, poor thing) and no planes fly from it, and now under curfew there are no cars, or at least very few, passing by in the night. This of course means there is very little interfering noise from here back and back to the heart- I can hear all the sirens downtown from all the way at the airport. I can hear it through the glass window. I can hear it through eight stories of air and a wide parking lot and fifteen-twenty-half an hour of highway. It is faded and distorted by distance, but I Know; faded enough that I almost thought the sound was ringing only in my head. It isn’t; and I was still surprised that it isn’t.
I am thankful I can’t hear the pop of teargas. It sounds like gunfire; which is to say, it sounds like a small firecracker, or a champagne popper with depth. The movies are for entertainment; they don’t have to show you, or let you hear, the truth if a bit of film-flam makes for the better story. I can say now, I prefer the story. Would that all guns were just heavy toys to make it easier to pretend.
Friday morning from behind our front window; a building about a block away was on fire, the flames licked and danced above the blocking roof of the bank, which also (eventually) burned; and it was a very strange and poignant moment, when brown smoke smeared the sky grey to the left of my position viewing the fire, and to the right, the clear blue sky dazzled with clean white clouds I’ve come to expect this time of year. In the windowsill, our noisy and bold cat, who is quite small in size- such that I sometimes forget she only weighs eight pounds when I haven’t picked her up in a while. On the couch, below the window, our other cat, nervous and desiring only to be at someone, anyones, side. He, I think, ate a brick when no one was watching; perhaps it is his slight personality that makes his dense body such a shock. The small one doesn’t care if you hold her; the large one wants to be put down, now, after a measured count of eight.
The foul smoke that rose from this conflagration- and the others that dotted the city- so nauseated me that day, I did not eat until half past noon, when my head ached with hunger. The miasma of tear gas diluted in the air was so thick on the Wednesday before the Thursday before that day, I couldn’t help getting a pernicious sinus headache that I woke with, and went to sleep with, and could not escape even in filtered air.
The poison was already inside me, you see.
I was reminded that day of this: although people have their squabbles and ruinations, the greater whole of nature doesn’t give a shit. The cat in the windowsill slept; the cat on the couch was no more nervous than he always is. Somehow, I find it heartening. The world goes on. The poison is cleared; and if damage remains, so what? I am alive to be damaged, and heal.
As we left, I saw there were people sweeping the streets of broken glass-front shops and a building that was only a little bit still on fire, mostly on the roof, or so I heard; I couldn’t actually see it from my spot in the car. There was a dollar store burned to rubble, smoke still rising from its leech colored soot-blacked bones; the liquor store, the bank, the targets, and more still, looted and burned. And more people coming to see and join and fight; my friend Hannah who went out today- yes, this very day- and stood in protest at the capital, which is St Paul. My friend Hannah, who is brave, and white, and this day in such terrible danger I felt as if time would not move until I heard she was safe again. She is safe, just to gut that small moment of tension for you.
(I will thank you not to conflate Minneapolis with St Paul. The Twin Cities have different counties, and were built in different eras of urban design; one is Catholic and one is Protestant; one is moneyed and the other classed; one has a garbage disposal service that works, and the other has ruined their alleys with mercenary action. Prince came from Minneapolis, not St. Paul. I quite like Minneapolis and Minnesota, for all its warts and horrors, and I will get snippy about this little thing. The big things, I think, are well past snips.)
South Minneapolis is home to a number of anarchists, and to them I give thanks- for it is they who had a whole entire fire hose- a real one- and perhaps a wrench, and it was our block’s community that wrangled the thrashing thing in place long enough to douse the bank. My father, and my stepmom’s sisters husband, were among that community. They are also quite brave, I think.
My personal notes on the escape and subsequent confinement inherent in fleeing riots and rioters and flames and other such insurrections:
Bring a book. Bring your game system- Switch, Xbox, gameboy etc. You might think it’s just a digitized version of cocaine or opium, but oh what a blessing to be able to not think and worry about things you have no power to change; to escape somewhere the world can not touch but in such and such prescribed way, and that you can change in any way you’d like.
Animal Crossing is a very good game.
You will stay longer than a night, pack for longer than one night; you will get tired of food rationed from what you can order. You will not get tired of not having to do dishes, but you will get tired of not having a full sized trash can or any replacement trash bags.
You will get bored, and miss your homely comforts, the weight of your bedding and the mess of your things. You will miss your pets and your projects and your games you left at home because they were too heavy to take with you.
You will miss your laundry room. Bring laundry detergent, and dryer sheets, and that pouch of coins you never use because why would you.
You will not miss the noise; but the new uncertainty, laid atop your back (which aches from the weight of plague’s uncertainty) like a fine sharp knife, will steal sleep from your eyes and thin your last nerve to the very edge of breaking. Even with the silence, and perhaps the privacy.
You will want to start fights and be rude and cruel for no reason other than you know how, and can, and are bored, and you can only really control yourself at this point. You won’t actually do these things because you’re still a person, for now, and you’d like to still be a person at the end of all this.
You will continue to hope for an end, and ignore the news as best you can because it’s all lurid and terrible and you really just want a breakfast where you don’t have to aggressively find reasons the world isn’t a terrible place.
(The world is not a terrible place, for clarity’s sake. I’m just a little tired of the weather and cnn at free breakfast when all I want is an omelette and some juice.)
You’ll find ways to cope, again; you’ll find ways to resolve yourself to waiting, again. You’ll start a new book, or a different project, or take a nap. You’ll make a new schedule, to stave off boredom, again.
You will and should and can do all of those things; I give you permission. But.
Under absolutely no circumstances can you allow yourself to believe that the deprivation and calamity we are experiencing right now is in any way normal. Let no one, not even yourself, convince you that this- this state of the world, the quarantine, the too-closeness of your family and the distance from your friends, your skin crawling over itself with restless unending boredom- is normal. Revolution is necessary; it is not normal. Quarantine is necessary; it is not normal.
Aim for acceptable. But don’t accept it.
Oh, and if you’re up to it, do try and take more than two nearly good photos of a total five- human memory has an unfortunate habit of failure. Scars and memories fade away; but photographic glory is forever.
[To gut some more of that dramatic tension for you, we’re all safe and at home now. But the rebellion rages on.]
