(((Echo Chamber))) Update:
So i started tinkering with this newsletter project back in 2019. It’s had multiple fits and starts since then, and has been completely dead for about a year. Given that length of time, i decided to wipe the slate clean and try this thing out all over again. Again. Such is life, or something. Anyway, third(ish) time is a charm. Hope y’all enjoy.
The loss is foundational, the grief is engineered
Life is a gradual loss and grief is assured. i tell you this not to convey some pseudo-philosophical bullshit. i don’t think i’m telling you something you don’t already know. But i still say this because, despite understanding those facts, we somehow seem to routinely forget that a foundational component of our culture is loss. Unnecessary loss. We repeatedly find new ways to ignore that so much of our grief is intentionally designed and anticipated by these architects of American Exceptionalism.
Life is a gradual loss and grief is assured. But that loss doesn’t always have to be so indecent. Our grief doesn’t need be routinely and prematurely induced by a never-ending queue of broken men.
What’s left now is a numb body conquered and controlled by an insatiable cancer. What could possibly be left intact if we excised it?
.
maybe i have it backwards. The American Body as a healthy, perfectly functioning apex predator, and we are the infection it is trying — and succeeding — to stave off. But the American Body is an invasive species in an ecosystem that can’t support it. Were it burned clean of us, it would still ultimately continue devouring without question. Eventually, there will be nothing left to sustain itself. Eventually, soon, it will starve.
And there’s no tidy way to wrap this up. No satisfactory conclusion. It ends like it did for so many burned clean this week by the American Body — abrupt, irreconcilable, empty
(((EC)))