It is raining- after two days of the clearest warm skies (with nothing in them! as if nothing ever WAS in them!) this feels like tragedy- like the heaviest bag of sand. Or maybe I just spent too much time on the internet today- my neighbor’s wifi, was, for once, accessible (the signal is stronger on cloudy days) and so I was free to tumble in the lottery-ball cage of the public consciousness, as opposed to only being able to access gmail and facebook on my phone. I learned several things, while stumbling around on the internet, instead of working on my book- that the world is ending, and that no-one knows what to do. And it turns out, when the world is ending, that things feel pretty much the same as they always do- only people are more emotionally honest, as if they have just survived a brutal car accident and realize, for the first time, that they are alive. And yet if there are no nuclear disasters for a moment we will, of course, forget that the world is ending, and we will, in our vanity, once again complain about the weather and the price of Brussels sprouts, as if we are destined to live forever.
I forget what I was originally going to write about when I started this post. My guts have been all f-ed up today, which makes me feel like shit, and all I want to do is cuddle my dog in bed and read old New Yorkers. I was doing just that this afternoon, and my dog started barking at nothing, out the window, and then she ran into the kitchen and caught a mouse. She broke the mouse’s leg, and I flung it over the fence into the neighbor’s yard. That’s the third one we’ve caught in my apartment, and I feel awful every time. No matter how humane I try and be, they always die awful deaths. The first one I caught in a live trap, and I carried it half a mile and released it into a jumble of rocks next to the road. I realized, after I had released it, that it had no cache of food, and that if it didn’t starve, another animal would kill it very soon. The second mouse found its way into the live trap while I was out of town for the weekend, and, by the time I returned, the live trap had been turned into a sensory-deprivation starvation trap, and the small thing, after eating all the almond-butter bait, had died in a pool of its own vomit. And then Nik-Nik, my chihuahua, breaks the third mouse’s leg. To her credit, she did not enjoy toying with the mouse the way that cats do. The mouse confused her- the fact that it was living and not a stuffed toy, the fact that it wriggled when she picked it up. I think that I will get some good, old-fashioned, spine-snapping mouse traps, and be done with this suffering business. Mice are small and soft and they harm no-one, they only want to eat bits of rice and tea, and to proliferate rapidly in the walls. I want to stop their proliferating, but seeing them suffer, even though they are just mice, reminds me of all of the other kinds suffering in the world, magnified out and out like a kaleidoscope, and so in this way they have become much more than Just Mice- my humanity towards their kind has become a small, symbolic, meaningless thing I can do to make myself feel better about doing absolutely nothing to stop the suffering of the planet on a larger scale.
CARROT QUINN 
Oh Carrot, stop this. You are feeling sorry for yourself, not the world. Did you know that after the earthquake in Japan, something wonderful happened? The people in the burnt out villages with no electricity began to live in community again. They fed each other, cared for the children and looked for solutions as a collective. Now I’m not saying that natural and nuclear disasters are a good thing, or that your helpless feelings are the least bit unusual, I’m just reminding you that you too are part of the collective. The thing you can do to stop the suffering of the planet is care for yourself. You ARE the planet. Can’t you see? If you want to shift something, shift your attitude. Write your book, I say with love and gratitude. I know that helpless feeling, but I am learning that feeling helpless doesn’t help, and feeling hopeful does. And love is all around you if you look for it, proliferating like mice in your walls. Hate and suffering are there too, but they will snap your neck if you let them, or take you out to a strange roadside to starve. Look at hate, look suffering, don’t be blind, but fill yourself up with love first. It’s the only armor. You know?
i say, bring it on! i know the feeling of when your guts don’t feel well and then it’s hard to feel well psychologically, really, i think it’s alright to be a little mopy and stunned but then again i’m sitting here not drawing *my book…
Kate- I’m not feeling sorry for myself, we ARE fucked, and sadness is a completely valid response to that. The darker emotions are a beautiful, important, integral part of life- and our refusal, as a culture, to face them head-on is one reason that we’re so spiritually bankrupt and deeply mired in denial.
Chemlawn- Word. I LOVE PAIN. PAIN SETS ME FREE. Have you read this? http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/03/21/110321fa_fact_goodyear
Commission by Ezra Pound
Go, my songs, to the lonely and the unsatisfied,
Go also to the nerve wracked, go to the enslaved by convention,
Bear to them my contempt for their oppressors.
Go as a great wave of cool water,
Bear my contempt of oppressors.
Speak against unconscious oppression,
Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,
Speak against bonds.
Go to the bourgeoise who is dying of her ennuis,
Go to the women in suburbs.
Go to the hideously wedded,
Go to them whose failure is concealed,
Go to the unluckily mated,
Go to the bought wife,
Go to the woman entailed.
Go to those who have delicate lust,
Go to those whose delicate desires are thwarted,
Go like a blight upon the dullness of the world,
Go with your edge against this,
Strengthen the subtle cords,
Bring confidence upon the algae and the tentacles of the soul.
Go in a friendly manner,
Go with an open speech.
Be eager to find new evils and new good,
Be against all forms of oppression.
Go to those who are thickened with middle age,
To those who have lost their interest.
Go to the adolescent who are smothered in family
Oh how hideous it is
To see three generations of one house gathered together!
It is like an old tree with shoots,
And with some branches rotted and falling.
Go out and defy opinion,
Go against this vegetable bondage of the blood.
Be against all sorts of mortmain.
I read this last night in my futon bed. His words are like static electricity that shakes and rattles your bones. Sadness manifests. There is a slower vibration coming out of the trees now, out of you, out of me, all for the sake of healing the isolation within ourselves and the world. I think Mother Earth is laughing at us fighting her silence; she doesn’t want to try anymore.
I Embrace.
Clementine Rose
Hi Carrot, I’ve read your blog fairly often, Saturday mornings. I was looking for trainhopping stories and the search engine listed your blog. Took me back to my freight adventures. I admire so much of your writing. I just wanted to say I hope you get your novel done before the world (as we know it) ends. I will find a way to read it when you make it available. Best wishes.
Clementine- that poem is great! Thank you.
Decolat- THANK YOU FOR READING MY BLOG, and for having read it for such a long time, and for the generous generous feedback! I am going to try very hard not to disappoint.