A year ago, I began to read Little Brother, the 2008 novel by Cory Doctorow that I’d heard of a few times over the previous decade, even borrowed from the library a time before, but only sat down and began to read in 2022.
But, I didn’t get much past page 30. The opening was enticing, the characters curious, and the plot was thickening. But I put it down and didn’t return to be with the paragraphs then pages and chapters. Though, I’ve not yet forgotten that book nor the author.
Tonight, I saw Doctorow mentioning alternatives, so I had to go and I’ve read this:
science fiction demands that we look beyond what a gadget does and interrogate who it does it for and who it does it to. That’s an important exercise, maybe the important exercise.
https://doctorow.medium.com/there-is-always-an-alternative-e55fd414d1fd
Doctorow keeps writing fiction books that swirl into surveillance economy, endless war, who profits and for what, and how these circumstances and systems afflict the lives of humans and all beings.
I was talking up alternatives to dominant cultural norms two days ago in the setting of 50 people being laid off — I mean fired next week. It’s semantics that are irrelevant as people are pushed out of jobs, positions and roles that they have been giving most of their days to for the past decade or multiple decades so the nuance between let go, laid off or fired seems insignificant to me.
What was significant, and has been significant over the last two months since the *layoffs* were first announced is that people were clicking in and up a URL to come together to express their feelings, state what they need right now. And there were chances to be able to praise, laugh, cry, to look back and look ahead. At one point, I was shouting assertively so loudly that my mother who was on the other side of the wall mistook my work call for me calling out a pedestrian walking down the street. I told her, “no, that was me talking to some people in my work meeting.”
She still doesn’t quite understand what the work is that I do. Nor how I do it. Though, after hearing the shouting and yelling, I believe she better understands the why of what I do, as I told her that I’m encouraging people to express more anger, rage, disbelief and joy and grief, rather than suffocate and stifle those feelings. Because the dominant culture pummels us into coping and lots of the people (personally and casually) I know cope with alcohol and liquor, smoking, streaming or eating. The alternative to numbing out to make it through a today is to feel my feelings today.
The more that I feel my feelings, the more I remember in my muscles as well as my brain how feelings will change. I’ve been practicing grief and grieving while those 50 people grieve and I’m commuting to memory the DABDA acronym from Elizabeth Kubler-Ross:
- D is for denial
- A is for anger
- B is for bargaining
- D is for depression
- A is for acceptance
I’m changing my feelings along with my inner narrative about what is possible this week and this year. And as Deesha Philyaw and Carmen Maria Machado reminded me this morning:
I asked [a question that] prompted [her] to liken her writing process to solving a math problem…. I’m not an outliner; I’m a discoverer, a problem solver.
https://1000wordsofsummer.substack.com/p/day-7-of-1000wordsofsummer-2023
The 1000 piece, cryptic puzzle awaits me. Fortunately, there are infinite books to guide, remind, love me through the dark and the bright.
And, I gotta practice hope since I am always practicing something. Like Doctorow closed that commencement with, “Hope begins with the ability to imagine alternatives.”
washing dishes: a father’s glimpses 