Blue Skies and Gloom

Midmorning Barton Springs Report, 11/06/2024

Yesterday morning I didn’t swim, because it had stormed in the night, and I didn’t want to deal with the inevitable frondescence the weather would throw down and kick up in the pool. Last night, full of melancholy at midnight, I turned off my early morning alarm and went to bed. When I woke up on my own at 5:15 thought, If the race hasn’t been called, I’ll go swim now.

Alas.

Instead I talked to my kids, the one just awake at 5:15, getting reading for 7AM weightlifting class at her high school; the older one who slept in till 7:15, having followed the results too late the night before; and to my beloved ball-&-chain. I honestly cannot draw a single conclusion other than many, many people, specifically Americans, are worse and more gullible than I thought.

I took my older kid to school. We had to go around the back of the school because of a planned “protest”: a group of hateful assholes who are visiting Austin schools with megaphones. Not the Westboro Church: different hateful assholes. There is, as we know, no shortage. Yesterday, the principal sent out an email asking us not to engage with these guys—homophobes, transphobes, Islamophobes, antisemites [I edited this entry to add the antisemitism after my kid told me that the Islamaphobic sign had an antisemitic slogan on the reverse] all made clear on their signs—because what they want is attention and confrontation. So I dropped off my kid in the back. Then I decided to drive by them. Why? Because I knew that when I saw them I would feel fury, which would be different than the helpless sorrow I have been feeling.

I didn’t yell, didn’t even slow down, but I regarded the two guys in front of the school and stared at one particularly with the eyes of hate, which surely he recognized, though unlike him (probably) I was wearing my bathing suit beneath my dress, because goddammit I was headed to Barton Springs. I didn’t think it would make me feel better but I know it wouldn’t make me feel worse.

It is an unsympathetically beautiful day here, sunny, mid 60s. I swam for an hour and a half. I’d meant to swim another lamp but my old legs started cramping up.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the habit of comparison, which I wish to lose. I am generally pretty good at not giving into it, especially when it comes to my writing life: most of the misery I see in writers, both students and my contemporaries, has to do with comparing one’s career to another person’s. There is nothing more painful and pointless. I strive, and generally succeed, in viewing myself in a category of one.

Recently I put this thought into a book I’m working on, so there it was there amid the morning’s mental frondescence: swimming didn’t make me feel better but it did make me feel different. That wasn’t nothing. There were people laughing at the pool. I was not in a laughing frame of mind, but I was alone. I didn’t need to compare my mood to theirs.

Trying to feel better about the election feels like an impossible task right now, but I can make myself feel different. Maybe it’s our historical moment and maybe it’s the human condition: we compare grief and difficulty and find ourselves guilty of feeling sorry for ourselves when other people have it worse.

Today I concluded that this is a bad habit. I can nurse my little hurt and still know in incredible detail how much larger the hurts of other people are and work to help. Some grief is enormous; some is small; you do not need to put them next to each other to understand that. Comparing grief to grief might make things worse, brings to mind the awful phrase so often said about and to the grieving, I can’t imagine. Many years ago I heard an NPR spot on a study that said compassion was more useful than empathy: it allowed you to get more done. I’m leaning into compassion. (Not those guys in front of my kid’s high school, though.)

Another Trump presidency is going to be horrible, deeply horrible for vulnerable people, some of whom voted for him. I am not so vulnerable, though I am married to an immigrant and we are thinking about whether this means that our time living in my country is coming to a soonish end. I’m on leave. I miss my students: it’s good to talk to smart people about terrible things. It’s consoling to console.

Tomorrow I’m going to write some fiction because it’s one of the only things that every works to make me feel—different, at least, if not better. It’s only of the only ways I know to think about the unfathomable.

Not better but different: mid-morning, the cormorants performing indifference while deeply interested. The tiny train is once again running through Zilker park and was full of of parents and little kids, and I thought of an important baby who has just come back to Austin with his folks; I haven’t met him yet but I can’t wait and in the middle of the night I might have bought a quantity of baby clothing to make me feel better.

As I left I passed two women about my age discussing how disgusting the water had been yesterday, after the storm. “Dirty,” one said to the other. “I could see you fighting through it.”

It is true that people have lived through worse times, but they had to pass through something like this to get there. We have to look out for each other.