Stupid Summer

And why I'm trying to learn to selectively turn my consciousness off

Piha, where I plan on spending time this summer.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been telling people I want to do something called “Stupid Summer.” Starting in early December, I’m going to get around a month off work for the southern hemisphere summer, and I fantasize about turning my brain off during it. I want to get a medical marijuana prescription, lie on the beach, have barbecues at my house every weekend, play the PS5 my friend said she’d loan me for a month, and make every imprudent decision I’ve restrained myself from making to disable my consciousness. I want to become a creature of pure appetite, guided by instinct like a pig hunting truffles, and spare myself the agony that being able to articulate my malaise often brings. I don’t know if it’s going to work, and I suspect it won’t in the way that I want it to, but I’m going to try nonetheless. Any reprieve from reality would feel good right now as I figure out how to recalibrate to our new one.

I’m doing this because my ability to articulate myself is making me miserable. Every morning I write three stream-of-consciousness pages in a notebook where I describe things that would otherwise exist only as wordless subterranean aches. I then read well-written left-wing journalism throughout the day, take notes for this blog, and help plan People Against Prisons Aotearoa protests, in addition to doing my full-time job. I carry a notebook in my pocket in which I constantly write down things that interest me and I spend way too much time on Twitter and Instagram. I have a good sense of what both my and the world’s problems are, I know “what is to be done” to fix them, and know that I can’t do those things without facing serious consequences. My only remaining option is to selectively blunt my consciousness: to be “on” when I’m on and to put things out of mind when I’m not.

I don’t think I’m alone in feeling this particular pain. Last week, I read article after article about how Jevon McSkimming, the top cop in New Zealand, abused a woman he’d had an affair with who was half his age. He got the police to charge her with “digital harassment” after she emailed the police and media about it – a law ostensibly designed to protect women from male stalkers – and watched child porn and bestiality videos at work. You can command-find “McSkimming” in this Wikipedia page about New Zealand police controversies if you want to know more. McSkimming is also likely the man who directed police to aggressively overcharge left-wing climate, Palestine, and Māori rights protestors across the motu for the past two years. The right-wing minister for police, Mark Mitchell, claims he had no knowledge of any of McSkimming’s activities, but I think he’s lying. Wellington’s a small town and everyone knows everything about each other. My low-level government employee friends can tell you who’s having affairs with who at every level of parliament, and I’d bet my savings that lots of people knew about McSkimming and kept their mouths shut for personal expediency.

The New Zealand political class threw McSkimming under the bus and he’s probably going to go to jail, but I think our compliant media is going to let everyone who enabled him get off scot-free. They’re already reprinting the lie that no one in power “knew what was going on.” This put me in a bad mood last week. Then, on Saturday, a bunch of Jeffrey Epstein emails dropped. They showed that president of the United States Donald Trump, former president of Harvard Larry Summers, director of Harvard’s poetry department Elisa New, left-wing public intellectual Noam Chomsky, and many others remained chummy with Epstein for years after he was revealed to be a child sex trafficker. Reading the emails, I got the sense that none of these people cared that Epstein raped children because they believe a certain class of people should be preyed on to keep the capitalist economy running. It’s unlikely the American ruling class will do anything to its own, and I suspect it will let everyone in the Epstein emails off as casually as New Zealand’s will let off McSkimming’s enablers.

On Sunday, I helped put on a People Against Prisons protest outside Auckland Women’s Prison. Part of what we do in People Against Prisons is send socks, underwear, sweaters, shoes and clothes to prisoners because the New Zealand Department of Corrections isn’t. Buying prisoners these supplies is burning through our organisation’s budget, though, and we held the protest to try and pressure the Department of Corrections to clothe the people they’ve thrown in cages. Our current white supremacist government is unlikely to care, as they take libidinal pleasure in punishing the poor, but the liberal colonial party that’s expected to win the next election might be more concerned with keeping up appearances. Our demands were simple: clothe the people you incarcerate or we’ll keep applying pressure until you do.

At the protest, a woman who’d been recently released from Auckland Women’s Prison spoke about how dire things have gotten in there. She said that the prison isn’t supplying menstrual products, clothing, and underwear to the women they imprison, that she had to share underwear with other inmates, and that she got a painful infection as a result of that. She also said that Auckland Women’s Prison makes prisoners wear sweaters instead of sports bras in the hot sun for male guards’ “comfort” and that that didn’t stop a male guard from watching her shower. It was sobering. The New Zealand settler-state treats its prisoners like animals while its ruling class cavorts about watching child porn and abusing children. I’m angrier than I’ve been in a long time, yet I have to watch everything I say and do so the state doesn’t use that as a pretext to punish me too.

Being conscious hurts right now. In his review of Ari Aster’s film Beau Is Afraid, critic Sam Adams writes that Aster’s characters are ones who “desperately need a respite from the buzzing of their brains – who would give anything if they could, even for a minute, just stop thinking.” Adams cites a line from Aster’s Midsommar screenplay, in which its protagonist Dani smiles “with a joy known only to the insane,” as evidence of his thesis that Aster believes consciousness is immiserating. I feel similar to Aster. I don’t want to shut the world out, but I’m having trouble bearing reality’s white-hot intensity at the moment. I want to learn to strategically modulate it so I can handle what’s to come.

Luckily, there are models for this. Trans people, in particular, have been doing this for centuries. Author Torrey Peters’s novella Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones is a speculative fiction story about how if cis people had to consciously think about gender the way trans people do, capitalist society would collapse in a week. James Baldwin similarly writes in the manuscript Remember This House that “the people cannot bear too much reality.” People have been bearing heavier cognitive loads than me in harsher conditions for millennia, and they’ll continue to do it as things get worse. I just need to learn how, and “Stupid Summer,” or this experiment in which I practice turning my brain on and off, is an exercise in that.

This coming summer, I’m going to try to replace my phone, which I use as a permanent IV drip for immiserating information, with other vices. I’m going to keep going to People Against Prisons meetings but try to contain my political thought and action to specific places and times. When I go to parties full of masturbatory liberals who like to “bear witness” and self-flagellate by talking about the world’s problems, I’m going to suggest we play party games instead. I want to think less so I can do more, because otherwise, constant awareness of the ruling class’s impunity amidst the ecological crisis it created will drive me insane.

Recommended Reading

• I liked this essay by Alicia Kennedy in The Yale Review about the etymology of the word “foodie,” what Anthony Bourdain did to the idea, and where it’s going now. In it, she describes the new generation of foodies as “the original foodies’ kids, who like to put on a dinner party for the sheer fun of it, not just to create content. They have disposable income but need not be wealthy to indulge. It’s more about a sensibility remade for a new generation, one filled with young people who don’t know whether they’ll ever be able to buy a house yet still have to eat.”

• I liked this essay by Noah Kulwin in Protean Magazine about Seth Harp’s book The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces. Harp describes how one of the U.S.’s largest army bases operates as a drug cartel and how the U.S. government lets its top soldiers do whatever they want in exchange for executing difficult killings. In it, Kulwin writes “Special Forces soldiers enjoy privileges and protections afforded to nearly no one else. They are awarded these privileges for carrying out secret and usually illegal operations which are viewed as mission-critical in the corridors of power. The golden rule of Delta Force et al. is omertà, and the reward for silence is a de facto pension that can support enough jet-skis, deck refinishings and key parties to last several lifetimes’ worth of retirements.”

• I liked this essay in n+1 by Rob Arcard about Liz Pelly’s book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, Andrew deWaard’s book Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture, and how the financialization of music and movies into an asset class for investors changed what those songs and films look and sound like. In it, Arcand writes “A kind of vernacular historical materialism underlies [Pelly’s] premise that the musical styles of Billie Eilish or Post Malone emanate from the financialized, algorithmically conditioned environment of streaming itself, as well as deWaard’s ruthlessly symptomatic readings of 30 Rock and Space Jam. From there, both turn to critique the funding structures and production process that form the connective tissue between these economic and aesthetic categories. The critic of derivative media must be no less fluent in the language of boardrooms and earnings calls than that of sitcom dialogue or rap lyrics.”

Tāmaki (Auckland) Events

• The Capitol Cinema Film Club is playing Ken Loach’s Poor Cow on Wednesday, November 26 at The Capitol Cinema at 8:00pm. The film club’s founders describe it as “a strident work of feminist cinema and a vivid rendering of 1960s London.”