Body High 25: Insanity's Definition
Expert tips on surviving in a country that despises you
We are all queer Black immigrant women now. Welcome.
Also, hold onto something. Like, tight.
I’m here to tell you things are not going to be okay. Okay? Not at all, no matter what your favorite news reader’s unnaturally even delivery is telling you. We Sojourn District dwellers are not quite cooked, but we’re lookin’ at the grease and feeling its heat.
Helping to make life hard for the White House is how I want to be useful. The problem is that I am not strong. Not physically.
There ain’t a lot of money in delivering bad news, but I’ve crunched the numbers and… well, I’d rather be sane than solvent.
Consider the last vestige of mainstream humor: Late-night network television. Comcast (NBC), Paramount (CBS), and Disney are—for now—trotting out brave, sad men to convince us that our unchartered political domination is funny or, at least, in the ballpark of okay. The complexity of the denial that Seth Meyers projects impresses me most; it’s veiled with layers of fear, ambition, and lots of alcohol.
The Meyers studio audience’s weakened laughter is a measure of self-deception winding down.
I don’t know what Stephen Colbert is taking, as that guy has actually improved in this climate of inevitability. My gut tells me that homeboy is on some serious Catholicism, the uncut stuff from Yurp. Hollywood neighbor Jimmy Kimmel has been the nation’s honest comedy broker, weeping in public early, presaging our own eventual tears.
A ‘72-degree dictatorship’ is a fake-comfy fascism
In this three-minute clip, many sentences are spoken that differ from what I’ve written on this page, but not all of them. I’d categorized the need to watch this video as a judgement call.
Yes, conditions are going to suck, and in a range of unimaginable ways. An administration that has the audacity to use the words meritocracy and Pete Hegseth in the same sentence is going to legislate morality. At the same time, capitalism with its brakes off is sure to bring financial instability that our era of extreme inequality hasn’t known. I followed the President’s first full week closely and finished it still learning new ways that 4547 is bending America to his will. (We’ve belatedly learned that national governance relies on certain “gentlemen’s agreements,” and the current Oval Office occupant has no use for those. He’s a rapist, after all, not a gentleman.)
To act as if the American life is the same is insanity. Yet, as I said in Friday’s newsletter, we do have to find avenues to laughter.
We must also need to learn all we can about being strong.
When the 9.11 terror attacks happen, Manhattan publishing icon Graydon Carter pronounced “the end of irony” and made himself into an iconic prisoner of the moment. I’m not that particular loudmouth. We’re cannot lose humor. My prediction is that what’s going to make us laugh in healthy ways is going to be darker and come from places of pain.
Now, I’ve met a shit-ton of Americans. In terms of what we still euphemistically call the average American, y’all got little tolerance for pain. At minimum, pain tolerance isn’t what we’re known for. The higher you go up in class, the wimpier the American. And that’s a problem. Toughness—spiritual, physical and psychological is high among the criteria for surviving the tumult to be visited upon us.
The way I see my post-election job description, I will not have done effective journalism if I’m not eventually threatened with prison. And I have zero interest in being imprisoned. But our major news media environment is growing increasing compromised and toothless and I have played the enemy with teeth before.
It would be an honor to let y’all tap into my reserves of Black male strength and resilience via Body High and the other stuff on this here Substack. Helping to make life hard for the White House is how I want to be useful. The problem is that I am not strong. Not physically. Not now.
As mentioned in that last epic installment of Body High, I’ve grown fat this winter. In truth, the slow slide from leanness began when I quit running around that elementary school playground and hunkered down on my film project. Maybe I picked up five pounds. My back and chest muscles started to sag. Then, last month I set off for a month of overeating carbs and fats in Oregon and Northern California. And I drank almost every day.
Since mid-December I’d only really walked for exercise. My round new belly made a bare appearance in last Monday’s live inaugural coverage.
But even before that reveal, my body had begun a return to. Ending road-food privilege alone helped turn the tide. Plus, I’m using free weights when half-watching YouTube clips and turning downward facing dog into pushups every day, again. This mornig I debuted the first round of a challenging exercise, having drilled down on my diet since returning from Up North.
Reasserted in my back slide was was the undeniable correlation between excess heft and pain in our hips. It’s a lesson that must stay with me.
There’s a very hill near my upper-middle class, suburban LA crib. One night between Halloween and Thanksgiving I began running down that hill with my favorite song of that moment pouring out of my earbuds.
Wish I could tell you how amazing the wind felt, combining as it was with the sound.
When I reach the bottom that hill, I smashed the crosswalk button and didn’t miss a beat. The intersection was full of cars—half stopped, half negotiating a signal—but giving a fuck was unimaginable, not on the menu of options. I dance in the sidewalk for the same reason I wear my hair this way: Because I can.
But, yeah. I need to get back to being that guy again. He’s awesome.
On Sunday morning I watched a Canadian Broadcasting Company political panel discussion. An old editor of mine told the host that what’s been unleashed isn’t Trump 2.0. Because of Musk’s involvement and the fallen guardrails, what’s ahead will be more akin to Trump 5.0.
“Good Lord,” whispered this otherwise formal CBC host. It was as though she forgot about her mic, the news was so disorienting.
That’s why I asked that you hold on to something, back at the beginning.
Holding onto other people is an awesome place to start. After the awful death at Charlottesville and the appalling chants of “Jews will not replace us,” I was invited to a gathering in the Chinatown section of LA. It was 2017 and I had just moved back from Oregon. Few of us had yet developed a callous to Trumpian bullshit, and Charlottesville fucked people up.
My lasting specific memory is saying, “No, we’re not doing that” to this one hippie cat’s elaborate solution of by going off the grid and booting society. Sometimes I think dude was right. But even more so than that specific recollection is the tangible memory or the healing in that space. About two dozen people talking, crying, laughing and, perceptibly, healing.
Like what I’m doing? Feel free to contribute to my travel budget.
There’s no way we overcome the present circumstance if we’re spiritually unwell.
Begin preparing to do the hard things, to start put your old, pointlessly harmful ways on a shelf. This is no time to fall apart. This is where your life gets interesting. You can be heroic or you can live a victim.
Welcome to those of you who discovered my journalism through the collected installments of Body High. (Fun quasi-narrative, am I right?) That post functions as No. 24, if you’re keeping count.