Three Years Later

The Windows Broke. The System Didn't

Ten thousand years ago today, in an undisclosed location, I lost my roughly 36-hour struggle to not be born and emerged into a world that looks nothing like it does today. No social media, no Internet, stone-age personal computers. The Soviet Union was still around, though not for long. We were on the cusp of the End of History, a fact I would learn at seven to my infinite despair. The idea that I'd missed out on all the exciting parts of humanity's stumbling journey was unbearable, and I prayed to a God I did not believe in to transport me out of the suburbs and into, jeez, basically any other time. The 1940s, maybe?

Anyway there's a happy ending to this story, obviously, for me and no one else and honestly not really for me either. Turns out History is terrible. The follies of children.

In a purely literal sense I have had many birthdays–an increasingly horrifying number, to be frank. But it doesn't feel that way. As far as I'm concerned, this is my third. I am three years old today.

On My 28th, 2020, I woke up early in my Portland, Oregon apartment and went for a walk. I was still masking outside at the time because we were still supposed to, and someone without a mask passed very close to me and I yelled at her and she yelled back and things escalated and I shoved her just as a cop drove by and put on his lights and separated us. She declined to press charges. The cop told me to calm the hell down. He was not unfriendly. Everyone was so on edge, you know? And I look white, and I'm good with authority. And there it was: the last peaceful interaction with a cop I'd have in a very long time.

I went kayaking with a friend. It was glorious to be out on the water with another living person, almost like we weren't in the middle of a pandemic. The plan was to go home after and order sushi and maybe play a video game, browse Twitter, chill with the dog.

And then my phone buzzed. A different friend, someone I'd been fighting with. There was a protest that night. Portland's first. Second? George Floyd. I'd planned to skip it–it was my birthday, after all, and I knew there would be more. May 29th promised to be the big one anyway. I stared at my phone, sighed, and said yes. Whatever. When one of Portland's like fifteen Black people asks you to go to a BLM protest with him you say yes no matter how big a jerk he's been.

It was the first day of the rest of my life. 24 hours later I watched Chase Bank burn and heard glass shatter everywhere around me and I stood and faced that first police line of that summer, front row, as an activist, and when they hit me with tear gas I remembered Basic Training and the gas chamber and I knew my skin and eyes would stop burning soon but swore the city never would–not until we got justice. Police abolition and replacement with an institution that actually protects and serves the people, all people. Prison reform. No more names to chant. No more murders.

I pivoted to doing the journalism thing by mid-June and never turned back. Adhered to the code of non-interference: my coverage has an obvious and undisguised angle but I no longer participated in the actions. Seemed like the best way to help the cause. But it didn't start that way.

Two years ago today, I stood on the beach in Ensenada, Mexico, alone. Everything I owned was in my Subaru Impreza parked back at the campground or in a storage unit on the outskirts of Portland waiting for me to return just long enough to shove everything into a moving truck and drive cross-country: my final flight from the city I'd lived in for ten years. I bled for that city: shrapnel that tore through my pants and into my leg and so deep the doctor wouldn't stitch it when I went to urgent care the next day. Closer to combat than anything I'd experienced in the military, those protests, and I'd felt as close to the people around me as I'd ever felt to the people I'd met in the service: comrades in arms and ideology, or so I'd thought. I had believed–truly believed–in what now seems an absurdity: that if we broke enough windows, things would change.

And things changed all right. Everything changed, except the things we protested. No abolition, no defunding, not even reform. The city that backed us to the hilt soured on us, reelected mayor Ted Wheeler despite the things he'd allowed the cops to do to us, to them, to everyone. The cops were already demanding more funds and soon they would receive them.

The city changed, though. It is not a smoldering pile of rubble like Fox News wants you to believe, but it is deeply unwell. We had been brutalized, all of us, made into brutes: protesters and bystanders alike. Higher concentrations of tear gas for longer than anyone has yet studied, and it got into the houses of the people who stayed at home too. Chaos on the streets. Don't go out after dark. Fox will tell you it was the Antifas and I won't sit here and tell you all of them were angels but it was the cops you really had to watch out for. Roving gangs of bastards. The feds, in July, the three-letters: DHS, ICE, FBI. Loaded M4s at the ready in a uniform very close to the one I used to wear.

I had changed, too. I'd sold footage and articles and had a large Twitter account I was trying not to log onto so I couldn't see what people were saying about me. It was during that month and a half flight into Mexico that I learned the best way to deal with having your heart broken: post about how happy you are every time you want to die. That's what really hurts the haters. It's been a long time now, lots of water under the bridge, and I feel distant enough from that sadness to motion towards the extent and depth of it.

Not everyone in the city believed I was some kind of secret fascist and cynical grifter and dangerous betrayer, but most of them sensibly kept their mouths shut about their support in public. Not all, and I am grateful to the ones who spoke out. But many. Most.

No one has ever provided good evidence that I'm a cryptofascist, but most people who believe I'm secretly far right also seem to believe I livestreamed protests, so the truth is clearly not important here. The first iteration of “How I Got Here" was an attempt to address the various specific allegations leveled against me. It did not work. Nothing I tried did.

By the beginning of May, I was no longer welcome at events—I'd been physically removed. Good night alt right, bash the fash, etc. Not safe. So I left. Broke my lease. Drove south.

Ensenada was beautiful and so was the open road: the saguaros enormous and endless on either side of the long grey stretch of highway, the azure sea just beyond. There are military checkpoints but no cops to stop you from driving as fast as you can south, down and down and down, until the road ends in Cabo where the rich like to play. I got most of my shit stolen out of the back of my car and took a catastrophic amount of acid and wandered into the desert and spent a day and a night out there, the vultures and the merciless sun and a riot of stars above hills that shifted and danced all night. I found what I was looking for. Got back into the car, drove north, back to Portland, where I had the rest of my shit stolen out of the back of my car, of course, and then drove a UHaul all the way to New York City with my furniture and my books and my few remaining clothes, to try to start over.

One year ago today I woke up in Scottsdale, Arizona and hiked Camelback Mountain as the sun came up. A friend from way back had a corporate retreat and was allowed a plus one; her husband couldn't make it so I got to tag along. That night we went out and I had an enormous steak and it was a beautiful day. I'd recently wrapped a piece for NYMag. I'd written for Rolling Stone. I'd written for The New Republic. Impossible, unthinkable. It still feels like I started dreaming in 2020 and never woke up: one of those meandering dreams that gets weirder the more you dream it. I hadn't dropped out of school, like I almost did. Didn't drop out of life either. Clawing my way into the literal goddamn dream, and if my social life was a little bit empty, so what? I was getting that back too.

Today I woke up in my room, in my bed, in my favorite city in the world, with a final gift from The Mouse: a wicked sore throat and an upset stomach. I drank some lemon ginger honey tea and played Ixion and argued with a friend about revolution–the same person who dragged me to that protest three years and a thousand fights ago. I am cooking up an atom bomb on my computer. I am plotting sheer destruction. I want to talk about the windows, finally. Time to deal with the fever dream of that summer. Time to look clear-eyed at the wreckage and acknowledge the truth:

We failed.

We made the world worse, and we have to talk about why. Not because the cause was bad, but because it is good.

The opportunity will come again. It will be unpredictable, and it may take years, but there will be another upwelling of rage at our increasingly intolerable condition: this oppression, this emptiness, this sickness. We need a new left, a real one, that retakes populism and offers an actual, walkable path to real solutions. Something able to address the deep, systemic racism that has poisoned this country from its birth but need not poison us forever. Something also to address the very real problems fascism pretends to solve but only renders worse. Something of and for the working class that is also of and for everyone. The biggest possible tent but with bouncers at the door. Not a class war. A war against class.

One year from now, maybe I'll have a book on the way. One year from now, maybe I won't be invited into polite society anymore. One year from now will be four years of dreaming.

Who knows how crazy things could get.