Drone Notes

On fixating, on believing, on the constant American hum.

I.

I was intrigued at first, for at least two long nights—thumbing ever downward through the /UFOs subreddit, sifting through grainy or shaky phone footage for glimpses of bright lights in the sky looking choreographed, something abnormal to hang onto or else explain it all away. The orbs, many were careful to distinguish, were different from whatever it was that appeared to be shooting lasers at something on ground or sea level, different from the bright lights that circled erratically—way too fast for commercial crafts—or clustered together like synchronized swimmers floating just above the coastline. I clicked links to New Jersey police dispatch recordings, to leaked (?) military patents, to high-resolution stills of aircraft resembling complex dodecahedra, undetectable (I guess) by existing radar. I skimmed condensed histories of alien sightings written in the credulous tone of people who live full time in the subterranean caverns of alternative realities, earnest assessments from people claiming to have flight experience, military experience, who confirmed that none of this was normal—that there was (at the very least) something they weren’t telling us.

I had fun with all of this, I have to admit. Growing up in this country makes you susceptible to the belief that anything is possible—not just because on every screen there’s a rags-to-riches story that ends with a wide shot in an impossibly spacious naturally-lit kitchen, but because we’ve all internalized the extent to which our ruling class is shaping reality, and our material experience within it, while openly lying about their ability and desire to do so. Divorced from the physical body, from the unmediated conditions of toxicity and suffering on the ground, the American mind might believe any story at all. Why not aliens? Why not a foreign adversary? Why not proof of holographic projection capabilities developed in secret by the military? Why not an elaborate distraction from the news of a healthcare CEO’s recent assassination, so giddily received? Why not an exercise in making people fearful, nationalistic, supportive of increasing the defense budget? Why not an intervention by extra-terrestrials watching us drift closer to nuclear proliferation, or nuclear annihilation, or building nuclear plants to power the AI search results that no one really asked for, just so the stock market could climb a little while longer?

I’ll believe it when I see it comes close to my personal philosophy regarding most speculative information, but still—I liked this last story best. Treading carefully over the frozen ground at the dog park, under the blue sky of an eerily warm December, Jay and I fantasized about the possibility of inter-dimensional beings coming down to earth to stop us from making all the bad decisions we seemed to be on the precipice of making. We liked believing they were here to demonstrate that it was possible to develop energy that wasn’t combustible or poisonous, the way (it was rumored in the caverns) they once did for agriculture. Joseph had agreed with this too, I related, specifically on the nuclear stuff: that alien intervention was necessary, since we “sure as hell need some help.” Sam thought it was probably the government testing holograms to create mass psychosis. Jesse was certain it was China. Tyler, somewhat ironically, suggested it was a marketing campaign for some hipster prebiotic soda. Sophia, in response to my text asking whether she thought the aliens were here, responded immediately: “They been here. The real tinfoil hat question is why are they getting press now??!”

As with nearly every American spectacle, I quickly lost interest in the thing itself and became fixated on how people were reacting to it. I find you can decipher the outlines of anyone’s worldview by doing this, and thereby inch closer to a more accurate understanding of Why Things Are The Way They Are: an understanding that’s eluded me my whole life. And so ultimately, the drone story became a sort of casual test: a means of mapping who had lost their faith, and to whom they had lost it, and to whom they were now ceding their sense of hope or power or control, perched as we were on the cliff’s edge of something that everyone could feel, but only a lucky, evil few could see.

II.

Before the drones, before the assassination, even before the news began ticking up into its old hysteria (hand in glove) vetting the cabinet picks and so on, there was already this constant low buzzing everywhere in this country, so ambient it might be caused by freeway traffic or emitted from billboards—an omnipresent bass note of dread rumbling in the lowest registers, noted (very possibly) by guts and animals and brain stems alone.

Since the election, this low buzz has pitched upward into a mosquito-like whine. What was once a creeping feeling, an educated projection, now registers as tinnitus in the ears. This is my theory, anyway, for Why Things Are The Way They Are: eroding-feeling, dissonant and slipping, heavy fuzz distortions obscuring the poetry of life and living, the leafy twilit moments, tank imagery deafening, minds vacating tired bodies, bodies vibrating alone on their phones in their cars.

In the ideal mood with which to face the day right now (a disassociation veering into absurdism) I imagine a monologue in a stand-up special I’ll never write, one in which I implore our overlords to turn down the brain-cooking microwaves just a touch. You’re only hurting yourself! I exclaim, digressing into a long joke about assembly lines, production quotas, workplace efficiency…

As an Aquarius (the bit continues) it’s so much easier for me to speak from a we than an I. I can feel so blinkered—embarrassingly assured of the specialness of its own narrative arc. But when dumped into a collective, forced to find a shared territory from which to hold forth, its active nouns take on a cumulative power that makes me feel snug and held, embedded in a historical moment. We reject these systems, for instance. We long to throw our phones into the sea.

But I admit, it could be only me who feels this way. Only I attribute the jerky hand gestures of angry drivers to this mysterious American drone note. Only I find it impossible to plan for more than three or four months ahead. Only I squirm at the driverless cars, the computer watches, the smart fridges, the books written by machines. Only I welcome a fresh, bizarre storyline. Only I am exiting the holiday corridor gulping for air, fantasizing about rest, because I worked too much again, scared about money; only I worry I won’t ever catch up.

Yesterday my yoga teacher invited us to leave what we needed to leave at the threshold of this new year. Lying in corpse pose, my muscles warm and aching, I tried to get my drifting mind to make a list. As if the month were a sieve through which the stormwater of this moment might be filtered. As if I could begin to distinguish sound from sound, or any one thing from the next.

III.

I could go on and on.

This week the inversion drifted in and hunkered down: mystic and agate white, blowing flakes over our morning walks. In the afternoons when the soft surrounding mountain peaks are visible through the clouds, I can see a fine dusting of snow up there: a patchy blanket on the distant dead meadows and their pubic clusters of evergreen, echoes of the sloping Southern Humboldt hills but bitter cold, nothing at all to hide.

This past semester I asked my writing students to think about their fixations. Every writer knows that Thoreau quote about knowing their own bone, burying then unearthing then gnawing at it, but I asked them to make a list. What are your bones? I asked the roomful of quizzical faces, morning dark still out the broken classroom window, then set a little timer on my cell phone and started to write.

There’s the moon rising above a hill. There’s solidarity with the soft human body as it makes its way through the world of machines. There’s a desire to throw a light on systems, to find a way beyond them, to distinguish between the grid and the life inside it. There’s alienation and tenderness. There’s a yearning to create resonant beauty from common words, in such a way that reminds others they can do this too. There’s art and work in permanent imbalance. There’s a resistance to specificity. There’s three layers of color: the sky, the mountain, and then the grass.

Yesterday pacing around the cold studio, white sky out the windows and also leaking in, I pushed the red record button and began my address.

I read something the other day. I’ve been listening to music. I’ve been thinking. I dream of Oregon, and California, and a northern island I don’t know about yet. I took a long walk, then drove home. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I laughed and laughed. I got a little lonely. I had such a good conversation. I’m not sure how long we’ll stay. I want to write more, and work less. I guess I’m repeating myself now. I know. I love you. I still believe in everything.