This ain't it, baby
On imagining a better world and other January ephemera
This morning there were starlings lined up in the gutter of the rectory next door. They were huddled up in a row and flying down into our yard and onto the roof of our addition. I could barely see them through the condensation on our windows, which was better at least than the solid ice that was on the windows earlier this week. I got my binoculars to get a closer look at their narrow beaks and speckled bodies. They were clearly drinking water out of the gutter, like their own personal birdbath. As I watched them I realized that what caught my attention was the movement. The world is generally so still in winter, it’s rare to see anything moving around out there.
I had a whole New Year’s post planned out in my head, but I never wrote it. There were some phrases and intentions. I thought my phrase for 2026 would be, “It’s not a big deal.” Buddhists would call this equanimity. It was a pledge to be mostly unruffled by the vagaries of the world. It seemed like a very good idea, but then Renee Good was murdered and I could find no way to convince myself that her death was not a big deal. Maybe I’m not a very good Buddhist, but it seems to me that there are a lot of things happening right now that are quite a big deal. Equanimity will have to wait for another year.
I was also going to try to cut down on my negative speech. Especially with my poor, suffering husband, I do a lot of complaining. Complaining about mostly stupid stuff. I’d still like to do less of that but it’s also been a struggle in the early days of 2026.
Here’s the one idea I had that I’m sticking to—weird dancing. Once a day, I move my body in some very weird, funky, perhaps funny way. I do a little dance. I do a silly walk. I flap around like a bird. No doubt, there’s all kinds of research to back this up, but just a quick burst of weird movement changes my mood. It lifts me up. It makes me laugh. Maybe when my husband is there to see my weird dance, it balances out all the negative speech he has to listen to.
This was not at all in my mind as a New Year’s resolution, but I’ve decided I’d like to read more magazines. And by magazines, I mean physical things printed on paper that I can hold in my hand. My friend brought me an old copy of the New York Times Sunday Magazine with an article about the Danish writer Sojev Balle. There was also an interview with John Green. I shouldn’t have been surprised to find myself totally absorbed in reading those articles in the magazine in a way that I never am when I’m reading something online.
The problem is, what magazine do I want to read? I had to skip most of that New York Times magazine my friend gave me because I do not want to read about politics. It’s another thing to mourn in our current moment, that this ugliness has come to consume so much. Politics jumped out of its lane and I don’t know if we’ll ever get it back. There is more to life than what happens in Washington, DC or any state capitol. So much more. That’s what I’d like to read about.
I’ve been out of sorts at the beginning of this new year also because I’ve been dealing with health issues, a persistent sort of dizziness or unsteadiness or floating feeling which, as I write these words, almost makes me laugh out loud with the perfect metaphorical implications of these particular symptoms. At this moment in the world, the miracle is that all of us aren’t constantly feeling dizzy and unsteady and as if our heads are floating away from our bodies.
This unsteady feeling started about the time events for the release of SEX OF THE MIDWEST ramped up and, of course, that’s not a coincidence. It was all so delightful and also a lot. I thought I was handling the stress well, but apparently, it was all going to my head. Literally.
I’ve been to the doctor to eliminate most physical causes. I am not actually unsteady. That is to say, I can stand in tree pose (on one foot) and balance perfectly well. I do not stumble. I can walk a straight line. I have not fallen down. It is a feeling, which should be some comfort, only feelings are all we have.
In my endless googling of symptoms, I discovered something called Persistent Postural-Perceptual Dizziness or PPPD. With PPPD, some real event causes dizziness—a panic attack, an ear infection, benign positional vertigo, etc. It begins with real dizziness, but then you become obsessed with the feeling of dizziness. You begin to monitor constantly for the feeling of dizziness and this obsessive monitoring itself leads to a persistent feeling of…dizziness. Because like so many things, dizziness is as much as product of the brain as it is of physiology.
In other words, you sort of convince yourself that you’re dizzy all the time. And then, you are actually dizzy all the time. It’s not made up. But also, the cause of the dizziness is your own obsession.
Obviously, I’m not an expert on PPPD. It’s a relatively new diagnosis. It makes me think of Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo. Maybe that was what he had. I have no idea if that’s what’s going on with me. But I have decided it’s not a bad idea to just see what happens if I ignore the dizziness. To see what happens if, as much as possible, I try not to think about being dizzy. Do you know how hard it is to not think about something? Well, yes, of course you do.
PPPD happens more often in people who also struggle with anxiety and/or depression, who are perfectionists and who tend to a lot of self-monitoring. So, people exactly like me.
Last Sunday, I went to a vigil organized here in Madison for Renee Good and all the other people who have died as a result of ICE’s brutal violent actions. It was a beautiful event. I’m so thankful to the folks who put it together. It was an event in which we took care of each other so that we could take care of the world. We recognized those we’ve lost. We shared our fears and our survival strategies. We sang. We read poetry.
In one moment, we closed our eyes and imagined the better world we were working toward. This is an act that is both deeply mundane and incredibly radical. It is one thing to understand that the world we’re in is wrong. It is another thing to imagine what we want the world to be. As the organizers said, imagination is key to social change and organizing. If we cannot imagine anything better, we are paralyzed. Trapped. We must be able to imagine a different world.
The exercise made me think of the Jason Isbell song, “This Ain’t It, Baby.” The narrator is speaking to a woman who’s in a bad marriage, stuck in “a Texas town in a wedding gown with a near-beer.” The narrator knows the woman. He’s known her since she was little and as he keeps repeating, he knows her well enough to tell her, “this ain’t it, baby.” She deserves better. She is better.
It’s a raucous song. A rocking song. It’s insistent and that’s the energy I want to summon two weeks into this year. Yeah, 2026, this ain’t it, baby. We are better. We’ve fucked up quite a bit as a country, but we don’t deserve this level of fuck-up. None of us deserve it. This ain’t it. We have to keep insisting on this fact until we make it true.
Enjoyed the read. Want to imagine a better world, tough to do. Haven't tried the weird movement, maybe I'll start my own ministry of funny walks.
The raucous energy of that Isbell song as a call to action really captures something. I've been thinking alot about how music gives us permission to feel insistent about things in ways regular conversation doesn't. That connection between imagination and organizing is everything right now. The dizzyness metaphor works perfectly for this momment too.