The post posttruth journal
All your favourite distortions from here, there, everywhere and nowhere.
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In an alternate reality, Jo learns to listen to her body, and in this alternate reality, her body is telling her to run.
Not away from anything per se, more like through things. Through herself. It’s winter. She’s reminded of something a therapist once said of the season: When everything looks bleak, you just have to think about what’s growing under the surface. On those long snowy trails she feels more alive than she has done for some time. She falls in love with that almost feral feeling you get after crossing the 15k mark. Sports scientists would describe such a moment as that of the endocannabinoids kicking in. Jo would much rather think about it as comparable to a trance-like mental state that she’d sometimes escape to in her teenage years with a group of misfits from school who took her in and showed her what it was that London really had to offer music lovers after dark. The experience was freeing but complex, not least because if the friends in question struggled with anything it was a complete lack of limits that Jo was thoroughly unable to relate to or understand, given how tightly controlled her home set up was. She straddled both worlds, unable to let down her guard or let people in in either of them. Before her Forrest-gump style winter, Jo had fallen in love with running once before. She had been eleven years old, started running in the woods with a group of kids and found she was quite good at it, only in the sense that she had qualified for a minor race which meant being included in training sessions. The love affair with running died shortly after that one race: her father had taken it upon himself to prepare her for it, an experience, which, to be frank, involved more crying than it did running, per his absurd and erratic pedagogical approach undergirded by rules that made absolutely no sense and were informed by whatever dark fire it was that was burning in him that he’d always find distorted justifications for. Projections, really. Jo was a dumping ground for them. So was her mother, who in turn became a projection-generator herself, as is easily done in a household where throwaway comments at the extreme end of misogyny were nonchalantly thrown around day in day out. Women were either whores or dogs. That was one lesson. Or if they exerted any power at all, they were crazy, of course. And their bodies were things to control, at whatever cost to their sense of self. In Jo’s alternate reality, a reality that is taking place in a future of inconceivable freedom, and in which she is running long distances because that’s exactly what her body wants her to do, she experiences more emotions bubbling up than she knows what to do with. Winter has passed, things are growing, people are smiling. Warmth. She takes emotional risks, even, shares an intimate story from a very dark time, and experiences so much empathy and acceptance, she can’t help but feel angry about what was lacking before. Rage. It usually turned inwards, now, something about the frantic momentum of one foot springing after the next, had turned it on its head. But where to put it? A phone call with her mother, something dislodges inside her and springs outwards. “Why can’t you be a parent?” she finds herself screaming out of nowhere. “Why can’t you fucking take responsibility?” Shot one. Shot two. Machine gun drops to the ground. The pause, speedy ‘I’ve got to go’ and her mother hangs up. A message a few days later, inquiring into Jo’s mental health. The retort being a new one she should have used years ago. ‘Just because I’m speaking my mind, doesn’t mean I’m crazy.’ An eventual ceasefire. Apologies for the past, and for the present, all round. Taking fucking responsibility. Why didn’t she do that before, when it mattered? When she let him stay even though she had to send Jo to off Boots to pick up concealer for the bruise under her eye. When she let him stay despite all of it. The constant belittling and aggression, the terror and mistrust. The excessive gaslighting. And why rope Jo in to play witness and saviour around repeat contexts in which a woman is loved so fiercely she must be made to feel small and disposable -- and have these strange, intertwining emotional fragments form the uncompletable jigsaw puzzle that were her earliest lessons on adult love. It’s summer, things are in full bloom. Beautiful things, strange things. Warm things. Scary things. Sometimes, humanly mercurial things. Her body says, slow down a little bit, no need to run that far now. Lie here. Take a look at those clouds. See how nice and safe and magical it feels to be down here watching them. Don’t let that feeling go.
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Part 1
In a faraway time, and a faraway place, Jo lands her dream job. Or her father’s dream job. One of the two. Potentially both, who knows. What an achievement. She’s fresh out of J-school -- completed on her home turf, and, interestingly, exactly where her father studied -- and is the youngest and least experienced trainee in a cohort of groomed-to-be star reporters parachuted across the world to work at the region’s largest and oldest broadsheet, The Post Twilight Post Truth Post, where, it was known that occasionally, respectable journalism was done. She’s also kind of broke, living on an embarrassing trainee-salary in gangster-riddled windowless-subdivided hell whose only comfort came in the rare appearance of Mr. Whiskers, a slightly shy rat who’d hang out in the bins outside a front door whose window had been shattered when loan sharks came one night to intimidate Jo’s neighbour, a pregnant, pint sized filipina with pink hair and a spider tattoo on her neck who once taught her to break into her own room when Jo locked herself out. NO RUN-ON SENTENCES!!!! (ED) REWRITE. The opportunity of a lifetime, and an enviable career start which promised speedy career progression -- if cards were played right and front page scoops gathered. The move precipitated a clash with her father and a whirlwind of family drama that led to an eight year rift. The absolute optimal conditions for what was to come. What do you, my kind reader, need to know about The Post Truth Post Twilight Post? Well, first things first, it’s definitely fictional and not based on anything real at all, I promise you that. It’s also a colonial legacy and a geopolitical clusterfuck which, like most of the sad newsy-papery-things trying to survive the 21st Century, gets passed around by various enigmatic proprietors hoping they might get more out of it than debt and a barrage of bitchy comment pieces and muckraking by rival, equally broke and beleaguered publications. In Jo’s time there, its owners had officially given up on pretending to care about this storied and intensely-gossiped-about establishment, and were desperate to sell. Like trying to flog a fancy estate by covering up rot with stucco veneers, ambitious and seasoned reporters were brought in from across the globe with the promise that they’d actually get to do really good work out of one of the only corners of the region that supposedly still enjoyed free press. For now. In the spirit of the Digital-Media-is-our-Messiah times, that included the impressive hire of the couple responsible for the Daily Fail’s explosive online success -- including its infamous Sidebar of Shame -- a feat both felt a tad guilty about and an experience from which both were still healing. Were these star-studded journos able to do all the fancy things they were promised they could do? Hmmm. Well, may I remind you, kind reader, that the proprietors were looking to sell, and not especially indiscriminately. I.e. there were prospective buyers they might not have wanted to alienate. May I also explain to you the particular nature of geopolitical fuckism meets a clash of gargantuan reporter egos and the impact these forces have on the ability of anyone to get anything sensible done against a backdrop of influence no one could ever really figure out. What is one of the key differences between a British editor and an American one, for example? Well, as one almost-permanently wasted but brilliant British colleague found it, if you call your American boss a ‘cunt’ -- even if it’s precipitated by the word ‘good’ -- you will get fired. But then, you’ll get reinstated once that ‘good cunt’ is replaced by another colleague -- let’s call him ‘ambivalent cunt’ -- who hails from a big sooty place local reporters would most probably refer to as Mordor if they ever had time to read Lord of The Rings, which they absolutely did not, given that they were up-to-their eyeballs examining the intricate political and legal stuff to do with the city’s changing relationship to a domineering and all-seeing eyeball perched on a volcanic hill that screamed constantly into the digital void about auspicious plenums, economic miracles and a century all for itself. THIS METAPHOR MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE: (ED). REWORK. Eyeballs, eyeballs, eyeballs. That’s a word a lot of grumpy, whiskey-guzzling old print journalists hear often in meetings with the flashy, bushy-tailed youngsters who they are convinced know absolutely nothing about ‘real’ journalism. And by ‘real’ journalism, what they mean is the tradition of a pompous Anglosaxon man coming in to put his name above work mostly gathered by local reporters. Now that was a tradition Jo’s father had vehemently and litigiously pushed back against in his career-breaking day covering turbulence, war, and the crumbling of an empire from his home turf for the British press when Jo was just a baby. So, she was sensitive to some of the frustrations directed at her and parachuted-in-peers from her local colleagues, and maybe, even, sometimes, their willing punch bag. Eyeballs, eyeballs, eyeballs. Clicks, clicks, clicks. One of the main things these crusty old journalists have to learn about when someone explains what a ‘digital revolution’ means to them, is that there’s just a lot more competition to worry about -- a lot more voices screaming into void, with -- like the rest of us, varying personal agendas and yearnings for attention, power, and maybe, even, a spot of redemption. REALLY? REDEMPTION? WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THING THIS IS; MOBY DICK? PRETENTIOUS TWAT. One of them, it turned out, was the gossip blog of a very strange and kind of awkward and lizardy British guy a couple of years older than Jo. He had a real penchant for performative, attention-grabbing gestures in various self-righteous poses that worked well for his power-antagonizing brand. These included, but were not limited to, the gesture of sending Christmas cards with naked pictures of himself to a selection of female reporters at his self-anointed rival, The Post Truth Post Twilight Post, where he was disliked and dismissed by all. Except for the few friends of the reporter fired for getting the paper into some libel stuff who he had briefly dated and for whom he’d revamped his blog into an online news portal she could steer along with him and take aim at the place that most unceremonious bumped her from her illustrious trainee-reporter-on-the-rise slot. See what I mean about raging egos? And we haven’t got into what happens when forces like these meet the crazy-making fumes of political unrest meets 21st century reporting/ void screaming. There’s no word that quite encapsulates what all of that coming together feels like. But there is the following sound: AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. ED: WHAT THE FUCK? Anyway, she dumped him for a better job. Colleagues still get to be regaled with intricate details of their sex life. Jo first met him once when she was flat hunting and he had a room up for let. She’d been conditioned by her mentor to dislike him, but was also curious and open minded enough to want to figure him out for herself. He wouldn’t look her in the eye, and talked at her constantly. ‘Does the Post have a dartboard with my face on it?’ he asked at one point. ‘Nope,’ she replied. She didn’t move in. It would only be a couple of years on, having left the Post under, well, very uncomfortable and opaque conditions that brought about stress-related illness for which she was briefly hospitalized -- when enough career resentment had built that the idea of working for an outlet with increasing bite, and, admittedly, a lot more relevance, started to look really kind of sparkly. Lord-of-the-rings ring kinda sparkly. A mutual friend had recommended her as his right hand man, and, when the community found out that she’d accepted, the headline was: What a good hire. This time round, when they met, her impression of him had changed. There was still that discomfort: He was still fascinatingly uncomfortable in his own skin and self-important in his statements, but there was also this sadness and weariness about him, like he was only starting to realise how his insane drive to be televised in this attention-grabbing fist-shaking stance, had impacted to his capacity to lead a normal life, connect about normal things, have a perspective in which the front page didn’t always read: Someone is coming for me, and it’s because I’m important. Did this reflection come from Lizard man himself, or was it therapeutic work of Jo? She can’t remember. What she does remember is that taking on that job, in the service of her ego, was one of the biggest and most important mistakes of her life. Sigrid needs money. She tries different things: Standing on a street corner with a clipboard: Hello, what do you know about the plight of deaf children? Starts off swimmingly. After two weeks of training she learns to smile warmly, look at strangers like she’s known and loved them her whole life, and tap into that old, weather-worn skill of disabling own you safe-person navigational system and creating illusion of warmth and intimacy to get agreeable results: Four sign-ups on her first day in Margate. The newsletter they circulate dubs her their ‘charity fundraising femme fatale’. Things go downhill from there: Only one sign up outside a bet shop in Surbiton that doesn’t clear. So she tries writing, translations. Another game, some overlapping rules. The rich boyfriend of her friend needs his posh travel website translated. Sophistication is so easy to fake, just like warmth. It comes down to word choice: So many expensive things are ‘marvelous’, aren’t they? Or, if you’re 19 and pandering to the bougie and tasteless, ‘breathe-taking’. You’d have no idea she was the granddaughter of a felon from the Hungarian slums, would you? In the game of upward-mobility, rule number one is: erase all traces of the past. What about that boxer, Attila, with your family name? No idea who that is. Anyone here with family friends who smuggle cars? Nope. Hungarians are famously masters of illusion. Forged documents of nobility were all the rage in the 19th century. Nowadays it’s all around delusions of lost grandeur. Who robbed us of our own fantasies that had us lose every war we ever got involved in? The answer changes everyday. Sometimes it helps to shake your fist at a stone that’s looking at you funny. Jo, the cold-blooded Norwegian in the family, was prudent: She knew that art was a game played between rich people, chucked her flute out, and followed in her father’s bootstrapping journalistic footsteps. They used to test each other on long drives in the car. What was the capital of Nigeria? When did the Tiananmen Massacre take place? Who was Gorby? Rapid-fire velocity, just like when they’d play whist and rumi together. First rule of journo club: Just know more. No one can erase the facts you have in your head. After a shaky start, she learns to write the chutz-pat of a middle-aged man, and is respected for it. Everyday at the keyboard is a performance of punchy and clipped copy. She draws people to her that see the play, not the performer. Play: Jo knew her judge of character was shaky at best and thought it prudent to take up self-defense classes. Performer: Jo hated violence. Jo had always felt a strange pull to the world of flying fists. She discovered, quickly, that, on the mat, people saw her. The performer. Saw how she moved and what this said about her mental state. The mistakes she made, the risks she took. Her compulsion to protect, to disarm, to grapple with those algorithms in this specific context. Here might have been the first place she’d been to in a long time where a forced smile and a fancy word was not a prerequisite for being included. Watch people. Her coach said. Everyone has patterns. The trick is to find the flaw in the pattern and exploit it. One day, he stood in the centre of the ring and instructed her to put on a helmet, and must have instructed her friend and sparring partner to go all out, particularly blows to the head. She was certain she’d outsmart him, but as fists rained down on her she found herself immobilized by her own rage and feelings of betrayal. A few moments later she stormed out of the gym, knowing full well that this was exactly the training she’d signed up for. That maybe she needed. Her sparring style changed. At first she was all about the charge. Get ahead of their first move and make them dizzy with offensive maneuvers. Like a news story. Who.What.Where.When:Why. KO. It’s very rare that you’d win by gassing out your opponent. Her coach said. I like to trap mine. The clinch against the cage. First. you have to goad them into position. There are two types of fighters: Movers, and blungeoners. Movers read you like a book. Blungeoners have raw strength and unending persistence. Her fighting style changed when she started to see sparring partners as fellow performers in little plays they were acting out in real time, that felt, thoroughly real. Two people speaking about things they don’t really know how to talk about but can somehow explain to each other now, some kind of connection coming out of that makes fake smiles and fancy words completely unnecessary. And that, despite whatever has been seen or shared in that little play of real, unspoken things, they’ll be an end-of-class amicable head nod and a See you next time. ResearchShe likes to sit on Jo's bed since she left. Scan the room. Remember. Wait. Dark pink linen curtains. Swaying slightly. Shimmering midnight sun beams on the wall that some years ago after Sigrid had crept in Jo told her were the old gods staring at them. Look, there’s your friend Loki making all his twisted babies. Like Fenrir. Yeah. He’s there. And there’s Baldr. Which one’s Baldr. What’s he look like? Baldr’s the one everyone likes. What happens to Baldr. Oh he dies and then all the gods get mad and kill each other and the world ends. What Loki too? I don’t know. I think he messed up or killed Baldr or something. Anyway he was cool. Nobody could tell him what to do. Just like you. Silver music stand. One sheet suspended sideways like a freeze frame image. Solveig’ song. Pencil markings: SOFT!!! It’s sad isn’t it. Yeah it’s supposed to be. Downstairs when a door slams. Jo wraps her arms around Sigrid and gently leans her chin on the top of her head. One photograph pinned to the wall. The garden. Long grass. Squinting Sigrid in pigtails, mickey mouse shirt. Arms wrapped around Jo at the waist. Jo in a white sundress, puppy Fenrir in her arms. Why wouldn’t she take this with her? A dark wooden desk, empty and clean except for a black jewelry box. Sigrid wanders over to open it again, as she has done multiple times these last weeks. A little ballerina spins. She closes and opens it again and again, there her mind's eye sketches Jo’s frozen grin.
No flute. She knows nowhere places. Places with no sea, no cool waves, no sand. She knows the never ending roots of a nothingland tree, the serpent that eats itself, the missing eye. She knows war. The pauses of breath that last too long. The clicks of imperfectly oiled keys, that silvery sound sharpening despite diaphragmatic resistance. She knows bloodsoaked places, sees over all nowhere worlds, knows mistakes before she makes them, knows that e to d flat, e to d flat, e to d flat still won’t get that fourth finger moving without a lag when it’s crunch time. Knows that body betrays mind regularly, and that mind rarely forgives. She watches a gentle god bleed, and the venom of winding serpents drip down majestic walls. She tastes wolf mauled giant flesh, sees the nowhere tree shudder, hears Odin’s endless questions that are met with no comforting answers. What if he had never asked the old witch how things would go wrong? The nothing gods shoot barbs into her darting knuckles as the fingernails of the dead float like blurry notes on the page. Does she know why are they always so far away when she needs them? She sees hot stars tumble, a blackening sun, an unleashed wolf, and an old witch hang her head and sink into oblivion, pulling the whole nowhere world with it. She knows nowhere places, but she knows somewhere places, too. Places with sea and cool waves and sand. Places with this tree, and that tree, and they all stand tall and smell good, and offer shelter. Places without self-eating serpents, but tiny little wobbly green blobs your sister finds in the garden and gently places on your nail, and you shudder a little bit but she tells you they don’t bite and that one day they’ll explode from a cocoon looking really cool. Places with simple major scales and arpeggios, and all the old songs you once learnt that flow so effortlessly despite all the wars you once waged against them. Places with loud, incessant barking, and a wolf’s tail that wags so enthusiastically it nearly capsizes you. Places where a door slams shut and a girl screams, ‘I’m never going to get this right’, and then an old witch rises from the earth holding Odin’s dripping, missing eye (it was probably never really his anyway) and says; “uff da. Better luck next time”.
Jo prepares for her flute recital, inspired by old norse end of the world myth 'Völuspá and the Red Army Choir Crowds heaving. White smog floating, stinging. Ding. Shattered ticket machine. Kale salad and pumpkin seeds. Enter. Ctrl-alt-delete. Enter. Canisters and bricks on disgorging streets. Sun’s lacerations. All you fight fans. Ctrl-alt-c. Ctrl-alt-p. Ctrl-alt-delete. Gleaming structures, towering shadows, shuffling reflections. Shadow boxers and entwined torsos. Toes darting, ropes bouncing, bodies capsized. Mouthguards in. Me against me. Arms up. Thuds and tussles. Taste of metal. Tap. Purple elbows. I said tap. You against me. Two. One. Three. Three. One. One. Don’t let him take your back. Psshh. Clanging barbells, swinging bags, bloody knuckles. Keep moving. Psshh. Psshh. Gloves dripping. Dash. Sandy sweat, glittering water, swam so far everyone’s a speck. Dash. Adapted to survive hostile environments. These coffee rings, I just can’t read. Meat cleavers? Ctrl-alt-c, ctrl-alt-p, ctrl-alt-delete. Bleeding Newsfeeds. Ding. They just like to play. Crazy baby girl, there ain’t nothing. Parry. They use us to play each other. Dash. Catch me if you can. Me against me. tap. Bodies in motion. sideways. Sprawl. Sprawl. Hands off his t-shirt. Sinews gleaming. Tires hurtling. Get him to the ground. Plates crashing. Me against you. Keep it Simple, Stupid: don’t take street fights to the ground. Better go now, curfew in an hour. Ding. Philosophical questions: What’s a red line if it only wobbles? What is another word for fear? Dash. Ghosts layered on ghosts layered on ghosts. Dash. face so pretty you don’t see a scar. Which proves. Ctrl-alt-delete. Dash. Ding. Easy. Oss. Head high. One two. Fake. three. Push kick. Push kick. Stop. Hold. Swivel. Side mount. Trap his ankles, trap his ankles. Fingers wrapping forearm. Forearm pressing bicep. My boa constrictor body. Elbow pushing elbow. And squeeze.
Tap. I said tap. Tap. This gorgeous, gleaming, electric city. And everyone got what they paid for. Inspired by that Hong Kong summer, 2019 |
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