You were born in a crowded room.
Hey friend. It’s been at least six weeks since I’ve last written anything substantial which, not even joking a little bit, feels like two years. But you already knew that much. I’m sure if you’re reading this, you’ve likely since seen some combination of tweets or Facebook posts or Instagram stories. Some have been blips of joy and a few pleas for help. Mostly puns tho, so thanks for putting up with that. Many people I know and many don’t know had reached out and been able to help when I was at my worst, so thank you for that too.
I had a friend a while back give me the advice that I’ve been making often hasty decisions out of survival for far too long — reacting, not responding to the world around me. That wasn’t necessarily unwarranted. When you’re insecure about housing, about food, or your health, opportunities become binary. Fight-or-flight. Live-or-die.
Lately, there has been more to react to and more time to respond than ever. For years, I’ve been trying to keep from conflating my anxiety with my self-awareness. So badly I want to silence the small voice in the back of my head that says, “What about this? Did you consider this?” so frequently that when there’s nothing else to consider, it’s then up to me to take a stance.
Between January and March, I’ve been angry and hopeful. At least that’s how I’ve hoped to come off. Nothing in my life felt easier than harnessing my anger at all my endless streams. Though, I end up abstracting the challenging thoughts or tasks and instead of dealing with them healthily or even practically. Yes, I may have a better or more in-depth understanding of why surviving is so challenging. I might have more accurate coordinates to my place in this world. But where’s my time and attention best suited towards now?
Then the world slowed down a lot, and everyone else is asking similar questions themselves.
Prior to the global pandemic, I wasn’t doing too hot. I already set to move out of a room I was renting at the end of February without a clear idea of where I was going next. The bar I had been working at for a year was experiencing a deep, slow season, as it was along the Atlanta Beltline, and not enough people were out walking and brunching in the Winter to provide steady enough employment for even part-time work. I had applied for SNAP/EBT benefits to try to curb one of my more significant expenses to afford a new place to rent but was denied because I wasn’t working the minimum 20 hours a week I needed to get food stamps as a student. Though, before I could be too profoundly demoralized by the formal letter I received from the Georgia state government that I may be too poor for food stamps, I was reminded that oh yeah, I’m in school. Finding a steady enough job, a place to live, and a sense of personal security was taking up too much of my time, and my grades were slipping. It turns out it’s difficult to focus on an already aimless degree when internal debates often boiled down to whether I’d buy lunch or pay for parking downtown for class that morning.
One of the real reasons why I was getting dramatically less work at my job was because of my political outspokenness here and there on Facebook or online and more specifically when I dug up all those problematic posts from gay bar TEN Atlanta’s owner — a friend of my former employers, apparently.
After weeks upon weeks of little work at the bar and having picked up a canvassing gig for a Georgia state representative race (though without a W-2, it didn’t help my food stamps problem), I was given a rare Saturday shift (or, the one day a week I had asked since I started not to be scheduled) and immediately reported that I wasn’t going to make it that day.
I had plans to go camping with some friends (long weekends in phoneless nature sounded very alluring to me) and released the shift, in hopes of trading or picking up something else some other day, but when I returned got a voicemail saying that I was let go at the bar for not showing up. I’m not sure what my oft-vacant manager wanted me to do considering I had told him, and all the group chats that I couldn’t make it, that I wasn’t gonna make it. Don’t really care to know at this point. The weekend went by without a word from them once I had checked my phone after disconnecting, but by the following Tuesday found a missed call from him. It was the first time I was fired via voicemail and, I dunno, I think there are more respectful ways to fire somebody. Ask to call you back? Maybe tell me to come by the bar and look me in the eyes and say after a year as an employee even though you didn’t show up for a shift you told me you couldn’t cover, and I have to fire you. There are more respectful ways of firing someone, but that’s assuming you respect them.
So I just took off.
I took some Delta miles I had been sitting on and booked a flight to Denver — set to leave March 3rd. Instead of rushing into a cheap room somewhere for the month in Atlanta, I planned to go to Colorado to see my sister and her husband, along with some friends who were in town. I didn’t realize it’d be the last normal weekend for a very long time.
W e t e n d t o c o n f l a t e u n d e r s t a n d a b l e
d e c i s i o n s w i t h j u s t i f i a b l e o n e s.
This was a Facebook post I wrote on March 3rd, but it seems pretty damn quaint and pointless in some places now, huh. I don’t know anymore.
I’m sorry, I just don’t think there’s a ‘moderate’ approach when it comes to oppression and discrimination. It’s either there or it’s not, it’s either in our laws and in our hearts or it’s not.
It’s become resoundingly clear to me that even these presidential candidates who I thought were probably well meaning actually never really had any interest in changing the status quo.
For what they lack in intersectionality and ambition they make up for in cowardice and complacency. For Buttigieg and Klobuchar to fold after Biden wins *one* state on virtually name recognition alone doesn’t shed enough light on the strings being pulled behind the scenes, but definitely reminds us of their existence. I was never vocal supporters of either, obviously, but they were better candidates than Frat Bro Joe, right? Clearly?
We know that corporate interests and big money in politics are at the very least *capable* of corrupting not only our government, but our minds and our self-esteem. Whether it’s though advertising, comparing our lives and experiences to others online, or maybe like when ExxonMobil discovered climate change in the 1970’s and put profit over planet. There’s money to be made in fear, but scaring people requires effort, confusing people instead requires less.
It’s just manipulating truth for personal and financial gain. We tend to conflate understandable decisions with justifiable ones.It’s my opinion that if corporations have *any* hand in making decision in our democracy, there will always be profit sought and Americans measured not by the rights endowed by their creator, but by their capacity to consume and produce.
This is when the “capitalism” vs “socialism” debate comes in, which i’m deeply disinterested in because it’s a debate invented to scare people into thinking it’s too risky to demand corporations have a modicum of morality in the way they conduct business, and asks us as people to have a modicum of decency to human beings; even and perhaps especially the ones we cannot see. If you agree with that, you’re a radical progressive in the eyes of establishment politics and media. Welcome to the club.
Similarly, pure misinformation and fake news doesn’t seek to convince you of its lies, its goal is to obscure truth and scare you with micro-targeted precision. The mission is simply to barrage you with so much bullshit that you can’t tell what’s real and what’s not. So many are gonna scroll past this because it’s a long Facebook status and who the hell has time for that?
What’s worse is you just stop caring, which I’m sure is where a lot of us are at now. It’s designed to do that, even and perhaps especially this platform here. Facebook’s political ad policy is toxic and disgusting, where if you’re selling something you must be truthful in your claims, but all bets are off if you’re simply looking to persuade or confuse.
Definitely the worst part about being fed lies all the time is that it gets harder to identify truth when you hear it. It gets harder and harder to identify hope when you need it.
It’s not idealistic to imagine a world beyond institutionalized greed. It’s not idealistic to seek and elect representatives and find identity with politicians or advocates who make clear what they’re beholden to. I’m dubious of anyone who claims to be beholden to no one.
It’s not idealism, it’s not purity testing. It’s recognizing that making life substantially and sustainably better for the most vulnerable first makes existence better for everyone. Call it trickle-up empathy. There isn’t a ‘moderate’ approach to this belief just like their isn’t a ‘moderate’ amount of acceptable rat poison to consume.
You can say no more rat poison. You can say enough is enough. You don’t need to be strategic with your vote or support whatever optics look better. That’s not your job. You don’t need to figure out healthcare or education or affordable housing to demand better for everyone. Sure, incremental progress is how these goals will be accomplished, just like any goal, but in this Primary we’re setting where the finish line is. Don’t sell yourself, or those whose value you couldn’t fathom, too short.
I don’t see myself ten or fifty years from now regretting these positions, and I don’t think you would either. Everyone benefits from a healthy community, a literate and educated community, a community where everyone has a place to call home. We *can* have nice things. I’m dubious of anyone who believes otherwise, or that they are singularly the solution to any of these problems. I’m especially dubious of anyone who says that it’s too “far” in any direction to believe in a world without suffering.
Millions of desperate people are a national security risk. They will make decisions against their own interests out of fear, they will make choices out of a perceived lack of options.
You personally may not be suffering in the particular way we’re talking about but so many people are, and they desperately need your help. Don’t sell them or yourself short.
Y’all already know who my candidate is (it’s Bernie Sanders) and you can also see now how truly afraid so many comfortable people are with changing the status quo even slightly in favor of those who make those people’s lives comfortable in the first place. Some have gone from presidential candidates to scared individuals simply folding to job offers come next January within hours. That’s how powerful the establishment is. It’s all very human, but we tend to conflate understandable decisions with justifiable ones.
Thank God for Marianne Williamson.
I’m so grateful for that week in Colorado. Not only was I traveling on my own — something I’m not particularly privy to — but after seeing family and people I genuinely care for — it was a subconscious first step in assessing fundamentally what I Tyler Scruggs as a person needed. I couldn’t have predicted how necessary that would be in this new convenient time. Mari Kondo’s method of decluttering was helpful last year in finding minimalism physically in your home. Still, I haven’t quite found the perfect methodology in eliminating all the things that don’t spark joy in my brain. I need my family, and I need spirituality in my life in some form. My life can be anything I want it to be, anywhere. It’s not a Facebook timeline or a 12-year-old Twitter account that connects the threads of all the past lives and selves I’ve lived into a narrative; it’s me and whatever I choose to do with me.
The morning I boarded my flight back to Atlanta, unsure of what I was practically going to do once I got there apart from a promising job interview at the end of the week at a new bar. Then the notification came through that Atlanta Public Schools had indefinitely closed down due to potential exposure to the coronavirus. It was at that point; I knew things were going to be very different very quickly.
I didn’t leave the couch I had been crashing on for two days. It turns out it’s very easy to self-quarantine when you have no disposable income or place to go.
Some distant family in Roswell offered a room to stay for the time being. I gratefully stayed there for a few nights, but as the house filled up with newly out-of-school students and their grandma keeping her distance from us all already (March 13), I was unsure if it was the right place for me to quarantine, as limited as my options might’ve been at least until I started bartending again.
In my favorite newsletter, Welcome to Hell World writer Luke O’Neil talked about the last time things felt normal. In this piece, he included my contribution (cool). It was after my interview at the new bar.
So I took off again. I’ll get into that next newsletter.
For now, here’s a short lo-fi song I wrote a while ago called ‘damn this whole planet.’ It’s on BandCamp for now but do let me know if you’d like it on the streaming services too. Thank you to those who have purchased my music through BandCamp, it’s thousands of times more helpful than a Spotify stream, but I do get why those are nice too.
Thanks for reading all this and letting me dump on you, Internet. Talk soon.
Tyler Scruggs is a writer and musician living in Atlanta. When he’s not churning out internet content, he’s paying too much for coffee and buying movie tickets weeks in advance. Feel free to validate him on Twitter (@TylerScruggs), Instagram (@Scruggernaut), and YouTube.
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