Guy Fawkes Day 2024

Some reflections from after the election but before the inauguration

November 16, 2024

Dear Current and Potential Magical Germ Corinthians,

There is a big thing that I want to talk about—a thing the world has been all about, perhaps for the last 500 years or so: dominance.

No, I don’t mean in the sexy way that some of you might assume, primed to read my every utterance as some salacious innuendo (I’m a married lady now and I save that for my husband). When I write to you of dominance, now, outside of our group chats, I am trying to speak plainly about the thing that I have gotten shrill about in the chat. Since Haitch and I cashed in our coolness and bought a house we could afford in the suburbs, dominance has been on my mind.

Having a house, I thought that we would make time for each other; it would be easier to say these things to you IRL. I thought (silly me, all this thinking that I did) in the fall of 2019, our relationship, grounded in the group chat, had the seeds of a real communitarian collective. I believed that once we joined you in property ownership (one of the things that united our Founding Fathers to give George III the revolutionary middle finger)¹, we’d take turns hosting each other in our respective homes, one of us having a pool (sadly, only our uber-rich friends have them, and are stingy with their pool invites). We’d be the type of friends who would offer mutual aid in the care of our property: help with the minor projects that our retired boomer neighbors outsource to migrants with retirement accounts that won’t exist for us.

We did not get together in person. Sure, there was a big speed-bump for some of those years—we were good citizens through the pre-vax phase of the pandemic, even past it. There was also Haitch’s [redacted] and then of course Mike’s time in [redacted]. I thought, in the early days of our multicrises, that we would form the bonds that would become the foundation of a deep and lasting friendship. Crises tend to do that to people, or so one of my heroes writes. In my wildest imaginings (and I have always been prone to them) our neighborly camaraderie would become the model for the commune of Nuevo San Carlos, which would be the inspiration of a new utopia, Alta California. Mostly, though, I thought we’d figure out a way to barbecue together every month or so, even with some of your dietary restrictions.

I remember fondly how years ago at Seth’s & Cynthia’s—founding members of the OG Magical Germ Corinthians—we had a fire in their backyard, on Guy Fawkes Day. We joked beforehand, Mike thinking that we were celebrating Karl Bergman, whoever that was. Around the firepit, we explained to Mike, the Southern transplant (who really should know more about Anglo culture than us West Coasters, since he grew up in a state named after an Anglo monarch), what Guy Fawkes Day was, him never having seen V for Vendetta. The Brits call it Bonfire Day, we said, patiently walking him through the absurdity that this was a celebration of some Catholics trying to blow up the House of Parliament, oppressed by the Protestant majority. The Brits for centuries since have celebrated it by burning in effigy the Guy who planted the bomb but didn’t originate the plot. And then we laughed and joked about Karl Bergman Day, deciding we’d celebrate that on Presidents’ Day.

When Haitch and I bought our house, I hoped we would have more times like that. I imagined we’d go out hiking occasionally and then grab a drink and josh each other about silly things we said on hikes years ago, more jokes about Guy Fawkes Day and Karl Bergman Day. Maybe we’d actually make those dioramas, illustrating the different Karl Bergmans we’d found on the Internet: the Swedish biathlete who’d taken home a few Olympic medals before retiring; the hydro engineer responsible for designing a few minor dams in Europe; the heavy metal drummer who shot himself. Maybe we’d even get you all on a camping trip, something we only managed to do once with some of you to celebrate our marriage.

Somehow, with all those hikes, camping trips and laughs, it would have been easy to ask each other for help. Help with caring for each other and help with the house; for instance, that you’d begrudgingly agree to help clear off our solar panels or dig out a twenty-year old irrigation line (one of ours recently broke and our Southern California heritage succulent garden is now desiccating) in exchange for some grilled food and a beer (non-alcoholic even, for some of you).

But alas, here we are, post-Guy Fawkes Day 2024, five years from me achieving the American Dream, and we have not gone on hikes. We have not barbecued. You hired a contractor (who probably was paying migrants under the table) to redo your yard.

I am writing you now from another fire in the Anza-Borrego desert. Haitch and I are here, celebrating a milestone event: the cats’ first camping trip. Here we are, with these furry little fuckers who’ve been pining for the outdoors after a lifetime held captive in our ranch-style home (the “cat terrarium”, as Little Mikey calls it). These guys cry in front of doors and open windows, Porkchop darting out occasionally to roll on the concrete driveway. In an attempt to alleviate their middle-class cat ennui, we decided to macrodose them with the outdoors.

Now, as I sit beside the folding metal fire pit Haitch purchased off the Internet two days before our trip, the cats cowering beneath my legs, leash ends looped around my right wrist as my left hand drags over the paper, ink staining the side of my palm, I realize that I had always pictured you here in this moment.

Tonight, Haitch and I have built some dreams together: we’ve talked of which of you we would pitch to have join us at [redacted] Film Festival and what our “evil” plot would actually be once we got you there. We talked about which of you we both would like to have join us on a Cat Camping Trip, and which of you would ruin the experience due to a need for loud noise, either in music or in the plurality of voices.

The thing that I love about camping that I think I only showed you once: one person talks at a time. It’s kind of like my writing group, but out-of-doors with food. I realize what I hate about our world, and why we struggle to spend time together: it’s never just one person speaking at a time.

Haitch and I have been through the ringer these last four years; I reckon, though, that you have too. They haven’t felt easy for anyone, based on what happened this last Guy Fawkes Day in America. As I sit by the fire, realizing that this is an experience I wanted to share with you, I wonder: why is it so hard to hang out with you?

Look, I’ve always had a rich and active fantasy life. As a kid, I developed elaborate alternate scenarios with people I loved while I played alone in my yard, mashing manzanita berries and mud in moteros my father had to leave behind in the divorce. I fantasized about a time where I might one day be living with all my family and friends (how few I had then) in one place, peacefully.

Even as a kid, I knew that this was a desire that could never be fulfilled. It was a little story—a fiction—that I made for myself, to feel less alone in the sparse world that I was powerless to change. But when I dreamed of us, C&P MGC, camping in the desert not far from some of our houses, I thought it might actually happen.

Yet it didn’t.

I know, I know, you’re throwing your hands up in the air, ready for another episode of “Auxie being an asshole by telling me I’m an asshole for not hanging out with her all the time when the phone works both ways.” I do hold my friends to high standards. That you’ve made it this far in our friendship should be a testament to your character, especially your tolerance for the assholery that I’m always doing, the flights of fancy that I take, imagining amazing adventures for us and you always dropping the ball by not getting them on the calendar.

Recently, though, I’ve had trouble discerning the possible from the fantastical. I need grounding and better boundaries. So help me. Enlighten me.

How crazy was it for me to imagine you here? Let’s put it on a scale of other ideas I’ve had. Was it on par of irrationality of:

1. China spying on my husband and me via my hearing aids?

2. Glamis Camel Days 2026?

3. Getting that job at the marketing agency?

4. Seeing you in person ever again?

5. You subscribing to my Substack?

I have been going crazy this past decade in the States. I did better living abroad. Perhaps you’ll tell me, those of you with your years in recovery, that the desire to go back to the past is just another way to pull a “geographical”. If we were together and you said it, I would threaten violence. Jokingly.

My jokes: the thing that we struggle with. This is where I feel the yawning difference between our upbringings, our classes. You don’t think it’s appropriate to point out people’s flaws, you feel that it’s a violence. I grew up in a household where all we could do was joke about each other’s shortcomings to thicken each other’s skin. When we left the house, though, these jokes inured us to the barbs that the world had for us as working-class folk trying to eke out our lives in the hours allowed to us. It was training to keep our souls.

Joking threats of physical violence served another purpose: to draw lines in the sand of our relationships. Because we thought that outside our home the only pain that could cow us would be the pain that could be inflicted on our physical bodies. We were wrong of course — that there were weaker, more cowardly people than us, afraid of so much less than their bodily integrity—but that’s why we joked about violence: to steel ourselves against it when our lines were crossed. That’s why I do, at least.

This is the thing that violence does: it dominates. The punch or kick across the lines you drew against others can obliterate your will to protect it. Violence allows, at the simplest level, someone to have power over another. Now, after November 5th, domination through violence feels incipient in our world.

People like us, C&P MGC, don’t talk about violence or our privileged freedom from it. We believe in that Anglo-Saxon-European fallacy, that forward motion is better motion, and that with enough progress, you’ll arrive at righteousness. You know the quote, “the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” We believe those things, never realizing that it takes action to bring about justice and “progress”. Instead we talk about how stupid people are.

We laugh into our hands, expectant of the inevitable harm from their choices, shirking the work of understanding why these people are choosing the opposite of us. What about them is so aggrieved that they are willing to risk violence to themselves? We think that they are oblivious of the risk of violence embedded in their choices.

Let me explain it to you: they already feel they face the risk daily in their lives. We couldn’t have talked about that on this trip, friends, because we don’t think about the horrors that would bring violence into our lives. Frankly, we think the horrors of others’ choices won’t be that bad for us.

Tonight, camping with my cats, after Haitch and I started to talk about the fears we have about the future, we also talked about what our hedges will be against it. Like so much of my life in America, I find myself saying “maybe” to things that before were hard “nos”. I’ve wiped clean the lines that I navigated the world with, and Haitch and I find ourselves drawing new ones. We are revisiting an issue that had been, for most of our relationship, crossing a line of mine: if we will have guns in the house.

I believe, C&P MGC, that most of you would be on the side that I was: hard no. Since this last Guy Fawkes Day, since Americans have decided to light the fuse that will blow up the world, I find myself glad of having options about guns. I had been a hard no because of the risks (most gun deaths are accidents, suicides, or uxoricides²); it seemed like a bad idea. It seemed like inviting violence into my home. But then I remembered that the second amendment comes from the Bill of Rights, and before those OWGs, the American Founding Fathers, put to paper, “we need to keep our muskets”, they first thought, “We should be able to say whatever silly shit we want.” I want to keep that right, say all the silly shit I want, so long as it doesn’t cause a panic.

I don’t have any strong opinions about those OWGs, but one of the things that I see in them, with the Bill of Rights, is an ability to admit that they made some mistakes. That is what I’m finding now, as Haitch and I talk about how we will make it through this moment, what fears we might have and how we might need to change in this moment, is that I am looking for those who can admit that they were wrong. Especially those who made choices trying to protect their perceived dominance.

That’s the other thing that those OWGs did: they figured out how to make common cause with people that they disagreed with on some fundamentals. Sure, no one really took the opportunity to condemn slavery (the Three-Fifths Compromise being the lame excuse that allowed Southerners to deny Black people basic rights afforded to whites and get representational power from them, too) or promote women’s rights (to be fair, though, the Constitution was composed three years before the publication of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.) But, thankfully, some of those missed opportunities were rectified in revisions.

In the aftermath of Guy Fawkes Day 2024, I will be looking for people who are willing to change their minds and redraw their lines. It’s not just Second Amendment Fetishists, though; I’m willing to entertain making common cause with some people you loathe: [redacted], [redacted], Cross Fit Enthusiasts, Coal-Rolling Conversion Prosletyzers, [redacted]—fuck, even Mormons.

I’m not talking about converting to their ideals: I’ve been saying no to Mormons since Chanelle Weldy tried to convert me through the chain-link fence of our adjoining back yards in fourth grade. It was tempting, to trade my soul just to get access to her family’s pool. It even had a slide. However, what she was selling—an extended community through plural marriage in heaven/space—didn’t jive with what I believe. I didn’t want to wait until I was dead to have community.

What I am talking about though, is listening to what their freak outs are about in the next two years, and if it rhymes with mine. Ours. And if they do, if it’s about power and care and the lack of it, then maybe we can set aside our dietary preferences and insistence on secret handshakes through curtains to figure out how we can get on the same page about power. And care. And public pools.

I’m optimistic about the long-term prospects, but maybe I’m just riding the high of real change in my personal life. I feel obliged to tell you that Haitch and I, after these rough past years, are doing much better. While the [redacted] tugged against the fault lines in our relationship, we’ve had some breakthroughs in communication.

You may recall all my complaints about [redacted]. I get it now; when you’re right-handed and all the world is made for you, you can’t understand how a Sinistralist like me needs more information. It is work to think about your body in that way, and then to take that work and think about the differences in someone else’s body. You could say it’s just empathy, but empathy is hard, we learned on Guy Fawkes Day, for a lot of people.

Tonight, though, we had a communication breakthrough. While coaching me on how to adjust the logs on our campfire, incapacitated due to the cats sheltering under the fortress of his body folded into one of our chairs, holding the [redacted], reminiscent of The Dude (in middle-age I see sexiness in his gentleness), he coached me on how to adjust the fire and rearrange the wood for optimal heat. In his coaching, he thought, not in how our bodies were different, but how they were the same:

“Lift the log with your dominant hand.”

That made a world of difference.

I want that for us, Magical Germ Corinthians, Current and Potential, to spend time together, talking to each other in new ways, redrawing our lines together.

X

PS: Of course, I know where one of my lines is drawn, in the conflagration of the old norms:

I really can’t live with my parents again. And they sure as fuck can’t live with me.

PPS: Listen, you know I have nothing against migrant workers—I was one for all those years. I’m jealous that some of them get to make a living doing the thing that my Scandi ancestors came here to do, that I’m always longing for: move soil.

PPPS: I think I’m going to have to pivot the business, to get those butthurt billionaire dollars.

1. “Real Estate and the Revolution” Matthew Wills, July 4, 2024. JSTOR Daily.https://daily.jstor.org/real-estate-and-the-revolution/. Accessed 2024 December 16.

2. Just a fancy word for “wife murder.”