cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- My Monologue, to Date, Before I Maybe Kill Myself I am so fucking lonely. The screenings the other night went fine. The film isn't controversial anymore. Everyone is fully in favor. Ok, that's cool. So I made a hit film about the seminal event of our age. Hi, nice to meet you. Yes, I agree, Trump is awful. Heads-up -- if you are going to be a culturally significant person in the modern age, this isn't like it was 40 or 50 years ago among the counterculture. Being somebody means that you are nobody. Just some guy, swept along with all of this ridiculous bullshit. I started writing a monologue. And I'm going to paste it in below, in it's working order. In case that I drop dead and Metonym or Dagny Taggart or Mnemosynea find this (and that isn't crazy, because I haven't particularly enjoyed being alive for a long time now), here is the text of that monologue as of a few hours ago: On August 12th, 2017, I was covering the Unite the Right white supremacist rally in my home town, Charlottesville, Virginia. As a freelance journalist I was covering this thing for several different news outlets at the same time. One of my assignments was for the local paper, The Cville Weekly, where I was working as a member of a team of reporters who were all supposed to spread out in order to cover what we all expected to be a riot from as many angles as possible. One member of the team was assigned to stay close to the counter-protesters who opposed the neo-Nazis, another was supposed to cover the arts angle by hanging around in a nearby park where musicians were going to play as part of a counter-protest, and so forth. Being the only white male on the team, my editor decided that I was the one who should get as close as possible to the actual neo-Nazis and stay right there with them through the whole thing. When I arrived there was this almost incomprehensible tableau spread out in front of me. A roar and a hub-bub of chanting and screaming and militia members with AR-15s and people carrying banners and strange flags with runes and symbols looking like factions of orcs and elves and dwarves meeting for battle in Lord of the Rings. It was a place that I had walked past several times a day for most of my life. A small park next to the public library downtown. Completely transformed into some kind of post-apocalyptic dystopian future film set. I took up a position at the top of the stairs leading into the park. Right at the edge of where the alt-right guys were gathering, with them on one side of me and the hordes of counter-protesters in the street below. The white supremacists poured into the park in waves, all marching inches past me. And there was a man in a white polo shirt carrying a strange black flag on a spear-like pole who approached me, saw that I was clearly a journalist, and he told me that I had to leave. I remember he was heavy-set, with a bushy brown beard. He stepped right in front of me, breathing right down on me trying to do that thing where he's almost doing a chest bump like some douchebag football player in a bad high school movie pushing the scawny geek away from his locker. And there I was, completely alone, surrounded by literal Nazis, and at this point there's fighting breaking out everywhere and people are being dragged bloody out of the street. And I don't know where it came from but I found myself looking him right in the eye and I told him that I wasn't going to move and that “we must each do our duty as we understand it.” Now this line was also a nod to Abraham Lincoln's famous Cooper Union speech from 1859, and if this neo-Confederate had fully understood the reference then I'm not sure things would have gone well. But somehow it worked. And he looked me over again and he shrugged and moved on. So my presence seemed to be grudgingly tolerated. And soon after, a new wave of neo-Nazis streamed depserately into the park. They had marched in a double-column through a crowd of thousands of counter-protesters in order to reach the park and their faces and bodies were covered with fresh bruises, raw and bleeding but not yet purple. One of them, with a shaved head and wearing a black t-shirt was clutching his face and screaming in agony and as he made it up the steps into the park he collapsed right at my feet. I could see that he had been hit full in the face with pepper spray or something like that. And in my backpack I had a bottle of water. Now I knew that this man was literally a skin-headed neo-Nazi and while there is a certain political detachment that I've had to cultivate as a journalist, I knew that he was there to stand up against every American and human ideal that I held dear. And in that moment, a lot of things raced through my head but the one thing that came to the forefront was a name and that name was Shirley Chisholm. Shirley Chisholm was the first black woman ever to run for President. And her name came to mind because I had spent the last two years writing regularly for Smithsonian Magazine. I'd come in to Smithsonian as a science journalist who'd made a good reputation for doing weird biology stories for The Washington Post and Slate and for writing a book about invasive species. But pretty quickly my editor started handing me history assignments. One of those assignments during the 2016 Presidential primaries was on Shirley Chisholm's campaign for President. In 1972 the civil rights movement was not over and segregationism was still considered a viable political concept in certain parts of the United States. Chisholm was running in a field of Democrats vying to take on Richard Nixon that also included George McGovern (who won the nomination but lost to Nixon) and George Wallace, the segregationist Governor of Alabama. George Wallace stood for everything that Shirley Chisholm was against. But somehow they seemed to get along when they ran into each other on the campaign trail. On May 5th, 1972, Wallace was shot five times in a failed assassination attempt in Laurel Maryland. As he lay in a hospital bed in critical condition, Shirley Chisholm arrived to sit beside him where she held his hand. I interviewed Chisholm's former campaign aide over the phone and he explained it to me by saying, “he was a human being in pain. And she wasn’t going to turn her back on him.” I thought about Shirley Chisholm and I crouched down beside the screaming skinhead and opened up my bottle of water to rinse the pepper spray out of his eyes. Livestreaming the whole time, a comment popped up on my screen moments later. “That's Chris Cantwell,” someone pointed out. Chris Cantwell, if you don't know the name, is a notorious white supremacist with a weekly podcast called “Radical Agenda.” He was also the subject of an extremely well-known VICE documentary filmed on August 11th and 12th,, after which he was arrested and charged with several felonies for allegedly, and ironically, having pepper-sprayed counter-protesters at a torchlight rally the night before August 12th. Cantwell's friends came and picked him up and got him out of there. And the whole spectacle went on and a police officer got on a bullhorn and started to announce that “this has been declared an unlawful gathering. You must disperse!” And it took a long time, but eventually people started to move away. And at first I thought I heard it wrong but then the cop was on the bullhorn saying, “the library is closed!” And I'm thinking, really? Right now, this is the most important thing – in the middle of a literal riot – that everyone needs to hear? That the library is closed? And it's too bad because I may have had some choice reading in mind for certain people who were in the middle of that riot. And as people ran off in all different directions, I decided that I wasn't going anywhere. This wasn't my first riot – just a month earlier I'd watched the Charlottesville police march on a crowd of civilians, tear-gassing us and making arrests. And as people melted away, I decided that nobody was going to make me move and I was going to stand here in the middle of this intersection to document any possible police brutality and hopefully hold someone's feet to the fire. But then suddenly everyone was gone. And I was standing across the street from the park with my friend Ari, who I'd hoped would drag my body out of the street if it came to that, and there was just this big empty space with a parked police car covered with pink and purple dye and the street was littered with crushed water bottles and dropped bandannas and signs and disposable facemasks and there was a cell phone on the curb that I felt strangely responsible for returning to it's owner. And I thought, it's over now. The whole thing is done. Everyone is gone and I guess it's ok and nothing else important is going to happen. And that reminded me of a few years earlier when I was a professional hunter. I say that I was a professional hunter and people cock their heads and raise an eyebrow and look at me like I am special. That kind of special. But for about five or six years, I made my living as an outdoor writer, writing articles and books about hunting for food. And for a lot of that time I would take adult beginners out for a day or two to hunt for a deer to eat and I would teach them how to shoot and set up an ambush and move silently and how to butcher a deer if they got that far. I learned pretty quickly as a professional hunter that a big part of my job was being a personal hero for my students of the day. I learned quickly that most people – most of you – hate your jobs. And one thing that I would never do once I figured this out was to ask what my students did for a living. I didn't want to make the cubicle-bound account act or feel like an accountant when she was with me. I wanted her to feel that on that day, she could be whatever she wanted to be. Whomever this person decided that they really were deep down inside, I was going to let them be that person. And because they chose to spend an unreasonable amount of money to spend a day with me in the outdoors, I was going to act like they were the intrepid person of the wilderness that they were trying to become. I remember one day I was hunting with a man from Pennsylvania who had never held a rifle before his first day with me. And he turned out to be a reasonable shot – in target practice he hit a two inch bullseye at 75 yards, and when I taught him anatomy from various angles he understood just how to reach the heart and lungs of a deer from any direction relative to how the creature was standing. We set up an ambush over a very small valley in the foothills of a mountain range and we waited for over an hour. And the shadows grew longer and longer and began to fidgit. He knew that when the sun was fully down, the hunt would be over and he might have to go home with an empty cooler. And then in the final minutes, a small buck picked his way along the narrow valley from our right-hand side. And my student – who was at least 20 years older than me – lined up his shot and pulled his trigger. Twenty minutes later, we were walking uphill back to our cars to get a cooler and butchering tools and he told me that it didn't seem like we were going to get anything. Now I have sat in ambush as a hunter for many hours of my life, sometimes when I was broke and desperate with children to feed and the only way I was going to come home with anything to eat was if I fired my gun straight and true. And I stopped on the trail and I put my hand on his shoulder and I said, 'what is this seemingness? There is no difference between the moment before a deer steps out, and the moment before a deer does not step out. You have to carry that sense of electricity at every moment. It is always there. There is never a moment when you can say, with authority, that it seems like a deer will not show up and therefore you should give up and go home.” Somehow, I was able to carry that Yoda moment in my heart as a hunter, without it penetrating my perception as a journalist. Because I could not have been more wrong n August the 12th when it seemed like everything was over. While I was trying to find the owner of a smart phone across the street from Emancipation Park, the fight that sent Deandre Harris to the hospital was taking place just a few blocks away. Not much later, I met the woman who had sprinkled glitter all around Emancipation Park before the rally as an act of art and magic. I was in the middle of an interview with her when I got a text message that a car had crashed into a crowd of people only a few blocks away from where I was sitting. I raced off and in a few minutes I was at the intersection of 4th and Water Street, which I have walked passed several times a day for the last twenty years or so and where in fact my car would be blocked in as part of a crime scene well into the night. And there was this great silence everywhere in spite of thousands of people being all around along the sidewalks. And the one thing that I was reminded of was being a small child in London in the early 1980's when the IRA blew up a bandstand in Hyde Park. My twin brother and I stood for a long time in a crowd watching the police, behind some sort of lines. They drew curtains across the bandstand where everyone had been blown up. A portly man fiddled with his SCUBA gear beside a pond, where someone had supposedly seen someone throw a briefcase. That was the silence that I recalled. A very low murmur from a very lot of people and the occasional squack from an emergency vehicle. So much quiet from so many people. We waited. We waited and we didn't know. Just over the rise of the street was the sight of the coal tower. The coal tower is a vertical figure on the landscape of downtown Charlottesville. A symbol of death punctuated by a sculpture of a woman's hourglass figure on top. 1991, I'm in front of the long-closed Paramount Theatre. There's a man drawing portraits or charactatures, sitting on the raised and carpeted plinth which once held the ticket booth. The woman he was drawing has stood up and walked away. He takes a drag off his cigarette and complains to me that she wanted him to make her into Marilyn Monroe. “And that she ain't,” he says to me with a conspiratorial stare. Some years later, the cartoonist is a cook at Chap's Ice Cream. Dave, is his name. I am 17 and Dave and his Colombian girlfriend invite me and my girlfriend to come with them to Club 2016, a gay nightclub. We smoke marijuana in his car in the parking lot and it works for the first time. We go back inside and I am transported back to a hotel in Orlando when I am eight years old. In a hot tub with dozens of strangers. A huge atrium and the first glass elevator that I have ever seen. It is vast and beautiful and the crystal chandeliers astound me. Months later, I sit on the Downtown Mall in front of a bank, right around the corner from what would later be called Emancipation Park. I had recently broken up with the same girlfriend. She found some excuse to sit beside me. We stayed there in the cold for hours. Weeks later we became engaged to be married. I bought her a diamond ring for a hundred and seventy dollars. In 200X, Craig Nordenson killed two people under the coal tower. He'd stolen his brother's pistol and there was something about drugs. My twin brother had started Cville News dot com, and I started reporting from the field in what turned out to be my first foray into journalism. Craig had hidden from a full-court press of police by jumping from an embankment onto the roof of Roberts Oxygen and hiding beneath an air conditioning unit, where his heat signature was hidden from the helicopter hovering above. Days later, he had only made it as far as a shed owned by the grandparents of one of his victims when the Charlottesville police traded him a pack of cigarettes and some fast food for his surrender. I wandered around under the coal tower with a voice recorder when I met the father of one of the victims, Katie. “I don't think we're getting the whole story,” I said. “Me neither,” he responded, wide-eyed. I held ziplock bags with the teargas canisters they had shot towards where they'd thought that Craig was hiding. And I had the trash from their Polaroid photos that they'd left behind beside the coal tower. I still have those ziplock bags with the teargas canisters. Years later, in 20XX, I sat at the Miller's cafe. I was having drinks with friends and the girlfriend – now wife – who had sat with me blocks away in front of the bank. In the middle of our conversation there was a crash as a body fell and clipped a table at Hamiltons, the next restaurant down. I ran over to the young man's body and he was already dead. By the time I arrived at 4th Street, Heather Heyer was already dead. Every block of downtown that I walk there is the memory of someone who died on that block. In 20XX, a gutterpunk spent a few weeks around town making his name known and then ODed under the coal tower. A friend of a friend adopted his dog. “He's a good gutterpunk dog,” she told me. “He got cut down to the bone and never cried.” 201X. I went downtown on a Friday night and saw a black man in calf-length white shorts with dreadlocks sitting at the 4th street crossing on the Downtown Mall. I'd seen him a dozen times before. Sitting on a bench by the 4th street crossing. Later I sat again at the Miller's cafe, a few tables from where I'd seen the man hit the table and die on the pavement. A tall woman in a black halter-top jogged past and I though to myself, 'you don't see a lot of women in haltertops anymore.' Days later I would find out that the man in the shorts was named Jesse Matthews and the woman in the haltertop was named Hannah Graham. I had seen both of them on the night that he murdered her. When you see multiple murderers before they kill, it's easy to start to think that you have some special sense for nailing them. But I didn't have that. I saw one killer after another and one dead man after another and and didn't know what was right in front of me until there was a label that made it clear. 3:14 a.m. - 2018-01-16 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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