introductions:
Hello from an undisclosed location very far outside of the United States. I write because we are, at this moment, experiencing a reprise of the Cuban Missile Crisis, with a days-long fermata. The Trump Administration, presiding over the modern-day United States of America, openly debates nuclear activity with Iran.
I write, too, for selfish reasons: I have not been able to speak peacefully on geopolitics or my personal life because I had (and... have) important pending projects which required me to reduce my internet presence to that of a harmless bumblebee. Phase one is done, meaning I can respirate through my pen again.
first off– I do feel like a lot of people feel like this:
The boundaries between us and them belong to mythos. Spread of disease and nuclear fallout do not discriminate between "you and yours," nor anyone else’s family, suburb, nation state, or perception of circumstance. Air and water are shared and sovereign entities. Land. Air. Water. Sovereign and shared entities. No deed imbues the signer with the power to tell the tectonic plates not to move beneath their feet. The myths of the Anthropocene reveal themselves like falling rain: slowly, slowly, then all at once, and entirely outside of our human control.
review, from feb. 2025’s notes on the moment:
In this world-making, note two things: (1) the fastest and most profitable way to move shit along as a capitalist with a bit of world-making money is war. War feeds (and sometimes reinvents) the machine. And (2) the people that made this world up know that they made it up. They know they made it up! They teach the insider rules to their successors. They know it’s a game. They have no problem playing with our lives; would you? It’s just Yahtzee.
Witnessing oil prices surge up and crash down with claims of resolutions and ‘reasonable’ negotiations has made me cross-eyed. War promotes, primarily, the sale of ideas. Citizens coalesce around a nation-state identity in times of significant crisis. Great patriotism ensues from the threat of mass annihilation. The world of possibilities grows smaller with each falling bomb– the warfare, the violence feels inevitable, then becomes ordinary, then happenstance until it happens (of course, to you and yours). Blood money seeks war to enrich itself. The table shifts. Half the world holds its breath, waiting for the beginning of nuclear armaggedon... again.
Yahtzee!
feb 2025:
The United States is following the same playbook that Sierra Leone (and many other countries) did when setting the stage for war. Gut public services and prepare to get out quick. Set your succession plan up early. The parallels between Buchanan + Biden, Trump + Siaka Stevens… I would love to be wrong. I would delight in being wrong! I do not think I am wrong. Entirely separate essay.
I’m returning to these sentiments I penned nearly two years ago now where I compared the Trump administration to the first administration established in Sierra Leone after we had a successful transitional government post declaring independence from (and leaving) The Commonwealth. Not enough people have the presidency of James Buchanan etched into their memory from their weirdly intense middle school US history education like I do. I find his legacy as one of the worst reviewed presidents of the United States haunting, specifically because he largely did… nothing.
I define worst here not as the most destructive overall, but most destructive to the fabric of the nation state the president endeavors to protect. Obvious war brewed in the post-independence United States. The fledgling nation, gripped by the contradictions of chattel slave labor, saw rising tensions amount to armed scrimmages. President James Buchanan, having inherited a country rotting through the seams from violence, acted as he was: a diplomat. Lots of reading. Lots of research and expertise. Lots of negotiation. Beautiful gowns! Little to no decisive action– as the president of the fracturing United States.
He preceded Abraham Lincoln, who became a war-time president for the first civil war the United States would live to survive. [
"As president, Buchanan believed that he did not have the authority to interfere in the elections which took place in Kansas despite the fraud that had occurred there.” (History Is Now Magazine, 2019)
I have a love/hate relationship with the phrase, “History repeats itself.” I instead imagine time as a loop that bends. It seems we are in parallel loops of time, peering over our own bones at the crises behind and before us.
I’ve made the argument for the parallels between Siaka Stevens and Donald Trump many times over now: the president that cuts social services, drains public amenities, dissolves public education, and overall prepares a once happy populace for overt warfare. I’ve yet to speak on how much denial people in the city shrouded themselves with in terms of the war in Sierra Leone. Even as violence steadily marched inwards, the war was something that happened over there... to rural people... to border folks… to the countryside.. somewhere where violence was understandable and far from them and theirs.
US Americans, despite the wide proliferation of firearms and growing social disparities, still never think it will be our doorstep. As in your physical doorstep. As in, you look outside and there the war is. We don’t believe that. Not really.
I am never snarky, nor unsympathetic. I hope to be wrong. War is never a gotcha; there are no leftover feelings for rubbing salt in the wound. There is only d/Death that surrounds us all the time.
feb 2025:
We can expect bird flu to proliferate amongst those cast to the margins in contemporary Western society, that “expendable” work: farmhands, migrant agricultural workers and those in intimate space with them, people living in rural settings (especially those who might interact with birds or mice), those too poor to provide personal protective equipment (PPE) for themselves, and those who might be stigmatized for doing so (the overlap between these two groups is very strong).
Within the wealth grab, war utilizes the effect of mass fog: a hazy cloud of vague denials which allow for the wholesale purchase of dubious cultural ideas. I display one said 'dubious ideal’ straight from the media statement given by Yakima Health District’s communication office, under letterhead.
Right.
We also have the rising spread of Ebola!
Unfortunately, in the first edition of "notes on the moment," I plug small prophecies in passing and with little clarity. Now I do so clearly:
Auntie Nadaline's Bookshelf
small prophecies is my debut text. The one linked above is the mixtape version– a collected patchwork of political thought, growth, and action from the origin point of my radicalization: interviewing Ebola survivors in Sierra Leone, the summer I turned 21. My life permanently veered. I began to discover the lengths to which human beings will avoid discomfort, even if it means welcoming in more death in the long-term.
The disease narrative I witnessed in Sierra Leone replicated itself across the globe with COVID-19: the people experiencing the traumas of sickness and loss have been traumatized into forced denial and forgetfulness because there was and is no place to truly process the grief, and those unaffected still believe it’s some sort of curse that befalls someone else more deserving of it than them.
Most people cannot comprehend the agonies of dying painful, needless deaths. Most of us do not walk around our daily lives fearing such a conclusion as our primary fate. Most of us, in our hearts, may comprehend intellectually that we will become disabled as an inevitable circumstance of aging (if we’re lucky enough to age), or that we truly could become homeless in our lived experience… and yet somatically, in our bodies, we believe we’ll have comfortable apartments and hot water on demand and chances at upwardly mobile lives forever. Faced with realities which spell imminent and impending disaster, we do what we’ve been trained to do: believe these realities are impending, indeed, for someone else, way over there. You and yours will probably be fine.
Right.
Personal Notes
For one: I will return to New York someday. In my final days leaving the US, I got the distinct feeling I’ll come back… just not as myself. More as a symbol of movement, a machine, an event… not me, the individual person I was before all of this. I don’t know when, but someday. I didn’t get to have something in New York before I left because I had offline, urgent goodbyes to get to that conflicted with everything I set out for. I am so sorry. I don’t know when I will return, but I will. I must.
Then: there has been, essentially, a muzzle on my online life since late October of 2025.
The only thing I regret about my past actions is not having a safety plan sooner. I knew the heights and depths of my offline life and still concluded I was years away from any real repression... what a phenomenal miscalculation. Screaming in the street. Aging a year in a day. Drugged. Cinderblock walls. Anyways. More on this in March of next year (hopefully). Just got to finish a few offline things first... what a lesson in delayed gratification this has been.
The fallout from being dead wrong provided exercises in d/Death. Death if you don’t move, death if you do. My mind wanders with death and his intoxicating questions. How much Death can you tolerate? From who? Can you tolerate the death of your loved ones? Under what circumstances? Can you still keep still, amongst the dying? Are you sure? For how long? Who are you responsible for? What of the d/Deaths of your relationships you cannot keep safe? Where do you bury bittering, tenacious love? What happens when you lose yourself entirely– that person you previously were, that name no one calls you anymore? The college student who wanted to build hospitals and have a family, who ran away from stages? Does she still dream of avoiding death? Do you? How do you handle the death of anonymity? The death of your face and voice being unremarkable, belonging only to yourself? The death of personal sanity? The death of public respect? The death, the deaths, of prolonged, tearful silence? The d/Death of what’s “fair” ?
Did you realize you’re one of them? One of the dead, I mean?
That kind of stuff. It was an excruciating summer.
You know how hard it’s been to say nothing? As close to nothing as possible? I still failed.
There’s a video living on top of my skin where I draw strong distinctions between me and everyone else with the label leftist content creator. My primary contribution to global movements is not the rinky-dink videos I post on the internet; it’s the blueprints I concretize off-screen. The two are at odds; I am set to strangle myself within my own tightrope contradictions. I need resources to fund projects. Resources come most from visibility. Visibility brightens and heats the spotlight, making me sweat, fraying the ropes below, the taste of decay in my mouth. I have to find a way to be entertaining enough to gain trust, belief, money, time… around and around it goes, and there I am, twirling. Smiling. Someone, right on cue, tells me I shouldn’t complain for such a lucky position (where the luck in question is a few hundred thousand followers and a mile long drop. And the ropes, swinging, ever swaying, fraying).
Ah. I grow mute.
Reviewing my videos to put them back up on Instagram conjures Alice, who, gazing at herself in her looking glass, wonders what’s become of her having returned from the rabbit hole. I have lost this person, this disposition, this desire to be entertaining (which is a prerequisite of the job). I do not gaze upon the current global landscape and think about entertaining people enough to entice donations. My lens on the world, once malleable enough to loan, becomes a thousand-yard stare. I grow mute.
I’ll end with this: I want to like this again, writing for an internet that decays past belonging to us. I recognize it is futile to wish for the past; that world is dead now. AI crawlers lurk in your inbox as I type and you read. I train my robot successors in the same way one digs their own grave at gunpoint. And/also/however: I have now managed to reached through the screen time and time again to found love. I am sitting, once again, in the home of strangers turned friends. I braid their daughters hair. We exchange language, bit by bit. I belong to the world and her people, even in my cowardice.
Well, and anyways. I am covered in bug bites from the rice fields. I am nervous for nuclear fallout. I am a stupid amount of behind on bookkeeping and somewhere that will feel the weight of airstrikes. In sleeping and waking, I dream of children.
peace.
IG
Post script:
Nearly a year ago, I said my first essays back would be about the topic of fungibility. This is the first time in my career as a public scholar that I have had the opportunity to sit with essays for months, thinking, re-thinking, testing, re-writing, teasing out. I don’t know that I’ll have the opportunity to work this slowly again and I relish it. It’s a far cry from the grind of s*bstack, where you chase headlines and visibility via tweets-pretending-not-to-be-tweets-because-of-copyright. However precious I thought time was, I am always wrong. Constantly time drunk. Can never get enough.
As excruciating as the wait was, and as sad as it was to watch people slowly disengage, I am profoundly more grateful for those of you who decided to stay with me as I played the long game. First step was to leave the United States. Here we are in review: fungibility. Soon, soon, I will finally be able to speak.
hope the work of your day compels you past comfort (peace).