Want to hear something spooky?
Time is working differently for me, these days.
My sense of time and what it is and what it represents has changed remarkably in the last five months, since I left DC and decided to shake off all that rattles. Time does not move ahead ploddingly forward like it always has, or fly by. Time seems to have slowed down significantly. I savor it now. And sometimes – and this is really cool, it doesn’t happen very often… when things are really humming, it seems sometimes like time were moving backward.
As if I were getting younger. Which I actually think I am. After getting really old really fast, it now seems like I am living my life in reverse.
I used to be in the habit of getting through unpleasant episodes by saying to myself, just hang on Hannah, this will all be over soon. But I stopped. How could I wish away a part of my own life? It’s like wishing yourself a step closer to death. It doesn’t matter what is happening to you, it doesn’t matter if you just lost someone or if you are miserable or angry or frustrated, it doesn’t matter where the pain comes from or how it hits you, it is your one own beautiful glorious stupid life.
About four months ago, I realized that I had been terribly mistaken about the value of this hamster wheel ladder of success bullshit that had taken me to DC in the first place. I wish I had figured this out earlier, and not wasted ages 30 to 34 trying to prove I-don’t-know-what for I-don’t-remember-what-reason. But hey, I’m lucky, it could be a lot worse. Some people spend their whole life panting with their little rodent haunches on the wheel.
I quit my job, got rid of my apartment, and then one weekend began to give away my stuff. I started very causally with the VHS tapes, then it started really gaining steam, and just started dumping appliances out on the sidewalk.
The world I had chosen to enter was just awful. A whole city of political unprofessionals, waiting to speak in the meetings in their assigned order – it made monsters of normal, soft human beings who should have been playing the timbal somewhere.
Watching the progressives was extra depressing – these people sharing the same ideals, pushing each other aside, breathlessly claiming credit, lining up in the great factory production line of hackneyed sayings and stale ideas, a giant writhing mass of bodies all trying to manipulate each other. The only possible reaction I could have to all of this was, naturally, to want to move to the opposite side of the country, hide somewhere in the redwoods, write a book, get a medical marijuana prescription, and learn how to convert cool old diesel Volkswagens to run on honey and wisteria.
How do you restart your own life? How do you shake it all off like it’s a bad dream? And how, especially, do you do this when a large part of what you want to shake off is your nasty, annoying, immature, selfish needy weirdo younger self? And how, especially especially, are you supposed to do that when you had to make all of your beginning mistakes in public?
My family moved around a lot when I was young, in search of happiness in anonymity. It’s the frontier mentality: the crazy people who leave the small town because they are tired of being talked about. It is much harder to recreate your own life in the same place as your old one, while hanging out in the same place, and doing the same work.
It is my new mission in life: to be in politics, and do it right, and not accumulate the barnacles on my personality. The nastiness, the control, the anger, the spite.
POWER! Power power power! You just don’t know where it’s going to come from, and you never know what it’s going to do – or what it’s going to do to you. It comes out of the ground, I think. Often this force that blows through you does you damage – wears you out, throws all sorts of shadows on you, warps your personality. Fighting all the time, fear, anxiety, it’s a plague.
I am trying to be as simple as a conduit as I can be, from now on. There is no choice, really. I think I will be the river channel I have always wanted to be.
I have a lovely sense of inevitability about it. I have a lovely sense of inevitability about everything, actually. Very few people get to start their life over again anew, which is what I am doing now. Completely different. No more bubble gum. No more disrespect. No more NOTHING that does not make the soles of my feet feel good. Everyone should follow these rules. All the time.
I’m even listening to early rock and roll, that’s how young I am becoming again. I am listening to Chuck Berry and early Beatles and the Beach Boys. It is like those opiates at the base of your spine but, instead, you can dance.
So yeah. I have to find a new place to live. I have to find a job past November. I have to replace some of those appliances. I have to buy a really good stereo with really good speakers. Hardwood floors with really thick rugs.
I don’t really know what’s going to happen, although I do know one thing: the next segment of my life is going to be so much better than the last segment that there will be no comparison whatsoever.
Right now I am organizing a statewide conference on Saturday, Oct. 16 in Harrisburg for the Marcellus Shale grassroots movement across the state. That’s a five-year campaign to protect our incredibly beautiful state from being poisoned by the most powerful corporations on the planet, the multinational oil companies. I don’t know whether I get to work on that fulltime, but it's my kind of fight, and it's definitely the most incredibly complicated multilevel puzzle I have ever seen, the kind of thing that will keep me challenged for years. After Congress, the PA state legislature seems adorable.
And I tell you, this one’s going to be a doozy. It's going to have all sorts of far-reaching long-term effects that I can't even begin to predict now. Party registration. Campaign finance. Zoning law. Pretty much the Philly casino fight times one million.
And it's visceral. It's going to be the people of Pennsylvania standing in front of their homes holding shotguns and growling ‘get your asses off our land’; and when I say I have a sense of inevitability, I will say now, this one feels like when you are inside, and there’s a great windstorm rattling the windows, shaking them so bad you think they are going to break, and you know that all you have to do is reach up and unhook a tiny little rusty metal latch and the wind is so powerful it will knock open all the the windows with a roar.
That's how I feel about this one.
And so I guess this is why I learned to campaign, after all. Thank god there turned out to be a reason for all of that.
It should be fun. Now GO PHILLIES!
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