🫖 Welcome to Insecure Tea, dollest of dolls. For those of you who are new here (welcome!), this is my free Sunday essay. If you are interested in content like my Spotify Wrapped reveal, my recommendation column, and the occasional poem, level up to a paid subscription! Oh also, for a man-behind-the-curtain-moment, click here to see a video of me reading last week’s essay #26: autofiction at the Easy Paradise open mic night at KGB. Embarrassingly earnest and I swallow my words and it’s not an angle I cherish but here ya go anyways. Thanks for everything! 🫖
Another spasm passed through the mob and he was carried toward the curb. He fought toward a lamp-post, but he was swept by before he could grasp it. He saw another man catch the girl with the torn dress. She screamed for help. He tried to get to her, but was carried in the opposite direction. This rush also ended in a dead spot. Here his neighbors were all shorter than he was. He turned his head upward toward the sky and tried to pull some fresh air into his aching lungs, but it was all heavily tainted with sweat. (The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West)
What if there is a stampede, asked Isaac. I would hate to all perish in a stampede, I said, Isaac’s crowd crush. Isaacworld 😞, said Leila. Isaacgate! I replied.
How many people can my apartment fit do you think. Honestly wondering.
20? 30? I speculated.
Perhaps we were being insensitive in our party planning. Claustrophobia pushed to extremes is no laughing matter. Ten people died at Astroworld. The earliest reported crowd crush killed ten thousand in 80 AD. Anecdotally, up to 3,000 were killed in a crowd panic at the fireworks display at the wedding of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI. According to official French government records, the death toll was 133. There is something about a swarm that evokes the end of days. The panic. The push-and-be-pushed. The fear of personal death, tapped into the deeper terror of collective extinction.
BAM! BAM! BAM! That was the sound of Mrs. Cooper shaking the table up and down, rattling and banging with relish. As the resident science teacher for grades 6-7, Mrs. Cooper’s duty was to teach our young, Californian minds about such earth-shaking revelations as sex and earthquakes. She always had a flair for the dramatic, and her demonstrations struck fear into our hearts. She was strict and elderly and fat and wore red turtlenecks under purple sweaters, all of which were not the recipe for being a student favorite. She was nevertheless legendary. She told us stories of growing up in San Francisco, where you would realize you slept through an earthquake when all the brick chimneys were crumbled in the morning.
I grew up worrying a lot about “The Big One.” The earthquake that would end the peaceful mirage that is California. In class, we watched videos that informed us that the San Andreas Fault was overdue. Its frustration could reach a fever pitch any day. Learning this at the age of 11 made me feel pretty certain that The Big One would surely arrive tomorrow. And any day it didn’t come, there was always tomorrow. The U.S. Geological Survey predicts a 30-year window. It could have come tomorrow in 2009; it could come tomorrow today; it could come tomorrow in 2052.
The last Big One happened in 1906. Despite the film’s general melodrama, the earthquake sequence from San Francisco (1936) still chills me to the bone. Both of my parents were in San Francisco for Loma Prieta. As a kid, my mind was filled with anxious questions. What if we lost our house? What would happen to our cats and dogs? What would happen when we ran out of water bottles and cans of beans?
In Berkeley, I prayed that The Big One would hold off a few years until I moved out of the various zero-story first-floor tenements I inhabited with no provisions. Admittedly, I felt a morbid thrill indulging in a little doomsday prep with rolling PG&E power outages for fire mitigation in light of the cyclical infernos that painted the sky a sickly pink and dusted our cars with ash. I filled receptacles with water and stocked up on shelf-stables.
I still think about earthquakes all the time. Exit plans and crumbling brick and being trapped and screaming panic. I don’t like to linger on bridges or beneath underpasses. New York strikes me as the pinnacle of hubris: all brick facades and glass palaces. I could never live at an elevation I couldn’t easily descend by foot. In my first job, I worked on floor 13. My current office has doubled the ante to 26—a fact that fills me with unease.
Diana leaned in closer to inspect the writing on my sweatshirt. KINGFISH PUB, OAKLAND, CALIF. The only part of California Diana likes is San Diego. I could imagine her enjoying the occasional poolside sunbath, arms freckling under a coconut sheen of Hawaiian Tropic. A born New Yorker, Diana never trusted the Golden State’s unsteady ground. She asked me to roll up my sleeve a little further to expose the deltoid muscle. She pinched a portion of my skin between her pointer, index and thumb in preparation for the needle.
She felt one earthquake in New York, and worried about being buried alive in the new hospital building where she worked. To be buried alive, was perhaps her greatest fear. Coming up in the Cold War, nuclear apocalypse was always top of mind. Being fast friends, Diana allowed herself to get a little conspiratorial. “You know how they always tell you to hide inside when the nuclear bomb drops? What’s that going to do? They probably just want less bodies in the street to have to bulldoze aside. I just pray I would die before all the aftermath.” Totally, I agreed.
Diana advised me to ask for a bottle of water as I waited the designated 15 minutes before they would return my vaccine card and let me go. I don’t typically find 8 oz bottles to be worth the plastic, but the spirit moved me to take her advice.
Growing up, my mom dreamed of mushroom clouds on the horizon. Evana envisioned biblical fire and brimstone. Ryan worried about global warming melting the ice in Greenland and sending a wave to swallow the NorthEast. Nightmares about tsunamis continue to visit Kate at night.
Gaby saw most disasters as survivable. Tornados, hurricanes, tsunamis, plane crashes, the sinking of the Titanic. She already survived one car crash in utero and another at the age of nine, anointing her forehead with a survivor’s scar. Her greatest fear: the sun swallowing the earth. Unescapable.
Keara worried about being kidnapped by bad guys. Roman had two fears that would mark the end of his world: falling off a cliff or being pantsed.
Similarly, I never dreamt of large-scale doom. My nightly fears were always more myopic. Being lost at the mall. Or, trapped in the backseat of a car that began to drive away on its own.
Lately, I’ve had recurring dreams about being swarmed by wasps. A sick crawling. Covering every inch of my skin, in my ears and in my eyes. The threat of the sting. I know that they won’t attack, unless agitated, but I cannot bear the itch.
In dreams, mistakes are predetermined. Maybe if I gently try to brush them off…
The devil went down to Georgia. Christ went down to Brussels. Nathanael West went down to Mexico a year after publishing The Day of the Locust. He ran a stop sign on his drive back to burning Los Angeles—a choice that was the end of the world for him and his wife.
In my heart of hearts, I don’t believe in ruin. Ruined days, ruined friendships, ruined shirts. Shaken or swarmed, it’s narcissistic to believe it’s the end. Every stain is a gift.
5 songs for the rapture
“Doomsday,” MF DOOM, Pebbles The Invisible Girl
🎶 Definition super-villain, a killer who loves children
One who is well-skilled in destruction, as well as building. 🎶
“Life after Doomsday,” Fimber Bravo
You probably need this fantastic Trini steel pan player in your life. Here he is looking like a gd boss for Nicholas Daley’s Spring 2023 menswear collection. The story of how he got included in the shoot is serendipitous and fun.
“I Want You,” Mitski
🎶 You’re coming back
And it’s the end of the world
We’re starting over and I love you darling
And I am done here. 🎶
“TRIPWIRE,” Elvis Costello and the Roots
For all the Costelloheads out there, this song is just plain cool. You may have noticed that it’s by Elvis Costello and the Roots, and yes that is to say ?uestlove, et al. He samples his own song “Satellite” from Spike. What the hell!!! So sick. I include it in this list for its ominous, apocalyptic mood.
🎶 Torn from the pages of scripture,
Sprayed on the wall in the frays of a flag.
Kisses forbidden on lips,
And all of your fine clothes worn into rags. 🎶
“It’s The End of the World As We Know It,” R.E.M.
How could I not? A lyrical day of the locust. Treat yourself to the cutest music video in the world if you have four minutes to spare today.
🎶 Save yourself, serve yourself.
World serves its own needs, listen to your heart bleed. 🎶
🫖 Good evening, all! Hope the center holds for you this day and always. 🫖