How Stories Saved the World

I recorded an Instagram reel on November 17th, 2024 while staying in The Shire. In it, I exclaim the "good news" that I still subscribe to: we already won. We, apparently†, have accumulated the necessary karmic threshold that supposedly†† requires that we "ride the chariot" into a bright, sustainable, liberated future because the future of life on Earth requires that outcome, and, frankly†††, revolutionaries never die††††. In other words, the time has finally come, à la mode time, which seems to partition itself in rough chunks called aeons. Prophets have been prophesying about this shift for... some time.

Precipitating my expulsion from my parents' home election season, I had taken my hair stylist's advice and arranged a pet sitting stay at a home in a neighboring suburb. I met the couple for coffee at a café near the train station, and I was immediately set at ease by their Californian-ness. It turns out we had been neighbors in North Hollywood and returned to Chicagoland simultaneously. Additionally, they enjoyed cornhole (i.e. bag toss) and Wingspan, one of my favorite board games.

Reveling in our mutual interests, I asked whether they had been able to catch The Lord of the Rings musical that had recently wrapped in Chicago. My host-to-be smirked and revealed himself as the Bilbo in that very musical. Thusly, because they were continuing the show in New Zealand, I needed to watch and feed their kitty, Lulu (aka Lucifer).

There are many stories to be told about my time in The Shire, which brings me back to the point: stories, like water, are life.

I intend to write a book about the nature of existence one day, but suffice it to say that I believe we live as our stories do, and because we choose the stories we tell–those we inherit or create–we are truly gods, for we shape our experience and the experience of those entities whose stories we tell. For example, if I name my shoes Mo and Shmoe, you can imagine their storied lives as I've traversed America in the body of this hot, queer, Mestize, Millennial witch. Am I not their God?

This [indigenous*] philosophy, which I fashioned for myself following an icebreaker conversation at a staff retreat in April 2024, has proven useful as a survival tool. Choosing to tell stories at the "switchy-switchy" breakpoint of the eon is a pleasure strategy, and riding a chariot (whilst being pummeled by arrows in the form of American policy and society), must be pleasurable. We must choose to be gods, or else.

At some point during election season, I invested in an AMC A-List Stubs membership. It was easy to justify in light of my adopted philosophy. If stories were my religion, were movie theaters not my church? Did I not return to AMC theaters because those were the joyful spaces I frequented with my maternal grandmother, Abuela, who raised me in unconditional love only to die of colon cancer in 2014? It was that investment that ended up "saving my life" the forthcoming occasion during which I found myself homeless on a frigid Chicago night. I sat on the carpeted floor in the mezzanine after the escalator doors had been locked.

Aside: I do wonder if my (Cuban) Abuela's obsessive concern with money and capitalism had something to do with her knowing (at some level) my eventual financial hardship.

Stories saved me. Stories save me every day. Stories save you. Stories have always saved us. Stories will save us. We need to commit ourselves to telling better stories. Truer stories. More beautiful stories. It is because we have told enough good stories (thanks, internet!) that we already won. Stories saved the world. Sit back and enjoy the chariot.

† "I can't make this shit up," is a punchline I utter for myself frequently nowadays. I can't make this shit up because I am not a genius, I joke, or at least not that much of a genius (I joke). I can't make up the fact that I am a clairvoyant trans person of color barely surviving American imperial-colonialist-capitalist fascism. Apparently means that I have gathered evidence via "the veil," and I will elucidate further some other time.
†† Even while buoyed with "evidence," my faith in "the signs" often falters because the hellscape of America makes it very difficult to trust we're going to survive this, let alone have an opportunity to "enjoy" the ride.
††† Because of the inherent ridiculousness of claiming clairvoyance, I fortify my tether to reality with the humor of these adverbs, including frankly, which are generally considered superfluous by writing teachers. In coordination with my politics, my prescriptivism has shifted to descriptivism, and I embrace the utility of adverbs as a stylistic flourish. Why include any word ever, after all? They all serve their destined purposes, which can be traced (like a birth chart) via etymological study. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, frankly connotes "free, liberal, generous" (c. 1300) and "outspoken," (1540s) from Old French franc "free (not servile); without hindrance, exempt from; sincere, genuine, open, gracious, generous; worthy, noble, illustrious" (12c.), from Medieval Latin francus "free, at liberty, exempt from service," as a noun, "a freeman, a Frank" (see Frank).

Frank, literally, free; the freedom may be in regard to one's own opinions, which is the same as openness, or in regard to things belonging to others, where the freedom may go so far as to be unpleasant, or it may disregard conventional ideas as to reticence. Hence, while openness is consistent with timidity, frankness implies some degree of boldness. [Century Dictionary]

The entry continues, "A generalization of the tribal name; the connection is that Franks, as the conquering class, alone had the status of freemen in a world that knew only free, captive, or slave. For sense connection of 'being one of the nation' and 'free,' compare Latin liber 'free,' from the same root as German Leute 'nation, people' (see liberal (adj.)) and Slavic 'free' words (Old Church Slavonic svobodi, Polish swobodny, Serbo-Croatian slobodan) which are cognates of the first element in English sibling 'brother, sister' (in Old English used more generally: 'relative, kinsman'). For the later sense development, compare ingenuity."
* What, in America, is "indigenous" if to be indigenous is to be disbelieved, murdered, and forcibly forgotten? I hesitate to claim my own indigeneity not because I doubt the science of my blood or because I lack the community that might define an authentic indigenous experience, but because tradition is dead in America, and I choose to live, by which I mean I choose to believe my own truth, the only indigenous thing left to me. For this reason alone, I am convinced, America wants to kill me. For instance, if I stopped claiming my indigenous heritage, then I am once again a patriotic "American," which is to say murderable via the more "civilized" methods of economic disenfranchisement instead of being shamelessly disappeared.