Thanks for calling the hotline.
Songs won’t do it. You can go all pop and repeat “And that’s the sound of me not calling you back” and even admit Lizzo is clever, but it is just a song and it will be over in minutes. Nor will Tigrinya music and its earnest sameness do, with hyperkinetic Dula giving way to lovestruck Kiflu singing Tigrinya with Amharic and Temu singing Amharic with Tigrinya because only he knows kem kemey kem zHaderku. Don’t even get started on Arabic because what you thought was profound is just facile with heavy blanket. Songs won’t do it.
Maybe books. There are books and they have answers, but do they? The problem is there is always a specificity that negates their universality. All the Russians with their “universal” messages no longer speak to you. And Albert Camus is the stranger, writing in a long-gone time, in a far-away place, about existentialism. At least his refusal to be bullied into faith is something, but not enough. Books won’t do it.
And faith? Do you envy the faithful or do you scorn them. They call and wish for your beloved not just any heaven but the seventh heaven, Jenet Al Firdous. So, what, if God opens the doors to the third heaven instead of the seventh, how can you suppress the question, “why am I not good enough for the seventh?” And God will say, what, zeynatka anynatkan iyu, what’s not yours is not yours? God doesn’t sound very profound when he sounds like Tesfai Mengesha in ኣይትገራህ ልበይ. Faith won’t do it.
Pick yourself up.When Matt Taibbi is dead, somebody will approach his kids, (does he have kids, let’s say he does), and say, your pop was a great writer. He wrote the definitive critique of vampire squids sucking the economic life of America and therefore the world, and he shamed them and changed the world, of course he didn’t, the vampire squids are all back, even more powerful than ever, holding cabinet positions. But your pops was a great man. And by the way, kid, በርትዕ. That means hang-in-there. Except, be better. Be tough. Don’t be a fucking pussy. በርትዕ.
Randomness rules. People are born and then they die. Some live well, and some die painfully, and it is all random. Maybe you will find your true love and still be miserable; maybe the lotto number is inside her fortune cookie she didn’t eat because she is avoiding sweets. How do you know she is avoiding sweets? Because she will effing tell you nonstop: all who exercise and diet are evangelists, they can’t stop talking about it. Existentialists are given a bad rap, all they were saying, and it was to refute the old Greeks with a lot of time on their hands, shut up about essence and essentialism, or their abstraction about what makes the tree a tree, or the French telling us we are because we think, or as the leaders of your country say they are here to tell you about “the objective situation on the ground”, when the objectivity of the situation is described very subjectively by them, and the ground they stand on is shifting.
Find your distraction. You can draw, you can write poetry, and you can join a forum to discuss, I don’t know, the significance of the color green in The Shape of Water, but in the end, really, the movie is, as your daughter reminds you, about a mute girl who fucks an alien. She probably shouldn’t say “fuck”: after all she is your daughter and tradition, culture, civilization, and the frown on lady in the cue all say she shouldn’t. Although it doesn’t bother you, you have to pretend to be bothered because the opinion of a stranger you will never see again is very important to you for those 17 seconds.
Green, yellow, whatever, red. You don’t even know why the Red Sea is called “red”, and there is no consolation in the universality of ignorance on its origins. Would you believe them if they told you the red in the Red Sea signifies not color but direction? Well, it did once upon a time. Colors stood for north, south, east, west and red meant south of the Mediterranean. So what? You say that now, but when information becomes so fragmented that people will vote for the news they like not on the basis of its factuality but on its ability to confirm their bias (and that time is now), there will be charismatic sermonizers telling you it is named for the direction it is headed to and, like Colin Powell or Gebretsadkan pointing to a map with a stick, they will tell you that the red in the Red Sea is the color of war.
So, of course you are on your own and you can lose yourself in the infinite. As long as you pay your bills. Karl Marx told you that unless you are an industrialist all you own is your labor and you better hope by luck or design your kind of labor will be in demand long enough for you to figure out what to do when your labor is no longer in demand either because you are too old or too outsourced. Meanwhile, find your distraction, even if that is as impossible as changing the world, because whatever happens, you can’t be idle.
Go see Ephrem and Hamelmal; of course, you will see too-young, too-drunk people fighting over nothing, and the sound system will suck, and the tickets will be too expensive, and the parking too far, but if you are lucky you will be transformed for minutes to something higher, farther and when you are in your death bed, probably paralyzed and unable to speak, maybe you will think about it.
