Today on the morning commute on the fresh air they had a writer on. That, sometimes, is a good thing …

I want to say that I consider myself a supporter of the homosexual agenda, and I say that with all due awareness of irony. To put it more plainly, although I don’t go around shouting about how I’m an Ally, I am very much in favor of marriage equality, and I felt that way long before the pivot year of 2009 when 51% percent of Americans shifted to that evolved position, and the President and Amy Klobuchar could read the polls and consider it safe to believe in the obvious right thing.

Gay people are outsiders, just like poor people, just like trans people and people with darker skin. They should love who they want. They should fuck who they want. Justice for all should include them. Equal protection under the law should include them.

So that’s enough virtue signaling for one spill. I’m on their side.

And yet … when a lot of an artist’s work is taken up with themes of homosexuality, I have something of an impulse to tune out–if not literally, I at least … care less, about what they have to say and about investing time in listening.

It’s not just gay artists either. When a show I listen to has on someone who wants to tell me about the joy of being a breeder–about how motherhood or fatherhood is just so very central to their journey–my desire to listen plummets then, too.

I think there’s something central, in the process of consuming art and culture, to whether we can identify with the subject; and, by the subject, I mean not only the themes but the creator themselves too.

So it is easy for me to identify with Stephen Maturin, fictional spy and naval doctor in the age of sail, on the basis of being the smart and idiosyncratic one on a ship of fools.

It’s pretty easy for me to identify with the music of Madonna or Lady Gaga, not because they are gay/bi artists, but because they’ve got a lot of interesting things to sing out about beyond that one note.

It’s even easy for me to identify with David Sedaris on some level, because although he is very very Out and talks a lot about it, he’s also just an unorthodox representation of masculinity, and a reluctant working class hero who did hard time in seasonal retail. There is common ground aplenty.

But often when I hear a fresh artist begin to speak, and the conversation is heavy with something I can’t relate to (it might be parenting or Lesbianism or the awful burden of being rich), I just sort of internally throw up my hands and say, well, that’s not for me then.

So today’s interview with Saeed Jones, young and black and gay, started out like that. But I did keep listening, and I’m glad I did.

Toward the end of the conversation, Terry Gross asked him about his battle with depression, specifically about why he was depressed.

And he said something like: America is a depressing place, Terry.

God damn if that didn’t resonate.

Everywhere I go, from classrooms to supermarkets to getting pulled over on the side of the road for a license plate light, I see a built-in misery all around me. Misery built of the very fabric of what this society considers important, and what it dismisses without a thought. It’s a shitty awful system we’ve built for ourselves, generally, full of injustice at every turn, and ugly inside and out.

I have a pretty good life by global standards, and I feel it getting better too.

There are golden moments in the muck, as well. The clerk where I picked up my dry cleaning yesterday took a breath and a moment to ask me how my day was going, and it was obvious that she really and actually wanted to know. I loved her for that.

But still, day in and day out, what I see is quiet and not so quiet desperation and malaise. The bottles are plastic and so are the things that concern people. A depressive reaction to it all is a human reaction, quite a lot more natural than joy under the average circumstance. So many decent people, in the Midwest and elsewhere, voted twice for Obama, waiting for the change, and then just gave up at the end of eight years. No, they said. We’re not going to take it in the ass a third time and smile. Hillary and Barack and their whole inbred pack of evil neoliberal henchman can go pound sand. The other guy is batshit insane, but we haven’t tried that yet. It can’t be any worse. And in any case, it’s a great big middle finger to the whole corrupt ball of shit, and that counts for something.

Or they just stayed home, or wrote in Jill Stein (speaking of things I can relate to).

The problem with the Kamalas and the Pootergigs of this cycle is that they don’t get how weary and pissed off and hopeless people are. And they didn’t get this way from three years of Trump. They were already resigned when they put his ridiculous orange ass in office.

Elizabeth Warren comes out and says, yep, health care for everybody. That’ll help some.

And Pelosi and Pete, Chuck and Biden, they’re all like, oh god honey, pie in the sky. We can’t afford health care for those people in the trailer parks. We have bombs to drop on weddings in Pakistan. We need to give a third of a trillion to the zionist apartheid state so that the Palestinians don’t rise up and insist on being treated like fellow humans. We need newer and better cages for Honduran children fleeing climate change and the war on drugs.

Free college? Are you insane? Our friends at Apple and Kaiser might have to start paying taxes, if we changed the stained social fabric that way. What we need is UNITY. You have to promise to vote for whatever rotten hunk of meat we make the nominee for the big D. And you, Elizabeth, Bernard, you’d better get in line behind that neoliberal zombie, whoever we decide it will be. Just like you both did last time, okay?

I wonder what Nancy’s gonna do, when her beloved base says no to the old model of Biden or the fresh new old crap of Butterfudge. When the Wasserman-Schultz machinations fail this time where they succeeded four years earlier.

Will they draft Michelle Obama? Will they cut an evil deal with Warren and co-opt her in the end?

I watch it all like a soap opera, instead of watching myself cut the grass on a Saturday and watching the right orthodox manly game on Sunday afternoon.

I watch with an ever more agile curiosity, for the flash of recognition in the mirrorshades.