Drugstore wandering
The red wine flows with the blood of the bows tied by the devil.
In the shower this morning, I was thinking about the ways we think with the terms “micro-” and “macro-,” and how easy it is, as with any binary, to get stuck, trapped. (I was thinking these shower thoughts in relation to a Letter to the Editor published in Anthropology of Consciousness that is positioned as a critique of my article.) It can of course be helpful sometimes to zoom out to the bigger picture, and to sometimes zoom in to the small details. But it’s easy to mistake one for the other, thinking that the micro- is just a representation of something at the macro-level, or vice versa. Reductionism abounds in that kind of thinking. And where is the edge of the big picture? How are the edges defined, what do they leave out, and who is determining those edges?
Much more interesting, and perhaps helpful, is thinking about how macro- and micro-levels are continuously entangling, shifting one another, through mostly unseen and wandering ways. The ways that the macro-level affect the multitude of different things going on at the micro-level (and again, vice versa), are as multitudinous and individually nuanced as all of the micro-level things. There’s no way to “capture” or represent, and thus claim to know or understand, all of those wandering entanglements and extract anything of solidity.
After shuffling, I draw three cards from the Horoscope Belline deck: Well-Being - Gifts - Devil. I first thought about the images of food, drink, and gifts as very fitting for the holiday season. But my thoughts were still also on my morning shower and that I’m out of fresh razor blades for shaving. It’s funny to me too that the devil also makes an appearance in the title of the Letter to the Editor that I’ve written as a response to the other Letter.
But with this string of images, my thoughts settle on the idea that what gets packaged as “wellness” is so often nowadays the devil’s work. I think about this a lot when it comes to promoting my work as a diviner, how commodified spiritual and wellness practices have become. A whole industry has evolved and captured things like mindfulness, yoga, tarot, etc. How to not fall into that trap? The red wine flows with the blood of the bows tied by the devil.
I’m thinking too about the trap of modern ideas of wellness. What defines a healthy human? Whose definition? Well / unwell is just a variation of the normal / abnormal binary. So much harm has been done by our ideas of what constitutes health and wellness, the norms that have been established and codified as to what and who counts as healthy or well, our illusions about healing being an individual responsibility and process. Norms of cleanliness, purity, integration and wholeness, as though we are self-contained, box-like individuals. But we are all always already contaminated, fragmented, porous, and interdependent beings. Where are our edges?
Sophie Strand writes beautifully about these ideas in her lived experience of someone with a debilitating chronic “illness.” I think of how Bayo Akomolafe speaks about wounds, not as something to close up or “heal,” but as generative portals to other ways of being in the world. And that “trauma” is really a landscape, not something possessed individually. I think of what Vanessa Andreotti and the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective have discussed about the ways we deal with our shit—both figuratively and literally, in the modern way we simply send it down clean, polished, white porcelain toilets, to travel away from us unseen and deposited in other places, on other lands, on other people.1
I also begin to think about my cat’s health, and the number of medications he’s on: Keppra XR to prevent seizures, Felimazole for his hyperthyroidism, B12 supplements, joint health supplements… and as of last week, the vet has also put him on a prescription diet of K/D food because he’s probably in the early stages of chronic kidney disease. It’s something I’ve thought about a lot over the past six months—at what point will medicating become too much?
What happens when our tactics and strategies for healing contribute to making us unwell? Mr. B has long been a chronic vomiter because of his hyperthyroidism, but his thyroid meds tend to give him an upset stomach. When is care no longer a gift? Where’s the border between keeping him healthy and putting him through too much? What’s the tipping point between maintaining his quality of life and preventing him from dying well? We’re certainly not there yet, but the ethics of it all are often on my mind. Mr. B and I are quite intimately linked, biologically and financially, to the pharmaceutical industry (speaking of the devil), and at this stage of his life, those bonds will surely only increase.
I leave my apartment to go to the grocery store and drugstore, and there’s a man standing outside our building near the curb, looking at the building and seemingly talking to himself about our building’s address. He glances at me a few times in what feels like a furtive manner as I throw some packaging away in the trash can, light a cigarette, and begin to walk away from the building.
What’s on my mind is that a couple of other people living in our building have noticed unknown men seemingly staked out in front of our building, taking photos of the building, watching the building from their cars. In one instance, one of these guys also asked my neighbor which apartment they lived in. This stuff was happening in the weeks before the Christmas holiday period, so it seemed to me they might be casing the building to break in. We’ve also had a number of mail thefts, packages taken from the entryway.
So as I walk down the street, glancing back a couple of times, I have a certain uneasy feeling. Did I make sure the front door shut all the way and lock behind me when I left? But it’s also an inner struggle I’m feeling and noticing—paranoid thoughts about who the man was and what he was doing, and also simultaneously wanting to resist those thoughts. It’s a heightened noticing of how my usual attempt to try and never think the worst about other people is coming up against the specific history of what others in my building have observed happening over the past few weeks.
I keep walking to the store, wondering if I’ve made the wrong decision to not turn back. But I tell myself, I’ll only be gone for 10, maybe 15, minutes at the most. What will I do if I return and find this guy inside the building, or he’s gone but the packages which were sitting outside the door of my neighbors’ apartment are also nowhere to be seen?
I purchase paper towels, hand soap, toothpaste, razor blades.
See also in Machado de Oliveira, Vanessa. Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity's Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism. North Atlantic Books, 2021.