Levitasium (1950) by Leonora Carrington

The chipmunks have discovered the birdfeeder. I didn’t know they could climb so high, or that they’re light enough to eat seeds out of the half-closed windows of my weight-sensitive squirrel-proof feeder. The first chipmunk to figure it out was stuffing his cheeks so full that he looked like the protagonist of CHiPMonk Assassins.

Oh, you don’t know about CHiPMonk Assassins yet? It’s this cool anime series that teens worldwide are screaming and meme-ing about. The chipmunks are fifteen-foot-tall teenage motorcycle cops defending Southern California from a former homicide detective-turned-criminal mastermind named Monk and his gang of drug-peddling thugs. Monk was once a public servant, but under the stress of the pandemic lockdown, his 312 phobias expanded to include infectious crowds, large rodents, tiny holes, Amazon packages, tattoos, foaming soap, and Bachelorette parties. Monk builds a maze of underground tunnels in order to hide from his phobias, then he’s forced to lease it to Mexican drug cartels in order to keep his subterranean fridge stocked with organic matcha and nut butters in the absence of gainful employment. But his criminal activities don’t capture the attention of the teen-assassin motorcycle cops until he sets about murdering a gang of chipmunks squatting in his underground mansion.

You should check it out, seriously, it’s a great show. In fact, the Screaming Meme-ies declared CHiPMonk Assassins “more brat than a bratwurst” and “social media isn’t real” and “this your man” and “aldjfaldkfjasdlfkjadlfkj.”

Oh, you don’t know about the Screaming Meme-ies? It’s this feminist art collective that’s reclaiming hysteria for the modern age by insisting that madness is a generative form of bodily protest against the strictures of post-industrial neoliberal hegemony. Teens worldwide are setting their plushies on fire and throwing their bodies in front of public busses and commuter trains in order to signal their loyalty to the Screaming Meme-ies’ agenda of ‘hysteria over history, anti-histo-memes over antihistamines.” Some have called them “willfully ignorant” and “willfully asthmatic” while others insist that the SMs are simply “reclaiming genocidal vibes” and repurposing them for a totally worthy cause. “Masochistic devotion to changing the world” is their slogan. Or is it “I’m not the wound, you’re the wound”?

Anyway, weird that you don’t know about these things already. Have you ever been on the internet?

***

It seems like a lot of people are on social media again after a few years off. Personally, I haven’t come out of my Divestment Era yet.

Keep in mind, though, I was very online for about, let’s see… starting in 1995…. almost three decades. I wrote cartoons for Suck in 1995, reviewed TV for Salon in 2005, wrote advice for The Awl in 2010, wrote for The Cut in 2015, started this Substack in 2019, and wasted a big chunk of my life looking at Twitter from 2009-2020.

What did I get from so many heaping doses of internet? I’m not sure, but it doesn’t matter because I’m allergic now. I think this happens to almost everyone eventually. Even when you try to go online you can’t do it. Your body repels those poisons automatically, kind of like taking two drags of a cigarette and then putting it out. I go online and this old familiar dread rushes in, and I remember the shame-driven anxiety that used to trick me into believing that I needed to weigh in on everything that was happening in every corner of the globe or I wasn’t real.

Strangely enough, I feel more real now than I did then. More tired, but more real. 

***

Yesterday I swam very slowly, sharing a lap-pool lane with my friend who’s been visiting from California this week. While we swam, she told me her theories about five different things and I described what I think are the most debilitating and common forms of mental illness that you see every day in almost everyone you know and then we started making up songs for a musical. The songs were not amazing. 

Then we got out of the lap pool and lumbered across the family pool area, weaving around several beautiful young lifeguards wearing red trunks and red one-piece bathing suits like extras from Baywatch. My friend said, “In college, I used to look like Ally Sheedy. Well, not quite Ally Sheedy. A puffy version of Ally Sheedy.”

“Yeah,” I said. “And now you’re an overstuffed armchair doing its best imitation of Ally Sheedy.”

We snorted and chuckled like Beavis and Butthead at this.

“Now I’m a big plushie version of Ally Sheedy.”

“Yeah. You’re the Ally Sheedy furry at a “Breakfast Club”-themed furry convention.”

We went to the very small gym next to the pool and I ran two miles on the treadmill, then I bumped into my nephew and his friend who were lifting weights. He said he was leaving for college on Friday. He’ll start cross country practice immediately upon arrival. I asked him what distances he’s been running and he asked me how long I ran on the treadmill and I said only two miles but I ran five miles two days ago and I broke my toe two months ago so I feel good and things are looking up.

Then I felt guilty for talking too much and also for looking like an sweaty orc’s best imitation of a Brentwood housewife. I was probably embarrassing him. I offered a fist-bump instead of a hug so I wouldn’t gross him out and I said, “See you at Thanksgiving.”

He looked at me like "Thanksgiving? I’m not coming home for Thanksgiving! Have you ever been to college?”

***

My first few weeks in college were perfect. I liked my roommate. I fell in love. I cut out pictures from magazines and made a huge collage on the sliding door to my dorm closet. Sometimes random people would wander into my dorm room and ask me why I brought a teddy bear to college with me. “Because I like teddy bears a lot,” I told them.

I didn’t understand how I seemed to other people back then. When I told my roommate that we were wearing exactly the same pants, one of her friends said, “Yeah, except your version is cheap and hers is expensive.”

I looked at our pants and said, “But they’re pretty much the same and I got mine for so much less.”

“But look at how the seam to yours is all twisted and not straight,” she said.

For some reason I laughed out loud at this instead of punching her in the face. This moment was a foreshadowing of the next four years of my life. My coping strategy was to keep laughing and to avoid taking anything personally. I was so happy to be on my own.

Somehow I arrived at college with no idea that almost every student around me was very rich. How did I miss that fact? My dad was a professor at the university so my tuition was free. It’s not like we were impoverished but my parents were divorced and my mom was often in debt. I knew the other kids would be wealthy, I just didn’t understand how rich they would be, or that they only knew other rich people, or that, to them, observing that someone’s pants were cheap was almost like pointing out a personality flaw or a kind of moral failure. Meanwhile, I saw buying things for less money as a kind of moral victory.

My new boyfriend was middle class, grew up in a small rural town in North Carolina, and was attending my school on a big scholarship he was deathly afraid of losing. We thought the people around us were clever and fun but we also thought they were a little odd in ways we’d never encountered before. We didn’t arrive knowing everything about everything like kids do these days. We had never been on the internet.

“Why is everyone trying to act so sophisticated?” I asked him one afternoon. “We’re just kids.”

“Yeah,” he said. “They all try to talk like adults.”

“Why not be as immature as possible for as long as you can?” I said.

No wonder we were so in love. What’s more romantic than celebrating what you don’t know? What’s more seductive than putting off knowing more for as long as you can?

Ignorance offers an animal’s joy. Your vision is narrow. You aren’t aware of what you’re missing. You can’t remember a time when you were better than you are right now. This is what I’m the most nostalgic for. This is where I try to go every day, if I can find the time and the space and the drive to try. Peel off the layers of sophistication and world-weariness and preemptive, supposedly-correct answers until:

You are naive. You are optimistic. You can feel everything.

This is the most real you’ll ever be.

Thanks for reading Ask Molly!

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