Last week, the day before Halloween, I took the ferry from the edge of Long Island to the Fire Island Pines. A very nice friend had invited me to spend a day and night of the off-season there. It was my second time on the island in the last few months. 

The last time I went, it was the dead of summer. Then, the island was as it is in most people’s minds—teeming with queers who were partying and having sex and lounging on the beach and blasting dance music and finding joy in the idyllic surroundings and in each other. 

This time around, the ferry, which only travels to the island two or three times a day in the fall, had 10 people on it. And the island had perhaps 75 or 100—a mix of those who don’t mind (or quite enjoy) staying somewhere without cars, groceries, entertainment or shopping through the cold months, and the laborers who travel there each day in the off-season, fixing up houses before it gets too cold to do so. Much of this fixing up entails repairing damage from water from the past season, or preparing (see: lifting the houses onto stilts) for the inevitable damage from water from the coming seasons—Fire Island is not-so-slowly being engulfed by the rising sea around it. 

My second day there, I took a walk solo through the Pines, down the wood plank boardwalks, past all the empty homes, to the northern edge of the neighborhood, where the houses abruptly end at a national park that separates gay Fire Island from straight (there are, apparently, straight communities to the north and south of the Pines and Cherry Grove, talked about by the gay denizens as if they are far away and exotic and forbidden lands and not…like…a mile away). And then I walked back down south, toward where I was staying, this time via the beach, though to call it a beach would be generous—it was at that moment a concerningly-narrow strip of sand abutting the Atlantic Ocean.

It was Halloween, less than a week before the Presidential election, and 75 degrees out. 

For the past several weeks, I have been in somewhat of a funk. I thought this was simply because I was listening to the foreboding-sounding new Lady Gaga single Disease too much (aOoahooAoohaooooOAohhaooOAHhhh), but apparently most of my friends and family have been feeling it too.

At first I theorized this collective funk was a subconscious recognition that Trump was going to win—that we were all engaged in a pre-grieving process, steeling ourselves for the inevitable. But now I believe it’s larger than that, or at least has been for me: it is a recognition that whatever happens, we’re still kinda, in many ways, fucked. Whether Harris or Trump wins, the beach of Fire Island will continue to erode. Sure, one would make the beach erode more quickly, but neither have any interest or inclination to stop the violence of capitalism from ruining the beauty of our world...