Our Cockroach Era

November 10, 2024 8:23 AM

"They think your existence is a scourge? Then the best way to spite them is to keep existing." Geraldine DeRuiter (previously) has written the one thing that makes me feel better about what happened. Maybe it'll help you too.
posted by jenfullmoon (29 comments total)

Thank you so much for sharing this! Every time I start reading one of Geraldine DeRuiter's columns, I'm always taken aback by how good it is and then go back and see who wrote it and say, "Oh yes, of course it's her again!".
posted by hydropsyche at 8:48 AM on November 10 [1 favorite]

Great piece. Thanks for sharing.
posted by larrybob at 9:32 AM on November 10 [1 favorite]

Really great thank you
posted by gryphonlover at 9:41 AM on November 10 [1 favorite]

I do not want to be alive. This is not a new development; I first voiced this opinion to my mother when I was five years old, and it has persisted through the subsequent four decades despite therapy, a vast array of medications, and multiple forms of invasive treatments that have made my existence even less bearable while having no affect on my depression (or, as I think of it, my identity and most fundamental self). Given the opportunity to press a button and fast-forward to my deathbed, I'd do it without hesitation. But these Nazi motherfuckers will not leave the people I love alone. They are forcing me to stay alive, even though I hate every minute of it, just so I can contribute my meager skills to the war effort against them. You have no idea how furious I am, because all I want is to die, and they won't let me, because if I did I'd be ceding the world to them, and I refuse to do that without exhausting every drop of blood within me. If I can't have a single moment of joy, peace or happiness, then neither can they.
posted by Faint of Butt at 9:41 AM on November 10 [47 favorites]

Oh great. Another first world problem I have to worry about!
posted by Czjewel at 9:59 AM on November 10

We all need you FoB.
posted by bluesky43 at 10:08 AM on November 10 [25 favorites]

"Living well is the best revenge"
posted by aleph at 10:12 AM on November 10 [6 favorites]

sometimes the abbreviated is also appropriate, "Living is the best revenge"

hope for the best, prepare for the worst

and, personal favourite, "no pockets in a shroud"
posted by From Bklyn at 10:20 AM on November 10 [5 favorites]

I always saw that "well" part as finding out the ways to make a life for *yourself* with a minimum of their crap.
posted by aleph at 10:25 AM on November 10 [1 favorite]

Perhaps living well is the best revenge - but that leaves plenty of space to recognize (and indeed perhaps even requires) that simply living is revenge.
posted by nickmark at 10:30 AM on November 10 [6 favorites]

Recently I was doing a bit of light housekeeping in my tarantula's cage. While his setup was quite attractive, it had the disadvantage of giving his food places to hide, and I was tired of digging roaches out of moss to direct them back toward his web on every feeding day. What I hadn't realized--especially because he's a good hunter, a good eater--is that he had three or four roaches living in his cage, that I thought he'd eaten weeks or months ago.

Roaches don't think, they don't have emotions. But I can't help wondering what it's like, to be dropped into a predator's cage--locked in--and then just go about your business as though nothing was wrong, knowing at any minute, if you step on just the wrong bit of moss, just a bit of web, your time is over. I would be scared, I'd be paralyzed. I wouldn't last a second in any number of wilderness scenarios: I'm slow, juicy and afraid. But these roaches had simply ignored the presence of a killer ten times their size. They followed their instincts--find the dark, spend a lot of time sitting still--and it really worked out for them. For them, it wasn't a horror movie about a haunted house you're desperate to escape from. There is no escape for them, only survival or death.

Nothing is really mappable about roaches to humans. We do think, we do have emotions, we have a society, and our predators are people like ourselves rather than giant arachnids (for now). But it's impossible not to see something suggestive about learning to survive in the dark ages, rather than waste all your energy trying to escape the inescapable.
posted by mittens at 11:14 AM on November 10 [10 favorites]

Eh. The new fascists are big on "freedom" buzzwords. I expect more and more obvious examples of the lie(s). And they're also big on freedom of speech. At least publicly/for-now. That and places like this where you don't have to own a printing press to communicate will make a lot of the old oppression mechanisms less useful. Internet does help the Cockroach lifestyle. :)

I've lived through times that made me sick to my stomach. This is another one. At those times groups of similar minded people were all we had.
posted by aleph at 11:45 AM on November 10 [4 favorites]

i want to live long enough to stand in line for three days for my turn to piss on cheetoh's grave
posted by graywyvern at 11:58 AM on November 10 [9 favorites]

I *will* be upping my donations to orgs like EFF and media groups who do good reporting.

Got to make the lies *difficult*.
posted by aleph at 12:02 PM on November 10 [3 favorites]

"I always saw that "well" part as finding out the ways to make a life for *yourself* with a minimum of their crap."

For anybody puzzled by my insistence on myself in that statement (and groups in others) I should have mentioned that the biggest help to that life you build for yourself is groups you share it with. As any one sane knows.
posted by aleph at 12:32 PM on November 10 [1 favorite]

I previously quoted "living well is the best revenge", and I believe it. But there's also the fact that unless you believe in an afterlife or reincarnation... living is all u get. Live well, period.

But... cockroaches? I see them as fairly mindless programmed self-preserving bots. They don't seem to play, or to have much fun. Cockroaches reflexively voting for the Cockroach party is a big cause of the current problem, no?

I'm thinking... rats. Rats are social, clever, inquisitive, adaptable. They explore, they play, they cook (what? Ratatouille was fiction?). Rats are hard to eliminate, too. I'm gonna be a rat, thanks.
posted by Artful Codger at 1:04 PM on November 10 [8 favorites]

But the beauty was there, even when I couldn’t see it. It’s so pervasive, so stubborn. Even after the biggest catastrophes, the sun still rises. We just don’t notice right away, because we are too tired to lift our heads.
posted by doctornemo at 1:08 PM on November 10 [1 favorite]

I'm thinking... rats. Rats are social, clever, inquisitive, adaptable. They explore, they play, they cook (what? Ratatouille was fiction?). Rats are hard to eliminate, too. I'm gonna be a rat, thanks.

Poem posted on BlueSky today
posted by daisystomper at 1:12 PM on November 10 [10 favorites]

Cockroaches, eh?
posted by y2karl at 1:34 PM on November 10 [1 favorite]

Yeah. "living is the best revenge" isn't enough. Unless, as it's usually meant, living as *you*. Not some worker bot/consumer.

Survival on *those* terms is the best... whatever.

And *you* takes work.

Against all the forces (including exhaustion) trying to get you to "take it easy...", try this, try that, for low low price...

When I said "dopamine fixes" before I hope people didn't write it off as; social media = bad. After all, as has been pointed out, *this* is social media.

What I mean is summed up by a story I can't track down now. The conclusion was something like over-whatever in social media tends to be young women while young men had several thousand $ debt in the NFL Fantasy Games they all carried on all their phones.
posted by aleph at 3:22 PM on November 10

aleph, I suspect you are probably thinking of

"the girls on campus are reading three books at once, and all the guys owe $5k to Draft Kings”

from a comment posted here on MetaFilter by outgrown_hobnail.

I’ve been thinking about that one too, and your mention of it prompted me to track it down again.
posted by Songdog at 4:30 PM on November 10 [5 favorites]

Thanks. Then I'll back that one off to "anecdote". That's what I meant by the dopamine hits.

Gambling, excessive (?) social media, Gamification, others.

The distractions are very easy to let go and just drift...

But you don't have to do it that way.
posted by aleph at 4:54 PM on November 10

jenfullmoon, thank you so much for posting this. I love it. I have been playing The Mountain Goats's "Spent Gladiator" songs from Transcendental Youth which suggest off-putting and effective things the listener might do to stay alive.

"Play with matches / if you think you need to play with matches.... Find where the heat's unbearable and stay there if you have to"

or

"Like the mice in the forgotten grain / way up on the top shelf"

or

"I am happy where the vermin play"

and always

"stay alive"
posted by brainwane at 6:57 PM on November 10 [5 favorites]

Brainwane, I too have been finding comfort in The Mountain Goats this past week; I was considering making a repeating playlist of just different recordings of "This Year" for when things feel really bad.

A dear friend and coworker and I have been working on an inclusivity initiative for our department and we discussed a bit of this as the results were coming down: the only thing we can do is keep surviving and show people a better world. As they put it (tongue firmly implanted in cheek), "this shit is tiring, but fuck it, what else we got going on? lol"
posted by oc-to-po-des at 8:10 PM on November 10 [5 favorites]

keep existing

and keep Tom Cardy on high rotation.
posted by flabdablet at 5:01 AM on November 11 [2 favorites]

Tom's take on The Myth of Sisyphus, for FoB
posted by flabdablet at 5:17 AM on November 11 [1 favorite]

if I did I'd be ceding the world to them, and I refuse to do that without exhausting every drop of blood within me

feeling that
posted by flabdablet at 8:15 AM on November 11 [1 favorite]

Thank you for this, jenfullmoon.

If you fall into that privileged group, consider using your energy to remind others that they are precious, and beautiful, and so, so loved.

I can do this. At least some of the time.


[ finish reading ]

[ save to my Solace folder ]



Thank you for this, jenfullmoon. ( ... : You are precious. And beautiful. And so, so loved.)
posted by kristi at 10:40 PM on November 11 [2 favorites]

oc-to-po-des, I thought of you when I was listening to the song I link to in my new front page post, because almost the first thing the singer does is refer to the shared experience of singing "This Year" in the midst of grief.
posted by brainwane at 6:55 AM on November 12