Picking up G for movie night. I felt I had the teeth of purpose over my head halo-style. I had “exercised” earlier the day for the first time in three months, including jogging for the first time in eighteen. She let me show her some metal music on the way back to mine; namely, the only metal CD I have, which E got me, which is The Kite String Pops, which is by Acid Bath. Sludge. The track I use listen to on the way to work: “Dope Fiend.”

Anger is the concrete.

Why! do! you! love–to lick my wounds?

Why! do! you! love–to feel my pain?

Why! do! you! love–to suck my life?

Why! do! you! look so–motherfucking DEAD? DEAD? DEAD?

The match is the sweet release at the end.

Yeah motherfucker, I'm high / And I'm thankful just to be! alive, ye-ea

So we see gratitude is a physical thing. A high.

Blasting metal matches your emotional intensity to the concrete. Just another way of trying to make yourself sane. Insanity is (if not other things) the agon of a conflict between inner and outer realities. So, metal music lets you blast someone else’s screams so deep into your body from the outside inwards that the intensity of your own emotions finds itself matched in the reality around you. You have found decorum. You have found a fit in time and place. Another victory against an uncaring universe. Match on concrete.

I hear people talk, sometimes, about being grateful by practice as if being grateful is a warm feeling. A warm release, Emotional self-pissing, available on command. Be grateful! Warmth is of course incompatible with obligation done right. But I think that they, in such a case, conflate gratitude with what is more properly a feeling of wonder, of admiration for the things that exist alongside us and help us or do not harm us as much as they could or give us something they did not have to give. At worst, this kind of “gratitude” is the diplomatic face of fear. At best, it is a self-sufficient admiration that something is, that it does, and that you are in the world with it. This is easiest to feel high.

Gratitude towards people, as an individual, is not something you make much of if it is sincere. Personal gratitude is communicated in intimate channels and self-evident actions. It does not proclaim itself to the world.

Often I am given things that I did not ask for and that came at a price I had no say in negotiating. Gratitude is also a demand that I worship a certain arrangement of power: be grateful that I as an American citizen get to benefit from the labor of migrant or trafficked workers. Look a little farther back and be grateful that the historical subsistence of the people who produced me was catalyzed, wheelgreased, and/or fueled by slavery and genocide. And I'm supposed to feel grateful about it? Come on. Not only is that morally perverse, it's perversely stupid. History needs my feelings like a fish needs a bicycle. My feelings are irrelevant to history-as-the-past not because my feelings do not matter in general but because history in particular is not the past. History is the living storied fabric of every present moment, and what we really owe to history, to the dead, and each other is that action itself that brings about a better present.

The future is dead, the past is now with us, and we must present ourselves.