GONE AWRY

as someone who remembers the patriot act and all the conversation surrounding it, it's a bit... of an experience being able to remember how many people pointed out that Terrorist was a politically convenient term which could be used to dehumanise and legally strip the rights from someone and that eventually all this would be used internally. and the response was 'nuh uh only browns with funny headgear are terrorists'. and then two decades of 'fighting age males' being blown to pieces at weddings because they might have, maybe, looked at a terrorist once. A week ago a head of state is black bagged in the middle of the night by the US for being a 'narcoterrorist'. And now an unarmed, random woman - white, citizen - is gunned down by jackboot thugs and before her body is cold she is, of course, a domestic terrorist.

One of my favorite parts of Hadestown is the way Hermes slips so seamlessly between participant and narrator. The fact that he knows from the beginning how the story is going to go, but still plays his part, surrounded by people who don’t know they’re characters in a tragedy. And he plays his part well. Every night, he tells Orpheus, “You want to talk to her? Go on," and every night, he asks, “Just how far would you go for her?” Every night, Orpheus asks him, “ It’s not a trick?” and he tells him, “No, it’s a test.” And every night, when the cycle starts again, when his voice is so broken with grief that he can barely get the words out to tell the audience - the audience that he and no one else has known was there the whole time - “Don’t ask why, brother, don’t ask how he could have come so close. The song was written long ago, and that is how it goes,” when Eurydice appears - fresh-faced and alive, with no memory of what has just happened - to ask, “anybody got a match?” he wordlessly extends his matchbook to her, and lets the story start anew. Someone’s got to tell the tale, whether or not it turns out well.

I want this to happen to the CEO every time I click “not interested”