Literally Any

Everyone wants hope right now and nobody knows where to find it, because long after the posters even Shepard Fairey had to admit that the first Black president turned out like every other neoliberal, with drones and a domestic spy program, but yesterday on Instagram someone asked Yo-Yo Ma’s pedal steel guitar player where to find “literally any hope” in the music industry, and he said my band, said “@togetherbreakfastmusic just put out their album and it’s pretty amazing,” which—along with the packed house last week and the crowd that knew all the music and sang along even though the EP had only just dropped that morning and has no lyrics but does have a lot of time changes and polyrhythms and we think maybe a previously undiscovered sound, the crowd that fell pin-drop silent while Margot (for now, she is Margot while she can still source her estrogen, by which I mean for now, she is Margot until she is no longer safe as Margot, by which I mean for now, she is Margot until she presents her passport at the border, when she will become someone else, though only for a moment, because she has been, always will be, Margot, and we all become someone else, for a moment, from time to time) held a dissonant chord for more than a minute and mostly put away their phones so that for, like, half an hour we were all experiencing something together instead of doomscrolling and rotting alone in our beds—made us think that maybe—maybe—it was all worth it, until I ran the financial report from the door sales and merch sales minus the poster printing and the Meta ads and paying out the openers and calculated that really we only made nine hundred and sixty-four dollars on the night (less what we all fronted for merch inventory), split three ways (but really six because some of us are working for free because we believe in this project and have other, steadier jobs with health insurance), and when you include the time spent hanging posters and running ads and filming TikToks and updating the website and emailing the local rags and coordinating with the venue and the other two bands and rehearsals, we each netted less than two dollars an hour; Yo-Yo Ma’s pedal steel player (his name is Chris) said “the business folks can’t sell things that are complex … so right now the business is selling the most underwhelming stuff it ever has,” and I can tell you, as the business folk (manager) of this indie operation, that although we sold a lot of vinyl stamped at cost in a friend’s lesbian-run vinyl plant (itself a labor of love), we have not yet sold nearly enough to make up for the cost of the stamper and the raw polyvinyl chloride and the artwork and design and printing of the sleeve it goes in, but the band played and the crowd sang “Happy Birthday to You” to me because I turned forty the day of the show, the same day the US attorney general announced by memo the return of federal executions, and on the drive home along I-24 from Nashville to St. Louis, listening to Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark (Haymarket, 2016), I pulled over to write down “Joy is a fine act of insurrection,” which, because I had no paper in the front seat, I typed on my iPhone and sent to my Gmail for safekeeping, and a Tesla probably blew past before I got back on the road and Solnit resumed trying to tell me about the global justice movement’s victories against pipelines and for climate treaties that have since unraveled, and I passed exit 16 outside Paducah where a large Confederate flag has hung since 2012 and I wanted to give up until, in an Exxon on the frontage road where I stopped to buy gas, I found that someone had painted a lush garden all around the women’s bathroom, with sponged greenery and many tiny brush strokes individuating the leaves of a willow and, at the edge of the ceiling, draped with wisteria blossoms, Psalm 16, verse 11 (Berean translation, also 2016): “You have made known to me the path of life; You will fill me with joy in Your presence, with eternal pleasures at Your right hand,” and if someone can find reason to paint the bark—each singular ridge and valley in light and shadow—of the trunk of a willow tree above a truck stop toilet, then we, surely, can hit the road, keep going. 

Jeanette Mrozinski is an MFA candidate in nonfiction at Washington University in St. Louis and the business manager for the world’s biggest (and, we think, only) queer cozy math rock band, Together Breakfast. Her in-progress memoir on sex work and spiritual formation recounts her search for salvation in hotel rooms, churches, and other wrong places. Find her at jeanettemrozinski.com, and listen to some math rock at togetherbreakfastmusic.com.     

This essay is a Short Reads original.