a fuselit culture

I knew a guy in middle school, I’m going to call him Dee because I don’t know what he’s up to now and I don’t think anyone should pay for the dumb stuff they did in middle school by being named 20 years later.

Dee was on the football team, and looking back on it, he was one of the most gifted athletes I knew at the time. He was unbelievably fast, very coordinated and extremely aggressive. Dee was also the first person I’d met with ADHD severe enough that I remember it vividly now, 20 years later. You couldn’t keep his eye contact for more than half a second. He was failing classes before he even stepped into them, mostly because of the ADHD and only partially because he was a black boy going to school in the rural south.

I mention his ADHD alongside his sports performance because Dee poured every bit of his focus into football. It was the only thing he really could focus on. That’s probably why he excelled. ADHD, though, meant he couldn’t quite leave all of that aggression on the field. Dee was a fighter.

I don’t remember him fighting often. My middle school had a lot of fights, and they were primarily centered around a couple social groups, but Dee didn’t fight that much. Most people were afraid of him. Dee did carry himself like he would fight at any moment, and he jawed off at kids and teachers alike, almost daring them. Dee wasn’t big, but the combination of his speed and aggression and a sort of… crazy nature made people wary of him.

Dee moved before we graduated. Not that he was likely to graduate, he had been held back a few years and was likely to be held back again. I think he moved to California.

I haven’t thought about Dee in years, not until today. Today I have been frustrated, trying to figure out the best way to describe… culture right now. There’s not a great way to really sum it up, I think, until I thought about Dee.

Dee carried himself like something was wrong, but he was charismatically sprinting toward and into the chaos. Dee was a constant, walking threat of chaos, on the football field as a wide receiver and in the hallways as a volatile, cocksure student.

Dee was what I can only describe as fuselit.

We all heard the hissing when Dee walked the halls. Dee warned us that you didn’t know how long the fuse was. Dee warned us that at any point, he could blow up.

That’s the best way I can describe this feeling I’ve had for a while. The Iran war that constantly threatens to explode into a larger regional war. The economy, barely holding on to the upper curve of the K Shape while we all struggle with ballooning grocery bills and gas prices. Every day, thirty economists telling us the crash could come any day. Every day, thirty geopolitical experts telling us the war could go hot again any moment. Every day, a viroligist telling us this new virus is going to be the next COVID.

We are all walking around with the hissing of the fuse in our heads. Sometimes multiple hisses. Every dose of good news poisoned in the well by our own fear, something like an intuition, that this is just a brief reprieve and the fuse is still hissing.

Many of us have our own prognoses, our own theories of who lit the fuse, who keeps it lit and how we can put it out, but a hell of a lot of us have given up on the idea that we can avoid the explosion. Many of us are telling ourselves that actually the explosion will be good, a cleansing fire to take us to the new era. Many of us insist the explosive at the end of the fuse is small, that we will weather it. Cope, really, but we all need that in times like these don’t we?

The fuselit culture is one that ruins optimism with the stench of pessimism (the fuse is still lit, we just delayed the inevitable) and nihilism (who cares? we’re getting blown to smithereens soon anyways) and it’s crippling movements and people alike.

The fuselit culture is one in which the builders themselves are obsessively nihilistic. “We’re building not to stop the fuse, not to contain the explosion, but to ride the waves so that we can be in the shinier bomb shelter.” Those who might otherwise build a better society are crippled by nihilism and fear.

The last time I saw Dee was just before he was expelled. The bomb finally went off, one of the most violent fights I’d ever seen. Dee was fighting someone three to four times his size, sheer muscle. He lost, badly, and his emotional crashout was something that I don’t think my middle school brain could quite understand.

The overwhelming feeling of those of us who had circled up around Dee and the boy he fought was “well, we saw that coming and it was about time.” There was a shared feeling of relief. We saw the explosion we had feared for so long and it really wasn’t that bad. Now we knew what we reckoned with.

I hope some day soon we can share that same feeling. “So this is what we’ve all been fearfully waiting for. Now we can face it knowing what it is.”