“Would everyone who is scared to be here who or was told not to be here because it might be dangerous please raise your hand?”
From the back, I can see nearly every hand in the crowd start to rise. The day is June 12th. This evening, news outlets will report that millions of people around the country turned out for “No Kings” marches around the country. Here in Washington D.C., turnout is both more than I had expected and less than I had hoped for. Previous events in the city had drawn massive crowds (and I swear I saw Chuck Tingle at one of them) but today is different. First, it is barely noon and already miserably hot even for people used to living in this swamp turning rainforest that runs along the Potomac. Second, NPR has already reported that hundreds of thousands are expected to flood the city for the military parade to be held that evening, and rumors of roaming gangs of violent proud boys abound. Third, and finally, other local organizations have cautioned against attempting to stage an event in Washington D.C. for fear of violent reprisal , instead opting to run lower key competing events in surrounding cities.
In a few hours, we would all be able to see the farce of troops putting in less effort to stay inline than a high school marching band. But for now, things are pretty spooky. Both police presence and tension are thick and we haven’t even started. Like me, I imagine many of my fellow marchers woke up today expecting that we may be brutalized and arrested. Based on the number of wagons parked around the parade starting point, the police even came prepared to do just that.
My fellow marchers aren’t hardened heroes. They’re senior citizens with walkers, people who made protest sign vests for their dogs, and even a guy with a sousaphone. At the moment, a lot of my mental health is riding on the guy with the sousaphone. Not all heroes wear capes but many do, in fact, play brass.
I'd follow them into hell
Based on that show of hands, we’re all normal people and worried about what is going to happen as we set out to march toward the White House. Surely, almost everyone here would rather be doing something else with their time. But we also all feel like being here today is something we need to do. Before long, the organizers count off, an entire marching band has somehow formed around the sousaphone (and they're really good), and we’re underway.
It’s been an eventful few months leading up to June. On top of all The Horrors™, my office suddenly cancelled any ability to telework, meaning I now lose at least two hours out of my day commuting to sit in an office and take the same video calls I would at home. It's ultimately a minor inconvenience, but it's made trying to keep momentum on any creative endeavors practically impossible.
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of my youtube channel, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away…
There is a silver lining though. As the sages have foretold, seven years after defeating the snake to claim the title “doctor big brain PhD”, one may find themselves feeling like a person again. For me, that has meant that I’ve finally been able to read for fun again. After working through a lot of Steven King books, like the perhaps overly optimistic The Dead Zone, and other works like Gene Wolfe’s excellent series about the coolest sword and the terminally shirtless rube who wields it,aka Book of the New Sun, my brave and beautiful wife put me on to an obscure little series called The Lord of the Rings. Perhaps you’ve heard about it.
Truth be told, this is an extremely difficult thing to write about. Usually when I sit down to use a piece of media as a springboard to talk about something, I can usually count on it being novel enough to some portion of the readership so as to bait the hook that is my incredible wit and elegant prose. When it comes to something like Lord of the Rings, I’m talking about something that is new to me and almost certainly not to my reader. It is basically impossible to come up with anything new to say about the work. As someone who watched the first two movies as a young teenager, bounded off the books and lost interest by the release of the third movie, I am firmly a guest in this house. So let me take off my shoes first before unsheathing my stunning insight that the book is, in fact, good.
Spoilers Warning for Lord of the Rings (in case anyone actually needs one)
As a child who saw the movies first, I started the books expecting a dramatic tale of swords and sorcery. I wanted expansive rules about how magic works, dramatic fights and dragons. Basically, what I really wanted was Fate/Stay Night. It and its infamous CGI sex dragon would find me a few years later, making it impossible to ever interact with Arthurian lore without giggling. What I got was a face full of Tom “The Bomb” Bombadil. The movies made everything look so cool and the shitty-child who I was couldn't understand why Frodo was so reluctant to leave on an exciting adventure or why the book was taking so long for the coolest guy (Aragorn) to show up.
I thought this was so deep
As an adult reading in historic times, I found the opening sections of Fellowship of the Ring evocative, haunting, and captivating. Imagine my surprise realizing that the book I expected to be a high fantasy adventure is actually somewhere between an astoundingly effective horror novel and a wartime drama pulling from Tolkein’s lived experience. Frodo comes to inherit not just a magical ring but the magical ring; something so great and terrible that its mere discovery upsets the balance of the world. His plans of a long happy life are upended, and while he cannot conceive of the scale of the forces at play, he knows that nothing will ever be the same again. Known horrors lurk just outside The Shire and worse unknown horrors beyond that. It’s a journey that Frodo doesn’t expect to return from but one that he must take for there to be anything to return to.
Were I not so engrossed, I might have needed to take a breather when Tolkien beautifully distilled the situation with Frodo turning to Gandalf to say “I wish it need not have happened in my time,” to which Gandalf replies “So do I, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
I’ve had many nights in the past few months sitting with my brave and beautiful wife trying to find a mutually agreed on line where we flee the country we both thought we would grow old in. Every day, I check my socials and see the very worst people gleefully posting photos with hats that may very well be archived in a genocide museum someday. The latest “Alligator Alcatraz” line is particularly abhorrent. My sources are reporting that Alligators might break their millenia long moratorium on evolving to distance from that one.
When Merry and Pippin chide Frodo for wandering around The Shire wondering aloud whether he will ever see it again, I thought of the tree my wife and I planted when we moved into our house together,and how much longer it will be safe for us to stay and watch it grow. It’s a small moment that I don’t think I would have felt the weight of until adulthood, and one that I expect will only get heavier as I revisit the work years from now. I could go on with more specific examples to belabor this point but this would get very long very quickly and eventually just turn into rambling about how Éowyn is canonically shredded and Tolkein was decades ahead of his time on that one.
One of the throughlines that stuck me in this reading is how the characters we follow are simultaneously legendary heroes spoken of in song and just people who really don’t want to be there. It’s a point that didn’t really click with me until I got to the second book and Aragorn and Co. are explaining all their fancy gear to the poor coat check guy in Rohan. Poor guy is on his first day and Aragorn hands him a legendary sword with the warning it will literally kill him if he draws it (personally, I choose to think he was messing with the guy). Earlier, when The Boyz™ mention having met Galadriel, they get a look like they just said Santa Claus is real and carried them to Rohan in his sleigh or that all their uncles work at nintendo.
Until then, the reader has known these characters as being often hungry, more often filthy and almost always at a total loss for hope. None of them honestly think this plan is going to work but it’s what they can do and they know they have to do something. Even the ancient elves briefly ponder how to best pass the buck by tossing the ring in the ocean or something before everyone stops and agrees that is really very silly. It’s not just Frodo: every character in the story is just a person who wishes it need not have happened in their time.
Maybe it’s corny to admit, but in the past few months I’ve found myself looking to figures in history for inspiration. It helps out when I check the news and find out my civil rights are once again in question. In particular, Willem Arondéus often comes to mind. He was an openly gay Dutch artist turned resistance figure during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. At the time, the resistance had become very good at forging documents to protect those who the Nazis would aim to persecute. Unfortunately, forgeries are only so useful when official records exist to compare them to. The resistance’s solution was to burn down the records office. Their efforts were only partially successful thanks to an internal leaker. The majority of the group was arrested but Arondéus took full responsibility saving some members from execution. Before his death, Arondéus made the statement “Tell people the homosexuals were not cowards.”
To me, someone like Arondéus may as well be stepping out of myth. If he handed me a sword and told me that drawing it would kill me, I’d believe it. I would put that sword down and be afraid to even look at it. History is full of people who seem superhuman to me – actual factual heroes who did what seems impossible. However, they were still just people living in a particular moment. I can’t say for certain, but I imagine many of them would rather have been doing something else. Instead, they woke up and did the thing despite that, because that was what they felt they needed to do. 
Another throughline that struck me while taking my first journey to Mount Doom was the reminders that we all exist within the context of history; something came before us and something will come after. There is a small section where Frodo and Sam are nearing the end of their journey and pass a statue of a long dead king. The statue has been beheaded and defaced with the image of Sauron. The original head lays at the statue’s feet and has been replaced with an ill-shaped rock. However, even in this land touched by darkness there are also flowers growing in the shape of a crown on the severed head. Across all the books, this statue is my favorite image. It’s beautifully concise: Something came before you, this is the moment you are living in and there will be something else that will come after. Nothing will last forever, either good or bad.
I’m lucky enough to have made the acquaintance of a former militant AIDs activist. As they waxed nostalgic and perhaps a little too cheerfully about all the times they had been tear-gassed, I interrupted to ask what it was that kept people going as their communities were dying and the world seemed indifferent. They flatly told me that you have to keep believing that things can get better and that you can be part of that change. It’s only when you accept how things are that it is ever really over. You get up and you do the thing. You might not know if it will change anything but you have to believe it can.
Sometimes those efforts pay off in ways you can’t predict. Boromir is so ashamed of his own weakness that he can’t bring himself to admit that he tried to take the ring from Frodo. Still, he sacrifices himself trying to save Merry and Pippin because that is what he can still do in the moment. In my reading, he has no idea that his defense of the hobbits will convince Sarumon’s orcs that Merry and Pippin are the two hobbits they’re looking for, allowing Sam and Frodo to continue their journey. I’m certain he can’t imagine that he will also inspire Merry into being one of the biggest damn heroes of the war. Man, Boromir is the coolest.
I will cry here if/when I rewatch the movies
I hope that I come off as making light by comparing these very real examples to Tolkein’s writing. I can only really add my own personal experience to the mountain of work that has been written about Lord of the Rings. As I read, I couldn’t put the real history out of my mind and it heavily framed how I read the text and how I see the text in relation to this particular moment.
Maybe it’s for the best. I needed to age like wine to appreciate just how cool Boromir is – which is very. You can just ask my brave and beautiful wife who enjoyed days of me walking around the house talking about how cool he is. It was only stopped by my hitting the point in the books where Eowyn dons the mantle of “That Dude™ ” (gender neutral). Aragorn’s nepo baby ass could never.
I’d like to end this where we started. As that march got underway, things stayed almost weirdly calm. As we would later learn, those hundreds of thousands of attendees for the military parade didn’t materialize. For every guy looking like a thumb wearing wrap around oakleys standing outside a hotel jeering, there were a half dozen staff from the same hotel cheering or a bus honking. As the sages have said, hail to the bus driver. Sure, it was frightening walking up to the park that morning but I went home glad I did it, and hopeful that action might have had some rippling consequences. Sometimes you just have to get up and do the thing. Even if you’re scared, odds are everyone else is too, even if they look like heroes to you. You might just look like one to them.
Now that I’ve finally got these thoughts on paper maybe I can finally be free of the curse that makes me walk around the house naked talking about how great a character Boromir is.
Until my next entry. Be nice to yourself.