Also Reality

Abstract

Also Reality Michelle Renee Hoppe (bio) All I wanted was everything. —Rosebud Ben-Oni Determinant meaning within the English language exists through the electric glue of our conjunctions. Sticky tiny words like "but" and "also" define the psyche's trajectory in a story, and stories determine our relationships and behaviors. "And" and "also" are some of the least glamorous of the transitions and are often overlooked for the more forceful usages of the contrast conjunctions and consequence arguments. I have outgrown my usages of the more convoluted ways to join together thoughts, people, and events, abandoning most of my contrast and consequence statements in favor of additionals, which is to say the simplest math of meaning. Our American legal system depends upon the either/or contrast. Both defenses and prosecutions rely on consequence conjunctions, too, and they use them with abandon. Making the argument that any action is only a consequence, that it is inevitable, is to remove all agency and responsibility from the state. To remove any agency from the majority is to encourage the imprisonment of the marginalized. There is no separate law school needed for prosecution and defense. Lawyers switch sides in any argument, thus the syntax used in today's courtrooms means nothing. The US Constitution starts with a justification, the subordinating conjunction "in order to," which is meant to be a very long reason. It is an eloquent excuse: WE THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. The remainder of the US Constitution is a series of "and" and "also" statements made along with a few "but" exclusions. Consequence and contrast statements are what direct and enforce our laws [End Page 657] today, and they are not the origins of America. Irene Villaseñor, indigenous author and artist, completes erasure poems of colonial documents, reading most recently at The Whitney Biennial.1 And, like me, Senor identifies as on the autism spectrum. __________ I have come to call my own world of "also" and "in addition" an Also Reality. Also Reality is my personal attempt of making sense of dissociative fugue and amnesia, which is to say I've experienced more horror in my nearly forty years on this terrifying globe than my brain is altogether capable of holding, rationally. There are times when I think flashbacks are speaking to me again. I have delusional thoughts and irrational beliefs that summarize all the narratives of my past traumas—a type of PTSD that has congealed and amalgamated into what I consider a chaotic benevolence. I break. Cognitively. I am wholly disjointed. Within. Art helps. So do essayists. When it comes to insanity, I am of the CIA-is-spying-on-my-thoughts proclivity. That's because my maternal grandfather was a military intelligence service agent/spy and a Mormon ecclesiastical leader who was also very against LGBTQ rights and who also did a favor for President Hoover, which got him into Stanford Law. This man, Gardner Hale Russell, also tried to make out with me when I was twenty-three years old and told me to be quiet about my father's domestic violence. He warned me that, should I persist, we'd be on the news and have no money to eat. In addition, Cannon Air Force Base was named for the other side of my family, my father's side. General John K. Cannon taught Lindbergh to fly and was thanked by Churchill for ending World War II. My former fighter pilot father, Captain Bruce Hoppe, was directly involved in deescalating 9/11. He also came home to break my nose in his kitchen. My family could stop international wars, and they could not help themselves from beating the shit out of children. Once I gained some degree of emancipation, during the Palestinian conflict in May 2021 and after major surgery, I got stuck in Amman, Jordan. In 2012, I was also in a domestic violence relationship with...