Review Mode: “So, What’s Your Escape Plan?” Isn’t Good Small Talk

Welcome aboard the bummer train to Despair City, making all local stops.

Welcome to Review Mode, a biweekly newsletter where I mark up my social interactions, mining my, like, medical-grade self-monitoring for your reading pleasure.

In my finest moments, I’m a neutral contributor to the vibe of a party. When I’m feeling down, I become a highly skilled vibe assassin, prolific and precise.

For example, this past weekend, I was at a rooftop party. Amazing hang. Perfect weather. Well-curated group of people. And how did I choose to start all my conversations? With “So, what’s your escape plan?”

Okay, it was not the first thing I said. It wasn’t like the sequence of the conversation was “Hi, Carson!” “Hi, friend! How do you plan to expatriate?”

But it was pretty close. Cause it didn’t take long in any conversation for someone to bring up you-know-which-news-item, and then that would make me think of the transphobic and authoritarian response, and within maybe two minutes, I’d be asking folks what their route out is.

Disclaimer: I’m not going to leave the country right now. For the time being, I think the mental health danger of me moving alone to a foreign place would be significantly greater than the danger here at home. (See? Huuuge bummer to talk about! It’s giving Eeyore.)

On a lighter note, I also think a lot of the stories and posts that got me the most scared turned out to be overblown fear-mongering. The danger might be less imminent than I thought in my most terrified moments.

But this weekend, in the wake of all that’d happened, I was starting, for the first time, to get curious in a real way about escape routes. It was something I’d thought abstractly about before, but it’d always seemed more hypothetical. Now, it felt more tangible.

I wanted to know how other people were thinking about it. I was asking in part as a reality check and in part to feel less alone.

And it did make for interesting conversation. One person at the party told me about how her Ukrainian father came here without knowing anyone and laid roots by finding a community of other Ukrainian people. Another friend told me about the three years he lived alone in Turkey, having moved there with a partner but broken up six weeks into living there.

People shared what escape routes they were thinking about, and it made me feel a sense of solidarity that a) no one seemed shocked that I’d asked the question and b) most people seemed to have done some real thinking about it.

But it also COMPLETELY killed the mood every time.

Cause you can’t go from talking about “Here’s what it would take for me to leave behind everything I’ve come to know and love” to something like “Have you heard that Person X and Person Y are hooking up??” And you certainly can’t add “And when they tried to bring in Person Z as a third, it totally imploded, because Person Z was way too into feet stuff.”

Fleeing authoritarianism is not fun party chatter.

Imagine it’s this past Saturday. You’re excited. You’ve been invited to this rooftop party with a beautiful view of the skyline. You love the host, and you know she always invites people you’ll be happy to see.

It’s been a really tough week, so you’re eager to go hang out with your friends and put all that bad stuff behind you for the night—to celebrate the community that you still have in front of you. You arrive, you see a group of your friends chatting, you approach them excitedly, and then I, Carson, look you dead in the eyes and say, “Oh, hey, we’re just talking about our plans for escaping fascism.”

That sequence of events happened to like five different people. I feel like I owe them handwritten apology letters.

There’s a time and a place to have those weighty conversations. I think. I mean, I haven’t figured out what it is yet, but there’s gotta be one, right? But parties are not that space. Parties serve an essential role, and that role is joy.

Now, because the bummer train has already left the station, I’m gonna kill the vibe one last time. I’m gonna bring up the AIDS crisis.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that AIDS crisis quote that gets attributed to Dan Savage: “We buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night, and it was the dance that kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for.”

Which brings us to…

The lesson I should but probably won’t learn from this: Let the people dance, man.

(Here, dance is a metonym for any expression of joy. Okay, wait, if I’m trying not to kill vibes, I probably shouldn’t be using words like metonym.)

Carson’s Life Updates

• Shanah tovah! I went to evening services last night and (sitting in the way back) saw two familiar-looking figures up front. I thought “That can’t be Mamdani and Lander, right?” It was them! So, as long as I’m down to view politicians as celebrities, 5786’s off to an awesome start.

  

  The picture I texted my parents mid-service to say “Do you think this is Zohran Mamdani and Brad Lander?”

• Next Friendly’s is 9/27 at 7pm at Starr Bar in Bushwick. Tix here. We’ve got GG, Sunny Laprade, Tina Sieben, and Isa Medina.

• I’ve developed a new self-soothing mechanism, and it’s called drawing a fuckton of pools. I highly recommend drawing a fuckton of pools. Obsessively and repetitively, “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” style.

  

  The Boilerplate

  Carson Olshansky (still they/them, despite the haters) is a Brooklyn-based comedian and writer. You can follow them at @carsonolshansky on Instagram and TikTok and at @carson-olshansky on YouTube.