The Confluence

I’ve been right so long, I’ve been done wrong.

I woke up to a note I had no memory of writing. I scrawled it in the dead of night, a time I used to dread but now embrace, because the nightmare-makers sleep then too.

It is January 2025. The future has caught up with my prognostications and I’ve started rationing reality: as Shirley Jackson noted, too much of it makes you insane. But I’ve written the story of American autocracy so many damn times that I can’t watch it play out at the speed of life. My mind works like a rigged redactor, drawing black lines over the sins of day.

Later my conscience gets the better of me and I remember what I long to forget. I write it down because those redacted lines stretch like a highway to the past. The past is precious: that’s why oligarchs want to erase it. The past is a gift, but living in it was a curse. I walked that highway like a time-traveling hitchhiker, thumb forever down.

Folks like to say that no one believed my warnings. I wish that were the case. The hard truth is officials believed them and let the worst happen anyway.

The first article calling me Cassandra came out in 2016. “A Cassandra of Trumpland”, it proclaimed, due to my observation that Americans were a betrayed people and my prediction that Trump would win and rule like a kleptocrat. In 2019, I got upgraded to “The Prophet of Flyover Country” for claiming US institutions were too corrupt to combat autocracy and the Mueller probe would do nothing to stop Trump’s takeover.

My predictions were obvious, the monikers ridiculous. I accept only one nickname: Cosa Nostradamus, because all I see coming is transnational organized crime.

Track the profit, not the prophet. America’s fortune’s been told and it’s sitting in offshore accounts.

* * *

I open the note to see what I wrote to myself.

“I Been Right So Long, I Been Done Wrong,” it said at the top. Underneath, I wrote: “(Kendzior Blues)” followed by paragraphs of lyrics.

I started laughing. Who was directing my subconscious? Lightnin’ Hopkins? Tony Joe White? I could hear the melody as I read: I woke with a song in my head that I hadn’t known I composed. I hoped I hadn’t sung it while sleeping, for the sake of my household. But I decided it was okay if I had.

David Lynch had died the week before. I was mourning him along with everything else American. Twin Peaks is my comfort show. Its world reflects our Epstein reality — with the exception of its competent, imaginative FBI agent. I rewatch Twin Peaks because in the pilot, everyone is crying — the way you should cry when someone dies. Lynch’s work is surreal but never fake, in contrast to AI and its heartless facsimiles.

In 1992, Lynch was panned for telling the truth too early with the Twin Peaks movie, Fire Walk with Me, and its raw exploration of female pain and exploitation. His film came out three months before Sinead O’Connor tore up a photo of the Pope and was also punished for telling the truth too early — again, about power and sexual abuse. I watched their vindications over the decades, artistic and factual. I know they both would have traded vindication for justice, and that’s why I loved them.

Now they’re both dead, and the industries that never understood them are dying, and Americans are being sold scraped bits of plagiarized humanity in their place. AI will never tell the truth too early: that's why authoritarians crave it. AI knocks out the inherently human power of subconscious pattern recognition. AI will never challenge authority. AI will never dream.

If you learn anything from David Lynch, it’s that dreams matter. Even if they’re wild. Even if they leave notes in the night that go a lil’ summin’ like this:

I been right so long, I been done wrong
Lost the fight and all I got left is this song
Singing a chorus but no one here to sing along
A solo to a choir of liars in the midday sun
Ten years of warning, in the end — it’s ten years gone.

I did the only thing a Missourian can do when they start writing the blues in their sleep: I went to the river.

* * *

The Confluence is one of my favorite places to go in winter. This is the spot where the Mississippi and Missouri rivers meet. In warm weather, you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. But when the rivers freeze, the Mississippi thaws first, turning a shimmering blue, while the Missouri stays a dull translucent grey with shards of swift-moving ice.

This January saw the longest stretch of freezing weather in St. Louis in decades, contributing to the stir-crazy feeling that made me pen the nighttime autocracy blues, but promising adventure once the cold receded. It was frigid on the day I arrived, but earlier warmth had melted the snow, making the trail passable. The wind whipped my skin as I approached the water, but I was so glad to be outside that I didn’t care.

At the Confluence, fading signs remind you that you are at the nexus of history. This is where two major American rivers collide, where Lewis and Clark set out on their westward journey. They left behind the Mississippi, that mighty river of pain.

When Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America — a change I acknowledge as much as the so-called renaming of Twitter — my first thought was how many songs he would ruin. And that music would be the reason the name would never stick, because the real America — the one Trump keeps approximating but never lands — is the America of country and rock and blues, of Memphis and New Orleans, of a river of mud that empties into a swampland gulf.

Trump is good at reading America the way a vulture is good at detecting prey. But he can never feel soul, and soul is what the river has to offer. Soul is safe at the river, even when your own soul hurts like hell.

* * *

On the way to the Confluence, I checked my email. “Despair is not an option!” an email heading proclaimed, which I thought was rude — folks need to know they have options! The emailer’s recommended remedy was to send politicians money.

I felt angry about this driving in, and I got angrier walking the path between the rivers, where the trail narrows until it is only rock. How dare they police our emotions on top of everything else? How dare they chide us for the attributes that make us human — our grief, our fear, our reality? All for another swindle. The blues is not a pretty tale, but damn if it’s not true.

The Mississippi rolled by, the river of despair, immortalized in songs no Google Maps rebrand can kill. The Missouri raced by, the river of rage, sheets of ice gleaming like knives. I stood at the edge of a rock where the rivers met under the midday sun. There was no ambiguity about which was which, and there was no ambiguity that they were more powerful together.

I started crying just to feel something warm on my face.

* * *

I don’t know how much more of a favor you can do for someone than tell the future in advance, other than forgive them when they don’t believe you.

A warning is a form of compassion. The reception to a warning is an indicator of how you are valued. I was among many, many people who warned of this crisis, which will hurt the most vulnerable among us first. It was often the vulnerable doing the warning.

The problem is that when people are late to understand the original warning, a new crisis has already emerged from the delay, requiring new understanding and new solutions. The continual refusal to grasp that time is the autocrat’s greatest weapon is what destroys the possibility of defeating him.

Many in the “opposition” prefer to profit off the threat rather than prevent it. The Vichy Dems’ heel turn is not new. You couldn’t see the heel because it was stepping on your face.

I write the blues in the dream-bound night because it hurts too much to document the despair of the waking day. The blues don’t just warn, they witness. When they tell you what’s coming, it’s to share the pain. River’s gonna rise and there’s nothing you can do. Train’s gonna come and you’d best rest your head on the tracks. There are no solutions except whiskey and women and ramblin’ and gamblin’ — which, to be fair, is better than what either political party offers.

But there is ruin and redemption in the blues too. That’s the other Confluence.

America has already had ruin. Ten years of warning, that’s ten years gone. I’m not spending another decade telling you what’s coming, because it’s clear as the remorseless sun.

The most important thing is not being right, it’s doing right.

I long for redemption: for this country, for myself, for everyone. Redemption is another quality of which AI is incapable. Redemption is a quality that’s not quite human — but it is beyond it, not beneath it. The search for redemption is worthwhile in itself. The search for redemption makes reality more bearable.

Redemption haunts American pop culture, lifting it to something ineffable. It’s in the dark wonder of a Lynch film. It’s in the anguished heart of the blues. It’s in the way two rivers collide like tears on your face, here at the center of America, here at the confluence of too much and not enough.

* * *

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The Confluence, West Alton, Missouri.

Bald eagle on the river. I like how the shadow on the bluff looks like him in flight.

The Mississippi River at the Confluence.

The Missouri River at the Confluence.

In case you get confused!

The rivers’ edge. I visit that triangle rock with the ice band every year.