From a Plane after PAX West 2017

(I've been looking cautiously back through older things I've written. I post this primarily because it shows how frozen I've been, within myself; some of the phrases and attempts at revelation here are shamefully similar to what I've written to myself in recent weeks. I've been fighting to get past self-devouring, trauma-frozen fear of hurting myself by speaking freely for well over a decade. I'm not going to stop fighting, though.)

“Some of these will not get bigger. Some of these kids will never grow up.” I pick cherry tomatoes from a garden and we choose not to wash them. It’s good to eat a little dirt. Some full, ripe, and red. Some smaller, but still red ripe. Higher up the vine, even smaller tomatoes, yellow and green and still trying their best.

Smoke coming down from the mountains. British Columbia ablaze, California smoldering, Texas draining. Fires on the west coast; floods around the world. Grown-up kids in cartoon costumes avoiding eye contact. Crying in front of a computer game about singing even though you aren’t the hero. It’s what you can do, so you do it.

The buses in Vancouver say, “SORRY NOT IN SERVICE”. In Athens, they don’t say SORRY. I tried to remember if I’d ever seen a bus apologize. If so, I couldn’t remember it. I was struck by decency.

Art on the walls, plants on the ceiling. Music as a matter of course. It can be so nice to be a human, in a safe place, surrounded by accumulated fragments of human kindness. I tried to be especially grateful, because my feet were dry, my legs were dry, and nothing needed to be dragged to the curb in a sopping broken heap.

The U.S. sweats through its shirt, uncomfortable from ambient hate. The countryside seethes shadows; we’ve been made to fear the forest, fear the darkness, fear the strange. We could look out for each other, but instead we do this. There is nothing in the woods except ourselves.

More than once in my life, I’ve felt like my own ghost. I sang in silly voices for my friends, and can’t shake the feeling that the one who truly loved to sing is gone. But it’s still me. Something erected barriers between me, walls of control and containment. I learned to be afraid of myself, or what I might be, or the ways I could explode. I soaked the wood with water so the bridge would never burn. I lost touch with myself. I lost trust in myself. I’m still just testing the footholds, seeing if the wood will bend. If the creaks have something dire to portend.

—

Jace and I traverse Seattle’s heart to find a place to see the end. Twenty-five years later cannot wait another day. A diner promised coffee and pie; we’ll have salads while we wait. Black and white zag electrics on the bathroom floors. But when it starts, we can’t hear Gordon clearly. That's funny. Enormous speakers for pop, timidly tiny for Twin Peaks. So we bail, hit Caffé Vita where there’s one tiny pie awaiting, and walk back to the apartment. We talk about celebrities we’ve met, and the trans-media feeling of a television figure sitting just there, in the bar. Like Panama City, but you can’t escape. We have to call Showtime to ask why we can’t log in; but as soon as we call, we can, and we laugh with the phone tree man, and someone in the background laughs, too.

Like this: I’ve tried to log in for 10 minutes, changed my password twice, and still I can’t connect. Finally we call.
“I’ve never called Showtime before, so let’s do it.”
“I didn’t even know you ~could~ call Showtime.”
We’re waiting, and I click the button again.
“Thanks for calling Showtime, how can I help you?”
And just as he says this, it works. I’m in.
“Well, I wasn’t able to connect for a while, but just as soon as you answered, I could! So I guess it’s all good!”
“Oh! Well, is there anything else I can help you with?”
“No, you’ve been great! You did great.”
He laughs, and so does someone else.
“Well, thanks for calling Showtime. Have a great evening.”
“You, too!”

And then we go through 2 hours of televisual torment exaltation, in the comfort of a strange apartment, coffee and a pastry, everything resolved and then unresolved, and then we lay on the floor and pace around the place moaning and saying, “God. What?! God.”

We’re happy to be there. Grateful for the strange. Glad we made it this far. Jace says, “I’m grateful to have lived during this period, so I could watch Twin Peaks more or less as it happened. If anything is remembered 500 years from now, I hope it’s this.”

I expect to be dead in a year or five, the way things are going. I don’t expect to be remembered widely or well. Jace says this is okay. That it’s liberating. I don’t know if I feel that way.

I used to want to make meaningful art. I guess I still do. But I want to focus on bringing joy and compassion into the world, in whatever ways I can, even though I’m not always good at it and I don’t always do it right.

—

Walking around PAX for a few days is enough to drive me into despair. Who are all these people? So many faces I’ll never see again. There are too many people to even begin to comprehend. Each of us is living out our tiny piece of human history, in the midst of the massiveness of our personal history. Two people I’ve never seen before take each other’s hands and smile. One man gently rubs the back of the man to his right as they walk past a towering screen showing bullet holes and carnage. Beautiful young people have transformed themselves into well-loved characters; one woman dressed as Mercy is told, “I’m shipping you so hard right now,” and Mercy laughs back, “I’m being shipped a lot today.” I can’t shake the feeling that we are engaged in a form of irresponsible excess. I’m here because friends are here; because I can help them a little; and because I work in this industry and ought to try and meet more people. But why do I work here? Why am I doing any of this? What year is it?

—

The sky is orange with smoke from the north. Does tree smoke turn things red? Was the moon red last night because it shone through the blood of evaporated trees?

—

I stopped being honest with myself. I stopped writing freely. I feared the voice of my father, the eyes of my mother. I was convinced that I was in error, and that the things I wanted were wrong, whatever they might be. I retreated inward, stopped sharing, stopped confessing, stopped communicating. I’ve lived for years in my own shadow. I have not followed my dreams; I have shaken them from my mind upon waking. I have been convinced that every moment mattered too much to take action. I have been convinced that vanishment would be better than punishment. I have learned to hate my own inclinations, because why are they always so wrong, why do the words come out wrong, why has my life come out wrong, why did my dreams die, why can’t I get it right?

Now, I don’t quite think that way. But nothing has quite come in to take its place. There’s still a gap between me and me. A shrinking gap, but one I contemplate before each leap.

I'm told to live in the moment. I don't really know which moment this is.

—

Waking my laptop from sleep. It rushes through messages from recent days; what did I miss? What did we say? Did you see this? Did you see this? Did you see this?

The untethered insecurities of a hundred men will kill us all.

—

I'm pretty sure there's a bone broken in my foot. I stumbled up the steps once, moving things into Jada's apartment, and kicked my left foot pretty hard. It's been just uncomfortable enough to make me suspect something is broken, but not bad enough to stop walking around. I don't want to go to a Canadian clinic, because I don't want international paperwork. I don't go to a Seattle clinic, because I don't want interstate paperwork. I wish I never had to go to the doctor, deal with the paperwork, the expense, the guilt. Getting x-rayed eases the mind one way or another, but being x-rayed when nothing's broken is a hundred-plus dollars down the drain for simple certainty, and I'm spending all my extra money to go on this trip in the first place. America is a fucking train wreck for us all to be afraid of what the doctor will cost.

So I hobbled for a bit, but that put strain on my knees, so I resumed walking more or less normally, and most of the time it doesn't hurt. I know from experience that I can have a cracked foot bone that mostly doesn't hurt; but is just uncomfortable. I don't want my foot to heal wrong, or to not heal at all, but uncertainty and expense keep me from investigating. Maybe it's just bruised. But it's almost definitely broken.

Most of my major injuries have been self-inflicted accidents. Head injuries, broken arms, broken toes. I move too quickly to be this fragile. I get more timid over time, as rushing forward has mostly just hurt me. I move more slowly, speak more slowly, hesitate and assess the safety of any action. Usually for long enough that the decision becomes irrelevant. The moment passes.

It's hard not to feel guilty about an accident. I mean, things are bound to happen. But there's a gnarled claw in my mind that snatches at how I could have foreseen this; if I'd just moved more slowly, or taken more breaks, or maybe just not taken this trip in the first place. What did I think was going to happen? How did I expect to plan a cross-country, cross-border trip with just a few days' notice and not get hurt somehow? How many more mistakes will I make? There's plenty of room for more, if I don't watch out. Even if I do.

—

I mostly feel like writing when I travel. Maybe I leave myself more time to think. And usually the first thing to come out is a kind of purge, where my worries and difficulties uncork and spill out. Maybe the reason I don't write most of the time is because this is what comes out. Maybe I don't listen to myself very carefully a lot of the time because this is what it sounds like in here.

Not all the time, though! It's a habit of mind that I want to break, the harboring of derelict ships and ghostly crews. This trip has been full of laughter, and friendship, and love. I am deeply grateful for the people I got to see, and to know better, and to meet for the first time. It is remarkable that people I met once, a year ago, seem so glad to see me again. How can this be? I so often feel like I deflect from the surfaces of strangers; maybe that's just because there are so many people and we aren't meant to be friends with all of them. But when we meet people who click, for whatever reason; if the context creates friendship, or eye contact conveys understanding, that's kind of it, isn't it?

But it's harder for me to write about those things. Especially publicly. I'm afraid of misrepresenting, or really of making some proclamation that someone else might take issue with. Friendship is private for me; but for some reason I fret publicly. I should maybe reverse that stance.

—

There's easily too much of everything.

[This is the first draft of a story I wrote a few weeks ago. It was based on a few prompts my friend Lucy came up with for creative exercises in June, including "An adventure worth taking," "Somewhere a human has never gone," "Horror Comedy," "Ocean Western," "Create a situation where sympathy for the monster is appropriate," and "Fog/Timeless." There was a prompt for each day, but I just did what I could and blended ideas in to start each new part of the story. I wrote what I could think of, and don't have the energy to revise it yet. Let me know if you get something out of it!]

In the horizonless cataclysm of sudden-jut mountains and bone-blended sand, Godzilla trudged forward alone. He shifted the incredible weight of his backpack without a glimmer of resentment. It reminded him of before, when creatures great and small did everything they could to bring him down. "Comfort" wasn't really in Godzilla's vocabulary; he did not speak English. He had never heard of English. He squinted directly into the sun and wished it were bright enough to hurt him.

He'd been trudging for many days. It was hard to tell exactly how many, because his stride carried him across time zones with as much regard as you give the seams in a sidewalk. When Godzilla slept, it could be for hours or centuries. He didn't feel much like sleeping in this noise. The planet roiled around him, spilling hot blood and sending scabs of soil into the clouds, where they would suffer slow degradation over milennia. Youth is sharp and daring; age sands everything softer. Even mountains. Even Godzilla.

His claw polish was peeling, particularly on the right index blade. His eyes flashed deep-ember red when he noticed. You do these things for yourself, just to feel like you're worth the effort. Even if you haven't seen another eternal beast in ages. Even if the insects had scoured themselves from the surface. You deserve to treat yourself. He'd keep an eye out for replacements.

—

Rummaging mightily through his backpack, Godzilla wished he had packed more snacks. He pulled the top 20 stories of a skyscraper out of the bag, held it up to the light, and yawned a little radioactive heat into the girders and glass. He saw the tiny outlines of desks and chairs burst into flame behind the windows, and he smiled at how flammable the human world had been. They don't make them like they used to, he thought, and took a big bite out of his s'morchitectural treat. They don't make anything anymore.

Godzilla sat in the dust and blinked his very large series of eyelids into the distance. When you were emerging from a fortyear of peaceful slumber beneath the waves to stomp around a human city as simultaneous punishment for and allegory of their crimes, it was easy to feel like the world was small enough to know. Back then he was liable to run into another ruinous voidbeast every few years or so, especially when humanity was really getting into its nuclear experimentation phase. But with most of the cities scraped clean off the planet, and following the massive topological restructuring of their final self-destructive act, he just didn't know where he was anymore. Nowhere knew where it was. So, he told himself, when you don't know what to do with yourself, it's a good idea to take a walk.

But that had been forever ago. It takes a long time to fill a heart as big as Godzilla's with melancholy. His head, heavier than any non-monstrous terrestrial creature's entire body, rarely drooped beneath his shoulders. Godzilla was, if you had to try and sum him up in a single English word, resilient. Every reservoir has a bottom, though. Most reservoirs didn't even let him soak up past his thighs. Again, he was big. And he was starting to feel quite lonely.

—

Godzilla picked at the edge of a billboard, which he had found broken off its pillar and stuck in the uncertain earth. God damn it, he thought. I just. Come on. Come on. His bulldozer nails sought fruitless purchase between the canvas and its message. Having endless time didn't give Godzilla infinite patience.

BLOW YOUR STAINS OUT was simply colorful noise to Godzilla. The image of a subscription toothbrush shaped like a handgun — SUPERSONICALLY MURDER YOUR PLAQUE — which required monthly refills shaped like ammo clips — OPEN CARRY... YOUR SMILE — with a happy-eyed person putting the bright-neon barrel into their mouth. Godzilla didn't think about what it meant. He was interested in color, and the garish billboards of humanity's end were entirely his aesthetic. He just wished the adhesive was a little easier to work with.

The sun swung low before he managed to peel the poster free, tear it into delicate fragments, and arrange them into a pleasing array. A whisper of death from his cavernous snout holes melted the glue one piece at a time. With tabletop precision, he draped them across his claws and smoothed out the bubbles. At the end he had repaired the blemishes in most of his claws, and he smiled open-mouthed as he held them up to the sighing light. Kaleidoscopic nails the size of tractor-trailers. Evaporated products and ghost-hawked services abstracted into reptilian fashion.

Godzilla chewed contentedly on the billboard's infrastructure and watched the sun give up while his nails cooled and dried.

—

If you walk long enough in any wasteland, you develop a strong sense that surprise, however strongly desired, has become impossible. The spindling textures of individual volcanic peaks become wallpaper patterns against the nauseating curls of smoke that staged a coup against the sky. As fascinating as a campfire can be — and Godzilla is a true connoisseur — there is an upper bound on the meditative power of an entire smoldering treeline. Freeway tangles and splatter-shot branding may have been the disgraceful coda to human colonization, but fire makes its own scalding monoculture.

If, however, you walk yet longer, you will inevitably be surprised. Nature hates to vacuum, and even still there were patches of what had come before. Godzilla caught a glitter in the distance one noxious morning, promising something besides soil and skulls. That's how he found himself walking through aisles of antiques, shopping idly among intermittent flickering lamps and glasswork. Shadowbox cases held disused remnants of the old world. He hadn't appreciated it fully before, you know? But a few standing city blocks were more than a simple playground for wreaking retribution or tussling with his buds. This stuff was beautiful.

And then there she was. Godzilla rounded a corner — plucked a gargoyle from some towering home for exploitative assholes, just to feel its texture against his scales — and saw her. Perched lightly on the golden dome of a building where the powerful dozens had made decades of decisions willfully dooming the futures of billions, Mothra raised her antennae mildly.

"oh what's up, godzilla?" Mothra sighed. She whispered catastrophe. Foundations cracked and shifted in supersonic agony before her, and Godzilla felt jagged lines re-open deep within himself.

"MOTHRAAAAAAA! HOLY SHIT I'VE BEEN LOOKING EVERYWHEEEEEERRRRRRE FOR YOU!" Godzilla said as casually as his grand canyon maw and hindenburg lungs could manage. The tattered flags on nearby buildings waved one last goodbye and evaporated into memories of poison.

"for me?" she asked, shuddering a slight rain of skeptical dust from certain spots on her wings.

"WELL! LIKE. OKAY NOT SPECIFICALLY FOR YOU, BUT YOU ARE ON THE LIST OF PEOPLE I WAS LOOKING FOR!!! I'VE BEEN WALKING FOR EVERRRRR AND HAVEN'T SEEN ANYBODY! HOW..." he shrugged and awkwardly slammed his tail into a bank. "OOPS." His little arms waved around in uneven circles. "HOW THE HECK ARE YOU!!!"

"ehhhh, fine?"

"ARE YOU STAYING AROUND HERE NOW OR...???!"

"kind of temporarily, but i guess i'm more like just squatting for the moment"

"YEAH I GET THAAAAAAT!!!"

"where are you coming from?"

"I'VE JUST BEEN WALKING THROUGH THE EXHAUSTED END OF BIOLOGICAL LIFE ON OUR ONCE-BEAUTIFUL PLANET!!! YOU KNOW! WISHING THERE WAS STILL AN OCEAN, HAHA. IT'S HARD FOR ME TO SLEEP WITHOUT FATHOMS OF PRESSURE KEEPING MY ANXIETY AT BAY, SO, YEAH. I'VE JUST BEEN TRUCKING ALONG!!!"

"yeah, i get that"

A brief pause became a long silence between them. In the distance, a fragment of the moon burned quietly through the sky until it disappeared behind a volcanic plume. Godzilla thought he could feel the gentle quiver of its arrival in the soles of his feet, and in his big weird knees. He'd been walking so long. He guessed his calves were probably looking pretty cut, but it was hard to angle his eyes to see. What absolute luck to run into somebody else after all this time.

"FUNNY THAT WE RAN INTO EACH OTHER IN THE FIRST REMNANT OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION FOR HUNDREDS OF MILES!!" he blurted.

"godzilla..."

"I MEAN THAT IS HOW WE MET!!!!"

"don't do this"

"OKAY SORRY!!! ANYWAY, LOOK DO YOU MIND IF I HANG OUT WITH YOU FOR A WHILE? OR VICE VERSA!!!"

"i don't—"

"I JUST, YOU KNOW, I THINK I USED TO BE A MORE SELFISH PERSON!! I'M PROBABLY STILL SELFISH NOW AND EVEN ASKING THIS MAY BE A MANIFESTATION OF THAT, BUT ONE THING I'VE LEARNED IN MY ENDLESS WANDERING IS THAT BEING ALONE IS DEFINITELY WORSE THAN BEING WITH SOMEONE ELSE, YOU KNOW!!!"

Mothra turned her little (relative to her huge furry body and amazonian canopy wings) head away for a moment, and looked like she was considering just taking off. Godzilla thought about crashing into a building just to ease the tension, but waited as patiently as he could. This involved just crouching a little bit, and then standing up and waving his arms in the air like at the beginning of a Village People chorus. But he did it quietly, and finally she turned back around.

"i don't think that's a good idea, godzilla. i'm kind of looking for a place to hatch my eggs and just like, settle down for a little bit. you're not exactly 'settling down' material"

"HMMMMMM WELL—!!!"

"we're not going to be a family again," she sighed, and flapped once with finality. "i hope you find something else you were looking for."

Mothra took off abruptly, like she was lifted on strings, and sailed smoothly out of the city, while Godzilla stood, mouth agape with hands spread toward the sky, shocked into stillness.

—

An unknowable interval later, in what was left of the moonlight, Godzilla sat with splayed legs and drooped tail on a long stretch of sand that had once been a beach. Haunted house fog huddled thick around his toes, stretching out into the futureless distance. One hand rested on his backpack at his side, empty except for a gift he forgot to give Mothra and some bottom-of-the-bag shreds of steel and asbestos. The faint shadow of an accidental tyrant stretched out before him. The mist didn’t feel like anything.

Could it really be that he’d never sleep soundly beneath the waves again? Would there never be water deep enough to pull over himself, no darkness unbroken except for his own intermittent light? What the hell?

Maybe worse: would he live long enough to see the oceans return? Godzilla understood death, and had periodically feared his might come in battle. But he’d been around for thousands of years, gorging on anything combustible and then resting while forests and cities collapsed and blossomed anew. He had witnessed and enacted catastrophes of all kinds. Never like this. He vaguely remembered dinosaurs, wondered how many times a planet could recover from mortal wounds, and whether he’d still be here.

The sun rose without fanfare or beauty. The fog began dissipating immediately, and Godzilla watched mystery succumb to desolation.

He looked down the slope across tumbleweeds of kelp and bleached coral, down across miles of steady descent that eventually wrapped around the planet's curve. Dots of dried out vegetation might have suggested an immense code to someone who cared about symbols. Godzilla didn’t deal in subtext or secrets. Formless lightning flashed in the ruined sky. He was so fucking tired. But being an eternal beast of destruction mostly seems to mean you feel like shit, scream when you want to whisper, and keep moving anyway. It was also possible the deepest trenches of the ocean might yet hold water. Either way, thinking of sitting here without the rush and clamor of waves made him want to roar and flail. So he did, for a time. Then he sighed, slung his pack over his shoulder, and headed down the slope.

I'm thinking right now about just posting some fiction pieces I've written over the last few years and mostly never shared. They're mostly not done, and a lot of the longer things were written several years ago and would no doubt come out differently now. But I've probably written over 100,000 words of stories in the last 5 or 6 years and haven't done anything with any of them because of depression and discouragement. I feel a need now to at least put them out in the world somewhere, because they feel dangerously inert just sitting on my computer, exuding rays of "no one will ever see this and it was a waste of your time."

If what I've written has been a waste, or isn't polished enough for public consumption, or is just plain bad: okay. That's okay. I'm not a professional, and like so many of my creative endeavors, I've put the energy I could into writing before being swept away by a tide of self-loathing and day job labor. You can read it or not. This isn't a free country, but you can at least choose what you point your eyes at some of the time!

For some reason when I upload pictures to this site from my phone, they sometimes don't have the right orientation! Like, I didn't mean for those Evangelion pictures to be upside down yesterday, and they aren't on my phone, but they are on my Mac!

So I spent 45 minutes researching, documenting, and reporting the bug to the creators of the CMS, which will hopefully help. Maybe I just did something silly. iPhone photos appear to use EXIF data to determine their orientation, and something might be getting floofed up between phone and site. That's outside my jurisdiction.

In the meantime, please enjoy wrong-way pictures, sometimes.

Update! I fixed it, maybe not optimally, but in a way that seems to work!

I just want to say, I'm sorry for liking the things that I like. I try really hard to broaden my taste all the time, and to not be an Annoying White Dude with Glasses, but I also just get a kick out of things that are annoying. Yes, I like reading Jacques Derrida's essays, because he's funny and connects things in unusual ways and is always ultimately trying to undermine the dichotomies that reinforce bigotry. Even though it's annoying to read a philosopher from France in the 1970s. I'm re-reading chapter 4 of From Hell because the stuff about using architecture to create dread and prop up the patriarchy is both fascinating and terrifying, and a good counterpoint to the increasing bullshit contention that aliens built the pyramids and shit like that. But almost everyone who is Super Into Alan Moore is someone who thinks Watchmen is actually really thought-provoking (it isn't, Rorshach sucks, that's literally the point of the book but it makes the classic mistake of making its villains idiosyncratically compelling). I'm also reading Frankenstein for the first time, various poetry and essay collections by poets (Mary Ruefle's Madness, Rack, and Honey is SO good), even though there's little use for poetry in the modern world (even though all tweets are poems). I'm partway through two dozen books and so many other sources right now, by people of as many backgrounds and dispositions as I can.

I'm engaged with all this stuff because I like it, because it makes my brain tingle, because hardly anything moves the needle of my emotions, but complex texts and strange linguistic conjunctions and history-spanning mutterings about the people who have believed in magic (even though I don't) are interesting, they hold my attention for more than a few moments, and they can open new pathways of thought for me. Even though talking about this stuff with anybody is so painful for me, because the looks of skepticism and impatience people give me because the pop culture positioning of so many things I genuinely enjoy is one of ridicule and disbelief. I think I've personally spoken with 5 or 6 people who have finished Infinite Jest (which I read in an unemployed month in 2010 and mostly enjoyed), but there are so many people who not only refuse to read Wallace (maybe for good reasons, whatever!) but who actually don't believe anybody else really enjoys his work. One day when I was working at the little local bookshop here, minding my own business behind the counter, somebody came in and started going off about how much they hated the air around DFW and asserted that, "No one even really reads him! Nobody has finished Infinite Jest! They just SAY they do to impress other macho literature guys." And I, meek in my glasses and bad short haircut, quietly said, "Well, I did read Infinite Jest a few years ago, and I mostly enjoyed it." And this lady looked at me with absolute disgust and pity, shook her head, and moved on.

I know the problem with all of this stuff is masculinity. Either truth or perception of machismo on the part of the authors or, especially, their fans. It's not wrong to say most people who will talk at length about Dee Eff Double You are academic assholes. I've met these guys! It's real. And I hate deriving any pleasure from media objects that are associated with macho dudes. But sometimes I do. Usually because true friends have made impassioned recommendations, and I've approached with that pop skepticism, and then been surprised at how much depth and humanity there is in these things. But then I try desperately not to talk about it. I maintain almost-zero levels of confidence about anything I enjoy, and have found it increasingly difficult to just talk about stuff I like and dislike because I can't bear to be given these looks, or to anticipate them.

AND ALSO none of these things are my Absolute Favorite! I like Alan Moore's novels and prose, and his series Promethea is really lovely, but I don't idolize him, especially not the earlier graphic novels that have polluted our culture with their (maybe justified at the time) cynicism! I haven't read Wallace in many years; I just bring him up because I never talk about him if I can, even though a lot of his writing has resonated within me pretty vividly, particularly when I was a decade younger, more academically-inclined, and even more inward-turning if you can believe it! I keep returning to Derrida periodically, but I also understand there's plenty problematic about him and his work, even if I focus on the broader points and techniques that make disparate concepts zip together in my brain like a tight pair of jeans!

But these are all emblematic of a feeling I have that I'm cursed with the bad taste of my birth conditions and the structures of my upbringing, and that it's viscerally difficult to enjoy myself for very long privately or publicly for this, among a constellation of other curses. This is a place for me to write about whatever I want without trying to anticipate the audience overmuch, so that I can work through this stuff at greater length with the possibility of feedback, and if that means some people roll their eyes at me, I'm going to try to get over that fear being the thing that prevents me from speaking in the first place!

So, anyway. Sorry if what I like is annoying, or if a lot of people who like some of the things I like are even more excruciating products of our Monster Machine Culture! I'm going to make Posts about that shit anyway, and try to articulate what I like about them beyond their surface-level cultural sheen, because OH WELL

Also, I'm writing all of this noise about stuff that isn't immediately relevant because thinking directly about all the things that are really bothering me right now will cause me to writhe my way through the floor

There’s a lot to listen to and learn from in this interview with adrienne maree brown:

We’ve been trained to be afraid of our own yes, and what feels good in our lives. Get curious about that. Who benefits from you being terrified to be happy? As long as you’re afraid to be happy, you’ll not pursue the very things that would require the system to change, require the system to accommodate everyone’s joy, instead of just the joy of a few rich people at the top. That kind of systems change is of deep interest to me.

We have relationships and accountability to the kinds of stories we tell. Art is either upholding the status quo, or disrupting the status quo. Class, race, gender, sexism, nationalism, militarism… the toxic energies of our time want to come through us. They want to come out. They need to be rewritten, and we have to be conscious about how that happens, so that we’re not writing the same narrative.

There’s always going to be a part of me that’s laughing at my own earnestness, so considering my own insignificance always makes me laugh and helps me relax. Everyone’s like, ‘Am I doing enough? Can I do more? Does my life matter? Do people like me?’ I think I do my best work when I’m not concerned about how it’s going to be received, and when I’m really in touch with what I feel is the most true part myself.

Humans have done so much to make ourselves still and rigid and routine, and some people get comfort from that. I guess, as a Virgo, I’m supposed to be comforted by that! But I enjoy routines, as long as I know I can change them whenever I want. The harder truth that you have to get in contact with as a human being is that you don’t know for sure. Everything we’re doing is our best-case scenario, best hypothesis. Since I can’t guarantee that in the future it will be impactful, what I try to do is live each day as if I’m in that future. Like, I want to live in a world where nobody was lying to each other, and we said exactly what we were feeling and thinking with as much kindness as possible. Then I did that, and got much different results than I’ve ever gotten from like, lying, or just being polite.

Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am”

As I’ve opened up this avenue for posting, I find I’m inclined toward more of a circa-2002 LiveJournal-style public diary, including raw revelations of my internal emotions. I’ve always traced that desire to having been trained to journal publicly by the adolescent-digital culture of the early 2000s. Not a photographic attempt at presentability, but a textual attempt at sentimentality or “truth” — often just as manipulative as an instagram smile.

But then Derrida comes out of a crowd of animals to connect autobiography itself to Christian confession — and I remember my training, the early-life admonition to pray to god, to whisper internally a list of my crimes and desires and to beg forgiveness. Somehow after all of this time (with my memory punched through repeatedly by the moths of depression), I hadn’t connected the thread back that far. At the same time as I want badly to just type freely about how bad I feel and why, and then to post it publicly for my friends and unknown future enemies, I then turn around and face down the inclination for likely-good reasons. But in the depth of my wiring, in the primordial soup of my consciousness, there’s the toxic waste of christianity leeching out in every direction.

Catholic confession is in part a power mechanism; tell the priests about your sins, and they can leverage the community and hold power. Private confession in the Baptist style makes you your own jailer; or, in many prominent christians, it apparently makes you immune to restraint or regret. If you can do whatever you like, and then be forgiven by the ghost voice of your own internal god, then nothing is off the table.

God doesn’t live in my head anymore; but the litany of wrongs runs constantly, uselessly, and the desire to seek sympathy from external sources is a bottleneck on my entire life. Otto Rank said somewhere that eventually we become the keepers of our parents’ voices, or of god’s; eventually we have to become our own parent, our own god, or else the voice of recrimination and judgment takes on a life of its own and strangles out the more productive voices.

There is still a frowning god mumbling somewhere within me; and more-readily, the ignorant condescension and irritation of my parents. I seem to want to submit my thoughts for consideration before a jury of my peers, both to hear myself more clearly, and to possibly have someone say, “You’re right!”

One of the last lengthy text things I posted publicly (almost 2 years before starting this site) felt good to get out of my brain. Multiple friends said they really appreciated it. A stranger said it made them love me. But then my mother saw it, and texted to say she thought I sounded insane. The truth was my mother never learned to hear me clearly, for whatever combination of reasons. But I was still a few steps away from entirely rejecting her voice as an influence in my life, and that chastisement was so effective that I shut down again, when I could have been blooming. As I had done so many times before.

I put my own aims for my life on hold for most of a decade simply because my parents’ expectations were so narrow, and loudly-doubtful, that I assumed I must be wrong and needed to adjust myself to accommodate them. Before that, I wasted another decade trying to divine the will of god and live according to conservative control structures. It’s hard for me to look back on any of my life with anything but resentment and grief. I think I have been a happy child, a bright student, an insightful friend, and a prolific creator. But at the same time, I feel like I’ve hardly ever gotten to meet my real self, the one who has continually tried to rise up out from under these root-smothering sheets. I know lots of other people feel varying forms of this, because we were raised in a garbage culture of authoritarian control.

I continue to feel that writing helps bring me closer to myself. For whatever combination of reasons, it’s easier to write if there’s the possibility someone else will read it. This also introduces the danger of judgment; of appearing weak, unstable, or bewildering. Unmarketable. I may be all of those things sometimes. But I have difficulty reaching the rest of myself if I can’t look at and set down the messy surface of my mind.

Derrida also says, “Things would be too simple altogether, […] there would even be the risk that domestication has already come into effect, if I were to give in to my own melancholy.”

I have absolutely given in to my own melancholy, as well as to the melancholies and manipulations of familial and social structures, and been domesticated to the point of docility before my own death. I don’t know how many lives I was born with, but I’m tired of lying down silently to lose them. I need some of the wildness of “truth,” confessed to the screaming unyielding sun, to the meaning-free constellations of our lineless gods, to whichever fellow animals will hear me and tilt their heads in recognition. I need to believe in my own voice, to believe that I need it, to believe that it isn’t simply hateful noise that needs to be suppressed in order to work to pay off the debts I owe to our monstrous systems simply to sustain my viability as a laborer.

So. Let’s put one word in front of another and believe the page leads somewhere. Even if it has to be expressed partly through the mechanics of control I was given as a child and from which I may never fully escape. I’m just what I am, and I’ve got to endure the parts I despise in order to sustain the parts I sometimes have the energy to love.

Watching a clip of “Hakuna Matata” sung by real-looking animals and thinking it’s either a test (of what we are able and willing to put up with?), a psychological operation by well-known malefactors (Disney), or a cry for help from a dying culture devouring itself. Anyway it made my brain feel bad to look at it, but hopefully everybody has a good time helping Disney make a bunch more money