Death Magic

See my previous couple of posts for some thoughts and feelings on magic and death.  Continuing my most recent thoughts and building on them, welcome to this post.  Although it’s being written pretty stream-of-consciousness, so if anything coherent comes of it, that’s just luck.

I had a brief moment watching a playthrough of Elden Ring wherein I genuinely felt the magic of spooky weirdos in the service of death sorceries.  Reminded me of when I feel tha magic in other media, like the weirding way from Dune, like Jim Morrison bullshit in that Oliver Stone Doors movie, like… I dunno.  The part in Lord of Illusions when the ground is crumbling away from Nyx’s feet and he’s still levitating like it’s no biggy.

So this has me wondering how I might use that inspiration to write better magic in my own stories.

Y’know I still don’t have a good strong idea of just what Josefina in J&B is capable of and how it works.  It would be super useful to have that figured out before I write the last half of that book.  The last scene of my first big chonk of that book has her teleporting short distances and anchoring a spirit creature to the ground so Blasfemia can finish it off.  I do know at least one big impressive thing I want her to do at the end of the story.  What can build toward that?

A bit off topic but related and I may double back to it before I’m done here.  In this one I was thinking about my thinking about my notions on Death Magic.  Previously I said that magic in this context is less about exerting one’s will over reality than interacting in a more profound way with the big important concepts in life – love sex chaos death etc.  It’s about emotion.  Surrealism is not much without feeling behind it.  It helps surrealism hit right if the feeling is one of the big ones; magic too, I think.  Maybe.  Like I said, working off the top of my head here.

How do I feel about death?  What is it?  I don’t like it.  Like, I don’t wanna die.  Really don’t.  There’s a goofy song by Depeche Mode called Flies on the Windscreen which states its case with the opening lyrics:  “Death is everywhere!  There are flies on the windscreen for a start, Reminding us!  We could be torn apart.”  This is real as shit.  Death and dying are everywhere you look in this world.  Part of life, of course, but if you’re feeling it, it’s sure easy to let that turn you into a goth.

The further I get from the moment that inspired this, the more the feeling is faded, like a dream.  I may have been drifting toward sleep in that moment.  God I feel like I could sleep any damn time.  When I retire, I’m gonna sleep six hours, wake up for two, then sleep another three.  And it’s gonna feel awesome.

Anyway, how can I get back to that moment, remember what it’s like?  Gotta focus on my feelings.  How do I feel about death, really?  If I strip away the bullshit and the philosophy, but don’t go so simple as to say “it sux and be scary.”  What is death, to me?  It’s so hard to focus.  I closed my eyes and felt it out.

First thing that came to mind was the inevitability of it.  It’s looming there like a monolith… more like the walls of a prison and I’m inside.  Second thing, the absurdity of it.  More specifically, of people’s responses to it.  There are the religious faithful, which we can scorn or pity in our own ways.  More absurd tho are the things people do with their lives.  The fact death looms large in front of orngdolf shitler renders the way he’s choosing to live his life profoundly absurd.  But that’s true of most of us as well.  When you consider that you could die at any moment but you’re still going to work and living like a human being, instead of wilding out, doing anything you love and that you’re capable of…  It’s depressing, appropriately.

It’s a joke and we’re all the punchline.  It’s meaningless.  It’s the return to zero.  Even the Universe is ultimately going to die.  When I’m having trouble focusing, it’s the quiet in between the notes of the static.  It’s the low point on the brainwave graph.  Again, it’s all around and looming and cannot be escaped.  So what was the feeling that intrigued me there, in something I normally avoid the contemplation of?

Maybe it’s the way I’m horny on goths.  In my cowardice, when I see somebody who does not look away from death, they become powerful to me, magnetic.  Was I just being horny on the concept of this character?  Doesn’t feel like it.

Truth.  The fictional depictions of magic that move me are the ones where a character knows something about reality and it confers on them a kind of power.  Fia the Deathbed Companion doesn’t look away from death.  She intentionally focuses herself on it fully, and though she has some magic powers from that awareness, the most magical thing about it is the awareness itself.  Drink a big glass of poison and in the moment before it kills, live forever.  Live the thing that others fear.  Don’t fear the reaper.

I don’t think killers are cool.  The cool assassin man from movies, nay.  It’s fun to watch the action as no-names go flyin’ from the paired pistolas of Chow Yun-fat, but he’s gotta have a good reason to do it, and they gotta genuinely not be human in any way.  Chaff, or Snidely Whiplash’d.  Killing people sucks and the extent to which it happens IRL makes the fiction less appealing to me these days.  But the mortified character, whether dying saintly or transcending life more grotesquely, cenobite style – that’s an interesting character.  Powerful.

I dunno i dunno.  Probably feel different about that tomorrow.  I’ve thought before that when I die, I wanna look like that bog mummy.  You know, the one that looks so peaceful, like he laid down to take a nap and crumpled into the earth just a bit, to lay there forever.  That guy died violently, of course.  Nice to imagine otherwise.  Let my sleep be peaceful and dignified – not that I’ll be there to care about it.   Still.

The death wizard is already dead and not dead yet, fully aware of and in communion with the walls of this prison, a part of the Universe in a way most are not.  That’s power enough.  I don’t know what it means.  Still haven’t figured that biz out.  Still can’t conceive of ways to express this idea on the page that don’t feel like aping what’s come before, or worse just come off like some dungeons & dragons.  This’ll have to do for now.

–

Jongleurs of Love

I wish I remembered this dream better.  The other night the alarm woke me in the middle of scheming on a heist, with my crack team of specialists.  There was a lady who specialized in hacky sack and a guy who was some kind of juggler or master of throwing knives.  She was in her mid 20s and a lil butch, he was slim and balding and more like mid 30s.  However, their propensity for tossing things around caused an animal magnetism between them, and they fell in love.  Not like passionate tear off your shirts love, but always being together in solemn companionship love, like they’d been married for years.

Anyway, my subconscious thinks you need to have interests in common for twue wuv, and that’s probably informed by my conscious experience.  Met my husband in art school.  LTRs in the comments, do you have a lot in common with your lover, or are you on that “opposites attract” bit like Paula Abdul and that animated cat?

–

In other things, I’m still thinking about magic.  Was watching some dudebro play Elden Ring on yewchoob and his guy was obliged by the game play to be embraced by Fia the Deathbed Companion, and acquire “a baldachin’s blessing.”  I really like the way some types of damage in that game, like frenzied flame, deathblight, and scarlet rot, are themes that unite factions and monsters – and are themes you can take for your own, influencing in some cases how the game ends.

In particular I was moved by this odd moment in my head when the goofy fantasy notion of Death reached out a bony finger and touched my feelings about really real life tragic death.  There’s something in that.  I get focused on how magic is an extension of the will, mind over matter, but it’s also a heightened relationship with the fundamental forces of nature, the big concepts that dominate our lives like sex and love, chaos and death.  A feeling powerful enough to move one’s self, change one into something more and less than human as it passes through your bod.

Reminder I’m not trying to say magic is real.  I’m just feeling out better ways to represent it in fiction, to touch that transcendant feeling of it.

–

It’s a Kind of Magic

I find myself lusting for magic again.  I may have mentioned before that my soul is forfeit because I made an ill-considered deal with the devil while walking home from a shift at Pizza Hut in the ’90s:  Show me magic is real and you can have my soul.  Why make such a foolish deal?  Because the world can seem so very dull and pointless.

I can’t tell you why it feels to me like magic would make it interesting and worthwhile.  There’s evidence a lot of people out there feel this way, especially those who are able to fool themselves into believing, at least in fits and starts.  Probably cultural damage of some kind.  It doesn’t really make sense.

Some people have very magical thoughts, like they’re the center of reality, important and big in some way.  It isn’t always a good feeling; you see this a lot with paranoia-flavored mental illnesses.  Tough to feel OK with life when everybody is out to get you.

I didn’t really want to write about that.  I’m just trying to put a finger on this feeling again.  The place it’s most relevant to me is in the creation of art.  I can’t make myself believe in some cult bullshit or mainstream religion either.  I can’t eke a transcendant spiritual feeling out of the things that I do believe, in my heart of hearts.  All that stuff just overwhelms in a bad way.  But fiction, that’s another thing altogether.

This feeling connects to other thoughts I’ve had in the past, as expressed through blog posts on The Doors, on levitation, on action, on Faust.  Is it wrong to want the weirding way?  To be a scanner, or if I’m ready to go, to get scanned?  I want my will to move the world, just a little bit.  Push.

I am reminded now of the Floaters-themed personal ads on my levitation post, and how they should be updated to reflect my current name.  Here I go…

Cancer, and my name is Bébé
And I like a lover who gots somethin’ extra in their jayjays
Whether that’s a big belly or a dingly dang dongus
There’s no way you and I can go wrongus
when you
Take my hand, come with me baby, to Love Land.
Let me show you it’s queer and/or gay
Sharin’ your love with Bébé
I want you to Float On… Float with me baby…

Way off topic.  The important thing is that y’all tell me how you do it.  Projecting your will like Charles Gray in The Devil Rides Out.  Stop holding out.  Slip me the runes.  I can handle it.  It’s time.

JUST GIVE ME THE PRIZE!

–

Life List: Song Sparrow

There are sparrow sparrows, from the Old World where Karl of Linne was doing his big naming project, and decided they were the for real deal.  Then there are embirizids or New World Sparrows, which include most of what this amurrican would ever talk about.  Of those, the song sparrow is one of the most common and most commonly heard.

I feel like there was a Calvin and Hobbes comic with a very realistically drawn song sparrow in it, but don’t recall for sure.  At any rate, they are streaky brown and grey things like every other sparrow around here so who cares?  But they sez god jeezy has his eye on the sparrow, so… get judged, fools.

I didn’t know song sparrows were so common because they aren’t so easy to see.  Maybe if I had a bird feeder to watch all day.  For years after I started paying attention to birds, I never saw one with the clarity to ID it.  Only once I used the birdy app to recognize calls did I find out just how common they are.  And, having become more familiar in that way, I finally took some notice of them visually.

Still not very often.  One time they blew past me like lightning at the rhododendron garden in Federal Way, one time I saw them cross the footpath in the wee hours outside my old place of work, and one time I saw them in the rose bush in front of my house.  But if you know the calls, they are everywhere, all the time.

And yet… I don’t know the calls.  Just don’t have a good memory for ’em.  The list of birds whose calls I recognize is much shorter than the ones I know visually, and the more varied and complex a bird’s calls are, the less I can remember them.

Why am I writing about a bird I barely recognize, am not impressed by, and have no stories about?  I needs an angle…

Song sparrows are drab little brown birds that compensate with a fancy song.  Some people are like that.  I was reaching for this in my head and first person that came to mind was Teena Marie, the very ’80s singer who did not look amazing.  She looked fine, like any rando you’d meet working the counter at the bank or the grocery store, but had a big voice – and she wrote her own songs?  That’s a skill that a lot of singers don’t have.  Good job.

Then I find out she died of unknown presumed natural causes, not even 55 years old.  Life is cruel and sheisty.  Hey, I’ve got 6 years until I’m as old as she was when she checked out.  Gotta watch my back for scythes.

Anyway, the art of writing a tune is real business and I don’t think I always appreciated it, until listening to a bunch of bob dylan covers on a random lark one time.  The best way to tell if a song is really well written is to divorce it from its original style completely and see if it still stands up, and the more covers you have, the more evidence you have to weigh and consider.  Nobody’s gonna cover Teena Marie, so we’ll just have to decide about her qualities for ourselves.

As far as I’m concerned?  She’s alright.

–

RP by Comment 00004

This is a bonus post.  For the regular daily content, look at the post before this.

You can still join the RP by comment, open for two more players.  Catch up from the beginning here, or whatever.  This is an “urban fantasy” in an earth-like world.  The characters are students at the equivalent of a community college, for the usual reasons a person might end up there instead of a more prestigious school.  What are you doing here?  What’s your major, something mundane or something adventurous?

~Previous~ 🏵️ ~~~

The freshmen were at last rewarded with cheap but nice sandwiches, chips, cookies, and cola at the cafeteria.  The professor was probably supposed to be coming around to them individually, but succumbed to anxiety of her own, and slouched in a corner.  That meant some amount of freedom again to talk to whomever one desired.  Ilmardan was beginning to get the idea of this place.  Some students were from families too poor or too practical to pay for the tuition at fancier schools, some were orienting themselves toward careers that didn’t require a full four year degree, some were taking practical classes to support jobs they had elsewhere or to try branching out into something new.  But most noteworthy, some were here because they were scandalized.  Black sheep, the kids you don’t have high hopes for anymore.  Punks and dropouts.  Ilmardan saw the graffiti, the radical flyers stuck to the walls next to advertisements for concerts and art shows and dubious supplements and school events.  What kind of mess might one get into, in such a place?  What was he going to try to do with his time here, socially or academically, really?  Was this a purgatory or a slacker’s paradise?

If you’re starting to get any new ambitions, have yer guy think about ’em.  If you just want to socialize for other ends – planning the club trip or whatever – get into that.  And if you want to time skip, I’ll add more to this post to facilitate that…

~Previous~ 🏵️ ~~~

–

These Gay Antics

Hey, what’s the deal with the gay antics out here?  Lookit that guy up on the stage, kissin’ the other guy on the stage, and nobody says nothin’ about it like we all get it, big joke, they get the no-homo pass because they’re rocksters.  That ain’t fair.

I’m thinkin’ about the boys in Nirvana back when they were all alive, makin’ out on Sunday Night Live and whatnot.  But also about Bruce Springsteen kissin’ that one guy from his band, and didn’t some of those hairbandmans do it too?  Like Bon Chovies or David van der lee Rothe or Motley Poisons?  Why does nobody think any of them suck wieners?  That’s kinda weird.

Rap guys can’t get away with it.  Every time they wanna say something nice about gay people they gotta backpedal into the depths of hell to keep their street cred.  I feel like one of those Mobb Deep dudes had to do it.  It’s kinda interesting tho, some rap bands are cocksucker this faggot that, and others don’t use those slurs at all, like, mysteriously absent from their vocabulary.

And however hardcore that rapper is, when I notice that about them, I have to wonder, who are they being nice to?  Themselves?  Their friends and relatives?  Some of them even stay sorta vaguely respectful to women.  Can you imagine?  But they can’t make out with other rappers on stage and get a pass.  No permiso.

Gay antics tho.  Dire Straits using the f slur in Money for Nothin’.  Probably about Duran Duran, but he did go on to say Duran man gets his chicks for free.  As opposed to Dire Straits who have to pay for it?  Or do they get their dudes for free?  Reverse reclamation maneouvre?  I don’t get it.

Are these liddle old men trying to appeal to fujoshis?  Scare republicans?  Is it a homophobic joke like “wouldn’t it be funny if we were gay lol u losers”?  I remember high school jocks being on that tip, but doing very overt gay things in pursuit of that “joke” and leaving one wondering.  Or jacking it, depending on how hot you thought their homoerotic display was.  A few of those situations may have entered my “spank bank” as it were…

Rocksters explain it.  I’m at a loss.  How u do these gay shenanigans and get away with it?

–

Life List: Black-Capped Chickadee

There are birds that are still, for all that’s fucked up in nature right now, doing very well for themselves.  And I have to wonder with all of them – are they doing too well for themselves?  Are there supposed to be this many black-capped chickadees, or has the presence of colonizer-styled civilization caused them to multiply beyond the numbers they should have?

Like dark-eyed juncos, black-capped chickadees are ridiculously numerous.  Then again, I’ve only been paying attention to birds since I’ve been living in Washington state.  I get the impression this could be nationwide, that there could be black-capped chickadees from coast to coast, but crimbo decorations could give one the same idea about cardinals, and those are not where I live.

Also, regarding the numbers, something I haven’t talked about yet in these articles:  Before the current woeful epoch, just how many animals were there?  What were the numbers like?  It’s easy to imagine without cars splattering bugs and larger animals everywhere they go, with less poison and plastic and pollution, with a more stable climate, there could’ve been a lot more creatures, everywhere and all the time.  When a mummer gamboled through the streets of Saxony in 1586, how many storks were on those rooftops?  Sparrows in the eaves?  How many different species of bird would an observant person be able to see every day?  In short, would it look like there are too many chickadees if there were more of everything else?

Black-capped chickadees do the famous chicka-dee-dee-dee song, which to my ears sounds more like tsickita-bee-bee-bee.  They have a lot of other vocalizations, mostly variations on tsickita, but one always captures my attention.  It sounds mournful, and it may be confirmation bias, but I feel like I’ve mostly heard it from chickadees far from a flock, alone in a tree, especially on a cold or wet day.  That call sounds like oomp-pewee.

So basically, in an AU where the first chickadees observed were all depressed, they’d be called umpewees instead.  The more u kno.

I saw a birding youtuber document one season worth of breeding by a pair of chickadees in a nest box, and boy howdy, these guys fuck.  Seems like in a good year, a couple of chickadees could spit out a hundred.  This is not as fast as mouse breeding, but it’s pretty damn prolific.  This is why small predatory animals exist.  Eat these guys up like some marshmallows.  Pop ’em like skittles.

Some animals just look like a food.  I think bushtits look more like a food than chickadees, but still… bite size.  There are different types of cuteness and small birds like this are in that Hello Kitty territory, where the idea they’d have thoughts or feelings is less easy to imagine.  Shut off your empathy; be like the mighty falcon; gobble ’em up.

Chickadees of all types are basically New World tits, so like, I once again had an excuse to say tits on an article.  They have a black-cap and chin.  You know what they look like.  Don’t play the fool.

You know, I thought I’d have a lot more to say about black-capped chickadees, in part because there are so many of them, but I can call nothing more to mind, now that it’s time.  Put out a feeder and you’ll see them.  They should look familiar.  If you’re norteamericano, they got yer ass surrounded.

–

Ruining Lives for Fun and Profit

note:  my RP by comment is still going and open for two more players.  see this post.

Debt is a motherfucker.  Our society is usurious as all hell, stealing from the education system to leave people innumerate and cutting so much slack to “legitimate” businesses that they all degenerate into con jobs and pyramid schemes, abusing people’s lack of savvy to run up egregious debts on them, run them ragged for life on the debt treadmill.  It’s not sustainable; the subprime mortgage scandal was caused by lending imprudently, the idea you could keep the bullshit rolling on stone blood forever.

I myself was a victim of “legitimate” businesses selling debt on lies.  It was student debt, racked up to obscene amounts through interest I was never ever going to be able to pay off.  While Shitler and his Shitbirds have taken a wrecking ball to student loan forgiveness and income-based repayment programs, as of this moment, my own forgiveness is still safe because it was part of a court case against various for-profit schools that used misleading material to make us think employment was much more certain and would be much more well-compensated than it actually was.  I’ve got some kind of long-term deferral waiting for the forgiveness to be processed.  Thank fuck, and here’s hoping there doesn’t come an executive order to overturn that court case as part of the Arbeit Macht Frei Act of 2027, to pump up the population of debtor’s prisons.

Many other USians are not so lucky, having been all lined up to get their debts forgiven under Biden policies that were hammered by conservative assholes.  Even a fucking three year old knows that “no backsies’ is sacred.  Don’t tell us we’re getting loans forgiven and then renege.  That’s injustice, motherfuckers.  Anyway, the latest evil evil fuckshit to come from on high is that any student loans in default are being sent to collection agencies.

Have you heard of collection agencies, or are you from one of the hell countries where these things are real?  A business that is incentivized to keep you from paying as long as possible while also abusing you into paying as much as possible, created this creepy system where they make feinting attempts to notify you of the debt for a while, shots across the bow, while running up whatever they thought would be a cool interest rate.  Then they start the harassment, the repossessions, the wage garnishments.

Considering the staggering size student loan debts can run to, this is a recipe for hounding people to suicide or homelessness or other terrible situations and harms.  These motherfuckers are ghouls.  They live in golden palaces and sleep in the down of sacrificial doves, but it’s not enough.  The view from heaven only satisfies if they are looking down on eternal torment in hell.

I am bothered by this because of the certainty that my own loan forgiveness is in their sights, that they’re going to kill it the second they can come up with a way to do so.  But much more than that, I am bothered on behalf of the people who are suffering through this policy right now.  It’s like, I’d be bothered if I might get shot, but not nearly as much as seeing someone else shot in front of me.  That’s how I feel about the victims of this policy.

I had some chipper motherfucker tell me once that Biden’s loan forgiveness programs were buying votes.  Well, who makes for a better world, somebody who buys votes by making lives better or someone who buys votes by making lives end?  But this is what ameriKKKa wanted.  Torment.  Hell.  Because it’s always gonna be someone else’s suffering right?  Never you, no sirree.

It’s cool to see people show up big for protests, but I know those are the people who voted.  And all the bitches who sat it out, they’re driving by oblivious.  Get out of the way, you old hippies with your illegible handmade signs.  I need to get to my third job to toil away the rest of my life because doncha know both sides are exactly the same and things couldn’t possibly be worse under the one the nazis liked so much.

Feeling tired.  Anyway, Shitler keeps making regular people into desperate motherfuckers with nothing to lose, which is exactly the kind of people he needs to be fearing.  I’m glad the fear centers of his brain seem to have been replaced with aluminum amyloids and jelly beans.  I’m glad he won’t see it coming, because it’ll be more likely to land next time.

–

The Celebs Are at It Again

content warning:  fictional-within-fictional bestiality.

Famous bit of internet humor by internet humorist Dril:  “It is with a heavy heart that I must announce the celebs are at it again.”  Classic.  It’s not infrequent that I have celebrities appear in my dreams, but sometimes it’s so obvious.  Last night before I went to bed I saw a photoset of Julianne Moore on tumblr, then in the night I dreamed I randomly met Julianne Moore.  She was lounging on a lawn chair acting like a posh weirdo – on a grade to Maude Lebowski, but more low key and charming.  I was like, “wow she’s like that in real life, wotta character.”

When I was much younger the celebs were mostly from the media I’d spent the most time with at that age: Star Trek: The Next Generation, The X-Files.  I would be the characters or be with the characters pretty often.  TNG had such an iconic cast.  Fucken love those guys; cannot blame people for watching Picard, as bad as the reviews have been.  I just ain’t payin’ for it or learning to pirate it myself.

The celebs don’t always fare well in my dreams.  When I’ve been Fox Mulder or Dana Scully, it would sometimes be in conflict against monsters I could not hope to defeat – using a wimpy peashooter against a raging werewolf, that kinda shit.  Of course, there’s when I was Ripley from Aliens and the queen alien gave me an abortion.

The worst case tho was from when I had my appendix out and was drifting through wakefulness and dreaming with vividness.  Janet Jackson was in a music video where cheap special effects were used to make it look like she’d just given a wolf a blow job.  The music came in and she bellowed the chorus, “Dog Sex!  Why did you make me do this?”

In the dream, I thought to myself tsk, tsk, tsk.  I can’t believe the things they’ll show on MTV these days.  But then I awoke to find that MTV was not to blame, nor was Janet Jackson’s agent.  It was nobody’s fault but my own.  Sorry Janet.

–

Fascism was Never Cool

One of the best / worst moves the nazis ever pulled was recruiting a skilled fashion designer to the cause.  Hugo Boss towers over the history of the world as the unholy shithead that made nazis look cool.  I’m not going to pretend he didn’t, as much as the aesthetic is extremely disgusting to me from when I stand.  You can find stories about how this obsession with form over function resulted in bad clothing causing problems in combat, but that’s a quibble by now.  Even if nonfunctional buttons or unnecessary straps cost a nazi his life once upon a time, the look continues to give the worst people in the world erections.  So mission accomplished.

Aside from that one thing that one time tho?  There is literally nothing cool about fascism.  The ideology is ironically the mentality of the incredibly weak and foolish.  I say ironically because it poses as the mentality of the inherently mas inteligente and musclebound.  Fucking absurd.  Who wants to kneel before some almighty lump of decaying flesh in an expensive suit?  Who needs to be told their place like a good little submissive?  Who believes that tyranny is better for society than distribution of authority to those who should reasonably hold it, like experts in their fields?  Who thinks a con artist is better qualified to make decisions about medicine than a doctor, a bully is better qualified to make decisions about human rights than mental health professionals and ethicists and sociologists and the people whose rights are threatened?

That’s just the philosophy.  This article is about the superficial.  I’m talking about coolness.  You know the ’80s cool guy with the sunglasses?  The lady with all the bangles and the big hair and neon legwarmers?  The deadpan standup comedian with self-effacing charm, cutting down the powerful with the scythe of wit?  The hip kids on the corner always pushing the edge of what people think is acceptable to wear, making the world a more interesting looking place?  The people who invented the zoot suit?  Flappers?  Bobbysoxers?  Rock and rollers?  None of these things can come of a fascist mindset.

There are some people who were legitimately cool, such as cool is, that had flirtations with fascism.  David Bowie famously made that mistake while strung out on cocaine in the ’80s and I imagine got his shit right well before he died.  The artist Romaine Brooks let classism lead her into sympathy for fascists, according to some sources.  These were not shining moments in their lives that anybody looks to with affection, and of course, not moments that had anything to do with why they were ultimately regarded as cool, on the balance of their respective lives.

Fascists steal coolness from other people.  An mp3 that did the rounds back in the file-sharing days was a nazi propagandist antisemitic cover of “Making Whoopee.”  You ever want to hear a nazi jazz band?  I can’t imagine their originals were worth a shit either.  There was a pathetic moment in electronic music when neo-nazis tried to make “fashwave” a thing.  They tried to claim artists who despise them as being part of their shit, and sometimes just literally stole somebody else’s song and spliced in naziness.

A lot of cool comes from black folks.  And who is the most fascist black man making music today?  Ye?  That guy is about as cool as a rusty cybertruck.  That guy is about as cool as a crumpled paper bag full of shit and dead animals.  That guy hasn’t made a song worth a dime in a long-ass time.  Record sales to college republicans don’t count.

I remember when one of the Penny Arcade dudes was being a transphobe and got called out by the Diesel Sweeties guy who said something to the effect of, “hating trans people doesn’t make him cool; it makes him Rush Limbaugh with tattoos.”  Dressing hip while expressing the values of a megachurch is some youth pastor shit.  It’s coolness drag.

And let’s check out the coolness of fascism’s big boys and monkey boys of the moment, shall we?  Tfxnp.  Mxyk.  Ben Shapiro.  Charlie Kirk.  Marjorie Tailor Greene.  Tucker Carlson.  Candace Owens.  Are you starting to notice a pattern?  These are the people the ’80s cool guy would have been embarrassing with his hijinks and breezy charm.  These are the people who would be tearing down the community center in Breakin’ III: Electric Boogalee,  until those awesome kids raised a bunch of money with breakdancing powers and heart.

And yet they think they are cool.  Look at the way they swan around in their piles of ill-gotten loot.  It’s absurd on its face.  I can’t even with that shit.  I know I’m not the coolest bitch myself, and I definitely know coolness isn’t the most admirable quality a human can possess or any kind of basis for making important decisions in life, but I’m claiming rank as an arbiter of cool here.  I deserve it more than they do.  Hell, I could dress in garbage and shit myself on the bus and be cooler than any one of those clowns.

My husband reminds me that a few years ago there was a book claiming that conservative was the new punk, that they were taking cool back from the radical left or whatever.  Now it’s cool to own property and go to church, they said.  I couldn’t find it on a cursory google search, which is more effort than that crackpot idea deserved.

I don’t have a point.  Shit’s just got me a little cranky.  That makes me a “hater” and therefore inherently less cool than a “player,” right?  There are more criteria than that.  On the balance, any cool points they get for being players are utterly hosed by anything else about their entire lives.

Get ’em off the stage.

–