The Bribe

got this turd in the mail, a bribe to vote nazi, one of a number of chump change giveaways to distract from the destruction of everything secure and halfway decent in the us government.

i’m making the rock bottom contribution to my savings plan, leaving matching money from my employer on the table, because my take home isn’t enough to support my household.  but hey, now i can sign up for an extra ira with shitler’s name on it, which will be equally valuable when he’s dragged our economy into the pits of hell.

don’t give me money dicknald, give me something i really want.  for every dollar you were gonna give me, stab yourself in the face one time.  it doesn’t have to be with a bowie knife unless you’re feeling uncharacteristically guilty.  just use a straight pin.  i’ll wait.

i don’t want to see your fucking nazi mugshot again until it’s swollen from thousands of tiny wounds, seeping and glistening.  keep your fuckmoney.  fuck off and die.

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the ozarks of king county

our power’s been out more than seventeen hours.  i’d characterize the weather that did it as “wet and a lil blustery.”  this is the county that houses the headquarters of fucking amazon, how do we not have the resources to get our power on?  i hope puget sound energy is ready to replace the contents of thousands of refrigerators like ours.

much of the square footage of my neighborhood is trailer parks.  i wonder if classism is a factor.  also wacky, seems like every time we’ve had an outage, we could hear something exploding a few blocks away right as it happened.  a lil blustery.

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Ninjutsu, Tears, and Inexpert Musical Guff

This should be several posts worth of material but I just don’t feel like doing that right now.  First up, it’s grocery Sunday as I compose this.  Just got back from running around getting everything.  In support of the “no ethical consumption under late stage capitalism” kick I’ve been on, I glanced at the ingredients of some shit I was buying, and saw it had the orangutan-extincting palm oil in it.

But I needed that shit so what the fuck am I going to do?  Become a citizen journalist and track down every alternative and order it from Sri Lanka and pray that I didn’t miss any fine details about the exploitation involved in that particular fucking product?  No answer required, thanks.

On lighter note, I noticed a kid flopped on the floor where carts could hit him and I said, “don’t do that, baby.”  When he noticed someone noticed him, he got up and did a naruto run to show off.  Are five year olds still familiar with Naruto at this point?  Feel free to answer that one.

Since covid my mother-in-law and i have been reducing our exposure by taking turns soloing the shopping at a given store.  I get the stuff at walmrat and winco while she chills in the car, she goes into treacherous joseph’s while I chill in that parking lot, then I go into safeyway if it’s that kind of week.

To survive sun on the windows I put up the silver windshield screen and get side windows down.  I play music, and today was raucous punk, until l overheard a young lady from a nearby car yell “shut the fuck up!  i can’t even with you right now” and start to cry.

She was arguing with her dude.  I didn’t look, but going off the sense of hearing alone, there were kids in the car, and to let her have a chance to recover, dude walked them off to some store or another.  That left me in an awkward parking lot with her.

Now Richard Hell and the Voidoids are no type of crying soundtrack, but if I switched tunes she might notice she was heard and feel worse.  On the other hand, I also no longer wanted to listen to puncous rauc.  I switched to “Crying” by Roy Orbison, which may have been a bad choice, but my greed to soothe myself won out.  I couldn’t hear her anymore anyway.  Maybe she rolled her windows up, doing the neglected dog thing as a form of self harm.

So I’m listening to Roy and I transition to Del Shannon, “Little Runaway,” you know.  That song is incredible.  When I was a kid listening to it on the oldies station I was just amused by it, but over the years, I’ve come to regard it as a total classic.  Unlike most Roy Orbison songs, I unreservedly love the instrumentation on it.

I know jack about music history but I did know that instrument on the solo was the legendary musitron, invented by the guy playing it, who co-wrote the song with Shannon.  Forgot his name tho, that was Max Crook.

You may notice the (other) kick I’ve been on about evaluating a song’s technical merit by way of covers.  The solo is so perfect on musitron, how does it hold up on other instruments?  Check ’em out…

Hope the lady is having a better day now.  Mine ain’t too shabby.

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backherts

low key threw my back out.  this is different from fully throwing back out, where one is utterly crippled and barely able to perform basic functions of life.  i was able to do several hours of activities with a back brace.  and excedrin.  and oxycodone.  but at the end of the day?  just sitting here hurts.  soon i will be relieved of the low key torment under the black velvet curtain of sleep.  indeed, i keep nodding off mid-sentence, whether i’m reading or writing.  very ready for it.

thinking back on the several months where i’d been able to write one post a day, ending a lil over a year ago, and wonder, how did i have so much to say back then?  there may have been bad reasons for that i’m going to choose not to reflect on.  well.  beddy-bye now, back brace groceries in the morning.

if y’all have any ideas for things you’d like to see more of from me, hmu.

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Tap-outs

Man, it was a bad month for writing.  I was doing well enough when I wrote, but there were certain demoralizing circumstances that have been messing with me for a few years and were worse than average this month.  So.  Road Rage goes on indefinite hiatus.

I might fuck around and turn in random Josefina+Blasfemia chapters occasionally.  I know that’s no kind of way to read a story, so if you’re so inclined, wait until I end it, then go back to the beginning and read the whole thing.  That story is probably my magnum opus of being weird as fuck.  Centennial Hills, The Septagram, etc, they’re intelligible enough, I think.

Anyway, happy crammed in roman asswipe month part Two.  Maybe shitler will get a month before he’s done, whaddyathink?  A thirteen month year?  It’s time.

Oh, and if it’s time to vote for you, vote!  I’ll be doing that tomorrow.

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Dead and Funky, Lethally Sunny

Both bloggers and commenters seem to be less active at the moment, which, if my perception isn’t slanted, started with the commenters slowing down.  Salrite, things can be like that.  At the same time, FtB has become a bit unstable.  It’s actin’ funky.

Given the recent legal shenanigans, I wonder that one of the haters has decided to employ extralegal shenanigans against us.  Something something DNS something DDoS something whatever.  It isn’t full-on like those weird takedowns that hit us from South Asia.

Speaking of South Asia, I heard thousands of people are dying from the heat there, but this was only from one random social media post.  In fairness to mainstream news, such as it be, I don’t follow it, so I wouldn’t know if they’re giving that short shrift or not.  Good luck to all of you.  AGW is a beast.

I saw another social media post collecting tweets from immigrants in France suffering the heatwave there, reporting their embarrassment that it hit them so bad, when they lived through higher temps in their home countries all the time.  Somebody commented that even at noon, the closer you get to a pole the more you get broadsided by the sun’s rays – it’s hitting more of your body than just the head and shoulders.  I dunno.

Anyway, y’all know I despise the sun like the veriest of vampires, so big sympathies.

Happy Juneteenth, Nobody is Free Until Everyone is Free

I’ve got a bit of a grudge going for Dave Chappelle.  I don’t think about things or people I hate all the time, so it doesn’t come up much for me, but when it does, I’m like, fuck that guy a lot.

There was an episode of his show where some goofy pimps time traveled to the days of slavery, and one of them shot an overseer.  The meta-laff was that this was supposedly a skit that had been cut from an earlier show by execs who didn’t think killing slavers was funny.  I had a good time watching that a million years ago.

For those who don’t remember his story after that point in his career, he had a nervous breakdown and broke contract to abandon the show and chill out in Africa for some years.  Comedy Central ran what was left of his show as reruns for a very long time – probably still does.  Then, at long last, Dave emerged from the earth like Punxsutawney Phil, to chip into the discourse of our times.  What did he purchase with the remainder of his cultural cachet?

He defended shitler’s “grab them by the pussy” remark like a month ahead of his first election.  Then he fucked off again for a while, during which time he did some few standup shows.  At one of these, he was photographed partying with Apartheid Junior and some other Bay Area heels.

After that he really got my attention by going full transphobe.  One of the subjects of his “humor” was a trans woman who subsequently committed suicide.  I imagine she had other reasons as well, but still.

But let’s back that up a moment.  Chappelle has partied with the guy who is currently egging on white supremacist riots in northern Ireland, who unambiguously heiled hitler at the grabber’s second inauguration.  Do you suppose the has-been comedian has any misgivings about the company he’s kept?

I’m sure he doesn’t, because like the terfs who thought they could defend cis-women’s rights by killing trans women, like the working class white ameriKKKans who thought they could protect the working class by killing mexicans, he makes this one important mistake.  He believes you can discriminate against one oppressed class of people without empowering the oppressors of your own people.

It can’t be done.  You cannot separate out the struggles of the oppressed and say one group deserves it, one group is a reasonable sacrifice.  This is basic fucking shit, as basic as it gets.  Freedom can only be protected by solidarity between the oppressed, whatever their differences.

You don’t have to like or even care about other people on your side, as long as you can stifle your shitty mouth when you’re tempted to let your prejudice run – when you’re tempted to give aid and succor to the Fourth Reich.  Do people like Dave Chappelle care about his fellow black people?

I don’t buy it for a fucking second.  Like the recurring theme in Russian folk tales of a decent pauper who becomes a shitty prince, people get X amount of dollars and decide they hate taxes more than they love human rights.

Biggie Smalls once said, “Fuck the world, don’t ask me for shit. And everything you’ve got, you work hard for it.”  I say many hands make light work, and nobody in the fucking world should have to truly work hard, as many hands as we have.  If everybody who hits the sixth zero in their bank account turns nazi, it’s time to make sure nobody gets that dollar.

Freedom for all oppressed people.  Traitors eat shit.  Long live the fighters.

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Toxical Disk Horse

I chose a life in the Great Social Discourse of Doom when I helped push Atheism Plus to establish a blog network of its own, back when that was a thing.  It’s a lot of work though, and I’m not usually up for it.  But I potentially poked that bee’s nest on my last post, so I need to clarify my position.

If someone hates it enough, they’re welcome to go talk shit about me somewhere else.  If they agree, they can agree quietly because I don’t feel like discussing it.  My hope is that, especially if you’re a trans woman, you will be neutral to it.  You will not necessarily agree at all, but you’ll be willing to let a well-intentioned comrade abide.

This is my opinion on all SJW discourse at the end of the day.  The project is to make the world a better place, not to establish an orthodoxy to which all good people must conform.  You need to be OK with disagreement, or we’ll keep having the stock leftist struggle of never achieving a coalition, always being buried beneath the power of conformity found in the fascists.

Agree with me or don’t, but I hope if you find something strongly disagreeable in what follows, you’ll still be able to tolerate coming around here most of the time, because most of the time I’m not discoursing like this, right?  And I like to see your pretty faces.  For now, let the acrimony begin…

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So, I’m kind of an outlier on FreeThought Blogs in that the only social media I use (unless you count this blog as social media) is tumblr, aka trunglr, aka the blue hellsite.  As I understand it, the dominant early user culture was teenage girls who used to post onceler slashfic on deviantart and who, around the time I sarted using it, had just grown up to post thirsty gifs of aol-time-warner-disneed-marble’s the revengers.  dot com.  And Sexy Demon Hunter Bros and Captain Whom’st and Stanklock, I forget.

These girls, some amount of which went onto become boys or somewhere inbetween style creatures, were at that age where social justice discourse becomes a thing – trying to converge on an acceptable way to be, to separate yours from theirs, with yours being the good and theirs being the unacceptable.  This was against an internet backdrop of gamergate/MRAjr culture battling liberal nerd culture types who framed all their feminist articles in terms of baby wizard shit.  Innocent times, but the bloom was coming off the rose.

The way I see it, the main political successes of tumblr were, in chronological order: making asexual youths sad, organizing the terf movement, and getting young leftists not to vote, condemning us to fascist hell forever.  All the political projects you’d want to succeed did not.  Still, compare that to facebook et al helping coordinate ethnic cleansing, and it’s not quite so bad.  All social media sucks major ass, but it’s replaced other forms of reading in our collective consciousness, it’s got us hooked.  I quit it sometimes, only to find myself needing to fill my brain with something in a quiet moment where music and other good things aren’t quite tenable, and it’s just right there, you know?

The current thing making me want to quit tumblr forever is trans infighting.  Terfs love that shit, but the fighters are locked in, and can’t escape.  Particularly the trans women.  Personally I think it all started with oppression olympics, and is an object lesson in why you should not fuck with that shit.

Let’s play that game for a second.  Who has it the worst in the world right now?  Trans women, especially black, indigenous, and people of color.  Gold medal, congrats.  OK, there’s no medal.  Actually, your prize is an abiding paranoia that is richly rewarded and reinforced by the myriad people who are, in fact, out to get you.  RIP to the far too many women who have been murdered recently.

But focusing on your fear is no way to live.  It isolates.  It harms.  It helps you dust yourself off the planet so your enemies don’t have to lift a finger.  I had to stop following Stephanie Sterling on youtube because the constant drumbeat of “nobody loves us and everybody wants us dead” was not just depressing, it wasn’t true.  I don’t need that shit in my life.

Back to the oppression olympics.  Trans women win, but they should not be playing the game.  The primary motivation for constantly reminding everyone how bad you have it is to keep us conscientious of the situation.  Cool, but see my doomerism policy in the sidebar, and focus on the reasoning for it.  For some people, this raises consciousness.  For other people, it makes them commit suicide.  You gotta figure out how to moderate your voice in the discourse.

Tumblr’s CEO and moderation staff are actively hostile to trans women and have been nuking their blogs on sight, all while gaslighting them and throwing a rainbow wash on the platform.  Bad times.  Parallel to this, some acrimonious discourse was breaking out between trans women and basically everyone else – but especially trans men.  I don’t know who shot first and I don’t care, but let me give you the short version, like the ESPN commentator at the oppression olympics.  You hate to see it, as the meme goes…

TME/TMA.  Too much enformation / too much anformation.  I mean TransMisogyny Exempt and TransMisogyny Affected.  These could be useful information in the context of discourse, like, where somebody falls on that binary contextualizes anything they say on the subject.  Sure.  On the other hand, from a certain childish point of view, it is putting a shiny sticker on trans women.  The prize in the oppression olympics?

Remember what I said the other day about AFAB people being hammered with conformity more than AMAB people?  You see this play out in LGBTQIAetc discourse as them seeking validation.  The asexual movement was like 95% AFAB (as far as I could tell) and felt the need to assert the legitimacy of belonging to an LGBTQIAetc identity.  This was roundly mocked on tumblr, leading to the asexual sadness I mentioned above.

Who else is AFAB and largely invisible’d by queer discourse?  And might find a desperate need for validation compelling them to the kind of discourse that some self-righteous and dominant personalities might regard as cringey or offensive?  Trans men, it’s your turn.

The idea of Transandrophobia was introduced.  If transmisogyny is a thing, could there be a special type of difficulty trans men are subject to, deserving of a name?  A lot of the hate they catch is just misogyny directed at them by people who won’t see their manhood, so a new term would be gratuitous right?

The main argument against it goes like “this is oppression olympics being played by someone who got jealous of our shiny TMA sticker.  Transandrophobia doesn’t exist for the same reason androphobia and misandry aren’t real.”  To that, I say if you think trans men don’t have it even worse than butch women, who have it pretty bad, you’re huffing your own ass vapors.  It could be reasonable to want to put a name to that, whatever the merits of the actual discourse that has taken place, or the term that has been proposed.

But to everyone involved in all of this, I say who benefits from trans men and trans women disliking each other?  Kiss and make up, motherfuckers.  Still, it’s entrenched.  If someone has become a partisan in that fight, it’s all over.  No small amount of tumblrinas have avoided the conflict -not become partisans- which is the only reason parts of tumblr are still habitable.  But this crap is all over the place.  Stanky.

As I mentioned on a previous post, I think AFAB children are more strongly abused and neglected into a sense that they need to conform to be accepted than AMAB children.  The ruinous ace and transandrophobia discourse are good examples of it.

This isn’t an all people in all situations thing.  Any boy raised by Ruby Franke had it worse than a girl raised by Jodie Foster, right?  But acknowledging the pattern matters.  If it doesn’t, then no kind of feminism matters.  Are girls systemically treated worse or not?  And few cisheterofascist parents would ever know their trans girl is a trans girl, knows their trans boy is a trans boy.  How they treat them comes from the brand forced upon them at birth.

Some trans women get bothered by this, which to me seems like feeling insecure in their womanhood.  Yes, you were never a boy, any supposed privileges of being a boy were oppression to you.  I’m not going to defend the idea that “male socialization” is a thing.  But there is a type of oppression AFAB people got that you did not.

Was it worse?  I don’t give a fuck if it was or not.  I told you what I think about oppression olympics.  But it was there, right?  Most people who were regarded as girls had been so roundly neglected or chastised for every little thing that by the age of three this shit is set in stone: X amount of their mental processing power, for the rest of their natural life, will be hijacked by concern for whether people like them, whether they are acceptable, whether they are valid or allowed to be.

You might have that too, tho I’d argue the flavor hits different.  Could it be worse?  Could be.  But none of it’s good.  And the kind that they got did flow from their assigned gender, which you did not share.

It’s hunting season for trans women on tumblr, and some amount of them are blaming trans men.  There’s a whole other dimension of this shit I’ve alluded to in other recent posts that I’m not going to get into here.  But the paranoia this engenders has led to the ever-useful firefox extension Shinigami Eyes becoming fairly less useful, as various trans men have been labeled as transphobes by those oppressed ladies.

Oppression olympics start with the understandable feeling that your oppression is both terrible and particular, and people around you should understand it – need to understand it.  But when any kind of comparison begins, the shit begins.  Don’t be fooled again.

Although I’d say the democrats are long overdue for a riot at their convention, so maybe stay fractious long enough to make that happen.  Somebody hit Fetterman with a folding chair.  I’ll say nice things about you.

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That’s it.  No more discourse for now.

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I Remember the Loving Vampyress

I don’t wanna bother anyone who doesn’t wanna be bothered, and the person I’m about to mention, when last seen, was on some “don’t bother me” business, but in this moment I cannot resist (besides they’re ungooglable so i’m probably in the clear).  Many years ago now, I was in a contentious comment section, when a young lady possibly having a manic episode got into frantic posting, which I matched.  But should I have?  Probably best to help calm people down when they get too hype.

Especially when it’s a person who makes themself too visible, gets embarrassed, and deletes their existence.  I think she changed her name like three times in the course of that conversation alone.  Somehow I ended up seeing a blog of her writing elsewhere, and it was erotic in nature – again to be disappeared, perhaps from a fit of embarrassment.  I don’t know how much of what I remember is vibes and how much was revelations, but I believe she was very poor – possibly in public housing.  I could say a bit more, but obviously she didn’t want to be known.

The Vampyress is immortal but exists at the outer limit of entropy, capturing the imaginations particularly of those who are haunted by mortality and living in the half-light of gothery.  The Vampyress drinks of the well of life until there is nothing left; in the case of her erotic fiction self-insert that wasn’t just blood.

I hope she’s alive and well in this World of Darkness, and the same for all my long-absent commenters – especially the few who I have reasonable cause to suspect are no longer alive.  Let that reasoning be wrong.  If you see this and know who you are, drop an anonymous comment, or too many comments by various names until you run away blushing and deleted once again.  I won’t forget you.

(EDIT TO ADD … don’t read too much into the lyrics of this song, just a feelin is all …)

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We Lost Gost

Seven years ago this day I went to a concert, some cool newish bands my husband was into.  They impressed.  The opening act was a lady-fronted local death rock outfit who put on a fun show.  The headliner was a famous international playboy of darksynth, some kind of miniature frenchman.  Somewhere in between was his fellow genre titan, James Lollar, known professionally as Gost.  About one month ago, he died young from undisclosed causes.  His family’s fundraiser is still up and hasn’t reached its goal, if you’re interested in paying respects.

I don’t know if David Lynch’s passing a year ago softened my man’s resolve but he’s been feeling the sadness for this one even more overtly.  I wasn’t as close to Lollar’s art and so am less affected, but as ever, this kind of thing sucks tremendous.  Causes undisclosed, but what’s hosing down musicians by the score these days?  Don’t do drugs, kids.  They’ve gotten demonstrably worse.  Maybe that wasn’t it, I won’t pry, but still.  Fucking knock it off!

There was something about this guy that was special.  There are a lot of musicians these days that are nothing but a face.  James Gost wore a skull mask or corpse paint at every concert and in publicity material.  Not a clown about it like other masked musicians, it felt like humbleness here.  At the show he was tucked in stage right, looking smol and serious, his presence overpowered by fog machines and a searing light display. Even the light display had humility of a kind; Perturbator turned the club into Close Encounters after that.

Gost belonged to a genre where most of the bands are one or two people, often just one.  This feels significant.  Yes, it’s easier to make a full sound sans bandmates when you’re in electronic music, but it also feels apiece with this moment in time where everyone is apathetic and retiring, too stressed and fragile and deadened to accomplish anything above and beyond.  People who have the gumption to make something happen have trouble finding anyone willing or able to help.  And making art of any kind – especially more ambitious things like albums – does require you to go farther, to put in extra work.  I usually say this of people who put in the work to make the world a better place through activism, but here I’ll say it of artists – long live the fighters.

Or maybe his isolation was the result of having more vision than others would allow to him.  He was in bands before, but stuck in the rhythm section, propping up somebody else’s ideas.  His innovation was only possible as a solo act.  Darksynth emerged from synthwave, which is more video game inspired, to fold in influences of John Carpenter soundtracks, glitch, and industrial.  The result is the heaviest music I’ve ever heard.  I remember when Ministry’s ΚΕΦΑΛΗΞΘ sounded heavy to me.  Might as well be the Tetris soundtrack these days.  It has a chilling spooky vibe, but more human somehow than related genres.  You can feel the haunted guy inside the glitched beat.

And maybe that heaviness why I haven’t gone in for darkwave as much as I could have.  I’m going soft, with my ’80s nostalgia bullshit.  But I recognize greatness.  At the concert I was too wimpy and unambitious to stand with my husband down on the floor, sitting my ass on the balcony.  I had been crushing my feet at malwart during the days back then, so excuse.  When Gost came on, when the show went from death rock to darksynth, the young people stood up and danced.  In Seattle that’s as amazing as the dead rising.  I remember a fat guy who had seemingly come alone – someone who could be disregarded in life, perhaps socially maladroit – and he was willing to brave the disapproval of others to rock out to his favorite music.  I salute you, hombre.

Salute as well to the artist that moved him.  James Lollar, the Gost.  Condolences to his wife and children, to other family, and to fans – including the one next to me in bed.  It just ain’t right.

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