Blue Wave Ain’t Gonna Happen

I’m calling it now with reasonable certainty. Lots of people would vote if they could, but they can’t, so they can’t help. Meanwhile, the roaring heyday AmeriKKKan fascism is enjoying at the moment? Very empowering. Tons of the wrong people are going to vote – including people who hadn’t even bothered to vote their fuhrer in. Baby nazis who stayed home during the last election because they felt hopeless to affect it until the upset? Or who couldn’t vote then but can now because they’re 18? This beer with kavanaugh thing. This is their time, my people.

Look to Brasil. It’s always rough but it is diving straight into neofascist hell right now. They’re fucked even worse than we are – and we are pretty damn fucked. Anyhow, look to places like Brasil, like Spain under Franco. Capitalist democracy has handed some of the most populace countries in our hemisphere to pure evil, and the only progress we’re going to make is by fighting every bloody inch, breaking laws, risking our lives.

We might have a few democrats flip a few seats, but it’s not going to be what they hope for, what we need. I’m not saying don’t vote. Vote, knowing you’re going to lose. What I’m saying is be emotionally prepared to suffer and fight every day and still lose everything, because that is what being a good person in a fascist state looks like.

Long live the fighters.
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Dookie Speculation

To further my reputation as the most eminent thinker on this blog collective, I humbly submit the following informal hypotheses. Content warning: feces, of course.

Random thoughts from last night. Old folks sometimes have terrible dookie stink. It’s kinda sickly sweet garbagey like a dumpster of rotting fruit. Unfortunate.

That’s me in just a few years, so I wonder. Why? And I came up with two possible answers, which could be tested by a scientist with the facilities and inclination. (Or maybe the answer is already known? Whatever, I finish my thoughts.)

The Fresh Trash Hypothesis: The aged digestive system cannot handle food as effectively, meaning the stool has more under-digested components. They smell stronger because they’re not as chemically burned up / denatured.

The Shitbarf Hypothesis: In honor of the prolific graffiti tagger of Seattle, Shitbarf… esquire? Anyhow, I think the gatekeeping of the digestive tract breaks down.

Fluids meant for the stomach end up in the esophagus or duodenum, those meant for the duodenum end up in the small intestine, etc. So basically, old folks could be passing some amount of fresh bile.

I am not googling the answer. Not curious enough yet. Maybe when I’m olda.

I just hope I never get like the person who stinkbombed the “Rapid Ride” bus when it first started in my town. For some reason, one of those busses ended up smelling hella rank, only becoming bearable several months later.

It smelled like one of those Europeans that used to eat mummies went on to become a mummy that was fed to a cruise ship on platters of norovirus shrimp, and the bus was used to ferry passengers to the hospital, with several dying en route.

Dookie. I don’t like it.

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Just Go Ahead Now

     

Some weeks ago, I was at work and the radio chanced to play “Two Princes” by Spin Doctors. I was in a silly mood and felt the kitsch, was amused by the thing as I went about my labors. Some time after that, I was at home, remembering the song and vaguely recalling the video. My judgment skewed by the afterglow of that moment, I looked it up on youtube.

At work I only heard a bit and at low volume. At home with headphones on, the band in front of me? Something else.

I didn’t last a minute. That song is pisschristing horribad. It is the Abyss, and when you gaze too long, it tips its hat and says “milady.” It shivered my fucking timbers, matey.

Since then, I occasionally have moments when I think about it. It’s tempting to view the song as emblematic of something terrible in the American character at the time.

Grunge was a thing, and it had lessons for the masses. People can’t subsist on music about dancing and fucking. There’s more to life than that, and sometimes it’s best expressed with unpleasant nonsense words and guitar feedback.

But some people took the wrong lessons from that, decided Seattle = cool, expensive coffee, big sweaters, shitty facial hair. Two Princes was the dawn of the Starbucks playlist.

That part of our culture is what I like to call NPR liberalism. It’s about being just progressive enough to feel good about yourself and refusing to look with any depth at the class war, racism, misogyny, and cisheterofascism underlying this whole shitshow.

NPR liberals aren’t always bad people. A lot of them are swell, just obnoxiously blind to important shit.

They give at the church but never look at what the church does with that money outside the congregation. No matter how many times you tell them, yes, your church really is exporting violent homophobia, they will forget that shit like a goldfish.

They’re the moms that misgender you constantly because they will never in their hearts acknowledge your identity. They’re contrite when caught, but will never change because their cutesy memories of how they saw you as a child? More important to them than your real mental and physical health as an adult.

They just can’t remember anything that isn’t somehow nice or cute or reassuring. The extent to which they can remember what the big bad republicans are up to is only the extent to which it can be put back in a box with a sassy soundbite, put on a mug, put on a sweater.

NPR liberals have faith in the “blue wave” and the forward trajectory of history. Just wait, you don’t have to be loud. Go with the flow, have fun.

Two Princes is like “Don’t Worry Be Happy” for white people, but eh, maybe Don’t Worry Be Happy was the Don’t Worry Be Happy for white people. I think Chuck D said something about that once.

So the song puts me in mind of that strain of thought in the USA, and of how prevalent it was in my high school, in media of the ’90s. The dualism of our country then was the liberal sense you should be nice to people, with the anti-PC-flavored chuckles from the bros on the other side. Dharma and Greg were walking hand in hand, apple pie, yellow ribbons and A-10 warthogs.

Because the NPR liberal is committed to making nice, they never offered any opposition to the advance of American fascism. The belly piercing girls and darwin fish boys from my school grew up to be the moms and dads telling you family is more important than politics when you get pissed at grandpa Bruce and baby Braden for chatting holocaust denialism at Thanksgiving.

It’s tempting to look at the dopey grin and scragglebeard on that dude, at the floppy flaps on his shitty hat, to hear the Walmart-friendly “alternative” hootenanny jam, and to see that as emblematic of the blind eye people turn to keep things nice, reassuring, simple, peaceful.

It’s tempting, but surely just overblown nonsense. Mental vomit in response to the overwhelming saccharine smell.

So if you want to call me baby, just go ahead now.

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Google is Evil and I Hate Them

Youtube recommendations. It’s bad enough the comment sections are eye-scorching shit pits. You can ignore that by not scrolling down. But due to the wide aspect ratio of most monitors, you will see the recommendations in the sidebar. And thanks to their fucking algorithms, if you watch almost anything it will recommend fascist propaganda. They’ve personally turned swaths of the youngest generations into a brigade of Hitler youth.

For my purposes, I just want ONE FUCKING THING from them. When I say I’m not interested in a channel, STOP FUCKING SHOWING ME THAT CHANNEL YOU GODDAMN FUCKHOLES. I’m not saying, “ooh, gosh, not interested at the mome, but maybe I’ll turn into a nazi in the next ten minutes, so feel free to show me that later.”

I’m saying nuke that shit. If I had the option to annihilate other people’s channels with a button, if I had a button that would force a nazi channel’s creator to be hauled out of their house, beaten and smothered in goose shit, I’d push that button too.

I want ONE basic courtesy out of the dominant video platform on the internet, run by a company that used to say “don’t be evil.” I want the ability to truly block literally genocidal literal fascists from my computer screen. If I had children, I’d want to shield them from the same, without having to install third party extensions.

Google, burn in hell you fucking shite.

-I should clarify, there’s a reason I don’t use browser extensions to block the sidebar altogether. If I didn’t, google would build a profile of me that says “anything goes,” which would gradually skew fascist no matter what I did. I have been able to tease the interface into giving me far fewer fascist videos than when I watched atheist shit, but some channels are just plagued.

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Cancel Your Netflix

I just cancelled Netflix. It’s a good time to do it. A) They don’t have anything good on. The recent seasons of their coolest shows were either disappointing or incoherent because they were trying to bump up the edge. B) They’re promoting a new original show that is an eating-disorder-triggering fatphobic pile of trash. It’s called “Insatiable” and that link goes to a response article by a fat activist.

Anyhow, if you care about any fat people or people of any size who have eating disorders, cancel your Netflix and list that as the reason why. I’ll be your best friend forever if you do. Automatic banning for anyone who drops health trolling or whatabouts in my comments. Fuck diet industry propaganda, and fuck body policing fascism in the form of conventional wisdom.
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I’m Hella OK

It occurs to me, in light of the comment on my latest bird article, some might imagine me depressed. Worry not, dear readers. I’m not. I only ever feel bad to the extent that it would be reasonable to feel bad in any given situation, and my situation is not as bad as many other blogadores y blogadoras on this internet. (Especially on The Orbit. Support The Orbit y’all.) I’ve got that depressive realism, but without the clinical depression, it’s just a pretentious arty flavor in my thought.

The world is rough and keeps getting rougher. And as a quiet cat in the corner with eyes open, you can see the fires burning with clarity. I didn’t call the exact date of the subprime mortgage collapse. But I was that impoverished minimum wage fucko on the bus, looking at ads for home ownership none of us could afford, wondering how long it would be before predatory lending on that scale had consequences.

It’s grim, but through it all I just don’t feel as bad as I could. Seeing people around that have it worse than I do, getting to know some of them personally, I know what mental health is. My mind heals well. I’m probably the poorest person on this network, but aside from that source of stress, I’m one of the most fortunate in the neurochemical department.

When I talk about some grim stuff, I don’t need reassurance. I’m hella OK. Just waxing lyrical.
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Thoughts on ABC Freeform’s “Cloak and Dagger”

ABC made a TV show off Marvel’s comic “Cloak & Dagger,” and shit it out onto their new streaming service called “Freeform.” The concept was and is problematic (black teen boy with powers of dark hungry void, white teen girl with magical powers of light), but the execution – even in the comic days – was pretty progressive, humanist, not shabby.

The show could be better, could be worse. The kids are alright. One thing sucked tremendous though: It ended in zombies. Really boring shitty nonsense zombies. Can we be done with zombies yet? I heard Walking Dead has flushed all its good will with fans straight down the terlet. Can that be done? Can everything zombie be done?

The worst thing though? ABC Freeform. The only things of any interest at all on there are Cloak & Dagger and re-runs of The Nanny. I kid, I kid, I mean, I could watch Paul Blart on there too, what am I complaining about? Everybody cancel your streaming services of choice and hit it up.
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