Dreamposting – Institutional Violence

Content Warnings:  Unreality, Starvation, Violence, Torture, Animal Suffering, Animal Death.

I have access to sensitive information at work and Saturday morning I had a dream that I went to prison for accidentally disclosing some of that information improperly.  This prison wasn’t a very secure structure but it was a given that if we tried to escape we’d die, so we didn’t.  I didn’t know anybody and everything felt very dangerous.

They gave us food that was amazingly vile.  There were hard boiled eggs made from some kind of reconstituted matter, the whites breaking up into irregular chunks, the yolks green and slimy – possibly rotten.  The bread was basically cardboard with some tiny amount of food like substance in the press to make it easier to swallow.

I couldn’t eat the food for two days and began starving to death, which is silly because how does two days pass in a dream and also that’s not long enough to starve to death.  I expressed my suffering and a prison guard attended to me.

She led me outside.  For some reason she forgot that my problem was hunger and led me to a highway underpass where feral cats lived.  She wanted to give me a cat for companionship and dug out a large but bony cat, long-haired grey tabby and dirty.  The cat was amenable but I thought it would for sure be hurt or killed in the prison, or even by the guard that was with me.  She was brutish and seemed to bristle with barely restrained violence, even with words of kindness in her mouth.

I declined the cat and she started picking up others from the same stretch of dirty highway grass.  I knew she was going to hurt them and discouraged her with each in turn.  I knew she wasn’t going to leave until she had killed one of the kittens.  At last she came to a kitten that had been born conjoined at the head to a dead twin.  I nodded consent and she used some kind of implement to split the heads apart.  I woke shortly after.

 

Sunday (today) I had a much better dream.  I was working in a generic open office space, no cubes.  Funny it’s never my actual office but then, I’ve been telecommuting half the years I’ve worked there.

I overheard somebody dealing with a supervisor, where they needed to get something signed off by a specific person.  That person was unconscious or incapacitated, but still sitting at a desk there.  The supervisor cheesed the letter of the policy by holding a pen in the unconscious guy’s hand and writing his signature with it.

I grew suspicious.  Somehow I figured out that sus sup was actually a Russian spy, along with one accomplice.  They had a small external hard drive they could use to defraud millions of americans and we had to get it back.  I yelled for help and everyone in the office scrambled to catch the spies or at least get the hard drive back.  Or so I thought.  They were acting like dream people, where you ask them to do one thing and they can’t comprehend it or manifest the agency to do it.

Frustrated, I took off in pursuit.  The supervisor spy’s accomplice got away, but I ended up in a tense upstairs downstairs elevators and parking garages pursuit with her.  By that point in the dream I was a woman, I think, so it’s not too weird I got into a big fist fight with her.  She was a skinny little blonde lady over thirty, TV actor energy, but she could rumble in tha jungle.

The whole time we were having some kind of philosophical debate about how it’s wrong to do crimes, with moments of “if only you knew the power of the dark side.”  It was perversely romantic.  By the time the alarm woke me up, I was feeling some affection for my foe.  Enemies to lovers trope, haha.  I like action dreams.
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Got No Memes

I want to do something for International Down With Cis Day, but ideas fail me.  Every year since I started at FtB has gotten materially worse for trans rights and the well-being and safety of trans lives.  I hold the shitbird governor of Texas as especially emblematic of the whole situation – blatantly using open bigotry to score political points, bible bashing while using rhetoric generously provided by terfs, pushing for the worst anti-LGBT policies this side of China or Iran.

So I think, meme his ass.  Political cartoon like this was 1922.  But nothing comes to mind except depictions of him on the receiving end of terrible violence – you know, madame guillotine putting in an appearance, somebody setting him on fire and kicking him off a cliff, etc.  Not funny, not a good look.

Hm…

https://www.google.com/search?q=respect+existence+or+expect+resistance+trans

Not bad, but still feels wildly inadequate to the struggle right now.  We’ll see what we’ll see.

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Freedom So Dear

Americans know what’s best for themselves.  I don’t know why I have
Particularly contrary epiphanies around this time of year with such
Regularity, but bear with me yet again.  All this time I’d been thinking
I was among the wise ones, getting vaccines, using a mask, all that
Loser kinda shit.  But who was I to stand in the way of nature, and to
Frustrate God’s designs?  We’ve been proven wrong by this plague
Of COVID-19.  Nobody predicted the disease would be able to persist
Over the long term like this, nobody had any wisdom that could have
Left us COVID free.  This was always going to be the outcome and
Satan sez protecting yourself, your country, and your loved ones
— should always be optional.  We can’t do any better than
—— nature and should live like beasts.  Beasts 4 Jesus.
——— Amen.
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I Stopped Reading FtB

Nobody in my immediate life is affected in any way by abortion bans.  We don’t have the equipment for pregnancy or it doesn’t work – not a functional uterus in sight.  And yet somehow reading about the “kill the doctors and the patients” anti-abortion bill from Texas was the final straw for me being able to follow news.  I just can’t handle it anymore.  The most cogent response I have to that is bargling death threats.

“What can men do against such reckless hate?” asked King Theo in nerdwad movie.  To the people capable of engaging with these fights, I say “Long live the fighters” (from different nerdwad movie).  Good job, people.  You’ll always have my votes and other support as possible.  Right now, I can’t handle reading about that or anything else wrong with the world.  It’s gotten too stressful again.

I don’t follow political tumblrs though I catch dribs and drabs of politics on there.  On FtB there’s always a blog on top of the newest fuckshit, and as long as I have a sidebar of “Recent Articles on FtB” I’m going to compulsively read all of them until blood shoots out of my ears.  I blocked that element in my browser, and I likewise I left the FtB discord for the same reason.

That also means I’m missing any non-stressful news or cheeky posts.  If anyone sees anything fun elsewhere on FtB don’t link me to it, but give me the short version in the comments here, if you’ve got a moment.  I don’t want to look directly at the articles and see the titles of the “Previous” and “Next” ones.  And thanks.

As for my own posts, I’ll continue the little random things I’ve been doing, though without news input, it will be less topical.  Also less despairing and angry!  So that’s something to look forward to.

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Stars

I titled this post “stars” because I am transforming into Mr. RE Nemesis.  That’s one for the #gamerz in the audients.

But seriously, there’s a lot of talent out there in the world that goes unnoticed by the mainstream.  A couple of rock ladies from the 90s got together with an unknown weirdo for a little band, did a few tracks, like ten years ago.  Metal bros didn’t like it.  I can’t listen to it much because I’ll get it stuck in my head, but the metal bros are wrong.  They just don’t know from fun.

So who are the stars?  The ol’ rock gals do good lo fi cronchy music, but that singer is who I’m thinking of the most.  She’s spectacular.  She’s got a funny presence and it’s on purpose, plus she has the powerful clear and brilliant voice.  Why was this the closest she ever came to fame before disappearing?  I’ll hide the video under the fold for gobs of fake blood and The Shining references.

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Hey Conservatives

Lately you’ve been trying to kill people a little harder than usual – kill people who get abortions, drive trans people to suicide, killing the old and the infirm with covid, torturing refugees and stealing and raping their children, legalize killing protestors – as long as it isn’t your own nazi buddies…  Anyway, I’m just thinking, anyone who is so horny on killing should absolutely be horny on being killed.  If you push this stuff but don’t want to be murdered, you’re being hypocrites.  I don’t even need this to be an even split.  Let’s say for every five oppressed people you kill, I wanna see one of your figureheads take their face apart on national television with their weapon of choice.  Get on it, motherfuckers, or I don’t know, stop being such homicidal fascists for TEN FUCKING MINUTES PLEASE.

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Hard Time Writing Floor Blues

I’ve been trying to be a writer for several years now, ever since my first big success with a first draft in NaNoWriMo 2013.  Not being a writer in the sense of seeking publication, because I don’t need that nod of approval from a corrupt doddering industry that will require me to bow and scrape and schmooze, to have a fucking twitter account.  No, I’m aiming to have some works edited to a level I feel at least worthy of self publication.

Self publication is a real thing now, not just the scam of vanity presses filling sad boomers’ garages with boxes of unsellable novels.  It’s not like that, but it is still exactly as ridiculous as you’d expect it to be, the field glutted with pure trash, editorial standards basically nonexistent.  But there are people trying to do good stuff and I’m going to be one of them.  Hey, look at our own Mr. Bolingbrook Brinkman, actually taking the time to edit his own masterpiece.

Right now I’m working on a story that, last fall, I was having big delusions of grandeur about.  It was a hot idea for the moment, and I was catching insomnia from imaginary interviews with Rachel Maddow.  But reality had a lot of meathooks along the way and I got real disinterested in the project, just too depressed to write.  And as I looked at it today for the first time in a month, I realize this is a “novelette” at best – finished, it will be 15,000 words if I’m lucky.

Nonetheless, I’ve decided I’m committed to getting this thing done ASAP.  I wasn’t feeling that before, so I didn’t share this, but hey, maybe putting this out here will push me to get it done.  Enjoy the rough draft of the cover, and imagine what literary delights it will hold in store for you…

 

The Vaccine Scene

 

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Got Antisocial PD?

I was thinking about different kinds of people I’ve known, or known of, and the things they got going on.  In their heads.  Which made me think about my sister, who got the formal diagnosis of Antisocial Personality Disorder – the condition informally known as sociopathy.  If you’ve gotten to know somebody well who has that diagnosis, it might still be easy to think of them as soulless, hollow, robotic.  My sister can look sad, more often look mad, say she wants this or that out of life, but pathologically she returns to the same behavior pattern she’s been doing since younger than age four – allying with one party to emotionally torment another.  She easily rewrites her own history and seems able to genuinely believe the new story.

The condition has a grip there.  She can’t seem to do anything that contravenes it.  Abusing people is, for her, like breathing.  It is, metaphorically, autonomic.  (i’m fucken pretentious tonight)  But who is she, outside of that?  Does she have something like a heart?  Does she have feelings?  I haven’t seen her in more than twenty years but I bet I know her better than anyone she’s met since, and I don’t really know the answer for that with certainty.  But I feel like it’s Yes?

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