From the writing blog.
Moving
It feels like I’ve moved every year or two since 2012.
It’s been exhausting. Most of what I own is books– the books have moved with me every where I’ve gone. I don’t regret that– in my life books have always seemed more reliable than people. They provide emotional support and the stuff of humanity when I have been too isolated, vulnerable or frightened to interact with *real* humans. Books are kind.
Books are heavy, though.
I’m moving again.
I’m tired of living in the geographic dead space where the life I shared with my family used to be.
I’m tired of hiding where I live from them.
I’m tired of wondering if the neighbors are going to take exception to my existence again.
I’m tired of wondering if my mom was the one who sicced them on me.
I’m tired of wondering if my mom and her strategic gossip was the reason I lost all my clients, twice.
I’m tired of wondering if the jerk (co-worker) who harassed me at work (which incident the boss tried to make non-existent twice) is poisoning the ravenous-insecure fat front desk girls against me by flattering and flirting with them, and working them up against me.
This is important, because they’re the ones booking clients and making or *accidentally not* making confirmation calls and handling tips.
If I just only try to make friends with the girls at work, of course, this will be interpreted as flirting and flirting interpreted as some kind of sexy ultimate evil omen of doom that they can cluck about for weeks to make their shit boring lives seem exciting and important.
If I try to make friends with the boys, they, apparently, decide this means it’s open season to harass me.
And the girls militate against me as “competition”.
But the boys can flirt with them. Even creepy assholes. That’s totally cool.
And the gay dude throws me under the bus over his idiot straight boy crush on the little sociopath who flirts with him and then, as soon as he’s out of hearing, tries to turn the others against him.
I sort of hate people right now. All people. I know it’s not fair, but I’m so tired.
I laugh hysterically, deep down inside, when I overhear my boss wondering why he can’t keep therapists working at his clinic.
Books are good friends.
Books are lighter to carry than the weight of human indifference.
I’m moving again next week. Not between apartments.
Between cities. Between regions.
I will miss this area. I will miss the trees and the quiet water and the humble tangled groves and the wide sunrises and sunsets on ploughed fields. I will miss the past sewn into every angle of the ground and weather like blue stitches in a childhood quilt.
I will miss my home.
I won’t miss living here.
Wish me luck.
Not been up to much.
But I’ve been painting.
Here are some of the projects I’ve been working on.
For years now, I’ve some times had the suffocating sensation of being trapped in a thick glass bubble.
Depression is fun, yeah?
The sea of evil hands.
A symbolist Apocalypse. Still in Progress.
Isn’t it always though?
That’s what’s been cooking. I may have a show at the beginning of May.
Keep it real, folks.
Metropolis
i am fucking
empty
.
i wish i were a Satanist princess
dancing beyond the masses
like Robot Maria of the Black and White City
.
Except this
time
It’s the other way round
The Flesh-
Blood- and Soul-
trip
ple god
dess
-First Mother-
winding finally
together
into flesh and blood and soul
fluid darkness arcing
Body
.
Now-
mechanistic mothers of ideal
shuffle
wide rolling eyes detached from smiles
in circle kitchens
herding
swarms of children into the lines of graves
as
the Dollar-Junta overlords implore
in
apparent preparation
for…
.
Mother of Humans
Monster
in their eyes or not
is and lives
her
Shape
with every drop of her moving
monstrous
Real
And drops the mic.
.
Ave
Maria.
Maria
Futura.
I must be a Satanist now.
if death is pushing daisies, desire is pulling off their petals.
I don’t think she’ll want me.
when she finds
my goddamn skull is a cave of Aladdin horrors and she
shuts
although she brightened while we met and left.
It was hard
when I was trapped in
a world I couldn’t fit.
Knowing I am the trap
I can’t get out of
is worse.
Open.
Directive.
crumble smooth plaster. Unveil
the tomb. breath into bones.
Resurrectionist anarchy bleaches the land into color.
Don’t leave one single dead
soul living
dead
catch-fight. fly.
The more one acts like all opponents are harmless or misguided, the more scope abusers have to gain ground while you’re not looking.
“peace in our time”
The more one acts as if their victory is inevitable, or that conceding things will make them treat you well, the more ground one cedes before things become so unbearable that one must turn and fight, whether victory is possible or not. Or just give up and die.
“arbeit macht frei”
The more one hides- emotionally or literally- out of fear of an enemy who threatens or out of fear of fighting, the more horrible the fight is going to be and the more horrifying the enemy is going to be. And the more horrifying you are going to become in the process.
If you want to fight as morally as possible, fight as soon as possible.
“Now I have become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Humans are emotional machines with an attached function of intellect. There are certain circumstances in which the function of intellect will engage. There are many more in which it will not. Emotions utilize the intellect- they rarely are guided by it.
The emotional drives are more powerful than self interest. Watch who engages people’s emotions-and how- and to what end. And watch how, by whom, and by what your emotions are engaged.
“All things are known because we want to believe in them.”
Nothing known or believed or wished changes what is.
Fight in the world as it is. Fight for the world as you wish it to be.
There is no destination except the one you yourself make.
Save them- Save yourself
This year. Could it be rewound? Be kind, please rewind?
A friend has died. Last I heard they didn’t know why or how. He was in good health.
He was brilliant. When he was optimistic he was one of the most optimistic people I knew.
I used to.
I used to, if I had a really good idea, write it to him. Cause I thought that if I didn’t make it he would. We had talked about the things that are now, about the tree and the serpent, the winter and the fire.
This can’t be real.
This is real.
god. what is this?
I am the one to do the things now. I have remember- myself. I don’t have the luxury of failing. There is no one else.
oh god. this is not how it was supposed to be.
Strange and Marvelous Shiftings of Blame. Part the Second.
I wish my dad’s death had changed the effort he put into his relationships. With me or, really, any of his children.
Picking fights with him or my mom worked. Kind of. For me.
But you know. Before I started in on that- or if I didn’t fight, it wasn’t like he bothered.
And it’s not like any of the others are gay, so it wasn’t even that.
Strange and Marvelous Shiftings of Blame. Part the First.
Content note: Sarcasm and lack of reverence for sentence structure.
I saw a film. That’s what I did. A week or two ago. Went and saw Dr. Strange.
It was such a cool movie. I have been waiting for them to do Dr. Strange- not as long as I have been waiting for the Prometheus sequel, But at least all summer. All the magic and stuff. Inception style curdled architecture. Mordu as Dr. Strange’s black best friend. Wong being the librarian instead of Dr. Strange’s magic personal servant.
The inspiring theme about accepting failure and never giving up. I really liked that. I really want to write a post about that.
It made me feel happy feelings for a while.
Wait. Back up.
Ooooohmygosh. Marvel reduced the black hero to being merely the white hero’s black best friend.
Again.
Mordu is given no back story. Even in the case of Dr. Strange’s Asian Mentor who was magically a European Woman who was magically deprived of all Feminine Markers Like Hair so that a White Man could almost learn to take her seriously without throwing a hissyfit-
well
the story(tellers) decided she still had to die for it. for correcting a White Man- and being right
-even in her case they explain the lack of backstory by saying ‘she doesn’t talk about her past’. She hasn’t told the other characters, so the Audience(protagonist) can’t find out either. OoooOOOoooo. Mysterious!
She probably doesn’t talk about her past because she used to be an Asian Dude and she knows what racist transphobes y’all are!
Mordu, they don’t even make a mystery. Why is he doing the things he does? ‘He had a hard life’
What does that have to do with it?
Doesn’t matter. Case closed.
He’s told the other characters. He’s talked about it. They’ve been round and round, trying to work through the pain of his past, channeling it into constructive forward facing strategies.
It’s just that the suffering of a black man isn’t important enough for the white (protagonist)Audience to even suffer through a one or two sentence description of it.
He has fulfilled his narrative function in the White Hero’s Journey. No vestige of humanity is required. Dr. Strange moves from ignorance to enlightenment and from whimpiness to badassery -by means of Mordu’s instruction- without ever having to become conscious of -say- the white cop who shot Mordu’s dad over a broken taillight.
Or whatever.
‘Cause if it wasn’t something White protagonist(audience) was implicated in-
Then they could say what had happened. Couldn’t they.
If it were Thanos’ fault somehow. Or maybe an Asian Dude’s fault. Then it would be okay to say ‘Thanos killed his father’ ‘He follows the rules so strictly because he was cheated- an Asian Dude blamed him for a thing he didn’t do.’
It wasn’t The Big Bad who caused the pain in Mordu’s life. Because then we(the audience) could bear to hear WHO caused that pain.
And- because I can see the words forming in your brains because of how magical I am- if they bring Mordu back, in a later film or WHATever-
They will still not make him a full fledged character. I guarantee it and bet you a thin dime. They aren’t withholding this information to make it more special when they finally tell us later. They are
never
going to tell us Mordu’s backstory.
Well. For all that. It still could have been worse.
They could have had three black best friends, like they did in Civil War.
AND THEN.
And then.
And then the black best friend turned out to be EVIL.
His evilness consisted of a plan to run around the whole world- and STEAL the power of OTHER PEOPLE.
Which is LITERALLY
The story of EUROPEANS and the rest of the HUMAN RACE.
Running around the whole world, stealing the labor and the ideas and the bodies of other humans. Trying to scrub their souls into the same state ours were in, so that WE would be more likely to attain salvation for having made the attempt.
Europeans literally betrayed the humanity of All Humans Everywhere, by treating other(any) humans- and in practice particularly Africans- as a sale-able commodity. Subsuming the power of an enslaved person to the (innately criminal)enslaver who may then by means of the enslavement use that power as their own.
And here we are.
Comforting ourselves during hard times with a smarmy story about how an African betrays a European by committing THAT crime and gosh isn’t that evil of HIM.
And how the European has such endless courage despite being killed over and over. Yeeaaaaaaah, that’s totally who gets killed over and over these days.
No.
No.
I am at the edge of my life’s energy here, magical or otherwise. I would love to sink into this tale of courage and death and adventure and meaning and let it lift me on wings like eagles.
And be comforted.
But I am not comforted by this story.
If Marvel meant that- that main theme- that you have to be willing to accept your failures?
Why are They not owning up to Our own goddamn crimes, America? Our- failures?
Embedded in the structure of the story is a refusal to do what the story seems to be saying. They don’t seem to mean what they’re saying.
And if the audience(We) was(were) able to accept what the story is telling us(our failure), wouldn’t (They)Marvel HAVE said it and meant it?
Who has failed?
There is something rotten in Denmark.
tired beyond reason
That picture doesn’t really have to do with anything. I feel.
So, all this has been difficult to deal with.
I’ve been drinking a little more than usual, which is a thing, I think, that is bad.
Drawing is better than drinking. Dancing is better than pacing. Writing is better than laying on the floor- sober- staring at the base of a book shelf for hours at a time.
So I’m going to try to write more.
I’ve been too tired to do anything lengthy or linear. Yeah! Who needed that shit?!
Thinking of all the things boiling under the surface of your life. All the things that could go wrong. Trying to calculate how many of them are happening and how soon they could happen and what you can do to fend them off and where you could go if you can’t.
When it’s too much effort to lift your foot from the car to the ground after you’ve opened the car door. But you know it looks funny that you’re just sitting there with the door open.
I don’t feel like the sort of person who survives. Times like this. Things like this.
I found my new favorite quote today.
I have never once in my life consciously and deliberately listened to a song by Madonna. Lady Gaga, Yes. Madonna, No. I don’t know why. I’m sure they must have drifted past me, in stores or lobbies or wherever.
“People say that I’m so controversial, but I think the most controversial thing I have ever done is to stick around” – Madonna
But who did Madonna turn to, when Madonna was depressed?!?
Among others- Maya Angelou.
And that sums up social progress in America.
*** *** ***
Still I Rise
Maya Angelou
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.
Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.
Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.
Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops.
Weakened by my soulful cries.
Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
‘Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own back yard.
You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.
Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?
Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.
House of Water 