Another Thought – Juneteenth

This is a bit of a lazylinking driveby post.  You’re going to see a lot of legitimate grousing from black people today about Juneteenth becoming a federal holiday and commercialized, how token gestures are useless.  But there were African Americans that pushed to make this happen – check out the article on NPR – and let’s not sour their celebration too much, here at least.  I doubt any of them are reading this, but I hope they’re having a very nice holiday today.

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ETA: And another thought!  I hadn’t read the article PZ linked to on the FtB Juneteenth hub post until just now.  Having read that, doesn’t the very fact we’re doing this seem like a violation of the fourth of their (yes, a bit jokey) Juneteenth Commandments?  Well, I started doing this, might as well ride this embarrassing rocket all the way down.

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Opening Thoughts – Juneteenth

Non-African-American-having FtB is throwing a Juneteenth celebration of sorts, as befits the year it became a federal holiday in a still quite white supremacist nation.  We’re tryin’, baby.  As people who care about human rights, dignity, and freedom, we have something to celebrate in the emancipation.  Thanks to the people who made that happen, by force of law, force of arms, and force of persuasion, we don’t have to live in a country where our fellow human beings are overtly enslaved.

Unfortunately, there was a loophole in that amendment, allowing the slavery of prison labor.  And worse, even if we closed that loophole, systems have evolved over time to take advantage of a desperate illegal immigrant workforce in slave conditions.  Some “illegal” workers are laboring in the open with a crude bare minimum of protection and pay, but many people who come to this country don’t have that much, and become literal slaves – shackled by the threat of state violence, deportation, etc.  It’s like the hellish bait-and-switch they use in Dubai, working immigrant muslims to death to build their gilded towers, except here it’s people from all over the world doing agricultural work, or house work, or – in the only type fuckers are ostensibly bothered by – sex work.

So while slavery persists on American soil, let Juneteenth be a rallying day for those who would fight it.  Later today I will post about the more celebratory side of things, but for this morning, some bitter coffee for the people.

And one more thought.  Not to undercut my comrades here, but I feel like this isn’t my day to celebrate?  Solemn remembrance, reflection, putting in work for the cause, OK.  But the barbecue?  The jocularity?  That belongs black folks, as it has, as it continues to be regardless of its now official seal.  This isn’t strictly a feeling about appropriation or some other SJW rhetoric.

Think of it this way – emancipation wasn’t the gift of a good thing, it was the removal of (one) bad thing.  Let’s say you spent your whole life under a rock that somebody else put there.  Eventually the guy who put the rock there comes along and helps you roll it aside.  He doesn’t help you stand up – you have to do that for yourself.  Once you are standing there, still crippled from a life on the ground, you might feel like celebrating.  But do you really feel like extending that celebration to the smug guy congratulating himself for eventually changing his mind about the rock?

There are thousands of African Americans with my last name.  I don’t have to look up a genealogy to know that means some of my ancestors were human filth that had to be murdered or forced at gunpoint to practice the most basic of human decency.  It means all those people are surely my brothers and sisters by a father who was one of the very worst types of rapist.

I’m not at all interested in the stories of white people like myself who can make this claim, whether it’s backed up by historical record or not.  Please don’t talk about your slaver ancestors in my comment section.  There’s probably another blog on this network more amenable to that, and that’s fine.  I only bring this up to say that my people did some dirt and profited from it, and I still profit from it every day, whether it’s apparent or not.  As long as that’s the case, I will let other people do the cake and cookies on June 19ths.

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I Hate Nature

Remember that mother’s day when I saw crows killing a baby pigeon and had to feel all creeped out about it?  Tonight was crow’s turn for pain.  Fuckin’ middle of the night going for a walk there’s a crow skipping along the ground looking all skinny.  There’s an interested cat nearby.  A great deal of a crow’s bulk is provided by its wings.  Was it skinny because it already had a wing torn off?  Or just lost a lot of feathers during some torment?  I kept walking, hurt in my heart.

I know that’s how it’s gotta be, but it would be nice to never ever see it.  For me, at least.  I know some of you are cool with doing the dirty work of making animals into food.  I respect that.  But woof.  Not for me.

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Not a Hot Start – Dreamposting

This morning is the first of my Fridays off since changing my work schedule* and I was hoping to come out the gate with a full head of steam, but my back was a bit funky and I was like, I’ll just rest a bit.  Then I had one of those dreams where nothing works right.  For reasons I don’t remember, I took a bus to Seattle, but then I still tried to do my job, which is on phones.  I had a phone that was basically a piece of paper.  I was having a sad annoying call then I remembered a phone the thickness of a piece of paper would have bad battery life, and it cut out.

But for some reason that just interrupted one call, then another dropped in.  Then I remembered I’m not supposed to be working because I have today off, but I couldn’t stop taking calls neatly without hanging up on another customer.  Then I went down through Pike Place Market, like I used to do in college.  It was hugely crowded, then I remembered it’s been less than fifteen days since my last COVID shot and I didn’t have a mask, so I started trying to bum one off of restaurant workers.

I got a mask and met my boyfriend.  We went into a coffee/art shop and there were skinny European neo-nazis in there.  We left, on the way out suggesting to the restaurant they call the cops.  In the next place we went, I saw some burly antifa types.  This is funny because IRL neo-nazis are more likely to be muscleheads and antifas more likely to be scrawny lil bros.  But I then remembered there were nazis next door and told the antifas.  They went next door and some kind of noisy rumpus began.

But on our way out, I saw some nazis chilling outside and was like, what the fuck did the antifas do?  Get distracted by a shiny object?  We kept leaving.

At some point my boyfriend went missing and I knew when I found him, he’d either be pretending to be one of the ghosts from Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse, or he would actually be one, a shadow melting into a wall and saying “help me.”  I found him behind a couch looking shadowy and threw a pillow at him to get him to stop melting.

He stood up and laughed it off like he wasn’t going to do that, but he was vibrating like a movie ghost.  I remembered he has epilepsy and wondered if it was relevant.  I don’t remember how the dream ended, but here I am.  Time to get to work!  As a creator…

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*to be strictly accurate, this is the first friday of the new schedule where i didn’t have another huge obstacle in the way.  hasn’t been going great.  still at it tho.

I Hate Fanfic

I tried googling the phrase “I hate fanfic” in hopes of finding somebody with a similar annoyance to one I have.  Sometimes it’s fun to see a hateful rant that echoes your prejudices.  But there were zero good results on the first page when I tried this.  The closest to the exact phrase and intent was from somebody that seemed to hate it because their own fic was not well received – that ain’t me, chief.

I don’t actually have time to get into depth about this right now, just wasting a precious minute due to the naggings of that imp of the perverse.  But I will likely elaborate if pressed, or if I’m feeling similarly irresponsible at some point later in the next few days.  I feel safe in making this declaration here because nobody in my writers group – which includes many ficcers – reads my blog.

Let this somehow rise through the google ranks like a phoenix and spark a conversation that doesn’t center either the demented opinions of ficcers, or the needlessly hateful opinions of people who are just legit misogynists or elitists.

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Stave it Off, One-Two-Three

If you got that reference congrats u r dork.  I just think of that song sometimes when I must hold an unproductive thought at bay.  Now is not the time for melancholy.  It’s my first Friday off since my change to a 4-day week and it’s time to be productive.  Productive!   I will array my demons for closer analysis.  It’s time…

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The Success of Qanon and Trumpism

There are a few articles around now about how laughable Qanon is.  It’s true, they’re the most absurd and easily mocked face of modern nazism.  And as atheists, seeing a new religion arise around a well-documented and incredibly obvious con man confirms our prejudices about religion as a whole.  Trump as messiah?  One wonders how much a twisted crapsack a historical Jeezy could have been and still ended up with that hagiography.

Trump showed the right wing of politicians across the entire planet how much they could achieve with bald-faced lies and appealing to straight-up white supremacy.  Qanon was a crucial component in the latter part of that project in a number of ways.  One, there is a limit to the bullshit the masses will accept, even if it’s dangerously high, and Qanon showed us the upper extent of that limit.  The majority of people who see the facts regarding Qanon will not accept it, now we know.  That gives the fascist bullshitters a neat metric to constrain their lies.

Two, Qanon has not reflected badly on Fox News, Breitbart, OANN, or any of the other people that helped create them.  It was an object demonstration in how the public consciousness is utter shit at connecting important related concepts, at holding the right people accountable for serious problems.  Now more than ever, Fucker Carlston knows he can have 100% swastika facial tattoo having nazis as audience members and nobody in the USA that matters will ever call him to account for it, or at least they will not be believed.

I’m not going to breathe any sighs of relief about this fascism crisis being near an end.  Not that I think any of my comrades are either.  They’re just taking the chuckles they can where they can.  But personally, not laughing right now.

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More Uninspired Disney Shit

Saw the new trailer for the Loki show on Disney’s streaming service.  If what passes for wit in that clip is the cream of the TV series, set your expectations real low.  Or if you don’t want to support the Mouseopoly, use it as a inspiration to not bother watching at all.  For more of that kind of reinforcement, see also the Marvel “Phase Four” trailer that was mostly emotional bits from the last 15 years of their movies, interspersed with straight-up propaganda-sounding lines about “being a part of something greater.”  It felt like a republican candidate TV spot and was manipulative in a way that just isn’t working on me anymore, quite specifically because of the way they set me up to give a shit about Space Shooters in episode 7 then landed like a shart in episode 9.

That new A24 movie looks tight though, hm?

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Another Anime Girl

U kno u want it. It’s the famous Flora dans le galaxie étincelante, of Distorsion céleste fame. Never heard of it? We’re writing books that are, in part, about anime that never existed. Both this and the last one were made in sharpie ink on poster paper, though the other one was sweetened in photoshop compared to this.


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The Privilege They Believe – Class Privilege

People hear the word privilege and assume it means what most of us have used it for over the previous hundred years – class privilege. Then they think, I’m not rich, and their brain shuts down. That’s fine, I’m not here to convince them. But I’d like to discuss class privilege for a minute because, like many shrieking status quo warrior jackoffs, I am lacking in class privilege – and it has genuinely caused me harm.

This is something we don’t discuss much in the USA compared to the UK, with its more formalized class distinctions. It has been said many times that we need more class awareness here and I’d say that’s true. Social justice discourse could use a little more focus on it, where it won’t derail another important issue. Indeed, a huge problem for black people in the USA is the intersection of race and class oppression. Not all black people are poor, but those that are? Intersectional problems multiply.

Because we have so little focus on class oppression, its effects are seldom laid out. That is why it’s taken me a very very long time to realize what that damage is in myself. First off, from about age ten onward this undefined despair interfered with my schooling. I reached some kind of developmental plateau at that age – maybe something to do with self awareness, or considering the future – which caused me to go from straight As to nearly straight Fs. I never graduated high school.

It was strange because I did have oodles of white, and male, and mental and physical health privilege making me feel like I’m some kind of cool genius, that I’d wake up one day and the world would recognize me and I’d get whatever I wanted. In Fight Club when Tyler Durden said we all thought we’d grow up to be rock stars or astronauts, many people found that unrelatable or absurd. Palahniuk wasn’t talking about you – he was talking about people like me.

I’d have that attitude at a conscious level, but also felt this hopelessness about escaping family strife and poverty, like it was unimaginable. So the weird grandiose expectation on one hand, despair on the other, gave me a kind of license to put off work, throw myself into escapism. I’d doodle and dream and play shoplifted RPGs all day, let school slide completely, because I felt like all I had to do is show my talent to the right person, the right moment, the right way, and opportunity would lift me out of the sewer. It was a little fiction I used to excuse myself from responsibility.

Those responsibilities included hygiene. Ever wonder why some poor people are stanky goblins? When home is a filthy mess where people alternate between sulking and screaming for most of your life, there’s a definite sense of why fucking bother. I was thoroughly disgusting for a pretty long time. Quarantine has me backsliding, unfortunately. Something to watch out for.

After school I spent my entire 20s in fast food and other chump jobs, never learned to drive, never had a car, never could afford a place of my own. I had a few sympathetic friends’ families that let me rent a basement or attic space for a few hundred a month. I was healing from the damage of poverty youth. I got into a scammy art school around thirty, racked up a student debt that makes the remaining FtB legal debt look like chump change, on the promise of getting a good-paying job in the video game or entertainment animation industries. Little did I know the amount of money those jobs pay rocketed into a black hole over the years and I was better off as a security guard by the time I graduated – still without enough money to dream of ever repaying what I owed.

How did I let myself get snowed by my alma mater when all I’d have to do to know the job promises were smoke and mirrors was to google some job listings? Because that combination of despair and grandiosity again. Of course there’s opportunities for me, I’m awesome, right? And bothering to do any work above the bare minimum in life? Too emotionally draining. I have dreams to dream. I probably sound like a huge asshole by now, haha. That is accurate enough.

All those years though, there was a much bigger aspect of my class damage I never noticed in myself. I felt like a criminal (years after I stopped doing crimes), like I don’t belong wherever the “good people” are. This KILLS me in job interviews. I fucking suuuuuuck at job interviews because in some weird way I don’t feel like I belong where the money is. I feel like a permanent member of the underclass, only allowed to have jobs on my feet, busting my hump.

What allowed me to realize this was that finally, at about the age of 43, I landed my first white collar job. It’s nothing fancy, but I work in an office (presently from home), I earn something close to the median income of my region, and I’m not falling to pieces from physical labor. But I came close to losing that opportunity, felt my face flush with stress, stuttered and flubbed for reasons I didn’t initially understand.

Now I get it. I never felt like I belonged there, in the office. I felt like I was going to get caught, get bounced at any moment, for any little thing. (If my employer was worse, I probably would have been.) I felt like I was trespassing because the building itself was too clean. Like I’m not fit to touch the hem of prosperity’s garment.

If you’ve been poor, how do you think that affected you? I’d really like to hear what people have to say about this, because I hear it so rarely. I’ll even take comments from regressive scumfuckers, if they are insightful and not full of poison. This is what you think “privilege” means, the kind of privilege you might believe exists. Talk about it.
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