A Moment of Bothsiderism

The gnu-flavored atheist movement was founded in part by people who favored military adventurism against muslim-majority countries, chiefly Christopher Hitchens.  That movement quickly morphed into a broad liberalism which appealed to less bloodthirsty people like you and I.  That was revealed to be paper thin cover for a reactionary mindset during Elevatorgate, which is why FtB is so much smaller than SciBlogs had been before the schism.

Elevatorgate’s queen was Abby ERV, who basically abandoned pro-vax activism in favor of a 24-7 misogyny campaign.  Together with Gamergate and the MRA and incel movements, these were the foundational kernel of the neo-nazism that has taken over the USA.  If you meet a rethuglican bro under fifty, he probably spent some time in one or more of these online communities, or their descendants.

If we take that piece of shit ERV as being an icon of atheo-skepticism who contributed to fascism, what of her opposite number in the anti-vax movement, Jenny McCarthy?  Anti-vaxxing (and medical woo in general) used to be strongly associated with liberals, with left of center people.  When conservatives embraced anti-vaxxing, those people swung hard.  I’ve had the misfortune of talking to some of them.  Maybe they have a left belief or two among the gallery of monsters in their skulls, but they are ardent supporters of shitler, and many are Qanon as well.  Both pro- and anti-vaxxing contributed to fascism.

So here’s my moment of bothsiderism.  Who contributed more to our present political ruination, gnu atheists or antivaxxers?  Abby ERV or Jenny McCarthy?  Even tho the actor was much more famous, I honestly do not know the answer to this question.  Both movements had some amount of access to the halls of power via lobbyists or cultural prestige.

In composing this post, I found myself reflecting on the strange political moments and movements that added up to Nazi USA.  That broad tent is wild as hell.  It’s so much easier to take the world apart than to make it better.  The locust swarms flow into and out of each other, devouring hope and love.

I do not fault anyone for feeling doomed and destroyed, but I still have hope for all of you, that you keep it together, that you enjoy the things you can, and you don’t feel too overwhelmed by the overwhelming circumstances.  We’ve got each other and we’re still alive, baby.

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I Said No Motherfvcking Backsies

The US government told people it would give them a thing, then it said psych!  jk lol.  OK, this has happened many times, but the one I’m thinking of most recently is student loan forgiveness.  This is backsies, and I say, no motherfucking backsies.  Now some might say that about us loser ass chumps who didn’t caveat our emptors before agreeing to the loans in the first place, but no, we signed those agreements based on the fabulous careers the education was supposed to provide us.  That shit ain’t real, therefore the education was never worth the asking price.  It was, as so many things in the United Snakes are, fraud.

So when we were told forgiveness was on the horizon, just do this and that, pay what you can in the meantime, we’ll work this out, and then… hard no.  Because fuck us for being poor, that’s why.  cool, cool, cool.  I’m just gonna be over in the corner sharpening this big piece of metal to hang in that wooden frame over there, hang it on a string.  It’s modern art, don’t worry about it.  After all, I have a bachelor’s degree in fine art.  You told me it was worth a lifetime of debt, so it must be legit.

Supposedly, the type of forgiveness I’m in line for was not one that has been kiboshed.  It was part of a court ordered thing, the government telling a slew of sheisty business schools to eat shit.  So perhaps it will come to pass.  Perhaps not.  Perhaps they’ll slap the irons on me when debtor’s prisons return in force.

The way federal employee pensions are calculated includes an average of your highest three years of earnings, and at some point the Big Beautiful Bullshit included a change in that math that would result in federal employees getting less money when they retire.  You’re promised one thing, you pay in, you get arbitrarily told psych, jk lol, no.  This is backsies.

Poor children dying of easily prevented causes was making states look bad, and they got a lil federal money to reduce the body count thru a program you may have heard of called Medicaid.  Thanks says the state, collecting funds to save poor people’s lives.  Psych jk lol, no.  They can eat shit and die now.  Backsies.

Anyway, don’t tell me you’ve got something for me and then take it away.  No motherfucking backsies.  Thanks.

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Selection Selection

You can still join the RP by comment, open for two more players.  Catch up from the beginning here, just look at the most recent post, or whatever.

we know natural selection and sexual selection.  it’s pretty clear complex species have a kind of sociological selection, even if it isn’t the darwinism some would imagine.  what other kinds of selection could be happening?  all that’s needed for selection is a variable thing and another variable thing that filters the variety of the first.  what if there’s a kind of selection we haven’t identified yet that drives the cycle of mass extinctions?  people point to certain astronomical and geographical cycles but i’m thinking something more abstract.  i once wondered why diseases hurt and kill, when they could proliferate more if they did not do those things.  maybe what selects for them to cause harm is something we haven’t thought of yet (tho there were other explanations from commenters which seem more likely).

might be that sociological selection is understudied.  i could be using the wrong term and i don’t know the literature, don’t even know for sure that sociology is the field in which study would happen.  the way unregulated capitalism guts itself and ruins the world is actively selected for in some way.  superficially you can look at specific actions like the repeal of glass-steagall, but it’s part of a larger phenomenon which is out of control and strangling democracy.  i guess that one would be studied by radical economists, even tho it shouldn’t be radical because it’s blue-sky obvious from outside the schools that spawn alan greenspan clones.

i dimly recall some scientists believing that sexual selection was just one aspect of fitness selection and didn’t deserve equal footing.  people fond of the fascist version of natural selection would apply it very broadly, but i’m sure there are non-nazi justifications for doing so.  then again, that could just be humans trying to cram the natural world into neat little boxes for ease of understanding, when complexity and chaos are the true way of things.  If sexual selection is just natural selection junior, then natural selection (as fitness to the environment changing rates of mutant gene expression in populations) could itself be a concept nested within a larger framework, and in company with myriad categories of related phenomena.

i’m gonna start with the types of fitness i’ve discussed so far and list any others i can imagine off the top of my head.  feel free to add more in comments, or whatever you please.

type of selection — variable A — variable B / the filter
natural selection — mutation — environmental fitness
sexual selection — costly displays — weird fetishes
sociological selection — cultural behavior — success of the culture
invisible hand shit — supply — demand (lol fake)
political corruption — personal ethics — lobbyist money
sexy water droplet on laura dern’s wrist — goin different directions — chaos

i never did get at what i was feeling, something bigger… but that’s all i got for now.  waking up for work in six hours…

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When the Shit Goes Down

Said Cypress Hill, when the shit goes down, you better be ready.  Today is that big No Kings biz, which shitler has promised to respond to with brute force, while he’s doing Kim Jong Il cosplay in a monument to Rome built by slaves.  Meanwhile, Israel has expressed its desire to turn the whole middle east into a smoking puddle of blood, Pakistan and India are still nuclear powers skirmishing as well, and Russia is still trying to turn Ukraine into Russia Junior with more mutilated human remains inside.

If you’re in a directly impacted part of the world, my condolences.  That feels like the emptiest of gestures.  I can’t throw away my life to save yours, and that feels like the only gesture that would have any meaning, when you’re looking at people whose lives have been chucked in the meatgrinder of political greed and bloodlust.  May all the responsible world leaders magically develop consciences tomorrow and die from the agony of guilt.

For the rest of us, we’re all weighing the risks coming our ways, tho they pale in comparison to yours, and thinking of what we will do, what we can do.  Within that, it’s important to keep a sense of perspective.  For much of the world, life goes on, and we’re obliged to our families and friends, to those who depend on us, to keep going on as well.  To those who can fight, long live the fighters.  To the rest of us?

Try to remember you’re still shopping for groceries, paying your bills, going to work, feeding your pets, watering your plants.  Stay with us.  Don’t give up.  For 99.9% of you, the shit is not imminent.  Your world will still be there next week, regardless of what happens now.  Much love.  See you around!

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Life List: Grey Goose

One time around a green lake I saw a grey goose.  Green Lake is a good-sized puddle somewhere in all that stuff north of Lake Union, not super far from Woodland Park Zoo.  It’s kinda touristy, which is funny because there’s not much going on there.  Just park.  Trails.  Goose shit.

I was there to visit a veterinarian near by.  I do not remember why I ended up at the lake a couple of times back then.  I had a ride; you’d think I’d just get in the car and go.  But there I was.  On the lake itself, there were the usual coots and mallards and canada geese.  Cackling geese?  I didn’t know back then.  No small amount of waterfowl also patrolled the grass around the lake, keeping it fertilized.  And in that grass, I found a small flock of grey geese that I did not recognize.

Small flock. Was it only two birds?  A few more?  Memory is fuzzy, but they were at least as big as canada geese, and resting – maybe even sleeping.  I got real close.  As I recall, they looked like canada geese that forgot to have any black on them.  The grey ran up onto the neck and head, the beak was orange.  There was some kind of white near the tail?

Based on the birds found with any regularity here, 98% chance they were greater white-fronted geese.  Which is normally high enough odds I’d just title the post accordingly, but I wanted the chance to call the post “grey goose,” after the vodka.

I don’t drink vodka, but I have intentionally put it in my mouth before, for dental reasons.  Also hydrogen peroxide, for the same reason – kill bacteria, kill pain, until the dentist can sort something out.  If you have dental pain and no opiates, it’s pretty good for that.  Doesn’t last long, but keep swiggin’, and if you’re a teetotaler like me, spittin’.  While this vodka wasn’t “the good stuff,” how different can it be?  And to me, it really was a similar experience to swigging with hydrogen peroxide – foamy astringence, taste barely different from water, but with bizarre chemical aspects.

If you’re an alcoholic-ass drunky like James Bondage, you come to like the sensory experience of consuming booze, right?  My drunkest friend was a box wine boy instead of a liquor man, so maybe not.  But grey goose always makes me think of this article I once read, on cool reckless youths in Seattle’s International District.  Asian street racers, living 3 fast 3 furiously.

There’s an image in the story (if i’m remembering this right) of a heavy-set young dude with a shaved head, wiping sweat with a hand towel and saying something like, “The goose straight had me.”  This was a reference to my titular vodka drink.  Careful how hard you party, goose man.  Especially since your other hobby is driving.

Street racers.  I calls ’em racey boys.  They became much more of a thing in recent years.  Since covid mostly, but even before that, there was a huge uptick in children stealing cars for joyriding around here.  In my last apartment complex, I heard some young child had hotwired a car and just drove it around the parking lot demolition derby style, fucking up people’s cars.

I attribute this in part to the Franchise & Furious, who so convinced people of the carefree fun of driving too fast that one of the stars bought the glamer and bought the big one.  Goodbye Paul Walker, but honestly, it’s what you deserve for doing a hundred in a forty zone, fuck’s sake.

They obviously don’t care about other people’s lives, but primarily they do not care about their own.  It may seem silly to call this a consequence of environmental and political despair, but it absofuckinlutely is.  I hear kids say that kind of shit sometimes, online.  They have no hope.  Good job, crapitalism.

So.  While I hope the street racers take themselves out in a ball of twisted metal before they take any innocent bystanders down with them, I can’t hate them too much.  Tiny modicum or respect and sympathy even.  I pour one out for you, racey boys.  Or at least spit one out, next time I have a toothache.

Back to Green Lake, on one of these goosey occasions.  I had to use the bathroom, and walked in to see a naked dude standing there, talking russki to somebody on his cellphone.  Now this bathroom also had a public shower I think, for anyone disease-loving enough to swim in the lake, so nudity had an excuse.  He wasn’t erect and wasn’t jackin’ it.  But he wasn’t wet from a shower, and he seemed like he was just waiting in full frontal view of the door for somebody to walk in and see him.

I smirked or cocked an eyebrow, like, alright man.  Might have even been slightly aroused.  For some reason this didn’t hit me as bad as the dude that sexually harassed me on the bus that one time.  But it occurred to me later, absentminded and distracted as I’d been, that he may have been hoping for kids to walk in on him – which is decidedly worse.

The world is a vampire.  Makes you wanna drank a goose and hop in a muscle car.  But no, we abide.  Eye on the big peaceful bird, dozing the day away.  That’s where you’ll find me.

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Disability Criteria

There’s a tension in all countries with the resources to have social benefits, between the idea everybody should have to bust their hump just for the right to be alive, and the idea simply being alive entitles you to a certain bare minimum standard of life.  Most people aren’t going to believe fully in either of those extremes, but fall somewhere in the middle.  Being far closer to the latter than the former, I can feel resentful toward those responsible for gatekeeping social benefits.  Less the bureaucrat at the crowded dilapidated office full of squalling babies and unfortunate-smelling people talking to themselves, than toward the politicians who grandstand on arbitrary beliefs about how this should be done, and vow to stick it to the freeloaders when they get elected.

I got curious and looked at how the US Social Security Administration decides whether you’re disabled enough to receive benefits.  Right up front there’s a line drawn on the basis of whether you busted your hump enough.  There are two different disability programs administered by that agency.  The one they talk about at the link is Social Security Disability, and to qualify for that you need a certain minimum amount of recent work history.

Worked hard for twenty years and then had a slow decline in health which kept you from knowing you needed to apply for disability until you lost “insured” status?  Fuck off.  Worked hard at unpaid labor like raising children?  Fuck off.  Never able to work in the first place because you’re too mentally ill to function?  Fuck off.  Supported a family business by working unpaid for years?  Fuck off.  The disability benefit these people might qualify for is called Supplemental Security Income, which is a vastly more restrictive, petty, cruel, wildly inadequate, and ruthlessly policed benefit.  I saw a post once, roughly “Did somebody scam SSI into giving them a benefit they didn’t deserve?  Good for them.  They just pulled off the most elaborate demeaning and time-consuming con ever, for a benefit that is not enough to survive on anywhere.”

SSI is that benefit you hear about where you lose it if you get married, and since your eligibility for Medicaid (need-based health insurance) in most states is tied to eligibility for SSI, you also lose medical care.  Strictly speaking, marriage doesn’t always cut off SSI altogether.  Depends on how much money your spouse makes, how many kids you have, etc.  I guarantee that math is at least as cruel and petty as you’re imagining.  And if two people who get SSI get married?  Both of them have their SSI significantly reduced, on the assumption their pooled resources make up the difference.  That might be true if SSI was more than $967 in most states, but it isn’t.  Double that and you’d still be living in wretched conditions, with rent as high as it is these days.

Back to SSDI, Social Security Disability.  Not as many restrictions, but you gotta understand them well.  People often get bounced from that program with a retroactive effective date, making it so they not only have no benefits but also suddenly owe the government like fifty to a hundred thousand dollars – potentially subject to the Treasury Offset Program which can jack your tax refund and any other money the government might owe to you, as well as garnish your wages if you manage to work through the pain.  As much as SSDI is more generous than SSI, it still averages less than the cost of rent in most places – while still just high enough to keep you from qualifying for Medicaid or food stamps!  That sweet spot where you can be thrown to the wolves in other ways.

I meant to be talking about the criteria.  Word on the street is that regardless of what’s happening, you are always denied the first time you apply for disability.  Is that true?  I don’t know.  But even getting to that decision – possibly a denial – SSA says takes an average of 230 days currently.  I’ve heard of it taking much longer than that as well.  The appeal process commonly stretches things out to two years, five years, or even more.

What is a disability?  A condition that is expected to last a year or longer or result in death, that prevents you from engaging in “substantial gainful activity.”  There’s a dollar figure on that – currently $1620 per month.  Higher than the cost of a one bedroom apartment in most of the USA, you say?  Yes indeed.  Considering how long it takes to get a decision, better make sure you’re not making more than the SGA figure during the application process, or you’ll get denied on those grounds.  But hey, if it looks like you’re intentionally limiting the amount of work that you’re doing to stay under that figure, does that mean you are actually capable of making more?  Might still get denied, depending on who’s making the final decision and their own personal biases.  Better to have a couch you can surf for the years it can take to get approved, rather than risk working.

Let’s say you have Down’s Syndrome but managed to get a part time gig and have been making a lil money while also drawing SSI.  Consider your paycheck halved basically, because for every two dollars you make over $65 bucks, one dollar comes out of your SSI.  But you’re also earning your way toward insured status for Social Security Disability by earning taxed wages.  Problem.  A requirement of SSI is that you have to apply for any Social Security type benefit you could possibly receive.  Get SSDI and all but twenty dollars of it count against your SSI amount.  SSI goes away, so does your Medicaid – and you don’t get on Medicare until you’ve been on SSDI for two years, so hope you don’t need medical help in the meanwhile.  That’s for “the Healthcare Marketplace” aka Obamacare, which is not great.  Not that any of it is great in this motherfuckin country, but even so, the difference between the cost of meds on Medicaid vs. Marketplace can be the difference between affording them or rationing them or just going without.

What happens when you get old?  The Social Security Administration must never have heard of intersectionality because disabled old people get no special consideration at all in the amount of money or medical coverage they receive.  Benefits are on the basis of age or disability, not both at the same time.

Of course, some people have a disability that leads to them being unable to face the withering scrutiny of being considered for a disability benefit in the first place, no matter how meager that benefit is, so those people must do without altogether.  This is the sort of thing that would be covered by a UBI program and massive expansion of rent control or low income housing, but eh…  We’re living in the world we’re living in, for now.

The internet is drowning in misinformation and no small amount of that is specifically about Social Security benefits – clickbait to get sad desperate people to look at shitty advertisements.  No, there is no plan to increase this or make any of these benefits at all less cruel and pathetic.  There’s often legislation proposing such, dying slowly in congressional committees year on year.

And many of the people who need these programs the most were told that firing Mexicans into the sun would save the government so much money that they could be showered with love and beneficence.  They bought that, they voted for corporate fascism, which aims to break these programs down to rubble and replace them with the kind of corporate schemes that have given us the worst healthcare in the developed world*.  Shit makes me tired.

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*I still can scarcely believe how evil UHC is, how the supposed “death panels” an industry shill ass-pulled against obamacare are actually a real life motherfucking existing thing, under capitalist medicine.  Buck buck buck.

Tales from the Ghetto: Schoolhouse Foolhouse

My earliest school experiences were either preschool, kindergarten, or very early grades.  I don’t remember which or much about them, but as I’m trying to put together some childhood memories before they disappear, it’s school time.  The school that had me feeling the youngest was an overtly christian one in a rustic looking piece of suburb.  The driveway and parking lot were gravel and dust, and there were largish deciduous trees all around.  Probably this was preschool?

I remember making gingerbread houses for xmas.  I’m not sure if we used legit ginger pieces or the cheapo version, with graham crackers, but the icing was good enough.  We built them around trimmed down milk cartons, as a mold.  Seems like an advanced craft for somebody who had only been walking for a few years.  Of course, there were hand turkeys and all the usual shit.

There was a playground with some pretty good-sized equipment.  I remember the centerpiece of it was almost like a house.  I could stand up to my full height under the platform.  I wasn’t a total misfit, but I was very outnumbered by girls.  In fact, I’m pretty sure I played Bosley to some Charlie’s Angels at some point, of which my sister was one.  Hey, she was a biracial angel years before Ella Balinska was born.

Again, I feel like I had a girl or two who were fascinating me and I didn’t understand why yet.  Not precisely, but I was kinda precocious in this regard.  One of the girls looked kinda like me with light eyes and buck teeth, but had short black hair*, and another one had long brown hair.  Maybe I was more interested in the brown-haired girl but got along with the black-haired one better?  I have a dim memory that I might have gotten as far as baby-styled “going steady” if I’d stayed there much longer.  We never did stay in one school for long, as it happened.

We’d play tag with these rules.  The person who was “it” knocked on the playground house and the people inside say, “who’s there?” It says “Big Bad Wolf.” We say “What do you want?” It says “Colored eggs.” We say “What color?” and It has to guess. When they guess the color you were thinking, you had to run out of the shelter and get chased?  My recollection breaks down here.

We had a cat at some point and lost it.  I forget the cat’s name but think it was orange tabby.  This bothered me enough that when a teacher told us about prayer, that was the first thing I prayed for.  No dice.  Further, while I could conjure a vague white glow when I closed my eyes and did the rigamarole, I realized that I was just imagining it, and that stopped it cold.  When you tell a kid about prayer for the first time, there’s probably more clever ways to do it, ways less likely to result in atheism.  They blew it and I was an atheist for life already.  Not long after that, I remember realizing I didn’t even remember the missing cat – not really – and was disturbed by the fact.  Growing brains do weird things.

There was a school play where I had to perform as a shepherd, with a crappy sheep hook made out of paper towel rolls and constantly falling to pieces.  On the night of the play I don’t know if I even got in two words before I turned bright pink and laughed until they removed me from the stage.  Earliest memory of this tendency I have, but it’s still a thing.  Usually happens in situations where I should be afraid, and am on a subconscious level.  Like the ghoulish humor I fell into when my husband had his gall bladder removed and was all messed up.

There was another school-esque situation we were in for a minute, in a more urban location.  Where that one had been gravel and grass, this one was beauty bark and concrete.  More shadows from neighboring buildings.  I didn’t get along with anyone but don’t remember fighting.  Just remember an enforced nap time that I was usually awake through.  And breaking a finger for the first time.  I’d gone off alone and was finding the cool metal of the front gate appealing.  I ran my little hand inside a groove there, and when it opened automatically for a car, snappo.  Not a serious break, but enough that the staff should’ve done something about it sooner than they did.

Lastly, I remember another school which tried to teach us American Sign Language.  This was more like a regular school so probably first grade.  I was ahead on English skills so it felt like baby school.  I fancied myself an artist but I was the only one in class that fucked up our papier-mâché Easter eggs, by not putting enough mâché on that shit.  I probably cried.  I recall starting to hate school about then.  I remember this school was racially diverse and had those big tires on the playground you could hide in, maybe monkey bars? but little else.

These were the only schoolish experiences I’m pretty sure happened when we were living in that housing project.  I remember nothing of the teachers except that they were women.

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*Wow, it’s really weird with these memories of memories, how removed they are, trying to feel your way back to something like this.  Maybe her name was Iris**?  And for the life of me I can only picture her as looking like one of my own childhood pictures with darker hair and more colorful clothing.  Eh, small enough kids all look the same, so probably not all that inaccurate.

**There are mandolins in that song?  I didn’t remember that.  Why didn’t I remember that?

Tales from the Ghetto: Excursions

Still writing about the earliest epoch of my childhood, in mid-California suburbs. Now, I don’t remember having seen Karate Kid back then, but I must have, because one year I wanted to be a The karate kid for halloween.  Ralph Macchio was a barefoot king, and by gum I would be barefoot as well… but no, mom kibosh’d that shit.  I felt like the costume was ruined.  Probably my tender feets were grateful tho, especially as this was before plastic bottles were more prevalent, and there was broken glass fuckin’ everywhere.

This post is about excursions, trips, jaunts even.  Things that didn’t happen at home.  Some of this was in the homes of family members I didn’t really know.  I think my aunt Margaret was one, my aunt Pat was another.  I remember little about them from that time, but Pat’s condo had exercise equipment and a refrigerator full of one of the early diet pops – Tab.  I wonder if it contributed to her colon cancer later on, or if that was just the same mutation that was likely to blame for mine.  Only known LGBTetc person from that generation of my ancestors, a Frisco dyke as they say.  I did see her again as an old lady, slept in that same condo one night as a bald-headed starving artist.  Exchanged some awkward emails with her when needing a favor; did not pan out.  She was a privately cold and publicly difficult person to get along with for more than brief times.  My brother got along with her better, while living in the Bay Area for college.

Back to the kid years.  At some point we were at a family member’s house with a swimming pool in the backyard.  My brother almost got himself drowned, not sure how.  My dad remembers the incident as him arriving to see that our mom, who was supposed to be watching us, had her nose buried in a book and missed it – that  he had to dive in and save the boy.  I don’t even remember him being there.  In my mind it could have been our mom that saved him, but I’d trust his memory of this better since he wasn’t six years old.

I recall seeing the drawings by a cousin, a teenage boy who drew nothing but cars.  I was plenty impressed.  There’s a picture from around that time of me sitting on the couch with a teenage boy and I feel like there was some implication from someone somewhere at sometime that the kid was up to no good.  No idea who this was or how true that was.  Pretty sure it wasn’t my Bay Area hipster cousin Dave, who looks like Dave Gahan, tho I think he does work on cars.

There was a lot of dry grass in the world, yellow and scratchy.  In my grandparents’ driveway I got stung by tripping and landing with my hand on a dead bee.  Same driveway where I lost a fingernail in a car door.  I just remembered my grandmother had a red volkswagen bug.

We went to a family reunion with a bunch of people I never knew and will never know.  Again, it was a situation of wealth, the cornucopia opened for all the little goblins who stole into the banquet chamber, and I was left for years afterward associating the term “family reunion” with nice food that I wasn’t allowed to have.  It was in a large park with green grass and covered picnic areas, with heavy wooden beams.  Frisbees flew.  I don’t even remember now what the nice food was, aside from watermelon.

We went on at least one, possibly more excursions to mountains and forests.  On one such occasion I almost got hit by a car, running across a road – one of those roads that curves around a hill and has no need for crosswalks or sidewalks.  Mom yelled on me.  On another trip, my dad got a tick on his ass, and my mom got it out while we were standing around, looking away.  There were big trees and a big wooden suspension bridge there.  Might it have been the famous Redwood Forest?  My dad has a deep voice and at some points in his life has successfully come off as Joe Coolguy, but I remember many more occasions of him suffering humiliations and defeats.

For that and other trips, I remember the car we were in – a big rusty white station wagon I’ve previously mentioned.  Once again, my midj’ing of it:

I remember vaguely sleeping in it, with the back seats folded forward.  Car interiors now tend to be plastic; this was unyielding and cold metal.  A thin sleeping bag doesn’t much improve that, but it’s fun to feel adventurous.

I might remember more bits and bobs about this part of my life sometime, but for now, one last thing that stands out for me.  We used to go to a big drive-in theater.  In my memory it was much much larger than the late-surviving one from my town of Auburn WA, which finally shuffled off the mortal coil in 2012.

I don’t know how old I was, but I must have felt like a non-presence in the back seat – some assumption I would pass out hard enough they could watch whatever they wanted without forming lifetime memories in my skullpiece.  Guess again, fools!  I remember impressions of a racecar driver movie with one brief scene of full frontal nudity.  Was it Stroker Ace?  There was one with Kenny Rogers, right?  Why am I imagining there was one with John Denver?  Don’t @ me bro.

I will also cherish the memories of memories of Dolly Parton and co-stars doing weird adult things in Nine to Five.  I’d put Dabney Coleman in bondage too.  Understandable…  As much as the movie was ostensibly about ladies getting revenge for dude malfeasance, in retrospect it feels like a masochist’s wet dream.  Who’s been a naughty boy?  Don’t hurt me ladies.  Wink.

We watched some kind of Disney movies too.  At some point in my life, I’ve seen Snow White, Cinderella, 101 Dalmations, and The Rescuers, any one of which might have been in that theater, as far as my brain can work out.  But more memorable is what I was not supposed to be seeing.

Looking out the back window while some kid movie was playing in front, I saw an adult cartoon that strains believability.  I don’t think it was Fantastic Planet, though you’re going to want to tell me it was.  It was much pervier.  In my faint baby memories, it involved cartoon colored people in a fantasy environment, with their naughty bits all hanging out, and sex scenes.  No, not Heavy Metal either.  In my head, the plot was about somebody losing his turquoise cartoon wiener and trying to find it, like the story of Detachable Penis by King Missile, long form.  At some point in the 1990s, I came across a likely suspect for this movie at a Suncoast Video in the Supermall.  I thought for sure I’d remember what it was called this time, but no.  Suncoast went out of business and I never saw it again.  Back to KinderTrauma with my ass.

flashing lights on this video

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Tales from the Ghetto: Grandparents’ House

content warnings:  child sex abuse mention tho i don’t go into any detail at all, child neglect and abuse, class strife.

Found out recently my maternal grandparents both died around ten years ago, which means they had easily found online obituaries.  My paternal grandparents both died before that, and are not so easily found.  This means nearly nothing to me, in stark contrast to PZ’s experience.  I once had an article about the magic twenty thousand dollars that everybody but me seems to get, but that isn’t wholly true.  From my paternal grandfather the broadly esteemed superannuated horrifyin’ secret criminal, my dad got around twenty-five grand, of which he gave some amount to me.  I don’t recall how much, but I used it all on rent while being underemployed as a freelance artist.

Per this article, I’m expanding on the things I can remember from early childhood before they evaporate.  I was born and raised through earliest childhood in suburban California, and previously discussed things that happened in or around my family’s apartment in the housing project.  The other things I can remember from back then took place in other locations, to which those memories belong.

There’s a geographical aspect of memory, where things that take place in a given location will be continuous with each other and run in parallel to experiences from another – home life versus work life, for example – and after the fact it can be harder to remember when a memory happened relative to a memory from a parallel timeline.  In this article I’ll look at Grandparents’ House timeline – events at my non-cybermemorialized paternal grandparent’s residence, in a much nicer neighborhood than my own.

My father had a horrible childhood, victim of violence neglect and abuse from many directions.  He’d have very good reason to want nothing to do with his parents, and yet poverty will bring one around, hat in hand.  Especially because those parents were beneficiaries of the best economy in the 20th century, fucked up nightmare dad being a union carpenter rolling in greenbacks.

Worse still, he left his own children in the care of those parents often enough that I have a lot of memories of that time.  Did I get abused by them?  Not that I recall, so it was a gamble that paid off.  Unless of course my older sister was abused by dad’s nightmare dad, which is distinctly possible.  Fucken sigh.  How did I not make that connection until now?  Ain’t no justice possible in any of that.  The monster was instantly killed in a car accident in his 90s without having known a moment of remorse nor of punishment.

That grandfather used to drink buttermilk straight out of a tall glass.  His skin was sun-damaged, his hair white when I was a small child, and the whites of his dead grey eyes yellow or blood-red most of the time.  Looked a bit of the monster that he was, not that all of those traits couldn’t be found on a wonderful human being, up to and including the dead-eyed expression.  I saw him go for the buttermilk and gave it a try, as a child.  Was not to my tastes.

That grandmother was dark-haired and wore big-ass eyeglasses.  They were those transition types that turn into sunglasses outdoors, but the technology wasn’t worked out back then, and they looked fairly sunglass’d indoors as well.  I don’t remember her eyes, probably because of this.  I do remember one humiliating time when I had to revert to diapers due to a stomach illness and she changed them in the living room.  I can understand not wanting to get out of your lazy boy, but unpleasant, and in view of the gross granddad who mocked me.  I don’t recall the words, which is probably a good thing.

My brother did that 23andme bullshit, which said we had 25% Iberian ancestry.  That was so specific it made me think I had a secret portuguese or spanish grandma.  The grandpas were too northern looking.  And yet, those grandmas both had well-establish USian roots with UK-derived surnames galore.  So this grandmother, not spicy, unless adopted.  Portugal had a historically close relationship with England and probably it’s random ingress from that kind of thing.  In the US it’s all whitey.  These distinctions are nothing here unless you go out of your way to play them up, which would be disingenuous for me, to say the least.

Overall, their household seemed like a goddamned land of bounty.  A place I wanted to be; a cornucopia of weal.  With a cigarette-choked living room, but still.  They had a garden with fresh vegetables and grape vines and more.  I remember eating cheerios with sugar, sometimes sliced bananas or strawberries on it, and raisin bran.  There are two major raisin brans in the US – Post and Kellogg brands.  Kellogg has sugar crusted into the wrinkles of the raisins, Post does not.  I got the good shit.

Why are so many of these memories about grapes?  As small kids we were given snack foods a lot, and one was these tiny boxes of raisins.  The brand was Sun-Maid, and it was the first word I can remember sounding out backwards.  Diam-nus.  Take that, normalcy!

And in the smokatorium, where I hardened up my lungs a bit, I got to watch a largesque color TV in one of those stands with the wicker screens on either side.  A lot of wood paneling back then, chonky wood furniture in olive or forest green, tchotchkies and decor that were utterly lacking in our slum.  The curtains were always bright with sun.  49ers games which bored me, TV and movies which entertained.  As I recall Kung Fu and Man from Atlantis were easy enough to track, but the plot of Flash Gordon didn’t make any sense to me.  Didn’t matter; everybody in the movie seemed like they were having a good time, and the theme song ruled.  One time on the porch I was hanging out with the kids and we were all singing that theme with the “bump bump bump bump” beats, and interjected some hiccups and burps to much hilarity.  “Flash hiccup burp Ah-Aaaah!  Savior of the Universe!”  That porch had some kind of deciduous tree, not hugely tall but with leaves that looked gigantic to me.

In most of my memories there, no other siblings are around.  Why was that?  Was I usually sent there when I was ill, to be tended without spreading the disease to the others?  Were some memories formed before my brother left the crib?  Was my sister being kept away while I was not, to avoid attention that I would be presumed to avoid on the basis of my assigned gender’s anatomy?  Was I being watched while my sister was attending preschool but I wasn’t quite old enough yet?  Let’s say it’s the last one.  It’s the most probable, thankfully.

On Flash Hiccup Burp occasion, my sister and brother were there, along with some unspecified neighbor or cousin – a girl taller than me.  This was one of a few girls that fascinated me in ways I didn’t get yet, and whose memory somehow escaped me so hard.  I don’t remember her name or even her hair color, just that I was intrigued.  Maybe wasn’t getting to be around kids other than my siblings much at that point.

I remember being alone looking at the clock on the wall.  It took so long for me to figure out how to tell time on a non-digital clock.  I was watching the second hand and imagining I was watching minutes speed by at some wild rate, felt like I was expanding my consciousness lol.

I remember all the ash trays and the main brand being Marlboro, in brown or in white and orange, both with gold foil near the filter, and a tiny little coat of arms.  At night when I couldn’t sleep, looking into grainy darkness, I found when I try to focus, a tiny spot of the grains at the center of my focus seem to sharpen and intensify.  I would in these situations remember that coat of arms, and imagine the grains to be wildly oscillating heraldry.

The class disparity between my parents and grandparents had us kids complaining a lot, like, why can’t we have better things?  Maybe you could just leave us with them.  That would be cool, right?  No?  Weh.  Anyway, class war now.

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Tales from the Ghetto: Primordial Soup

content warnings:  child sex abuse mention tho i don’t go into any detail at all, child neglect and abuse, poverty, violence.

In this big post I tried to say everything I can remember about all the places I’d lived as a child, and as many places as that was, there may be some pretty big gaps.  Life isn’t a story with a three act structure and a cool hook.  Though one can tease it into something resembling that, I’m just trying to get it all out, bit by bit, before the dust of time blows over it all.  Before I start to forget who and where I am – to the extent that I am anything, which is an occasional issue for me.

In that post I said I would expand on those entries individually.  Better nate than lever.  I approach the task…

In the beginning, I was born into a housing project in suburban California.  My father reenlisted in the army and hauled us between another few states, but we came back to land in the same shitty spot, and all my earliest memories were there.  I didn’t know it was a project until recently, having a conversation with my dad.

My dad recently told me for the first time that when I was a toddler, my sister had shut me into a footlocker and was being secretive about where I was.  He said I could have suffocated, might have been an early hint of her antisocial personality disorder.  That might be a dramatic take on it, and I do not remember the incident at all.

Seemed like any of dozens of places I’ve lived.  Beige carpet, cottage cheese texture walls, popcorn ceiling.  The closer we got to the nineties the more every interior light fixture became titty domes, but back then in the middle o’ Cali, they were frosted glass squares with an organic bulge in the middle.  The open sides collected more flies than titty lights.

I don’t remember the layout very well, but maybe the dining room faced an interior courtyard to the east, the bedroom I shared with my brother faced west and was south of the entrance.  I feel like it was the ground floor and while there were two story buildings in the complex, this wasn’t one of them.  The dining room and kitchen would have shared a cheap linoleum floor with optional cigarette burns and cracks.  I don’t recall ever seeing a cockroach, but it may have been the feebleness of crawling out of infancy hobbling my senses – I cannot imagine such a place not having roaches.

The euphemism for kids doing weird sexual crap is “playing doctor” and some amount of that happened there.  The nature of it, in combination with later information, suggests to me that my older sister may have been sexually abused at an extremely young age, and it gave her ideas.  We weren’t even in school yet when that happened, at least I wasn’t.  It might have been in preschool for her.  My dad is a piece of shit scumbag, but not that flavor.

I remember my dad singing a drinking song when we were there.  Only one part of it.  “Beer, beer, beer, said the sergeant, merry men are we;  For there’s none so fair that they can compare with the airborne infantry.”  There were artifacts of his time in the army – duffel bags, fatigues.  I might have seen him in uniform once.  He wasn’t fat yet, but he seemed like a giant, like king kong compared to me.  I never did get as manly-looking as him, which I can be thankful for as I’m more transfeminine now*.  Dude looks like Herman Munster with big gorilla hands.  Jack Torrance hairline to match his creepy demeanor.

There’s a photograph of me from that time.  I’m wearing a magenta coat and turning around in my seat, looking down.  Maybe there was a bird on the ground.  Behind me, at an outdoor restaurant table under an umbrella, my dad was drinking a bottle of michelob while four or five empties sat on the table in front of him.  Think he had a suitably 70s-80s moustache.  Dook dook, little boozehound.  Sweet dreams.

I remember I had a little green ensemble with Richard Simmons length shorts and matching t-shirt, with blue and white stripes down the side.  I liked the material, a kind of fake velvety stuff but not shiny.  There’s another picture of me with my adult teeth starting to come in, the overbite fully developed.  It propped my mouth open and I looked pretty damn dorky until I learned more self-awareness around ten and forced my lips shut until they stuck like that.  In that picture I was smiling but had extreme eyebags.  Maybe it was taken on the day I learned about daylight savings time and was certain it was a bad joke.

As I mentioned in the other post, the project was next to some golden fields of wheat, or some other crop.  I saw a tumbleweed in the parking lot once; I saw lightning strike in a field in broad daylight.  I learned what hail is.

I learned what sickness is.  One morning I projectile vomited my breakfast cereal, forming a lifetime memory.  It was in that place I contracted the chicken pox, with feverish delirium, itching, the usual – leaving silvery white scars on my body.  I don’t remember any cool fever dreams, unfortunately, only the itching, and being too exhausted to move.  Sleeping propped up so I could breathe, losing track of day and night.

I must have learned to read and write during that time, but I could not read cursive writing yet.  I remember drawing a bunch of loops on paper to emulate how my mother wrote.  I have been told it was my sister who taught me to read, and that tracks – my parents were neglectful.

With any sort of fault, it’s different from person to person.  Some neglectful parents starve their children to death, some just turn a blind eye to mental illness and serious issues while being seemingly supportive in other ways.  My mom managed to not kill us, to generally nourish us, but we were getting skin conditions and bad hygiene habits that would haunt us for a long time.  My dad was putting the whole job of parenting on her, while he was having alcohol and drug issues.  So even with antisocial personality disorder developing, my sister must’ve felt like teaching me was a fun thing to do with her time, made her feel big, and therefore I’m literate.

We had a TV back then and the only thing I can really remember watching at home is Dukes of Hazzard in its initial run.  I probably watched Sesame Street and cartoons, but I don’t remember doing that at home.  Happened somewhere else, maybe grandparents’ house.  I know that’s where I saw Flash Gordon, Kung Fu, and Man from Atlantis.  Saw some westerns I can’t remember, some football games.  I don’t remember any specific books from that time.  I do remember the radio was that barfy saccharine late 70s early 80s guff.  Sing it with a perm and rhinestones on your evening gown or lapels.

A grandmother made us quilts with our names and dates of birth on them.  Mine was chiefly yellow with lavender embroidery for the name, black squares with a citrus fruit motif.  It got pretty beat up and some purple bubble gum permanently adhered before it was retired.  I feel like my brother had a light blue “security blanket,” like Linus in Peanuts, but this could be mistaking comics for real life.

I didn’t think about being a middle child much, as a thing, but I did identify with those sardonic characters, the exasperated calm at the center of the wacky circumstance, like Charlie Brown and Kermit the Frog.  I was reading the Sunday comics, tho I didn’t understand a lot of what they were talking about.  I liked the art style on Tank McNamara, but had no effin idea what the sportball jokes were about.

I remember my brother sleeping in a crib and some kinda fuss about when he stopped.  I remember not thinking anything much of the fact my sister was from a different father and was biracial.  Maybe kids are less prejudiced without bad influences, maybe it’s because she was one year older and therefore The Boss, or maybe it’s because she unmistakably did look like us – just with brown eyes, coffee-colored skin, and loose brown curls.

One time when we were outdoors at night, I was playing with a toy gun and tried to throw it to my brother, and it hit her close to the eye, cut her skin.  The parents insisted I apologize and I distinctly remember feeling it made no sense to do so when no ill intent was involved.  They did not successfully explain to me that recklessness is as much something to apologize for as maliciousness, just made me feel like I had to eat shit for no reason.  Is there no communication in this household?  Thereafter toy guns were not allowed.

I’m gonna do a separate post for the grandparents’ house, I think.  And another for excursions, another for school.  Got a few more things to say here and it’s already run long.

I remember my dad combing my hair after a bath and asking which side I wanted it parted on.  I didn’t know what that meant and said both?  He said ok haha and ran the comb over my head on both sides, one after the other.  With his big-ass gorilla hands, that caused me pain.  I was genuinely mad, which I’m sure amused him more.  The things we remember the best in life are humiliations and pain, generally.

And names?  When I was a child I remembered names very well.  On some occasion I was left to play at the apartment of a boy named Dennis Kessler.  Only name I remember between then and elementary school tho.  He was blond (I was too at that time) and not too rude.  He had a lot of toy cars, which I was impressed by.  He had a toy truck where you could stick cars in the back of it, and that was fun.  Toy cars were more likely to be metal at that time, tho some were plastic as well.  I feel like this was a situation where I was being stashed so my mom could fuck off and do something bad, but who knows?

Last thing of note here was my very earliest memory – getting punched in the nose when arguing over a swing.  I would have been three or four, the boy much bigger.  First of many bloody noses in youth, tho the only one I can recall being directly caused by violence.  I have a deviated septum, which could well be from that incident.  I had a dim recollection there were adults in the background who did not care.  Recently my father told me they were Hell’s Angels.  If your beak is gonna be fucked up for life, might as well be from a Hell’s Angel baby.

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* this feels unfair to trans gals with very masculine faces.  not sure the best way to express this without triggering someone’s gender dysphoria, but i wanted to express where i am on that, for myself.  to most i’m sure i also look frankensteiny, and in alternate world where i’m not with my husband, i would totally get with another frankenstein girl.  but few of us would want to be her.  i just recognize tha struggle?