a lil outpatient procedure, nice and easy

…and I went back to the ER for a truly hellish experience shortly after midnight, not getting home until now at 5:00 a.m.

if u happen to have a CT scan after abdominal surgery and nobody tells you anything about the results, you might want to ask them if they saw blood in there. if they did, do not try to lay flat on your back for a few days at least.

it seems some loose blood from the surgery lapped gently against my diaphragm, triggering spasms that felt much like what you would imagine of a heart attack, only more violent.

kinda like my chest tried to rip itself apart, followed by spasms in a heart-sized area and seeming to follow a heartbeat, during which pain was truly extreme and breathing was not possible.

over the next fifteen minutes the spasms grew further apart and more faint until they stopped, but yeah, somehow I missed a few very important memos about possible side effects of this surgery.

i try to sleep now.

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Sweet Lovely Death

Content Warning:  Suicide.  Death stuff.  But I end on a positive note, I swear.

“Sweet lovely Death, I’m just waiting for your breath.  Come sweet Death, one last caress.”  That’s Glenn Danzig lyrics in the Misfits song “Last Caress” – at least, it’s every lyric that isn’t an admission to terrible crimes committed in pursuit of a violent end.  I’m no music expert, but there’s something exultant in the sound, the way it’s sung, that just makes me want to sing.  Is it in a major chord, contrasting with the descending punk rock ghost vocal style?  Some scholar could easily explain it, I’m sure.

But besides the music, there’s the message.  Singing of death as a thing of desire, like the central theme of Grave Pleasures / Beastmilk‘s oeuvre.  “Death is beautiful, death is the meaning of life.”  What do I find appealing in this?  I suspect it’s the blasphemy.

Blasphemy is one of my earliest passions.  Christianity got my motherfucken goat at a very young age, and as soon as I discovered hollywood-flavored satanisms at a later age (early double digits, and think it was the Tom Hanks Dragnet movie), I fell in love with it.  To insult god and jesus, this is my highest sacrament.  See that?  I just heresied in my blasphemy.  Fantastic.

The appeal there is complex and multi-layered.  There’s iconoclasm – the joy of hating on something other people love, which is the primary appeal of Neil Cicieraga hits like Baby.  There’s taboo – violating boundaries that others have set as “sacred.”  But those are all negative and I don’t think my joy in blasphemy comes from a purely negative place.  There’s something positive in staking out a place for godlessness in the oppressive atmosphere created by ameriKKKan xtianity.  Blasphemy is absolutely as important to me as prayer is to jeezis people.  I need it.

Back to the thesis, blasphemy is to xtianity as death is to life.  There’s an obvious difference between jeezyism and life itself.  One has intrinsic value and desirability, the other is an abject waste.  So why would it feel pleasing to blaspheme against something that is actually good?  Life has its downsides and they are pretty egregious.  Danzig has another song from his solo career called “When I’m Tired of Being Alive.”  That’s a thing that can happen.  Everybody who is born will experience pain, suffering, disability, and a bitter end.  Better to have never been born in the first place, for many of us.

But antinatalism – the rejection of procreation – can rouse jumped-up fearful reactions, even from otherwise reasonable people.  It’s an ethically perfect proposition – create no humans, create no human suffering – but logic flies out the window when people are confronted with it.  For the record, I don’t agree with antinatalism, because I don’t think logic should dictate everything we do, and I have a fanciful dream of the human species living and loving its way into some kind of golden future (after the millennia of unimaginable horror capitalism has guaranteed to us).  But I can’t argue against its logic, and I understand that its most heartfelt proponents are people who have experienced far worse things than I have in life.

People have a similar reaction when somebody commits suicide.  The rejection of the gift of life is personally terrifying.  Some react with anger.  I think that was part of my own process when Kurt Cobain did himself in.  I was young.  Suicide is sad, but to take it as a personal offense, or some kind of harrowing existential experience for yourself as a bystander?  It’s irrational nonsense.  It’s letting the fear of death make a fool of you.

Unlike crustyannity, life has great self-evident value, to the point one could argue it is truly sacred.  When something is sacred, part of me just wants to thumb my nose at it.  I’m not suicidal.  I love being alive.  But in a moment of embarrassment or humiliation, you may catch me saying “kill me fam” or similar things.  In times of prolonged stress and difficulty, I may long for some kind of annihilation of the self, perhaps through drugs, or just getting knocked into a coma.  But those are passing fancies, nothing in the face of my lust for life.  Still, there’s something in it.  A grain of a death urge.

There is a black hole at the center of the galaxy.  There is a spinning cosmic abyss promising the end of everything, dragging us with invisible arms thousands of light years long.  Step inside, lose all thought and all pain.  It is inarguably cool, like a skeleton on a motorcycle with a sword in its teeth.  Die.  It’s fun and easy.

When you see people defending morbid interests, like true crime buffs, they sometimes invoke another idea – that looking upon death unvarnished can give you a greater appreciation for life.  Maybe it’s something like that.  Howling at the moon.  I don’t know, but it does feel good.

At least until I’m looking at the real thing.  I’m not one of those murderpedia/faces of death -type motherfuckers, or even a true crime bitch, because this shit only works at the level of the aesthetic.  I’m an enemy of death in any way I can be, at the end of the day.  It’s rather impertinent of me – death will ultimately take away everything that ever bothered me about life, and I should be more grateful.  But I’m not.

I’ve been watching that Superman & Lois Lane TV show, and this season is about Lois Lane having cancer.  Perhaps because I’m watching it in the middle of the night when my emotional defenses are worn down, I have gotten close to tears a few times.  Why?  Last year I had stage one colon cancer.  Picked up several new abdominal scars, but never had to do chemo.  Just had the followup colonoscopy and no new polyps.  Fantastic.  But I got to look at that motorcycle skeleton, and the real thing was not so fun.

Like Michael Hutchence said in New Sensation, “there’s nothing better we can do, than live forever.”  Live forever, kids.  And in the meantime, if you wanna howl in a graveyard at midnight from time to time, I won’t tell.
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Cat-egory Errors Explained?

You may recall I have occasionally treated my boyfriend like a cat, in moments of unconscious error.  Today I almost put cat food on my own plate.  Perhaps, rather than seeing my boyfriend as a simple animal, I see all humans as socially interchangeable with beasts – myself included.

OK, that doesn’t explain why, but at least it looks less like I’m demoting my lovin’ man to domestic creachur status.

Corvide continues.  Paxlovid NyQuil and DayQuil are surely helping.  Science suggests the vaxxing helped, and as bad as it’s been I have to imagine I’d be dead as fried chicken if not for that.  Still, no alternate universe view of me being foolish enough to antivax for comparison, so I admit room for error.

I spilled pop on my computer so this was made on a phone, slowly and painfully.  I won’t post much til I get that resolved.  Also not answering comments much, but thanks for the support, really.

See y’all later!
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The Covid has Landed

Diarrhea starting last Thursday, sore throat Sunday, cough starting today at around five AM.  My workplace has been making us come in one day a week and I forgot my N95 at home for that one lousy day last week.  I held my hand over my mouth until I could double-mask with the freebies they have on the bus, switched to an N95 at work.  The complimentary ones are a defective batch which some geniuses stapled so the straps have to go around your entire head instead of the ear.  I had to modify the straps with scissors to make it fit.

Or maybe I got it from the person my boyfriend’s mom works with, who came in to work with a cough last week.  Who can say?  All I know is this – I haven’t coughed in years now, and since I started coughing again, that shit is mightily unpleasant.  I will never ever be without an N95 in public again.  I also have to reschedule my surgery and other procedures, but the donations will still help – I’ll have to take off the same amount of time whenever I get these things done.  Thanks to those who contributed.
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Covid Inbound

EDIT: THE FUNDRAISER IS OVER.
Stretch goal reached!
Look for my rap video, most likely before the end of the month.
O___O

 

Somebody in my household just blew hot for the Creepin Crud.  The Corvide.  The 2019 Gift That Keeps on Giving.

There are three of us.  One is fortyish and too disabled to have a day job, one is 65 and  works in an office five days a week, and there’s me in the middle at forty-six, working in a mostly empty office one day a week and telecommuting another three.  Our resident senior citizen, unfortunately, had the largest exposure, works with covidiots plague rats (forgot my policy), and brought that stuff right home to us, breathing in our grits relentlessly until the hot test less than a half hour ago.

So we’re pretty much gonna get it, and I’m probably going to have to reschedule the procedures I have scheduled for the 25th and 27th of this month.  Vexatious.  Tempted to be pretty fucken mad at our senior citizen because she is a lot less conscious about keeping her mask on than we are, but she can’t help being a dingus, and she does mask more than most people in the USA right now.

I’m hella PO’d tho.  As ever, motherfuck the United SnaKKKes for treating the pandemic as a chance to practice capitalist medicine on the rest of the (more) civilized world, squatting over the medicines like dragons on gold, guaranteeing this will go on forever and ever.  I never stopped masking.  I surely never will.  But will that keep me from getting covid?

Fucking of course not.  Still worth it to lower viral load and minimize long-term symptoms, but yet another reminder you can do everything in the world to take care of yourself and your people and still get taken the fuck out by the scumbaggery of others.
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TDoV Fundraiser, White Rap, Cringe On

GOAL ACHIEVED – FUNDRAISER CLOSED
This post will remain for historical purposes.

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HEY!  I had a telework meeting earlier this week and since I wouldn’t get harassed on the bus by doing so, I dressed like a lady.  Little did I know I was two days early for the Trans Day of Visibility.  I’m visible, babes.  Be the fat middle-aged white lady you want to see in the world.  I’m lovin’ it.  But still..

image of your blogger great american satan

Like many trans folk today I come to you with cup in hand.  I’ve had medical issues burning up my leave at work, and for some abdominal surgery in late April I’m going to use at least a week of leave without pay.  To make my bills less ouch, I’d like to fundraise.  Here is the incentive:  Donate at all, and you can choose a word I will rhyme in a rap.  If five people choose orange, I’ll try to come up with five shitty sorta-rhymes for orange.

This will be strictly words on digital paper, maybe starting below and then compiled in a blogpost, unless we reach goals.  At $500, I will do an audio performance of the rap.  At $600, I will do a video.  These productions, if they happen, will be lo-fi as all hell, because I just don’t have the time for big effort.

I will run this through midnight April 21st, so I have time to make the audio or video if necessary.  If you like my terrible styles and enjoy cringy embarrassment, please give me a ko-fi, as it were.  And if you like donating to FtBloggers, throw our recently unemployed mans Brinkman a bone too.

link to my ko-fi

 

 

USA, More Weimar Than Weimar

A few years ago it was hot to compare the USA to the short-lived Weimar Republic of Germany, the one that was replaced by the nazis.  The situation in Germany was largely attributed to the punitive treatment of country after World War One.  Somehow (demonizing socialism, never meaningfully addressing any crimes the US committed, never willing to face the hateful core of America’s real values), we did this to ourselves, no major military loss necessary.  Congrats?  Anyway, the comparison never stopped being valid.

Right now we are even closer to nazi rule than we were under Trump himself.  The way power is structured in this country guarantees the GOP a seat at the table, and they’ve gone full goosestep.  Many states are already falling under laws that are equivalent to the book burning at the Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft.  Don’t say pronouns law?  Rampant book banning?  The dismantling of a single university in Florida under that state’s governor?  The exact mirror of Bolsonaro’s raids on universities in Brazil.  Expect it to go nationwide as soon as we have a nazi president.  I’d say republican but at this point that is fully redundant.

The howling jackals of fascism are gearing up for total conquest, and all they need is the executive branch to clinch the end of our weak-ass imitation of a democracy.  It’s just a matter of time.  They will get the presidency again.  One possible way to prevent a future nazi president from devastating this country with executive orders would be to curtail the powers of the president substantially.  I’d like to see that happen, but power fucken looooves power, and will never put meaningful restrictions on new powers that have been allowed.  The same way we can’t make meaningful taxes happen on the rich once they’ve been given breaks.

I was put in mind of this by the way there are good things happening right now, mostly from executive action.  There are executive orders, but also appointed heads of government agencies making progressive policies within their remit – like the way you can, for the moment, change your gender marker on your Social Security card or passport without need for proof documents.  Expect all of that to be reversed with a single pen stroke under the next nazi president.

It’s best to just be prepared for it, emotionally and physically.  Think, what will my role be under nazism?  We can’t all be armed fighters.  Some of us will have to settle for smaller acts of resistance.  As republicans expand their hate campaigns and shore them up in the legal systems of their states, anybody who murders a trans person, no matter how flagrantly, will be let off the hook – like Emmett Till’s killers.  For that matter, expect all reproach or rebuke for killer cops to end.  Many who have already been jailed will probably get pardoned.  At least the white ones.  Under a republican president, we may see concentration camps for trans people (we never stopped having them for immigrants), probably gay folk as well.  The idea has already been floated, in Arizona I think?  Jewish people will be far from safe.  I have no idea what kind of crack fucks like Ben Shapiro are smoking, that they are willing propagandists for the nazi side.

That’s the obvious stuff, the stuff they’re already announcing as future plans.  But what about the stuff that hasn’t been stated yet?  That is historically part of the fascist agenda?  Military conquest.  Fascism fucks a country up, and to maintain the illusion it’s a reasonable way to do things, they need to sack resources from other countries.  The easiest targets will be Cuba, Haiti, and other Caribbean countries.  Might see an Axis-type alliance with Brazil if things go sideways there again.  Ultimately Canada and Mexico would be occupied territory.  Hopefully no nukes will be used, but given the expansion of first strike capabilities under Trump, it’s anybody’s guess.  I’m guessing the Mexican resistance will do some righteous terrorism on our asses.  Maybe the resistance under Vichy Canada will also impress?

Eventually US fascism will fall to whatever nonsense comes next.  But consider this.  Even in nazi germany, some people could live almost sorta kinda normal lives.  Have love, have children, work, nurture, make art, etc.  Bad things will happen on a terrible scale, but life will go on, and eventually the worst things will pass.  Fight if you can, live if you can’t.  Don’t give up hope, because, ultimately, anything can happen – including your own happily ever after.

As always, long live the fighters.  Death to fascism.

Andvaka

Flashing Light Warning on this video:  It doesn’t actually have flashing lights, but the jarring camera movement and hard cuts between scenes in chiaroscuro lighting might have the same effect.  Also the music is intentionally cruel to the ears, but artistic.

Andvaka is the Icelandic word for insomnia, which isn’t terribly meaningful in itself, but as Iceland gets a season of excessively long daylight, they probably feel it harder than we do.  Last night I got to sleep about 2:00 AM and woke up hard at 5:30.  Time to get ready for work rolled around at 9:20 and I was still awake, so I had to call off.  As I type this it’s 4:30 PM and I’m flagging badly, glad I had the luxury of a paid sick day so I’m not making potentially ruinous mistakes right now.

I had a night a little over a year ago that was similar.  I couldn’t sleep, and my mind kept turning paces.  At that time, I was going over what I’d say if I was being interviewed by Rachel Maddow, over and over and over again.  Last night, it was a little more varied and less grandiose, but I think it dipped into talk show interview territory for at least a bit.  This seems like textbook mania, for a bipolar person, and there’s every reason based on my immediate family to think I have some risk of that.  But it doesn’t happen often enough to be a major problem.  Still, fingers crossed it doesn’t get worse.

There is something else related to my family health history that was on my mind.  I’m mutated.  I’m a mutant.  Seems to be from my father, and possibly my brother has the same issues.  We all have arthritis and degenerative disc disease in our lumbar vertebrae.  Last week I found out I have a mutation that increases risk of certain cancers of the abdominal organs.

it's a riverdale reference

This made me wonder if there’s a connection between the cancer risks and the spinal stuff.  Call it a developmental biology question.  As an embryo’s cells divide and differentiate, they move and branch.  Grossly inaccurate, but you could imagine it like a river delta branching fractally as it runs to the sea.  A mutation is like a stone near the head of the delta changing the shape of the waters downstream.

The mutation is known, but the mechanisms by which these things cause health problems are less understood.  I’m just wondering, when I was an embryo, did the mutation throw some shit in the river, neighborhood of my lumbar stem cells, that made both the spine and internal organs “downstream” from it more likely to fuck up?

Do the pancreas and colon even come from the lumbar part of the embryo, or do they grow in a different segment and migrate to their respective positions?  If the latter is true, my notion doesn’t hold up.  Every DNA-having cell in my bod has the same issues, whatever they mean.  I also have two other mutations that could mess up children if I had them, so good thing I’m no breeder, and another mutation with unknown ramifications.  It might explain the telekinesis and laser eyes.

Something bad happened in my not too distant ancestry and that’s life, babey.  Something to think about when you aren’t sleeping.
–

No Solutions

Content Warnings:  Mental Illness, The Failure of Social Services, Poverty, The Failure of US “Democracy,” Child Abuse, Murder, Paranoia, Doomy Thoughts.  But I’m OK, don’t worry.

People get overwhelmed, look at the whole of everything that’s wrong in the world, or just their lives in particular, and feel hopeless.  Generally, I think that’s depression or some other problem messing with you.  Life can be made bearable or have OK moments for almost anyone.  But I have to admit, sometimes in life there are problems with no solutions.

That’s the kind of shit I deal with at work sometimes.  I got somebody on the phone with paranoia, wanting help in protecting herself from imagined oppressors.  What the fuck is the recommended wisdom for helping people with paranoid delusions?  Do you humor them and act like you’re taking it seriously, but not facilitate any actual pursuit of their claims?  Do you tell them gently that they’re imagining things?  Tell them sternly?

Any action you take will only result in more paranoia, more delusion.  The best case scenario is that they get distracted and forget they talked to you in the first place, but unfortunately a lot of paranoid people have excellent (if warped) memories.

Sometimes at work* I have to tell people that they have no income, have a massive new debt, and are facing months of travail for a mere chance of setting things right.  Basically, “If you don’t have family to lean on, welcome to your new home eating rats in the underpass.  Or go back to work even though you’re disabled and stay doing that until it kills you.”

Technically, this is a problem with a solution:  Overthrow of the US government, or at least a progressive rout of the whole system.  But that magical probably-not-happening future does nothing for people fucked to death by the laws and policies of the here and now.

I wrote my senator about the need for progressive reform and her underlings sent a form response with clear tells that the message was skimmed at best, not really read for understanding.  That senator is literally the perfect person to write about the issue, sitting on a committee deciding the relevant laws.  Too bad, so sad.

Mutual aid is probably the only way the masses will survive late capitalism, but we’ve been systemically divided.  I don’t know the rotating cast of neighbors in my apartment complex and they don’t know me.  We have every reason in the world to regard each other as potential thieves and creeps.  We’re all busting our humps at work too much to do the emotional labor of establishing a community.  Instead we’re fighting over parking spaces, as the jacked up rent has the number of tenants per unit exceeding capacity.  There have been a few murders and attempted murders in my little apartment complex, and it’s not even considered one of the bad ones in my city.

One of those murders may have been the solution to a problem – a child stabbing a (possibly) predatory adult in the household many times.  But you know what happens to that kid next, and it looks like less of a solution in the end.  As common as child abuse is, most likely it was the motive, but I did open the article talking about paranoid delusions, and the murdered person may have been innocent.  Who can say?  As the meme says, the world is a fuck.

The idea that things can always get worse looks more true every year, with a natural end point for that in human extinction.  With a complex enough system there are thousands of ways for things to go wrong and very very few ways for them to go right.

But, you know, keep taking care of yourselves and each other, and maybe this will look less dire on the other side.  And in the meantime, if somebody can eviscerate Matt Walsh and use his entrails to hang JKR from the parapet of her castle, please do.  The sun will come out tomorrow, haha.

–

*This is the best job I ever had, in terms of recompense and security, and my only hope of clearing the traps of poverty in what’s left of my life, so changing jobs is not an option at the moment.  How’s your line, lately?

I Can’t Even

An international cadre of professional transphobes building on the work of internet terfs were a significant source of our current problems, and while I’m powerless against the moneyed side (see my slam poetry), we can all do our part to cut off / isolate / quarantine the internet creeps.  The Heard trial and the downfall of RvW have been a field day for terfs creeping into regular people’s reblogs.

So I had a good idea for a new side tumblr: “I steal the good ideas from terfs so you don’t have to reblog them.”  If it got popular enough, people could have a single blog for feminist posts that for sure isn’t tainted by terfery.  Of course it would take some discernment making sure the abortion resources they link to are legit and not fronts for terfery, making sure any feminists quoted aren’t eliminationist zealots, etc.

The thing is, I can’t even.  I don’t have much time between my personal and professional life in the first place, can’t keep up with chores.  I have nothing left for the fight.  That’s why one of my daily hashtags is #long live the fighters – because I’m not one of them.  To my comrades in the streets or on these internets, great love and esteem.  Thanks for doing what a lot of us cannot.

I need to rejimmy my work benefits to name my boyfriend as my beneficiary for any monetary value of them should I cark it.  Maybe while I’m at that, I can reduce or eliminate the savings plan and turn that into a recurring donation to local abortion funds for red states.  Something where I don’t have to lift a finger.  What would Hell have of its humble servant..?

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