So that sense of reality overtook the optimism I was feeling fresh out of surgery, before the two ambulance rides to the emergency room and my subsequent back problems. Realistically, I’m not going to be able to accomplish shit with this time off from work.
That’s always depressing when reality gets in the way of inspiration. I’m not feeling so hot. I can barely wipe my ass in the state I’m in. How is your week going?
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In my youth, I once briefly worked a job where there was a button you had to press between every transaction. If you didn’t hit that button, the previous transaction would be added to the current, which could result in you paying out a lot more money than you were supposed to. I could not consistently remember to push that button, and cost the company more money than I was owed in wages.
At roughly 5 AM today, I awoke with a profound feeling that I had to become nothing more than a data storage device. That I was a glowing white folder in a computer’s graphic user interface, and that I was containing files requiring some kind of work. I could not, for the life of me, figure out what kind of work was needed.
In my job I sometimes handle electronic messages in a proprietary interface that is a little more awkward than modern email. You have to label messages according to priority, make sure they’re headed to the right component code, set the request and “tickle” date, and other annoying little shit. I figured that I needed to do this kind of work to the files within me, but I didn’t know how.
My current employer has a potentially adversarial relationship with people applying for certain benefits, and it was also unclear to me if some of these files represented me as an applicant or as a claim processor. These files were just words in a void, important but unprocessable. Stifling.
This persisted for at least a half hour. During this time I have also been trying to work up the will to risk injury by changing the position of my body or getting up to go to the bathroom. At about 5:45, Hecubus placed a single paw on my belly and bore down within a few inches of the site of my surgery, stirring me from my uncomfortable reverie.
This feels worth remembering, although again, I’m not sure why.
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Should mostly conscious hypnagogic states be tagged as Dreamposting?
Edit: I never connected the first paragraph with the rest of the post. Now I can’t remember what the connection was, not precisely. I’m unwell, my fellows.
…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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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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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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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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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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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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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