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.

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*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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Somebody Oughtta Do Somethin

Content Warning:  Back on that Climate Doom Bullshit.

There are very few people in the world with the power to course correct on the capitalism-inflicted extinction of humanity, but the facts that are as clear as day to you and I?  Those privileged few are as blind to them as we are to (most*) ultraviolet light.  I mean that.  We can be surrounded by UV, soaked in it, and not perceive it with our senses or minds.

Privilege is a powerful blinder – even at the feeblest levels.  A middle class person one medical situation away from crushing poverty is measurably less empathetic and less generous compared to the poor.  Take that effect and multiply it by a billion.  Musk, Gates, Saudi princes – they could have the plainest truths immediately in front of them, blotting out anything else, and rather than see it they will simply go blind to everything.  Hence the ludicrous fantasia of space escape.

That’s why they don’t take action.  I’ve said before capitalism is a blame diffusion engine par excellence.  Millionaires, politicians, people with hands on levers and buttons of that could theoretically take action – they want to take care of themselves and their own, can always leave it to someone else to take the meaningful action, always have an excuse.  Billionaires are wealthy enough to have a real chance of escape from that game.  The existence of trillionaires?  That means we’ve officially reached the point where a single person could easily plow through all those mirrors and illusions and games, could just decide to do something about the problem and make it real.  But they won’t.  They don’t.

I feel that blinded by god emperor privilege, maybe they can’t?  Maybe the argument that capitalism is an inevitable expression of human nature and that anything else is sky-eyed impossible dreams, while facile and defeatist, might be completely true.  But I’ll take it a step farther than the people who use that as a defense of capitalism – If this argument is true, we’re all gonna fuckin’ die like (most**) dinosaurs.  We’ll be lucky if there’s an organism like Lystrosaurus left to eke out a future for tetrapods of any kind.  I’ve said before that I think some few humans are likely to survive the climate apocalypse by merit of our social and mental powers, but if we are truly as greedy and useless the capitalist beast?  We won’t make it.

I don’t remember why I started writing this article.  I claimed once before I was swearing off climate doomposts, but originally this wasn’t meant to be about that.  I think I just wanted to expand on my “angler” thesis with some recent insight I’ve had.  What was that?  I’m too warm to think.  That kind of design flaw isn’t gonna be helpful in short order on this bitch of an earth.  Hm…

Fucking hell.  I have completely fucking forgotten my point.  This sucks ass.  I fucking despise summer.

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*I had a feeling I should double check that, given the depth of complexity and weirdness and nature, and found an article to undermine my simile.  Ignore that, please.   **I knew this I just wanted to say the phrase “die like dinosaurs” because like many clown-ass writers I like alliteration.  Then I felt guilty about it, hence this edit.  Now it looks ridiculous for other reasons.

Got Antisocial PD?

I was thinking about different kinds of people I’ve known, or known of, and the things they got going on.  In their heads.  Which made me think about my sister, who got the formal diagnosis of Antisocial Personality Disorder – the condition informally known as sociopathy.  If you’ve gotten to know somebody well who has that diagnosis, it might still be easy to think of them as soulless, hollow, robotic.  My sister can look sad, more often look mad, say she wants this or that out of life, but pathologically she returns to the same behavior pattern she’s been doing since younger than age four – allying with one party to emotionally torment another.  She easily rewrites her own history and seems able to genuinely believe the new story.

The condition has a grip there.  She can’t seem to do anything that contravenes it.  Abusing people is, for her, like breathing.  It is, metaphorically, autonomic.  (i’m fucken pretentious tonight)  But who is she, outside of that?  Does she have something like a heart?  Does she have feelings?  I haven’t seen her in more than twenty years but I bet I know her better than anyone she’s met since, and I don’t really know the answer for that with certainty.  But I feel like it’s Yes?

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Fuccing Breakthru Cases

I have an online acquaintance I don’t know very well.  She’s been bitching about shitty family risking covid constantly – including a lady whose children have no father because of it.  My acquaintance got vaccinated and… currently has covid, surely from one of those family members.  Meeting at my workplace a week ago.  Guy says “I know three people fully vaxxed still that got covid,” boss says, “I keep hearing that at these meetings.”

Any luck and my acquaintance won’t so much as lose her sense of taste, though she’s about as old as me and it makes her more likely than the babes to come off of this scathed.  I told her I wouldn’t blame her for pistolwhipping a family member’s teeth out.  Motherfuckers got to know their limitations.

How are your vaxxed up people doing?

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Pondering the Future of Life

HUGE CONTENT WARNING – APOCALYPTIC CLIMATE DESPAIR

It’s possible that humans, at the far end of this hellride (maybe a hundred years off), will have eradicated all life on this planet except the most intense extremophile bacteria and archaea.  I think even from where we stand now, assured of calamitous devastation, surfing the edge of an extinction event in progress, that does not seem likely.  The way that would happen is if the completely runaway global warming that is already too late to stop snowballs into temperatures that rival the Hadean Eon.  I don’t know how possible that is.

But it is surely probable for this heat to become globally devastating in a way we’ve never seen before.  It’s a pretty safe bet that all large mammals will go extinct outside of enclosed environments, and 90% of what else is living beyond the artificial spaces will go extinct as well.  That’s enough to make a nature lover miserably sad and some of us fit to suicide bomb a petrol exec or politician.  Looking forward to more of that happening, because this stuff does have me miserably sad, and I’d love to see the fuckers eat shit and die.  Zero qualifications regrets or backtracking on those words.  If you’re petrol or a political enabler, please, set yourself on fire on live TV for me.

But this post is about none of that.  I am inclined in this random moment to think about the life that will survive global warming.  Because unless we successfully turn Earth into Venus, this warmed world will settle into some kind of equilibrium eventually.  Birds and reptiles are much better at surviving heat compared to mammals, and despite the insect apocalypse going on at the moment?  You know those lil bastards will bounce back.  Again, huge numbers of species will be gone forever, but those that remain?  Will ultimately repopulate to exploit the niches that remain.

I know less about plants.  Obviously if they don’t make it through, the rest of life is in a bad way.  Goodbye to all tetrapod life if that happens, probably – no lizards no birds no rats.  But I suspect there are plants that will do well enough, even in a world that reaches a hundred sixty in the summer, choking in fire every year until the last scrap of tinder is mingled in deserts of ash.  The poles will not be quite that hardcore, some cool weeds will probably stick around and wait for a chance to spring back.  That will give a foothold for some insects and some kind of tetrapods.

If humans are lucky in all that, we’ll be living in tightly controlled environments with smaller populations.  Maybe underground.  We’ll be living off of vat-farmed algae and recycled garbage.  But what I’m most curious about in this moment of detachment is this – what animals will be the best survivors?  Who will be the lizards and bugs and weirdos that scrap back, diversify and repopulate the Earth?  If we’re lucky enough to still have dinosaurs, who will they be?  Ducks and chickens pulled off this feat once before, I bet they could do it again.

For the comments, I’d like to see people placing their bets on what animals survive this mess.  I, for one, believe that humans will be one of those animals – for good or ill.  But aside from eyebrow lice and gut flora, who will we be sharing the world with?

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Eating Genesis Pi

Genesis 3:14:  And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life.

Injustice that calls itself justice, hatred that calls itself love, is foundational to the abrahamic faiths.  The serpent in the garden was a cartoon villain with no motivation but the joy of evil itself, taking the text at face value, but any cursory examination of the events of the stories as written exonerates all villains save god himself.  Of course he made the serpent to love evil, made men and women to be curious, and so on.

And as abrahamic faiths are foundational to western civilization, the injustice is baked into who we are and how we do.  Poor people deserve to suffer because whatever people have or lack in life is according to his will, is “just” by divine fiat.  We must have done something wrong to deserve this.

I am put in mind of all this because today my ramen noodles smelled and tasted like cigarette ash.  Having smelled that, why did I proceed to eat them (with a lot of butter and salt added)?  I didn’t want the ramen to go to waste and I’d already added the packet by the time I smelled it.  I thought about why I’m eating cigarette ramen.

Maybe somebody rich is adulterating ramen with literal garbage just for spite.  Or maybe some poor filipino working in a ramen factory, knowing he’s gonna die in economic hell and unable to do anything else, tipped an ash tray into the flavor packets, knowing it would find decadent western mouths, and fuck those guys.  I won’t blame the worker, as shit a thing as that is to do.  I blame the global system built on exploitation, making us poor folks as cruel as what the rich have given us.

And capitalism, as much as it runs contrary to the hippy shit young jeezy preached, is a perfect piece with the justice that runs through most of the bible.  I’m a serpent, I’m gonna eat my dust all the days of my life.  Or maybe I’ll rise to the middle class, where I can eat chaff instead, and rain dust upon my lessers with a sense of righteousness.  All is as it should be on god’s earth.

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EDIT to add:  I’m living on my belly as well – more crippled this week than I’ve ever been in my life from throwing my back out.  Had to miss 3 days of work.  I turn 45 in a few days, so I probably got another 45 years of this worsening to look forward to.  It’s OK tho, I’m cool.

Ending Quarantine, Bound by a Death Cult

Past a certain point in the USA, holdout businesses and agencies are going to need to end their quarantines, even in places with low vaccination rates, where it will result in contagion and death.  A certain amount of americans have chosen ignorance and the risk of death – to themselves and others – that it carries.  We’re stuck together in this country.  Most of us do not have the means to emigrate, would not be allowed into many other countries due to our national antivax rep, nor allowed to stay due to local xenophobic policies that mirror our own.

We’re stuck together and that means we’re really over a barrel.  There are some things we cannot force on other people, any more than the US could force itself on Vietnam or Afghanistan.  If fashy freaks don’t want to participate in a public health project even to save the lives of them and their own, we cannot make them.  We cannot try to protect them from themselves forever.  It’s just not feasible.

At some point, we must embrace the horrible status quo.  Sufficient numbers of people want their grandparents, parents, husband and wives, themselves offered up as a plague sacrifice to their orange god, and they can make it happen.  Just like they can make getting a simple ID practically impossible in the pursuit of vote suppression, they can make vax carding illegal, or make enforcement unfeasible.  We cannot control them, cannot control this, and some crucial public services cannot remain limited like they are now.

It’s time to reopen the government offices (yes, many are still closed right now, even in texas), wear masks all day long if we have to, get used to this reality.  Trump-style virtue-signalling won’t die until the last trumpist dies, probably around the time coral goes extinct and the US midwest is the new Sahara desert.  Many of us will be alive to see that.  Looking forward to the death of qanon-type shit, not looking forward to the time that will drive in those coffin nails.

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I Hate Nature

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

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

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The Privilege They Believe – Class Privilege

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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