Memes are Dead

I remember before it was general knowledge that literal neo-nazis were the chief purveyors of pepe memes, when we’d pass them around on tumblr like fucken clowns.  Anyway, the Department Of Government Efficiency is absofuckinglutely named after the same meme as elron’s crypto rugpull “dogecoin.”  It is.  It is a massive “fuck you” to all the innocent summer children of internet foolery past, that hey, look, you helped this happen.  This is always what it was about.  Soft-pedaling the death of democracy.

The thought had crossed my mind the first time I saw a news article about it, but like so many things in the era of Fascist Deathclown AmeriKKKa, I didn’t even know whether to believe the article was real, or a joke.  So it took a few days to sink in, days during which I may have posted a meme or two.  Like earlier this week.  I think, no more.  Gonna figure out a different way to be on the internet, in my remaining time here.

No more memes.  The nazis dug up that cheezburger cat and crucified him on the whitehouse lawn.  Matt Furie’s frog ripped his skin off and sunk his carcass in a peat bog.  Somebody once told me the shrek theme guys headlined a superspreader event in the heart of the pandemic.  The doge is a government entity devoted to killing poor people through “austerity” policies.  Any hope for gradual change to a better USA and a better world is triple fucking dead right now, and irony is the weapon that killed it.

Memes served a purpose for those of us who aren’t soulless nazi fucks, and not sure what we’ll replace them with.  Well, I’m probably the only person in the world that is going to hew to this policy, so I’m not sure what I’ll replace them with.  I’ll figure it out.

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Gaslight Ghetto

I’ve had the strange experience a few times in recent years of mentioning my childhood poverty to another person and their response making me feel gaslit, like what am I remembering wrong?  For example, mentioning I have lived in a few housing projects and homeless shelters, and them asking which ones, and then…  I don’t remember the names, barely remember the locations.  I wasn’t living in them for long enough to identify with them, to see that as my “hood,” get to know the other kids there.  We’d be kicked out or otherwise shuffled along to our next flophouse before that could happen.  My father helped me fill in a few of these details, but he didn’t remember all of it either.

So to gird myself for this situation in the future, I’m trying to remember everything about my childhood that wouldn’t be too creepy to tell.  Maybe some of those things too, with appropriate content warnings?  Here we go…

Content Warnings:  Violence Against Animals, Animal Death, Description of Poverty, Mention of Parasites and Pests, Child Abuse, Child Neglect, Child Injury, Children in the Context of Sexual Things (but no CSA mentioned in this one), Racial Tension, Drug and Alcohol Abuse, Marital Infidelity, Teen Pregnancy, Vomiting, Terminal Illness, A Man Dying Young, Mental Illness, Generational Abuse.

This will take more than one post and include details that don’t have to do with the poverty itself, just me trying to remember what I can before it slips any further into the void.  For this post, I’ll lay out what I can recall of the chain of places I’ve lived. [Read more…]

Thanksgiving

As the divisions within this country deepen, some middle-of-the-road seem to have given up and said “sigh, guess we’re all nazis now,” and trudge dutifully through their lives.  But will they feel motivated to go to thanksgiving, with gloating cheerful white-haired fascists carving up the bird?  And of those who had been tolerating it thus far, how many of them will find it now fully unbearable to look into the eyes of the heartless fucking pieces of shit in their families who are making this hellworld possible?

I’m just sayin’.  Thanksgiving and subsequently xmas, they might be a little more lonely this year for you nasty fuckers.  Taste it.

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Tradescantia

Tradescantia is a genus of “flowering herbaceous” viney things that include a number of popular houseplants.  Because they creep around your room if you let them, and probably some medieval nonsense, it was called “wandering jew” for a very long time.  But have you heard the new hotness?  People are calling it “wandering dude,” and it’s taking over!  You can see the new name all over tha plant web now.  That’s progress, babes.

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Give More of Yourself

I don’t know if this has always been true but people, in general, are very stingy with themselves.  Attention, interest, affection, sympathy, friendship, assistance… Anything positive we can do for each other, we tend to give less than we can.  I would like to take pains here to be very clear that the people most likely to read this and think, “oh no, it’s me!  i suck!” are probably not the people I’m talking about.  The people that are like this – most of us – are inattentive or ungenerous in ways that we don’t notice.

My last two jobs have involved helping people, which aroused a sense in me that this is what I have to do.  One can work at walmart and put in the bare minimum effort, and honestly, you probably should.  They don’t fucken pay you enough.  But you are in a position where sometimes a desperate sad-ass person will want something that you can actually provide, or at least do enough to take the edge off the situation.  The sense of reward isn’t some rad dopamine hit or smug warmth that filleth thy cup.  It’s more like, you saw somebody bleeding and slapped a band-aid on them, and now, at least until the band-aid wears out, there’s less bleeding in the environment.

It’s not nothing, and it is necessary.  People that can do things for other people should do things for other people.  It’s how this social species is supposed to work.  If you got nothin’, ok, disregard.  But if the thought hasn’t crossed your mind, and on reflection, you think maybe you could be doing more?  Do more.  Let this be your permission.

You do not have to go out of your way for it.  Opportunities to help people will find you.  This sounds like I’m talking about helping the needy, and that’s part of it, but there’s a much bigger one that is in front of most of us everyday, all the time.  That’s just being sociable.

You aren’t obliged to be friendliness champion of the world, not obliged to do anything weird.  What I’ve noticed is that the most basic niceties of conversation and companionship are egregiously lacking from our interactions.  Like, somebody says “I watched a movie this weekend,” and you don’t say, “What movie was it?,” you just leave them hanging in that weird space.

If they’re immune to noticing insult, they might carry on, but if they’re not, it’s “Well fuck me” on the inside.  You don’t have to give a shit what movie they watched to just do the bit with them.  And who knows?  You might find out something funny or diverting.  At least, you will not have made a person feel like they don’t or shouldn’t exist.

I got a few half-assed friends, and I don’t want to tell them to fuck off, but they don’t have anything for me unless I have something for them.  Like, they literally don’t want to hang out with me unless we’re doing the one specific thing they want to do with me.  Don’t wanna play a video game, don’t wanna watch a movie, don’t even want to chit-chat about the weather.  What’s up with that?

Humans are like pokemons that say their name, “pika pika.”  We start conversations to assert our presence in a space, like, look fellow humans, I am a human here as well.  When people don’t reciprocate adequately, it feels kinda shit.  This is part of our “loneliness epidemic.”  Nobody wants to take half a fuckin second to say, “tell me about it, bob.”

I’m not even talking about the little old guy that’ll yard your ear off.  We won’t even do this for more than a few seconds with our peers, right in front of us.  It’s kinda weird.  Some amount of this may be social anxiety.  Social anxiety, on the other hand, may be a result sometimes of never learning how to do this, or falling out of practice with it.  Socialization, they call it, when talking about puppies and kittens.  We need that too.  We need to learn how to not go through life alienating ourselves from everybody, wondering why we’re alone at the end of the day.

When we’re better able to look at other people as full humans with all the feelings and importance that we ourselves possess, we’ll be better able to make mutual aid happen, make durable social institutions that can succeed where liberal “democracy” has failed.  Figure out how to stop spinning alone in your hamster wheel and squeak with each other.  It’s time.

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Western WA Birders Help…

There’s this stretch of 320th Street in Federal Way, a bit east of I-5, just business parks trees and gas stations.  Probably just a bit out of sight is water – tiny plots of wetland maintained by the city, maybe a little lake?  I don’t know the neighborhood that well, but I pass through it a lot.

Anyway, for the second time I have seen these birds I cannot identify.  It’s hard to get a good look at them when driving past, even from my spot in the passenger seat.  I see them flying over the street or near it, thirty to sixty feet up, in a tight formation of several birds.  Colorwise and regionwise, I would assume glaucous-winged gull.  After all, just west of the highway at the mall, they’re so numerous that I imagine they’re nesting.  These are very white birds.  I feel like a glimpsed just a little streak of black from the coverts or the body.

But their wings are too short, their wingbeats too fast.  Not waterfowl fast, but close.  Maybe they fly more like big gulls when they get to higher altitude.  Still, they have me so flummoxed I looked up all the waterfowl with white bodies.  My views of them have been so fleeting I think it’s possible I missed a dark head or legs.  But all the significantly white ducks have too much black on their wings, couldn’t be them.

I’ve even thought, a flock of white pigeons?  They are smaller than glaucous-winged gulls, but I think still too large to be pigeons.  After all that, I am thinking they are one of the smaller gull species, like ring-billed.  I can’t rule out tern, but again, don’t most terns have very long wings?

The reason I was so specific with the location is that if, by chance, an expert birder remembers driving through that spot, and what they saw there, this might be an easy answer.  If I can’t work it out, I’m just going to have to commit a day of my life to camping out at the side of a busy road with the hobos, and watching the sky.

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You Had the Surgery? Paper Doll Edition

I had a consciousness-raising experience about transgender people shortly after age thirty.  I don’t think I was a complete shit before that, but did have a few embarrassing missteps along the path.  I’ve always watched people around me more than I should, and during that time I started noticing whenever a person was androgynous or trans, and wondering, what’s that person got in their pants*?  Classic wildly offensive goof, which mostly had the self-awareness to stay unspoken.

But this instinct was reawakened in me by an image set on tumblr, from an anime called Oniisama E…, or Dear Brother….  For some reason, there are girls in that show drawn with the proportions of androgenized bods.  Broad shoulders, narrow hips, tall faces that make a forehead look short, strong chin, no visible breasts most of the time…  These are the idolized glamorous older girls too, not shunned weirdos.  And in the haze of this creepy terfesque genital obsession, I asked these paper dolls if they’d had, you know, the surgery..?

The answer is no, near as I can tell without watching the whole series and translating Japanese fan wikis.  One of them gets breast cancer in high school (u got spoiled!  as if you care lol).  They’re cis-girls, in that universe.  If somebody felt like watching the whole thing with the assumption they are trans in mind and doing the queer critical lens thing, that might be a diverting experiment.

I asked chat j’ai pété about it, and it said the original manga writer was inspired by the Takarazuka Revue, which seemed the opposite of what I’d expect to be the reason.  Also, the drawings from the original comic did not seem as fully masculine as the ones in the animated adaptation.  So, a hallucination, it seems.

Do any of you know if there’s a cultural reason why these anime cis girls look so non-passingly trans?  I don’t get the impression my comment section is bubbling with otaku energies, but I might as well crowd-source my curiosity.  This article isn’t the best showcase for it, but the cartoon looks very beautiful, which may be why it gripped me.  One of the less manly girls looks like Sean Young in Bladerunner, but they’re all very cute.  Never dubbed or subbed in English, so it slips away.

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*I think the vast majority of trans people will never, very seldom, or only situationally pass as cis, so the idea of passing as the singular goal of transition – the only fix for dysphoria – is harmful, even if it’s understandable that many of us are obsessed with it.

But still, even pretty hip people can be fooled hard by human androgyny.  I had a high school teacher with no breasts, an adam’s apple, and a deep cleft chin – who got pregnant and carried that baby to term.  Intersex but still functional, or just nature flexing on us?  I dunno.  Likewise, during my creepy shifty-eyed time, I had taken a skinny lady with an angular face as probably trans, and a few years later saw the same lady pregnant.

Most of the time you aren’t going to get a big tell like that, so you gotta learn to quell that curiosity when it arises.  I did it; you can too.

Just Don’t Like his Face

if nature could finish the job on the scrotum elect, i wouldn’t mind.  i’d sure appreciate it.  as incompetent as he is, him staying alive is probably the least worst scenario at this point.  but i’d take competently evil replacements over him, just to not have to see his face or hear his voice ever again.  just to see every single reference to him be in past tense, damn, that would feel like a hit of ecstasy every time i saw it.  i feel the lack of that in my life right now.  c’mon.  just a tiny taste, i’ll never ask for anything else as long as i live.

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Sexy Pew Pew

You ever hear Sex Shooter, by Apollonia 6?  No?  I’m sorry, but now we must all experience it together.

This is profoundly unsexy and awkward.  I fucking love it.  It’s so funny to me.

These aren’t outfits, they’re underwear.  They’re wearing panty hose under their lingerie.  The side girls look like office ladies.

OK, I’ve got a bit of an “everyday people fetish” so the office ladies are a little hot, but still.  This whole production is embarrassing.  I like how lead girl is aiming for Marilyn Monroe but just coming out like she’s got a respiratory abnormality and needs to see an ENT.

She exhorts us to sing along.  Can you fucking imagine?  What crowd anywhere in the world would want to sing these lyrics back to the girls?  The fail, the cringe.  It’s adorable.  It feels like Rebecca Black trying to be cool.  I love you, pathetic girls.  I hope you’re in a better place now.

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EDIT:  Found out a little more.  Apparently these people were all wildly successful for being sexy and cool.  Who knew?  Lead singer there dated David Lee Roth and Prince, and starred in Purple Rain.  Skinny girl dated Prince and other famous dudes.  They are actually all singers, not just dancers or models…  This production really hinders the glamor, that’s for sure.

Incidentally, the song was written by Prince and he recorded a version of it, haha.  They can’t all be winners.