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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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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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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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.
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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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.
This is a post that sat not-quite-finished in my drafts since before October, dusted off because I am done with my “hope” series. That’s not to say I’m going doom, just that my big push is over. I will try to include a silver or at least grey lining in all future posts on dire topics. If you missed any of my hope articles and want to check them out, I had at least one a day between 11/6 and 11/16. Oh 2024, what a time…
Anyway, the same old shit, back to one post most days:
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The massive fuckboyism of organized atheism has put me off the brand completely. You won’t catch me saying “atheist and proud,” because how can I be? Don’t come up in my comments begging for a list of the dozens of famous atheists that have turned out to be shitbirds. The movement itself was a contributing factor to the rise of reactionary fascism, and while FtB types should feel good about how we conducted ourselves since Deep Rifts 2.0, most of us were part of the problem for a decade leading up to it.*
But I do hate jeezis an awful lot. If hate could power telekinesis, I’d have accidentally caused a few million in property destruction over the years. I see a bus go by with the name of some vile religious fake charity, youth group, church, or whatever? One devil claw in the side, scraping through the words as it passes by. Billboards in flames. Church facades in rubble.
I’ve long thought the origin of American fiction’s love for underdogs has to do with our national narrative of rebellious colonies, but realized today it’s apiece with the way jeezis fans here will imagine themselves oppressed, and that can be traced all the way back to the origin of xtianity** itself. Why in fuck did the Romans adopt the religion of some Hebrews – people they’d colonized and oppressed?
It’s because of that dramatic story in Exodus, and the reiteration of the same theme in jeezy’s story – wanting to play the brave victim. It captured imaginations. More importantly, it somehow gave license to people with all the power in the world to feel like they were oppressed courageous fighters for that one special truth.
Religion in general promotes and protects itself with truth claims no matter where it’s found, but these narratives of oppression have a unique appeal which has given the abrahamic faiths potent recruiting power – especially xtianity. Jewish and Muslim people aren’t mine to talk about, but xtians are. They spread jeezix germs nowadays with tears for the magic suffering boy (and voter suppression and using collection plate money to fund the legalized murder of gay people abroad).
Look at what you did, sinners. You made the magic boy cry. And when you accept him into your hearts, you can feel the empowerment of that suffering. His performative victimhood is yours! For just $9.99 a month (which we will use to prop up conservatives that help us launder more money and eviscerate the social programs on which so many of you depend).
Jesus is my enemy. Progressive and liberal xtians aren’t necessarily my enemies, but if they see me talking like this and take it that way? Fine. Your boy is shit. He’s an excuse to feel oppressed in a culture where your fellows in faith have control of nearly everything, to feel justified in persecuting anybody who can’t or won’t fall in line with your fables.
If xtianity was truly a good thing, it wouldn’t still hold a concept of hell, wouldn’t separate the saved from the damned. It would just give to everyone, and take nothing in return.*** It can’t pretend to. If jesus the superghost exists, and christianity is his will, then he can be held to account for so many crimes, enormous and small. Not a day goes by that somebody isn’t victimized in his name. This entire nation is about to get reamed by his holeyness.
He’s in my head because I’m culturally xtian. Even if I’ve never believed, I absorbed the lessons of misogyny and homophobia and islamophobia from the culture he controls, and they made me do bad things, made me harm myself, made me harm others – or at least annoy them.
Progressives can quote all the parts of the bible where magic boy is not being hot trash, but conservatives have the veto of cultural dominance. Your version of jeezis has never held sway over the masses. The one in control demands human sacrifice and is already drinking that tithe of blood and souls from those who died waiting for an abortion.
I’d crucify him again just for that.
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*It’s funny that slymer bitch “nunyabiznis” is Xitting that we should feel bad for making him a fascist. Fucko, the only thing we should feel bad about is that we were rubbing elbows with you up until the soup went down. The movement was always ableism and islamophobia with a progressive gloss. In our own separate ways, we’ve both figured that out, and are now living our truths. It’s not our fault if your truth makes it hard for you to look in a mirror.
**I get that x can stand for jesus, hence xmas and xianity. I just think xtianity sounds better, but honestly I’m up on the air for what I should call this dogshit what I’ve been stewing in. I don’t want to call it by the name it wants for itself.
***It’s a low bar to clear but I’m holier than that, giving help to people regardless of political persuasion, nine to five – for less money than I’d need to pay my mortgage by myself! I’m one accident away from disaster, as most of us are, but I’m still putting myself out – even to utter fucking bastards – for this pittance. Back of the line, jesus. I’m numba one! Seriously, fuck you!
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Does this post need a silver lining? Maybe. Most of us are not women whose lives depend on an abortion in the Midwest or south, not gay people in Uganda, so most of us will be fine – just sad, is all. Whoever you are or however much risk you personally endure, take care of each other and take care of yourselves, comrades. I love you!
Note: I’ve been queuing serious posts as part of my Hope Series for 6:30 AM Eastern time, and a frivolous one like this for 9:30 AM as a chaser. I mention this because you may have missed previous entries. There is one per day for every day from 11/6-today, whereupon the series ends. Check ’em out.
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my husband turned me onto this weird neglected 80s band. they got on the label of that eurhythmics dude, got as much promotion as anybody could hope for at that level, but never got anywhere. they probably made a bank full of money when annie lennox covered this one tho. the whole album this one is on, it’s kind of a ride. a concept album? i just love the pretentious dracula weirdness. i really like it a lot, i don’t know how to express the feeling. also, a bare booty ass on yewchoob, because sufficiently film grained. enjoy.
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This is the end of my Hope Series, in the wake of the Likely Death of Democracy. I’ve been queuing these posts for 6:30 AM Eastern time and a frivolous link post for 9:30 AM as a chaser. I mention this because you may have missed previous entries. There is one per day for every day from 11/6-11/16. Check ’em out.
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You may have seen a video recently where I said I want to see the equivalent of a “shadow government” for every aspect of life. I want to buy shadow groceries at the shadow 7-11. I want to see shadow movies at the shadow theater, eating shadow popcorn and drinking shadow coke. With my shadow homies, Sheisty Pete and Nefarious Gonzalez.
Off topic, but how about Shadow… run? In that TTRPG there were cyberboyz with something called a “monofilament whip,” which was sooo sharp it could slice through anything. They had to keep it in a slice-proof little spool case like deadly dental floss. It raised similar questions to the omnipotence of god – can there be a filament so mono that it can cut itself? Would it turn into mono-confetti if you rattled your floss box?
Sorry, this is the last post of my “reasons for hope” series, so I should really be more serious.
OK a shadow government is where people are like, let’s actually run this joint because the official guys aren’t it. Pretty quickly we will not be able to rely on the federal government for much. The more “evil genius” of the coterie of ghouls waiting in the wings of the oval office will probably opt for a gradualism where the public won’t notice what they’ve lost until it’s gone, so I don’t expect Social Security to get shut off instantly, for example. But it will get worse, as will every government service we rely on. So. Shadow government.
I do think good state governments will help a lot, but we will be better off with more self-sufficiency. I nominate the university system to be the first system to get Shadow’d.
SHADOW UNIVERSITIES
The U system is a dead system walking. The vast majority of professors are academic hobos who can barely afford mouthwash, while administrators snort coke off gold-plated toilets with israeli ambassadors. I know the people who still are hanging on doing the best they can are doing the best they can, but.
Let’s get stronger systems in place for giving anybody whatever education they may desire, for free, under the table, out of the back of a rusty van with dealer plates, in a haunted stretch of Interstate 99. Or the internet, whichever works better. This would require a number of things to work.
First, an incentive. The current U system uses the rotten carrot of adequately paying jobs as reward for million dollar debts. The shadow system would have… what? Shadow prestige, I think. God, I’d heap laurels on a good shadow professor, for what those are worth. Sexual favors too, if my husband allowed it, haha.
Second, it needs a way for professors to get by in a pursuit with no recompense. You know, a lot of academic hobos / adjuncts are hard-pressed to get enough hours to pay rent, so they do have some free time. Not all of them, but enough to support this endeavor? Maybe. Third, it needs resources, for lab work and such. Well, meth labs exist. We can figure it out if they can, although we have less money.
Fourth and by no means least, it needs at least a virtual classroom. I think, maybe internet forums? They’d be subject to getting disappeared instantly by crapitalism, but with frequent backups, you might be able to slide under the radar for years and survive a few fires, y’know? Anyway, it would need a lot more than what I’ve discussed, but I hope what I’ve done is get a conversation going.
SHADOW SOCIAL SECURITY
Well, everybody who isn’t lost in the bullshit blizzard of media created by fascist billionaires knows that the rethuglicans want all social programs dead, dead, dead. This is just a matter of time. The only solution for this is something that people from more collectivist cultures have been doing for ages: family and community associations. In the West we used to have some things like this as well, but those institutions were eroded or violently taken out, in order to reduce us to rugged individualists who scrabble in the dirt until we die.
How do we rebuild something so completely fucking gone from our civilization? Ya got me, chief. But if we did, these groups could do things like care for the old and disabled, when all the mainstream gov institutions fail. They can also pool resources, get young people jobs, provide physical protection when the community is threatened…
SHADOW MEDICAL SYSTEM
This already exists, and it is fundamentally bad. Remember Sally Fields talking about how she was molested during her Tijuana abortion? This is what we’re dealing with. But. I imagine the right kind of activists could improve it. This would be fundamentally more expensive than anything on the list. Shadow Social Security might help pay for some of it, but it might just need to be a kind of altruistic organized crime – straight up stealing medical supplies.
I don’t know, but it would be cool if, in some place where health care is all owned by the catholic church (much of the USA) or ruined by forced-birthers, there was recourse for health care that wouldn’t end in molestation or stolen kidneys.
SHADOW 911
Be nice to have somebody you could call to help with a rough situation where deadly force would be completely off the table. Because 911 is tied to the pigs, even asking for an ambulance can get you twitchy overpaid nazis with guns. I don’t want to discourage people from calling who they need to in an emergency right now, even with some amount of associated risk, but I do wish we had more alternatives.
SHADOW IRS
The tax system should be used to pay for the betterment of all, but it’s mostly a vacuum suck to the military industrial complex and other horrifying corrupt entities. Not saying you shouldn’t pay your taxes because unfortunately that’s how things like Social Security are funded, but it’d be nice to be able to pitch some money into a fund you know will help your people. I guess this gets back to the community groups I mentioned in Shadow Social Security.
SHADOW ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY
There are a lot of people making art for little to no recompense, just to be heard, to express something, whatever their reason. Corporate art has glimmers of brilliance that it squeezes out of the tortured bodies and minds of exploited artists. Fuck the big five book publishers, fuck Diamond Comic Distributors, fuck the fine arts community and its incestuous relationship with extreme wealth, fuck the RIAA to death, fuck Netflix, fuck Disney, fuck Time-Warner-AOL-Nestle-Mars-DuPont-Halliburton.
We need better systems for supporting indies, but more importantly for big projects, like competing with hollywood, we need better ways to have artists collaborate without exploitation. It’s hard as hell because we’re such a chaotic bunch, but it could happen. I can envision a better series of action-adventure movies than anything Disney could shit out, made with cardboard and computers, real writers, and a genuine vision. I don’t know how yet, but I swear we could do this.
A good aim would be an indie soap opera. Drama students and out of work dinner theater actors of the world, unite! I want you to make compelling telenovelas for release on yewchoob or dailymotion or thepiratebay or thumb drives in manila envelopes and dark alleys. It’s high time you got to answer your calling without a rapist’s casting couch in the way.
ORGANIZED CRIME
Technically speaking, even if these things were 100% altruistic and well executed, they would be criminal organizations. Worse still, any institution that is not allowed to function in daylight is going to attract exploitation from the actual organized crime. There are some who say the mafia is a community group that helps people get employed and defends when the community is under attack, all that stuff, but at the end of the day? Protection rackets, drugs, sex trafficking, murder. Bad shit, and any shadow org is going to attract some involvement of criminals like that.
There are no perfect solutions to a situation that is fundamentally bad, and I don’t have any solid ideas on how to make these things happen. But it’s time to start trying again. We have a lot of work to do. We won’t have it all, won’t be safe or secure in what we do get, but we can get a better deal than the fascists are going to give us, if we make it happen ourselves.
It’s worth a shot.
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With that, my Hope Series is ended. Regular random content continuing tomorrow…
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remember when i posted about lovage? here’s a video by them, in kinda wretched quality, but it’s what we have. jennifer charles is the singer here, in this video about being a bisectional gal on the hunt. look at her hairstyle, her whole presentation. it’s designed to look like she just got out of bed after orgy night. she’s greasy in a way lesbians seem to love. fantastic.
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