I Think I’m Slowly Getting Over Myself. The Operative Word Is Slowly. 

Keep liking the horny posts of that girl who doesn't follow me back. Eventually she'll fall in love with me. Yeah.

I don't think anybody but spam bots be following me but...

If you're real. Let me know.

That sudden peace and drive safe was me be being lazy as fuck. 

God damn it.

Maybe I'm doing something right.

Maybe.

I don't fucking know though.

You feel me?

Can't even dress it up.

Anything that ever worked wasn't cuz of the white boy in me.

I wanna mean that.

Loosely connected thoughts.

Back to the lab again.

Just tryin' to live.

She told me, "May you find your worth in the waking world."

I picked up the controller again.

She shook her head and insisted I had learned what I needed to learn.

The waking world.

Back to the world.

To try and live.

Ordinary man.

Trying to live.

That's all.

The problem with school is that it doesn't teach you to be a human being.

Introduction

My name is not important in any way. If I’ve linked you to this blog, then you know my name. If you do know my name, then for some reason, I think you’re capable of handling this. 

Shit. I’m reading over the above paragraph and it’s so lame, right? What the fuck am I ever gonna write here that’s so earth shaking? 

I suppose I’ve had a lot to grapple with in this life. One of those things is a harsh truth. I’m nobody. There are other things too. Life is boring. It’s dumb. It’s scary. Mostly, it’s just boring. It leaves me feeling restless. 

I get older and I get more restless, ya dig? 

I’m a lazy son of a bitch. 

I’ve wasted a lot of my life. 

I got this need though. I said need. I didn’t say love. I got a need to put words to a page. I got a need to play with language. I got a need to write. I don’t love it though. I hate this shit. It frustrates me. It pisses me the fuck off. It makes me want to scream. It makes me want to put my fist through a fucking wall. If I’m not trying to do it though, I just don’t feel right. 

In fact, I can feel myself calming down as I write this. I don’t feel like I’m just wasting. 

It’s unfortunate but I’ll never be famous. I’ll never be rich. I’ll be average looking but I’ll be wise. I’ll have bore witness. Bearing witness to what I see is something that’s important to me. You can laugh. You can scoff but the idea of bearing witness is sacred to me. 

Part of the reason this exists is cowardice. Actually, maybe cowardice isn’t the right word but I’m usually not too gentle on myself. I’m freer with my expression if said expression is not tied to my slave name. Aight. Maybe slave name is a little dramatic but ya know, there is some truth there. If i’m not worried about reputation or about people sending me messages that they are praying for me, then I express myself more freely. So, there is slavery to reputation and to capital. Capital got us all by the naughty bits, ya dig? I get paranoid about something making me less employable. Look, I’m probably never paying the bills with this shit. I know this. I know what it’s like to struggle to find a day job. Let me tell you, that can fuck with you. 

So, it’s between you, me and the NSA. 

There will be navel gazing. There will be laughs. There will be tears. There will be stuff that works and stuff that doesn’t. There will be poems, prose, jokes maybe. 

Thanks for reading. 

Random embarrassing fact #1

When I was in high school, I used to play this game on the Internet called Harsh Lands. It was a MUD. Basically, it was this text based medieval game world with a heavy emphasis on in-character roleplaying. You stayed in-character. You talked like your character at all times no matter what. You did what your character did. My character was this deeply religious warrior who rose to the rank of Master Sergeant in The Tashal Watch. The Watch was the organization in charge of keeping the peace in the city of Tashal which was the largest city in the Kingdom of Kaldor as I recall. I was the highest ranking player character lawman so I was basically the law in that city. After I retired that character, I played a thug/enforcer type who was a member of the Lia Kavair. The Lia Kavair were basically a medieval Mafia. They were a den of thieves, assassins, racketeers. My character roughed people up who needed roughing up, extorted people, menaced people and on one occasion even killed someone. I remember spending a lot of time ruminating on this character's guilt for having taken a life to the point where I made myself pretty much a wreck in real life. I should mention something about death in this game. Death was permanent. If you died, there was no coming back and starting over after losing some gear or whatever. You were dead. As you can imagine, that made shit pretty intense at times. This sounds nerdy and dumb and it was but it was incredibly fun to collaborate with other people and create stories.

Further thoughts on Alex Vitale's The End of Policing

A few summers back, some cops got killed in Dallas. That summer had hate in the air. The Trumpian demon was waiting in the wings. I remember seeing a friend of a friend on Facebook express anger that the people who protect us were under attack. The idea that the police protect us is an idea almost nobody questions. If we're not questioning it, we're high on something.

Alex Vitale in The End of Policing tells us a bit about the origin of what we know as the police. Sir Robert Peel who started the London Metropolitan Police developed his ideas while he was managing the British colonial occupation of Ireland. That is crucially important to know. The origins of one of the most influential police agencies was in oppression. Peel took what he learned about social control on a foreign shore home with him. This illustrates one of the many troubles with the monster that is imperialism. Let's apply that to the U.S. What we learn about keeping a population down in Fallujah, Iraq comes home and is used in places like Ferguson, Baltimore and Bedford-Stuyvesant. That is the ugly truth of it. It's the truth that we cannot ignore. The U.S. is a society of savage inequality. The police are there as managers of that inequality. They are there to impose the order of the haves on the have-nots. This is true regardless of how many videos go viral with a cop lip synching to a Taylor Swift song or how many photos are shown on the evening news of an officer hugging a black child. I see blatant propaganda like that and it makes me want to fucking puke.

I reflect on the propaganda of my youth and it's enough to make my brain nearly self-destruct. I remember D.A.R.E. A clean-cut, white-skinned officer of the law with a gun visited my school every week. He led the class in an anti-drug cheer. He told us that people who used drugs were losers. I sure as fuck did not want to be a loser so I resolved never to use drugs. I did not touch a drug until I was almost halfway into my 30s. I suppose it is a tough thing to broach with kids but do you know what was absent from Officer Friendly's lectures about drugs? The sociological reasons that fuel pathological drug use. Guess what, children? When the factory that paid a decent wage closed, a bunch of people found solace from their misery in heroin or meth or something else. The shit was bad but it took away the pain. We did not get told about any of that. We got told to choose baseball or ballet instead of a joint and that was the end of it. Do people fuck up their lives? Sure they do, but you cannot overestimate the importance of individual acts or "moral failings." It seems that the political will to address the pain that causes people to fall into drug abuse simply does not exist. What does exist in ample supply is the impulse to throw cops at the problem and to build massive prisons to warehouse the people who have been left behind by the system.

So, what the hell do we do? The bitch of it all for me is realizing that we simply cannot just manage inequality. That's a bitch to realize because managing inequality is all that the people with power wish to do. We've got to address inequality. That means public housing, education, healthcare. It means the transformation of our society. Something has to give. I truly fear for this country. I believe inequality will grow worse under the regime of Donald Trump and policing will grow more heavy-handed.

Idea

So... 

I’ve been thinking about reflecting on The Purge films that I’ve seen and basically writing about them as they relate to the world that produced them. 

How qualified am I to do that? Not very. 

I believe this could be an interesting exercise for me. I would like to do something other than navel-gazing and quick angry political rants. 

Obviously, there has been a lot of commentary on these movies by people that likely possess more insight than me.

I’ve seen The Purge: Anarchy and The Purge: Election Year so far. At first, these movies kinda repulsed me. However, the near-future world of these movies started to intrigue me. I believe there is kind of a clumsy sort of wokeness in these films that is worth exploring.  

As far as cinematic universes go, this is one of the more intriguing ones to me. 

Sorry I can’t come to the phone right now 

I’m stuck at the precise moment 

where I realize 

she ain’t comin’ back 

when it hits me that it’s gonna be one of those days 

where somebody gonna tell you Job had it harder 

and that does as much for you 

as thoughts and prayers do 

when they’re pickin’ up the shell casings 

after somebody got done with one of those lives. 

Stuck at the exact moment 

I realize that maybe what I did 

is re-write a shitty U2 song. 

Please leave a detailed message after the tone 

and maybe I’ll call you back.