Sans Seraph

Category: Uncategorized

  • Down to speed

    Well, once again, it’s been a while. There hasn’t been much time to write or do anything other than what has to be done for a while, but I’m currently being blocked from doing what I wanted to do while the new house gets some HVAC work done, so I figure it’s high time I updated this blog.

    Things have been changing faster than I think I’ve ever experienced before. Old relationships ended, new ones began, and yes, I said the new house as I’ve moved in with my two partners and we are busy fixing up all the things in this fixer-upper that need fixer-upper-ing. It’s the first decent bit of rain we’ve had since spring, and I’m sitting in my new room. It’s cozy, despite the sound of holes being drilled in the wall below me.

    On my side of the bed is a sky light, angled up toward the great gray void above me. I so much despise this time of year, but with how fast and how much has happened the past five months or so, I don’t mind looking at it. There are shapes in the clouds, undulating, roiling, wet. The wind is picking up and the gray blanket is being drug along with it, as merciless as I feel against the tide I’m swept up in.

    I’ve followed my heart here, into the shelter of what the three of us call “our idiot house” because I believe that the three of us are so much better together than apart. We have so many dreams of the future, and despite all of the trials we’ve faced, and continue to face, we all share a love so deep that even on the coldest nights you can’t help but feel warmed by it. Every day we inch closer to achieving the dream of just being together, and then, when you stand back, look beyond the chaos, you realize “holy shit, I’m there. What a wild place to be.” I need to remember that more, but it’s something I’m working on.

    This year’s burn was amazing. I got to work very closely with my artist friend, who I absolutely adore, and love, and help him make something very important to him. I am so infinitely proud to have been a part of that. I also got to spend the week with one of my partners, and show her the playa the way I see it. I hope (know) that it changed her mind about my favorite little desert planet. I cannot wait to return next year with both of them, and my own art.

    If i had to describe my general feeling from this time, it is equal parts exhaustion and hope. I do not know if it is age, or being out of shape, or how frustrating my job is, but I cannot help but feel the white hot fire of being utterly drained at the end of each day. It’s too bad that doesn’t translate into good sleep, either. The balance, though, is that each little effort, each bloody step of progress, puts a small crack in the shell of what we’re all doing here, and the light that pours forth is blinding.

    I’ve spent a large part of my life just believing I would never achieve anything I set out to do. I blame myself so much; for not caring enough to pursue my art, for trying to drink myself to death, for not working harder on things that mattered. I spent so much time just going through the motions of a lived life, and I have so much regret for how things turned out, but this little bit of hope, like the hope I felt when I finally decided to start living my life on my terms just a couple of years ago, it’s starting to burn all of that away. There is such a long road ahead of me, and of course I am infinitely frustrated that I can’t speed through it all, but there is value in this part. The struggle is the heat that we’re tempered in, and I do not think I’d arrive at the presumed finish line happier if I did not feel the pain of this growth.

    I lived in my old house for six years, and I’ve reflected often this past month on how that place was so put together, and so decidedly me, and how this new life is so much different, but there was a weight to that old place that I could never shake. I continue to be haunted by the ghost of my former life, and, as I’ve talked about before, each step I take away from that, each piece of him I shed, I’m happier. It’s scary to give up that comfort, but so was transition. Fear no long suits me, and the only thing that matters is following my heart, despite how uncomfortable, despite how painful. If all of the wonders of the universe can be born out of a violent explosion, then so can a life worth living.

    Let the scars of this process be the nebulae I wear on my soul with honor. Let the growth continue unchecked and be swift, and beautiful, and terrible, and gnarled, and perfect in its imperfection. May it end, and begin anew, and may each cycle build upon the last, and may I end before the dreams do.

    And for L and A, I love you so very much.

  • Just keep swimming

    Just keep swimming

    I’ve been focusing rather hard recently on finding somewhere I belong, some sense of community in this new identity and body I’m finding myself in. Considering how little I slept last night, and how puffy my face is from crying, it’s going well.

    Nothing is wrong, really. I went to play a very interesting DnD variant last night, and had fun. Everyone there was nice to me. I will go back and hopefully continue to push through my own bullshit and make friends. For right now though, I don’t feel like I belong anywhere.

    I’ve made it my goal for this year to branch out and widen my social circle. That’s not to say I don’t have a lovely group of friends and a partner that I adore, and I have already made some new friends since coming out, but I feel this very deep longing to be part of something that I honestly have never really felt before.

    It was so easy before. When I was wandering through life, pretending to be a guy, being mad at the world, hating myself, I had no problem being alone. Afterall, who would want me? Why should I have any joy when I’m trapped in this body I despise? For thirty-five years I went through the motions of what I thought it was like to be a person. Now, though, the mask is off, and I really can’t put it back on. So much of how I moved through the world was hidden behind the character of the man I played at being, that I never developed a sense of self. Now, at my early middle-age, I get to figure out all of the things that people usually have decades to work out.

    I’ve realized that not only do I have next to zero social skills when I’m not drunk off my ass (nor confidence in who I am) that I also exist in this liminal space where I don’t feel like I belong with men or women. It also seems like the other trans people around me are much younger, and are getting to learn who they are without having to unlearn as much programming as I do. It’s a very isolating feeling.

    I’ve lived half a life. I have the greatest of hopes that things will get better, but from down here, that feels so far away. I’ve felt that sense of belonging that I crave now before, at raves, at Burn, and I can’t help but be mad that he got them, and I didn’t. Even though I can still go to those things, I’m older, and that wild, young, free person is a bit more subdued now (and much, much more jaded.) I can’t help but feel resentment for all the time I didn’t get to be young, and gay, and a woman.

    I’ll be thirty-seven soon, and, statistically, my life is about half over. Subtract the years of abuse I put my body through, and the chronic anxiety, and I probably have less than that. It would have been far easier to just kill myself, but I’ve never been much for taking the easy way. The truth is, I’m a lot of things, but a coward is not one of them. I can repeat that over and over again to myself, but it doesn’t make the pain of feeling like something other go away. I know a lot of this is my own internalized fears, and a lot of it is just needing to grow more into who I am, but being essentially a teenager trapped in a grown woman’s body is the most supreme of mind fucks.

    I guess until it gets easier I just have to trust that forward is the only direction. It’s all part of the becoming. I spent so long in a state of arrested development, and I’ve gone through so much fire and ash to get to this small precipice, that to stop now would be a disservice to my past self (yes, even him.)

  • I will fear no evil

    I will fear no evil

    I recently got a new piercing and it’s made me think a lot about fear.

    Fear is not an emotion that I like to subscribe to often. I think of all of the vast range of human emotions, it is the most belittling. Fear leads people to do horrible things, inhuman things. Fear leads to panic, which often leads to death. Fear leads to war, to genocide, to living a half life in the shadow of something that is rarely so big in the light.

    Yet even though I like to say that I don’t live with a lot of fear, I do. I was afraid to get my nose pierced. I was incredibly anxious, nervous, but ultimately afraid of the pain, the change in my routine, the unknown of how it would affect my life. Even immediately after, some of that lingered. In the end though, it didn’t really hurt, and though it has been annoying adjusting my routine, I quite enjoy it. It gave me ownership over a part of my face I’m not too happy about, and that was my goal. However, in the week leading up to my appointment, I was very much on the fence. Even in the moment, I wasn’t too sure about my decision, even though I had spent a good amount of time considering it. I tried to call those emotions everything else but fear, but they were.

    My mother used to always say that there are only two emotions, love and fear. I don’t like to give that heinous witch too much credit, but she had some wisdom. If you really want to be reductionist, I think that you can boil things down to just though two emotions. I think sometimes intelligent people can get caught up in all of the myriad ways we can define and categorize things, yet it’s hard to not look back on all of the times we walk forth into the void, pushing past all of the uncertainty and doubt, and move forward into greater things, that it wasn’t those things that kept us from doing it sooner, but ultimately fear. After all, isn’t anxiety mostly just a fear of being wrong, of having too little information, and making the wrong choice?

    I spend a lot of time thinking about why I didn’t transition sooner, when it seems like the time was right a decade ago, and, though there is an argument to be made that I wasn’t ready (because dear god, I wasn’t) it was really my fear of being something that I had been told was horrible to be my whole life that stopped me from even considering it. I spent so much time trying to make anything else work, that I missed out of so much of my life, all mostly because of an emotion that in hindsight is just so small, yet casts such a big shadow in our lives.

    Some fears are instinctual. Being afraid of what can destroy you bodily is healthy. When your gut tells you that something you’re about to do is sketchy, then it’s usually a good idea to listen to it. Fear definitely has a purpose in our lives, but the real problems are the fears that we’re taught. In a vacuum, there is no reason to be afraid of all of the things that society tells us are wrong. These fears are little lions with amplified roars, echoing off of cave walls. These are fears that are meant to control us, and make us bend to the will of others. These are the tools of evil, and those that seek to work it have used the same formula to get their way since the beginning of time.

    The right likes to tout the idea of the “woke mind virus” as if the idea of being awake is somehow bad, as if it is better to live in the dark then to be shown all of the messiness and splendor of what is going on around us. They are ultimately afraid of losing what they have worked so hard to achieve, and those that follow them have co-opted that fear as their own. Now they decry that their cause is righteous, that the way people like me live is against some divine order, when really, they’re just afraid of the truth: there is no order, and not them, nor you, nor me, are indistinguishable from god, and when everything is the same, nothing is special. We’re all born, we live, we die, and the cycle repeats until the last proton decays. Our lives have no more meaning that the actions of a hydrogen atom fusing with another, and honestly I think that’s rather beautiful.

    I think when you take out the idea that life is special, it takes the pressure off. The roar isn’t so loud, and you can see the actual beauty in everything. The absurdity of it all is fascinating, because when nothing is special, everything is. There’s a duality to existence and oblivion that makes the whole idea of judgement, of caring what others do and shrinks it down into an oddity. The only law is to cause no harm. To stand in the way of other’s trying to live their life is an affront to the flow of the universe, a violation of a physical law that is far bigger than you could ever hope to encompass. I think we’re seeing a change here, and on the other side of it we will realize how childish it was to live with so much fear and hate.

  • A hole at the bottom of the sea

    I’m sick, it’s injection day, and, shockingly, I’m miserable. I’m doing that thing I do, less than I used to, but still frequently enough that it’s annoying, where I just can’t help but wonder, “What the fuck is the point?”

    Sometimes I feel like the immense weight of everything is resting on my shoulders, like I’m being crushed under the mass of existence. I feel like if I can just move, a little bit, I could rest, and gain some perspective, but the waters are pouring in, never-ending, and nothing really seems to change. It makes one feel like every change they’ve ever made, every bit of progress, has just been trading one ring of hell for another.

    I know I’m not alone in this. This is, above all else, the curse of my generation. We work ceaselessly, breaking our minds and bodies, so that we may earn less, have less, and be less satisfied with our lives. I’m sitting here now, on my way to my day job, so supremely unsatisfied, yet there isn’t really anything I can do about it. Finding a new job, even if it happened in the current market, would just been trading one devil for another. I’ve done it before. The novelty carries you along for a while, but eventually it always ends up the same. Birth, death, rebirth, in a never ending cycle; a constant search for meaning, success, something that will heal instead of hurt. The realm of the human has become the realm of hungry ghosts, always starving, never full.

    I’ve always been a huge proponent of, “if something isn’t working, change until something does,” and, yes, there were things I needed to change, that is for damn sure, and I am massively better than I was, but there just seems to be something wrong with the world, something I can’t get past, and it bothers me that I’ve reached a point where perhaps change is no longer than answer. The Buddhist thing to do, then, would be to try acceptance, but, that doesn’t seem right. These forces feel external, and acquiescing to them feels like losing.

    The deck is definitely stacked against us. If I could take a temperature reading of the world, then we would be close to boiling over. This state of constant agitation though, of being a bubble waiting to pop, is so pervasively anxiety inducing, that right now, in this moment, I’m really struggling to see the point.

    There used to be things that you could do that would matter. You could sell everything you own and move to the woods, except there are no jobs in the woods. You could get a remote job doing something creative, except those have all dried up. You could go back to school, except now the career you train for doesn’t even want you, or perhaps, doesn’t even exist when you graduate. Then you find yourself saddled with debt that can never be paid back, slaving away for some job you’ll never enjoy, doing the same thing, day in, day out, never growing as a being.

    You may say, “Well do with less. Cut back, do something that makes you happy, even if it doesn’t pay as well.” However when a studio apartment costs $2000 a month, how do you even consider that an option? There is no where to go. You’ll cling onto your shitty job, and your shitty life, until you and your shitty, burnt out, depressed, spiritually annihilated body die. You’ll be told how much better you have it than others, and how you’re free, and the whole time you’ll wonder if freedom ever existed.

    You’ll try to fight, and the hegemony will kick you back down, and serve you processed food, and flash fashion trends and ICE killings in front of your eyes on a black rectangular mirror that you paid $999.99 for the privilege for them to do so. Just make it make sense to me. My queendom to someone who can.

    I usually like to end on a bit of hope, or call to action, but sometimes I think it’s okay to just lay out what you’re feeling. Screaming into the void has become one of my favorite pastimes of late. I know there’s hope, you see little pieces of it every day, but it’s just that: fragments, specks of dust, little bits of joy you hold onto while the tempest roars around you.

    How about this: I know that this is what they want. I know that the point is to be worn down, ablated by the hate and fear, so that only the kernel of your soul remains. Well, today I think it’s winning, or, maybe it already did, but as long as I’m still here to scream, the darkness can’t consume me.

  • Jagged little pill

    Jagged little pill

    I have to take these supplements every day or else my joints hurt. Yes, I’m getting older, and yes, I’ve been doing blue collar work my whole life, but more than that, I spent at least a decade, probably more, simply not caring about my body.

    I’d assume this is somewhat typical. When you’re young you think you’ll live forever. You can watch your wounds close up in front of you whilst you search the cabinet for a bandage. For me though, I wanted to be broken. I wanted to use myself up, to sacrifice my body and to leave a husk to blow away in the wind, or some other such poetic drivel. Before I came to the realization I was trans I hated myself. I saw no reason why I shouldn’t work myself to the bone, do risky things, and not drink and smoke myself into a stupor every night. A very common phrase of mine to toss out was “I’m just waiting to die.”

    Now, to my employers, this made me an excellent worker. I’d do the hard things. I’d work late, lift too much, get paid too little. I didn’t care. In a way it was a cowardly way to approach suicide, though, after a while, it started to be clear to me that I was far more resilient than I gave myself credit for. I was going to suffer before my body wore out, and I was starting to worry that I might not be up for it. The answer then came to be that I would have to hasten myself off this mortal coil. Being a firearm enjoyer, the quickest answer seemed to be eating a nine millimeter sandwich, but that seemed to be letting myself off easy. I still wanted to suffer.

    So i figured one day, at some point in the future, I’d drive myself out into the woods, toss a rope over a limb, and hang myself. Not a far drop, I wanted to suffocate. I wanted to watch the world fade away, grasping at the rope futilely as my instincts betrayed my desires, then all of the anger would make sense. The body I’d hated so much for so long would cling to a world that I hated so much, and me, the real me, that lived inside, would finally end, and with it, all of the suffering I had to endure.

    I didn’t though (obviously.) I’ve always been a fighter, and more than my share of stubborn, so I had to try one more thing, and, lo and behold, I finally had my answer. Transition literally saved my life. Now, however, I have to deal with some very interesting consequences.

    The longer I’ve been transitioning, the more I have trouble relating to that person that wanted to hang himself. Not only because that dim world I lived in has gone, but because that is not all who I am now, or perhaps ever was. When I think about my life before, it is so hard to think of it as mine. I know, logically, that all of those events happened to me, but the extreme disassociation I had for the first part of my life has left me in a state of arrested development, such that here, while going though a second puberty, I find that I truly have to learn who I am all over. Whoever I was before, and the experiences I had, has come to have very little bearing on who I am now. The things I liked to do, the way I dressed, the people I liked to be around, all of those are in flux.

    Aside from my partner, I feel so supremely alone in this world. Not only is this a lonely time, but naturally, as we get older, we drift away from the things we liked to do in our younger years. I have no lived experience telling me where to move on to now though. It is frustrating, and anxiety inducing, but all so exciting. I’m trying new things, slowly making new friends, but where as a teenager it is so easy to be fluid, I’m a thirty-six year old woman. I have a job, responsibilities, and, yes, aches and pains that have pigeon-holed me.

    Experiencing such a great change in the middle of my life is by far the biggest mental trip I have ever been on. Perhaps on a daily basis I have to catch my breath and reassert myself into the world, lest I be swept away into the waters of disassociation by the massive “what the fuck” of it all. I’m sure, as time goes on and I get farther into my transition I will cement this personality more, but for now, it is quite the experience.

    For now though, despite everything going on, I just have to live my life. The world, the country, the species, all of it is literally burning down around me, the difference is now I don’t want to be swept away by it all. I’m all full of piss and vinegar, and that fighting spirit, the little part of him that held on so that I could raise like a putrid flower from his corpse, isn’t going to shy away from living while everyone else wants me dead.

    In the end, he got want he wanted, but I like to think that as he slowly fades into oblivion, that the anger he expected has been replaced with a certain peace watching me step out into the light.

  • Misanthropocene

    Misanthropocene

    As we find ourselves coming to the end of the year it’s usually a good idea to pause and reflect on the past and take a look toward the future. There isn’t a lot to do when you’re stuck inside, hiding from the deluge and wind, but sit around, staring at each other in the candle light, watching the shadows dance long down your lover’s face, hoping that when the calm finally returns, there will be something of the world left to salvage.

    The amount of apathy I have toward the world at the moment I feel is a decent reflection of the apathy that got us all here in the first place. Our planet is angry, and instead of responding to a changing world, and trying to either adapt, or prevent disaster, we as a species have decided it is better to fight each other, and ignore the bigger threats. How can we possible deal with our failing infrastructure and increasingly record breaking weather events when the boys are wearing dresses, the children are using litter boxes, and the elderly are intent on burning the world down around them just to stave off the cold of old age? We are gambling with the one thing there isn’t more of in this universe: time, which, as someone who doesn’t gamble at all, seems like a bad idea. What do I know though, I’m just some trans woman with an inner monologue and empathy.

    This year has been hell. Sure, there’s been a lot of good, but I’m sure that my fellow Americans will agree that the general feel in this country is that hope is fleeting. Prices are higher, jobs are disappearing, and even those that “voted for this” are beginning to see just how wrong they were. To put it simply, we done fucked up. How can anyone do anything but look to their own survival in times like this? When you can’t eat, or get your meds, and every day you’re told that society is collapsing around you, how are you supposed to put up a fight?

    This time of year there are always a lot of posts like this, and videos talking about the year, but the most pervasive ones I’ve been seeing have contained a message that circles around this: if all you did this year is survive, then that’s good enough, and, sure, that’s valid, even in good times there are some of us struggling, but these aren’t good times, and if we are already, as a civilization, knocking on the doors of survival, at the hands of our own duly elected leaders, then how do we expect to survive when the actual doom comes? We sit on the face of this planet (giggity) and proclaim ourselves masters over nature, but some bronzed pedophile and his Gatsbian court of ghouls has brought us to our knees. We are victims of a terrible intelligence, but that pales in comparison to the one thing we are all victims of, physics, and if we cannot survive a baboon, then I shudder to even begin to imagine the untold suffering that we are about to witness in the next century.

    The dams and levees are breaking, crops are failing, every summer is hotter, every winter colder. If these warning signs are ignored, then when the real shit comes, when mother nature tenses and begins to shrug us off the surface of the earth to save herself, then it won’t matter that the bible isn’t taught in schools, or that the girls are kissing each other, or that a Puerto Rican is doing the halftime show. There will be death, not noble, not bright, but total, brutal, in the way that only a cruel and uncaring universe can mete out.

    My hope is that this past year has taught some of us that it is easier to leave others alone than to try to control them. Above all, as long as whatever someone is doing isn’t hurting others, then they should be allowed to do it. We spend far too much time caring about the actions of others, and not enough working on ourselves and trying to better the collective. At this critical point in our history as a species, if we do anything that does not contribute to the greater good, it should be considered a moral crime. Take care of yourself, take care of your neighbor, and take care of your planet. One day, even if we turn our shit around, we will need to find a new home, and we cannot gain the knowledge and build the technology we need to do that if we are constantly bickering with each other.

    So stop it. Live your life, let others live theirs, stop giving so much of a shit about the things you don’t like. It’s selfish. We are selfish, and it’ll be our downfall. If you care about yourself, your children, your friends and family, then you have to also care about the rest of us. There is no more distinction. Never before has the line “the only thing required of the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing” been more poignant. So if all you did this year was survive, then in the next you should riot. Tear down the enemies of mankind that have made you only able to survive. We are running out of time.

  • Where the waters do not curve

    Where the waters do not curve

    One year ago today I went on a date with an amazing girl at a Mexican restaurant on Alki Beach. We were both shy and awkward. She forgot her ID and so neither of us had a margarita, which was fine, because she doesn’t really drink. We went for a walk on the beach. It was very cold, though I was much colder than she was. We decided to sit in my car with the heater running, and talked for hours. I stayed up past my bedtime.

    This morning I woke up next to her, the same as I have for many mornings now. Of course my first lesbian relationship would be one in which I very quickly U-Hauled. I had a Halloween party the weekend after our first date. The night before was the first time she slept over, and she helped me set up for it, but didn’t attend. I was too scared of things moving too fast. That night, at the party, I kept bringing her up, and was summarily met with questions such as “well, why isn’t she here?” I was scared. I didn’t want to rush, but I hadn’t quite grasped that I was caught up in a wave of feelings that I could not control, and day visits became nights, became weeks, became months, and now, I’ve spent a year with her.

    I love her so damn much. I’ve never felt so understood by someone, or let myself be so open. I don’t know where I’d be now, I don’t know how I’d have gotten through the last year, as rotten as it has been, without her next to me. She has let me radiate all of my chaos into her life, and stood by quiet and composed and ready to help me put myself back together. Similarly, she’s harnessed my stubbornness and unyielding march toward progress to her own benefit. We work very well together.

    I have some pretty major trust issues, mostly stemming from my upbringing. Until recently, I’ve seen my life as some great cauldron, run through with cracks, and filled to the brim. The water leaks out, and I am furiously applying clay to patch the holes, failing to see that the cracks are getting smaller, and the flow of love into the vessel out weighs the flow out.

    I’m very lucky. I have an wonderful partner. I have amazing friends. I have been in amazing relationships in the past, and they are now very dear and wonderful friends. I suppose that is what healing is, at least for me. If I am a coiled spring, cold and tense, then the love that has been brought into my life by accepting myself, and welcoming the acceptance of others, is the heat of the torch that is straightening that spring. Slowly I’m starting to unwind. I’m starting to forget that I was ever coiled, holding up the weight of the world. I can’t begin to thank all of the people that have helped me along the way.

    Ram Dass says that “we’re all just walked each other home.” We all remember trauma. We all enter into this world formless, and have others beat us and shape us on the anvil of adolescence. The world looks at us with a cold eye, and says that we must do this, and say this, and think that, but love eventually returns us to that immutable shape. We are not the sum of our experiences, quenched in oil and set rigid in the sky. We are the same lump of clay we always were. Sometimes we’re a pitcher, or a plate, or some horrific sculpture born from the mind of a narcissist, but never fired, never set.

    The hands of love reach down to us and smooth our edges. They push and prod and make us into something new, something better, and then remake us all over again. It’s up to us to accept the change, and the help, and realize that nothing is wrong with us, and that the only thing you’re doing wrong is standing still.

  • Friends in ‘booch places

    Friends in ‘booch places

    Last night, whilst traipsing around Capitol Hill with my friend, posting flyers for my other friend’s meme coin, I visited a kombucha shop that was entirely unmanned (which is a sentence I never thought I’d write.)

    You walked up to the locked door, scanned the code, created an account, and let it know you were there. The door unlocked and you walked inside. There was a multitude of different kombuchas on tap, as well as a few little sitting areas, a restroom, some swag, a little red light therapy trial box; the whole thing was very modern and kitsch, but the really amazing part, was that there were no employees. Now, there were an inordinate amount of cameras, so surely someone was watching to make sure we didn’t make a mess, or steal anything, but it was surreal. My friend poured a medium ‘booch out of the tap, paid on the app, we used the bathroom, visited the downstairs yoga lounge, then were on our way.

    The really interesting part is how seamless it all was. At the time we visited, there was no one else in the shop, so I had to imagine that if it had been staffed by a human, that person would have been bored to tears, busying themselves with menial tasks, or truly doing nothing and idly doom-scrolling. My initial reaction to this was “wow, someone could have been paid to be here, but instead the whole job is done, essentially, by a robot,” which then made me realize no one needs to do this job.

    The fact that I even had that thought tells you how infectious and pervasive our participation in capitalism is. Sure, the company that runs that shop could have paid someone minimum wage to be bored to death working there, or, they can make it completely self service. Not only does it make sense from a business perspective, as labor is always a huge part of overhead, but when you view this from the lens not of “they’re taking our jobs” but from “they’re freeing us from labor” you see how great of an idea it is.

    With the rise of AI and how much that technology is being leverage in creative spaces, then it makes sense to be angry with technology. Creative pursuits are exactly what humans should be doing. Throughout time technological advances have led to more leisure time that has been followed by more creative endeavors. Technology should always be welcomed when it frees us from doing menial tasks. With the rise of agriculture, more humans could take up other occupations, and thus art, science, and a million other industries were created.

    Freeing labor is exactly what technology should be for, but when labor is free, and the people have time to themselves to think, to work together, to look around at the world rather than focus on survival, then the institutions that control that labor begin to feel their foundations quaking. Your boss, your government, and the corporations that they serve do not want you to be free. They do not want you to find a better way. If it were up to them, we would all still toil daily, hunting and gathering, while they tithe us for “safety and protection.”

    Marx himself wrote extensively on how advancements in technology would one day culminate in truly freeing the proletariat from all forms of grunt work. Even despite the push back, the slow march of progress continues on. We are seeing a time where the current clandestine “rulers of the world” are shaking in their nickers trying desperately to keep us in line. They force us to toil in the dust while they leverage inventions created because of the liberation of labor against us. They show us that our pursuits of art and literature, of leisure, can never compete with the efficiency of their machines, all while the fruits of our creativity command even higher respect despite it.

    Those who seek to control you fight a losing battle to history and the inexorable march of time. Progress will continue, and they have thrown in their lot with the losing side. They have artificially created tragedy just to maintain their control, but it will never work. Through all of the chaos in politics, and racism, and bigotry, and all of the rivers of blood and ruined cities and lives, we, the meek, the down-trodden, the great driving force of progress, will eventually be free of their machinations.

    If there can be fully autonomous kombucha bars in Seattle, and robots can build cars, and make food, and even a small group of people can then take the time to truly live rather than sweat, then those that seek to hold us in the dirt with a boot have already lost, and that, in a very small way, is giving me hope.

  • All the bones of summer

    Well, that’s it. The summer of 2025 is over. The bleak gray of the long dark has come once again to Seattle, and I sit here hoping in the deluge and freeze to come, that some of the rot and decay that has stuck fast to the ribs of this country will be washed clean. I hope that in winter’s blanket the world, and myself, will heal a bit, and be ready to face what spring will bring, and what will probably be another summer stolen.

    I recently returned from a work trip. Usually I abhor going on such excursions, but this time was a bit different. I am a bit different. I’m a bit better. Despite everything I feel the progress in my own soul advancing, even when the world outside me seems determined to crumble. For a week I holed up in my hotel room, and in the hours that I was not working, I took a break. Spending time online recently has been a source of extreme frustration and suffering, and I just couldn’t do it. After washing off the dirt of the day, I’d lay in my rented bed, watching cable (an anachronistic hobby at this point) and reading. In between page turns and early evening cartoons I had a lot of time to think.

    When I’m alone and not plugged in, I’m happy. When even for a minute I can ignore the tempest blowing through the hallowed halls of Washington, I can remember how I felt in the summer of ’24, when my whole life was ahead of me, and that’s the thing, it still is. I’m really starting to love the way I look, and how I feel, and I’m starting to gain an amazing confidence and surety in myself that I can’t believe I never had before. What I am doing, what I’m going through, this whole process of becoming, and of being true to myself, it’s working, which makes me wonder why are there people out there that think that standing in the way of that, when it affects them not at all, is a good idea?

    Completely ignoring the fact that most people actually don’t care about trans people, and most people also want to be left alone to live their lives, and that trans people are just another in a long line of marginalized populations used as scapegoats to further the agenda of organizations determined to impose their will and, more importantly, capitalism, why does anyone fall for it? Why do followers exist? Why do people look at me, who has found within herself all of the tools to heal and be healthy and is doing the work to make a difference in her own life, with such disgust? Surely it can’t just be the fault of propaganda?

    Why do others feel the need to impose their will on others? Why is everyone so convinced that their way is right, and that others are wrong, and that they can’t be happy until everyone thinks like them? I think there lies within the structure of power, of governance, an inherent evil. One that is ancient and must be routinely routed out, or else great pain is felt for entire generations. The playbook for this evil is known, and that knowledge is widespread, yet there exists some sticky-sweet honey that it possesses that allows the common man to fall prey to its charms and ignore all of the history, all of the rivers of blood, that it has left in its wake.

    It is the need of the few to control the many that gives rise to this evil. True freedom, for anyone, can never be felt as long as there is the will of another imposed on the will of the self. Small groups of people can work together, and I think everyone agrees that common goals and mutual aid are a great boon to society, yet we seem to all be fighting the same battle every century.

    If Siddhartha’s great battle was to free the soul from the infinite cycle of birth and rebirth, then the modern search for Nirvana should be to break the constant cycle of the few holding sway over the many. I do not know how much longer we as a species can do this dance before have no more floor on which to do so.

    Men who live in excess now go to their satin lined graves on the backs of generations of people who wanted nothing more to be free. They have sacrificed the future of billions of their fellows in order to make their temporary respite from oblivion marginally more comfortable. What else can you call that but evil?

    I want it all to make sense. I want to understand how anyone can look around at all of this, see what’s happening, and not rage against the time stolen from them. I want to know why evil prevails. I want to know why something using such archaic weapons is still so effective.

    I’m very curious how this will all play out. We always look back at things like genocides, or wars, or terrorist attacks, and say “never again,” but it always comes back. Millions of people, myself, included, have been pointing out the descent for years, and yet it all falls on deaf ears.

    The only hope I’m holding onto right now is that the current administration seems so farcical, and so inept, that I hope all of the atrocities I’m predicting don’t come to pass. I’ve been staying away from the news as well. That has truly been helping. I don’t feel so under fire when I get away from it all. I am doing great. When I focus on my little life, I am constantly in awe with how much better my minute world is now. Perhaps that’s the secret. Maybe where individualism went wrong was it stopped being about the individual. If you look to make yourself a person you’d actually like to be, you stop caring about how others are different. If you look to better yourself, then all of their primordial weapons will turn to ash, and finally blow away and find rest on the fields of history.

  • Carte blanche

    Carte blanche

    I don’t normally like to be so reactionary with my words as I’m about to be. I’m not a reactionary person. I prefer to observe, assess, plan, but I have some time to kill at the moment and the specter of fear is lording over me, so, here it comes out of the brain pipe, raw and unfiltered.

    I hope I’m wrong. I hope that the truth prevails, and that this incident with Kirk doesn’t become the call to arms for the right to start firing up the engines and building the camps. I hope that this incident was (as statistics show) just another pissed off cisgender, white, male.

    But it won’t be. The right has been looking for a martyr to catalyze their message for years. It didn’t work when Trump was shot, not how they wanted. They needed blood, and, after seeing the video, it looks like they got it.

    I pray to whatever force beyond me is listening that the shooter doesn’t turn out to be a trans person, but, as the truth does seem fluid these days, I’m sure no matter the outcome, we will be blamed. There is an agenda here, and this fits so nicely into furthering their narrative, that I really don’t see a way that they won’t try to twist this as a leftist-trans plot to kill “the Great, and even Legendary, Charlie Kirk.”

    Since January 2013, of the 5700 mass shootings in the US, 5 of the perpetrators have been confirmed to be transgender, according to Gun Violence Archive. A statistic that works out to 0.088%. That’s even less that the often reported 1% of the population being transgender. Yet, of late, every single horrific event is being tied by the right to a transgender person.

    If at any point there is a person in this country with even a modicum of free thought that thinks that trans people are not being singled out an othered to force an agenda of eradication and genocide, then you are the highest of fools.

    Here’s what is really happening. Law abiding trans people, such as my partner and I, and scared. Fear is not something I generally describe myself as having. Yet, in the middle of the night two days ago, as I awoke to my dog barking out the sliding glass door that walks directly into our bedroom, I was afraid. I am proudly, outwardly trans. We have trans pride flags hanging from our frontage. Yet in that moment, my partner mentioned how maybe we should take them down. I wondered at whether I should keep my pistol out of the safe and next to the bed. Trans people have now become hunted things.

    What had become the greatest gift I had ever given myself, to be truly happy, to feel joy and love for myself and my body, is being used as a political tool to further the cause of fascism. It happened before, and it is happening now. Every fascist regime needs a scapegoat, and trans people are it.

    In the same week as three prime ministers have resigned from office, as countries such as Nepal riot in the streets and demand better, America, so braggadociosly strong, rests on her laurels and lets her democracy erode. While the jews died, the Germans suffered, and it will be the same here.

    Though the world did not depend on Germany. Germany was at best a giant among men. The United States is, for better or worse, a cornerstone of our civilization, and the fact that the “greatest country in the world” is keen to sit back and let the rot of fascism eat her from inside, says a lot about how decadence and comfort are the enemies of growth.

    I’m afraid, and if you’re not, if you think yourself distant from the conflict, or even on the “winning side” then you should at least beware.