Hurt Me Daddy, for I Have Blogged

Year was 2004. I was freshly graduated from a private East Coast of the USA university. A tuition I'd only much, much later learned that my dad had paid off. And I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life or my future. What I did know was that I was fairly unhappy and angry and sad a lot. In a post-9/11 US world, I didn't really know where the jobs were going to be anymore. So I started looking into joining the military. Both Army and Marines. Had I actually joined Army I probably would've figured out how to do Army Special Forces. My reasons were: -Guaranteed job after 9/11 -Opportunity to learn Arabic, especially Iraqi and/or Gulf Arabic, which would've been useful for business skills later (at least, this was my rationale) - I was kinda dudebro metal so it fit my personality -I'll be vague about this one for reasons, but if you do some digging into why AFAB people join the military specifically, it was adjacent to that. And I have to say, this was so weir...

Today I'm a little bit of sad clown. I'm emerging on the other side of a portal during which I was reminded of the radical self-honesty that I cannot be so much of what many people who used to be close to me need right now. I thought my life through fascism would be expansive and community-oriented as it was for my ancestors who did this, but instead it feels prejudiced, limited and small. It's little like what life was like 6 or 10 years ago for me and I try to steer sharp pivots as the waves of destructive capitalism fling me. Were soothing words friends gave me just a few months ago even still applicable? Likely not. It is another era of un-minimizeable mass death. I witness from the edge and try to make laughter, art and music, but they are small because I am small-minded. I could not be what many needed. I eat candy and food that doesn't agree with my body like I used to smoke cigarettes. You should reuptake smoking for pleasure if you haven't yet. My grandm...

Recently on Bluesky I wrote a thread about the first major experiences 10 years ago that caused me to get un-addicted to social media and revamped my PoV about it to instead understand social media platforms (particularly Meta and Xitter, but honestly a lot of places have their icky aspects) as places that are authentically harming a lot of people. Seeing how arbitrary the treatment I received during that encounter 10 years ago was, plus post- 10/7/23 when I saw a space that was previously supposed to be fun not only become a propaganda machine (for no singular viewpoint) and a viewfinder for the endless slaughter and torture of people, I grew heavily disillusioned with how socials were functioning. Those were the big moments during which I started to notice the diminishing returns. It then became slightly easier to leave spaces that were suffocating me with their lack of reach. What, so I pay in personal data but you don’t show my stuff to anyone? Not reciprocal. In a lot of ways,...

What do people even mean when they talk about self-love? I’ve seen the rhetoric around Valentine’s Day move from romantic and sexual love, to galentines and palentines, to self-love, and that is such a strange concept to me, because I think Americans have a great methodology of self-loathing (thank you, destructive Xtian hegemonic practices that don’t talk about healthy accountability at all), but I don’t even know what people are referring to at its core when they talk about self-love. Are they talking about self-acceptance? Are they talking about commitment to freedom from guilt and shame, especially for the past? Are they talking about the spiritual and psychological equivalent of body positivity or body neutrality, like accepting your flaws—which, it’s worthy to note, has also been extensively weaponized by some to just consistently excuse away abusive and shitty behavior? Are they talking about neutral acceptance of the fact that we all have healthy egos and take things personally...

Here's one of those weird peripherally personal stories about Lynch. When I was between 8-10 in the early 90s, my mother used to visit this elderly Romanian professor in Garden Grove. He was fluent in at least 4 or 5 languages but not too strong in English. Occasionally he and I were able to communicate in French. I was often bored in his house and I don't even think he had a working TV, or if there was my mom wouldn't let me watch it. He did however, seem to, like many immigrants I knew at the time, collect stacks of TV Guides--both for the English practice and the pop culture understanding. And that was the first place I learned about Twin Peaks. It seemed so sophisticated and grown-up, and I often got it mixed up with Knots Landing (also quite frequently on the cover of TV Guide at the time). I remember once reading an article about the show but I don't remember what it said. The visits to the Professor eventually ended. He had a home caregiver, and eventually he was...

Fifi Dosch and Robin Tran have inspired me with their Skin Suit podcast , and a lot of what Robin talks about re: personal growth has really been hitting hard with me lately. Seriously, if you haven’t listened, you should. I’ve been talking to my therapist about how after The Great Unfriending of 2024, I’m honestly kind of going down the list of people that I could reach out to to add back on The Failbooks, and...I don’t want to. Not because I think they’re garbage people, but because sincerely, I don’t think I am actively enhancing that many peoples’ lives, or really can, at one time. We’ve turned viewing each others’ stuff into what I consider to be really passive spectatorship on social media, and that makes me despondent in a lot of ways. I realized this with the aftermath of That One Online Magicky Group a few of us were in. First of all, I’m not sure I was tangibly improving a lot of those peoples’ lives very much; I don’t think I always prioritize talking about social issues o...