Hurt Me Daddy, for I Have Blogged

  I want to bring something up here, since my FB is split between people I hang out with in person and people I know online. If I’ve said something that’s directly damaging to our connection together, ideally, I’d like to know. I realize that that implies a certain level of intimacy and familiarity that I don’t have with 100% of people here, so I allow for that. I also understand that the cultural norm is now to preserve oneself and just ghost and walk away. I’m fully, maturely aware that no one owes me a “breakup” conversation about anything. I allow for all of these realities and see and hear them. But for those who have the spoons, I’d like to actively know how I might’ve harmed our relationship towards one another, so that I can try to make it better, or at least know for other relationships in future. Some of it is going to be socially trained stuff, like various forms of privilege, that are not immediately visible to certain people on a daily basis and that we have to wor...

Ok so let me get this straight. NFTs came on the scene and y'all complained that it was a whole bunch of enviro wastefulness that was overvaluing low-quality art that looks like a stoned incel in his basement could've burped it out. Then AI art came on the scene. While servers were beta testing, literally the process of fine-tuning the machines to be less exploitative, less racist, less focused on body-normative standards etc as well as open to developer feedback on the Discord servers y'all were ignoring it or already complaining. When things ramped up a few months later and apps started offering pricing or much more limited free tiers you complained that it wasn't real art. And now, when most of you haven't bought the tiniest of shit nuggets off your friends' merch stores or even reposted their stuff for FREE unless it gave you clout, you're complaining that AI is stealing from artists. Who are, clearly, out here wiping our asses with money, right? Because...

Weirdly I've been revisiting a lot of Dresden Dolls' music and aesthetic lately, especially their first album. I'll admit to something--when the album came out I worked at Borders shortly thereafter (people got bored with releases a lot less quickly), and a LOT of people there compared my visual aesthetic to AFP, which really kind of put me off giving anything more than a single superficial listen, though I could recognize quality in that album when I did. AFP's Twitter shenanigans were no better and I continued to find her annoying, until around the early 2010s when I got a little more into her solo stuff and eased my opinion on her a bit. (I still do not give her problematic behaviors a pass but I finally read The Art of Asking early pandemic and it helped with some things. It's complicated and I still like Neil more but I can also see where misogyny might come into play with that.) Looking at some other personal artistic-aesthetic influences. Bowie's early m...

Suggesting to gender-marginalized people that they use discernment about what gender archetypes we consume and where those are coming from is NOT internalized misogyny. It's like a suggestion that you know the ingredients of a food that you're going to consume. It's not telling anyone to go on a diet or not enjoy food; it's just suggesting that we know what we're nourishing our systems with & know what we're putting into our bodies. "Divine Feminine" is a neutral-value concept. What we are critiquing is "spiritual" people who don't realize how or when their beliefs prop up patriarchy. Also, Divine Feminine concepts are not uniform cross-culturally, because gender values/expectations aren't (thank you to my actual, pretty agender by a lot of US standards, mother! for driving that point home). But New Age bullshit tends to water everything down then condense the Greatest Hits into something that in fact supports conservative ideolog...

Just a thought for today: If you think the work/ general existence/example of creative shit etc that someone's doing makes a personal difference to you, tell them. I got the opportunity to give feedback to someone like that this week and then someone else returned the love to me too, and it was wonderful. I especially appreciate when I get the compliments for being my weird fucking self, and especially this week cause queer folx need to love on each other just a little harder right now. The feedback from people you hugely respect, who are excelling at their art form(s), who take the time to compliment you in a non-circle jerk kind of way, is a huuuge deal. I got some very early, kind, but balanced commentary about my comedy, even back in the day when I was just blowing stupid outrageous hot air on Twitter, and I think it was partially responsible for motivating me to keep at it all. And I also specifically think that cishet people actively encouraging/nurturing/casting/giving oppor...

I'm trying to be grateful for the friends who did stick around this year. I'm trying to view things less in a binary of "you're near to me" or "you're far away from me." Love is unlimited, but humans are limited. Our hearts only have the capacity to carry so much. It is our containers that only exist as a certain size. So we grieve those whom we had to ask to depart. We hope that maybe some of them will return. But we're unattached in that moment. Not   uncaringly. Just....in the middle of some existence that feels neutral. Maybe Zen. The Reverend Kinky Flashlight would be proud. Night Town is quiet and empty sometimes. And the darkness makes us feel small and alone, though we're not. The remedy to this condition is false intimacy. Or is it? Screens. Bubbles. Meshes. Membranes. Then you find yourself someplace, ten years later saying "I don't think I remember how to do this anymore. " We don't think we remember...

  Your regular reminder that terminologies can often become weaponized. Neutral terms can have guilt and shame instilled into them by events and actions that are not your doing. Words like “community” can become weaponized in the name of cultish harmony at all costs, when we constantly forget that a diversity of approaches, life experiences, ways of thinking and ways of being in our bodies are how most amalgamations of people and other living things operate. And honestly? Speaking from that school of hard knocks bullshit? A level of discernment around this subject is really important. And it’s exceedingly important in organizations that employ top-down power structure, because powerful people can alter definitions on a whim. They can and will change the rules on you. You are not harming community if you come forward and speak out about harm. You are not harming community when you try to pull an uncomfortable conversation forward. You are not harming community when you center vi...

  I think, in life and in general, there is something of an overarching expectation that you do not come for members of your own group, especially if that group has been historically marginalized. Indeed, I’ve found my own choices to be in alignment with this type of thinking. I’ve granted excessive mercy and patience to fellow Jewish people, and experienced a reluctance to sever ties even when harm was perpetrated. I’ve noticed a discomfort at potentially echoing the ”other guys’” political talking points when having a conversation about a lot of types of politics or belief systems. I’ve noticed an extreme reluctance to name harm within one’s own ideological community, whether that be political, religious or spiritual. And I’m trying to understand where this thinking and framework comes from. Is it particularly North American? Is it Eurocolonially derived, coming from an idea that we can’t be wrong and if we are, that’s a “sin” that only serves to challenge our rightness of pres...

 The gibberish of a drooling cave-dweller... Showmanic Clown Word Salad Pretty fucking thankful a bunch of people tuned me out. Popularity and traditional success are just burdens. The more I get abandoned the more powerful I become. People have always been so upset that I express my humanity, vulnerability, nihilism and even humor so public-facingly. Damn. Get your panties out of a wad already. If social media is going to commodify us, I'm gonna use it like it's 2014. Laughter and showing everyone their absurdity is my medicine to the world. Some people need to get over themselves. BDSM and standup are hugely similar. Who is on top & who is bottom? No one really knows. Clowning and tension buildup, are we getting off already? Our faces hurt. It's gonna be hugely ok even if things feel not ok. Those of us who're tuned in know. Our ancestors lived through what felt worse. I'm not saying it's getting better, not at all. We just know better now. Half-formed, th...

I realized on a pretty deep level recently that I'm definitely not someone who's in the role of community builder. That is a very specific role, and extremely challenging. I've always described my job more like improv performer/ Showmanic Clown. One part of all that is humbly pointing out the accountability process--including all of our inconsistencies and hypocrisies as humans and also suggesting the accountability process for harm doers. The thing with all that is, first, who am I to decide? Well, I rarely am. I take cues from wronged people. Rarely do I bring my personal beefs forward, despite what people have assumed of me. It has happened, but it's minimal. You fuck with my friends? I'm gonna be asking plenty of questions, probably publicly. What if the person isn't ready for apology or accountability? That's something that happens often. When talking about transformative justice we need to be prepared for this eventuality often. The assumptions that th...

  It’s been far too long since I came back here. G--- J changed their name to Jazzy J, and sometimes their inners call them Jazzy They. Since they’re not really sure whether they actually have Roma ancestry. Are they still playing music? I miss the sound of their violin. Drifted away. Sibling, when will we make music together again? Will we ever put our hands together and make spells? “Maybe I’ll see you on the dancefloor later..” a friend says. I smile quietly. Maybe I will sway without thinking about it. It feels drunken out there. We swim in a Piscean sea. Are we happy? It doesn’t matter. I hitch up my boxers clandestinely and wipe a fleck of eyeshadow from near my tear duct. I look deep into our faces. Some of us look the same, or have aged in reverse. Under deep layers of makeup, our beauty and handsomeness floats, buoyed. But many of us have aged. The skin crackles and bows to gravity, to change and unspoken trauma. We stretched. We contracted. We gained weight. We lost w...

  I am trying to get better at accepting people of a wider range of personal opinions. My problem is not so much taking it personally anymore (or is it) but feeling that when a person says and does certain *types* of things, especially when it comes off with a tone that mocks marginalized people, it’s really hard to not let some of that reflect on the depth of who they are. But maybe I need to question that too, because a lot of people have oppressive, whyte supremacist programming that gets in the way of their truth. I do feel like we all have some level of bias/prejudice, internalized oppression or low-level bigotry. But at the same time, even though I’m trying to accept people with a wider range of approaches and opinions now, I also feel that people do show themselves, and I’ve been in so many situations where I was privy to things that no one else seemed to take note of, or that they ignored because it wasn’t harming them directly. That’s upsetting to be a part of too, because...

 Hey all, so I'm groggy and a half right now. Got the flu shot yesterday and it just fried me, haven't had a response this shitty (or good?) since like '14 or '15, ugh, could barely sleep last night. Anyway... I came here to say that I've been working on healing some shit in therapy. Namely, the effects of casual misogyny/queerphobia on  me during my late teens/early 20s. It's one of those things where I didn't take note of how deeply a lot of the commentary sank in until really recently, but it was really fucking insidious. To clarify, this was a period in my life where my friend groups were probably largely male. As high school ended and I went off to college right away (remember when we did that, kids?) my friend group dwindled somewhat, down to all people who identified as men at the time, and then...me. The oddball. Of course looking back now I can see that part of it was because I looked at myself as non-gendered or a non-woman. At the time it was just...

Reminder of my boundaries below! So I want to say that I continue to be wary of this space and of longform blogging in this format. Because I feel like people now have judgmental ideas of whether or not you have the right to keep a blog that is more personalized, that talks about your personal thoughts and feelings on things and stuff, that is subjective. The thing is, I am not here trying to make a case that my feelings are objective scientific facts. I am not out here trying to disseminate harmful shit. I am out here trying to be a human on the internet in a world where we have all turned into mini commercial advertisements. I also don't have inflated ideas about this. If people read this shit, great. If they don't, great. But it's a nice place to be authentic. And also, I'm a grownass fucking adult. I can rant on the internet if I want to, hehe. But you know, people decided they wanted to vilify me when I tried to speak out against a harmful person earlier this summe...

Before I take the plunge here, I invite anyone reading to read my "rules," listed below. I am still figuring out my intentions for this space. I guess it might be able to function more like a process-oriented journal. I do not necessarily think it's going to be "community building." I have tried things like that in many regards and feel that I've failed, repeatedly. I'm not a demagogue or group leader, I've always been kind of a depressed loner type who occasionally attracts others. Not so good at community, but pretty good at navel-gazing. So all that said, please go read the parameters at the bottom of this post. When I want to solicit peoples' input on something specific, I will ask for it. Now, into the bigger part of it.  Lately I've been processing and integrating some MAJOR new info I just found out about my family. I finally just found out about the US-based/Canadian Jewish branches of my family in much deeper detail and for the first...

Wow wow wow! So I am posting here per a Twitter thread that Rob Sheridan shared recently, about going back to blogging like it's 2007. I really would love a place to word/feeling vomit, have a space for nonjudgment, to whine and bitch like I did on LJ (R. pointed out that we probably used LJ like that because we couldn't afford therapy at the time lololol, too true). I am trying to navigate my relationship to my life, promotional stuff, things I give a shit about that I also happen to do for a living...it's complicated right now and oh-so-jumbled together. So I don't want to be super hard-lined about not promoting here, but I'm not really sure how to go about much of any of it at this moment. I think I am going to try to make a Canva graphic stating my boundaries, which will probably generally be: -No unsolicited advice, ever, pleeze. Solicited advice/feedback may happen, so don't worry, if you're the type who loves to tell your friends what to do, lol. -Pra...