Hurt Me Daddy, for I Have Blogged

Circling back around to a topic I think about often, "community builder/building" is such an ambitious label. I think it's super ok to not identify with that label or to reject it. I know what role I play in society. It's a personal role, where others potentially see themselves in me and then have the realization about themself. My friend Schreeck and I called this the Showmanic Clown but it's also a basic artist role. I've never held anything but the belief that that role has sacred value, beyond any existing economic system. Nothing to prove with it. If folx are signed on,   great, if not, I get it too. We could be living in caves, the robocops could be kicking me, and it wouldn't make a difference. When you play this role, it's more like community congeals to witness themselves in you on occasion, and then goes home to think about it for a while. It may or may not change anyone's life and you may or may not ever have an impression of whether or ...

CW: self-harm, burning stuff for fun . . . It always strikes me as something funny when my older Gen X friends attempt to explain being a latchkey kid to me. Did I write the book on it? Nah. But instead I had the delicious and contradictory cocktail of no other siblings or even pets, overprotective ethnic parenting and also latchkey experiences starting when I was 11 or 12. I liked to burn things. Didn’t discover the fun of burning myself til much, much later. But at 12 I was a cutter. It was all the rage. You were even cooler if you carved alternative band names in your skin. I didn’t make it that far, but I tried some other stuff. Still have a few scars here and there to this day. Thought of doing all the run-of-the-mill things everyday teens think about doing to themselves. Or are they? Well, as the younger siblings of the Prozac Nation, they certainly were back then. It was because of this that from about 11 or 12 onward, my mother stuck me walking home from school with an emba...