Half Naked. 

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.

“it’s the soul that’s erotic.”

— Adélia Prado, from “Dysrhythmia,” The Alphabet in the Park: Selected Poems (Wesleyan, 1990)       (via metaphorformetaphor)

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.

The Fail-Son

My parents had two kids. I’m the oldest by a year and some change. I also happen to be the one that failed. I’m the fuck-up. I’m the problem. I’m the one they worry about. I believe the prevailing term these days is fail-son.

I’m a fail-son. Being a fail-son is not such a bad gig if you happen to come from money. I do not come from money.

You might think I’m being too hard on myself. Maybe I am but what I’m doing here is telling the truth. I’m giving you the truth even if that makes me look like a feckless piece of shit.

The longest period of time that I’ve ever held a job is six years. I left that job on impulse. I left that job on account of boredom. They were going to fire me eventually. I was on and off FMLA for depression. It was only a matter of time so one day I went in, I fired off an email to my direct supervisor and told them I was resigning and that my resignation was effective immediately and that was that. Yeah, I was depressed and often was burdened with an anxiety that made me feel like the apocalypse was imminent. See, that’s such bullshit. It was always anxiety over shit that was minor. Maybe I’m gonna come in to some snippy email from the boss. Maybe I’m gonna have some awkward social interaction. When I look back, it’s clear to me that the primary motivator for walking was boredom. I gave up a steady paycheck and relative stability because I was bored.

I’ll admit that that wasn’t the brightest thing I ever did.

After that, it was about 5 or 6 years of bouncing around from bad entry-level gig to worse entry-level gig. What I ended up doing more often than not was working as a call center agent. If there be circles of Hell, I’ve very little doubt that one of them is a god damn call center. I did low-level technical support. 95% of problems got fixed by having the inept soul turn the uncooperative piece of technology off and then back on again. You might think that doesn’t sound so bad. Alright. Imagine being chained to a phone for 8 hours a day. Imagine call after call after call after call after call. Imagine doing this at odd, wacky hours. Start at 3 PM and get off at midnight. Imagine sitting at your desk near the end of your shift on your Friday (Your Friday. No one else’s Friday. You work weekends so your Friday is a Tuesday.) and you’re praying to whatever Gods may be that you are not gonna get a fucking call. See, you don’t want a call. You have no idea at all what that call is gonna be. Every time you hear that tone in your ear, it could be a simple 5 minute call that is relatively pleasant or it’s going to be that call that makes you question every single fucking decision you ever made in your life that possibly led to you sitting in that desk taking that call. So many times, the fickle finger of fate poked me in the eye and I ended up talking some guy through installing some piece of software a half hour past quitting time as he gets increasingly more irritable and pissed off. I lived in dread of that. On my days off, I still felt dread. All I could think of was going back to it and a lot of the time, I didn’t go back. I’d call in sick, stay home and live in dread of going back to the shit. I can remember driving to work and having mad envy for so many people. I envied the guy who was out running. I imagined that maybe he’d go back to his home and he’d just chill for the rest of the day knowing that he had already done the hardest thing he was going to do that day. I envied the guy who was out there landscaping. I had no idea what kinda headaches landscapers endured, but sign me the fuck up.

It got to the point where I just could not stand to do it anymore. I could not hold down a job. I could not cover my bills. I had no choice but to return home.

The home I grew up in.

The place that doesn’t quite feel like home anymore. The room I sleep in has a floral bedspread and a statue of Jesus hanging on the cross.

I come home from the office to the Fox News Channel blaring all loud, sinister and mean. The people who raised me to be decent, kind and honest believe in President Donald John Trump. My mother is a Mexican national. She speaks English but not perfectly and with a noticeable accent. This is a woman who waited tables. Fuck. I can remember being ashamed of the fact that my mother waited tables but she did that for me. I hate myself for having been ashamed of that. I denounce Trump and she tells me that I’m jealous of his success and that every woman who accused him of sexual assault was being paid to do it. My dad is a simple man. He never missed work but he bitched about work all the fucking time. When I gripe about the grind, I catch myself sounding just like him. He loves those cheesy, underdog sports movies. I think he sees me as the underdog that’s eventually gonna win. Trump is no spunky underdog but my dad is in his corner for reasons I just will never fucking comprehend.

I hate the fact that they support Trump. I cannot ever let that go. However, I’m undeniably grateful that they opened their home up to me, that they took me back in. I realize that not everyone has family that can take them in when times are tough. That keeps me awake at night.

I’m a fail-son that should be hurting a hell of a lot more but somehow I’m not.

Maybe I'll try bearing my soul on this fucking blog to strangers who might happen by cuz that's how lonely I really am.

This game got one mode

That mode is crazy

Bitter-tastin' cheat code

and that's all you see

and to see like that

is a felony

didn't even want to play

but I gotta pay

to pray

to make it today

cuz daddy need a new jet

to set around the world

to proclaim....

And this is a work in progress, folks.

Thing with dreams is 

sometimes they are just too shiny 

and they blind you. 

Dreams burned into your brain 

by people who finished school 

and always work late

and you can never tell the difference 

between yours 

and theirs. 

That kills. 

Additional Notes on How I Learned to Love the Lord

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about what I wrote earlier today. Mostly I’m not too satisfied with it. I feel like things could have been more lucid and more interesting. There was so much that I could have said that I did not end up saying. 

Faith or lack thereof is a challenging thing to express. There was a lot that just got lost or at least that’s my feeling. 

The story that I told myself as a Christian was that I was a reformed criminal that found redemption. Reformed criminal? I was a kid that did something dumb but in my mind, I might as well have been knocking over liquor stores or have been some kind of budding serial killer. I had a desire to convey to people what a wretched sinner I was if I ever got the chance. I look back on this and I’m both amused and disturbed. 

People give reasons for doing things. I don’t know that I buy too many of the standard answers given about why someone takes the dive for J.C. especially if it is couched in theologically “correct” language. People can say that they became conscious of their sinful nature and of their need for a savior but I often suspect there is a more interesting, more honest, more genuine reason. If someone tells me they believe simply because they like Jesus or it just kinda seems correct or just wants it to be true then I respect that a lot more than some bullshit they half remembered from a text book or a tract or something. Wow, this paragraph sucks. Moving on. 

My faith was nonsensical. It was utter bullshit. It basically revolved around feeling guilty for having sexual desires. I got really tired of hating myself for natural desires so I kinda just said fuck it and quit. Hating myself for liking the idea of sex made no sense. I wasted a bunch of time hating myself for a stupid reason when I should have been hating myself for being a Republican. 

The marriage between evangelical Christianity and conservative politics is an awful thing. It’s destructive. It baptizes ideas like peace through strength, low capital gains taxes, gutting the social safety net and other abominations that make the world a terrible fucking place to live. I can’t be part of that no matter how bitchin’ those praise songs are. 

It’s ultimately just not a very adult way of looking at the world. Adult is the wrong word. I just don’t think it’s a very honest way of looking at the world. 

Heavenly Father

When I lose my religion 

I come to you. 

When hope is just a bitch

Maybe I lose it and I pray. 

I reach for the phone and start dialin’ for parts unknown. 

Heavenly father, 

one more day. 

Have mercy on your boy

cuz he’s for sale 

and he’s last year’s model. 

Have mercy on your boy 

cuz maybe today is gonna be the day. 

Have mercy on your boy

cuz he never asked to come out of that cave 

into this blinding white light screamin’ 

like he knew exactly what the hell was up. 

God damn it. 

Have mercy on your boy. 

Can ya do that? 

If not me, for someone who needs it more. 

Amen.