This item was located on an old drive and is being inserted into the blog for archival purposes. The Cost of Being “Too Nice”: A Personal Reckoning There’s a harsh trade-off in modern existence—a tax on autonomy charged in the currency of conformity. To get in the door, you yield a piece of your will, and in return, you’re handed the legal minimum: a salary just above drowning, benefits dictated by those who’ve never sweated at your level. Every dollar is stretched across the real cost of staying operational: food, shelter, medicine, sanity. It’s a balancing act demanded by all […]
On the nature of despair and its remedy
In the 14th century we find the first instance of a human crafting a word for the feeling of a certainty there shall be no prosperity, and/or of existing in an environment in which everyone around you expresses this sense OF you, TO you. It is interesting to me that there is no word that opposes despair, no word that can flip or turn it. It has ‘an opposite’ (hope), but theirs is a dichotomous relation. The nature of despair is, at least linguistically, binary. We speak of ‘giving hope’ but it is a sleight of mind; we give not […]
Biting the Hand That Built You: The American Hypocrisy of Immigrant Exclusion
America’s current preoccupation with attacking and deporting legally residing immigrants and naturalized citizens is a grotesque spectacle. The nation is now eating itself, driven by a supremacist and xenophobic mindset that cannot abide the truth of its own heritage. Ethical censure, not celebration, is what the United States has earned in recent years, as it enacts policies and cultivates attitudes betraying not only its founding promises but also the very mechanism of its historical rise.
I insist: The “problem” is not me.
Content advisory: Venting, emotional, unemployment, struggle, grit-jawed tenacity. Audio only.
Just the facts… (Review, historical)
I assert that longstanding choices have contributed if not caused our current economic instability, civil unrest, and this insistent plod towards autocratic and kleptocratic governance. My assertion draws on a combination of well-documented trends and widely discussed critiques in political science, economics, and contemporary journalism. What follows is roughly 20-30 years of thinking pushed into a six decade+ timeline and the whole thing is rife with what has, is, and seemingly will continue to be a deliberate predatory aggressiveness toward the working class that reveals the United States to be no different whatever from any other feudal, dictatorial, despotic, and/or […]
Synchronicity & Validation (No thank you.)
Content warning: Personal history, likely uninteresting for anyone but me.
Dramatis personae – sister
Content Warning: Abuse, big emotions, family trauma, generational trauma
Dramatis personae – mother
My mother was, I think, a horribly traumatized woman who lacked the self awareness to grasp and regain her agency, autonomy, and lived experience authority. She was far less complicated than my father, but her injuries and lack of supports lead to a life of learned helplessness that I doubt she could have overcome alone. All that said, I know little about her outside what I was told long ago and my own experiences, which admittedly, are biased. My mother was born on May 25, 1947 in Heflin, Alabama. Her father was a music director for a well known, international […]
The practice is the practice (grieving)
The following content is emotionally laden, extemporaneously recorded, and unedited. It discusses deeply personal issues from childhood and presents disturbing or psychologically violent themes and experiences. It is not transcribed for this reason. I am working through my shit and refactoring my being, largely in real time, and this place is my charnel ground… if you’re here to carry something away for nourishment, be welcome and may you find what you most need.
Dramatis personae – father
To say that my relationship with my biological father was complicated would be a massive understatement. But in thinking about it, I realize that I do not know the history that caused my father to be as he was, but for very broad strokes supplied in passing remarks over the years by my grandmother. My mother rarely spoke of him, my grandmother was insistent in her refusal to discuss ‘ugly things’, so there remained no insight nor information. What I do know is sparse. My father was born November 4, 1945 but I do not know where. Nor do I […]