Serious Poses

 

They say memory plays tricks on you. That every time you remember something some detail will change. Maybe the light, the angle, or the sound. 

I'd been hanging out every night till almost dawn for almost a week, eating and sleeping as little as I could get by with, spending the rest of my time running the streets of Wooster smoking everybody's pot and drinking everybody's beer. Wind me up and watch me go. This crazy hippie from somewhere else, somewhere real far out there. Who just popped up one day and intruded all over. What adventures I had.

I don't remember much of that one night, in big house full of middle class jock types wondering where I came from, till something set me off and I got hostile for no reason. I recall this senior yanking me up in the air by the head, yelling something at me, his thumbs digging in to my face just in front of my ears. I've been having this memory for 45 years, awake and dreaming both, and I can't keep track of the details very well  but I can say that sometimes I don't wet my pants. 

It could have been worse, there were too many witnesses, among them my girlfriend who'd sworn she was a virgin. He had every right to do worse. All he'd done to provoke me was be the handsomest, best built, most popular jock in the room. But it was only a Swiss Army knife, and I only weighed about 115# then. I even got my knife back.

After that she'd try to make me understand that it wasn't over, a few of those jocks were planning out where and when to beat me to death with their bare hands, and that she'd never live it down already, so I'd better just go. But I was too in love with her, in that desperate way crazy 15 year olds get, and it sounded way out of proportion. There no way anybody would go that far over something that trivial. I did have an idea to make it right: walk in to the next Friday's party to walk right up to him, apologize in public, thank him for not hurting me, and hand him a six pack of Michelob or something. And then leave and not bother them again.

She said not to bother with that it would only make things worse for me.

I told her if she wanted me to go away she could just tell me, there's no need to make up some boogieman story. Something like that. I don't recall her answer.

After about three days she told me to gather up my stuff from where I'd been crashing and come to her place, so I did. She had a big purse stuffed with god knows what, and more determination that I'd seen all week. 

We were running away together, right there and then, hitchhiking back to my parents; place in Baltimore, her and me. So we did, we traveled for 18 hours straight and six or seven rides, this 15 year old country girl and her scrawny hippie boyfriend. When I asked what brought that on she said she had to get me out of there before they got to me, and neither of us could afford bus tickets. 

That's not the end of the story, that was a long summer of tumult, but those are the parts I've been reliving over and over for the past twenty-odd years. And the emotions that come over me were not the ones I'd felt then, I was too strung out, but what anybody in his right mind should have felt: the shame, the gratitude, the wanting to drop dead.      

    

  

The Real Meaning

 

As great thinker once said, "A lot of the time the real meaning isn't very important to us."

It can't be, not to folks like us. We can't afford it. How did we live this long? Passing on a Social Role. That's what we do. Sometimes we're lucky, sometimes we're not. But we do know what a Social Role is, and we try to differentiate between them.

Your script said "Have a wife and kids."

Mine said "Better yet, run for the hills."

I don't recall any of you ever mentioning your kids are on parole or in treatment programs. While I grew up under such conditions, and somehow knew better than to replicate that bug.

All along you had a point. You talked sense. Whether I agreed or not, it made sense to me. There are those who think they ought to breed and in a certain way, and then there's all the people who come to it by accident. You're basically swearing yourself to your kids and vice versa, while I can't imagine what that's like. Okay I could, but as a total fantasy that had little chance of coming true. The lottery is another such gamble.

I hope you're right about the value of the genes you're passing on. Because some of my genes are too heavy to tote around. If I'm making a mistake there's nobody to notice it, but if you're mistaken, well... Of course I hope you're right. For everybody's sake, including mine. Why would I not?

 

Your Obvious Mistakes

 

The basis of my position is that y'all should stop producing weirdos to torment. The situation has been so bad, and has recently gotten much worse, that you're not able to fix it, indeed many of you don't even think anything's wrong. your societies don't want misfits, and except for a tiny few celebrated examples all you do is beat on us. You are incapable of truly moving the world to accept "exceptions," except maybe if they're "trans" (that will soon go away), and you don't know how to use what we can do to make your societies better. Your world wants Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard, not David Fucking Perry. As the misfit I know best, I should not be here. You never knew what to do with me, you simply don't deserve me. 

 

You might feel insulted because you voted for the Democrat, but people like you made the choice between Harris and Trump possible. The political machines created two candidates to choose from. Maybe the choice wasn't as starkly awful as when Cheeto was opposed by Hillary, the Democrat incarnate, but then Trump won this time by a bigger margin didn't he. The USA is a hopeless cause. The best you'll be able to do is to slow down the downward spiral, reduce the harm you'll leave to future generations. Make nothing but "normal" people. Find a few serviceable models and standardize them. Invent a better cookie cutter. Prevent defectives, and euthanize those sports who'll happen anyway. Spare future generations from the pain inflicted by your world. Spare your society the trouble.

You don't want people who need the maximum dose of two antidepressants to keep from getting executed during a "mental health crisis." Nope. Your world wants people who saw all the Star Wars prequels and can discuss them in order. Who shop at Target because of the people of Walmart. Who proudly wear corporate logos (including college sports teams, T-shirts that hide me just enough so I don't get called "fa**ot"). People who most of the time don't know what I'm talking about (unless it's all over Google News at the time), and don't care. People who right away agree with everything I'm saying here (but might be insulted by the way I say it), as if I'm just pointing out the obvious. You want Zaden and Destahneigh. My ilk just gets in the way.

Have mercy on us. Don't make us anymore.

 What total po-po propaganda. Officer Friendly all over again. Thy came to every public school I was in whenever they felt the need. The message is clear: a threat of physical "disciplining." The Cops Come Here. That's a "class war" narrative, whether you know it or not. Some people benefit, while too damn many don't.

In this particular instance we're shown the Homeless Vets damned with faint praise. I take that to mean "be careful or this might be you." That's what matters to some people: "there is some shit i will not eat." What we don't need is more "pathetic veterans," not when there are so many vets out there. The War On Terror had our guys in Afghanistan for 20 years. Till they gave it back to the Taliban.

Now somehow the Syrians in Al-Queda have chased out the puppet of Iran, and now Israel is staging drone attacks to protect and avenge the Druze in Syria. Not too far from Israel. The geography is well known. It has been for as many millennia as we have records of. That's where atrocity stories come from. The differences depend on whose side you're on.

There has to be a reason why they tell us about so many "chewed up and spat out" veterans. Instead of all those who were turned into corpses or sections thereof. This persists, by the way.

If you can't imagine winding up like that then you're the people who pay for this Social Role. You must somehow benefit, like you benefit from all those fentanyl addict's babies. Because your society has beaten some people into hopeless victims, and provided them neither contraception nor abortion. We don't even see our poor women get sterilized, to spare them all that suffering. Instead defective mothers' babies are better than none.

The gods of greed are hungry. That's what they do with your taxes. If you can't pay them the "stage fee" for the privilege of your Social Role they bleed you dry and then piss on you.

Let the cycle stop here. What so good about poverty that you've got to keep it going? Have mercy. So many of us are poor people, you'd think we know better. By now.

Ahem. "Karma is a bitch." Though he could've picked a better target, say a full-time member of the Cincinnati police that killed his son. Not anybody who's dressed funny will do.

The obvious response is to stop killing oppressed people, anywhere and everywhere. But it can be done piece by piece: y'all could decide that American cops can't be so oppressive.

Oh but y'all elected Trump. Again, Some of you voted for him in all three elections. Who'd probably be okay with city cops killing Black people. So now they get to use the law to beat up on somebody. Because he sought revenge when cops killed his son.

In some Third World countries the next thing to say is "So who will avenge this comrade?" But in the USA there seems little point to trying that, because it might provoke a "home front" like what's going on in Gaza. Various Dominions would like to do that here, and then the odds are so against us. When it comes down to it The Powers That Be don't care how many of us get killed. Sometimes they even make a track race out of it, as they did several times in the 20th century.

We know they can do that, they can treat some places in the USA as occupied territory. They'd probably love to. Yet again.

That might not be a good idea. So maybe it's better if we cut out the middle part, go straight to individual self-killing, or even in groups as at Jonestown.

Before they rob us of the ability to destroy their property, i.e. us. Isn't that their objective? Why do you think they call it "wage slavery"? And they also like tenants, as in people who give them a large portion of their money in exchange for the right of residence? (You'll never guess who owned the places coal miners kept their families in.)

Resistance is futile. The voters have installed an autocrat who can't even say what the Pledge of Allegiance means to him, on internet-wide TV. 

I don't believe our Rulers are literally lizards. But they might as well be, they consume so many of us. They always have.

Then too, consider that the problem here is that too many people fail to draw the obvious conclusion from a widely known event. Or series of them. And they put his finger back on the Nukes button. Because they couldn't figure it out they first and second times.

This one has clearly indicated that it's okay with him if cops kill civilians. And then he pardoned the "patriots" who beat up DC cops. Who where there because anybody he might rather call was a horrible choice for law and order. Can you imagine the Secret Service shooting down DC Police to keep them out of the "patriots'" way? Trump sure can. I'm sure he did.

So the cops can kill you. And MAGA can kill cops. They can even kill cops for not killing you, it's called "insurrection." That wasn't so much fun for ordinary people the first several times.

There is one thing we can do: stop making more of us. Stop making our children grow up very poor, especially when we grew up like that. Have some mercy. Stop passing poverty on to future generations. The more of us there are the less any one of us can count on them for anything but suffering. Their valuable things are expensive and rare.

End several kinds of oppression. Stop giving Them new victims to wring out and beat up on. They can't shoot our children if we never have any. I never did, and if I can do it anybody can. It's easy once you realize that's the best thing to do. They'll keep doing what they've done in all of recorded history for as long as they don't run out of "peons." If we do quit providing them with fodder they might have to do something else. Like send up a Member's Only space station. It's not like they let us on anything like that.

Let's quit while we're behind. Let's have mercy on our peoples. Because once again we are too many. That won't turn out well. It didn't the first five hundred times. And that was long ago.

We are the mistakes our ancestors made. From the Sumerians to the Goan Dutch. Let's stop the cycle. While we can.

What Worthy Cause? [Part One]

 

When I saw yesterday that the President of the USA couldn't even answer a simple slow-pitch question about the Declaration of Independence it embarrassed me so much that I wanted to immediately fly into exile, maybe Portugal because some people I respect have gone there themselves. The problem is my income depends on me living in one of the United States, which does not include Puerto Rico and does not even include Washington DC. (The capital of our empire is not a US state, y'see.) 

 

Knowing nothing about the country and even less about its language I can't imagine figuring out a way to survive there except living on the streets, which I could do here in the USA and even still get SSI so I won't have to beg to buy food or do laundry.  There are people I know I could ask for money to live overseas, everybody I know who's close to my age has more money than I do, and it wouldn't be very expensive for anybody because I'd rather several people pitch in a little than depend totally on any one person.

But I can't picture myself actually asking (not seriously anyway), partly because I really figure out why they should give me money. It's not like they'll ever get it back, unless I win a lottery or something, and my life ain't worth insuring so mortgaging my carcass won't work. What works when people ask me for money is that they ask politely, they clearly need it, and I can afford it: I follow the KISS principle because it's easy, I'm a lifelong slacker who doesn't even need to 12 Step first.

 

I bring up this generosity as if it's a noteworthy principle because anybody desperate enough to beg from me is unlikely to be able to pay it back. I give gifts, not loans, because the people who kept me alive in the mid-'80s never insisted on being repaid, guessing correctly that I wouldn't be able afford to in the foreseeable future. And back then too I couldn't come up with a really good why reason they should support my crazy self.

 

It was true that I really needed it, that I asked politely, and tht they were physically able to (whether or not it was a good idea for them), but I've never been able to persuade myself that I really deserved it. Like, really, who am I? What is my abstract worth as a human being, and why should I be worth anything to them? (Maybe that's another example of Depressive Realism, which by the way is not required to be inaccurate.) So now that I can afford to toss a few bucks here and there to anybody I take what seems like the proper attitude based on the example shown me, i.e. they ask politely, they need it, and I can afford it (at least for now), which seems like enough to me.

 

Then too I can't think of anything non-cash to ask in return. What do I really need that I can't somehow do for myself, except maybe to go into exile overseas? (It's too bad nobody in Portugal asks me for money, I could turn that into renting space on their floor to sleep in.) Decades of poverty have taught me that it's better to do things for myself (and to do without what I can't), and that stuck so well that now that I have credit cards I'm pretty careful with them. There are so many things I can do without. Then there's basic common sense, like asking her to drive 500 miles to take me shopping across town sounds a bit extreme to me.

 

So here I sit, too broke to do more for somebody than buy her some as or help with a veterinary bill. (I'd like to find them a better place to live, but I just don't have a good way to do that.)

 

And anybody I know who's better off than I am might want to know why they should help me live in exile in Lisbon (or Kolkata, or Melbourne), and the only answers I have don't seem quite good enough. It's not like I'm tax-deductible, and I'm not cute and sweet enough that anybody needs to hear me purr or watch me wag my tail.

 

So for now I have to live on a small fixed income, in a small apartment that's getting roach-infested again, in Lexington, KY, in a country whose aspiring dictator can't even say what the Declaration of Independence means to him. 

 

Obviously I'm much better off than a lot of people, but even so I doubt anybody in my anticipated audience would trade places with me. And to persuade myself that I'm worth a damn I remember how I lived this long, because otherwise I can't come up with a decent answer.

 

So. Like. You know. Here I sit. I cannot do otherwise.

Getting Boosted

 

Kroger, the large supermarket chain, has a "club" called Booster, that gives members a few nifty discounts, and some free perks like home delivery. I did a 30-day Trial Offer a while ago, but cancelled it before I'd have to pay because of the price: $99.99 for a year of same-day delivery, or $69 if you can wait till the next day for your stuff. It's just not worth that much to me. But I still shop there a lot because they're the closest grocery, and for over a decade I've been enrolled in their Kroger Plus loyalty promotion, so from time to time they send me email with Special Offers. 

The latest offer, which was worth something, was 50% off a year's Boost membership, so I took it: I got the whole-hog same-day-delivery package for $49.99; the discounts and perks make that an acceptable deal. But the kicker was something I hadn't noticed before: that includes one year of free streaming video from Hulu, which I had paused for 12 weeks to save myself $10.49 a month and had been thinking of cancelling outright. So right before I paid for Boost I did cancel my extant membership; now for $49.99 getting a thing worth $125.88 for free. 

The additional discounts over a year would probably not have totaled over $99.99, but $49.99 should be worth the investment, and there is definitely a place for free deliveries. For several years until pretty recently I'd had to trudge out sometimes for over a mile each way in all kinds of weather to bring home a couple weeks' worth of groceries, which is what people who can't afford a car used to have to do. Imagine pulling a shopping cart 1.5 miles each way in a blizzard because you can't put it off any longer, you've already run out of things like toilet paper and soap and milk and coffee and bread, and now you need light bulbs because the one in the kitchen ceiling just burned out and the 40 watt in the beside lamp just won't cut it. 

So Boost is now my third "special membership" that delivers for free, the other two being Amazon Prime and Walmart Plus. Because I can, and because I have use for what they provide, this year I'm spending a total of $182.30 to have goods delivered right to me (or to the front desk downstairs in case of non-perishables). And I get my money's worth in free deliveries, especially considering that I don't have to walk or take the bus a mile or more just to buy a can of coffee and a pencil sharpener. And the cumulative discounts might equal the membership cost; now that I think of it I should start doing that math pretty soon. And at least one tenant in this 11-storey apartment building is bound to have something delivered every day, so I'm not poisoning the planet with a lot of extra carbon.

So you see I am a trained consumer. I even buy from major corporations that have been known to unduly exploit their workers, including UPS and whatever other services do the delivering, and I pay yearly fees for that privilege. Fifty years ago I'd've regarded people who so such things as brainwashed counter-revolutionary scum, because it's hard to argue that such things ultimately benefit The People more than they hurt us. Things like this keep late-stage capitalism from collapsing, contributing to such dispensable evils as mass death in Gaza and slavery on Cambodian shrimping boats.  In order to make my life a bit easier I am increasing the share of human misery all over the Earth. 

So for these and other similar reasons I've been finding it impossible to avoid at least my share of shame, guilt, and self-hatred for what I have to do just to live another day. Even when I don't intend to hurt anybody, or when I rationalize that a UPS driver having to piss into a bottle beats not having a job at all, I still incur moral demerits. In my youth I was seldom troubled by such things, as the ascetic lifestyle that almost unbearable poverty left me with at least meant that I was less "privileged" than most other Americans, that doing without whatever I absolutely didn't need and buying used clothes from thrift stores meant I could contemplate a sick and starving child without feeling that it was my fault. I wasn't a lot better off myself: I often went hungry without it symbolizing anything. Now that's no longer true. 

As with many other of life's "negatives" I console myself that I'm not THAT bad: I'm not directly personally responsible for starving any particular baby, and I contribute to such evils less than most Americans my age, and I don't feel that such things are my right as a privileged character. Comparatively speaking my heart is in the right place. With this self-defensive appeal to proportion I've been able to live for 62 years, more than half of those in what my not-too-distant ancestors would have regarded as lordly luxury; I have not yet felt driven to set myself on fire for the sake of moral principle. Indeed it's hard to imagine hating myself enough to actually do that, however intellectually appropriate it seemed at several points for several reasons. Furthermore I can claim with some self-evident justification that nothing I do or refrain from doing will have any measurable effect on the sum of human misery. A lifetime of insignificance and triviality exempts me from the ranks of noteworthy monsters. Not even being a "despicable Zionist" really counts for anything.

So with that in mind I've just lived through another of my significant anniversaries, another of those dates when putting an end to myself would be making a point. Granted most of these dates are entirely personal, you'd have to be well-acquainted with me and my history to know what I picked that day, but being well-acquainted with me ought to show that suicide has always been my particular temptation. I never really needed a special occasion to perform a sudden landing. Every day I live is a day I've chosen to. 

The current problem is that now I'm running short on consolation prizes, I'm not getting as much reward from life as continued behavior warrants, and the trend of current events in today's USA gives me less hope for the future as well. It's getting harder and harder to justify arrogating to myself those sins I commit simply to stay alive. I can't shake the feeling that somewhere in the Third World there's an emaciated toddler who's dying of diarrhea because I don't want to walk a mile to buy groceries. 

But now I have another site to stream free cheesy movies from.