it's been falling for centuries
PREFACE: this message was supposed to send two nights ago, but never sent, and instead I received this message from tinyletter (the service i use to send these missives).
as you'll find out, this edition is entirely comprised of me talking about race and class and empire from a personal standpoint. weird that it got flagged while all this intense internet censorship is happening right now!! i asked the TOS mod why my message was flagged so i could prevent this happening in the future and they said they said
Thank you for writing back. When it comes to the specific data monitored by Omnivore, the keywords and content that Omnivore detects are constantly changing based on improving data and broader industry needs. Therefore we are unfortunately unable to provide a full list of all potential prompts. We're also unable to delve into details surrounding the specifics for this account in particular, as these are part of the proprietary formula and would expose the system to the potential of gaming. Noting this, what we'd recommend is to review the following articles on spam filters and the keywords that most commonly prompt emails to be stopped by these systems, as this will greatly help to avoid issues such as this in the future.
so. happy reading.
------
happy new moon, everyone.
last night i stayed way up on stimulants (read: social media), and all today i've caught snippets of other people saying 'today is weird' and the like. today is a strange weary feeling type of day.
we're in major paradigm shift level times. as days and seasons pass, i find myself less and less inclined to rally on with analyses and calls to action. i find myself in a nowhere place where the social media format of communication is no longer for me. i think about class and gender and upbringing and culture and looming, pervading it all, is the special philly east coast blend of race relations. i think about stability. i think about my parents (all three), and the concept of fealty, and how i'm managing to communicate about deep familial hurts through writing––to my own fam. it's wild.
a while ago i got an anon message on tumblr from someone who very simply came for me over using the word homie and oh was i trying to act Black now. a few years before this, when i announced on my old tumblr that had the following, that i would be taking my dad's spanish last name as a pen name, in honor of his request to take it and all this long-winded n very personal backstory, a follower decided to go off on how i'm just another anglo doing appropriating some shit, and i aint even claim to be xicanx and they were disappointed/disgusted and all this. when i was a kid one of the other kids on my (predominately Black) block exclaimed i was a white n-word, and to this day i still have little idea exactly what it was supposed to mean or what the reason behind my mother's reaction or the other kids reaction was or what. once a person from australia asked me what was up with how i performed/wrote the vernacular of my characters in all that's left, and i was like, this is the sound of my life, the sound of my family, where i'm from. especially since i left olney, since i ran away from home, since i came back to philly and fell in among college educated middle class transplants and queers and queer transplants and have had so many stressful interactions with liberal arts queers (u follow?), i've had so many days of anger and bitter spiteful rage at what Philly even IS to people who just move here and ...
well today at my job we got in a christmas card that says "seasons greetings from philly!" and shows a bunch of santas on a subway car, except it's a fucking new york city subway car.
and on my twitter i follow @bmoredoc and all the ppl from nyc and watch them grieve and criticize and fight for their cities and their cities' culture.
for days and days i am still reading about the twists and turns of the canon of european history and that whole land mass that extends and trails into what we presently call africa and the middle east and asia. today i came across an article that's like o shit we found an ancient skeleton from present-day sweden that has plague dna in its teeth and that sort of fucks up our theory that plague came from the steppe of eurasia whoops wut
and then this controversy about this researcher? scientist? who went ahead and recklessly gene edited some babies against all standing ethical practices and concerns, across national organizations and countries and shit, and i'm like aiiiiiiin't thiiis how The Stand type shit happens? just lol
just what does it mean to be from a place. i dont think there is "an answer." in a very sadly catholic way, i'm inclined to say that 'being' from a place consists of suffering in a place. but to invoke a binary, that must also mean 'being' from a place consists of experiencing great joy there as well.
my homie Alexis sent this piece on the life & times of Allen Iverson this morning to a group of us and said "i'm not crying, you're crying" ... and Alexis has long been a gentle and resilient and brilliant person in my life, who has loved me and put me on to stuff and shared her love of the world as a friend does, and anything she sends along i usually check into immediately cause i can trust it will be interesting to me... ANnnnyway (just wanted to show u love, alexis), the AI jawn was so good:
Straight up, no b.s., this is one of the biggest lessons I’ve ever learned: Not everything has to be measured — and not everything was meant to be! That goes for hoop, or life, or whatever. Can’t wrap your brain around the whole damn universe.
Some sh*t, the way things work, it’s just a mystery on purpose.
the AI jawn was also so good bc it's direct from AI himself, and i really really for real appreciate the vernacular or spoken quality-- like did he record himself talking? did someone transcribe him talking? did he just write it like that himself? did someone edit? the website that the article is on is actually a new platform of athletes doing their own media, which is hell of cool. storytelling
STORYTELLING.
being able to tell a story and being able to pick apart the pieces of a story, are important skills ESPECIALLY in these high and ongoing propaganda times.
i wrote on my twitter
"man this shit w tumblr is fuckin me up on a level like a house of cards before its fall, a row of dominoes and so on"
"it's been falling for centuries"
like, that's poetry right? i'm having some intense nostalgia for the after school cipher of my junior and senior years of high school. talking bout dropping knowledge and science and anime shit. someone stole the rhyming dictionary out the school library and toted it around like a precious article.
the clarion sci-fi writing workshop is back open for applications. they send me a newsletter. i was surprised to see the 2019 faculty after my two previous attempts to get in, where subsequent workshop years' faculty included...no melanated people (and i say melanated rather than people of color bc i appreciate that distinction of literally having an abundance of melanin in ones skin rather than a non-european or non-white cultural distinction which i personally more associate with the term POC ----annd of c i need to state the obvious that the term melanated itself is one ive seen Black nonbinary, women, n femmes using). anyway, yeah the faculty, the fact i got some stories under my wing, all this shit has me wanting to apply for the hell of it. i just think i'm going to talk about it forever until i either do or don't do it.
i want to do it just to do it. i want to spend $55 just to apply, and then fucking not go out of spite because WHAT is the point of going to that except for prestige and networking, and wasn't that what college was for and oh right i was too far behind on the collegiate career success path to actually succeed and instead was like fuuuck this shit i need a job to pay my goddamn rent and lemme write scifi instead. and now my only savings is thanks to an artists award i won because i had been doing my own damn DIY thing (shout out leeway)(shout out metropolarity the timeless coven).
i guess this is a retrospective newsletter. i've been listening to the 2nd half of the mariah carey 'the remixes' album on repeat this whole time (after @fuckrashida posted one on her tumblr)
so i'm 35 and maybe about to move in with my boo and the stability dream is causing a trauma-fear response i just gotta work through. i been thinking recently about my own line from ode to rock lee (a tumblr rant of yore tbh),
AND NEVER EVER UNDERSTANDING THAT EVEN THOUGH YOU CAN WORK HARD TO AFFORD ALL THOSE THINGS, THE UPPER CLASS STIGMAS THEY ALL CARRY SATURATE YOUR BLOOD, AND THAT YOU CAN HEAR THE VOICES OF YOUR AUNTS AND UNCLES MAKING JOKES ABOUT THEIR UPPER CLASS WINO COWORKERS TALKING ABOUT THEIR THERAPIST AND THEIR NEW HOUSE AND OTHER BULLSHIT THAT THEY JUST COULD NEVER EVER AFFORD BECAUSE THE PAYCHECK HAS TO GO TO BILLS AND INSURANCE AND CIGARETTES AND GOD WILLING THAT ALIMONY CHECK COMES IN TOO. AND IT ISN’T ABOUT MONEY. IT’S ABOUT DOMINATION. AND ACCESS. AND WORTH.
AND WHAT IS A WORKING CLASS PERSON’S WORTH IN THE FANTASY WHERE THEY STOP WORKING?
i've read articles on ppl who --what's the term?-- leave the class they were born into? or like, what is this 'class' experience i'm experiencing but that of whiteness? a lack of direct oppression. a lack of familial wealth. i've said it before-- it's not lost on me that i work for a wealthy woman of british and german descent. and it's not lost on me that my father's mother was a mestiza woman who was kidnapped by his own father, and that event produced my own survivor dad. and it's not lost on me that my stepfather has questionable attitudes towards Black women. and it's not lost on me that my irish italian family just keeps their own assimilation traumas to themselves... and in the meantime, i set up an altar to both my grandmothers and begin speaking directly to them.
reducing complicated matters to isolated parts is not a useful practice for storytelling, i think. one can analyze their own agonized histories until they die, and what becomes of that? one can make themselves in an image of their own suffering (hell, the catholic church encourages it). honestly i talk about my own bullshit so so so so frequently because i JUST. WISH. i could hear someone else saying yes, me too, me too, me too. just one other person from philly with a very similar randomass mixed existence, exactly the same as mine. but ive resigned myself to a reality where that does not happen, because i validate myself from within.
this is where samurai warrior street tough attitude shit comes in to play. like word is bond and actions speak louder than words and shit. also, it's good to know where you lack faith or courage, because by acknowledging your own fears and cowardice you can begin to address they exist. and then begin to affect change. same with guilt. just be real with yourself. i try to be real about myself.
yet here we all are in this matrix. colonial power continues to accelerate and consolidate. what IS human. civilization. organized society. ???
in another breath i say who gives a fuck. we're IN the shit. violence maintains 'order' and who made it that a standard order was inherently a necessary or good thing?
something else i said on twitter: "that line in lilith's brood where the mixed ooloi child puts that piece of plastic in its mouth and feels the poison so strong and shocking"
pshhh this whole jawn i been writing as if i was on my old old tumblr my old livejournal. i guess that's a generational thing-- cathartic personal writing to a small online network??
cutty's story in bad user agreement, selected notes on my daughter's culture, is so so so so good and i guess devastating is a word i want to use but that's a negative connotation. it's a person with a child living through a civil society collapse/starvation period on the edge of the city here, and watching the child develop its own culture that she wishes she could figure out but knows she isnt privy to.
damn i tuckered myself out with all this. feel free to write and talk, ask questions. i know i brought a lot of various pointy items up without quite massaging or taking them into the light.
i wanted to let you know that i did end up finishing that huge story for my transitional times transitional body zine. it's $6 plus shipping. i'm going to put the whole new all that's left story on my cyborgmemoirs.com site as usual, too.
i'm also waiting to see if this essay i wrote did indeed get included in clog magazine's A.I. issue. they accepted my initial submission, suggested edits. i did the edits, then they suggested some final edits, and i said yes to some but no to others... and then just never heard back if it was indeed included or not. i still dont have the heart to write and ask like, yo what's up with this, and am just waiting for the local magazine shop to get their copies so i can look for myself... [EDIT: i'm in]
i'll have to write next time on why i even bothered submitting in the first place.
just thanks for reading. let's have coffee or tea or shoot the shit some time.
@}-}-;------
monk
some moar links if ur hungry for info:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=12&v=HPc8QMycGno
https://medium.com/s/greatescape/when-working-in-virtual-reality-makes-you-sick-795a61f5e5dc
https://vrvblog.co/felker-martin/3178/made-from-the-red-soil-fantasies-of-misery-in-neon-genesis-evangelion/
https://datasociety.net/research/media-manipulation/
https://www.gofundme.com/arkdust-scifi-book-from-alex-smith
https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/31/18047346/the-wandering-earth-trailer-cixin-liu-chinese-science-fiction
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/12/06/goodbye-edge/