the witch remembers what they want to be forgotten

the sky over philly right now is the very-end-of-dusk overcast red-purple humid with a chill breeze blowing. "there's a lot more water in the atmosphere" my boo said while we sat on their roof and watched the sunset a few days ago.

i redid my cyborgmemoirs.com website... almost on a whim, but it was one of those things that i was meaning to do for so long. i'm VERY glad it only took me a few days and not like a whole week, cause dredging through code can get discouraging.

i'm watching 90s drum and bass mixtape youtubes on my smart tv.

oh, please check out the re-done cyborgmemoirs.com at your leisure. it is redone to look more appealing on smartphones and tablets, and there is a previously unreleased story on there, plus a new news section that i decided to bring over after realizing i only listed my "news" here in this newsletter or on my goodreads author blog. as always, i kept the color scheme away from the #FFFFFF – let me know what you think about it.

if you wanted a mean scary femme appreciation club tote, there's only one left and I won't be remaking them, so last call on that jawn. shirts are also on sale.
STIMULATING ITEMS
Beneath the Rose

"We have pilfered, scanned and torrented the mysteries – creating not a leap in consciousness, but a culture of entitlement. [...] We need to take secrecy back, and we need to remember what the secret is. [...] Bentham realised that the fear of being watched was enough, a dynamic we find in the repressive Abrahamic religions with God as their all seeing eye. [...] As occultists we should be familiar with consciousness research which demonstrates that being watched changes us in meaningful ways. [...] Being watched is the direct opposite of the aim of occult practice, which strives to make us present, and often employs optic devices such as the mirror to look back at the denizens of the universe."

"For America to Live, Europe Must Die"
(note: music autoplays on this site)
i'm gonna post a big chunk of this brief speech so please read the whole thing

"The only possible opening for a statement of this kind is that I detest writing. The process itself epitomizes the European concept of "legitimate" thinking; what is written has an importance that is denied the spoken. My culture, the Lakota culture, has an oral tradition, so I ordinarily reject writing. It is one of the white world's ways of destroying the cultures of non-European peoples, the imposing of an abstraction over the spoken relationship of a people.

So what you read here is not what I've written. It's what I've said and someone else has written down. I will allow this because it seems that the only way to communicate with the white world is through the dead, dry leaves of a book. I don't really care whether my words reach whites or not. They have already demonstrated through their history that they cannot hear, cannot see; they can only read (of course, there are exceptions, but the exceptions only prove the rule). I'm more concerned with American Indian people, students and others, who have begun to be absorbed into the white world through universities and other institutions. But even then it's a marginal sort of concern. It's very possible to grow into a red face with a white mind; and if that's a person's individual choice, so be it, but I have no use for them. This is part of the process of cultural genocide being waged by Europeans against American Indian peoples' today. My concern is with those American Indians who choose to resist this genocide, but who may be confused as to how to proceed.

(You notice I use the term American Indian rather than Native American or Native indigenous people or Amerindian when referring to my people. There has been some controversy about such terms, and frankly, at this point, I find it absurd. Primarily it seems that American Indian is being rejected as European in origin--which is true. But all the above terms are European in origin; the only non-European way is to speak of Lakota--or, more precisely, of Oglala, Brule, etc.--and of the Dineh, the Miccousukee, and all the rest of the several hundred correct tribal names.

(There is also some confusion about the word Indian, a mistaken belief that it refers somehow to the country, India. When Columbus washed up on the beach in the Caribbean, he was not looking for a country called India. Europeans were calling that country Hindustan in 1492. Look it up on the old maps. Columbus called the tribal people he met "Indio," from the Italian in dio, meaning "in God.")

It takes a strong effort on the part of each American Indian not to become Europeanized. The strength for this effort can only come from the traditional ways, the traditional values that our elders retain. It must come from the hoop, the four directions, the relations: it cannot come from the pages of a book or a thousand books. No European can ever teach a Lakota to be Lakota, a Hopi to be Hopi. A master's degree in "Indian Studies" or in "education" or in anything else cannot make a person into a human being or provide knowledge into traditional ways. It can only make you into a mental European, an outsider.

I should be clear about something here, because there seems to be some confusion about it. When I speak of Europeans or mental Europeans, I'm not allowing for false distinctions. I'm not saying that on the one hand there are the by-products of a few thousand years of genocidal, reactionary, European intellectual development which is bad; and on the other hand there is some new revolutionary intellectual development which is good. I'm referring here to the so-called theories of Marxism and anarchism and "leftism" in general. I don't believe these theories can be separated from the rest of the of the European intellectual tradition. It's really just the same old song.

The process began much earlier. Newton, for example, "revolutionized" physics and the so-called natural sciences by reducing the physical universe to a linear mathematical equation. Descartes did the same thing with culture. John Locke did it with politics, and Adam Smith did it with economics. Each one of these "thinkers" took a piece of the sacredity of human existence and converted it into code, an abstraction. They picked up where Christianity ended: they "secularized" Christian religion, as the "scholars" like to say--and in doing so they made Europe more able and ready to act as an expansionist culture. Each of these intellectual revolutions served to abstract the European mentality even further, to remove the wonderful complexity and sacredity from the universe and replace it with a logical sequence: one, two, three. Answer!

This is what has come to be termed "efficiency" in the European mind. Whatever is mechanical is perfect; whatever seems to work at the moment--that is, proves the mechanical model to be the right one--is considered correct, even when it is clearly untrue. This is why "truth" changes so fast in the European mind; the answers which result from such a process are only stopgaps, only temporary, and must be continuously discarded in favor of new stopgaps which support the mechanical models and keep them (the models) alive.

Hegel and Marx were heirs to the thinking of Newton, Descartes, Locke and Smith. Hegel finished the process of secularizing theology--and that is put in his own terms--he secularized the religious thinking through which Europe understood the universe. Then Marx put Hegel's philosophy in terms of "materialism," which is to say that Marx desacredized Hegel's work altogether. Again, this is in Marx' own terms. And this is now seen as the future revolutionary potential of Europe. Europeans may see this as revolutionary, but American Indians see it simply as still more of that same old European conflict between being and gaining. The intellectual roots of a new Marxist form of European imperialism lie in Marx'--and his followers'--links to the tradition of Newton, Hegel and the others.

Being is a sacred proposition. Gaining is a material act. Traditionally, American Indians have always attempted to be the best people they could. Part of that sacred process was and is to give away wealth, to discard wealth in order not to gain. Material gain is an indicator of false status among traditional people, while it is "proof that the system works" to Europeans. Clearly, there are two completely opposing views at issue here, and Marxism is very far over to the other side from the American Indian view. But let's look at a major implication of this; it is not merely an intellectual debate.

The European materialist tradition of desacredizing the universe is very similar to the mental process which goes into dehumanizing another person. And who seems most expert at dehumanizing other people? And why? Soldiers who have seen a lot of combat learn to do this to the enemy before going back into combat. Murderers do it before going out to commit murder. Nazi SS guards did it to concentration camp inmates. Cops do it. Corporation leaders do it to the workers they send into uranium mines and steel mills. Politicians do it to everyone in sight. And what the process has in common for each group doing the dehumanizing is that it makes it all right to kill and otherwise destroy other people. One of the Christian commandments says, "Thou shalt not kill," at least not humans, so the trick is to mentally convert the victims into nonhumans. Then you can proclaim violation of your own commandment as a virtue.

"For America to Live, Europe Must Die"

i started lifting weights at a friend's house.

i remember when i was younger and had no money or job and made my thrift store clothes all wild with sharpies and safety pins, and would go into the urban outfitters on walnut street after school and make fun of how expensive everything was and side-eye the cool kids at high school whose parents had money to buy them those overpriced trend clothes. and now when i'm bored i wander in there to look at the fashions, rolled right back around to funny 90s-redux-of-70s fashions... i got rid of a lot of clothes when i did the konmari process to my things. my dad has a lot of stuff he keeps. he's like, i didn't have nothing and now i can have anything i want. i'm like ok dad you got like ten of the same black beanie hat in perfect condition (and to this day I still wear my beanies the way you told me looked proper).

i wanted to title this email "your latest jawnbox is here" in a play off email advertising headlines, but I didn't want to get stuck in a spam box.

Claudia Patricia Gomez Gonzales, who was shot in the head by a Customs Border cop in Texas last Wednesday, was an indigenous woman from Xela, also called Quetzaltenango in Guatemala. Myself and many other passing American tourists and students have been to Xela, to attend their famous Spanish language schools. I drained my savings to go there for a month and earnestly study Spanish – it's vexingly more affordable than any language program with a comparable study load in the US – in hopes to massage a dormant connection to my hat-collecting father, who has always told me to be proud of my roots. In Xela, you can walk in off the street and say you want to sign up for classes. You can do homestay. You do not need to be a university student in order to study Spanish in Xela. You, an American, can waltz in and throw down your money, and get what you want without harassment.

Have you ever been harassed? By someone aiming a gun at you?

I saw that documentary about Christian fundamentalists being the biggest pro-Israel lobby because they have an erotic religious desire to experience the rapture. Where would we all be if the bible had never been written down?

There is another way. There is the traditional Lakota way and the ways of the American Indian peoples. It is the way that knows that humans do not have the right to degrade Mother Earth, that there are forces beyond anything the European mind has conceived, that humans must be in harmony with all relations or the relations will eventually eliminate the disharmony. A lopsided emphasis on humans by humans--the Europeans' arrogance of acting as though they were beyond the nature of all related things--can only result in a total disharmony and a readjustment which cuts arrogant humans down to size, gives them a taste of that reality beyond their grasp or control and restores the harmony. There is no need for a revolutionary theory to bring this about; it's beyond human control. The nature peoples of this planet know this and so they do not theorize about it. Theory is an abstract; our knowledge is real.

Distilled to its basic terms, European faith--including the new faith in science--equals a belief that man is God. Europe has always sought a Messiah, whether that be the man Jesus Christ or the man Karl Marx or the man Albert Einstein. American Indians know this to be totally absurd. Humans are the weakest of all creatures, so weak that other creatures are willing to give up their flesh that we may live. Humans are able to survive only through the exercise of rationality since they lack the abilities of other creatures to gain food through the use of fang and claw.

But rationality is a curse since it can cause humans to forget the natural order of things in ways other creatures do not. A wolf never forgets his or her place in the natural order. American Indians can. Europeans almost always do. We pray our thanks to the deer, our relations, for allowing us their flesh to eat; Europeans simply take the flesh for granted and consider the deer inferior. After all, Europeans consider themselves godlike in their rationalism and science. God is the Supreme Being; all else must be inferior.

All European tradition, Marxism included, has conspired to defy the natural order of all things. Mother Earth has been abused, the powers have been abused, and this cannot go on forever. No theory can alter that simple fact. Mother Earth will retaliate, the whole environment will retaliate, and the abusers will be eliminated. Things come full circle, back to where they started. That's revolution. And that's a prophecy of my people, of the Hopi people and of other correct peoples.

authority is for no one.
take care of yourselves because no one else will.
shouts out to all my fellow geminis.
@}-}-;-------
m