The Ninth Tentacle

COMRADES,

I am with you 1000% in your assessment 

That we are in the clutches of a sociopath

Who's more interested in comparing

Inauguration-size

Than establishing a healthy bond w/ Intelligence

This isn't just scary, it's not just odd or offbeat or Trump being Trump and that's why we like him

This is pure ignorance. Pure jingoistic juvenility, and I'm not just being alliterative because it makes me jolly. I really mean that.

His XTREME-of-consciousness makes my poetic streams look like dry riverbeds of legalese. In other words, my poetry would make for more presidential commentary than what was said yesterday at the CIA.

I am embarrassed by this. I am embarrassed for us. This is not cute, people. I would love to find humor in it but I just can't this time.

I am terrified of the masters behind this creepy clown-puppet. And of the hate that has bared its teeth on the internet & on the walls of the mosques & temples & soon perhaps biting into our own skins.

We watched footage from the Women's March on FB live before going out to SRQ's own march. The one person who really got through to me and made me feel like nothing regressive was going to happen on her watch:

Sen. TAMMY DUCKWORTH D-IL

Look her up if you missed her very short speech at the March. As a disabled Asian-American combat veteran, she has so much intersectional cred she might as well be God right now.

If things start going eggy, she is the person I will reach for. I will google her name if I'm feeling hopeless. I will write her a letter if I'm afraid. I will stalk her at her home & end up in jail if that's what I need to do. But I've chosen her as my person-in-power to hitch my wagon to.

(lovely schizoid metaphor going on here ^^^)

And hey COMRADES, especially you anti-Trump libtards (aka my people),

Please remember to go high. Don't jerk your knees so hard they come back to fracture your larynx. Think it through before you start smashing windows or plotting assassinations. The alt-right conspiracy theorists are already projecting a neo-liberal feminazi assassin…

…well, heh heh, I'm not going to tell you not to do it, but just…think it through…

[Speaking of alt-right nazis pretending to be good ol Johnny Appleseed rootsy folksy shucksy mankind is my mission I can save you all cuz I saved myself from the flames & my sizzling synapses hold all the answers Spreading the…not love, but TRUTH! TRUTH, that harsh tough gristly gift that's so different for each one of us! 

I like everyone, but all my black friends live in Africa where they belong, see?? 

Speaking of them and their lonely white dicks, and their fear of the pussyhat, and their hatred of what they can't own as property--Tthey are still here, living among us. 

Those guys who hate that my femininity went rogue on their exclusive chemical cocktail! The fear that they may give me a Very Good, Sir when I deserve only a Nice <3 i="">

Where Sir = bro, I am the weird zero, and you are the hypocrites addicted to your own mathless myth]

All right. I am a poet so I'm allowed to be all cryptic and mystical and kind of you know um…quirky solopsistic navel-picking shoe-gazing cherry-lickking jack-offative narcissist. But not our President, not our fearless communicator our impartial father figure our big old Uncle Grandpa Mohommed cartoon conjugal Jesus visitor! Not him! Oh please, not Him!!!

*******************

All right, again. I started doing my daily stream-of-consciousnesses

I really need them now…to get my brain farting again

Stabbed in another dimension! A hallway in my heart I never knew I had. Ever dreamt you found a room in your house that wasn't there before? You peek your head in--"Is this real?"--and the room goes from closet to attic to mezzanine to subconscious palace. But you can't make yourself enter--"Here it is inside my house but is it mine?" The property of dreams unrecorded on the table of elements. Ever dreamed you've grown new body parts? A limb, a genital, a slit in your side that vents when you start to feel fear? In my dreams my body always belongs to me for it's not property. We've grown a new president, a ninth tentacle. I no longer recognize this octopus I've analyzed for ages. We've grown apart, as legal aliens often do. Another midnight master who wakes a sunrise student, bereft of the lessons in a wet cartoon.  1-21-17 

**************

AND HEY COMRADES! I hope you enjoy this crappy art--The Pre-Inaugural Nerve Doodles. I am out of practice. Obviously.

Pathological Pravda

FRIENDS, RUSSIANS:

Happy Goddamn Fucking New Year.

Unlike most of you who eschew new year's resolutions because you won't keep them anyway, I always make resolutions & stick to them.

For instance my resolutions last year were A) to forget more things B) to submit quality writing and get it published.

And I did that! All year long. I got more stuff published in 2016 than the previous 2 years combined. And boy--did I forget a lot of stuff. I can't even remember all the stuff I forgot last year!

[For my new friends (and Russians) who are wondering why I would want to forget stuff--I have one of those perfect biographical memories like MaryLu Henner and I really needed to clean out my brain, make room for all the highly classified data that's incoming

But I can still remember everything if you ask me by date---ie, what happened on Oct 9, 1985? (It was a Wednesday & we were working on the play 'Antigone' in my high school theatre class). But as far as remembering the painful details from each calendar square of my life? I'm purging some of the hurts & judgments & emotional propaganda I've been feeding myself since…1985.]

So what's on the docket for VT in 2017?

A) Retrieving my sense of humor from wherever I left it in 2014. I'm sure I won't find my sense of humor in the condition it was when I abandoned it, but I KNOW I will need a funhouse lens through which to view the nouvelle regime. I am scared shitless and know that is when levity is most essential. But I don't know how "leviticous" I can be about it. Plus I'm so unfunny now, I worry that I may be getting Alzheimer's. 

[Alzheimer's is my new thing to be unreasonably paranoid about. It's always something--sinkholes, blood clots… This year I will find every reason to believe I have early onset dementia. Is this really happening? Maybe not.]

2010 character: The Majestic Text-mouth Sparrow

B) This doesn't need repeating but --Writing, submitting, seeing more work in print. I actually feel really weird whenever I have a poem published. At first it's thrilling--yay, someone appreciates my words! But then it's a scary out-of-comfort-zone heebie jeebie vulnerability. I'm not cut out to be a person, let alone a person with a name. And cred. But I've worked my whole life to occupy this out-of-comfort zone, so I won't give up just because America isn't great yet, or I'm losing my mind.

C) Do more art. I don't need to say it but sorry I did no art in '16. That will not happen again.

D) Weaning off as much single-use plastic as possible. We were doing pretty good with this for awhile, then our cats destroyed our cloth grocery bags one by one & suddenly we had a cabinet full of plastics again. If we are saying good-bye to environmental protections for awhile, I want to contribute as little as possible to the shitpile.

[Of course transitioning means--syringes! Plastic ones! Unreusable disposable waste that usually gets incinerated. But I refuse to throw them out. I've been using them for watercolors and other constructions. So expect some needle-art this year : )]

E) Owning my transition. I'll never be super masculine, but I want to feel comfortable thinking of myself as male. I was such a boy when I was a little kid, and even up through high school I dressed femininely but was gruff & tomboyish as ever. And then something happened after high school…life without a net…and I felt this horrid obligation to play the role of female, and pretend to enjoy & be fine with it. And now that I've been released from that obligation it is still hard not to feel guilty when I think of myself as "he"--I let everyone misgender me because I don't want to be one of those militant "delusional" trans people who disavows all gender constructs.

I just want to pass as a guy and live a quiet life w/ my mate. I don't want to demand anything from anyone, but I need to demand of myself that I FORGET the forced femininity. And the guilt and the hatred and the overflowing misogyny I drowned in for decades. Once I do that, I know passing will come naturally.

Other than that, I have no "trans chores" this year! 

What else? Right now I'm training to do a run. I'll probably start with a 1K or even 5K if I'm feeling strong enough. Back in the days when I was crying so loud & uncontrollable that i thought it would scare the neighbors, I started running around my house, trying to calm myself down. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes I was running for hours. Hours, friends & Russians.

It felt awful at the time, but now I'm a pretty good runner for an old curmudgeon. I ran a 9 minute mile this morning and next week I hope to do it in 6, 'mmmmkay?

All right….that's all I have to say now. I hope everybody's year goes well…I mean, really well. If we all need to join forces we will. Until then, I'll be doing all that stuff up there ^^^