OCTOMATIC MAN

FRIENDS!!!

What is sup?

Well, I told you 2 things last time—that I was going to start doing automatic writing again, and that I was going to do adventures in the bathroom—me the most uncourageous person in the world finally using the men’s room in the post-Trans revolution (phase 1) Trumpocalypse.

I’m happy to report that on my bathroom adventures I’ve found them to be unobtrusively occupied & well-kept. In other words, there have been no “adventures” and I’m glad about this & I’ll let you know if anything adventuresome happens, but it may not be the life-changing experience I thought it would be : ))

However I do have some automatic writing (aka stream of wheat aka Vogon poetry aka classified NSA gibberish) for you. I am a little rusty at since being on big pharmaceuticals for the past 3 years but it’s all coming back to me : )

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

VOGON: Jan ’18

(+ a few from Dec)

Slice the fog w/ 10 swords

I’m as paranoid as they come

Seriously tired poor wretched

Nibbled toes of Liberty

Pledging allegiance to the basement pizzeria

Slinging sex gangs

7381 Suicide Attempt Hotline

But where is the rest? I’m not gonna make it

Up the silo

Where’s the rest of the leopard print

Outside lines, outside spot

Coloring books for institutionalized adults

If they have you in effigy, they have you

The masque of the MRA v. permanent yoga pose wave 3 feminist (albino-neutral)

Reverse downward dog

Take it to tarantula photoshop

I’ve walked out w/ your images

Stuck up jerky

iMovie rendition of all the beheadings I never watched

All the stop-motion intent w/ which I live

You’ll pray for you

I’ll pray for me.

1205:0925p

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

Construction on new head space

Began in early ’14

Before I fully understood

How much new junk I’d need to shove in there

I’m the human Univac

Purring through the slats

I can’t possibly hang more diplomas

And yet I must if I’m to board the ship

Where I applied to work for the cagey bee

I want to know the people of America like lovers

Like cameras

I want to see through their yellowed lenses

Bluing the world into

Something calmer than it is

I want to filter my thoughts

Through the pages of the phonebook

Weeks of doorstop poetry

I decide to use it

Instead of big dumb Pharma’s tampons &

Their tax-attached strings

Loophole Sunset Cervix

1206:0150p

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

You grew like money from the ground

A green baby waving limbs

At a time when rockets

Can’t seem to reach space

Did you see the special effect it left in the photogenic atmo?

You’ve been killed, my refugees

And it makes me want to kick your corpses &

Spit on your graves

Because loving you, shedding my tears like

Sophisticated sprinkler systems all over your roots,

Gave me a joy that made all the sadness worth it…

You flop on your backs

Choking on ancient icebergs

Stomped to death by the sun

0111:0625a

I’m pretty sure my heart’s not red

It’s succulent & green

Wet like a reptile (to the eye not the touch)

I recognize you, Princess

My rival in androgyny

What world did I paint w/ all these invisible inks?

A trail of dewdrops

Leading to a future that glares

Silver-colorless, 

A close up that reminds me

We’re full of liquid rust,

Embarrassing green jellies…

Will the Presidency corrupt the Oprah?

Do you understand what I’m saying? Celebrities running for office?

Gore (Al) & Gore (Vidal)

bringing Hollywood to the shining opposite sea &

Washington all emotive, fluttering fans &

Going off script

There’s nothing we can do

I’m more afraid of Pence

His deluxe model Naziism

Scarier than the clown antics that pass 

For leadership

And then there’s Mother

With eyes like oil spilled

From a tiny car. SAD.

What’s happened since the last time I did this?

Too much to list.

Stuff no one would believe.

I live in a world I can’t trust to be there each morning

A world more scary than the one I painted

Last decade

And yet some beautiful details

Included in the hellish landscape (oops, topography)

No soothing aloe for sociopathy

You’ll have to resort to the bitter metals

Brewed at the pharmacy

Doled by millennials w/ neck tats

Your brain wears that dust like gold

Can you believe you retrieved that memory?

I was silenced; you were encouraged to speak

Why am I still angry?

I thought that would go away one day

Especially after all those tears

All that ancient sadness

Plundered from its chest

My chest

So… a little rusty

A mechanical puppy learning to drool

in the Age of Aquarius

Smiling from clavicle to clavicle

From sea to radioactive sea

0111:0675a

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

Tell Them How You Really Feel

You sent me here w/out a handle. w/out a lid

So when I boiled over no one

Could take me from the stove

A blast furnace bending glass

A sagging bottle of fire

How much burning cools the herd?

Mentored by flames,

You are indeed hellbound

Unclothed uncamouflaged Shemperor

Airspace One

Airwave sizzle w/ warning

Of heirloom tomatoes mushrooming w/ disapproval

You bomb onstage

On blitzen und donder

Heil Hitler w/ one little finger

You’re fired…

And no hard cinnamon candy button

As consolation

0123:0225a

Speaking of cinnamon

Let’s sprinkle some on these cremains

A sweet coffee ocean scorched

By the orangest element

Hard butterscotch soda

Tarantula toes tickle that

Sensitive delta between us &

Novosibersk & Pyongyang

Unputined

Put under

Nup unit

1 tuna pun

Boy you said it

There’s just no sense there

Quoth the scenery, I owe him

His sacred Rent

The oligarch waiting 

To amputate

My thumbs w/ a sharpened dollar bill

Is that how I came here

W/ no handle, no lid?

W/ no magic (or even practical) wand?

No tempting cinnamon button

Glistening w/ power

No pulse, no produce

Just eggs in a cauldron

An unattractive alchemy

Dummy sex 

W/ a vertical frown

0123:0250a

Music is News

To my ears

Here we go on the evolution

Park/ride

Here,

We don’t evolve 

As much as stretch

Lengthen on tippy-toe

Reaching a layer of self

That was previously out of reach

Peeling it away w/ no onion tears

Phony emotions have grown

Into computery feelings

The boy w/ nail polish taps

‘Emotion’

Onto his not-computer screen

And cries deep inside

For his mother

W/ no outward glitches

They (the wealthy

Coastal educated prog

Ressive bleeding heart

Libtardo cabal) said 

‘Art is Dead’

In the 40s they said it

In the 80s they said it

But Art is more like The Moon

Flexing & waxing

Retracting & extending

Making porn in the sky

A divine whore

Fattening each monthly decade

2010s a difficult one!

We are mid-revolution

Scrambled, breaking &

Omeletted eggs stuck to the cauldron

Some recognize this

And some keep waiting for it to start

But we’ll look back at NOW

& say That was no present

0125:0150a

1988,

What was it all about??

It was like time held me down &

Raped me

Then forced me to go to work

In a factory wearing

A flowy impractical clownsuit

Caught in the gears

I’m no longer allowed

To say I was sent here in the wrong body

It’s for progress &

the next generation

But how shall I say it?

It’s okay that people know

Your insanity as well as

Your accomplishments

But man was I born in the wrong body…

0125:0225a

[oh

Oh

OH

Don’t remove the Clintons from the equation

She wanted a candidate (opponent) she

Could easily beat; didn’t count on Putin]

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

How did we used to do this—

Know the world thru our fingers?

Private tours thru

The next level of awareness

Led to lots of angel-talk

But no clothing removal

Led to lots of soldiers

Crying in my ear

But no end to the war

I started a thought in the dark

But the thought grew filaments

It was light

Because

It was a thought of Gumby

Prone in a state of gumbo

An orange stew (for instance,

Did you even know there was an

Election in Russia tomorrow?)

How will we hack it?

By going to war w/ China

Finally paying for all that

Pipeline & drywall & panda bacon &

Suicide

0129:0125a

DOTS!!!!

I’m a Fool

An uneducated Fool!

But here I am alone w/ time again

After it tried to hurt me…

No right or wrong side

But middle of the tracks

Their helix straightened 

W/ an iron

Called locomotion

Ssshhh..I’m trying to hear,

Not think…

My poetry turned into thoughts in 2012

Big abstract detached worms leaving my ears

Through sinking ratholes on a ship tipped up

Tethering corona to sun

You had a blast w/ those eggs!

Nothing hatched, well…actually

Some tiny perfect chicks

Unviable on the internet, 

Too peckish for screen culture

They’d never quite find 

Their niche, never make it

Onto the blacklist

0129:0125a

Behind the proscenium lies:

More lies! Someone who

Believes he lights the way

Is actually a darklord carrying in his Armani

Exchange pockets

The seeds of a painful

Civil uprising

The thinking & the feeling

Will go at it again

And compromise somewhere

On the Wheel of Fortune

54*latitude

31* longitude

0129:0150a

Now Is Not The Time For Psychobabble

Oh, but it is!  And here’s why:

1) Everybody’s doing it. Get on board or be left behind.

2) For me, it’s just pre-sense. It may not mean anything right now, but it will next year, or next century. You just wait!

3) Instead of calling it psychobabble, let’s just call it poetry & see where it takes us…

FRIENSKIS,

How are you? I am doing better & better. I had a couple of rough months. Somehow I managed to be jolly & positive through Dec/Jan, but Feb/Mar were a little aftershocky.

Don’t worry. That is going to happen here. It’s okay to have feelings. Even BIG ones. Even irrational ones. Irrational feelings are often intuitive timebombs going off prematurely, kind of like psychobabble may just be memories from the future.

I’ve been googling Sen. Duckworth (D-IL) regularly, and I fact check everything that comes out of the great American blowhole. And as soon as I can walk again, I start my “chosen activity” on the frontlines…

…oh did I tell you I broke my foot about 3 weeks ago? I’m so bummed because I had my mile down to 8 minutes, and had wanted to do a 5K in Apr/May. I’m trying to enjoy this convalescence, but …I feel like now’s not the time to be side-lined.

But maybe it is. And here’s why:

1) I did all the hard work already

2) Now is the time to gather strength

3) I’m still in a “period of transition”

*************** A PERIOD OF TRANSITION**********

So, VT, how is your transition going? I hear everyone ask me all the time.

Not. 

No one asks. No one wants to know about it. But I’m going to tell you about it anyway, because that’s how generous I am w/ my experiences on this planet.

Toy Village 2003

The truth is—I haven’t changed much. If you had told me on 12/7/15, the day of my first shot, that I would still look pretty much the same 16 months later…

I would’ve been really disappointed. Once I made the decision to start T, and waited 5 months to get in to see the Endo, and imagined myself as a guy for the first time since I was 19 & almost died because i was really a girl in the world’s eyes…

I was so looking forward to this wonderful transformative journey (which I expected would take about a year). I was anticipating (& fearing) being unrecognizable in the mirror. I was anticipating (& fearing) the loss of my mezzo-soprano singing range. But the excitement was definitely greater than the fear.

Being an older trans guy (46 at time of 1st shot), I’m on a lower dose of T than the average 18 year-old would be. I was in that hormone range where i wasn’t making much estrogen anymore so I was okay w/ the lower dose. Plus I had to think of Moonchild’s comfort level too…

Even though he understood gender dysphoria from living w/ me for years, he was not looking forward to having a husband instead of a wife. I was okay with transitioning slowly if it would help him acclimatize.

Of course, I told you all that from the moment I made my appointment up until the start of this year the “Ma’am bombs” began—

the world called me ma’am so many times, just so I’d never forget : ))

Baby Eloise—she's sitting in the windowsill chattering at birds now 14 yrs old

But I do want to forget. And the world doesn’t call me ma’am so much anymore, but I don’t exactly pass as male either. I think since I had top surgery I’m read first as “teenage boy” but people figure out pretty quickly that I’m older & that means I must be female…

My moustache is trying so hard to be more than a soup shadow. But it just hasn’t progressed much. Even on my lower dose, the doctor thought I should have more facial hair by now.

My voice also hasn’t really changed all the way. Sometimes it is deeper, sometimes it’s just scratchy, and sometimes I feel like I sound just like my old lady-self…

I don’t think people even remember that I’m trans & some of my friends who were so good at trying to use my name and pronouns have just gone back to she-ing and I feel like I might have to come out all over again…

I had been waiting on the changes that would make it easier for my friends to switch pronouns. I know it feels delusional to call someone ‘he’ when they still look like ‘she.’

So...in Feb/Mar I was lamenting my slower paced changes (I’m used to being around younger guys who have goatees & Jim Morrison vocal ranges in like 6 months) and feeling left out, and wondering what should I do about this??

But now I’m feeling a lot better about my failure-to-trans. I feel so much better on T than I did my whole life as an estrogen monster. That alone makes the leg-stabbing worth it. Plus the changes that may not be so noticeable to a casual observer—muscle mass, “downstairs growth”—are enough to ease dysphoria to functional levels.

I have some of the changes I wanted, and none of the ones Moonchild didn’t want—so it’s a win-win! I just have to keep it in perspective, and stay on my own path. Any time I dare to compare myself to the younger guys I come away feeling quite hopeless.

I don't know what this is—2015

And yes, it’s true that I pee in a cup in the car. It’s actually a coffee thermos. I am not a fired-up trans activist, and I don’t want any bathroom drama.** So I practice avoidance. I know some people would say this makes me “not a trans ally.” 

But to me it just means I’m used to being self-protective over confrontational. I recognize that the world has trans compassion fatigue and I’m trying not to push any buttons.

Just reading the room as they say…

*******************READING ROOM: AS THEY SAY************

I read a book a few months ago that I want to delve into in one of my serious Octopus Diary entries. It was the biography of Sci Fi author James Tiptree (who was really a woman named Alice Sheldon). I had never heard of Tiptree before reading the book, but a friend thought I needed to read about him and sent the book to my mailbox.

This was way more than a story about a sci-fi author with a pseudonym. It was very misogynist-feminist/trans-masculine. Not to mention Alice Sheldon, the person, lived a jaw-droppingly privileged & introspective life***, in which she managed to do great things before ending it all in a murder-suicide. 

Unfortunately I finished the book right around the time of the election and it got shoved aside in the sideshowery that ensued. But I’ll write more about Tiptree when I have some art to go with it! Yes! I want to do some Tiptree-inspired watercolors to go with the article. 

Today, you’ll have to recycle this used art with your purple irises.

************   ** & *** ********************

**although I almost had car drama when we were up in Ybor City—I was peeing in my coffee cup & some guy banged on the window. He was the paid parking attendant and I don’t think he saw what I was doing but it was a close call.

***speaking of introspective lives, in response to my FB post about “utopian societies of the future” someone asked, VT, what do you think a utopian society IS? 

And I said, A society that’s more introverted. 

More on that serious topic

Later

In the Octopus Diary

I don't know what this is either but I made it during my nervous breakdown 2014