What's Black & White & Trans All Over

 Hello My Abandoned Little Blogspace & All the Popeyes Peeping In,

I’m back! Just in time to wrap up this frenzied and fruitful year with a big red Xmes*/Chihuanikkah ribbon! When I say frenzied and fruitful I do not mean halcyon and pear-shaped — I really mean frenzied and fruitful.

By now you know that I began this year with a horrific pharmaceutical side effect called akathisia, that we made the rash decision to not only sell our house in Sarasota but to haul our asses all the way back to Tony “Moonchild” Egler’s incipient horizon, and that somewhere in between I managed to have a chapbook published by Alien Buddha Press and you can still buy your copy today**. (I also have some poems that will be published at different venues starting very soon. I’ll keep you posted on FBhook)

Pretty exciting, ha? Sometimes I want to shout “Make it Stop!” because as you know I like sloth-paced living best and this has been more of a tasmanian dust-devil trajectory.

But what I actually came here to discuss in this very serious space are some of the frenzied & tasmanian developments within the LGB  TQ errr, community[?]  First though, I will answer a couple questions you had regarding akathisia —

1) How can you tell if you’re just really depressed & anxious, or if you’re having a reaction to your medication?

I sort of explained this in the last blog, but it’s been awhile…You can tell if your normal depression/anxiety symptoms get dialed up to 111. Beyond anything that is bearable. You can tell if you are taking any of the medications I mentioned (anti-psychotics, benzos, anti-nauseates) and you just keep feeling worse and worse. You can tell if you feel like your skin is crawling, like your spine is being nibbled by rats and you keep twisting & turning and rocking to stop the ticklish/agony of it. You can tell if your brain is a non stop nightmare zone — senselessly horrific scenes rapidly forming in your head all day. Rapidly. Speedy, unstoppable scrolls of terror. Not just a bad thought here, a sad thought there…but floods of anguish that can’t be reasoned through. The subjective and objective will blur and these nightmarish thoughts will translate into regrets about your whole existence that cast you as some kind of monster or demon who deserves to feel the way you do (and that was the tricky part — I thought I was having valid realizations about what a terrible person I was, and how everything I did in my life was a terrible affront to humanity, especially those closest to me)

Here's the only art I did in 2021 (and I did it on Jan 3rd, so a whole year ago almost) Quintuplets' Supper on the Tour Bus w/ Barefoot Mom

Some of the terrifying thoughts I can remember having throughout the winter of ’20/’21 were of my house suddenly conflagrating and my pets getting burned alive. Knowing that if I didn’t run into the fire to save them I was a terrible selfish person. Hearing their cries of pain and death and not being brave enough to burn with them. Also had a strange fear of all the glass objects in my house — from kitchenware to decorations to windows — seeing them as animate beings that would shatter if I came too close to them and try to embed their tiniest shards into my skin so that it would take painstaking effort to remove them. 

These are not thoughts that I would willingly torment myself with, even if I was very depressed & anxious. It brings to mind what (I’ve heard) happens with postpartum depression. I kept wondering to myself, Why the fuck do I have p.p. depression at my age/gender/childlessness level??

2) What actually causes it?

The uncontrollable movements/thoughts that characterize akathisia come from flooded dopamine centers in your brain, coupled with depleted serotonin centers. It happens to people with schizophrenia/bi-polar/Tourette’s who are on these anti-psychotic medications for a long time, or if they try to stop them. It’s kind of a round robin of side effects being worse than the diagnosis, going off meds, experiencing symptoms of diagnosis, going back on meds that will eventually make your skin crawl. Caring, experienced professionals are needed to recognize and help manage these precarious balances. 

It can also happen with recreational drugs like cocaine. Key is knowing your own mental/emotional playing field well enough to recognize when suicidal ideations feel like electrical cattle prods rather than well thought-out end-of-life solutions. 

[Not advocating suicide here, but I respect those who make the decision to end their lives, if it is indeed a choice to escape insurmountable circumstances]

Which brings me to my intended topic regarding the LGB  TQ’s… starting with

DAVE & DAPHNE

By now we’ve all seen the latest Dave Chappelle comedy special and have our own opinions about how transphobic it was or wasn’t. I posted my own response to it on Facebook, along with an array of responses from the trans community (as it exists on Youtube). And if you’re one of those people who had to cry out about Well, why was the part about child sex abuse in the church glossed over? OR Why didn’t the joke about Space Jews cause a huge riotous protest? I’ll explain —

a) the punchline about Dave loving to cum in the priest’s face was a triumphant punch UP against the church & its conclave of pedophiles. ‘Mmmmkay? 

b) the joke about the ’Space Jews’ was met with a lot of groans from the audience. But I’ll bet this was Dave’s way of punching up at rich Hollywood executives (we’ve heard forever that Hollywood is run by old Jewish guys)

c) the bulk of the show was not about Dave’s complicated relationship with priests or Jewish people. It was about his complicated relationship with the LGB  TQs

[I’ll explain later why I keep separating the LGB from the TQ. There is a rift in the community and it is happening between those particular letters. I also don’t include the I or the A because intersex people largely don’t want to be lumped under the umbrella of sexual/gender identities. Intersex is a medical condition and most intersex people lean into the binary one way or the other by puberty. The A can mean Asexual or Ally —and asexuals, largely, are turned off by the overt sexualization of the whole LGB  TQ movement. Allies are allies and can be offended on our behalf (or not) but are generally cisgender, heteronormative folks.]

Anyway, the special pretty much has Mr Chappelle pitting the Black Lives Matter movement against the LGB  TQ movement (which in his mind is an all white movement? it seems?). He sees the LGB  TQs as very successful at effecting change in the world & the BLM movement as not so successful. Which may or may not be true, but totally trivializes the need for both movements to be equally successful.

 

Dave makes some pretty graphic jokes about trans women’s anatomy and way-of-being in the world. Which is not what offended ME personally — I allow for sexually gratuitous humor because I grew up in the 80s and I’m kind of inured to that explicit lowness of brow, especially from men. Yawn, I say. Dave is a straight, cis man who likes pussy and LOVES his dick. Wow! Who would’ve guessed.

What I hated about those jokes is that they demonstrated a total lack of understanding of what it means to be a trans woman. What gender dysphoria feels like…WHY a (biological) man would reject his body/social role/privilege even… to be a WOMAN (whether it’s a woman who still has a dick to whip out in front of the urinal, or one who has opted for that “impossible pussy” that just isn’t real pussy).

In my opinion, if you don’t have a deep holistic understanding of things you’re trying to satirize, you should probably steer clear of satirizing, or mocking, or demeaning these things, especially if these things are human beings.

Let’s talk about Daphne now. She was a friend of Dave’s from way back — 2006, I believe he said — before he even had his Comedy Central show. They somehow became engaged in a heckling dialogue at one of his stage shows, and Dave said he just couldn’t understand why she would want to go through life pretending to be a woman, and she replied that he didn’t need to understand why, he just needed to accept that she was having a human experience.

A comedian herself, Daphne was one who could ’suck it up.’ She was strong of spirit and character, not a petulant little snowflake who would stomp out of the theater in response to a little heckling. She even gave Dave a pass on understanding her — just believe I’m having a human experience. And Dave liked that. It freed him up to continue thinking (and joking) negatively about the trans people who weren’t so accommodating. What’s their fucking problem???

Now, I’ll have to admit that I’m probably more like Daphne than your average Millennial or Gen Z trans activist. I would rather fight ignorance with razor-sharp humor than foot-stomping insistence on conformity to the new world order. But I’ll also admit that my razor-sharpness has dulled in my old age, and sometimes all I can do is grumble Baaa, not this shit again…

…and that’s pretty much how I felt about this whole special and the fall-out from it —Baaaaaa!! Why are we still at square one on this??

What I discovered though, in trying to discern just where the public at large stood on trans issues in 2021, is that we are not at square one at all.  Somewhere in 2015 we may have all been at square one. But now some of us are at square 3,817 and some of us are at square -1billion.

So…let’s return to Daphne. She and Dave remained friends for many years. He invited her to open for him when he had a show in her hometown. She continued to stand up to hecklers like a champ. She continued to be tough & suck it all up. She defended Dave when TRAs (trans rights activists — more on them later) boycotted him and called for his “cancellation” — in 2019 I think — after his previous special, which was also very focused on the LGB  TQ community.

Then the TRAs turned on Daphne. 

And here’s where the whole thing goes pear-shaped for me. Because Daphne ended up committing suicide by jumping from a roof.  And Dave joked that it was the most dude-like thing she ever could’ve done, and said she would’ve loved that joke, and that it was the fault of the TRAs who attacked her online after she defended him…

…and I had to wonder if any of that was true. Would Daphne have loved the joke about her suicide? Was it the TRAs who forced her to her death? Was Dave using Daphne —his token trans friend! — as a shield against those he perceived to be too sensitive to suck up his brand of cis/hetero humor? Would Dave appreciate a white guy making insensitive jokes about black people just because he had a black friend? [I can answer that one — in fact Dave answered it in the 00s when he walked out of his lucrative contract with Comedy Central because of how many white people were appropriating his jokes that made fun of black culture.]

It turns out that after Daphne defended Dave in 2019, about 9 people on Twitter came after her for supporting his transphobic rhetoric. (Who knows how many in-real-life TRAs may have harassed her?) It also turns out that Daphne had a lot of other aggravating circumstances in her life — money problems, estrangement from her children, other family conflicts — at the time of her suicide.

Anyway…the special went from comedy to tragedy very quickly in my eyes. But my deep dive into the rabbit hole of post-Chappelle fall-out from the post modern trans rights movement was very …confusing in an enlightening way. This blog has gotten wayyyyy llooonnnngggg, and I know your attention spans are crying out for mercy so I will be kind and wrap it up —

 — I still have a lot to say though. Recall that Dave proclaimed himself “Team TERF” at the beginning of the special. I’ve known about TERFs for awhile now, and my understanding was that they were a minority faction of the latest feminist wave that were douche-y man-haters and their hate extended to trans women because they happened to be “biological men.”

I had no idea how douche-y and vocal TERFs actually were though, and I will regale you with everything I’ve learned about TERFs and TRAs and Autogynephiles and trans-medicalism and conservative trans bloggers and Detransitioners and vaginoplasties and phalloplasties and all the other “trans rites” surgeries and Jazz Jennings who returned to TV this week instead of starting classes at Harvard. Oh, and the rift between the LGBs and the TQs… 

…so very much fascinating sociology! HERE in the Octopus Diary.

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

*Xmes = rhymes with Hermes (the fancy scarf designer)

**You can get my poetry collection True Stories of the Odd Equinox here

Suburban Sprawl of Consciousness

All right FRIENDS!

Your attention spans did great w/ those 3 epic poems from 2011. But now prepare for the REAL challenge:

Here is the first half of an epic poem I began writing early this year & am still writing. It is way longer than 'Howl' and just as husky. It could be as long as The Canterbury Tales… so, good luck getting through it. I'll be rooting for you!

Anyways, I'd just like to reiterate something that I iterate often--  IF I WAS THE BOSS OF THIS WORLD I'D TAKE AWAY ALL YOUR GUNS! I'D TAKE AWAY ALL YOUR CARS! AND I WOULD CANCEL XMAS FOREVER! AMEN!

Now here is long, husky free verse nonsense:

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

JAN--MAR

I took 68 showers in 2015. Don't be repulsed by the math. I kept clean w/ 292 soldier baths. Water is a resource worth fighting for, an element worth dying for. Grey film sitting still upon the steady gaze of black-eyed peas. Zen cop drama hadn't begun to disappoint. I caught sight of a meteor and instead of joy felt instant paranoia. Took the tinsel off the wreath.

I fill my days w/ prescription ambition. Take away one melancholia tablet, equalling 100 milligrams. I missed the opportunity to educate the Jesus-fearing wino who runs the fruit stand. "I think he wants to be a giirrrlll," she giggled as the customized customer glided away in her bell bottoms and sparkly vest.

My brilliant reply, "Maybe he's a comedian." And a sickeningly hard facepalm from inside skully interrogation center. Tell me again how you're ready to take this journey?

Mercury in retrograde resembles watercolor blood in orbit. Clamped in capillaries meant for ink. Losing lifeforce like Pluto, losing planetary status. I met w/ loved ones & the loveliest one sat alone. I broke the ice & not the bone I threw at Facebook. The book I threw at the dead professor's face. If not my loved one, please be friend #101.

Forgot to take my meds but mid morning reminded me. You're not ready to shave any more milligrams. Look in the mailbox for discarded friends. The awkward knock. Do I answer? I take too long to decide and they are gone. Car trouble on a day you can't afford to open the door. I spend much of winter crying next to the tub. It holds exactly 4 hours worth of tears. No minutes.

Psychologically isolate alter egos. Radioactive decay from pixie dust. Who can tell what's what these days? I  saw your brown eye contact in front of the Blue Owl and no one died. I saw your casual use of black magic and thought, 'Good luck sewing that exit wound shut.' You lived to watch TV another day.

My cat is an aerialist. A daredevil! And I am a washed up rock a dead cartoon star. I need a new prescription, this cockblocking tournaquet around my seratonin reuptake areas will kill anything resembling pleasure. Pleasure, not happiness, is something I can't sacrifice to Big Pharmacies right now.

This is not real writing. This is code for Verbs Are The Scariest Particles of Speech. This is not a Tarot opportunity, it's a neurosurgeon's job. My voice is as cooperative as a cat. Success is being mistaken for a son at Fantastic Sam's. Success is a headache with a good haircut.

Ssssss…..Sssssssss….I am a snake today

In the grass

In the bath

In boxers

In loving synthesis w/ electric shock….ssszzzzz

Jury Summons #4 arrives. I won't go. You are an asshole until proven innocent.

My favorite new coffee shop. Except I've never been back there. Guilty as grey on groundhog day but I haven't been back. Can something be your favorite if it only happens once? God says yes. So do yesterday and the popular kids. Depression passes for Tuesday. Shopping for joydom. Freedom to lie about sniffling & coughing. PJ day. My calendar marked w/ sonnets. Brazen pencil, disoriented ink.

I just draw cartoony stuff 'cause I'm a privileged white queer on the up escalator who doesn't have to try walking in anyone's untied shoes. My sonnets droop on the keyboard. I survive til I get my sex drive back. When I get out, when I volunteer to leave the house, I invite tragedy to aim its weapons at my vacancy. I've got the universe figured out like Level 4 of that one game where you only lose if good stuff happens to you. I never got to meet my 3rd step father. I guess he died today.

Raincheck. Asteroid credit. Acts (or excuses) of God?

I'm going to a place where lots of cool cats stay. Being excited was a mistake. Cats so cool and aloof you could cry & I sure did. It took 45 minutes to finish a 30-minute run. Being curious was a mistake. Short of breath I see no reason to fix my leaky watercolor valve. Yinsulation. Yangxiety. Even cool cats can be awkward. Especially on social media. I've waited 40 years to talk about this and being understood was a risk. I'll pass for one more month.

HAPPY VALENTINES MISTAKE!!! 

The phone says chirp

chirp 

chirp

And I do too. I am up early to be a student of the hive mind.

Teach me Plathy pathology. Equal pay for surrealists. Teach a brain to silence itself and you will sleep in its lap like a cat. A cantankerous cat named Sidney w/ 99 lives and kidney problems.

Is your last name Love? Can I marry you & be true only to your name as it's worn around me like a ringing bell? Is your middle name a place I'd like to be?

We'll see…melancholia, megalomania. Missing mail. What up, boxmaster? Turned into a cockmaster.

Wish I could be the chirping Asperger bird, no vocal boundaries when she asks me about all episodes of Brady Bunch I can't remember watching, or never saw at all. Who censored me so seriously? The narcissists or the no ones? I will cry for 48 hours while I ponder the answer.

A slap in the iris. A POV I cannot see. A good bye I can't speak to Spock.

I stare at enemy territory before entering, before using up the last few words in my vocabble-babble-bubble-sublet-rumor-tumormonger-fishy-horsey-constabulary. Words I've never used before--Yes. Hi. I am fine.

[magnified nerve cells look like hairy eyes]

Green w/ jealousy, amethyst w/ relief. I'll decompress in purple twilight, I'll remain deflated until the leaves blow past my job. Where are my verdant verbs? I'm still searching (foraging, seeking).

Hairy eyes 

Signify a lack of confidence

And resentment for those who have confidence hanging

In their closets w/ price tags 

Still attached

I wear my favorite Tshirt which I've had for 30 years now. Occupy the amethyst evening, elastic vocal cords yodel in a suburban garage to mute the jackhammer. Concrete grave goes quiet like a dead baby's rattle.

Stretch your mind around that insult. It won't reach the conclusion that all 4-inch slabs of meat belong to men and a woman's profile states Salad for life! This little pig went to great lengths not to get all sarcastic & shitty.

Slo-mower. Lawnmower. The farmer in the you're getting a Dell commercial. The laundry in the Westinghouse hellmouth scrubbed of all its liability. The phantom DNA in the arcade of textiles lost forever. These weeks need a rewrite. But they'll sit in the slush pile for decades like you sat on your Kotex pads.

Nothing makes me happier than new socks and that's all I want to share right now.

I've waited 40 years to shut the fuck up. You have the right to remain mysterious. I sweat when I speak up. Even when my mouth is dry my armpits sob into my sleeves til everyone around me grows uncomfortable & must laugh or risk leaking fluids themselves. My skin, I believe, is made of Kleenex.

Poetry + tea = my 19th century past lover and I say Dear Mr. Moneybags, Please be reasonable and give me a hand-out. Since then

I have changed my name 8x.

Since then

I quit swallowing 200 more milligrams of unnatural response

Since then I've had

317 favorite songs…wait…

318

I don't want no jive!

Fridays are always sharp as porcupines. Scalpels at the end of the week. Occupy Porcupine Street. Use scalpels to dig the rest of your tears out so you don't have to push from the inside. Like giving birth to sadness. Like taking a dump on a single Kleenex ply. Preparing me for 2 days off the blade, away from the spoon, forked and serrated into variables so untravelled I'll write a separate poem about it later.

I choose all noise in life drowned in music. I make all choices based on the ratio of amethyst to jade. How sad will I be if I don't try, how jealous and bitter will I grow?I page through my arcade of memories, my brain stacked in slices, little invoices of all the shit I've bought on this planet.

Majestic straitjacket! I grew outta you! Try to fit in my closet now--it's as big as a broken social construct! The straitjackets of self-loathing are exposed to the nosy eye.

I wonder how this Thursday differs from last & find that all my inner Thursdays are retracted. No looking back, these dates will not be referenced for any reason. Never a Friday that didn't begin w/ the acute jab of Thursday, but never any penetration between days.

Let's go to the cafe where writers can be seen being writers. It may be enemy territory But I don't expect the joint to be terrorized. It may be traumatic to transition socially. A potential hello quickly reshaped into fuck you, but this is no place for the jihad of deep non-thinkers.

Emotional magazine content bursting at spines, killing spree with deft buttery knives. Final score: 100s to dozens. Troops to eggs. Break Benjamins to buy donuts.

I thought my effortless genius was a gift from a god even diviner than God. But it was a trick played by Allah on my ego. My ego full of swiss cheese loopholes. I cannot deploy this tactic any longer. My ego has died of heart cancer. It died reading aloud, subversive literature to an unprepared crowd. In front of boat owners and golden uteri chasing after poopy changelings. Disapproving stares firing 400 rounds per iamb. 

I chased my mind down for perfect words, notes from beautiful throats. I chose to abandon my clothes. Soft-spoken mystery gone streaking across a blank canvas. Streaking across the master keyboard.

1-7-16

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

APR -- JUN

Can't you see me feeling instead of thinking? It's a nice change--to feel good enough not to think. Obeying the stop sign, flipping off the green light. I run so the meat on my legs doesn't spoil. I run for hours but still decompose in the shower. My endorphin factory has shut down. Is this depression or onset dementia? Time will tell.

Now droplets of history congealing into fine art particles for someday's perspective. For someday's detectives.

Lovely to walk under the crucified bunny moon. Full on all haunches, dying on hind quarters, caught in night's pinhole camera forever,

or as long as any solar system lasts.

It's like the city turned upside down while I remained standing on a burial ground of eggshells. Fetal egos in my shaman's mind. I feel incapable but pull it off for a second, a treasured microsecond. 

When day is so good night looks like bad blood, gangrene, jungle rot to a lawnmower's gaze. Hack, hack away at my overgrown jealousy for i am the long streak of garbage-gray between greens. Be above the pain you meet on this planet. Be front page news. Be the nerve that calls the tribune. Be the vagina that chronicles its journey from the infinite vaginas it glimpses in the hand mirror.

Death & taxes & burritos & broken water heaters & refunds all in the rearview mirror by nightfall. All in the suitcase in the car in the garage in Sarasota preparing to be elsewhere in the telescope by tomorrow. New noise, necessary noise. Drown out the kryptonite glare. I see you under a knife getting repaired. The traces of estrogen's footsteps removed from the topsoil.

The invisible fence of time and privacy. You have a well-constructed family. I live in a tent w/out a pole.

When I let strangers in they look around like they've just found all the missing child-messiahs in the world. It's a look of fear & amusement hooked together like rollercoaster tracks. I ride it like the bicycle I got in Kindergarten.

I'm paying someone to be my friend. It's embarrassing, but it's a choice I'm making. Choosing vanilla at the ice cream shoppe of 69 flavors. My delirium shakes, vanilla. But I know someday I'll be the single malt Scotch I was always meant to be. Paying for a friend is a step in that direction.

I'm still prone to leaking blood when the right chemicals seep through the membranes around my whale corpse. A bloated submarine hides below my Peter Pan surface. But I can still bleed, one forgotten sailor still aboard, long drowned in the wreckage but still hoarding those red cells in heart corners & bone pockets

My blood still likes to dance. It pumps my lungs for info. It strafes my unprotected areas with cancer rays. Finds, of all things, colorful water in my veins. My blood is with the Bolshoi Ballet.

This Just Out: Bicycle/helicopter leaps over the fence to the White House's green lawn endangering the black Prsident and pinkening the cheeks of Secret Service slackers (I try to respond how Allen Ginsberg would if this had happened in his day. His words will always eat mine right off the page.)

And I will keep on 

Keep on typing

Trying tampering stamping

In ink, scrap-booking all

My gendered garments

Spaying & neutering a closet full of lies

And releasing them into the wild

When I add or subtract chemicals from the black tower of my spine, I can feel that shit! Anxiety maggots come crawling through my whole genome, getting into shoulder joints and weakening my knees. I want to make an entrance but my jaw is made of slime. Hello sounds like bad poetry. My dependance on chemicles--does it make me more human?

Feed my addiction to the pale yellow sun. Wait til the stars get a view of your chalk outline.

The spider smooshed on your doorstep. What's left of a werewolf howling at you--Brace yourself for the chip implant future you won't enjoy in the slightest. Here it comes.

Horniness is very life-affirming. It's the best reward for pushing through day-star withdrawal. Giving birth to spontaneous thoughts, reactive phrases with a fermented brain. i will drink the blood of grapes again someday.

On the day you came to me I thought the happiness bubble would only get bigger. Inflating my heart like blood-flavored gum. But I should've learned from exploding houses. If you keep blowing the walls will come down, the gum will return to its flaccid state. 

Since you came the bubble has burst over & over. "Happy Anniversary" says the power outage says the lawnmower says the wasp nest says the automatic pesticide spray melting my shoes to the floor. I pay you to be my friend & you pretend to like my poetry.

I pay music to be my friend and it's not ashamed to be seen inside my head.

The road is: long

black

fast

asleep

dangerous

And I'm on it

I'm back on the pale yellow pill

And no one calls me "Miss, miss, Madam!" on this trip

The museum is: bright

white

Mexican

morbid

light

Crushed under a bus & thrown in a fountain. What's more goth, your will to resurrect a broken spine or the dead dj haunting the taqueria? You decide. 

Am I talking like alphabet soup in a trash can? Throw a tomato if I've stopped making sense but don't throw shade on my memory yet. Road trips back toward home surprisingly full of song. Living dj haunts the dash, makes the wheel spin way back in space to your poopy little angels. Afraid to use the public litter box.

Still running at the mouth and legs. Still frozen in the middle. Still hear spiders howl like human wolves. You empathize with scavenger's remorse. The spider is a cannibal. Out, out damn voice! Still soaked in sodium hydroxide, your uncertainty is just like your mother's. Pour detergent down your throat, nothing removes a voiceprint like Drano. Polite libel, sir, will not get you a more expedient character assassination.

A child's correct gender assignment ends a century old conflict. Is this just a phase? Goddammit, no!

I'm alone w/ my social media trying to piece the carefully curated snippets to the horrors that inspired them. I am a failure, unfriended.

It's time for my yearly evaluation.

Isn't it a little early?

Yes. At least wait til the Mad Men finale. Sure, I can wait til 1970 if you insist.

I'm ready to be on a solitary retreat, away from trans-societal restraints. Handcuffs would be more cozy than the cold stares and lack of "most important thing."

The most important things are: Quiet

Dates canceled by rain

Facts checked by doctors in white coats and cute peeptoe wedges.

She's a doctor who has time for nail polish. She doesn't have time for me.

I'm not on the list of important things

Quiet as i may be

Take a hike in the post-rainy July-like May

Listen to the moods of your guitar, high chord pressure, melancholia, busy being successful too busy to stop. No. Busy is no excuse. You make time for what's important to you. Hating on the left side of the brain the howling poets of modern-american Greece.

Knock Knock.

Who's there?

Vicious.

Vicious who?

Vicious Aloysius.

Knock Knock.

Who's there?

The girl in the dragon costume w/out tattoos.

[Let's play this game for months!]

Runner's High v. Hormones that won't quit making you cry

Moon's Menacing Crescent v. Victoria's Lack of Self Respect

Hormones win 1st round. Moon wins next.

(Consult the crescent lunar zodiac in which one sign is an airplane & all the rest are living things)

Good mornin'

   Good mornin'

       Good mornin'

Did you dream of electric penises? No but maybe my phone did.

Black v. white on a blood-smeared rain-soaked chessboard. I gave you a scare with my lack of hand-eye coordination, but you won in the end. Because you don't have to dream of penises. You don't have to live with my mess.

I forgot how it felt to get caught in the rain's lightning cage. Middle age middle-class white privilege punk not afraid to get my hair wet, not afraid to get shocked out of my shoes. A binder full of women in binders pretending to be men. They'll never be "real men" (Mitt Romney's air quotes)

Data day robots. Info fertile

The cows come home

To abort 

Microcephalic calves

And be damned to a hell that is a rocking boat

So unlike the meadow

I'm seeing the future & I'm not finding myself there. Have i been dropped like a cold genetically mutilated potato? Aquariuuuss! AAaaaaaahhhh-Quaaaaariiuuuuussssss!!!!!

All the truths I once knew are retiring to be w/ their families. What they didn't tell me was the real truth: They're dying. The rain promised but the cloud never shook. Skull broke into a headache instead. We live w/ choices of others but ignore our own robotic motions

Quoth Marilyn Monroe

"I'm bored

W/ platinum

& diamonds

But valium is

A girl's best friend"

In a fit of submissiveness she hoped to get published but banged her head against the bed instead.

Politics, you are correct!

I hear your motorcycles circling my paranoia. Your tiny smelly scrotums sticking to the seats. I couldn't be less impressed. My annoyance stuck in second gear.Get lost said the raven overhead.

My name is a poem

And yours is pornography to my ears

I was gendered correctly in the cat house & knew the happiness that brought

Would be quickly blown to bits

And it was… Like sands in the litter box

These are the moments we'd love to forget

But which burrow into our heads like septic drill bits.

Sick black kittens EVERYwhere. My magnificent privileged panther doesn't get it. Vibrating purr lord. He knows the vascular anatomy of my humanity & sinks his teeth in.

My name is whiny poetry and my hands flash fiction in sign language only Geminis understand. Free bleeding & the Future of Femininity. The hoax that drove the bus over a cliff and onto the camel's back. A single-hump highway that crumbles like original infrastructure  There's no future for feminine tentacles. Here's where we slip into the kind of genetic engineering I've always dreamed of.

Asleep like a street. Awake like a saint. I wipe your blood out, not just away from the screen. A verbose & indiscreet genocide. Gendercide. Gumbocide.

Your babies will be made of carbon on a 3-D matrix & you'll love them like devices, hold them in the palm of your mind, bypassing the gore of maternity and Father's Day will be the loudest holiday of all!!

Juliet is dead, but long live she--Let her die by hormones that begin w/ T--Let her be memorized like a nursery rhyme--and please God let me stop crying…

1-22-16

The 7th Sense (In The 21st Century)

Funny Little Friends,

How are ya all? I am fine. I mean, I'm not really fine…but I know that's what you expect me to say. That's all you can handle, because YOU'RE not fine & you don't even want to deal w/ how unfine I am.

So now that we got that formality out of the way, let's talk…about The Senses. There are 7 of them:

1. Sight

2. Hearing

3. Taste

4. Smell

5. Touch

6. The Sixth Sense (clairvoyance, ya know)

7. Sense of Humor

As I age I've noticed I'm losing ground with Sight & Hearing. That's to be expected. But I also think that I'm losing my Sense of Humor!

This scares me, because along with music, art & literature, Humor has always been a cherished survival tool for me. One of the things that scared me about "adulting" was that it seemed like to be a proper adult you had to stop laughing. And I was against that.

I always wanted to see the silly, the ironic, the cartoonish side of life. And I think I still do…but it doesn't seem as funny anymore.

But I also wonder, is it ME or is it THE WORLD? Has the world gotten so ugly, are there just so many people fighting to be heard & treated fairly that irony & cartoonishness have gone by the wayside?

I write this on the post-cusp of Robin Williams' suicide anniversary (& the pre-cusp of Joan Rivers' negligent plastic surgery death). I write this as Bill Cosby stands accused of drugging & raping women throughout the 60s, 70, 80s. I write this one week after John Stewart's retirement from The Daily Show. I write this at a time when comedians are refusing to perform on college campuses because students are so easily offended, especially by social issues & the jokes that may arise around those issues.

This is disturbing to me. First of all freedom of speech is important to me, and I believe in using that great gift to keep social justice alive and well, and I believe comedy is a great vehicle for keeping social issues in the ear-canals & brain centers of the Universe.

I realize that comedians sometimes cross the line or cut to the very edge of serious issues to make their points. And that is okay--I can usually take it. I usually understand where the zings & zaps are coming from & that they are meant to make us sting, think & evolve.

It is rumored (I wouldn't know for sure)-- that the generation called 'Millennials' are so coddled & padded & blindered from the jagged edges of this world that anything reeking of satire is perceived as taunting, mocking, bullying…

…thus the reluctance of comedians to perform on campuses.

But I find I too have become over-sensitive to certain types of humor. There is much rancor between genders & races (particularly black & white) right now. So I am very sensitive to any humor that slams women (or men). And I have gotten a little bristly when I hear about how horrible white (or black) people are--even if presented in a comedic context. I kind of wish we were past such "obvious" joking-points.

But we aren't--there are still a lot of layers around gender & race to unpeel before we get to the real equality at the center of the onion.

One thing that does suck when social issues are too touchy to joke about is--we resort to the lowest forms of humor. NO I'M NOT TALKING ABOUT PUNS. I mean colon/bladder humor and of course, dick jokes.

I said it before, penis jokes are fine on occasion, fart jokes are definitely funny especially when well-timed. Penises & farts are pretty funny! Noises that come from your butt--hahahaha! Spongy, mushroomy flaps of flesh that harden up & look like Darth Vader made of liverwurst**? Hilarious.

OCCASIONALLY.

But…I really do get sick of old unattractive white guys (like John Oliver & Bill Maher & Ellen deGeneres) using their dicks as metaphor for all matters from corporate greed to invasions of privacy (& invasions of countries) to gun violence to dentists killing endangered lions in Africa… 

Ie, EVERYTHING. [Also, do you see what I did there? ^^^ I added Ellen to the list of dick-jokers because it's totally ridiculous on one level, yet makes sense on another level--Ellen does kinda look like an old white guy & she does make (non-political) dick-jokes on occasion]. I just learned that type of humor is called PARAPROSDOKIAN. And I like it.

[And I hope I have offended no lesbians born between 1987 & 2001].

So…what kind of humor DO I enjoy now???

When I'm not being slapped in the brain by bologna-dicks, or being fed boring stereotypes---"Black people be like this" "White people be like that" "Bitches be like…" "Dudes be like…" 

I always appreciate clever word-play and punnery (sorry I don't find that to be low-humor at all), 

I like good delivery better than raunchy content. Clean humor can be hilarious is if it is cleverly packaged (oh no--I said "package")

I love the twisted & the surreal--shit that's just outrageous & probably inspired by drug use : ))) Aqua Teen Hunger Force, TV Funhouse, Absolutely Fabulous, Uncle Grandpa….ADVENTURES IN REALITY!!!!!

I love animals-doing-human-things humor. My new favorite is BoJack Horseman, which features animals & humans co-existing as if they are all the same species. It is an animated satire on the very essence of Hollywood, the Bizness. It balances the crude & the intelligent with finesse. And …did I mention Animals Doing Human Stuff???

(And even though I do love Animals-as-People humor, I absolutely hate…HATE…that movie TED. Ughhh…that is a FAIL in my favorite genre. I would like to beat the stuffing out of that bear's head & then menstruate all over it.)

Oh! Speaking of menstruating --which I hardly ever do anymore-- Vagina Humor was fun for a moment (if only because it was a welcome relief from Penis Humor). But it really is difficult to make vaginas funny. They do all the hard work in this world & get little credit for it.

(Tee-hee…I said vaginas do all the "hard" work. That's ironic!!) But I do think vag's could be used in that metaphorical way that dicks are used by Oliver, Maher, et al…if any women hosted political satire shows on cable. Maybe someday…but, I'll admit I was getting pretty sick of vag humor too, before it went underground like a good little beaver.

OKAY. I'm tired & need to eat lunch. This has been a good discussion about humor & sensitivitiy & the Seven Senses. One of the things that made me laugh the longest this year was a line from Orange Is The New Black, when Pennsatucky was talking about her favorite ice cream flavor--Double Fudge Chocolate--and she said, "I don't get it. How can you take chocolate…and then fudge it…and then double it?"

ROTFLMAO.

?????????????? I don't know why. It was just too silly.

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

I hope you noticed the artwork I've included in this post. I force myself to draw something--anything--each day, even if I don't feel like it. This is kind of an experiment to see if I could actually "be an artist for a living" with assignments & deadlines & such. As you can see, some days I can't quite get inspired : )))

Hermaphrodite Skeleton wearing eye-phones & saying Orange

** If it is a white dick. Black dicks just look like Darth Vader. (oh no…I just made a too-obvious race/gender joke…sigh…I'm so offended)