fickled

I was never good at romantic redundancies - excessively heart-shaped ukuleles, custom made and monographed, making one think about a last name.  My idea of a heart-felt gift was more about the recording possibilities, a high end humbucker guitar pickup, not gift wrapped, let alone monographed, for sale, baby shoes, never written.

Rage against the reflection

So this is what it takes to get me to write - anything - on my blog - or anywhere else - since forever. And look at this? Not even poetic fragments but coherent prose with a purpose. Anger. It's fueling me, keeping me awake, breaking the lethargy. But it's not something I can work with. It breaks ME, makes me go too far, pick fights I shouldn't be in.

Caught fire in two facebook threads today, found that I was the start of flame wars with "friends" of friends. Who are these trump-supporting wackos coming out of the woodwork, stepping onto my dad's terse message of reasonable disappointment with our southern neighbor's election? Then something flips, and I flip out. Start posting and posting and getting angrier and angrier and clicking on their links from anti-vax sites to take them apart, as if saying facts to a raving insane person is a constructive activity. Soon I'm ad-hominem-attacking the sources because oh god, of course those sites support trump because they're the kind of marks who would fall for his con, any con, any chemtrail - or at least appeal to the marks in the hopes that they'll click on the organic coconut oil ad next to the article about the jew-run media. Feeling that old feeling, of impotent rage. Sickening, finding myself in the position of defending an establishment I hate just as much as trumpers, but I have good reasons, not like them, I have rational responses, not like them. And I'll quickly descend to the ego-feeding echo-chamber to prop up what I want to feel right about, just like them, because my unseasoned psyche, knowing no way to stay calm in an escalating argument is screaming to me, HOW CAN THEY DEFEND THIS PIG? And I so want to say: I'm with you on the anti-PC... but that's not the fucking point! And I agree: He's not so bad... except he's fucking president! You'd think there'd be a higher standard than one held to a vulgar, tacky hotel magnate and reality TV star whose thing is that he fires people. Great TV guy, yeah, with real comedy chops even. And I would like to say I'm so with you when you're so right about the pathetic Clinton dynasty that has outworn its welcome, and then say that you're so wrong about how the guy who's different is gonna make good different change cause different change is good, cause just change, and he says crooked hilary's corrupt and it's true, so trump is different change, lock her up! lock her up! That's what that shit sounds like to me, but pushing back against such facile facebook banter is not an errand for this fool. And it's a moot point anyway, oh, so moot.

I want to feel right about my disgust for Trump, but I don't want to BE right. I want to be proven wrong, at least a part of me does, it's a part of me that's wedged up in the superego, it got stuck in good intentions that went by the wayside, I barely graze that old pair of undies, are they still elastic enough to fit this callous calcified person I've become? A good ol' part of me wants to believe that I've been led astray on the one hand with a kind of cynical pox-on-both-houses hopelessness, and on the other, with accepting wholesale the voices that sooth me, literally because they're what I use to chill after a hard day of work and make a pleasant numbing bed of autonomous sensory meridian response, and they speak to what's left of my faith in humanity and technology, that there's some way forward in this clusterfuck, and that it's not a rat race to the bottom if we decide it doesn't have to be. I split the difference between this one youtube channel and the other, the one is too neoliberal for the other, and the other is too crazy revolution for the one, so it's good enough for me to alternate between the two, and get pumped up with the molotov cocktail rants, then sober up with the "but seriously now..." realism wind-down that appeals to my sense of not being a fucking fruitcake, that's where I get most of my news, because it soothes, shapes and fondles my views.

But there's still the noble ol' part of me that wants to be able to accept that I was wrong, like I accepted I was an alcoholic and from that powerless starting point, with humility, make a better life for myself in recovery. Cause what if... I find out that, despite my skepticism, it turns out trump was serious about the good things he proposed, like less foreign intervention and more protection for workers, and totally kidding about the insane things, like keeping nukes on the table and climate change being a chinese hoax. I'd like to think, if that happened, I'd come around and say, even joyfully, wow, I gotta give him credit, he really is doing some good, and most of that ugly campaign rhetoric was only to get enough support from the scummy floor of the republican basement to win the nomination.

But I don't want to BE wrong in the long fever delirium of conflict. In those slurs an open and charitable mind is the furthest thing from my fingers, especially in the fevered hours and days later in a tight loop of typing, checking threads, trying to win the argument once and for all, hoping they didn't respond so I could have the last word but AH, FUCK, I'm deputized to rebut again, because I have to, because... ah, fuck it. That's why I deleted those threads, in the hopes of deleting all the fucks I have to give.

Fuck them threads. What's the point? It's not my country. It's not my fight. Let America sort itself out, let them deal with the 18% that ordered the pro-ignorance president. I offer my solidarity with the majority that rejected him. Solidarity with the young and non-citizens and prisoners for non-violent drug offenses and disenfranchised voters in gerrymandered districts and urban centers where the republicans closed poll stations to depress turnout. Solidarity for them. But my role isn't in that entertaining drama that distracts. I can affect change in the place where I live, exemplify alternatives to know-nothing foot-dragging fake-populist agendas, like other countries and states have done. Help the world get off the carbon crackpipe with or without the USA, with or without my own federal government, with or without "the leader of the free world", that obnoxious synonym Americans have for their president. I'm pretty free, maybe a little free-er than you folks in some ways. But here, I thought I lived in a sovereign nation. I didn't think he was president of me. But OK, if I must, I'll grudgingly admit that my country and many countries do largely follow America's lead in a lot of things, and a lot of us other countries are subject to pressure from said leader's agenda - so in a way, he's our leader too, if you insist on calling him that. I'd rather call HER that, but she did lose because she was a bad establishment-backed choice, and you have to respect democracy, and sometimes, you gotta chew on that turd sandwich, then swallow it with a shit-eating grin and hope you can get the people back on your side next time. And it's good to know that it's not exactly rigged.

I will vent, in any case, and not on facebook. Fuck arguing, and turning into the monster I'm attacking. I should be better than that. And I'm not fit for arguing, my emotions get out of hand immediately. And self awareness drags me down, keeps me from soaring on the delusion that I'm particularly informed or equipped for sorting out impossibly complex situations or cracking insoluble problems. I hit a wall, stumble back, disgusted with myself and the shambles of  the ideas I had, that I could indict the establishment but also, with such nuance, state how vexingly dumb it is to answer public sector corruption corrupted by private sector money... with private sector corrupters klepting the public's money.

Shit, maybe later I'll write something on nuclear arms and the prospect of this American president-elect having executive powers. No, I'm not being hysterical, I'm not shitting my pants, I don't know for sure if he said "if we have them, why can't we use them"? But A: It's fucking easy to imagine him saying that, and B: I'm more worried about a population that will elect a person who will proudly, ignorantly, arrogantly stand up in a televised interview and say that he won't take nukes off the table. FUCKING CHRIST.  Even if there was a first strike, what goddamn good does it do to kill hundreds of millions on the other side of the planet? Fallout toxifies the whole atmosphere, it's a round world, or is that also up for debate on the alt-right anti-science video streams the trump supporters get their news from? Of course there's logic in maintaining the capacity for mutually-assured destruction when the other side also has it, provided the idea is synchronized incremental disarmament, but the shit he's said on record shows a fundamental cluelessness about the basic strategic purpose of these tens of thousands of biosphere killing warheads still sitting around in stockpiles.

Oh well, I just wrote about that. There, there's that rant. Fuck, I'm unhinged. Something's really wrong when I write straight forward stuff like this, it really doesn't suit me.

Also, I know I never worked very hard on improving my writing, I'm a slacker when it comes to that, and I never evolved from comfortable indulgence in all the adjectiveful bugs that I found to be features, when they ranon to marathons of matinee timesmear jaunts. I need to get some thoughts out I guess, this is cheap therapy for me, and like most of what I do, for no one else really.