Skin Deep

I have a few things to share today, so let's start with the ranty one and end with the artsy one.

The Ranty One
So I've been paying attention to Ferguson somewhat since that whole thing started in August, and then exploded a week or two ago.  I'm a cis white male, if I haven't outright stated that before, which I don't think I have but hey maybe you assumed I was anyway; anyway, that's the perspective I'm coming from when I talk about this, which makes me (a. not an expert, (b. probably microaggressive when I don't mean to be, at best, and (c. very acutely aware of the privilege I have with relation to black people and communities more directly affected than I am.  I can't pretend to have any idea of those experiences; however, I can object to systematic injustice, and I can take steps to addressing it.  On the other hand, I can't pretend I have all the answers, and I shouldn't impose my vision of a just future on anyone. 

That said.

I think I was originally going to talk about police brutality, or this this lovely thing I found on Facebook that simulates racial segregation based on Thomas Schelling's famous model [citations and further reading available via link], but instead I think I'm going to address a confusing point that probably just displays how very little is my understanding of the United States justice system.  To wit: what the fuck is the deal with grand juries?
They both, "would be able to indict a ham sandwich," but are somehow incapable of indicting police.  The proceedings are secret, but prosecutors working closely with law enforcement agencies lead the proceedings.  The defendant doesn't have the right to be present or give testimony, but Darren Wilson's accounting of events is apparently strong enough of a case against all the other conflicting eye witness testimony to rule out probable cause of a crime.
It's worth noting that apparently the United States is the only common law country in the world that still uses these things.
The system is fucked.
The process goes something like: you're accused of a crime; if a felony, you get your case put before a grand jury under the supervision of a prosecuting attorney, which you may or may not be informed of.  Not every state does this, but a lot of states still require it by law.  Witnesses can be compelled to testify without legal representation or protection.  Evidence is provided by the prosecutor, but anything new uncovered can be used in future trials should an indictment occur.  It explains at least why law enforcement gets a free pass on this stuff most of the time, given the close relationship that exists between prosecutors and police investigators.
There's more to it than that, but let's put this out there as part of the problem for now.  I'm not the first to have said any of these things; I've only recently noticed them.  And all it took was a black man getting shot in St. Louis.

The Artsy One
As I was reading the news reports, and following the trail of shootings since August, I went between feeling angry that these things were not only commonplace but expected and accounted for behavior (although obviously not acceptable), and feeling powerless because the incident isn't isolated enough for me to have any confidence in the reform process.  So I wrote a poem that tried to capture that, which I want to share here.  This is the artsy part, and it's kind of in the lines of a youtube trend I sampled a bit of where black poets speak out about their experiences with racism.  I'd link, but I'm lazy, but the hashtag is #BlackPoetsSpeakOut, so look that up if you care or if you like poetry.

Anyway, here's my voice.

I look away

I would read more stories in the news

Stories of black men and children

Being killed by cops

Without consequence

Slipping through a justice system

Whose rules seem incapable of producing a sound

Guilty!

It feels like a cover up

It reeks of conspiracy

And I can’t stand to look at it

Because it makes me angry

Angry enough that if I felt like I could

Or it was my place

I’d burn this whole world to the ground

But I look at my own skin

And I look at my own body

And I know at any point

I can look away

Because of what I am

I can’t speak for them

I can only speak against others like me

I can’t raise anyone’s standards

I can only tear at the double banner

Raised high over the white camp

And hope someday it falls

But at any time I can give up

I can stop fighting

Because of what I am

I can look away

A 7-year-old girl dies shot in her sleep in a police raid

Manslaughter charges dropped

Appeal denied

A 12-year-old with a toy gun is shot in 2 seconds

No aid given for four minutes

Dies in the ambulance

A 22-year-old samurai cosplayer is shot while running away

Police accuse media of being biased

Sword looked real enough

Police shoot a man carrying a Walmart air rifle in the store

After a customer saw he was black and called 911

No indictment

Tonight I look away

Tomorrow…

The Thought Doesn't Amount To Shit

I've found something I crave more than masturbation.
There's a fire in my diaphragm, a slow burn
it can go for weeks on its own
but every so often, it needs fuel.

Tonight I got a job, took a walk, smiled for a bit
Then I misspoke once and it all went to shit.
I lie in bed, listening to Amanda Palmer
hoping the burning will die down.
Guilt.  Shame.
I'm fucking stupid.
I don't deserve friends.
I don't deserve him.

I climb to the roof of Habitat For Humanity
And I marvel at the faraway city
I breathe in fire, and my chest roars
and I think,
"Nighthawks was so cold.
It's Early Sunday Morning down there,
and my throat burns."

I sit on the top level of a car park
It's so high, but not as high as I could go.
There's solace in altitude, being alone
But fucked if I can find it tonight.

I breathe in fire, and I say,
"Nighthawks was so empty.
I'd sit in an Automat until dawn,
but I don't have the change."

An abandoned silo affords the best view
Getting up there is a bitch and a half.
Moldering grain smells mix with the smoke
and I gag a little.

I drown the flames in mucous,
and standing up I shout.
"I'm sitting at the bar in Nighthawks,
the barman asks if I want a refill,
and I don't know what to say!"

My pack's almost empty
And the altitude is dizzying.
It would be so easy to just pitch myself forward.

One last cigarette.
I go home, and my voice is shot.

I want out I need out I HAVE TO GET OUT No.

I want out.
Every waking moment spent here is a bitter torture.  It's serene, but I've never hated anything more than the sight of my own reflection in that bathroom mirror, making eggs on that stove, sitting in that chair while outside the sun sails and the clouds float and birds paddle in that goddamn birdbath.
Is this beauty?  Fuck no.
This is my life on hold, my brain on drugs, my mind on self-destruct as I wake up to a ceiling that isn't mine in a room that doesn't scream, 'THIS IS WHO I AM AND HOW I CHOOSE TO LIVE.'  Less than half of this stuff belongs to me.
Get me out, I plead to a god I no longer believe in--to employers, to landlords, to anyone who looks at me and says, 'I can give you this, if you do that.'  I would whore this broken body and buy a plane ticket to anywhere rather than face the prospect of never leaving this wooden box.
Let me go, I rage at my family, but they're not holding me down.
Stop asking me!  Keep your fucking hands out of my business!  NO I DON'T WANT TO!
These people, who care about me, and just want me to fly.
They're not so much wardens of my prison as fellow-inmates, but they choose to be here, whereas the longer I stay the less I feel I can leave.  I'm suffocating.  I'd contemplate unspeakable violence against myself, but for the fact that I can just do that without even trying.  My body hemorrhages without my having to prompt it.  Who needs pain to verify what we feel?
I hate that I hate what I hate, and what I hate the most is the guilt.  I shouldn't hate my mother for her concern, but she has always failed to connect with me (neither of us are really trying anymore, which is to say, I'm not trying).  And I hate myself for that, because she doesn't deserve what I wish upon her on the daily.  But I hate myself for hating myself, because the more I erase myself emotionally, the less I can feel without fighting an uphill battle against a truly implacable opponent.
My fucking consciousness.
This house, these four walls.  They don't do what I do to myself and everyone else, but they make it so easy.  I can settle in to a safe routine, physically comfortable but mentally I'm rattling the bars and cursing anything that moves, let me out, let me OUT, LET me OUT!
If I can't save myself, then who the fuck will?

If I ask for help.  If I just.  If I say.  If I pick up the phone and call.  If I do.  If I don't.
When finishing a thought becomes the highlight of the day.
When the best days are the ones where.
When seeing my father is.
When I.

I feel most alive when I'm not where I am, surfing websites and living proxy fantasies.  When I come back home, I am at a loss.  I find solace in sleeping, or masturbating, but that's another fantasy and it's never as satisfying as I hope it will be.  Bad habits follow me like a lost dog, compelling me to throw them a bone, share a little love, and it sickens me but I do it anyway.  But the worst part?  I don't even care enough to diversify my sins.  Why put in the effort?
This somber cage is cluttered enough as it is.
When I was at my lowest, barely strong enough to walk, they brought me here to rest.  I sat up in my chair alone for days and stared at the ceiling, willing myself to get stronger, become healthy again, to seize those days and wring them dry of worth.  But it never happened because I sat there and did nothing, and now it's too much of a chore again not to.

I want out so I can find a new hole to crawl into and wait to die.
I need out because this place of pain drags at me.
I have to get out.

Dirty, Beastly, Filthy Bass

This afternoon I decided the thing I needed was to listen to something angry with a heavy bass track, or twelve, so I pulled up some Killsonik on my iTunes and tried to piss myself off.  It didn't work super well, but I got to thinking why I like this kind of sound, and if I can't be sourcelessly vexed then I can be introspectively miffed.  Same difference, a lot of the time.  Anywho.

I have a friend, who is really awesome, who does freelance artwork and recently got work with the Monstercat label.  I can pretty much source my interest in dubstep back to her, because my biggest exposure for the longest time was Skrillex and, ha ha, but that's a bit like saying one is a fan of blues because one knows Bing Crosby.  I'm sorry, but you don't know fucking anything about blues if that's all you listen to.  Not that Bing Crosby is a bad singer, but he's entry level.  He's the Top 40's of blues.  Everyone's heard him, so you don't get any points for saying you like his shit.  Skrillex is a lot like that, but dubstep.

So I listen to Skrillex, and some Benny Benassi remixes of Euro electrohouse stuff, along with video game soundtracks and whatever Japanese AMVs my antisocial internet mule friend throws at me.  Not exactly shaking the pictures off the walls over here.  Dubstep didn't really get on my radar until I was living in a house with six or seven other people, a few of whom were pretty ardent techno/electronica fans.  They went to see Pretty Lights in concert, which I wish I could've done with them because it sounded pretty baller, but alas I had other shit.  But I remember one discussion in particular about dubstep proper, which came about because someone was listening to some remixes on youtube and another guy was getting annoyed by it because they sounded like garbage.  The line that stuck out at me was, 'yeah, there's some good dubstep out there, but there's also a lot of complete garbage.'

Meanwhile I was getting pretty heavily into VK and symphonic metal, so I just shrugged and let it be.

The first non-Skrillex dubstep song I think I got hooked on was Internet Friends.  Natch.  My friend from earlier, the Monstercat artist, has some really pretty wicked Knife Party fanart, and I had no idea who the fuck those guys were, so I looked up some of their stuff, and Internet Friends is what came up.  And it was...fucking hysterical.  I love the lyrics to that goddamn song, and I just couldn't stop listening to it.  It reminded me of another track I'd heard, like a few months prior to that point, I was down in New Orleans for Mechacon and they have a rave there, and one of the DJs played this track where Microsoft Sam and female equivalent were arguing back and forth I think it might've been called Crazy Psycho Bitch but I have no actual clue.  But that association, plus the darkly humorous quality of the words themselves, stuck and so I became a Knife Party fan.

But that wasn't really enough for me.  I'd tasted of EDM and wanted to see what else was out there, which was a little weird at first because when I was younger I was that kid who pointedly refused to listen to a lot of music on the grounds that 'there wasn't any skill involved in it'.  Christ, what a wanker.  It took some searching, but I broke into the genre eventually and found there were a lot of really good tracks out there.  There was one problem, though: I was continually struck with the thought that, of the stuff I found listenable, it really didn't cover a wide range of moods.  Like, there's chill dubstep, that's your Zedd's Dead for example, or Modestep if you're a fucking closet house fan; there's dubstep you can rock out to, which is ultimately the point so it stands to reason, and this stuff doesn't just apply to dancing, you can take it running or down to the gym, or sparring if that's what you're into (i'm into that).  It's probably just a mark of who I am as a person, but I found myself wanting a lot less positivity in my dubstep.  I wanted tracks I could fuck shit up to, and most of what I listened to just didn't do that for me.  Maybe it's because I'm just not often in that kind of mood, or I'm very good at suppressing it, I don't even know.  But dubstep should be the stuff that gets me crazy--I saw Excision in concert and the bass was loud enough to resonate in my lungs, if it weren't for the fact I was pretty wiped by that point in the night I'd've been less meh about it.

I probably just don't listen to as much of it as I'd like.  All the artists in my library I know a thing or two about, and my brain just takes that depth of knowledge and says, 'you're good, you don't need to look up any more you're already an expert'.  Haha, brain, fuck you.  Although, one advantage of that approach is that I can tell regional differences apart, or sometimes pick out an artist without knowing what the track's called or who it's by.  Zomboy has a distinctive sound, as compared to Krewella or the Glitch Mob.  And DJs from the UK generally all sound different than DJs from the USA, the former still taking influences from electrohouse and the latter laboring under a culture of Top 40's bullshit.  But the cool thing is that even though all that's true, everyone's remixing everyone else's tracks, and collaborating and sharing and posting new stuff every day and they're still largely doing it under their own steam.

I dunno.  Whenever I've run up against a pay barrier to new EDM it's always been through a site like bandcamp instead of through the bloated monster that is iTunes, which usually means that I won't be able to steal it, but I take it as a good sign anyway.

See that?  My anger's all gone, and been replaced by something akin to hope.  Fucking bullshit.  Now I have goddamn Farrell Williams stuck in my head.  Hang on, gotta fix that.

That One Where I Ramble About Sex And Stuff

I think I can only do this when it's 2 a.m. and my thought processes are therefore indistinguishable from those of a tipsy 6.

So earlier tonight I took a survey, part of a research project for the University of Maryland's gastroenterology group, with which I currently have a relationship.  The survey was on how my illness, body image, and sexuality have been getting along, and promised up front to be delving into some fairly personal questions.  Duh?  I thought, to myself.

So I have Crohn's Disease.  Let's just get that out of the way now so I don't have to pretend to be cagey about it anymore.  It seems like every time that gets brought up, I either have to play teacher, there's an uncomfortable silence, or I discover someone else who has it and we spent the next two or three hours comparing notes and trading stories.  And I always feel a bit weird no matter which one it is, because in the first case I have to explain a condition that is embarrassing enough on its own, and which is integral to who and what I am as a person.  Awkward silences are weird no matter who starts it.  You'd think I would openly embrace meeting someone whose experiences might parallel my own, but you'd be wrong.  I don't take comfort in the fact that someone else is suffering from something I'm intimately familiar with, and the fact that they still have it means that they haven't discovered a way to get rid of it.  The only thing we *could* do would be to commiserate or provide moral support, and that just rubs me in the wrong way.  Because it's difficult enough to acknowledge to myself that I can't be my own pillar of strength sometimes.  Because I sure as hell am not comfortable with showing my weakness to other people.  And I'm never sure where I want to stand when I'm actually interacting with someone else, like how does socializing work I was raised by wolves, and that's just another stressor to throw in for fun.

Given all that, I was fairly excited to take the survey, because boy would I have some answers for them.  It was a bit strange--they put the question about sexual orientation under the race category, like being gay is no different than being hispanic.  And they limited most of their questions to the past month, and, haha, I haven't exactly been playing the field in the past YEAR let alone month.  But I could still talk about masturbating, so that was something.

They spent most of the survey talking about sex, somewhat less time talking about my illness, and even less on body image with a couple questions in there outright pointing at depression and deeper mental health issues.  I feel like they could have either expanded the survey to include a more comprehensive mental health picture, or just dropped that aspect altogether and sent it as a separate survey.  From my own readings, there's a pretty solid connection between Crohn's and depression, and Crohn's and poor body image.  Like, in my case, I usually think my body looks terrible, because it does.  I'm not talking conventional beauty standards, or bucking the whole 'you're beautiful just the way you are' camp.  I have extreme difficulty maintaining a healthy body weight, and this is reflected in the fact that I've been able to count my ribs for years.  So I try and eat well and frequently in an effort to bulk up some, because I'm tired of seeing my ribs.  And sometimes I exercise, because I hate being physically weak.  I am not disciplined on my own to keep it up for very long--longest was a month I think, without being on a sports team or club--but I do try, and I don't regard this as a necessarily unhealthy mindset.  Everything else about me already is, so it wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that the way I think about me is as well.  But what I mean is, I don't hate myself and think I'm worthless because I look like shit.  I know why I look like shit, and it's something that I can only control to a limited degree. 

No, the reasons I hate myself are entirely in my head.

So there's no point in worrying about it--just remember to keep eating, exercise, avoid food triggers, but don't overdo it.  This will be a lot easier when I finally move, because I'll have access to a public park with running trails, and lots of really great restaurants.  Hopefully I have a paycheck as well so I don't end up on the streets selling myself for crack (but actually, the midwest is apparently rife with the stuff).

The thing I worry about with my disease and my sex life is this: I'm bisexual, and I'm pretty flexible about dominance just on principle.  Actually, I'm largely bisexual on principle, and always have been?  Like, when all I knew was heterosexual relationship norms, I was all on board with that, but then I discovered that homosexuality was also a thing, and decided that gender was a stupid criterion to use to decide who I could be attracted to or be in a happy relationship with.  This was, like, just as I was coming into my own sexual maturity, so I could make statements like that without sounding like I was dropping a line to get laid--it'd just sound like a stupid teenager, because that's what I was.  Fortunately for me, in some respects, my stated disinterest in discriminating by gender carried over in practice, although I'm generally more strongly attracted to other men.  At the very least, I'm more interested in sleeping with them, although maybe that's a consequence of having a predominantly female coterie in high school.  I didn't have any guy friends I could scope chicks with, so girls to me were people you'd date, and then guys became people you'd fuck, more or less.  I'm weird.

But yes, the thing I worry about: being on the receiving end during sex.  Not because I find it strange or unpleasant--I don't--but because I'm worried about what my disease has done to my GI real estate.  At last check, I have active inflammation, which means I have to be extra careful with my diet and be very scrupulous with my medicine, but there aren't any guarantees I won't have developed a fistula or what have you.  Chronic bleeding isn't unheard of with my condition, although I'm pretty sure I'm in the clear.  With enough lubrication, anal isn't a big deal on the surface, but if you're not careful you'll still bleed a bit.  Now take that risk and multiply it by ten, and you have where I'm coming from (ha).

I'm worried I'll be having sex, and then I'll start bleeding and I won't be able to stop because my intestines tore open and now I'm going into septic shock, and after they operate on me (again) I'll be informed I can never have sex like that again, etc.  There are a lot of things that could go wrong, and I know what most of them are.  And I'd have to share this information with any potential sex partners out of self-preservation, and that's some heavy shit right there to handle.  Also helps explain why I haven't been super into hunting down a partner, although the bigger cause of that is lack of acceptable options.  God I hate being at home.

There's one guy right now, and I think I'm in love with him, but he's not here, and that whole issue is the topic of another late-night rant.  Beyond that, there's really nobody, but again I'm moving to a city, so my dating pool will correspondingly expand. 

But first I need a job.  And a doctor.  And possibly a therapist.

[Title Here]

Well now that I sit down to write this, I have no idea what I want to say. Great.

So a friend of mine mentioned me in passing in a blog post recently, and that kind of inspired me to finally get around to doing this.  I've been making flailing motions at the internet for a while now, but nothing's ever come of it worth mentioning, which is a shame because I used to love doing this--I had a LiveJournal back in the day when that was relevant beyond fanfiction and otherkin communities (let's be real, that was never), made a few friends, talked about a lot of things, did some memes, the uzhe.

I didn't run out of things to say, but over the years it got harder and harder for me to just...say them.  Shit came up, you know how it goes.  Anyway, I dunno what's going to go here just at the outset.  Some people keep travel blogs, or comedy blogs, or whatever, but I'm probably not going to dedicate this to one cause in particular beyond whatever the hell I feel like saying.  Less a genre blog and more a personal statement, I suppose.  I don't even know who I'm talking to right now, nobody's probably going to read this post.  I guess I'm just talking to myself.

But yes, travel and comedy.  I'm going to be traveling a lot in the near future, because I'm moving halfway across the country.  Going to be shipping out to the Twin Cities for a spell, finally get out from under my parents' roof and see how well I can do on my own.  I'm pretty excited, because it had not fully dawned on me just how many friends I had in the area, like wow way to do your research 6, and also way to keep up with your social circles.  I've never pretended to be any good at that.  But yes, lots of cool people I've known from college, and high school, or just met out there through mutual acquaintances, and all that good stuff.  I'm not a huge social butterfly--actually, putting me in a room with a large group of people is a pretty good way to set me on edge because oh god I'm going to say something really stupid to someone--but I've been kind of starved of facetime since I've been back home.  All my local friends are gone, and I don't have enough respect for the people around here in my age group to reach out and make more.  A lot of interests just don't align, you know?

Why did I mention comedy and then just not say anything about it?  I dunno, foreshadowing.  Moving on.  So that's the biggest change in my life that's happening, but there are a lot of facets to it besides a simple relocation.  And almost none of those other complications are sorted, so these past few weeks have been quietly stressful.  Like, employment, that's a big one.  Applying to jobs.  Putting my face out there on the market.  Such a terrifying prospect.  Another huge concern is, I haven't seen my doctor in a while--it's cool I've booked the appointment, it just hasn't happened yet--and I'm going to need her to refer me to someone else in the area, hopefully within Minneapolis because that'll be the city I actually live in, but yanno public trans it's a thing.  Starting a relationship with a new doctor is always a song and dance, though.  It's one I'm familiar with, I've done it like four times already, but still.  There's the transfer of medical records, getting used to a new office with its own labs and billing policies, and hopefully the doctor's a good fit personality-wise, but it's never a guarantee.  When I graduated and had to switch from the University of Iowa system to the University of Maryland, there was a huge bureaucratic bugaboo, which I managed to mitigate by keeping my own personal records that I could share with my current doctor while my previous doctor's office got their shit together.

So I'll probably be doing that again.  Whee.

And yeah, so there's a lot on my mind at the moment, but only so much I can do about it at any given time, which is frustrating.  I'm not super patient when it comes to big looming problems, I'd rather just get them out of the way and sink or swim 5 times out of 7.  So I occupy myself with other things, like books and games, you know, typical nerd stuff.

By the way, I'm too old to be shoved into anyone's locker, and if you fuck with me I will break you in half.  If you fuck with my friends, I will break you in half.  Well, if they don't break you first.

That's a thing I've missed a lot: being that I live in rural nowhere, I haven't really had a lot of access to things like kickboxing dojos, or what have you, so I've gotten kind of out of practice, and definitely out of shape.  Reason #47 to move to the cities, right there.  Those things cost money though, usually, so that's another stressor on top of the job woes.  But I miss fighting, and having friends I could casually punch that wouldn't bitch about the fact that I just punched them.  I miss being able to walk down a street and confidently feel like a bad dude who don't take nobody's crap.  I still size up everyone I see for a fight, but increasingly I've been resigning myself to the idea that I'd probably lose, if it came to that.  Maybe that's just my self-esteem talking, which is weird because usually it's not that pessimistic.  Brutal, yes.  Full of itself, certainly.  Whatever.

So I guess that's probably what I'll use this blog for: tracking my progress on becoming a Bad Dude.  I've got no illusions: I'll never be the Baddest Dude Around, but that's okay it takes the pressure off somewhat.  I'll also talk about other stuff, hopefully a lot of shit that pisses me off because it's always good to rant and air that shit before it starts festering.  I haven't done that in a while, either.

Anyway, that's all for now.  6 out.