scentofgenocide - Tumblr blog

[scentofgenocide]

Sold the house

I always do

The war was lost

And so were you

[scentofgenocide]

It’s just the remnants of the virus leaving your body. That’s all. It’s not romantic to face reality. It’s not fun to hurt the ones you love. Leaving the bones in the garden and letting the flowers grow. They are no longer there, they’re with you now, they live on in memory and other blink - and - you’ll - miss - it. The gravestones and reliquaries are for the living. That’s why they boundary around the winding roads and jutting stones. Coughing my way into a hole. I like cocaine too much. I like dangerous situations too much. I like a good story because it’s my good story.

But I’ve never been honest and I won’t start now.

Blink - you’ll miss it

Breathe - it’s not going to end well

But when you pick at scabs they’ll bleed, when you starve wolves they’ll feed

Stop listening to the creepy crawls of Dave Gahan and try to remember this elation when you direct the outcome and don’t engage with it. This anticipation is funnier than the ending. You know that.

I mean you have to laugh, right? She/they’d with big academic dreams and airplane gutters. Who drives anymore? You can just take Uber. Or the subway. Who doesn’t like the subway? you can’t pack up the bones with you, you have to leave them. You gotta protect the living. You have to run while you’ve got the chance. you eclipse California, you eclipse the lower east side. Is anything built in my direction? I can’t force passive men to burn upwards. I can’t draw landscapes with no horizons. You gotta get right with me.

[scentofgenocide]

Oh dearest, oh dearest. You were falling in love with this guy, weren’t you? Z with his silly circular talks and eyelashes to the ceiling. What a hopeless, sad state of affairs. It feels like cold steel, or a day that is too humid. Nothing you can grasp, nothing comfortable. Sweaty, quick, unreliable.

I hate closing chapters this early, when the book starts to go south a few chapters in. It is times like these, worn and lonely, cold and hungry in the beginning of the NYC winter, that everything feels so much more isolated and bleak. I pray to God around the holidays because I very rarely have much left at this point in the year. Just bleak visions of better days.

I remember the weeks after I came back from Vienna, where Davis seemed unfamiliar and hazy. Hot, boring, and so, so strange. I felt like an enemy, and it was all over.

I beg of the algorithm and my friends to just let me vent, to not judge nor worry - but do I need to be here? When I am uncomfortable in a room, I walk out. I gagged and squirmed and puked my way out of high school. I knew it was bullshit, it was roadkill. I Reserve the right to choose my own adventure, to reach The End if I want to. I know that I want euthanasia when i have had enough, enough of my aged body and crippling mind. As V used to say - it’s su*c*de by omission, by neglect. I’ve never been terribly fond of being me, and this continues. It is not getting better. Bret was right, the slogan was just a slogan. It does not get better.

Is there a reliquary just for you?

[scentofgenocide]

At some point along the ride of this tragic 6 months, I realized that the only way this will ever make sense is if I find someone who can k*ll me/die with me as an equal, careening towards oblivion together, blood on our lips. It’s starting to manifest into more than a fantasy - that isn’t to say it’s something that can be directed or planned, as the will to survive is so strong - but the chaotic fantasy lingers and starts to make more sense. And what does happen when you move so far east that there is no more land to cover? I am decolonizing myself. I am giving the land back, I am fleeing the land my family settled a stake on. I am letting the natives reclaim their myths and families and agency. I am throwing down my weapons and running freely into the wind.

This is twisting into something beyond aesthetics, this will be a full body paradise. A destructive oasis. Chattering skulls with gold teeth.

Now that they know about us, what meditation do I direct to this heart center? what days are filled with dreamy circulars and which ones must be filled with work? I would prefer the walk that ends at your funny home, and we could creep into the silence and listen to static.

[scentofgenocide]

They came like moths to a flame

You left like a house in a hurricane

And what to do with this, a dreamy eyed lost boy with eyelashes to the ceiling? This one I must sit with, inhale smoke and exhale slowly, walk until the sun sets and crawl around blocks and buildings. You tell me you don’t want to see your mother, and I lean my head against the subway walls. Too bad. tant pis pour toi.

This one is tough. I interrogate it: let me slice up your arm, a half step on the chest? I practice what I preach, shining mouth of gold teeth. I’m a little dangerous but I don’t need to impress, I just wind around the clouds and hang stars on sickness.

We both move, constantly move, do you like to sit on the ceiling like I do? Do you like someone to crawl until they bleed? Do you want to be taken care of? As always, I’m your man.

[scentofgenocide]

Covid, I suppose - every thought is warm and dripping wet, like getting out of a tepid bath. It’s hard to get a breath when you’re just so down. I don’t need this - this hurricane and wasteland - by the time I wander outside it will be gray.

Coffee with Z - approaching it with shaking knees and quiet voices. Maybe not so quite bombastic this time. He’s pretty, he’s assured yet shy. Beautifully long eyelashes curl to the ceiling, a profile that would knock you dead. Silly little tote bags and silver rings. I want to kiss him but I’ll crawl and wait.

But what is it, about cornering a shy nervous boy near half my age? I know he knows I eye him like a hungry wolf. It’s silly, and it’s absolutely asinine. I want to toy with him until he collapses and hurts himself in his confusion. Is that what they always liked about me? Inexperience and triage? Wobbling knees and shaky, uncomfortable smiles? Consent, consent, consent.

[scentofgenocide]

I am jerking off repeatedly and yet c*mming is a shred of what it used to be - is this a side effect or is this what you get to trade in as you become ruled by your dick? All I can think about it how i want to ride his face and yet - you know - you came on too strong and all the willing partners just aren’t as fun. Dahmer and Bundy, that’s the spirit. I’m reading Bret’s new novel and even though I heard the podcast all the highs and lows hit me as some sort of demonic cypher, I hate Halloween but I love watching people get drunk and utterly ruin themselves and clip clop like horses down the street in their bad heels. The problem with being a voyeur and a masochist is that you want everything and nothing. That’s what you’ll get.

I don’t know whether to do a ritual to complete this or if I should just let nature take its natural course. Either way ends up with me and a losing hand.

I pray for some break in the Halloween melancholy, god just give me a chance with him in a way that I can frame this so it doesn’t kill me.

[scentofgenocide]

Oh welcome welcome home little fixation, as you get so low, you imagine him as a porcelain saint, watery tears dripping down his face.

And yet you imagine D loom over you like a priest you confess to, imagining yourself with big watery eyes and telling him how stupid it is to shit where you eat. I wish I had better news to report…

[scentofgenocide]

Okay, last entry noted.

Ended as soon as it started, and dearest die-ary, I’m pretty lonely again.

[scentofgenocide]

I am stronger than Mensa, Miller, and Mailer

He didn’t know what troubadour meant and I need you to remember that.

[scentofgenocide]

I can’t be back here already! This one is a little different. This one is a little sticky. A little intense.

It’s just coffee.

It’s just been a few coffees.

It’s too many vampire novels and tv shows, I imagine myself a snake that stretches around him, fangs grazing his neck. My fantasies are always better than reality. My fantasies are mine and that’s why they’re perfect.

Sometimes in the world as is, you've

Got to shake the hand that feeds you

It's just like Adam says, it's

Not so hard to understand, it's

Just like always, coming down on

Just like Jesus never came and

What did you expect to find?

Why did he give me this desire, if there’s nowhere to put my desire?

You know you’re not a good person. You know you’re not a kid. Do you think you can rescue him from mommy and daddy? Keep him in a cage to learn and yawn and crawl out when you need amusement? they’re on a different plain. They have attention spans of weeds. They were brought up on Snapchat and snappy editing. You know it just takes an old man to walk by and you lose your footing. A German accent and a passport to Iceland. You think he’s going to wear a little uniform for you? Play dress up with your photos and medals? Tell me what color his eyes even are? Tell me what DL’s are again. Right, it’s what I thought.

You know I don’t see you when she walks in the room.

Time swarms to a crawl. Groomer, groomer, groomer. No good intentions and no way out. Just have to play the script. Just have to have the feeding frenzy and be let down from 500 feet up and crash into the earth, bleeding and broken.

You saw a fucking shiny toy and you grabbed it in your mouth. How long until it’s lost? How long, how long must we sing this song?

[scentofgenocide]

I Write here to remember - passé prose and all - a place to remind myself of my eras - like a Vegas retrospective or four hour concert lighting up the night sky. I write here when I know something is changing, shifting, waning. I age and my face stays the same. Vampire, vampire, play with girls your own age.

It is interesting, the culmination of March, brass tacks and sudden changes. Blood, guts, and grad school.

In the interest of memory:

HRT started first week of September, 2023. The prescription was annoying to procure, but as it worked out, it was when my age was eclipsed. I am going backwards, Mon Cherie, I am going backwards. I thought this would be the wehrwolf’s journey - but as I switch to a lightning hot temper, tensions buzzing in my brain, I see that I am as I always was, a lowly servant of the blood and rose. I stand up straighter, my back full of spines and razors. I man spread on the train, daring someone to pick a fight. To strike a chord. To try and fall in love. The man outside the cemetery said I had a beautiful smile. It’s only because of my fangs.

Which brings me to my newest fixation, my little Louis, sad eyed son of the lowlands. Broad shouldered and fine middle, I imagine myself worshiping his curves in my mind. His skinhead obsessions, i can see him in a Harrington jacket and doc martens. A Lonsdale lad, white laces pressing down on my throat. Oh, I can only hope. I can only hope.

It’s difficult for me to not get what I want - I must steel myself for the inevitable outcome, a reason a season a tinker tailor soldier sailor - but how lovely would it be for us to wander to Vienna together? Drowning each other in work and the waters of the Danube? Do you remember, you only look back a few entries to see the lives you have lived, the men you have worshipped. You change very little, you live among a world constructed into a fine castle of nostalgia, peppered with trinkets and reminders of a better place and time.

And what would you do if you got him? And what would you do without me to remind you? I face the reality that the person who cut me loose is the only person who could put up with my temperate nerves and wavering stomach. But what is a marriage but a trade off of sickness and boredom, nights droning into days. Are you so ready to jump back into that again, mandatory Saturday nights and crucifixion mornings? What are you so desperate to see other than a tick tick tick routine of imprisonment and allegorical rules.

He has his mothers eyes, I say as I buy a plane ticket. He buys the ticket. Who covers this tab, who laughs last?

My battleground is a body.

[scentofgenocide]

At the end of March I faced a department full of people who knew my name and face, my nuanced research about the dead and the remembered, panicking that I sounded frazzled , worried about D and his daughter, as he creeped up the stairs and went missing for most of the panels until mine. He came to mine though, and he said some very kind things. That meant a lot to me.

But that’s not why we’re here.

At the end of March, notes clutched in my hand, dressed in boots and a blazer I had dug out from my closet, I creeped out of my shitty house on Long Island that i hated, a too-large loft bedroom with no sun but a dirty skylight, my Chinese landlady hovering. I hated it there, uncomfortably large upstairs and cramped and gross in the downstairs, but I tried to make my best of it, I tried to do my walks and explorations, and it all felt like dull, lifeless nothing, like grey and muddy waters. I put on my nice boots and my blazer, went to the unreliable bus stop, and the bus passed me by. That in itself wasn’t rare, but the day, the day of my talk, the day when Long Island turned on me, showed me it’s MAGA fangs and when wearing army sweaters and Austrian caps became not so funny anymore, I walked to school in the looming rain, click clacking worn boots and light blazer.

I had had enough. No more would the MAGA protestors threaten my bagel stop on Saturday mornings, no unreliable bus with an app that made you watch ads before you bought the tickets, no more mile walk in the rain while cars jeered and tried to run me over. I was done, done, done, done with the suburbs and everything they represented. I made up my mind: I was moving to “the city,” where I could ride the subway and see my friends and where people wouldn’t say anything about my hair and stares. In “the city,” everyone had their own lives that didn’t involve me (which can be lonely sometimes but more on that later,) where I didn’t have to have a car, where I could just be trans without being a spectacle, where I could live with some semblance of what I wanted normality to be.

Two months later, I had found an apartment in the city. I’m here now - my room is cramped, but there’s so much Sun that the whole room heats up in the morning, making me sweat and dream. The floors are wooden and my roommates are good people who want to make money, but I had money and I gave that up. Now I have some regrets but not about anything I can fix or could have fixed at the time.

I’m writing this here now, to remind myself that I changed my entire reality within the span of two months. I sat in a marriage for so long, unable to move or breathe and I made myself small, and after one cross country move whats a little two hour jaunt? I still feel sorry for my movers and I hope they’re okay. But I’m here now, two months later, two months after sobbing under my desk, red faced and snotty when Rob offered to give me a hug and that was the most positive and loving male attention I’d gotten in months. He’s a good guy and I hope he’s okay.

But I did this, I did this in two months. I said, no, im unsafe, im unhealthy, this is killing me. I didn’t wait six months or ten years. I waited two. I put my money down, I took my pride and I took my things - some I haven’t seen in so long - I stacked them up and I arranged a room that overlooks a busy street and the neighbors play their music and their kids scream. Rainy days are nice because it’s quiet so I like rainy days now.

Ultimately I write this to remind myself that I am capable, perhaps more capable than anyone I know, I have uprooted my entire life and I will continue to do that until I feel at home. I will weed and tend and sow my own goddamn garden until someone listens and flowers sprout. I don’t have anyone to obsess over right now which leaves me weak and sullen, but they will come, they will come. They always do.

[scentofgenocide]

I don’t trust text because it’s nationalized and I don’t believe our words can save us, where we have no memories or histories because there is no personalization. Hyperlink, that drive to create something but only coming up short and feeling out of control.

[scentofgenocide]

a Silicon Valley rant

https://hplusmagazine.com/2009/09/02/virtual-life-actual-death/ I absolutely do not expect ham to read my weird rant but i'm mega stoned so it's happening anyway, i should be writing about media and the holocaust but I'm not so I'm writing about this because that woman in your panel set me off. Not because she's wrong about anything, it's not her fault, but the reason i left california is because the ground is polluted with some kind of westward expansion myth but san francisco is as far west as you can go, so they ran out of things to expand, and then they tried to retconn the whole thing by saying that hippies were good people but they actually weren't. Because if you didn't go to vietnam it meant you were rich enough for your parents to bail you out or you had done service already sans draft (early 60s, kennedy standby mode.) So you had all these rich bay area kids, and their parents in the berkeley hills with their huge mansions, and the kids would wander down to Telegraph avenue and hang out and do hippie shit. They didn't get drafted because their parents paid for them to not fail out of Cal. Anyway, out of a group of these people came a guy named Stewart Brand. He preached all kinds of great shit - DIY, eco-sustainability, peace, went to a lot of Grateful Dead shows. He started a magazine called the Whole Earth Catalogue, which became a bible for the hippies. It was an open forum magazine type thing, full of amazing information and stories. My dad had copies of them all, and he talked about how amazing the magazine was, even though he a hippie he didn't see the height of the Summer of Love because he was in a Da Nang jungle in Vietnam instead

[11:34 PM]So anyway this Brand guy, he was like the guru of this movement. And through the 60s and 70s, the movement grew, the true believer hippies clung to life. Then a weird fucking thing happened: he started preaching business, entrepreneurship, Reaganomics. He did talks for AT&T (who was under constant attack along with Pac Bell, for monopoly telecomm practices, actually a distant reason why we're in this mess,) became advisor to governor jerry brown. But then he did something really wild: he became obsessed with technology, and the importance of computers in creating an Ayn Randian libertarian utopia, free of government intervention and oversight. And this is how the civilian side of the internet was born. (edited)

Sick From Old Muffin Era — Today at 11:38 PMHe and the whole earth conglomerate at that point began running these very intense BBSes called THE WELL, basically where rich white college students and professionals with internet access could sit and talk to each other all day via message board. And a lot of people emerged from these boards with a dream for a utopian internet - Steve Jobs was one, the Oracle founder, a lot of major silicon valley billionares. They wanted to create a digital system that was specifically for "intelligent," "educated" "worldly people" (ie other rich white professionals and academics) and free of the confines of, essentially, the working class

[11:44 PM]So these silicon valley people started to see their parents die. WW2/silent generation who had amassed wealth in $$$$$ bay area property and old money, and oh guess what, the silicon valley guys now had an amazing nest egg to gamble their shiny new tech companies on. Back to Brand - by the late 80s, he had formed the Global Business Network to preach these values of libertarian fueled hippie-ism, why environmentalism can be solved with technological innovation. He was BFF with a ton of businessmen and politicians, super rich, etc. And people flocked and flocked to the WELL, which ofc had servers located in some of the earliest internet corporations. So these corporations were just filtering and storing all this stuff from people like humdog up there, until people like her figured out - hey, wait a minute - i'm pouring my heart and soul out here, and this Brand guy is making a fucking mint off me

Sick From Old Muffin Era — Today at 11:45 PMshe was attacked viciously on the board, accused of biting the hand that feeds, of upsetting the digital balance of the community. Brand was off talking to George Bush and shit, he didnt care what his open internet forum had become. (edited)

[11:48 PM]So, I'll wrap up the most unhinged rant y'all will get from me for now, but basically, these absolute Boomer ghouls, who grew up in bay area privilege, who preached love and peace and morality and free love, built themselves a fortress online to keep out riff raff - the working class, poc, LGBTQ, whatever - and as they sat in their parents houses and their tech millionaire houses, growing in value by the minute, they walled themselves off from the world. Homeless people? Not my problem, I've got my whole earth BBS with my white friends from all over the world to support me where we comfort each other and i dont have to walk outside and see the junkies passed out on my block.

Sick From Old Muffin Era — Today at 11:54 PMBlack people? well, they should learn a trade, like computer programming, then they can be successful like me. Mentally ill? A shame, but they should have advocated for themselves more when Nixon kicked them out of state institutions. etc., etc. So - i promise i'm getting to the end here - people like that woman who was at your panel, i don't even need to hear her talk to know her story. That's why she started making sense at first - "money is fake, we need a better world," then all of a sudden starts twisting and turning into her bay area walled garden of "well I'm poor and I can barely support myself, why should I help these other people?" It's a fucking brain disease. These people have been led in two opposing directions and they bought it hook, line, and sinker, and they have ruined San Francisco and the Bay Area, the silicon valley ethic has essentially been and will be the downfall of the west, and this is why you get people in 6 million dollar homes overlooking the bay and people saying to your face, "well, we're all struggling."

[11:54 PM]I'm not going back to california. This is why this is my bunker channel.

[scentofgenocide]

Not only did I lose you,

I lost myself too.

Fears on my pillow,

Under the unlucky Jew.

I don’t know why it all tumbled out as it did, sadness and spite. Too much truth. You talk too much. You interrupt too much. You said too much. Spiky and stuttered. can’t even spit it out. When you do spit it out, it’s just blood and salt. You know he’ll just turn it on you, right? You’ll get close and then you’re responsible for him. You’re already responsible for him. When people talk against him, you’re ready to fight. You never felt that way about your other fathers. You never wanted to defend their honor. What honor? You turn to an angry dog, rabid and feral.

Through some weird, twisted, fucked up psychic event, it all came tumbling out. The lost years. The grief, the anger.

I heard him say though, “I’d like to hear your story, for personal reasons…” and trail off. I don’t even know why I’m having trouble writing this. It was a chasm. It was a canyon. It was a forest full of branches and sand.

I don’t know why they are intertwined in my mind. There’s crossover. I will recount it, as best as I can, because it was significant.

The non-binary student mentioned their family stuff to him, getting in touch with their half brother, the similarities. They mentioned ties to Israel and Berlin, grandparents they never knew. I was taken aback, and out it tumbled:

Hope yours goes better than mine. We have remarkably similar stories. Wow. Yeah, my dad’s from Israel. Abandoned me as a kid. Didn’t hear from him for many years. I’m adopted. He got back in touch 25 years later.

And he paused, in his measured, lanky baritone, “if you’re comfortable talking about it, I’d like to know more. For personal reasons.” I know he meant his daughter. The missing piece. The dark places, the loose threads. And the non-binary student interrupted. That was supposed to be our talk. It’s not the students fault I bleed all over. It’s not their fault my story went awry. It’s no one’s fault. But I’m furious, furious, furious.

He and I walked outside, and I just. It all came out. The anger, the frustration. I could hear it dripping on the pavement like melting snow, thinking too myself, stop it, stop it, stop it, stop it, this will only be used against you. You took everything over and you let it fly. Muck, slime, bile. Blood. So much blood.

He asked why my dad got in touch. I said I’ve probed, I’ve asked, and he just isn’t forthcoming. I’ve asked about my grandparents. I told him he just writes to me about all the great vacations they go on. He clipped in his funny German dry humor, “oh, well, that’s great. Why would he do that? Why would be even get in touch?” Reiterate. I don’t know.

I saw him listen, I saw him show compassion, I saw him struggle not to linger longer.

I Said that Ive asked about my grandparents and the Holocaust, and gotten no answer. He said maybe my dad didn’t even know. Many people didn’t talk about it. I said I knew, but I wish my dad would tell me the truth. I bristled a bit, he apologized. It’s not your fault, I said, it’s just frustrating.

However, when we parted, I could feel him a bit shaken, maybe a bit rattled. Maybe someday you’ll ache like I ache. I could be projecting. Maybe he isn’t thinking about me at all. Probably not. Maybe.

This journey plagues me like an illness, a blister, it opens and festers,

But perhaps most acutely

I love him even more

[scentofgenocide]

If we’re here…

(Side note: As a reminder to the future self I will one day be, my dearest, saint malone @ girlblogger for the bits and pieces)

I could write a soliloquy and I could write a novel. Broken pencils and paper shards surround me like some stupid movie plot, nerves and fluttering eyelashes. Cant you see what you’re doing to me? Cant you see what you have done? I told her I knew this was going to be, because I saw him from across the country and I knew it was destiny. You can see the end result but you can’t see the bits and pieces, so those are the parts you have to fill in. A divorce? Sure. A hit tv show? Sounds great. Shoes and leather and gold teeth? All the better.

But alas, you know how this stupid movie plot goes. He’s not queer, and you are. He’s so normal, he’s a jock (they giggle,) he bikes and plays tennis (like my dad,) he can’t visualize things, how are you supposed to talk and breathe - and the howling wolf with sharp teeth takes over, bristling fur in the moonlight - he speaks so sharply: oh, a practical man? Have we not done this before? Did we not unravel the mysterious cishet in the suburban drawl? The dog and the pocket fence? Kids and cloves? You wanted freedom and you want so badly to be on your own. And you so easily jump into another roving obsession, a hamster wheel, a crushed origami crane where a person once stood. A spousal hire, that’s what you want, huh? A whisper that they’re-only-here-because-of-him, and can you believe he even gave *that,* that mangy wolf the time of day? Who rescued who, really? The wolf growls and snaps, watch your step, watch your step, thus you fall into the white man’s trap again, claws trimmed and fur shiny, a manicured freak on parade to make some tall, bright eyed man look good.

Oh I know, my wolf brother, I know, and I thank you for the warning. I wish I was as brave as you, as wild as you always, unencumbered and free. I am trying, my wolf brother, I am trying.