someshavedsheep

[someshavedsheep]

Alright, we need to talk about something. And you need to listen, because the way you’re operating right now, might just be harming children.

That’s right. THE WAY YOU OPERATE MIGHT JUST BE PUTTING CHILDREN IN HARMS WAY!

Shock ya? Good. Ready for another?

Pedophiles. Paedophiles. Don’t care where in the world you are, I’m talking about kiddy diddlers. They make me sick. And if you have any common sense, your stomach is turning and your rage is starting to boil just thinking of them... Luring kids into their vans with candy... Watching the swing sets through binoculars from their car...

Okay. So lets address the issue specifically. Child abuse in general should certainly make you mad. Sexual abuse of children should make you furious. Perpetrators of these actions are some of the lowest common denominators of the human race. We’re in agreement there.

Here’s the deal. First, we need to separate two distinct groups. People who have sexually abused children, and people who get aroused at the thought of it. People who have abused children have ruined other peoples lives, and without much dispute, deserve to have their lives irreversibly altered.

Do you think that people who are sexually attracted to children don’t know that? How horrible, and disgusting they are? How much hurt they deserve?

Now, let me ask you this, has a vegan telling you how gross your half pound ribeye steak really is, ever made you want to not eat it? Ever made you want to put down your fork, and take up the mantle of ‘animal liberationist’ alongside them? No, it hasn’t. And you telling them how gross and detestable their appetites are doesn’t make them any less hungry.

What I want is for you to think about the ones that havn’t hurt anyone. Lets ONLY address the people who have this horrible desire, that they KNOW is wrong. That YOU know is wrong. That EVERYONE has told them their whole life is WRONG.

YOU ARE CORRECT SIR!

Now stop feeling good about being right, because the way you go about being right is dangerous.

Most of us have a secret. A secret we don’t want getting out. Most of us will not have our lives utterly ruined if that secret came out. So what do they have to do? They have to try to hold this in. Hold in this desire. This urge... I tried to go without coffee for lent. I made it 3 weeks. I’d make a horrible pedophile. I’d have been lynched years ago.

So.. it’s wrong. Pedophiles are sick. We all know it.

So... when you’re sick... you go to the doctor, right?

If you tell your doctor that you’re sexually attracted to children, patient confidentiality does not apply. Children are at risk. The doctor is, if not morally or ethically, often legally required to report you. So you can’t go to your doctor or shrink for help.

Go to a friend?... Imagine, your best friend of 20 years, known him since you were in diapers, came to you one day and said... “Man, I think I really need some help, I just can’t stop thinking about little kids...” Would you keep that person in your life? My first instinct would be to knock all the teeth out of their head!

Go to a stranger? That’s a funny way to commit suicide, but okay.

So, they know they’re sick, they know they’re a bad person... But even if they want to, how do they change?

They’re taught by us, by society, to just lock it down... don’t let it come out...

But all too often, it does. And every time it does, a child is harmed.

And it’s their fault. And they deserve to be punished as harshly as practicality allows. No argument there from me. Child sex is rape. Rape is incredibly offensively objectionable. Rape deserves to be punished to the full extent of practicality, child rape even more so.

And we should ask ourselves, what can be done to prevent these horrible crimes?

More teachers watching the playgrounds at school.

Regular, populated walking routes.

Educating your children and providing them with phones to call in cases of emergency.

All of these things are great. But they are band-aids that don’t get to the heart of this cancer.

The fact is, that no matter how angry the world is, some people get this curse. This horrible, disgusting curse that needs to be purged from the planet. But you telling everyone how you would mutilate the first pedo you can get your hands on doesn’t solve the problem. It just drives it, and the people who havn’t harmed anyone, people that are suffering, further underground.

And when you perpetuate this hatred and intolerance without fostering empathy and understanding alongside it, YOU ARE PUTTING CHILDREN IN HARMS WAY!

Just think..

Maybe if John Wayne Gacy had received therapy after his first offence, maybe he wouldn’t have gone on to kill so many.

Maybe if Michael Jackson had found help, we’d still be talking about his music without that big asterisk today.

Maybe if R. Kelly had some counselling, he wouldn’t have ruined so many young womens lives.

None of these men would have asked for help. Because they know whats coming if they do. A pair of handcuffs on their wrists, a fist up the ass from a fellow inmate, and a lifetime of having to introduce themselves to neighbors with “I legally have to inform you that...”

So look, I know I’m not going to change your mind. And I don’t fully want to. I want you to hate child molesters. I just want you to know, that not all people that experience attraction to children have molested someone.... yet. And until they have a safe way of finding help and treatment, and god forbid, some compassion, the world is a more dangerous place.

The Dunkelfeld Project in Germany, and StopSO in the United Kingdom, are two organizations that aim to support people with this inappropriate sexual attraction to find help, before they hurt anyone else. Elsewhere in the world, the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers (ATSA) has become more welcoming of non-offending pedophiles. There is a website called VirPed.org which can be a resource for people who have not yet harmed children to find help.

These organizations are a step to making the world a safer place for our children. And while you touting domination over the unrighteous is great and all, it’s not actually helping, it’s hurting.

Stop hurting children.

[someshavedsheep]

Dear Reverend,

I’ve been attending your services virtually since just before ash wednesday, and while I normally wouldn’t wait this long to introduce myself, well, covid. If I may, I’d like to take the opportunity to introduce myself.

I grew up in this community, and while I spent a few years sowing my oats, I’ve always felt like this place was my home, and so I’ve been back for a little over a decade now. I grew up attending church just down the street, at Church of God, however, when I was about 10, my routines had to change when my family bought a cottage, and weekends were spent there for most of the year. In my early teens, once I was old enough for my parents to feel safe leaving me at home for the weekend, I would begin attending church without my parents.


I also grew up attending one of the local bible camps each summer. I loved, and still love, to study the bible. When the time came, and I was aging out of summer programming, I applied to be a counsellor at that camp. I was told, very politely, “We think your views on Jesus are too radical for you to work here.” I had always wanted to attend seminary, and pictured a live in service to the word... these were just the first people to tell me that I didn’t belong there.


I can’t be sure that this is specifically what they were implying, but a couple years earlier, I had reached puberty. And it was at one of these summer camps, that I realized that God had made me to share my life with somebody. And that, as a boy, God had blessed me with the ability to be attracted to both boys and girls. I just had to wait for God to show me who that one person I would spend my life with was.

As I would grow up, I held steadfast in my belief that God had created me without mistake. And I held proud and steadfast to my faith. But being a teenager is hard. Not just for me, but for the people around me. I didn’t understand how these people, who proclaimed to be Christ-like, to be Christian, could preach such hate in his name. The churches I would attend (3 weeknight youth groups, and sunday services), would either covertly or directly address... this gift. And spit on it. And whether or not they were talking directly to me, I was made to not be welcome in their halls.

I did find an affirming church for a short time, in Fernie, B.C., I spent a year there, and for a few months I attended a baptist church whose views were so succinctly in line with my own. Their mission statement was “To take the lessons taught in the Bible, and make them culturally applicable to today”.

But for the majority of my life now, I have been more or less on my own in my walk with Christ. It seems every time I’ve tried over the last 5 years, since getting sober, and coming out as transgender (Another gift I had known of at a young age, just did not have the terminology to articulate), to reach out to a church again, be it pastors I knew in my youth, or new ones at churches attended by family, I’m either met with hostility, or outright bigoted hatred. The last church service I attended, my (now) wife and I were seated in a crowd of maybe 600 (The Bergthaler church was packed), about 15 minutes into the sermon, the preacher went off script and off message to unleash a tirade of hatespeech about LGBT people. We politely stood up, and ‘quietly’ walked out. I seriously doubt my wife will ever attend a service again...

I guess the point I’m coming to... is that it means so much to me that your church exists. And that I might be welcome in it. I actually broke down in tears watching your March 14th service. Good tears, I promise. I pray that once the renovations are complete, I’ll be able to attend service in person. And though it may seem silly or trivial, I assure you, to me, it is no such thing; Thank you so much for existing. I look forward to fellowshipping with you and the rest of the congregation.

[someshavedsheep]

Dear intentions,


I’d like to give you the benefit of the doubt. You’re probably good. At least most of the time.

To all you bad intentions, I’ll deal with you later.


Good intentions, I hear lots of nice things about you. The problem is, so often, you don’t result in anything. Even worse, sometimes you wind up developing into negative actions. But that’s not your fault. I’m human. That stuff is kind of in my nature.


In any case, please don’t go anywhere. Stick around. I hear there’s good things coming down the pipe.

You bad boys out there. Y’all can fuck right off.

Do you have any idea how much time I spend trying to ignore you?

Sure, you’re fun to bring around from time to time, but I’m not ever really proud afterwards of the things I’ve done with you at my side.

“So kiss me hard, cause this might be the last time that I let you”

[someshavedsheep]

Dear Karen

I said goodbye to you today, but there were so many words I left out.

We took you in a little over a year ago. Thelma seemed like a kind, well intentioned lady. Im sorry you didn’t receive the care and understanding you needed to thrive with her. I hope, despite her condition, she never forgets her Kitty and the life you brought to her home.

Karen, I didn’t know what I was getting in to when I agreed to come pick you up. We were prepared for... something. But it was not thousands of dollars in vet bills. It was not months of care and recovery. Not that you ever really recovered. You never seemed to be able to put weight back on...

Karen, you were always so vocal and needy. Something I both hated and loved you for.

I wish I could have done better by you. I don’t have a clue what that would entail, I just... I had so much hope for you when we went to pick you up that day. And from the moment we took you out of the carrier in our home, and I saw this frightened, sick, sad little creature... I just wanted to fix you. I wanted to take away your pain and your hurt. I wanted to make your place in this world a good one. And thats not something I could do.

Im glad your suffering is finally over. Im also sad your suffering is finally over.

You touched my life in so many ways in the year you were in my life.

In the words of Black Joe Lewis...

BITCH! I LOVE YOU!

R.I.P. Karen (nee Miss Kitty) 2008-2021

[someshavedsheep]

Dear distractions,


Why are you always finding a way to try to stop me? What did I ever do to you? And now that I’m finally sitting down and doing this, you just keep coming at me. I’ve got something to say... just not here. I want more coffee. I want a cigarette. All things that would take me away from what I want to do. From what I’ve been meaning to do. Intention doesn’t seem to mean much without a follow through though.


So. Intention. Lets name it.


I want to write. It’s a skill I once harvested on the regular. Now? I don’t know. When I come to the vine, it seems to be there, waiting for me, but I don’t know that I can say it feels cultivated.

I had a letter to the editor, full of thinly veiled metaphor, published in the local paper last week. I felt really proud of it. My wife cut it out, framed it, and hung it on the wall. I wouldn’t say I felt that proud, but the support felt amazing.

Again, distractions. Okay, focus now...


My intention. To write. Daily. In the loose form of open letter writing. So what if, essentially, this letter is written to a part of myself.

My distractions are an extension of my psyche.

So that’s what I’m going to do. Yes, I’m going to fall behind on my video games. That’s a sacrifice I’m more than willing to make, to reclaim a part of my past that I miss dearly. More likely that not, it’s my housework that will fall behind, rather than my games, but... Right now, I’m feeling kind of on top.

I am what I am. And I’m glad for what I am. Arrogant. Vain. Proud. I am many things. I have felt shame, and decided that I’m better without it.


I will choose to be me. I am an animal lover. I am a wife. I am a casual musician. And once again, I am choosing to be a writer.

Until the morrow,

Author

[someshavedsheep]

People in glass houses...

Should not throw bricks, or so the adage goes. Although it puzzles me that more people are not shitting them. Fun fact, they also have no need to close the bathroom door when nature calls. Having just watched Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s latest episode of ‘Star Talk’ in which he interviews Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, several topics of conversation alerted me to the fact that I’ve already willingly made myself the victim of a one-sided conversation that is television. First, if you will, allow me to state my bias. I do not support typical ‘social media’. Yes, I have a phone, which gets used for emergencys and telling my boss I’m gonna be late for work. There was a time when I allowed my writing to fill up livejornal posts (For you younger folk... I dunno, google it or something), and updated my personal journal on BMEZine.com’s site IAM on almost a daily basis for years. It connected me with people with similar intrests from around the world, and allowed me the opportunity to engage in intellectual debates in forums from topics ranging from body modification to philosophy to what’s going to happen next week on ‘Dexter’ (Again, kids... Good luck out there). There was a time when sharing my life with strangers was passé. I had hundreds of friends on my myspace, suffered through countless resdesigns of the facebook homepage, and even signed up for a twitter account before the people I went to high school with had graduated (Not meaning to age myself, surely at least one of them now has a doctorate in medicine). I’m still the kind of person that believes in openness and honesty among individuals. I can sit down next to a complete stranger on a plane and tell them my whole life story should the conversation require it to carry along, this, of course, hinging on their perception of me being the guy that just won’t shut up, or the guy that has something of substance to say. Some people want to be left alone on a flight, personally, I think drinking alone is one of the puzzle pieces of alcoholism. And that’s a puzzle that always seems to be missing a few pieces at the end, and half the time you’re jamming them into each other thinking “These should fit, I know they should”... But that’s a story for another day.

Several years ago, I realized that my life was becoming more and more virtual. I no longer had even small conversations with people I considered my close friends just to ask how they were feeling, and what was new and interesting with their lives. These small moments of connectedness had been replaced by merely reading a status update on facebook. And no longer was I telling someone I was so proud to see that they had stuck out their post secondary education, or jealous of the bonding that must have occured when one had taken their teenage daughter to Shambhala (Kids, adults, music lovers alike. Fuck Burning Man. Fuck Coachella. Fuck the Warped Tour. Go to the Salmo River Ranch. Don’t take the drugs. And if you do, take a camera so you can at least remember what an amazing music festival in British Columbia’s Okanagan valley is like.), but I was merely ‘like’ing their status updates.

On top of that, I found myself no longer sharing my personal life in personal mannerisms. When a significant relationship ended in my life, my friends and family heard about it through social media. When I went to a killer party, or a concert that left me in tears and unable to pry my guitar out of my hands for days, I’d post pictures to my feeds, and would get replys like “That party looks awesome” and “Nice shirt” and “I thought only old people listened to Bob Seger”. And though sometimes I would reply with inqueries of where the next rager was happening, and filling someone in about a 50 minute encore to what was already almost a two hour show was a hell of a set for a man who’s pushing 70″. My social life no longer had real personal connections. I no longer was learning anything from anyone that they wern’t telling everyone. It was social media, where the stories were editorials that ended after the headline.

And so a few years ago, I took a step back, one which I refuse to define as good or bad, wise or not, and stopped using my facebook account. Quit blogging, quit updating my DeviantArt page where I shared my writing with the world, just... Told a few people how to get ahold of me, kept my e-mail address so that people could reach out to me, personally, if they wanted to talk, and walked away from my sometimes hours of disregarding pokes and innane anti-intellectualist banter and re-redefined what it was to have ‘friends’.

Now, you have friends. Actually, if you’re reading this, you probably don’t have enough. I’m flattered that my opinion matters enough to anyone who whould take the time to even acknowledge this pseudo-rant, so I don’t mean to alienate you. I’m sure you’re a caring, compassionate individual. But really, what is a friend to you? Are they the people you share your vaction pictures with? Are they the ___ followers who you think need to know who presses the best dark roast in town? For me, those wern’t my friends, and I didn’t feel comfortable continuing the delusion that they were.

Who were my friends? They were the people I would bail on work to go see when they called me crying. They were the people I would recommend my boss interview if only so their unemployed asses could taste the sweet pain and suffering of a minimum wage job. They were the people that let me crash on their couch when my old lady and me split up. They were the people who let a funny looking kid with strong opinions and an alternate take on life share in the bitter agony that is life in Manitoba. Or albeit, life in todays world.

So that’s what I did. And here I am today, once again bridging the gap between my psyche, and the great unknown that is the unfiltered (At least here in Canada) void space we call the interwebs. I say we, but it’s probably just me. Did I ever stop writing? Making music? Creating art? No. I have a deep yearning to put more into this world than I take from it. And so where I would usually write an essay like this and file it in hard form, catagorized and alphabetized in a file at home, this, at least, felt like in needed to be said.

And this brings me full circle to the aformentioned discussion of Twitter on National Geographic’s “Star Talk” television show. Stone, in discussion with Tyson, was recanting something from SXSW (A music festival of an altogether different nature than Shambhala, which consists more of barraging a city with millenials with pockets full of money than of packing a valley with hippies and barraging them with loud music and surrealist forest-scapes) in 2007. During the early days of Twitter, in which a tech designer was sitting in a bar crowded with people and unable to converse with his colleagues, he sent a Tweet saying to meet him at a bar not too far away that would be a better fit for what they had planned. In the short time it took him to get to that bar; I believe the number mentioned was eight hundred people, had packed the place and created a huge line down the block.

My instinctual thought was that, on a night out for drinks, people are bound to move around from bar to bar, being that the party animal of a social group will always be insisting “The next bar’s gonna be better, man.”, in a city like Austin, in the midst of SXSW, bars are bound to crowd. And the scientist in my head reminded me that “Correlation is not Causation”. Just because one person tweeted does not nessicarily mean that 800 people will follow him to another bar.

However, the term he used was that people had ‘flocked’ to this bar because one individual had proposed it. Referring to the movement of birds in migration flocking from one place to another. Another term, alongside ‘crowd’, was ‘mob’. A torches and pitchforks joke was made, when the itch in my head led me to another collective noun which my brain felt more suitable in relation to my view on the matter. That is that this ground of people was a ‘herd’.

Now, my username might be the first indication that I find sheep to be fascinating animals. You might not know that sheep are incredibly social animals. The frist clue would be that any time you see them, they’re clustered into relatively tight packs, if you’ve ever seen them outside your butcher shop at all. You might be interested to know that they are better at remembering the faces of other sheep than we are at recognizing other humans. A sheep might be separated from another for three years and yet they will still remember and recognize them when reunited. More importantly, herds of sheep are incredibly democraticly minded. Yes, herds are often led by an alpha ram, however, if, say, the herd needs to decide to cross one of two mountains in search of pasture, they have been observed collectively electing to reach a decision.

This ‘herd’ mentality seems to be altogether too common in todays society. Now, I could gripe about musicians that seem to have rooted place in peoples lives as musicians, but to each his own taste, and I will live if you and I differ on what is worth listening to. What television is worth watching. What troubles me is my observation of people seemingly collectively reaching conclusions on world events, politics, and yes, okay, what constitutes as music and film these days, through what they observe in media. Be it the sensationalized jornalism most 24 news networks spew out, or Kylie Jenner’s instagram feed. I am of the belief that it is up to the individual to educate themselves, and little fault can be placed on those around you if you grow up to be ignorant.

And so, as society has progressed, it seems cliché to reference Orwells 1984, so I won’t. A sociologist on the aforementioned program was asked if social media, Twitter specifically, was voyeuristic. She replied adamently that it was not, that if you go out in public, on a train, or to the beach, and someone sees you, it isn’t voyeuristic because you’re in in public. I saw a contridiction in this logic, that the man standing at the beach staring at people he doesn’t know is most certainly a voyeur, and that anybody flaunting what should be a private exchange, or moreso a solitary experiance, is most certainly an exhibitionist. Technology has enabled us to carry multiple cameras on our phones that are of arguably better at taking pictures than those that filmed television 20 years ago in our pockets. We take them everywhere, some of us sleep with our phones on our beds, not to mention the ipad’s ultimate purpose, to take your computer with you into the john. The iphone’s accelerometers are so sensitive, there is software that can pick up the typing of a qwerty computer keyboard simply from the vibration of being placed next to it on a desk. The microphone is of such high quality at times you might actually hear music at a concert better if you record it and play it back afterwards when your eardrums stop ringing.

Lets all remind ourselves that putting a lock on your door does not keep intruders out of your home. All it does is mean that if someone wants to get in, they have to smash a window, who knows, maybe even kill your dog if they want in. In such a way, even your fancy 12 character password on your phone, or pattern lock, or whatever encryption you may engage in, does not allow you privacy. If someone wants in, they will find a way in. And unfortunately, it’s not as difficult as you would think it should be.

Moreso, as a society, we have further allowed the degradation of the individual by allowing people we do not know personally to see into the shallowest corners of our lives, whilst setting aside the nuance of what it is that makes us who we are. In your photos of the meals you ate and tweets about how your chai latte was ‘Tots fliq’, and stand-offish likes of announcements of engagesments, You are shouting into the void. Should you be blessed or cursed enough, to tally the sum of your interaction with the world, and stare back from the void, Will you be satisfied with the choices you made? With who you chose to be? I would like to quote Philip K. Dick’s ‘A Scanner Darkly’. ““What does a scanner see? he asked himself. I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infrared scanner like they used to use or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me - into us - clearly or darkly? I hope it does, he thought, see clearly, because I can't any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone's sake, the scanners do better. Because, he thought, if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we'll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.”  

To quote a perhaps more known liiterary figure, “Know Thyself.” If who you are is someone with no boundarys, I applaud you for being so. But if you, like me, need to draw the line at what is for everyone and what is for just you and me? than I encourage you to educate yourself, and then decide for yourself, and then continue to educate. If the range of personal information accessable through the internet does not make you uneasy, perhaps is should, but if you’re just another sheep, well, you’ve heard my vote.

It might be a stretch for me to call myself an writer. Or even a poet. Or even an artist. Or even not hypocriful for posting my less than optimistic view. But for as hailed a platform as Twitter is, there is no way in hell my thoughts on it can be expressed in it’s 140 character constraint. If I could, I might simply say:

People in glass houses should not throw bricks, They should build a better house with them.