#so like i was VERY OBVIOUSLY QUEER in like 2000 ways more shit parents would squash out of their kid

[timeisacephalopod]

I don't know why my mom thought I was any kind of straight as a kid my favorite Scooby Doo character was Velma.

[britnxyspears]

wym "younger ppl are obsessed with you"??

On deviantart in the late 2000s/early 2010s people not much younger than me thought I was way older than I was (I grew up with 90s rules about not letting your identity be known online) and talked to me about their terrible and abusive home lives and like, i was used to kids confiding in me as an older kid irl but online for some reason these people didnt have whatever natural boundaries exist person to person and it went from me barely even a teenager trying to help them out and talk to them and stuff because no one else did and a lot of them developed that weird ass... teacher crush thing* or whatever the fuck on me which was jarring to me because even while I was being badly groomed by someone in their late 20s/early 30s on the same damn website up until I was 19, the whole teacher crush type shit weirded me out to no end and I still have nightmares about it because all I was doing was being like... idfk. Blunt but nice and listening to these people because thats exactly what I was doing to my groomers and I thought beyond that it was just the right thing to do, to always listen and be there and help someone. Especially if they're younger or trapped (like I was lol) in their house and controlled by their parents and they could only ever talk to people on a shitty little art website

**idk if teacher crush is the right word, but close enough. I wasn't a teacher but they saw me as older and shit like that 🙃

People my age never did it to me on there so it just freaked me out even more. I mean like... I was being sent long overly detailed notes about how they wanted me to protect them and stuff and how they had romantic feelings for me and it made me freak out and I had NO idea how to respond other than gently being like "hahaha... no, that's weird, I'm like probably closer to your brother's/sister's age" and it never worked.

Irl though there were some kids in my high school that were 4 years younger than me but since I was in their classes they knew me and shit and I guess because I was bickering with the teachers constantly (when you're failed anyways but obviously know the subject it becomes a hobby XD) and stuff they see you as cool to be around. And also because I was the only held back problem kid who wasn't mewn to them or called them stupid just because they didnt take the class thrice by that point like my idiot cousin did.

There was one case though like I said where this lesbian freshman was... VERY obsessed with me because I was the only outed queer kid at school who wasn't like like... out, but like called other people on being shitty and shit about it and then she just became way too friendly and it freaked me out.

This was also the case pretty much word for word with my younger brother David who had an incestuous love for me and that was absolutely because I was an asshole. I was an asshoke because I was like 11 and i was being made to take care of 5 fucking kids and I had to be an assshole to shield them from my father.

I dont hold anything against these people because I'm very certain all those kids on DA were being groomed just like I was and thats why they saw it as normal to... idk, share those kinds of things with older people they had crushes on. That lesbian girl (whose unfortunately a transphobe now) was the most timid human being I've ever met and she was abused at home and was autistic and I was the only one that would like, let her talk about her special interests as awful as they were, I can understand why she thought the only other gay person in her little town was something she was supposed to latch onto that way. I understand why David felt the way he did too, and even though all of these people are pretty much the reason I have 60% of my intrusive thoughts I dont hold any animosity at all. Now whenever a younger person reaches out to me I'm terrified that they're being groomed and I still have no idea what to do because my home situations lead me to just being groomed more. It's ruined my ability to console people with anything anymore. I keep asking why they had to be obsessed with me and not someone who could help them.

I'm gonna go throw up now that was a lot of shit I just dug up

[noblelake-blog]

Trump and the people

The fireworks started around midnight on the west coast, they were probably the most depressing fireworks I’ve ever listened to in my life. I hadn’t seen any Trump signs around the ‘hood but it wasn’t too shocking. This stretch of deep Southeast Portland backing up to Powell Butte is in the old school white working class vein of town, though it’s had a thrush of new blood in the last decade, as the few remaining communities of color have been pushed out this way. I sat at my kitchen table feeling like a bad acid trip was coming on. I was about to turn 40, and my 20 year old self would probably have been surprised that something like this had taken so long. I remember sitting around with a bunch of degenerate punk clowns in Austin watching the returns the night Bush “won” in 2000, and feeling the same kind of despair while my girlfriend and I consoled each other in ‘04. But beyond that, it had felt for a long time that a country rapidly overrun by oligarchs was gonna run itself off the cliff sooner or later. Now that it’s done, I feel utterly alone and terrified a lot of the time. I don’t know if that’s a valid reaction or not. It is certainly one of fear, and that fear is by no means ungrounded. I write this not so much the 20 year old anarchist who went to anti-globalization protests but a self-employed carpenter father and partner of a teacher. Working people, raising our child with the same working class values our parents instilled in us: do your best, and take care of each other.

  I had to think of the time, 8 years before, when I rode my bike drunk on a warm November night in Brooklyn, fist pumping anyone I saw on Myrtle Ave and yelling “Obama!” on my way to a victory celebration with a bunch of friends. The restaurant was run by a lesbian couple, it was a diverse crowd, and the sense of elation I felt that night was potent. I’ll never forget the way I felt when the president elect verbally reached out to queer community, it seemed so strange to hear that from the man who would be president, the first black president, so improbable and unstoppable at once. And it was stranger still because I hadn’t even voted for him. I had voted in the first presidential election of my lifetime in ‘04, although I was old enough to have voted in the two previous ones, solely out of sheer terror at the prospect of another Bush term. When Obama came onto the scene, I liked him, but perhaps it was the way in which so many of my friends had become involved in elevating him to such a high stature that they weren’t able to see that much of his politics were firmly rooted in neoliberalism and, even if he were able to embrace his more progressive tendencies, he would certainly be hamstrung by the political establishment, more so because he is black. I did not vote for him or anyone in that election, but I was three sheets to the wind a fair amount in those days, and I couldn’t remember if I had updated my registration since I moved to New York. It was the last presidential election I would ditch, I voted happily for Obama in 2012, even though by then the dream was dead and the Tea Party racists were half unhinged over a black man trying to tell them what to do with their health insurance. I voted for him partly because I felt a little ashamed of not voting for him in ‘08, and partly because I hate stiff rich white guys like Mitt Romney as much as most Americans.

  But Donald Trump is no Mitt Romney. The now famous picture of the two of them dining together may speak to their shared cartoonish robber baron natures, but the similarities end there. Mitt Romney is the stuffed shirt blue blood with the weird religion, Donald Trump is the macho TV star whose antagonism has been saturating the market of our daily lives for two generations now, his kind of sales pitch is safe as milk to a lot of us. The picture of the two of them is terrifying, his dominance of Romney broadcast so viciously.

It’s no coincidence that he came out of the same 80’s culture that made guys like Vince McMahon rich and famous, his antics are right out of the WWE playbook. Trump is the classic heel, in wrestling terms the villain you love to hate, the guy who doesn’t mind fighting dirty to get the job done. In the working class neighborhood in Baltimore I grew up in, more kids idolized Rowdy Roddy Piper, the heel, than Hulk Hogan. To draw further comparisons between Trump and the Hot Rod would do a disservice to the memory of the latter, but Trump is indeed cunning in his abilities. His racism is well documented going back to the 80’s, as is his treatment of women and outright powerlust, but it was not within his grasp to become a politician, for that he would have to wait until 8 years of living under a black president had created such an apocalyptic mindset in the voters of white America that he was able to seize his opportunity. And he held fast.

  Count me among those who believed that his candidacy would fizzle after the initial blast of profane assaults, but once his momentum gathered I felt like we were in for it. I was canvassing neighborhoods for Bernie Sanders but I knew he was never going to be given a serious look by the Democratic establishment. White folks in our neighborhood who were for Trump would give lip service to Bernie, and that kind of sentiment fueled the idea that he might be the only one who could beat him. We’ll never know how that would have turned out, unfortunately. But one thing that’s clear is that the Trump phenomenon is a vindication of the power modern media domination, and, to put a finer point to it, mind control. The Apprentice gave rise to its titular character’s aura of invincibility. Here we have the lavish billionaire, the picture of wealth and power, thronged by beautiful elites and backed by ominous music, dangling the sword over outstretched necks of would be sycophants, buoyed by the immense drama of those two famous words…..

  And in the end that’s all it took. The rich and middle class Republicans by and large fell behind him like we all knew they would, but much ink has been spilled in these last months about the rest of his voting block, those poor racist white people, and how could they be so stupid to vote for someone who so obviously doesn’t give a shit about them? Did they feel wounded and left behind by 8 years of a “reverse” racist-in-chief, or were they simply sick to death of the status quo and willing to vote for the flamboyant playboy because he at least doesn’t seem like such a phony? I suspect it’s more than a little of both, and more than a lot of decades of misinformation and subterfuge clouding the waters for working people of all colors, leaving the talk shows and comment threads with nothing but vitriol and bad analysis. Given the alternative of a candidate like Sanders, would people see that his brand of populism gave some beef to the airy promises Trump made to bring back manufacturing, or would people just see him as a far out Jewish commie? If Hillary Clinton had not been Hillary Clinton and instead been a woman more in the mold of Elizabeth Warren, would poor white folks have given her more of a shot, or is the horrid sexism she endured a true barometer the attitudes towards women among the working class?

  And then there is the whole issue of the term itself. Working class. Working poor. White working class. Blue collar. While there are fairly clear indicators of where we all fall on this ladder based on income, the past few generations have indeed muddied the usage of the term in a variety of ways. One’s upbringing and exposure to media and education may preclude them to a different outlook than those they share an income bracket with. As a child of college educated socialists I certainly viewed politics through a different lens than an old carpenter I once worked with, who thought that global warming was a hoax to sell more textbooks and hated Hillary Clinton not on the basis of her corporate, imperialist worldview but because she had the gall to be an assertive first lady instead of “knowing her place”. And there are certainly those who argue that the working class doesn’t even really exist any more; in the same way that people talk about the vanishing middle class, the attacks on unions have all but eviscerated the ability of working people to organize for their mutual benefit, to the point where working poor is perhaps the only appropriate term.

  I am working poor. I live paycheck to paycheck and I was raised by a single mother who lived that way too. Under President Obama, I had health insurance, medicaid for sure but it was enough to get me to the dentist every once in awhile. I also had hope. Not hope in the utopian sense that was broadcast large back in 2008 but hope in a more cautious, realist sense. I have long understood that I was born into the later stages of a cancer. We are abusing the earth at an alarming rate, and the world cannot hold up under the excesses of capitalism for very much longer. I do believe that, for all of his drone strikes and fracking advances, President Obama understood this too. I felt some measure of comfort in the thought that at least he could pilot the sinking ship of neoliberalism with some care and perhaps mercy. For the next four years, I will abandon that hope as he hands the wheel over to a narcissist lunatic. But I will most certainly not give up.

    This Friday they will be installing the madman at the White House, and the following day, thousands will march on Washington to demand that their voices be heard above clamour of those who would normalize the denigration of women, the dehumanization of immigrants, and the destruction of resources for poor people the world over. In the coming years some of us may have to make difficult choices about putting our own privilege on the line to help stem the tide of abuse that will undoubtedly fall hardest upon our more vulnerable brothers and sisters. I was raised to think these kinds of actions can not only make a difference, but can be what makes us human. I can only hope that I will be able to find the courage and determination to see that through.

-JS