Fear, right?

 They say a coward dies a thousand deaths. And I am wondering about all the times I have bobbed up from the dark water in moments of courage only to slowly pull myself back. I'm thinking specifically of coming out, of telling everyone I went to college with to call me she and wearing dresses and demanding so much from the world. Demanding respect and recognition. Only to arrive here in the sewer of adult life and cower from those demands. Having fear replace my determination. Fearing reprisal at work, fearing the terrible alienation and dehumanization of work. Pointedly thinking that my demands are ones that people won't meet. That asking will put me in harms way. I read on Hanif Abduraquib's  IG a little bit ago, after the rapper Ka died, a fragment of an interview the rapper had given, in which he said that he would die one death. That got me thinking about my many deaths. About the shades of death I have been living in. Ka must have had a generational kind of bravery (he was a NYFD captain so it stands to reason) because most people have got to die a few deaths, if they're being honest. And being honest, I have been a coward more times that I would like. 

My life of late has been so defined by- and we're taking a curve here- scarcity. And what is cowardice but a scarcity of courage. I moved to Tennessee in the summer, certain that I could land on my feet. Looking for a job was scarce. Nothing looked interesting, or fun, or novel or new. I was just hurling myself across the internet begging to do whatever bullshit anyone would let me do so I didn't have to kill myself. That felt really scarce. I sold my books and comics and a bass guitar. I sold plasma and still I wasn't even paying half the rent. That felt like death. That all felt like dying. Like life had been constructed for to make me a coward. All I could be was scared and cowering. I got a job and then I was scared still, driving to work, feeling like my heart was peeling off in small slivers like getting passed over with a vegetable peeler.  When I step into work I step in with a very specific set of lies. I've lied my way into the job, I'm letting everyone call me sir and he. I'm presenting as though I want to be there. There in this case being a steak house chain. Working as a cook. The people were pleasant. Supportive even. The cooking wasn't too hard. And it got stupid busy and the chef tried to lecture me about frying French fries and then I left. Was that brave? or was that a cowardice of some other kind? Quitting certainly put me back in scarcity. I'm back to pecking over my books and gear for stuff to sell just to try and contribute, to buy food. I'm back to crawling over the internet hoping for a job. Going to sell my plasma again soon. There is also a scarcity of vision. These last few years my sense of what hope can even look like has dimmed and dimmed and dimmed, from when I was 20, imagining the ways I could be a beacon, I could construct communities and egalitarian institutions, to now, just hoping I either have the blissful courage to kill myself or find a job I hate little enough to keep showing up so I don't starve. The aperture of possibility has closed to a tight pin. More cowardice. A fear of possibility. 

When I was twenty I came out as trans. I stepped into being a woman, unsure and terrified that I was making that choice for nefarious and ignorant reasons. And I use the word choice deliberately here. Not to trivialize the material of the trans experience but to forefront agency. That was a confusing time, and I could have found much different language to describe the sensation of wanting more from life, and gender, than those certain confines. That was seven years ago. I've quit probably a dozen jobs in that time.  Been in the closet for a lot of that. I've thought off and on about transition. About the drugs and lasering the hair from my body. But it has always felt so out of reach. My survival to this point has been predicated on an ability to deal with incredibly inconsistent financials. Constantly quitting jobs isn't great for the bank balance. Transitioning felt like something I needed stability for. Stability I just couldn't see myself having. I wonder how all the many deaths will prepare me for the final one? My catholic terror keeps me skeptical of death, of the chance of the concrete disaster it could bring. I would like to start being brave, but so much of the world feels designed to elicit scarcity of self. If life keeps giving you what feels like minimum after minimum, what will death hold? So you're locked into living, afraid to risk anything because repeated exposure to failure and pain has trained you to reach for the least that you can survive on. I have thought about the journey of transition, and when I look over my own body and see the thousands of maybe millions of hairs that would have to be shaved, burned, lasered away. The bent of my body being itself 'unwomanly', multiple fronts of attrition to be waged constantly and daily. And all for what? The disapproval of people who'd rather give me death than grant me the blessing of womanhood. I never wanted to risk it. All the chances to fail. For sure I just wanted to live in my own body for a while. I grew mustaches, I grew beards. I was and remain the girl I am. I wanted to be butch, flagrantly hairy... And then I was unwilling to take the risk of people staring, or asking me about the bralet I was wearing and I felt trapped in my body like so many of my sisters feel. 

Now, in some nominal attempt to be more feminine (and plus I have some weird skin thing that makes facial hair a bitch now) I shave fairly regularly. But I don't love shaving every day all the time. Being a butch tgirl is an experience in contradiction certainly. It's one where I have locked myself into a reality of social gender, where my womaness is defined by the people around me's willingness to grant womanhood to me. So in a context of loneliness or strangeness my transness all but disappears. 

I am wondering, now, in the face of all this scarcity, how to be brave. Could I find it in myself to bear the cost of it? Could I shave my arm hair off. The hair on my knuckles. The hair on my chest. Is what I need to be shaved and raw? I'm not sure. What I know is that I've let fear, cowardice, dictate my life for a long time. And sure, I have never been afraid to leave a job. But that's not earned me a whole lot. Were standing, all of us, looking out over the beach. The clouds are fire, the wind hurts. And we have choices to make. Some will make the mean choices. To castigate people with nothing. To hold and claw around for what they can scrape up. And I'm thinking about making the nice choice. To do, to be unafraid of love. Still I fear the prospect, and there is much about my life that scares me. The only thing to know for certain is that we will push through this together. In needing you I must be courageous. I must build up in order to build out. I wish manifesting really worked, but I'll settle for biding my time and hoping to land a part time job and maybe go to graduate school. Maybe find another friend out here. Save a little dough. Move back north. Or stay down here, in the sweltering south. I will not be so full of fear that I refuse to live out, and I will go where that is possible. 

Picture It

 Close your eyes please. Please. close them, and imagine a room you can't leave. Maybe it's a fine room. It's not too hot, not too cold. Maybe there are some people who make you chuckle. But you can't leave. Well, you could. The doors aren't locked, but if you leave that's it. Once you leave the people in your life won't know what do do with you because you won't be doing anything. Because you chose to leave over staying. Once you leave, you won't have anything. Sure you'll have you head, your heart, your stomach and your bones and the things they give you. Humor, and taste and inspiration, but by way of connecting with anyone you won't have anything. You're life with be illegible, even if everyone you know hates returning to the room everyday after they are told they may leave for the night- or the day- people won't know what to do with you, wandering the wilderness. Locked out, rather than in, to paraphrase Virginia Wolf. Not to mention the starvation. You'll dwindle. You won't have any cash because they give you cash for standing in the room. You might be able to scrape some up but there's no cash really outside of the room. Certainly not if you were born into the room. It's starvation on all fronts. Starvation of the gut and the spirit. I certainly wouldn't call this just. 

welp

 Trump is president again and all I got was this hellish country we call America. For the ten(s?) of you that read this I would like to be candid. I didn't vote. I didn't see much of a point, time and again being made promises from politicians that either do not understand, or simply can't, navigate the contradictory histories and degenerate aims of capitalist economics. I want things that politicians cannot give me, and so I thought, no matter the outcome, I just couldn't bring myself to give a shit. The bombs would still fall on Gaza. I would still require currency to keep myself from being homeless.  I would still be emotionally ill equipped for wage labor. The things that matter to me wouldn't change. The by ways of our political systems are so entrenched that voting feels like pissing into the Mississippi. Just a trickle into something rolling with an unthinking momentum. The base assumptions of the ballgame of politics just ain't changing. There's too much money, there's too much dedication to keeping the money flowing upward. I often wonder that if I wasn't an American, if I was French for Finnish or German, maybe I'd be an electoral creature. I'd have faith that my government worked toward my most basic needs. But America, with it's brutality and its benign, greedy indifference, has made me an Anarchist. A loud, suicidal, crazy bitch who see's flames in my dreams because from sea to shining sea I see little possibility for a beautiful life for myself. 

And now Trump is president again and my layers of cynicism are wilting. I wanted Harris to win, for whatever marginal safety she would provide as a predictable politician. Even in my Cynicism I wanted her to win, I hoped she'd win, all the while talking out the side of my fucking mouth about how it just didn't matter. And here I think I erred most in forgetting, somehow, that the one material thing Kamala could deliver on is abortion rights. Is an amount of bodily autonomy for women (with splash back rights for trans folks). A country in which a pregnant woman dying from complications can be saved instead of her swiftly arriving death being observed by gutless and cowardly doctors. Trump is president and all days it's just been dawning on me all day how deep the trouble could get. How frighteningly indifferent this country will continue to be. How the angst and combativeness of life will flourish. What is a trans dyke to do? Who do I pray to? I'm scared. Sorry I can't escape the the gear of solipsism. I'm scared and sad about what the trajectory of my life might take. So many of us are scared, we're scared and we live in a society which has, for decades, been disarming our capacity to build interpersonal relationships and hold cogent ideas about political power. But that is the hope, right. Every time something like this happens, that's my hope. That I will step into a world, not where everything has become perfect, but where at least I am surrounded by people will to do the hard, joyful, work of building something that's not about elections. or political parties. But rather something that both transforms our lives and our world. 

But it's that hope that will probably break me. 

What this means for American politics, and it will mean something, is probably beyond me. I could gander a guess that it will further erode any sense of accountability among our elite class. While the dems have spent the last eight years parading around their moral bona fides, make no mistake they've become more feckless and reckless than they already were. The republicans will salivate and waggle their genocidal jowls and prey for the death of undesirable populations. I had hoped this would be a happier rambling. But I'm also hoping to paint an accurate picture. To say how I really feel amidst this terrifying sense of foreboding. I sense that the hope will break me because American's are truly first rate at mediating their experiences through a deep seated delusion of normalcy. My fellow citizens have graciously walk through catastrophe after catastrophe, all the while reimagining the past as a place where the present always was. And that, I suppose, worries me most. Our capacity to accept with a strange resignation, or an even stranger amnesia, the increasingly difficult parameters of living on this earth. More girls forced to give birth. More girls dying from medical complications that are treatable. Only in America could a theocracy be disassociated from any actual meaning and become some vague political consequence. At least the crusaders had the guts to fly the flag as they sacked Jerusalem. Now we have fuckers who tweet. Podcast dweebs talking about how grandmothers become valuable in childcare. At least our fascists' used to mean it. Talking to a dude I went to high school with probably a couple years ago I mentioned the 'dragging you from your house in the night' rhetoric of the Republican party. He didn't know what I was talking about- I was talking about how at the recent RNC someone had used the phrase "we must eradicate transgender people from public life". He proceeded to talk about vaccine cards and how hormone therapy is like giving a little girl steroids. The death of consensus reality, right. 

I want to love people. Love so hard, as the phrase goes, that only liberation is possible. If I saw you, the hypothetical you, out somewhere, would we know that we need each other? Would a 'revolutionary optimism' have a repository? Electoral politics is seductive because you don't have change anything about yourself to do anything. You don't have to face a real fear of rejection. The possibility of impossibility. I keep seeing people post about organizing their communities and I keep asking myself, what communities? Have I ever been apart of a community? Electoral politics don't require you to contemplate the vagaries of "community" and "organizing". But did anything ever change using the same strategies? No, and maybe some vagaries are what we need. Our society is formed around power structures which don't forefront independent thinking, creativity, or autonomy. And every day we have opportunities to exercise our brilliance, our dedication, and our heart for the sake of one another. 'Cause that's really what's going to get anything done. And so, let me speak plainly. Friends, hold me. Please. Because I need it. And when you need, I'll hold you too.  

Making the Composition: On Film and the self

 Armed with a camera and thirty or so frames of film, the intrepid photographer is faced with infinite possibilities. And once you've graduated from wanting to take focused in pictures of parking meters and mail boxes you might be asking yourself, much like I did after taking the film cameras out of their bag after three years of rest, what will constitute your limited frames. Relative to technical limitations your options are limitless. Much like words on a page and notes in a composition, the starting point is a pretty vast horizon. the matter, as in most cases, gets more complicated as you try and build up a theme, or an idea, or to portray a desire. That's when it really gets down to the composition. If you don't get an idea about what you're trying to scrape up from the world around you, then you're just a prick holding a camera in a park. And that pressure, if you're me, mounts fairly rapidly. You might bring the camera up to your eye, pull the focus, evaluate. Put the camera down, keep walking. Try and try again. The limitations of film as a medium, to belabor a cliché, define how one creates that relationship to the work. The scarcity of function in using an old, in all reality half broken, piece of equipment, creates the opportunity for a kind of self reflection that the infinitude of digital photography doesn't. The facsimile, the realm of the camera, has penetrated every aspect of our lives (I feel like I'm just piling clichés on top of clichés) at a speed and velocity that creates a kind a world of the image unto itself. Out perceptions are defined more by the mediated image that perhaps they are by our capacity to ingest the material world around us. If a photographer sets out to, instead of consume, create images, photos, art then they have to come out of a usual frame of mind (forgive the pun). In this pursuit, the film camera, I believe, is well suited to the task of aiding the artist who wishes to look with intention. After you have taken the camera up to your eye, and lowered it, and again raised and lowered it, you might find that first thing that feels worth the price of the exposure. Maybe a Pidgeon. A boat on a river. Maybe someone quite interesting. Will you take a picture of them? Will you ask? It's perfectly legal to take a photo of someone in public without asking. Maybe that's not something you're considering. Depending on what kind of image your trying to make you're going to have to interact with people, express something of yourself and your relationship to other people in the pursuit of the work. You're going to have to figure this out, as your walking around with your camera. When I got into the groove I found myself shooting people from behind, positioning myself as a kind of peripheral figure, taking a shot of a river with some people in one corner or another. taking pictures of a beautiful water feature that has children playing in it, so you get a wide frame, you don't take a picture of anyone specifically. And that postured just continued as I wandered Coolidge park on the North Shore of the Tennessee river. Getting a couple in the bottom right corner of the frame. I was behind a large masonry planter, they were on the other side, cuddled up, arm over shoulder. They were obscured by swaying plants. I was framing up a bridge, there are three wonderful bridges that span the Tennessee river near Coolidge park. I still don't know what that picture will look like. If it'll convey anything like an emotion, or an idea... or maybe they're just pictures, moments frozen in a miraculous chemical reaction. Perhaps that is simply what you pull from the world with your camera. But I don't fear intention, or the rigor it brings. 

Clean Up On Isle Cinema!: Custodian

At the premier of his first feature film at The Main Street Museum in White River Junction, Vermont, director Loren Howard remarked "don't worry Dave I don't want to kill you." Presumably speaking to his boss at his day job, this disclaimer was-if jokingly- warranted. The hero of Custodian: The Tragedy of Trav Cone, the titular Trav, is an impoverished musician who winds up killing his degenerate bosses after a series of humiliations. Where one director might have played on the absurdity of someone killing their boss as a penultimate kind of departure from reality (and there’s a kind of jerkoffishness to all of the characters inability to get a fucking grip) we’re really in Trav’s corner. What Howard understands is that poverty is a construction, and one you’re never really promised to escape. Certainly not in America. Trav’s tragedy is one of circumstance and of isolation. Neither things he can particularly control. He is comically poor. Like a hobo or a figure in a Depression era Farm Security Administration photograph. Or a bum in a newspaper cartoon. He is a sad mother fucker, playing an open mic he gets snubbed for some promised cash and rushed off stage. Cut to, Trav pulling a plastic red wagon behind him as he takes cans from peoples recycling bins so they can be exchanged for the deposit. He sleeps in his car, which mostly doesn’t work. Reflecting back to these scenes I felt a kind of terror for Trav and the inconsequentiality of his life. When Howard let that quip off at the premier we had all just watched the same flick. A chuckle bubbled out of the audience. It was funny ‘cause we all knew you can’t write this movie without some belief in violence as an understandable reaction to the incarceration of poverty.
It's an uphill battle to fight narratively. I wouldn’t consider Trav an anti-hero, the acceptable depot for a murderous lead we’re supposed to root for, in that he doesn’t have some gritty-yet-palatable moral philosophy underpinning his brutality. Trav doesn’t have ANY philosophy it seems. He doesn’t bemoan his position- though it's probably safe to assume he doesn’t like being that poor. He doesn’t have any ambition in the arena of capitalism or a sense of duty or heart toward its destruction. He just can’t manage the abuse anymore. The tiny, seemingly insignificant ways his life gets moved in one way or another time and time again.
Sympathizing with a killer isn't often a universally translatable idea in a film that more mirrors the aching challenges of the world I wake up in than in some taut, dazzling other world. It's also a specifically hard uphill battle if one pauses to think on the fact that the entirety of the globalized economy has relied on the notion that forced hierarchy, in exchange for wages, is the natural order of the day. You get a job, and you tell your boss when you have to piss. Sure there's a decorum in place which more or less guarantees that they’ll just let you go piss (but hey the Amazon piss bottles tell us that this is not a universal decorum). They say jump and you gotta ask how high. Your labor gets bought from you, and you cannot buy it back. It's a kind of theft beyond recompense. And on mentioning this, upon considering it in your own mind even, out from the woodwork come the voices of contrition. "That's just how it works!", "Someone keeping you on task isn't evil.", "Don't you want to be a boss someday?". “Profit blah profit blah.”
Consider all the violence that the state and corporate entities expend in the pursuit of making sure that a system of singular tyranny, transferred from one person onto their subordinates, doesn't go anywhere. Think about the cops and jails, both the most flagrant and visible forms of property protection. Think about the colonial wars of the early U.S Marine Corp in Asia and South America. The 1985 MOVE bombing in west Philly. Kent State. All the unexploded ordnance in Laos. Violence from the top down is routine. It happens every day. It's what makes the whole fuckin' thing work. Keeps the shelves stocked. Now violence from the bottom up? That threatens all conventional orders. This ironic repression has not gone unnoticed in the history of revolutionary thinkers. "In fact the colonist has always shown [the colonized] the path they should follow to liberation." Frantz Fanon writes in Wretched of The Earth. This too did not go unnoticed by the film maker, pointing to the taboos of power inherent within the capitalist system.
There isn’t so much an arc to the movie, as it burrows - moment by moment- a straight line from passivity to action. There are machinations and motivations at play but a clockwork plot this is not. It more feels like a demented Ozu story, existing in its sharpest focus exactly in the moment in which it is happening, especially if we replace Ozu's locked in camera aesthetic with floating handheld shots Howard employs to drift us into the story. Our story opens on a body in a river. In a pillowy sequence of Trav making his rounds, recording music in his car on a tape deck, driving around, playing the open mic, collecting cans, pushing his busted car/ home, getting gas. We first become acquainted with the echoing texture of his life here. Needing, more than to save for food or maybe a night in a motel or something, to replace his keyboard Trav wades through the fowled mouth abuses of a music store dude. When it becomes clear that 15 bucks won’t replace his keyboard the music store guy sends Trav off to a recording studio for a job as a custodian, thus beginning the relationships that will eventually drive him mad enough to depart from the routines of his life.
The cast is, primarily Edward Ferland (as Trav Cone), Jake Ford (as Chris the Engineer) and Hunter Slattery (as Alan). No dis to any of the other dozen or so people who had words to say on screen but this is the trinary star from which the picture derives its dramatic gravity. Through this ensemble we find the honesty that animates the idea. Each one brings to their character a transparency that makes the absurdity, the comedy, the strangeness, workable. Ferland brings a stammering eloquence, giving depth to all the ways Trav feels isolated or alienated or more comfortable with the inside of his own self than the outside of the big dull brutal world that he lives in. Ford and Slattery make Alan and Chris the skeeving, odd, near-do-well duo that they need to be. Bursting in sparkling anger or not-quiet-coy-enough deceit. Ford really shines as a dubious liar.
Throughout the film Howard, in joyous calliope with his many many dedicated collaborators (of which I am one), the film stops to meditate on songs contributed from bands he knows (shouts out to chico and co for that synth pop banger!). Sitting in the Main Street Museum watching the movie these scenes, which didn’t really have any bearing on the plot, as it could be called, or really the characterization of the world… or anything much for that matter outside of the few times they line up with Trav’s interior world, they didn’t really land for me. But on repeat viewing and contemplating, I have to think these scenes are all about contrasting the limitations of work, and the world attached to work, with the infinitude of creativity- as well as the ways work bends creativity al a the douchebaggery of the fictitious Slob Drop. Trav is all alone. But he has his work. Work, I mean, in a Hegelian sense. In a classically Marxist sense. His music, it’s the thing that gives his life meaning. The strength to live and onto which to reflect his own humanity. ‘Cause there really isn’t anyone else around him for that. It’s striking, while rewatching the movie to notice that Trav doesn’t have any allies or friends the entire course of the film. To have accumulated a past in a place and to feel it is devoid of care for you is certainly a familiar kind of hell. A line from Hanif Abduraquibs book There’s Always This Year reminds me of Trav’s persistent creative impulse. "Nothing survives but the imagination in a place like this. Nothing fights its way to the surface of anguish, still breathing, like the imagination."
The penultimate shot in the film comes after Trav has killed Chris and kidnapped Alan, tying him to an old chair in a luxurious theater. Fernlands face fills the screen, pooling with shadow and golden light. Twisting his mug in an arch smile. Relishing in his own depravity. It reminds me of the unhinged, anti-social skullduggery Ferland tapped into to play the another one of Howard's weirdos- Com-Eddy- in the short film Last American Cowboy. In the end Alan gets drowned in a river, a bookend to the scene where Howard really paints Alan as vapid, incredulous and unstable. Really having no legitimacy to lead anyone else, or dictate the trajectory of anyone's artistic career. Trav, for the third (or maybe forth) open mic, confesses his crimes over yet another sultry, galloping ballad. The flashing lights of the police slashing through the windows of the joint as the rapt audience erupts into applause.
Trav most likely goes to jail. We don’t know but it’s the speculation that gives a film its power. What the character’s do once that last cut hits and the credits roll. The movie really comes down to that one choice. For Trav to pick up his glasses off the ground and kill Chris and Alan. The whole movie builds to it, not as an inevitably but as a choice Trav gets to make. In our society morality, as a kind of social currency which denotes someone as worthy of public care, the most vulnerable, the most damaged and exposed of us are often taxed with a greater moral weight. While those with the most power only have to superficially play to an idea of moral accountability. Trav, living a life that had no value, throws his away in the hope of generating pride. Creating a sense of worth. He might not be able to play guitar in the big house, but at least he’ll have a bed and three square meals.

2023: year in review

 wow. What a year. every time it didn't seem like it could get more disappointing and bleak, there was more disorienting trauma piled high on our plates. It feels ignorant to the suffering of people through history to say that these are unprecedented times. Pain, subjugation, war. These are not new things. They aren't even recent things. But  the sense that much of human culture is eating itself alive does not escape me. The sense that we are expected by the rich, by the powerful nd their lap dogs to just accept mass death and total control as simply the way things are feels more perverse than it has before. 

Knowing that there is a kind of long arc to the moment we are in now that traces itself back several centuries, it can just feel like too goddamn much. I have certainly retreated to a kind of mutated 'ignorance is bliss'. Rather than one of pure neutrality I find myself thinking "I know it's bad but reading about it won't help anyone anywhere!" Which is embarrassing and kind of anti-curious. I just don't know where to keep my eyes. Which atrocity deserves my attention this week. Should I focus on my home country and its surprisingly quick and robust slide into a new kind of insanity fascism? No truth! Just guns and no healthcare! Or do I expand my If there's some positive spin to my lackluster participation it is that I refuse to be an informational disaster tourist. 

Speaking of hopelessness and loneliness, its been a very hard year in those arenas. That was also another hallmark of this year, isolation, the winnowing away of social bonds. I suppose the nature loneliness is at odds with comprehending that one is amongst great ranks of others who feel very similar. I feel by in large friendless. I don't have many people to talk to. I have hardly anyone to hang out with. No one I can ask to hang out with really. I've felt dead and stagnant. Not moving in any direction. Trapped in these morbid chambers of material and emotional disease. I think about pivoting one way and I come up to a sheer wall. I either don't have the money or I don't have the relationships so I've had to just bare it. Take the isolation. Take the sense of  crushing isolation, the traumatic baggage of my youth, the sense of powerlessness. Of agony. In this year, like many years, I thought of killing myself. In my lonesome desperation I turned to death. It probably won't be the last time that happens. It's been a hard year. But every time I needed to, I took another step into another day and I am better for it. 

The largest inspiration for writing this was trying to frame some positivity around the year. I'd like to mark this as the positivity line. We're going positive from here on out. I was laying bed. Lamenting things. And then it hit me. I did some cool shit this year! Stuff happened! As much as it doesn't feel like my life has evolved. Like I'm going nowhere fast. I did things. And I'd like to list them out. I'd like to celebrate them and revel in the shards of achievement that I've accumulated. 

- I became a paid and published writer in 2023/22. It might have been at the tail end of 22 but through the early months of 23 I was writing freelance for the Keene Sentinels ELF magazine, a fluff piece factory that paid me 50 bucks an article. I'm not sure how many articles I wrote. It wasn't many and they weren't the 'serious' shit I wanted to get up to, but I leveraged all the opportunity I think I could. And I made a few hundred untaxed dollars along the way. 

- I put out a record on a record label! Sure I've been putting records out on my own for a long ass time but this was the first time someone liked my stuff and put there stamp on it. To support my art in some small way. I didn't get a shit ton of gigs or tour full time or sell a buncha records or anything. But it came out. And I have labelmates whose music I love and respect. That feels like a real victory. 

- I played a show in Keene for the first time. It always kind of stung that I never played a show in Keene. And I got payed! and a bunch of my friends came. It was awesome. I had gotten fired from a job like the day before so that hundred bucks saved my fucking ass. 

- I wrote the first draft of a screenplay. I got an idea for a movie, took a month to write it, wrote it, and sent some copies to some friends. Here's hoping draft two is kick ass and I can get an agent and sell that motherfucker for some stone cold cash. 

- I wrote a bunch of poems I like a lot. I want to make a little zine of poems so I put a bit of work into writing poems that I liked and while they are all deeply scary and sad and violent they are my poems. I wrote them and I love them. I feel as though I have a developing poetic voice. 

- I got poems published for the first time! I took a shot and emailed a blog called High Horse Press and they wanted to see some work of mine and they liked 'em and well I got published for the first time. What means the most is the words of encouragement they gave me. What they wrote about me on their Instagram was spectacular and so special. That was the real victory. 

-I wracked up a lot of rejections from literary journals. And that, my dear readers, means I'm trying. 

I don't think I really moved the needle this year, more often than not it feels like the voices in my head telling me I'm a loser, that I have no life, nothing to point toward as my own, is by an large right. But I did some shit. I tried. It's still so scary and harsh here in America, it feels like we are a long way off from care for one another. There are so many layers of demented thinking infecting life now. the normalization of death, the scarcity of empathy. There are men, hunkering into dangerous and isolating logic all over, I see the videos on YouTube. Crazed and lonely they record podcasts and YouTube shorts talking about how many fully loaded magazines you'd want for a firefight. That's how you think when you are alone and have only so little to protect. you think 'well I'll just kill whatever problem comes up'. And I know seeing these videos of these men preparing for firefights they will eventually seek out is scary, and I also know thinking of them as 'the enemy' only makes the version of things they're pulling for more likely. 

We are too days into the new year. I have some idea of how I want to move forward. I'm not sure how I can build more robust and trusting relationships. I know I need to. We can only make a world more worthy of our humanity if we do it together. Failing that, I know there are people out there fighting for human dignity. Every day they do the unsexy work, the most important work. There is possibility in the bleakest of times, especially when things feel like they are breaking. That's when you get to make something new. 

Love, 

bye

For the worth of life.

 Boring walls. No boss. Not a bad deal. Undisturbed and with unfettered access to stores of food. A decent job anyone might want to keep. 17 dollars an hour. Not bad if you can get it. 

I think my life is worth a lot more than 17 bucks an hour, an asymmetrical trade that can't be bought back. 

There is a lot of heady language being wiped around about the connections between the worker in america or the worker anywhere that the worker toils for wages and the people of Palestine in Gaza facing decimation. The machinations of global war, the turning of age old mechanisms, might seem as though they have nothing to do with working for a living. And they don't if that's how you want to go about it. Fundamentally though I think the link boils down to what is a life worth, and who gets to set the price. 

I know, like I know that my life cannot be bought for 17 but I must sell it incrementally to secure food and housing, that the people of Palestine must also sense that their lives are worth far beyond the constraints and torment they have lived under for decades.

In all honesty I am woefully ignorant about the particulars of this history. I have a glancing familiarity with its poetry through Mahmoud Darwish. Though what does one need to know about torture? What are the particulars that I need to be aware of in-order to unequivocally denounce geocide and confinement and incarceration and destruction? Here, I suppose, is where anarchism becomes a philosophy of elegant simplicity. I'm not squabbling about a states right to defense, or even sovereignty. I am not squabbling about the need for currency, or the economic utility of wages. I understand, in an infinitely fractional sense, the horror of being contained. That when your life, or the cessation of your life, becomes of economic interest to larger entities,  your ability to make a choice is always being filtered through someone else power over you, and in the infinitely abstract space of survival. Will they give me such and such day off? Will I not go in if they don't give me the time? Will I have the cash saved to weather the unemployment? I don't need to know much because I just know that when you are bound up in the fist of some terrible, deadly, oppression, eventually all there is is to lash out. You quit playing by rules of respectability regardless of whether is will work out in your favor. Because to keep idly accepting the limiting, claustrophobic conditions of your existence would be to leave your humanity at the door. 

It is simply not about Judaism as a faith. It is perhaps about land and indigenous occupancy right. I wouldn't know really. It's about what a life is worth, and the value it loses when the economic prosperity of certain people run opposed to the continued existence, not even the flourishment of some others. My clans are not dying, nor are my children being strafed by US supplied ordinance. I just know that one freedom beets another. The value of one life illuminates another. That a war to exterminate hospitals and houses simply can't be defending anything worth keeping, and that a people divested of their homes have always presented inconvenient narratives for ruling class, for the settler colonial state. Through their lens Palestinians become animals. An Arab scourge to be demolished, lives and histories pounded into rubble. As the inherent worth of humans everywhere has always presented an inconvenient narrative to the factory foreman, to the capitalists.

The goal is Palestinian liberation. Less would be to fail. Less would be to continue, each and everyone of us, to rigidly abide a system which is killing us. I am unsure what a measured, and by measured I mean feasible, form of resistance might look like but what I do know is that Palestine must be free. Israel must cease its genocide.

The goal is an end to the wage economy. 

From the river to the sea.  

This is in part dedicated to my friend Zahra. Whose Instagram stories keep this constantly on my mind. Her poetic and effective curation of cats in bombed out rubble, and kids posing in the skeletons of their homes could do nothing less then make this a struggle for the worth of human life. As she is an exemplar of what is best in people. Their kindness, their creativity, their sadness, their humor, and their heart.