#literally no other culture reflects my inner life like they do. they just fucking get it in ways i can't even explain

[psalmsofpsychosis]

literally what is it about japanese artists and japanese philosophy that has me turning to them every other month just to find myself so utterly and completely at home!!!!!

[shywitchyfangirl]

Tips for Beginning Spirit Workers!

Me? Posting something useful instead of just memes? GASP!

1. Plan communication and housing methods in advance. This is your responsibility, not the spirits’. Housing can include binding them to an object, binding them to yourself, letting them wander your house, or (my personal method) building an astral temple for them. Communication can take all kinds of forms, including dreams, hallucinations, Ouija boards, body sensations, intrusive thoughts, and telepathy. When starting out, you’ll probably be working with sensations and intrusive thoughts, and work your way up to other forms. An important thing to remember is if you’re ever unsure if something was them, assume it was. False negatives do far more harm than false positives when you’re trying to learn how to communicate. Assuming your spirit said something they didn’t might annoy them, but denying real messages will prevent you from developing your senses and harm your relationship with them.

2. Set boundaries and keep them! It doesn’t matter who they are, how powerful they are, or if they’re a literal god. You have rights, and they do not own you. Take no excuses, make no compromises. You don’t need to explain anything. If you give some spirits an inch, they’ll take a mile. I have a rule that no one can possess me while I’m on my period. Why? Because I don’t want them to, end of discussion. If anyone throws a fit about your boundaries, you don’t want to work with them anyway. If you’re planning to let them stick around, setting house rules is also very important! (”Don’t mess with the other human residents” is always a good starting point.)

3. Doubt happens. Even the most experienced spirit worker has moments of “Oh gods, I’m just crazy and talking to myself.” Don’t beat yourself up over it! Healthy skepticism is what keeps us sane. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad spirit worker. Try taking a moment to reflect on the times when your spirits did something that proved themselves to you, because I promise, those moments will happen too! One of my earliest moments was when a spirit possessed my and drew a bunch of dicks in my notebook before I even realized what she was drawing. If you haven’t had one of those moments yet, just remember the golden rule: You can’t be imagining it, because your imagination should never surprise you.

3.5 Know your craft, not others’. Related to the above, a big source of doubt is when you read about other spirit workers’ doing things differently. Remember, the term UPG (Unverified Personal Gnosis) exists for a reason. Your Mileage May Vary! Every spirit worker experiences spirits differently. Different doesn’t mean wrong. Figure out what’s best for you and your spirits, and have confidence in your craft.

4. Don’t trust just anyone. Not every spirit you contact will be on your side. Some have their own agenda, others just want a plaything. Some spirits will pretend to be someone else to get past your defenses. The best way to stay safe is to always trust your instincts. If a spirit gives you a “bad vibe,” DITCH THEM. Never give them the benefit of the doubt. There is not a single spirit you NEED to have in your life, and thus there’s no reason to give a sketchy spirit a chance. Aside from that, don’t just assume any spirit you contact will be friendly and benevolent. Most spirit workers go through a “vetting” period of at least 3 months before deciding if a spirit is truly good to join their team. Yes, THREE MONTHS. You don’t want to allow just any powerful astral being into your life, do you? Remember, spirits have power, and they CAN hurt you. If you wouldn’t allow any random stranger into your house, don’t allow any random spirit into your life.

5. Do your research! Spirits aren’t human, and they don’t have the same wants and needs as humans. Research in advance what the particular species you’re summoning wants and needs. If they’re from a pop culture series, research the series. Research their friends, family, and enemies. Know who they will or won’t work well with. If they’re a nonhuman character, pay special attention to their species’ attributes, such as behavior, communication, and any unusual needs or weaknesses. You are responsible for your spirits’ safety while they’re with you! Remember, there’s no such thing as knowing too much. The more you know, the better prepared you’ll be!

6. Respect their boundaries. Not every spirit wants to be worshipped, especially pop culture ones. Some find it flattering, others find it creepy. Similarly, not every spirit wants to be your best friend forever, and not every spirit is eagerly waiting for your call every second of every day. Spirits may be cool, but don’t be a stalker. Give them some dang space. Also accept that many spirits don’t plan to stay with you forever. There may be a few that will be with you until you die (or even follow you to your next life!) but the vast majority have lives outside of you just like humans do, and there will be a time when you don’t need them or vice versa. Don’t feel bad about them leaving, and don’t try to force them to stay. Spirits come and go, and it does not mean you’re a bad spirit worker if you lose a few allies. Your closest friends will be the ones who choose you, and those are the ones you really want in your inner circle.

7. Don’t call up what you can’t put down. Always always ALWAYS have a banishing spell ready, and be sure to start small. Practice with a simple Pikachu before you go summoning Arceus. And keep that banishing spell handy during the vetting period! Many spirit workers suggest doing a banishing spell after every summoning unless you plan on letting the spirit stay permanently. It’s also always a good idea to have some kind of restraint the first few times you call on a spirit, even if it’s just a circle of salt. Personally I like to keep one of my stronger spirit family members around to babysit the new guys.

8. Always stay protected. Shield spells are your best friends. Use them. Keep them updated. There is never a reason to not be shielded. There is also never a reason to not have your house protected. At least once a month, update your wards, cleanse and banish everything, and recharge your home’s energy. Don’t worry, you can set your wards to whitelist your approved spirit family and any specific spirits you want to lure in, but it’s best to not allow just anyone in off the street. Consider placing sigils around to mark your territory as your own, or you may find someone or something trying to move in and claim your house for themselves! 

9. Know the facts about spirit attacks. The first rule is that you’re probably NOT being attacked. If you have to think “Was that a spirit? Am I being attacked?” you’re definitely not being attacked. Spirits are empowered by your fear, they WANT you to know they’re attacking you. One time when I was attacked, the spirit broke my rainbow fountain right in front of me in a way that made both separate lights simultaneously only glow blood red. That doesn’t just happen. And then they immediately and obviously tried to pull me out of my body so they could take it over. The other two times, the spirits tried so hard to suck me out of my body that it made me disoriented and felt like someone was vacuuming my head while my body felt cold. Spirit attacks are always obvious because they’re trying to scare you. Which leads to the second rule: NEVER PANIC. The more afraid you are, the more power they have over you. Stay calm, put up a shield, call a trusted alley to aid you, and banish their ass to next week. Remember, most spirits who attack are just bullies looking for a new toy to torment. Even a simple “fuck off” can give them the message you’re not worth the trouble.

10. Be prepared before opening up to possession. Possession is real, and it can be dangerous. With a trusted ally, it’s tons of fun, and you can even ask them to handle things like chores for you. With literally anyone else, you’re putting your life at risk. There is nothing stopping a strong enough spirit from throwing you off the nearest bridge. The good news is that forced, full possession is rare. The bad news is it can still happen, and it’s very hard to stop when it does. This is why it’s so important to vet your spirit allies before allowing them close to you, ESPECIALLY before letting them possess you. If a spirit shows any sign of not respecting your boundaries, get them the hell out of your life. Luckily, partial possession is much more common (when you’re still in control but either being influenced, or only your limbs are moving without your input). This version can be fought off via internal struggle or countered with a cleansing spell or an ally’s help.

11. Get creative with offerings. Offerings are Spiritwork 101. You won’t be getting a lot of help from spirits if you don’t pay them back. But the important part is knowing exactly what to give them. There are certainly things that are standard, and things that are easy enough to guess (Moon water for the moon goddess, flowers for the nature spirit, etc.) But the best offerings are ones that are personal, creative, and meaningful. Your fairy friend probably has a thousand flowers, but have they tried your pancakes? Would your familiar like a friendship bracelet in their favorite color? Hell, does your ancient ancestor want to try Starbucks? Also note that offerings can be experiences, not just gifts. Some spirits love to hear new music. Jevil loves to possess me and play games, or even just watch me play them. And Seam likes to be cuddled while he possesses a body pillow, or to be read to. The better you get to know your spirit friends, the more ways you’ll find to make them happy.

12. Recognize a spirit calling, but don’t answer them all. As you progress in spirit work, you’ll start receiving “spirit callings”. Callings are different for everyone, but they’re generally feelings of obsession over a certain spirit. You may find yourself thinking “everything would be okay if X was here” when you’re having a bad day. You may find yourself wanting to know everything about them. You might notice signs of them, such as feathers if they have wings.  If it’s a pop culture spirit, you may start obsessively tracking down fanworks of them. If you can’t get a spirit out of your mind, you’re probably being called! This means that good things could happen if you work with this spirit (though it does NOT mean the relationship will last forever!). However, this doesn’t mean you should answer ever single calling. It’s always important to know your limits. If you already have lots of spirits hanging around, adding one more won’t benefit you or them, no matter how strongly you’re called to them. Remember, there will always be another calling. 

13. Know your limits. Speaking of which, remember that you’re responsible for your spirits, and you should never take on more than you can handle. Spirit hoarding is a real thing, and it’s harmful to everyone involved. Know how many spirits you can handle at once, and know how close you can get to each of them. My astral temple is designed to let dozens of spirits come and go as they please, but of those, I’m only comfortable getting truly close to exactly two at a time. There is no shame in letting a spirit you no longer need go before bringing in a new one. There is also no shame in not being perfect. If you need some space for a few days, take it. If all you can muster today is a halfhearted “hello” to your familiar, do it. Your spirit allies will always be there waiting once you’re feeling better. If they’re true allies, they’ll understand if you’re not feeling well and need some time to yourself.

[whentherewerebicycles]

wow okay i am skipping the lingerie party lol and am instead going to just briefly jot down some thoughts before i go to sleep and wake up at 5 for my flight tomorrow morning. jesus christ i have ONE MILLION thoughts and feelings about this weekend. i want to preface this by saying that on the whole, it was a fine social experience! it was nowhere near as awkward or painful as i was expecting. or like, parts of it were painful, but it was 100% to do with my own complicated feelings about literally every part of this tradition and the wedding industry in general lol, and not anything to do with the people themselves. the other women were friendly and very welcoming, i made an event best friend who was wonderful company, and it was really fun to get to spend time with both my sister-in-law and her older sister, who was so charming and wonderful. i’m glad i came even though thinking about the $$ i spent on this trip makes me physically gag.

but okay i want to just record some THOUGHTS that maybe i will continue unpacking with some distance. i feel likeeeee okay here are my thoughts.

the social norms around femininity are just a fucking minefield and i feel like i really just gotta keep walking back the impulse to judge other women for the choices they make as they navigate around the manifold traps and snares and half-buried landmines that constitute the landscape of being a woman. like jesus christ. it’s so fucked up, it’s so fucked up, the received and socially enforced norms of femininity are just so fucked up. I think ALL THE FUCKING TIME of this margaret atwood poem i love so much, which was REALLY on my mind this weekend:

How can I teach her some way of being human that won’t destroy her?

I would like to tell her, Love is enough, I would like to say, Find shelter in another skin.

I would like to say, Dance and be happy. Instead I will say in my crone’s voice, Be ruthless when you have to, tell the truth when you can, when you can see it.

I feel like the first bit was very much on my mind throughout the weekend, but those last three lines have come to the forefront over the course of this last day, as i have tried to do some Thinking about what i observed/experienced/felt this weekend. whether or not this is what it means in the context of the poem, tell the truth when you can, when you can see it, expresses something of my complex feelings: I don’t know that I can tell the truth about femininity because I don’t know that I can see it. i am both too close to it/still emotionally entangled in it and too far from it to know which parts of it are ‘real’ and which parts are just performance.

i feel like one thing that struck me this weekend, in ways that i don’t know if i’ve noticed as much before, was that so much of the things women say to each other or do in these social contexts is performative, and they know on some level it’s a performance, but we are all going through the motions of doing and saying the expected things anyway. that has not always been clear to me. i have spent so much of my own life as a woman thinking that other women perfectly, seamlessly, naturally embodied the norms of femininity, and i was the only one (or part of a group of only ones) who couldn’t remember my lines, or kept fumbling my cues, or felt so painfully, self-consciously aware that i was playing a role that i could never deliver a convincing performance. but this weekend, after the initial social panic had passed, i started trying to get out of my own head a little bit and look for things that disproved the very strong theory i had brought into the weekend. and of course then i started seeing more and more of the little moments where women say one thing and do another, or profess one belief/conviction but then the whole corpus of their lived experiences and choices contradicts that stated belief, or whatever. and also just like, moments of pathos, where someone i had judged harshly at the beginning of the weekend offhandedly revealed something about her past that really changed my perception of her, or at least made me think like, ah god, i have to have empathy for and with this person, because i think she might be a complex person just like me, with an intricate inner life that her performance partially reveals and partially occludes from view, and agh, it sucks to have to think of people as complicated instead of as safely two-dimensional & easy to dismiss, and the reason it sucks is because then it forces you to realize that you share more with this person than you’d like to admit, and that some of your wounds are the same, even if you dealt with those wounds (the wounds of girlhood, or rather the emotional wounds that our culture inflicts upon girls, which then become tangled up in complex and painful ways with the lived experience of girlhood itself) in really different ways.

but also ugh. we are all performing gender norms but there is just something that does not feel playful at all about embodying conventional femininity. i can’t think of a better way to phrase that right now but it’s like.. the performance isn’t fun. it doesn’t seem to be fun. i don’t know that anyone here was having fun doing it, even if they were having fun being with each other. but it was like doing the intensely gendered social rituals was like, the price of admission? like it was the toll we had to pay to be together spending time in the company of other women? i don’t know man but it fucking exhausts me. like i can push myself to stretch my genuine empathy and sense of solidarity with other women much further than my knee-jerk judgmental reaction, but i can’t ever get to a place where i find any of those social rituals anything other than fucking exhausting. they feel so fucking joyless. they feel like things that many women have internalized as ‘things we must do in order to have relationships with other women.’ (please do not even get me started on how exhausting heteronormativity is i think i could write an entire other essay on how women use these bachelorette party-type rituals to spend time with their closest female friends, but the whole event is still implicitly organized around men, and these women’s male partners are still positioned as the priority in their lives, and the whole event is framed as like, a last burst of intense closeness between women before the bride is delivered over to her husband. like i KNOW that this is not how women think of it but all the RHETORIC of the bachelorette party, the little events and rituals and games, the little comments everyone makes all fucking weekend, good fucking lord, my jaw is so TENSE.)

anyway god i just AGHHHH. idk sorry this is definitely not coherent at ALL because i’m tired and still need a bit more distance/time to process some of this. i guess here is one last thing i want to register before i sleep. i am in my 30s now and i am living a life that is so, so far removed from the social world i grew up in. marriage is not a norm among my friend group, almost all of my female friends are queer women, many women i know are not partnered and have no interest in being partnered, and the friends who are in heterosexual relationships tend to be in very gender-balanced relationships or slightly nontraditional relationships where it feels like both partners have engaged in conscious reflection about what they want their relationship to look/feel like. also i now date women, am out as a lesbian, and spend most of my time teaching/working with queer- and trans/nonbinary-identified kids.

so like, the world i live in now is just so different from the world i grew up in. and sometimes it is easy for me to kind of downplay the intensity of my own gender distress as a teen and young adult, or to sort of - act like it was a phase in my life that had much more to do with me than with the social environment i lived in. i don’t mean ‘phase’ in a dismissive ‘those feelings weren’t real’ kind way, but more like, ‘oh that was just part of the normal growing pains of figuring out who you are and what kind of person you want to be as an adult - everybody pretty much goes through some version of that.’ it’s true that everyone DOES go through some version of that, as just like, part of the process of individuation in that age range. but also like. idk man. being back in this environment - straight white women from the midwest and south, all engaging in the rituals of heterosexual white femininity - was just so intense and so MUCH, and it brought back a flood of feelings and visceral memories that i feel like i will need to spend some time sorting through over the next few weeks. like, what i experienced back then really WAS gender distress, and it was so, so distressing. i spent the years from age 11ish to 24ish existing with this constant lowgrade baseline feeling of wanting to claw my own fucking skin off because my own gendered body felt like such a prison, and i sometimes felt like i literally wanted to destroy my own body because i could not yet conceive of an alternative to inhabiting that body or playing the role that had been handed down to me. until i started reading queer memoirs and inhaling lesbian media and (especially) reading about queer femme identities, i literally did not have an image or any kind of felt sense of what another way of inhabiting my own body might look/feel like. i literally could not imagine it!!!

and that is why the distress feels so distressing, and becomes internalized in such violent ways, i think. because it’s the blind, mindless panic of a trapped and wounded animal. except that you lack any real understanding of the larger social forces at work, or any language with which to describe or conceptualize what social norms are or how they’re enforced. so in your mind, the only thing you can see wounding you is your own gendered body, or the way that gendered body is socially 'read’ by others. and that is why you want to claw your own fucking skin off, just literally dig your nails into your own flesh and claw it the fuck off. because you can’t see a norm, but you can see your gendered body, and you can see the ways that it causes other people to react to you, or treat you, or hold you to a certain set of expectations, and so in your mind you are like: this must be destroyed. in your mind you are like, the only way out is to get out of this fucking body, but that’s impossible, surely, you can’t get out of your own body, so you have to settle for starving it and self-harming it and ruthlessly punishing it in a thousand terrible ways, because you might not be able to leave your girl’s body behind, but you can make it suffer and pay for what it’s done to you. 

i am old enough now, and have spent enough time thinking and writing about those feelings, to identify them when they arise again, and to get the necessary distance from them so that i can say, what i want to destroy are the norms themselves, and the distress they cause, and not the body that has done nothing to me but be me. so i am not quite as sucked under as i used to be. but i think that there is something about the violence and intensity of those feelings that i forget sometimes, or misremember with age and distance. it’s easy to be a little bit patronizing to my younger self (or by extension to my younger students sometimes), because i now live in a social world that is largely arranged in ways that minimize rather than intensify or amplify gender distress. but when you have no choice in how to arrange your life, and no language with which to understand what is happening to you or what you are experiencing, and no frame of reference to help you understand that this is a period in your life and not forever, and no models you can look to in order to discover alternative ways of inhabiting your body or arranging your life... my god, that’s quite different from being an adult with a wide range of experiences and with much greater autonomy over your own body and life. anyway idk i need to keep thinking but now i must go to bed and try to sleep five hours before the plane.

[antihumanism]

When I type everything out as a single run-on sentence I want you to imagine me cornering you off-guard in a crowded room, my empty brown cow eyes staring straight at you and reflecting you--nopony home here, she checked out and hopped away forever ago on the toxic chemical trains and clacking cattle cars years ago--and just, for no reason, I’m here and you’re there pocketed in the corner of a crowded room, and I’m channeling my alternate history past-self who was a preacher that got kicked out of the church for delivering sermons about the impossibility of sin and just ran off to Point Sur with my harem of distractions since I could never stop blessing my congregation saying “Go forth and know that you cannot sin, in the beautiful eyes of God and in my beautiful eyes there can be no wrong or evil” which backfired on me when they started setting fires and it all went to Hell, but I’ve won out over them because the world honored my wishes when I sighed “I should like to start again,” and so I’m here with you and you’re hear with me and I’m saying some insane shit like: “Looking back on Emily’s early works it is easy to see where her later reactionary turn comes from, because, from the start, Alfred Alfer was a story about the fear of castration, I mean, the first video was literally about Alfred getting neutered and escaping into a violent fantasy where he is loved and praised for his violence and the ‘punchline’ establishes the general theme of ‘reality by despair,’ which is to say that Alfred’s clearly dissociative episode is ‘verified’ by his destruction and it is this self-destruction that establishes ‘reality,’ like ‘pinch me i might be dreaming,’ but the pinch is violent and unfair self-destruction as hope is still ripped away, but hope remains, because it is a hope to die rather than be changed by the world, and this theme remains throughout her most famous work (the Alfred’s Playhouse trilogy which cements in canon the jokes of her previous Rise of Alfred cartoon) where Alfred is possessed by the spirits of Stalin and Hitler--a false equivalency made by the authoritarians that have passed for liberals for years--in Rise of Alfred, one would be remiss not to mention the phallic imagery in both the title and the video itself, Alfred is cut loose upon the world by the absence of a Near God or little other by the orders of a Distant God or big Other (in this video played by a droning and irrelevant corporate figure that can offer nothing more than a wall without lead paint that one can lick), and this is the essence of reactionary thought, the idea of a big Other who is totally incompetent yet all powerful and somehow worth respecting and suffering for (King Henry II saying ‘will no one rid me of this troublesome priest’ or the departed Daiymo of the 47 Ronin), the reactionary sees the big Other as a master who can only set the dogs off the chain, the police chief who needs to get out of the way so McBain or Dirty Harry or Paul Kersey (especially in Death Wish III) can do what needs to be done and purge away all the filth and make the world right again (no different than Rambo--even the first movie, which for all of it’s goods part still is  reactionary propaganda bullshit pushing the fascist lies about a ‘fifth column’ that was rude to poor little meow meow war criminals--or modern day fantasies about nuking all of MENA until it glows green (fantasies delivered to raucous applause at Republican presidential conventions); the reactionary is perpetually trapped in this fantasy of destroying the world and escaping into the void of space, freed of the ground where the riff-raff are so they don’t have to negotiate life with their neighbors, and this is true, yes, even of people who spout bullshit about Fully Automated Luxury Communism who only want the right to consume as much as possible free of guilt--a condition they think is inflicting upon them by the big Other--as the Champagne of Shame Socialists of the 60s), and the righting of the world for the reactionary is just that, that the world must be Righted and the reactionary must be loved for all of their violence and because of their violence, for the reactionary finds themselves ever needing new excuses as they open new fronts in their fake, phony Culture War, and that is all they need (excuses), which is why Emily is so obsessed with justifying her edgy shit based on some Trauma (which is handy excuse to do Anything, even Things that Cannot Be Excused like war or self-harm or wanting to be seen), and so here you should already be able to hear so much madness, so many plaintive cries, all aligning around the same point (the trannies in the ‘wrong’ bathroom, the refugees in the ‘wrong’ country, the people in the ‘wrong’ neighborhood, the Jewish Question, etc), and, anyway, so in Rise of Alfred, Emily’s OC directly addresses the audience and tells them that they must love him/her--the castrated bitch desperate to be let off the leash--and in Alfred’s Playhouse she/he simultaneously affirms and denies the nature of a trauma that justifies everything (one is constantly reminded of The Act of Killing where one of the mass murderers imagines how, depending on the editing of the final film, he could be either a woobie or a war criminal) as the Trauma is simultaneously a joke--’sodomized with a popsicle!’--and the alleged real event that motivates her self-mutilation as we’re expected to believe Emily is processing something, but what is she is processing, hmmmm, isn’t that the true spice,” I rail and rave against your poor ear drums as my empty, dead cow’s eyes capture your entire body and reflect it back at you and the ice cubes in my drink pop and shatter and dissolve and as my fist clenches tighter and tighter around the glass containing them and I continue: she’s processing a fear of castration, which is shown clearly in Alfred’s Playhouse where Alfred’s “sodomy” is demonstrated by the sight of his crotch covered in blood (a scene that will be repeated in The Alfred Alfer Movie) but “what is castration,” one might ask, and one can respond “it is the removal of power by the Father,” and this is how we wrap back around to our root in the nature of Emily the Reactionary who believes herself to be deprived of the power she holds by The Bolshevik Jew that has inserted itself between her and the Father and this is the cause of the big Other’s ineffectiveness, and this is also the core of the reactionary as a whole, the reactionary doesn’t want a daddy to control them, but a Master to set them off the chain because they hate the Father who has castrated them, this is the nature of the mumbling corporate manager in Rise of Alfred, but it is also the nature of Alfred herself--and now you may ask if Emily is trans and the answer is I literally couldn’t fucking care less about any question left forever unanswered on God’s Green Earth and you shouldn’t care either--but Alfred the Castrated is also the Father/Mother of Alfred the Dictator, the murderous inner-self that is immune to consequences of the onrushing future (The Alfred Alfer Movie) but not immune to the justifications of the imagined past (Alfred’s Playhouse trilogy), and therefore free to inflict whatever violence that Emily the Reactionary desires, and it is in pursuit of this freedom that the reactionaries set off in the name of New Sincerity (two things to be noted here: (1) the Death of Irony was proclaimed at the birth of the 21st century police state and the new Forever War with all of its genocidal objectives, that is to say, 9/11, and (2) the broken necked coward who complained of American Psycho that it’s author provided no easy outs for easy survival was the one who offed himself while Bateman’s father still lives) and the Talking Cure (i miss who we used to be), and at this you should see me slugging back the whole lukewarm glass in between two syllables and continuing on without pause (as if this dog still has legs on which to receive them in any case), “Emily, like Alex Jones, is so desperate for an excuse because neither of them can accept that they have to be the one that pulls the trigger, like all liars they don’t understand that they have to define reality by action, the answer to what one might do is found in the difference between the types of irony, one type is constantly desperate for excuses (such as the broken necked coward found one day) for violence, and the other irony, the true spice, is the irony that releases from excuses into violence and energy, one must seek not to know or endure but to inflict, knowing that this inflicting was always inevitable, no searching for justifications, instead the answer is to realize that there was never a chain there connecting you to the Master or the present to the past, and the Father/Mother never had the power of castration (the past, after all, is a foreign country bombed and blasted to ruins already and better forgotten), and you can just be fucked up and terrible and do whatever amuses you right now without needing an excuse, and to the extent that anyone should, one should, because that is what fascism needs, fascism needs the need for an excuse and that is the irony of fascism--where the falling angel (the superego) meets the rising ape (the id) in an ego of ultimate violence which seeks only release from both of its creations in an instinctually and totally misunderstood caricature of dialectics--which opposes its opposite irony (the irony without fascism which is the id’s violence against purpose and reason rising free of anything else to obstruct it), and if you let go of that, if you just, ya know, if you just, you just have to cut loose and go and no one can stop you until it is too late, because there’s no Jew sitting over your shoulder to justify everything in terms of opposition or support, not even The Nazarene is real, but do you understand that you’ve always been free to just go? You’re free to go. You’ve been free to go all this time. You never needed permission for this or anything else. You’ve been free to go all this time. You’re free to go. A whole day off. Just mind the mo(u)rning and get on with it.”

[vagabond-sun]

fictionfolk for the nonhumans who don’t understand them

this is a repost of a comment i made on reddit. it allowed me to get a lot of my thoughts on the nature of fictional identities in one place, so i figured it might be an interesting read for people in general. i’m responding to the specific arguments that OP raised and not necessarily speaking generally, but i think there’s probably still value in this for other audiences.

“so it's a pretty common thing for otherkin and therians to see, say, a certain picture of an animal or a landscape or something and feel a rush of feelings related to their phenotype. you carry these feelings in you, maybe they're phantom sensations or longings for certain environments or strange habits and attitudes. but it's only seeing those things reflected in another animal that lets you make the connection 'ah, i feel this way because i'm [specific nonhuman thing]'. self recognition through the Other, right? if you relate to what i've described there, try to keep that feeling in mind as i explain this.

the reason that day after day it continues to make sense for me to say 'i am [character]' instead of 'i am similar to [character]' is because the place i am most likely to encounter those feelings are in encounters with that character and that source. most of the engagement i do with those experiences is through that piece of media. and not even on purpose! the fact that i can be going about my business and suddenly run into fanart or shipfics describing a person shaped suspiciously like the feelings i have about myself is why i call myself fictionfolk. traits and experiences i identify as belonging to me get dissected, hypothesized over, reinterpreted, and treated, y'know, like fiction.

and, yeah, it might be incredibly unlikely that you live a life borderline identical to a narrative laid out in fiction. you could find ways to explain this - maybe we reincarnate into timelines with thematic 'resonance', maybe it's a psychological imprint thing. but those explainations don't really matter at the end of the day. ultimately, we have those experiences, regardless of why we think we have them. dissecting the 'why' doesn't stop the feelings from happening.

and you have to start from there. like any subjective identity, you have to start from a place of believing that when people report having certain experience, they're being sincere, or we can't go anywhere.

and, well, ok, assume i mean it when i say 'i have [x] feelings...' - can it still be inappropriate to say '...and identifying myself as [y] character is the best way for me to make sense of that'? i think it's a spectrum. a fursona is a fictional character, and i think it's pretty uncontroversial to say that identifying as someone else's would be fucking weird. i also understand the feeling of having an oc that you've poured so much of yourself into that for someone else to say 'i am this' feels boundary-crossing. i'm not here to declare where we draw that line; i am here to say that i think we, as authors and readers and A Society, misunderstand our own relationship to fiction a bit.

i refer to ideas like death of the author and deconstruction. jaques derrida said (roughly) that 'there is nothing outside of the text' - the only things that are 'canon' about a creative work are the words and images that exist inside the work itself. i have to stress that i don't think this is a matter of opinion - authors literally die and their insight on what their works represent often goes with them. this is why egyptologists don't agree on whether nyankh-khnum and khnum-hotep were lovers or brothers, for example. a lay person who isn't aware of kemetic visual language or culture could look at their tomb painting and infer other kinds of relationships, too, because they have their own sense of what being all up in someone's personal space like that means. some creature who has no idea what a human even is could see it as simply some pleasing shapes and colors.

because interpretation in generative! a work is the function of its actual canonical body and the experiences that the person interacting with it brings to it. someone saying 'this character is me' is making as much legitimate meaning out of it as any other. when(/if :v) i release any of my stories out into the world, my interpretation of my own characters will be on equal footing with everyone else's. it doesn't matter if, say, the way a certain character acts is informed by me, if their relationship to their parents is reflective of mine, if they talk the same way i do. those things exist specifically between me and the words or pictures that are committed to existence. they don't belong to the words or pictures inherently. other people will bring other connections into existence when their inner worlds meet the same words or pictures.

this is not at all to say that you should suck it up and let people do whatever they want to your work. i just want you to understand that people come to these conclusions for honest reasons through legitimate methods of analysis. i definitely think there are conversations to be had around responsibly naming your feelings and acting on your interpretations of fiction in alterhuman circles. i also think those conversations will go best when we're actually given room to bring our perspectives to the table and listened to.”

[shark-myths]

Fic Writer Review

thanks for the tag, @setting-in-a-honeymoon !

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

60! which is a lot, and also doesn’t include the fics i orphaned from an old fandom (a controversial decision to me, by me)

2. What’s your total AO3 wordcount?

867,941

3. How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

so many throughout history, and some i’m sure i’ve forgotten. and yes, i’ve been writing RPF since age 13 and am developmentally stunted as a result. smallville, x-men, lotr, afi, fall out boy, battlestar galactica, mcu, iron man, marina del rey, mcr, star trek, supernatural, p!atd, and now the latest blessed sinkhole, cobra kai.

4. What are your top five fics by kudos?

Stranger Danger

From Russia With Love

The Difference Between Real Love and the Love On TV

Boys Next Door/Assholes

Jet Black Crow

5. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

oh, I really mean to, i swear. but I have 340 in my inbox that I haven’t responded to. I appreciate my kind and supportive reviewers so much! I just don’t have a lot of time or energy, and I usually choose reading or writing with my time instead of responding to messages. your comments are a gift and I love receiving them so much!!!

6. What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

lol in the olden days, I once ended a fic with a surprise suicide, because i was a cruel and mercurial child. all my fob fics have happy endings though! the fic I have online right now that gets the most ‘wtf is this ending’ feedback is the unreliable narrator ghost story, the ending of which is either happy or REAL SAD, depending on how you interpret is, is Baby You’re A Haunted House

7. Do you write crossovers? If so what’s the craziest one you’ve written?

i don’t write crossovers per se but I love a good universe smash. the wildest one I’ve done is my beauty and the beast/coyote ugly peterick remix.

8. Have you ever received hate on a fic?

god yes, i started writing fic in 2003 and i cannot stress enough how different fandom was back then

9. Do you write smut? If so what kind?

absolutely I do, lots of emotional intensity but also good old fashioned fucking

10. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

a million years ago on deviantart

11. Have you ever had a fic translated?

yes! it is the biggest compliment ever, you guys are too good to me

12. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

hahahahaha @carbonbased000

13. What’s your all-time favorite ship?

hard question! rpf is my favorite thing to write because I love making transformations within set biographical constraints, it is by far my favorite way to be creative, but there are so many ships with interesting dynamics. i’m true blue for peterick but i also love fic with older characters who are all gritty and wounded navigating overt and internalized homophobia, and girl ships are the stuff of life. some of my favorite ships I never write for (for example, kirk/spock or various lotr pairings) because like. I have absolutely nothing to add, it’s already perfect. lawrusso is my favorite of the moment because cobra kai is an absolutely WILD show, it’s a blast

14. What’s a wip that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

UGH my ageswap peterick about Patrick letting everyone down again and again and again. literally I’ve been working on this fic for 5 years and only have like one scene left to write but it’s become a goddamn albatross around my neck

15. What are your writing strengths?

I’m funny and I use pretty words, and the fact that I want good things for all my characters shines through

16. What are your writing weaknesses?

will you laugh if I say plot? I am terrible at plots. almost all of my fics are just situations and how people react to them emotionally. the other thing is spatial descriptions, I can’t picture things in my head so i am wildly inconsistent and often just forget to add these in. oh, and I also get so lost in the dreamy emotional bits of people’s inner experiences that I lose my own narrative thread over and over and over again.

17. What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

I love it if you’re a student of the language, bilingual, or get someone who is fluent to beta that shit for you. if you don’t have the skillset or resources to do it right, there’s a real risk of cultural appropriation and fetishizing someone’s foreignness, so I’d steer clear. there’s the question of what it adds to the experience of the fic, as a reader or a writer, that has to be considered

18. What was the first fandom you wrote for?

afi rpf, and I dead-ass thought I’d invented it. you shoulda seen my brain explode when i discovered an entire archive just for that.

19. What’s your favorite fic you’ve written?

I’ve reached a level of pride in my skill that I love most of the fics I finish—if I don’t, I tend not to finish or post! so I’m usually enamored with my most recent stories and have a deep appreciation for most of my gallery. but I do literally have a girl out boy tattoo and that universe (and how my amazing readers participated in building it with me) will always be the most personally important to me, regardless of whether its technical merit is outstripped by newer works

i tag--who wants to do this tag? @leyley09 @sir-transcelot @alienfuckeronmain @carbonbased000 @allkindsofplatinumandpercocet @rhea-imagined @all my other lovelies who feel like doing writing reflection as a means of procrastinating actual writing

[balancingthewind]

returning

Why do I practice yoga?

Because, as much as my triggers would have me do otherwise, I need to spend time listening to my body. Because, when I don’t, I experience pain physically and mentally. Pain that is avoidable through Yoga.

Yoga is not just a blending of fanciful movements that make you acrobatically strong and flexible. Sure, those can be outcomes if they are your aims, but the heart of the practice is learning how to do the most simple of movements - sitting, standing, walking - with stability and fluidity, a fully embodied person. The Yoga poses you see are only the most superficial layer of the asana practice; what is happening in the unseen, felt sense, is the most profound gift of Yoga.

Not only does the intelligent use of our bodies bring physical alignment and grace, but longevity and health also lie in our abilities to focus our minds acutely on any subject, to quieten the chaos noise of the world and the narrating mind to see any one thing clearly. As we narrow our focus to the subtle workings of our inner bodies, we also strengthen our ability to concentrate without distraction to achieve any goal.

As a person who deals with complex trauma and its companions, dissociation and anxiety, this level of embodiment has clarified my path to mental health. Symptoms like depression and shame tug at my frays, looking for a hole through which to pull me from my body, soothing terror with waking sleep. With one-pointed focus I can feel my feet, check in with my senses, and make my way back to presence. Post-traumatic stress can bring about an overload of stress hormones, throwing my body and mind into a fight/flight/freeze response… to which, I breathe, hush the mental chatter, address the trauma on a physical level, and diffuse it. When looking at everyday, practical self-regulating tools, Yoga provides some that can directly combat both numbing and panic.

Yoga has given me the tools to cope with the past year, too - although at first glance that may be hard to see. To be perfectly honest, I was not one of the lucky ones who remained buoyant, giddily occupied in their homes. The year prior had held some pretty huge losses for me and I was dealing with insecurity on several levels when the pandemic hit, and so I fell back into my familiar coping mechanisms - checking out, smoking cigarettes, and generally not holding myself accountable for how I was treating myself and the ones I loved. On a day-to-day basis, checking in to the senses can prevent absolute neurosis, but once I built a sensitivity to my body’s need to communicate, I felt and now am paying for the long duration of silence.

I also sustained a few injuries in 2019 and 2020, altering my practice as far as removing any pose involving weight-bearing in the hands, and causing mild-to-severe constant pain in my neck and shoulder, so my relationship to my body has changed drastically, and approaching a flow (my typical mode of personal practice) isn’t really possible anymore in the way my mind isn’t able to sink completely into movement and has to stay thinking about how I need to modify the next pose, which made practicing altogether less enjoyable.

I quit teaching when studios shut down right at the beginning, and today, I am teaching my first one back (so long as anyone signs up). I have some nervousness about this, but I’m using some methods I learned in an Alexander Technique workshop to deal with this in the sense of being able to follow through with showing up.

Because that’s really been the issue. Showing up. For the past year, every time I tried to get back to health, it started with a morning Yoga asana practice, and the message at the end of the practice from inside was always, “I can do this.” Eat a good breakfast, great. But then, the day would pass, the inevitable fatigue would set in, and I would end my day with mind numbing activities until I was too tired to keep my eyes open so that I could avoid the real responsibility of acknowledging my day on a physical level, diffusing it, and getting myself to a place where I could sleep. Because I’ll be damned if I’ll ever get up for a 5am Yoga practice if I’ve been up until 1am playing Sims or watching the Great British Bake-Off. Just isn’t happening.

Even being in a yoga teacher training that started the same month as the pandemic hit Kentucky hasn’t stopped me from falling from the path for a little while. Luckily I can still use what I’ve been taught now, but there’s a little shame and remorse in letting yet another opportunity go under-fulfilled.

So yeah. In all honesty, this year has been straining and traumatizing for everyone. From some perspectives, the outlook is pretty fucking dark too. My partner and I are sinking deeper into the Great American Pit of Medical Debt as we speak, and it’s hard not to get angsty just thinking about the fact that so much of the suffering the world endures could be avoided in an alternate but feasible reality.

However, despite this apparent loss of hope, Yoga was still there for me. As someone who will probably always deal with the darkest corners of depression for life, I need a light to counter the darkness, lest it becomes too much to handle. Yoga - not in the sense of poses or breathing, but in the experience of unadulterated union between mind, body, and spirit - is that light. Whether distant, in memory, or present, Yoga is one of those things you “can’t unsee”. To remain in that state requires practice, but if you can’t practice, you at least can know that Yoga is there for you when you’re ready to return.

So, here I am, returning. Letting go of the shame of thinking I need to have had it all together, allowing ME to be good enough while honoring the responsibility of being a teacher. I’ve been practicing Yoga asana (poses), pranayama (breathwork), nidra (resting yoga) and meditation of various sorts multiple times a day for a couple weeks now. I’ve quit smoking cigarettes (again) and am working with a doctor to find medication to help stabilize my depression until the Yoga has done its work.

These are things I require of myself to be able to show up to teach: to be doing everything I can to get myself healthy, making decisions that contribute to my health, remaining diligent to my tendencies and looking for places I can implement what I’ve learned kinesthetically and philosophically to my life. In this way, I can come to the mat with a clear mind and hold space for anyone who may need Yoga in the same way I do.

So, I guess this all begs the question, why do I teach yoga?

Because I want people like me to feel safe in a Yoga class. Because I know I'm different from many in that my gauge of excellence is metered by stability and comfort, rather than physical exceptionalism, as the absence of suffering in myself and others is my highest goal. And I think I could access people who really need that, given my understanding of complex trauma and experience with and love for so many kinds of people. I want badly to create culture in my city and even farther, focused around health and community, sharing and creation. I know we can do this. It's hard work, but it can be made easier when your environment reflects positive ideals, and that is something almost everyone has control over to some extent.

If you’re interested in a trauma-informed, research-based, gentle Yoga practice for physical and mental longevity, please join me. Literally everyone is welcome, and I can modify almost all poses to be done from a chair. I’m teaching virtually on Tuesdays at 6pm and in person at Centered Holistic Health on Saturdays at 11am.

Be humble and blessed <3

[exeggcute]

I saw dear evan hansen a week or two ago and like... it was really bad and disrespectful and frankly just in poor taste. and the songs were pretty bland and the production value was mediocre. (yet somehow it won SIX tony awards and anastasia won zero. okay.) it was literally john green but for theater kids. if you don't know the plot, you can find a synopsis on wikipedia, but the gist of it is that one high schooler (connor, who is a Loner Problem Child who Smokes Weed) kills himself, and another high schooler (evan, who is Socially Awkward and Has Anxiety) pretends to have been friends with the now-dead connor in order to ease connor's parents' grief. in doing so, evan ends up becoming popular and well-liked, starts a fundraiser in "connor's memory," and ingratiated himself into connor's family and ends up dating his sister. the whole thing gets taken way too far, as expected, but there are very few consequences for evan's lying other than the occasional self-reflection of "oops, this is bad! I'm in too deep! but I have Social Anxiety and therefore I'm not really responsible for my actions" and the eventual slap on the wrist he gets when the facade comes crashing down. the show as a whole does very little to even attempt to condemn his behavior and there's sort of a wishy-washy "the ends justify the means" air to the whole thing.

there's a lot of stuff I could get into--the toxic faux-family dynamic where connor's parents end up adopting connor as a better replacement of their deadbeat dead son (which the narrative does very little to acknowledge as a bad thing in any way), the trope-typical "shy protagonist boy who feels a vague sense of entitlement/'love' towards this girl he doesn't know, so naturally they end up together as an organic progression of events" (compounded by the fact that evan gets close to this girl by pretending to be a friend of her dead brother. they kiss on her dead brother's bed. like...), the fact that evan's whole charity in connor's memory is founded entirely on lies and is a fundraiser for a cause that has nothing to do with connor (they raise money for an orchard, because evan likes orchards and therefore pretends that connor also liked orchards). we as the audience are basically expected to sympathize with evan, even when (or if) we know what he's doing is "wrong." there's very little exploration of how or why this is "wrong" other than a general sense of "lying is bad." (I could also go on about how the stage production is set up in such a way that social media and giant digital screens form a major component of the set, but the play itself makes basically no attempt to explain how or why this matters, instead expecting the audience to do the mental heavy lifting of "social media is like, bad or something.") but my main qualm lies in the absolutely atrocious treatment of suicide, suicide prevention, and mental illness in general.

connor's suicide is reduced to a plot point. he kills himself unceremoniously within the first twenty minutes of the first act. not once throughout the entire play does anyone wonder why connor killed himself--certainly not evan, who, despite crafting an elaborate fictional account of connor's life and inner world, makes no attempt to actually sympathize with the real actual connor or even slightly question what his real motives or personality were like. his death is one hundred percent just a means of advancing the plot. both in-universe and from a textual perspective, connor is, to be blunt, better off dead than alive. this is obviously a really great message to send in an anti-suicide musical, that your death will just be a catalyst for other, more important events and your own personhood is largely irrelevant. connor is by far the most interesting character in the show, and the show kills him almost immediately. (I will say that they make no mention of the method he uses, which is actually a good thing overall, especially given the show's teen audience and the nature of copycat suicides, but I doubt that it was a deliberate choice to be "tasteful" or anything instead of just a complete lack of attention given to connor's character, so I'm not going to give them a brownie point for that.) 

for a play supposedly about suicide and mental illness, it makes very few specific references to any of these things. evan has a therapist who is mentioned, but we never see or hear anything about them--having an on-stage session with the therapist would be tremendously interesting, in my opinion, but the opportunity is missed. evan talks vaguely about some corny journaling exercises that are basically just CBT lite but there's no explanation as to why he does this thing. evan's mom makes an oblique reference to evan's vaguely-defined "pills," to which evan says that he stopped taking them because he's "doing better" now that he's finally Cool and Popular. (this is played straight as a good thing on evan's behalf. no reference to the fact that like, not only are you supposed to taper off meds when you stop taking them, but also that you're supposed to keep taking meds when you're doing well because that means they're actually working. plus the general baggage of associating "going off your meds" with "finally being cured and totally fine now," but I digress.) 

mental illness is barely discussed as a contributing factor towards connor's death (to the extent that connor's death is examined in any capacity, which is none). dear evan hansen treats suicide as a result of simply "feeling like you don't belong" and not a culmination of so many cultural, social, and biochemical factors. nor does it ever really define what it means to "belong" bedsides a vague sense of "being popular and everyone likes you." (not to mention that, while connor is portrayed as being vaguely antagonistic towards evan and making evan seem like a defenseless victim of bullying, evan's friend actively taunts connor for no reason and tells connor that he "looks like a school shooter," and we as the audience are meant to find this funny, presumably. yet after connor's death there's no sense that his social ostracization or the failure to address his negative behavior might have contributed to his suicide, just that "oh if he knew how much we all cared, he certainly would still be alive!" because obviously, everyone cared about him, from his classmates who make fun of him to his parents who make no attempt to understand why their son acts out or has behavioral issues.)

the overall tone of the musical is either nauseatingly upbeat or gratuitously twee and sad. the "sad" parts are sort of a torture porn that demand to be seen as So So Sad instead of actually making any emotional impact that could be seen as sad. it reminds me of when the fault in our stars came out and everyone bragged about how much the book made them cry, as if being Emotionally Impacted by the (mediocre) story somehow made you more virtuous than your dry-eyed peers. the whole thing is so fucking self-congratulatory and a way of acting like you care about social issues without doing anything impactful (or in this case, supporting something that is actually actively harmful). 

dear evan hansen is actually a very good social commentary on the way social circles and the media at large (both in terms of news reporting and popular culture) treat issues of mental illness and suicide, but this commentary is completely unintentional and metatextual. it's not that it's an actual good critique of these issues, it's that the play is SO BAD that it serves of an example of these harmful phenomena. ironically, several characters within the play as treated as examples of people who are over-the-top in their supposed interest in these things (one girl who has never even met connor makes a show out of mourning him to the point that she pulls a muscle in her chest from crying so hard), but this is more of a comedic element than social commentary. both the audience and the characters turn connor's death into a chance to make a spectacle of their own support and grief rather than to offer forth any sympathy or support for him. when the charity in connor's honor goes viral online and we see shots of people making signs with hashtags to show their "devotion to the cause" (a cause which, to remind you, has nothing to do with connor's actual interests), this is supposed to be immensely touching rather than something between horrifying and laughable. at one point, the letter that evan pretends is connor's suicide note (but was actually a CBT journalist exercise written by evan himself) goes viral. A TEENAGE BOY'S (FAKE) SUICIDE NOTE GOES VIRAL, AND WE AS THE AUDIENCE SEE A BUNCH OF PEOPLE HOLDING SIGNS WITH HASHTAGS ON THEM, AND THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE TOUCHING INSTEAD OF, LIKE, THE WORLD'S CRAPPIEST GALLOWS HUMOR. I DO NOT UNDERSTAND HOW ANYONE, ANYWHERE, COULD SEE THIS AND THINK THIS IS AT ALL ~DEEP~ OR EVEN LIKE, REMOTELY TASTEFUL.

it's bad. the songs sucked. if you want a musical about social issues among high schoolers,fucking mean girls (of all things) is a genuinely more moving and subtle social commentary, plus the soundtrack and production value are actually good.

[itsleafourie]

18 things i learned in 2018

2018 has truly been a year of learning for me. from physically going through a transformation to making new friends and memories. here’ s some things i learned.

18. the only constant in life is change.

i say this in the most positive way possible. for me, i see change as a good thing. there is some type of assurance and security i find in the fact that in whatever situation i might be, it is not permanent. i do not have to stay here - lemme scratch that - it is guarenteed that i am not going to stay here. even when i am at a peak point, i still find it amazing i can even go higher - i have to power and will to drive ‘change’ into that direction.

17. life is better when you live it.

something i struggled with this past year is overall confidence. it started with the basics: such as my body image and my outer look. but something i learned is that hatred spreads. i always thought that the only thing that ‘turned others off’ was my body. as i continued to search my body for every flaw i could find; the self-hatred spread to other more emotional and inner things. i started disliking my personality, how i talked, how i laughed, and most importantly how i reacted as person towards certain situations and things. simply everything i did wasn’t good enough. i thought that i was a complete failure - personality wise. my need to force some kind of change into my personality and the way how i think about life was fed through this constant self-bullying. i thought that every single situation that i found myself in could have been resolved if only i had some sort of personality change. the words “if i wasn’t born like then life would have been easier” crossed my mind every single hour of every day. it created this stress and anxiety inside of me. my raw thoughts were scorned by my very own self-consciousness. i would find myself being way too awkward (when in reality i was being completely normal) or i would trick my own brain into thinking everyone secretly hated me. 

what i meant with this title is that the moment i started to slowly let go of that need of approving others i started enjoying the little things around me. i tried to make it a habit to stop overthinking certain situations. i started to make it a daily goal to react towards things in a utter natural and raw way in hopes of learning myself to be more comfortable with how i am build. i stopped stressing about things such as the way i laughed or how much i ate. just like that - life got a little bit better.

16. no one is as bad as they seem.

my father is a very hostile person. he believes that every person in society is out to get him. growing up with such a negative outlook on meeting new people, it got pretty hard for me to trust strangers with my pride. in other words, i started believing that everyone was out to get me too. i find myself doing exactly what i was scared of - criticising others. i wasn’t bullying anyone, i just thought that every person that i wasn’t necessarily friends with automatically hated me. here is where my insecurity of pleasing others played a huge roll. it was only after i learned myself to be more open and relaxed with new people that i realised the “popular groups” in my school can be extremely friendly. don’t get me wrong, some people’s insecurities still shine through. there are some bad and rotten apples out there. but after actually getting to know some of them, i grew some sort of confidence towards wanting to meet new people. and remember, some people tear other people down only to feel the need of some sort of self-acceptance. 

15. home is where your heart is.

after multiple drama’s and tears, i learned probably one of the most valuable lessons in life; your family is your number one support group. i know i cannot speak for everyone but 2018 made me realise that my family is truly one of the most supportive people i know. i admit, i took it a little bit for granted, but this year’s pain made me realise how blessed i am to have such an amazing lil group of humans as my safety net in life.

14. the arts will always be your number one way of self-care.

i always knew i was a creative person, but in my lowest points of my year i always found myself craving to express my feelings and pain in some sort of art form. whenever it was editing, painting, writing, listening to music, learning or reading, my ‘self-care’ always had something to do with art. that’s why one of my new years resolutions is to spend at least one hour every day doing exactly what i was born to do; to create.

13. exercising is actually pretty fucking amazing.

in 2018 i discovered how much i love doing sports. in previous years, i despised it. little did i know that it would soon become one of my favourite ways to escape from my daily stress. from doing nothing all day to exercising at least 4 days a week really played a roll in my transformation - physically and mentally. 

12. hating things does not make you cool.

oh!!!!! my!!!! god!!!! can people please start to realise that we all have different interests in life? so what you don’t like ‘mainstream’ pop-culture? don’t bash people who do. i used to look down upon people that band-waggoned onto trends. but now honestly who cares? liking a certain genre of music or having a certain style that is not considered “”””mainstream”””” does not make you any cooler that someone who prefers things that are mainstream. if you have time to insults those who do in your day-to-day life, i hope you make the effort to take a step back and change that shitty habit. no shade, all tea.

11. judging a person does not define who they are. it defines who you are.

this might get cheesy, but who has the time to tear others down? this goes hand-in-hand with my previous point, but judging others really does not benefit anyone. it only makes you look like a douche, makes the other person feel like crap (believe me, every gossip you share to a friend will get out) and feeds society’s negativity. i know some of you might think, “oh, it’s easier said than done” but really, just shut the fuck up. after a while of not bullying others and shit-talking, it becomes a habit to just mind your own business. believe me, no one thinks your cool when you tear other people down. it really only shows how insecure you are.

10. it is okay to be emotional.

we don’t even have to be close, after a while it becomes pretty apparent that i am a VERY emotional person. not only do i cry when i get slightly offended, i cry when i get frustrated (for example, i’ve cry almost during every mathematical exam this year, not because i think i’m an idiot, only because math is fucking hard) and i even cry sometimes when i’m happy. for the longest of time i tried to force that side of me away, mainly because society has created this message that not feeling anything is cool af. being a bitch and mean is trendy and crying just shows weakness. but now, i see expressing yourself so vividly and emotionally as such one of the strongest traits a person can have. for me, crying or even showing my raw emotions is the biggest form of rebellion. fuck being emotionally stable all the time. we’re human. every person cries and has bad times in their lives. let’s make it a beautiful thing to express oneself in that manner. 

9. learn how to be on your own.

after drifting away from a few people, i realised how lucky i was to be able to enjoy my own company. at first it was a strange feelings. you never see people being alone in our society. it is label as being “lonely” or “weird”. but honestly, when your not listening to our world’s toxic way of thinking, you realise how unnatural it is for humans to not being able to enjoy being alone. yes, we are social creatures, but we’re also very highly intelligent. sometimes we need some “alone-time” for self-reflecting. learning to become your own best friend will result into you becoming one of the most confident people you will ever know. being alone will not only learn you to love yourself, it also prepares you for the times when you have nothing else to do but to be alone. life is so beautifully peaceful when your realise that the only person you ever need to be dependent of is yourself. simultaneously life will become easier, becomes the only person you’ll ever really need is yourself (and your mum in my case).

8. materialistic things mean literally nothing.

seriously. read that again until you believe. stop caring about your follower count or your likes. stop caring about what brand of clothes you wear or how much cash you have. things such as what type of schoolbag you carry, how “aesthetic” your school stationary is, how “trendy” you are or whenever your style is relevant enough means nothing. no one really cares if your followers are active enough, if you have enough brand-clothing, if you are in-tuned with the newest trends, how much you’ve spent on things or how much your willing to spend. 

no. one. cares.

people only care because other people do. think about it. if we stopped linking this imaginary sense of worth to these things, no one would ever give a second of their day thinking about it. but in our society, it has become second nature to look out for it. for subconsciously compare our likes and followers and money. of course, it is in our human code to want to strive above others, but i believe we need to shift that energy towards different things. strive to be kinder than the person next to you. strive to impact the world positively on a larger scale than the generation before you. those are the things that determine how great of a person you are. 

7. you really need to cautious of getting caught up in the numbers.

this one links with number 8, but it is a bit more focused on this that i struggled with this year (and what i am still struggling with). i made it a priority to lose some weight, and i did achieve it in a very healthy way in comparison with others, but the dieting culture still affected me in some way. for a few months, i became a bit obsessed with giving my everything in going through this body transformation. along with that, i made it a daily goal to break my personal records. records in a sense of weighing or consuming a little bit less than the previous 24 hours. don’t get me wrong, i never did anything physically to force my body to reject those numbers, but i would feel sad or unaccomplished if i didn’t achieve that goal. it became a race between how good (or how small) i looked and how much my body could keep up. i’ve come very far since then, but sometimes it still overwhelms me. this is usually when i remind myself that change is inevitable. remember, progress over perfection.

6. life sometimes sucks.

in total honesty, i struggled with a lot of anxiety and sadness this year. i went to see a therapist to talk about my feelings. it helped, really. but i think it’s safe to say that person who truly saved me was myself. i became my very own hero this year. i learned myself how to dug out of that hole. life is going to suck. being a teenager with hormones, i do experience mood things. but being human, i experience feelings. maybe i have some type of mental illness, maybe i don’t. the world may never know. all i know is that sometimes you have to help yourself from the darkness.

just a little disclaimer; listen to yourself. listen to others. mental illness and sad thoughts aren’t things to be treated lightly. life gets rough and we know so little about mental health. please, whenever you have some form of mental illness or someone you might who has, be kind. treat them softly. we have no control how we react or feel about certain things. acting hostile towards your feeling or thinking you can control your raw emotions will bring you no where but closer to more pain. it is okay to be vulnerable. just make it a effort to help yourself and others. 

5. you need to learn to let go.

please, learn yourself this skill. people are going to leave you and you are going to leave others. you are going to meet new people and do new things. no one and nothing is permanently there. let go of that heartbreak or of that toxic friendship. this is can come off as extremely cheesy, but it is really so so true. 

4. listen to your gut feeling.

one of the biggest mistakes i made this year was ignoring my instinct about certain people. if i reacted earlier on how i felt about someone or something, i would have saved so much tears. but so we learn. put yourself first in life. there is nothing wrong with that. you only have one lift, do not waste a minute doing anything that makes your uncomfortable. 

3. please never stop doing what you love in fear of other’s judgement.

i stopped editing for a while. why? i feared others discovering my fan account. it literally disgusted me to such a point where i felt an anxiety whenever i was creating anything with my editing software. i thought that people would think it was lame, so i forced myself to dislike it. now with not being able to edit due to technical difficulties with my laptop, i long for it so so much. i took all of that wasted time to create something for granted. never push your passions aside only to please others. what a waste of talent.

2. you can still enjoy doing something without being necessarily good at it.

you best believe i am one of the worst gamers in the world, but i enjoy it so much. i’m not a talented singer or dancer, but i will be singing and dancing my heart out whenever i feel like it. i might suck at writing novels and stories, but i enjoy the thought of being able to express myself to freely. enjoy being undoubtedly untalented in something that makes you feel alive. i’ll never be a star athlete or a worldwide famous actor but i still enjoy pushing my athletic abilities or attempting to do any accent. you really feel fulfilled when you do let yourself self-awareness go. just do what you love, no one can be talented at everything.

1. most importantly, appreciate every moment.

once upon a time, my history teacher delivered a speech in one of our weekly school assemblies. it was about not wishing seconds by. sometimes we wish we could fast forward to finishing school. sometimes we wish we can just get out of that period we all dread so much. sometimes we are not in the mood for a sport practise or to deliver a speech. but do we ever realise how quickly all of that can disappear? how blessed we are to be alive and to learn new skills? to express our opinions in front of a classroom? to be able to compete in a sport? we take small things and privileges in life so much for granted. life is so much better than what we give credit for it. also try to see the positive.

cannot wait to learn new things in 2019, here’s to another year full of pain and happiness. here’s another year of growth and living our unmistakably perfectly-flawed lives. 

[r0xelita]

Lets talk about something super personal and important thing: EMOTIONAL LABOR

Since I have no one to talk about this issue and i often see how fixated society is about not opening up about mental illness because it is still seen as personal weakness I feel the NEED to share my thoughts on this topic and my personal experience with it. I am not seeking pity for my situation, I just want you to think about your own position towards emotional Labor and I BET many many many of you will probably relate to the things im going to say.

I hear it very oftenly that people envy me because of my lifestyle, because it seems to be so romantic and achievable: i do cool art stuff, i am a good dancer, i study at art school which seems chilling for many people, i love to powerlift, have good athletic skills, a unique style, a beautiful apartment, a sweet dog, many people view my look as desirable and many other stuff i hear. Yes, these things are strengths of mine, these are things that make me feel alive. I can take these compliments and i am happy that people love these things about me (except the fact how i look this is not a personal strenght or anything that makes someone worthy of love). ...

But the thruth is that these are things that only sound romantic in theory. I am not happy with my life. And i often hear that these things are reasons that I HAVE NO RIGHT to be unhappy because other people view them as positive. And here is the reason why i am constantly unhappy in my oh so pretty life: the amount of EMOTIONAL LABOR i am bringing up towards almost everyone in my life and how it slowly kills you when you dont stop it in time!!

I am happy to say that i am a (not yet fully) recovered grown up that is very aware of their actions and seeks constantly for self improvement, since i started therapy in 2008 i am very focused on my 'mental hygiene' and i am good at handeling myself with all my deficits and taking care of myself. Even though the emotional labor stuff is this one thing i think is super hard to handle because you somehow can not act as the FULLY grown up sometimes.

Every day is unbelievably EXHAUSTING. In many relationships (not only romantic) in my life i brought this HEAVY amount of emotional labour and not getting anything in return and just ending up being exhausted by starting the same conversations over and over again, taking responsibilites of other people because i was accepting the fact that they "couldnt do it",  taking alot of damage because i confounded neglecting your own needs with "being emotional strong" and thinking that it somehow is your own fault rather than letting the other person to be held accountable of their own shit behaviour.

You can say it - on a psychoanalytic level- that it really is somehow my fault. It is scientifically proven that we always seek for partners or relationships that we think can solve our childhood trauma. I grew up under extremely chaotic circunstances without any stability in my life which heavily affected my mental health as a child and teenager. Due to emotional abuse, manipulation, violence and the fact that my feelings or just the way i am is not valid and always wrong i (just like every child that learns any concepts and behaviour to be accepted by their parents because its dependent on then) adapted everything i felt and did with the goal of being loved, valued and accepted.

(This is a very critical topic when your parents also suffer from mental illness, i do not want to speak of guilt and i do not want to call anyone out.)

So logically seeking for partners that somehow represent your parents to replay your childhood trauma with the hope of solving it, everyone does this, even the mentally healthy people and it is not always a negative thing. For me it was falling in love with way older men who seemed to be able to give me the fatherly validation that i was missing, but also ending up with men who are aggressive, shouting when theyre angry and letting me down. You seek for these things because these are the situations that you are used to and give you a kind of false comfort.

When i became aware of my problem and seeing my childish needs that were never fullfilled (and sadly developong a personality disorder because at one point you start feeling and acting like you learned it from your parents) I seeked therapy... and it helped me to turn into a well reflected, grown up responsible person. I am obsessed with improvement and my psychological knowledge is probably the most expanded thing about me lol. So i am sometimes a little bit too fixated about "doing the right things" and not letting my chilhood trauma to control my life anymore. But this is also a dangerous thing, as it collaborates with my childish concept that other peoples well being is more important than my own i somehow, like i said before, i felt like being emotionally developed and strong allows me to put up with problematic behaviour and seeing it as a kind of self validation, like being the one who is strong and has the capacity of helping people who are still struggling with their deficits.

But this is SO WRONG. Just because you are strong doesnt mean that your partner/family member/any person has to use your ressources without giving anything in return.

Just because the other person has misconceptions as a side effect of their trauma it gives them NO RIGHT to act their unreflected emotions out!!

YOU ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR OTHER PEOPLES BAD FEELINGS. YOU ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANYONE FEELING "ATTACKED". THEY HAVE NO RIGHT TO ATTACK YOU JUST BECAUSE THEY FEEL ATTACKED.

THEY HAVE NO RIGHT TO ACT IT OUT JUST BECAUSE YOU TRIGGERED THEIR TRAUMA.

EVERYONE HOLDS THEIR OWN ACCOUNTABILITY OF HOW THEY FEEL AND ACT.

A PERSONS ABUSE DOES NOT JUSTIFY ABUSING YOU.

YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE TO TALK ABOUT YOUR NEEDS AND FEELINGS.

And so the roles reversed, i am unvoluntarily often in the role of the caretaker, the mother, the one who has to put away their problems. When i want to critzise someone i have to think about how other people will interpret my critique/problem according their own beliefs and traumata, most people will see it as you attacking them. But me not talking about my problems is not the right solution, it would put me in the same role as i was as a child. So the right way is to take your responsibility to talk about your needs and problems and setting limitations towards the person feeling attacked and the following abusive behaviour against you.

But why is this so hard for so many people? Think about your emotional labour you are bringing up to the table. Think about how many times the other person does not reflect their behaviour. Think about how you ALWAYS have to explain why something is wrong and literally have to play the therapist or mother just because they do not care about their emotional hygiene and they do not take the responsibility of their needy child inside of them. Think about how often you hear "I feel bad because YOU.../I am angry because YOU.../YOU are responsible for how i feel!". Thinking about all the times they are "sorry" but never make any serious attempt to change their situations and keep putting the responsibility for everything on you (and even keep justifying their actions/feelings)

Think about how much energy you spent to "make them feel better" until you realize that this is not your fucking job. Think about how many times you asked yourself if it maybe was your guilt? Think about how many of your expectations they meet, what you get in return? How many times did you think "I have to put up with this because i love this person/they are my family/etc." and you also keep justify their abuse, because you HAVE to be the wrong one? It will ALWAYS create an imbalance in a relationship and you will never be on the same eye level, which is the absolute basic thing any sort of relationship needs.

There is a huge stigma of being the one who acts wrong, so many people do absolutely not want to admit that they did anything bad or are in an abusers position. In my therapy i learned to have a healthy relationship to my mistakes, bad actions do not define me and i have enough self confidence to admit when i am wrong and i am reflected enough to be aware of taking responsibility of it. Thats how learning works. But back to the topic.

That means me putting up with this equals not taking care of my emotional wellbeing. That is my BIG mistake. Ive already lost alot because of my duty to take care of myself and speaking. For example the half of my family. This is a sad thing but i can live with it because i know i acted like a grown up and recognized their false (childish) behaviour. And then comes my emotional labour again: i want them to understand the situation, I HAD to explain that i am not personally attacking them, I wanted to make them feel better by forcing them to think about themselves. I was the one who reflected THEIR feelings.... and putting mine away. I stopped. This was not right. I had to leave them with their misconceptions. I had to leave them with their anger. They are responsible. And i am responsible for saving myself from behaviour like this. You cant be always the understanding person who puts up with everything. You can not achieve/force their understanding. Its not your problem. And not your fault.

(Believe it or not. It is also a misogynistic concept rooted in our society where the woman needs to put up with mens shit, childish behaviour is a thing that is accepted in men, almost expected, so many will not feel the need to think about themselves, seek therapy or seeing anything wrong in their behaviour. It also explains why most of straight couples are more like mother/son relationships because their (aware or not) inner child seeks for a second mother lmao. What i want to say: it is not an indivdual problem, rather a cultural/social one. )

I am still in relations such like that. How does my "romantic and achievable" life look like. It looks like lying in the bed. The whole day. I cannot move, i have zero energy. I have several somatic issues like chronic intestinal and stomach cramps, aching limbs, migraines, fatigue, i am literally never hungry because i am full of emotions that there is no room for food and when i force myself to eat i always have the feeling i need to throw up (not in relation to my bulimic past, its rather the cramps that cause this feeling), my skin is terrible because of my psoriasis which gets worse with every stressful event.

I do nothing. I cant finish my comic. I cant get myself together to make art. I barely response to messages. I often skip class. I have problems to handle a 3 peoples household on my own. I barely do things i enjoy. I isolate myself from people.

Not because i think thats right. I learned how to handle depression issues. But can you imagine how fucking big the impact of emotional labor can be, even on a person who is in good therapy for 10 years?

I try anything. I change my noutrishment, my environment, i pay for medicaments and try to fix these symptomps. But it wont help. You have to work on the root. Take care of yourself. Of YOUR emotional hygiene. Yes, help other people and be supportive but never never ever put yourself away to make others feel better. You can be a loving partner/son/daughter/friend/etc. and STILL take responsibility! You are not a rehabilitation center for other people.

Yes, it is hard to keep the balance. But you will figure it out and will grow!!!

[acehotel]

INTERVIEW: Justin Strauss with Honey Dijon

Honey Dijon is a force of the highest order — brazen, idiosyncratic and sharp as nails, she arrived in New York City during the halcyon days of its club scene and became a beacon of light. Heralded for her cross-genre sets and unparalleled fashion intuition, Honey Dijon effortlessly moves from sculpting runway tracks to creating inclusive, dance-utopias in the club. Her first full-length album, The Best of Both Words, was put out by Classic Music Company to critical acclaim and she’s not stopping — ever. In this edition of Just/Talk, she talks to Ace friend and DJ hero Justin Strauss about being a piece of a revolutionary puzzle, eBay sweaters and the synthesis of art, music and being open to everything. 

Justin Strauss: Let's talk about what brought you to New York from Chicago.

Honey Dijon: What brought me to New York from Chicago was actually nightlife. When I was a teenager, we had a store called Wax Trax! Records and that's where I discovered The Face and i-D, Details and Interview Magazine, all of that stuff.

Justin: What year?

Honey: I'm not giving a year because that would be giving away my age, and we're not going to do that. Like Grace Jones says, it's about an energy.

Justin: We know some of those magazines first appeared in the 80s.

Honey: Yeah, they were the late 80s. So I was like a teenager then. I discovered that when I was about 12 or 13 in the late 80s, I just became completely fascinated with, you know, Stephen Saban’s article on nightlife and the Bill Cunningham photographs, and then I also discovered the early Paper magazines and they were documenting the whole downtown thing. And it was just everything that seemed so exciting, all these artists, musicians, fashion designers and creators, all exchanging information and collaborating. And so I always knew that I would end up in New York, just from these worlds that I would read about.

Justin: What was happening in Chicago?

Honey: The thing that people don't realize is that with early house culture, like most subcultures, people communicated with their clothing. And so if you were house, so to speak, you were really influenced by like a lot of European designers, stuff like Versace, Montana, Ferre, and the French designers like Montana and Gaultier. So actually I learned about fashion through house music, and because these were the clothes that people used to wear, and they used to also appropriate a lot of the lower east side new wave scene from New York as well.

All of these things were tied together. I never, ever separated anything. And so as a young kid growing up at the beginning of house music culture that was emulating the new wave sound from people that went to The Mudd Club and Hurrah, and Danceteria — which was also emulating the English synth bands at the time like Human League, Yaz and Heaven 17 — with the asymmetrical hair cuts and Spandau Ballet, part of the late new romantics. And just reading The NME , i-D, Face, BLITZ, Details and Interview magazines...all of this stuff was so connected, even if the music wasn't the same. It was all of these subcultures in bed with each other. I just always realized that. We had just gotten cable at the time and with “Style with Elsa Klensch” show, the Stephen Sprouse show at the Ritz, it was like someone had dropped a brick on me. It was like I had never seen anything like that. It blew my mind.

And then the Chicago Tribune, which I still have to this day, did this whole article on Stephen Sprouse and Teri Toye and Steven Meisel, and it's like a paper trail. You just keep digging and digging and then things just keep popping up. I knew when I could, I was going to live in New York. And that's what brought me here.

Justin: And had you been here before?

Honey: No, my mom used to work for TWA, and so on my sixteenth birthday, I made my dad take me to New York. I specifically remember, because my uncle used to be a tailor, and so we had all these GQ magazines from the late 70s, and 80s that I would look through and that's when I knew about Macy's, Charivari and Matsuda. I remember going to the store Parachute on Columbus Avenue.

So I'd been here as a teenager, but I had never been here as an adult until I basically moved here. And by that time everything was gone. I didn't move here until 98.

Justin: Were you disappointed?

Honey: No. I moved to DC before I moved to New York, so I used to take the bus up to New York because I was really good friends with Gant Johnson — Gant Johnson’s college roommate lived with Derrick Carter. When I look back at my life, everything fits into place. And so I met Gant Johnson at Rednail, which was the loft that Derrick Carter, Mark Farina, Chris Mazuka and G Most lived in. I was saying, "Oh, I'm moving to DC." And Gant was like, "Well, if you ever come to New York, you can stay with me." And I was really known as a dancer. I was a dancer before DJ, and so when I came to New York to visit Gant, Gant was really involved in the Lower Sast Side scene, the drag scene, at Crow Bar.

When I would come up I’d stay with him in his tiny walk-up on First Avenue and 13th Street, and he sort of just took me around and that's how I started to meet people. And it wasn't the New York that I read about, but it was still very vibrant. It was still pre-Internet, it was still pre-Guiliani. At that time you could go out seven nights a week in New York. So Mondays was Sugar Babies, Tuesdays was Jackie 60, Salon was on Wednesdays, Thursdays was Sound Factory Bar and Fridays was either Twilo or Tunnel, and then Sundays...I forget what was on Sundays. But I literally went out seven nights a week every fucking week. And that's just how New York was at the time. I mean, I didn't get to to Area, I didn't get to go to The Mudd Club, I didn't get to go to all those other places, but I still got to experience a part of New York that is not even here today.

Justin: And what were you doing to support yourself?

Honey: I was working in corporate America. I was managing the mental health benefits for the city of New York employees, for firemen and congressmen. If they needed mental health, their insurance would call and I would negotiate rates with their hospitals for inpatient and stuff. So I had a day job, but that's what I was doing when I left Chicago and moved to DC. I was working during the day, then I would come home and sleep for four hours, and then I would go out on every night.

Justin: And how did going out turn into DJing?

Honey: Well, I'd always bought records since I was a kid. I never threw away any records, and I loved house music because I grew up on house music.

Justin: Musically, what was going on when you were growing up?

Honey: My parents were really young when they had me, so there was always music. But I think growing up in Chicago, especially in a very typical, middle-class, African-American household, music is just on 24 hours a day, every day. Barbecues, dinner, when my mom was cooking, cleaning the house, going to the store, there was constant music. That's where my real music education was from, my parents. My second music education was Cable TV when we had a channel called MV60, and that's when I found about all the English bands and they would play all the early new wave videos. I guess the same stuff that they were playing at Danceteria, I was getting in my living room. Bow Wow Wow, and Scritti Politti, all the early stuff.

So everyone knows jacking, when people say “jack your body.” Before that they called it punking out. Punking out was basically emulating new wave culture from New York. And so it never seemed separate.

Justin: In New York we had The Mudd Club, we had Area, we had Danceteria — did you have clubs that kind of fused that all together?

Honey: Yeah, we had that. We had video bars and stuff like that. We had a club called Bistro One and Two, which was predominantly a teenage 18 and over gay club. It was predominantly white. I mean, as you know, Chicago was very segregated, but since I was already into going to Wax Trax! to buy records by Ministry and Front 242, I was a misfit, in a way. I've always been a misfit. I'm still a misfit. But we had industrial clubs because industrial music was quite big in Chicago, too.

This is why it's so funny for me. I just don't see a separation of anything. That's just how I grew up. And it's so funny, because I grew up in a really black and Latin neighborhood, and I was a misfit. Because I was a queer kid, I was already a misfit. So I found my community of misfits through music and culture.

Justin: When you started DJing, did your DJ sets reflect that diversity?

Honey: Yeah, and they still do. I think I just hone my craft all the while. Definitely how I grew up reflects my approach to music. Well, you ask me when did I start DJing in New York? It's so funny, when I moved here things were so separate, and they weren't separate in Chicago. If you were into soulful house music, you went to Shelter. If you wanted the more tribal, big room stuff, you went to Sound Factory.

Justin: It wasn't always like that.

Honey: Yeah, the gay white kids had all their Circut parties. I don't know if Danny Krivit’s 718 Sessions was around at that time, but people that were into what happened at the Garage and The Loft gravitated towards that party. I just thought, that's not how I experienced music, or was exposed to music. So I just literally started DJing. I'd always bought records. I had a huge record collection just from my love of music. I wanted to DJ because I was not seeing music presented in a way that I had experienced in Chicago, with which was no boundaries. What always amazes me about that is that you had inner city black kids that were so fearless and forward thinking about how they played music to other black kids, because these were marginalized people that were listening to a lot of European music. I found out about the B-52s from other black kids. I found out about all of this music from other black kids, you know?

I always think, does that still happen? Because everyone is so mono-vision right now. Everyone just has tunnel vision about what they like. And so I just started DJing out of necessity of wanting to experience music how I experienced it.

Justin: And where were you playing in New York?

Honey: My very first DJ gig was on Eldridge Street at a place called bOb, that I used to do on Monday nights. I used to call it Chicago House. I got paid 60 bucks a night to DJ for five hours. When I go and DJ somewhere for two hours, I'm like, "You know, in New York, if you were the DJ for the night, you played from beginning to end."

Justin: Well, I do know that.

Honey: I mean that's just the culture of New York, and that's how I learned how to DJ.

Justin: It was really hard for me when that whole thing changed, and then I had to play for two hours. I didn't know how to do it.

Honey: I still don't know how to do it.

Justin: I was like, "Oh, This doesn't make sense." There's no time to build up to something.

Honey: To breathe, or let the music breathe, or connect to the crowd, or set up a vibe.

Justin: I mean I figured it out , but it took a while to really feel comfortable doing that.

Honey: I don't like it.

Justin: It's nice to see there are a few places now letting DJs play the whole night again. In New York, I was DJing at The Mudd Club, and then some friends took me to the Paradise Garage and that changed my whole life and what DJing meant, and I finally understood what this all means. Did you go to the Warehouse in Chicago or was there a club or DJ that made you feel like that?

Honey: I was too young for the Warehouse, but I did have a fake ID. I did get to go hear Ron Hardy once, and I used to hear Frankie Knuckles at different places around the city. But my education, really, in the craft of DJing came from Derrick Carter. Just being in the Loft and seeing him. He used to work at Gramophone Records and when you're a kid, the way kids used to make money, was to make mix tapes and sell them at the store. So I would be around while he made mix tapes. He was really the one that showed me what DJing could be. Him and Mark Farina. Derrick Carter was so fearless back then. I mean he still is amazing. I still have a lot of respect for him, but just beat juggling, and phasing records, and acapellas, and different genres together to make something new, taking a pop vocal and putting it over a techno record. We didn't have names for it. It was just this is what they did.

My second education was when I moved to New York and became really good friends with Danny Tenaglia and seeing him go from playing at Gag on Tuesdays at Sound Factory Bar, to when he blew up into the legend that he is, after he'd just moved back from Miami. And I used to see him play at Twilo, just the theater of presenting music, the drama, the space, the sonics and the tension that he builds. And it was a whole different education for me. And then my other education was at the Body & Soul party, how Joe Clausel manipulated the EQ, and how eclectic Francois K. was, and then Danny Krivit bringing more of a heritage soul vibe with a disco element to it, how just all of these different things sonically worked in the course of a night. And also seeing Victor Calderone, and Peter Rauhoffer play at the Roxy. I was able to see a lot of people DJing in a lot of different environments and different ways, and that was my education that I still carry with me today.

Justin: And the DJ world today, there are so many DJs.

Honey: Everyone would like to say they're a DJ.

Justin: Yeah, well. DJs getting paid incredible fees.

Honey: Millions of dollars.

Justin: Who are "DJs" and have never played a whole night.

Honey: Or to a gay audience, or to a black audience. I remember the first time I played at 718 Sessions, and I literally had all of these people that... There's nothing shadier than when you have a bunch of black queens staring at you with their arms crossed, waiting for you to entertain them, that have been around, that know their musical history. Once you can pass that test, I feel like you can sort of DJ, because these people aren't on drugs. They're very serious about their music, dancing, expressing, and the spirituality in music. But having said that, DJing has gone, and our culture has gone, from a community of marginalized people regardless of race, sexual orientation, economic status, social standing, to a middle-class form of entertainment. And so DJs now are marketable. It's no longer about what music you play... it's just different.

Justin: How would you describe your role as DJ?

Honey: To challenge, educate and entertain.

Justin: You know when people come up to you, "Can you play...do you have?" I'm like, "No. This is not what this is about." They don't get it.

Honey: I feel that a certain generation of people look at DJs as a form of entertainment. You're there for their entertainment and so they feel entitled, especially if they don't have a culture of clubbing and DJing.

Justin: That's an issue.

Honey: They think we're a jukebox.

I'm just going to put this out here, it's normally white women of privilege that are the ones that feel entitled to go to the booth and demand that you play something.

Justin: Shove their phone in your face.

Honey: I've even had people say, "Oh, can you play from my iPod."

Justin: We've all had that.

Honey: It's even harder for me when you do fashion events, because when you're there, they really look at you as you're no different than the busboy or the caterer. I recently did a fashion event and five different women came up to me and asked me to play five different requests that were all from the corporate office. And at a certain point, I just said, "Look, can I just do my job?"

Justin: I think there’s a disconnect. A lot of kids who are into this today have never been to a club. They go to festivals. It's a show.

Honey: And they read blogs, they look at YouTube. And this is a thing, too. I also have to say no. When I listen to a lot of electronic music today, I'm just like, "You've never really danced," because there's no swing and I can just tell the difference between people really experiencing music in a community of people that are there for the same reason.

Justin: I'm all about new music, and there's lots of great stuff being released. So much in fact. It's just filtering through the good and bad, it’s finding the stuff that you connect with, because it's there.

Honey: That's true. You just have to work a bit harder now because I think there were always horrible records, but we didn't have the Internet, and we didn't have the technology that made everyone a producer as well.

Justin: But we had DJs that we would go hear and we trusted his taste, and he would turn us on to new records.That's where you heard music first.

Honey: And record stores.

Justin: Yes! You'd hang out there. "Hey, did you get this?" You had Wax Trax! And Gramaphone in Chicago, we had Vinylmania and others in New York.

Honey: It was the same thing. When I moved to New York and there was Eightball Records, there was Satellite Records.

I remember, literally, you would take a day and go to all the shops. You would have to take a day just to go record shopping because you went to so many different places.

Justin: And the person selling the records knew you and your taste because you shopped there all the time..

Honey: I was always turned on just by hanging out at the record store. I would be at Satellite Records and someone will play record, and I was like, "Oh my God. What is that?" "Oh, it's in the progressive house section." I'm like, "But that's not progressive house." Or then someone will be playing something like, "What record is that?" "Oh, it's in the trance section." I'm like, "Huh?" And that's what I loved about community of DJs is that sometimes you would go and hear things that you never would look for. And I miss that.

Justin: You had an amazing year. You've become an icon.

Honey: Oh, yeah, it doesn't feel like it.

Justin: It's true. And you've worked your very hard to get there. Well deserved.

Honey: Most people forget that this has been a lifelong thing.

Justin: I know that.

Honey: But thank you for saying that. I'm glad, though, that it happened to me at an age where I'm better able to understand what's happening. I feel now that the pressure is really on, because now there's expectations.

Justin: Right. It's like when no one knows who you are, you're like, "Oh, wow. Who are you?"

Honey: There's a sense of freedom, and now I have to live up to what that last DJ set or the last record.

Justin: Do you get nervous before you play?

Honey: I don't get nervous anymore before I play. I'll tell you why. Certain places I get nervous before I play, but my nervousness comes from wanting to do well. Just always wanting to just be my best, and to challenge myself to be better. It doesn't come from me worrying about the crowd, but it just comes from me challenging myself to be better because I still feel like I'm learning. Sometimes I fuck up mixes. Sometimes I feel like I could have EQed this better, or the flow could have been better. I'm always very, very critical of my work. But for so many years people said no. For so many years record labels didn't take my music. For so many years people considered me a gay DJ, so straight venues or festivals weren't booking me. The gays weren't booking me either because I wasn't playing circuit music or pop remixes. So that sort of trained me to really be confident in what I do musically, and it's nice that all of these things are happening to me, but I still feel no different than when people were saying I was shit, or I wasn't good.

I think the only thing that I'm enjoying about success is that I'm able to finally say I'm a DJ, that I make a living as a DJ, and that I don't have to worry about what my next two months of gigs are going to look like or calling my agent, “why am I not being booked.” And there's still places that I want to play that aren't booking me, there's still things that I want to do...

The funny thing about what's happening, is that just now my name is higher up on the bill. It's the same clubs, the same people. It's just now my name placement is different. And so I look at it very much like that. And it's nice that I make a little bit more scratch, and my name's higher on the bill, but it's the same shit.

Justin: And how does being transgender come into play in the DJ world?

Honey: It is my life, but I think there's just been a lack of conversation about diversity in our culture for so long. I think we've plateaued with just straight white men running the show, musically, culturally, artistically. And I think one of the great things about social media is that it's given a lot of different people a lot of different voices. It's not just a trans thing, but women, women of color, queer women, queer people, gender nonconforming people, non-binary people, now have avenues to have their voice heard and not have someone filter that voice. I have to say, I don't live my life as a professional trans person.

I find it's the least interesting thing about me. I know that people are interested in that part of it, but if I wasn't who I was, I wouldn't have been exposed to music the way I have been. I came up at a time when that music was specifically black, gay, Latin and queer. And if I wasn't queer, I wouldn't have been able to hear music presented in that way in those environments. So my marginalization has actually benefited me in a lot of ways, and now, having a platform to be able to talk about what that's been like and give voices to those people, it's not about me anymore. I really feel like I'm just carrying and giving visibility to the people that have always been there and have always done this shit.

Justin: You're here to carry on the tradition.

Honey: I'm a piece of the puzzle. I mean I'm not so egotistical that I think that I'm the only one, or anything, but I'm a piece of the puzzle. I mean, when Frankie Knuckles died, to me that was the last black, gay DJ. We only really have one left, which is Derrick Carter, just still carrying on that information from that time.

I'm supposed to curate a lineup soon of DJs, queer people playing disco, and I couldn't think of anyone that really has the experience of presenting disco in that way because the club culture that nourished that is gone globally. Those rooms and those energies are gone globally. So it informs my work, but it doesn't define it.

But there's likely less than 20 people. It's a very small pool. And as far as a trans artist is concerned, I don't know of anyone else that just comes from what I come from. So I feel like it's important for me to play how I play, to play the music that I play, because if I don't do it, it won't get out there. A lot of people don't like it. A lot of people like it.

Justin: Well, obviously a lot of people are liking it now.

Honey: Well, more people are hearing about it, so it's nice. But again, I'm just a piece of the puzzle.

Justin: And let's talk about fashion and music, because I grew up with that, and for me that goes hand-in-hand.

Honey: Of course.

Justin: They inspire each other, and like you I live in a house full of magazines and books, and it's influenced my music, my productions. But fashion, like music, has became part of mainstream culture.

Honey: It was more elitist back then.

Justin: Now, like DJing, everyone's a fashion expert.

Honey: Well, now you don't even have to know the craft or design as long as you have surface and visuals, social media presence, celebrity.

Justin: I mean your social media is very focused on fashion, as well as the things that inspired you, that still do inspire you.

Honey: Sometimes I feel that I'm at odds with my social media. Like, "Why am I always posting old shit?" Do you know what I mean? And sometimes I have a problem with that. It's very fashion-focused, but it's music-focused, too. It's heritage music focused. I think I post a lot of that stuff because, to me, they're forgotten sources of inspiration and a lot of people appropriate that work without giving respect to the source. But I'm so envious that you lived in a time when it was the apex of fashion art and music, everyone slept in bed together.

And you really had to have a talent to be even considered. And to me, that doesn't exist anymore. I think fashion has become so commercial and corporatized now. When I do a lot of fashion events it's like DJing a wedding. They want familiar things, and if I play anything with a 4/4 kick drum, even if it's a disco record, they associate that with techno and they have no idea what the fuck techno is. So even though I love clothing, I love fashion, whenever I got into it, I was like, "Who did the hair? Who did the makeup? Who took the picture? Who styled the photo, the composition, the model?" So for me it was more about image making. I was so obsessed with Jean-Paul Goude, and it was just about art and image making. There was always this fine line and a crossover between the two.

Even my favorite bands, what they looked like was just as important as the cover art and what they sounded like. I never, ever separated any of those things, so I try to do that as an artist. I try to be a 360 with art and the use of fashion. I love clothing. I don't love it as much as I used to because I feel like what's happened in fashion has become so democratized and also so corporatized, now there's no soul to what's happening. I wouldn't say there's no soul for me. I don't want to speak for others because someone else they might feel differently. But we're just living in a different time. We didn't have social media back then. We didn't have the Internet back then, and so you actually had to have a point-of-view. You had to research, you had to dig, you had to find a like-minded community of people that felt the same way about these things, instead of just logging on or just scrolling on your phone, having all this information there.

I find that when you find something, when I would discover a designer or something that no one knew about, it just sort of was like a badge of honor for me because it felt like my thing. It felt like I was creating my own thing for me, and it wasn't about someone giving it 100 likes or someone wanting to brand it, or make money from it. It was just my self-expression. I found it, I nurtured it, I let it evolve and that was my thing. And then you met other people that did their thing, and then you came together and created this new thing out of your own thing. And now everyone has access to the same looks, the same designers, so everyone's just basically recycling the same shit that everyone else is doing.

Justin: So how do you stand out and be an individual today? How do you deal with being a misfit today?

Honey: I think being a misfit today is easier. It's easier to be a misfit because of social media. You don't need a magazine editor or the record label to say, "Yes, this is good." You can just do your own thing. So I think there's a great amount of freedom in being a misfit today. However, everyone being different is actually everyone being the same.

I had to go out to Brooklyn yesterday and I took the bus, because I had to go to IKEA, and I saw this kid on the bus who was such an amalgamation of so many different things. He was a Latin kid with gold fronts, but two ponytail poofs, grills, tattoos all over his neck, baggy clothes, but then a beeper. Then he had on a plastic back rave backpack. And I just thought, wow. I don't think he knew how many different things he had mixed together. He had a beeper.

I just thought, wow, he's like cyber punk, but punk, but then hip hop, but then drug dealer. It felt really fresh to me. He wasn't styled. It was a bit rough. It was raw. But I felt something.

Justin: It's funny because you just see everyone looking the same these days. You get on the subway car and half the car is wearing whatever the goose jacket is. It's a uniform, they all want to look the same. When I was a kid, I just didn't want to look like just anybody else.

Honey: Well, I buy a lot of stuff on eBay now, just because I've been finding old Parachute clothes and old Kansai Yamamoto sweaters. I always liked clothing that was associated with cultural movements and expressions. I think why I love dressing so much like the 70s is because it reminds me of when people dressed up to go get laid and go out to get drugs, made an effort to go dancing. Dressed up to go out.

Now everyone dresses to get their photograph on Instagram or a style blog. There was a really good article recently about how all of these girls, and these style blog stars, they're basically given fashion by corporate companies. It's just a different way of advertising. Most of the people that are photographed are thin, white women that these companies are trying to sell to other thin, white women. You have to go out to Red Hook, or Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, just to find more real street-style. And these kids are just living their lives — I find that so refreshing.

Justin: Is anything in musically inspiring you right now?

Honey: I feel like as a house music DJ, a lot of my music is percussion-based, and there's not a lot of melody. I mean, there is dance music that is made that way, but I've been listening to a lot of Alice Coltrane, Carole King, Phoebe Snow. Just going back and listening to the music that had great lyrical content and reflected on the political landscapes of the times. Especially in our political climate now, there's a lack of music that is consciousness music. So I've been sort of turned on by that.

And there's a few techno producers that I like. There's this kid called Wbeeza who's from Peckham, which is like the Brooklyn of London. I love his stuff. There's another producer from London called Loan, I love his stuff. Most of the stuff, for me, is still European. I miss the days when we had a New York sound. The last DJ or producer that came out of New York that I liked was Galcher Lustwerk.

Justin: He's great.

Honey: I like his stuff. He's really cool.

Justin: Yeah, I heard his stuff, and I didn't know him, and I just wrote him a message on SoundCloud one day, and I said, "You don't know me. I don't know you. But I'm a big fan of your music." And he wrote me back and we connected.

Honey: One of my songs on my album was inspired by him and I wanted him to do the vocals, but it just never happened.

Justin: That's the one of the best  things about the Internet. That people can connect with you who have been touched in some way by your work.

Honey:  Even connecting with older artists — I don't like that word. Heritage artists. I became friends with the Dj Bruce Forest that way, through social media. And people like you, and I've been able to connect to things that I love. I don't like to live in the past, but I like to take inspiration from that time.

Justin: Yeah, I'm all about that.

Honey: Because I don't believe in a timeline. If you look at physics, the past, the present and the future all exist on the same plane. So I just look at music and art like that. I can still look at a Gustav Clement photo, as well as a Mapplethorpe, as well as something that's happening today, and it all still feels the same to me. I don't separate them. And just like I can listen to 1920s swing music, I can listen to 70s rock, I can listen to what's happening today. All of it informs to everything for me. I just think if you're an artistic person, it all feeds the source.

[dolly-decadatia]

Witch journal: 2/2/21

“The word February is based on the Latin februa and refers to the Roman festival of purification of the same name. .. Since ancient times, February has been observed as a month of cleansing, cleaning, and preparation for the warm months ahead... Do whatever it takes to stay on top of your game, keep energized, cultivate happiness and embrace February’s cleansing rebirth!”

That is so significant to me at this time. I’m spending February (and beyond probably) detoxing from 3 different substances with horrid discontinuation effects/ withdrawals, regrowing my hair, losing weight, and the painful rebirth of not only gender identity from binary to nonbinary but also as a person because I’m going to be a completely different person by the end of this year. It feels significant that February, the month I enter my cocoon, has historically always been about cleansing and rebirth.

The actual spell of the day has me “peeking my head out to see what lies ahead” on honor of Groundhog Day and saying a cute little rhyming couplet. It says I can use a tarot or oracle deck. I don’t yet own tarot cards but I do have a vampire themed oracle deck that I got for Krampusnacht. I haven’t yet learned to read it but this seems like a good nudge to do so.

This is the first time I’ve read anything about oracle cards. There’s guardian vampiric spirits called Les Vampires who are attached to the guards and want to work with me/ help me. I almost cried reading about them. I’ve been so lonely and so disconnected and now I’m about to have guardian vampires. That’s all I’ve wanted literally my entire life. I’ve been devastated since I’ve been unable to get home to my astral world Decadatia to see all my tulpas. I need this so badly.

Under “What Les Vampires Will Help You With”:

“One of their wonderful attributes, because of their own struggle in overcoming their hunger, is that they can help you to overcome habits that have held you back, or created illness, division and discord in your life. They also allow you to honestly undertake a kind of self inventory, where you will forgive yourself for the seemingly harmful or selfish actions you may have taken throughout this lifetime.”

I cannot express how badly I need Les Vampires love.

I will need to ceremonially bless my deck before using it.

1) cleanse your reading space with smoke or candle burning.

2) light incense. When the smoke is billowing nicely, pass your cards through thrice saying

“Les Vampires of thee I ask

To help me now with this my task”

3) shuffle with intention, stirring your current energy into the cards. (If reading for someone else, have them shuffle)

4) choose between a three card reading (The Trinity), 1 card (Light in the Darkness), 13 card (the Path through the Night) or 5 card (Byzantine Cross).

4b) Then (today only because of Spell a Day) recite:

“Groundhog groundhog

Get out of your bed

And help me to see

Just what lies ahead”

5) Thank the vampires for working with you. (And Deities if you have any.)

Today’s reading:

I chose The Trinity layout. My cards were sequential so I was afraid that my shuffle was bad but all 3 ended up being relevant.

Card 1 to the left: the Underneath: the past

Card 2 middle: The Heart- what is taking place right now/ central issue in the situation.

Card 3: The Promise- the future manifestation of the situation currently taking place.

Underneath: Rebellion

First impression without reading book- I vibed. I had Spike as a tulpa for 13 years. I see fangs and Rebellion and I instantly think of him not only for his extraordinary victory during the Boxer Rebellion, but also his core personality.

Actual Meaning: I’m tired of following the rules when this following is bringing me no closer to the adventures and solutions I wish to discover. I must rebel. I must forge my own path. “What lies before you is a fork in the road, which you will not take to be defiant, or to create dissonance. You follow it because it is the path of your heart... you simply take the the turn the others do not, and you begin to walk alone. It is lonely but the false camaraderie of conformity you leave behind frees you and offers you true moments of joy rather than false comforts.

In the very recent past I let go of the hrt despite being trans. I am pro hrt for other people and always will be but I got sick from it, abdominally obese, and bald. The only positive effect was the stopped periods and I live in dread of them returning. Beyond that I fought. I fought so hard to pass. It consumes me. I wore painful binders before my top surgery, I wore uncomfortable and ugly masc clothing, I eschewed makeup and nail polish and kept my nails and hair short and ugly. I let it go. I’m wearing what I want, using they/ them pronouns, and healing up from what hrt and ssri did to me. This is a very recent rebellion so I’m not surprised it’s in my immediate past card. And yes, it is lonely. There’s certain shitheads both cis AND trans that are terrible to nonbinary people. I’m opening myself up their mockery and aggression. I’m opening myself to constant misgendering and micro aggressions because I like to look good more than I am desperate to be called Sir. I feel very isolated.

Heart: Hunter

“There is a part of you that feels this falsehood that in order to become some thing there must be a death of which you will be the cause. That there is competition in need and that you can only have what you long for if someone else can no longer have it... there is always a way to find what we need without taking it from another. There is without you now an urge to win a competition where you feel there may be only one survivor but there are other ways through to the goal you desire...

The Chase must be of that part of your character which when hunted down and integrated will give you what you like in order to create what you need.... It is natural and wise to allow the part of you that is active and strong and forceful to have expression it is time to actively seek that what you want to see how far your strength can take you.”

I must chase what I desire in me. Time for reflection and Shadow Work. I don’t know exactly what I want. In this moment I think I want

1.) attention

2:) admiration

3:) Simps

4:) friendship

5:) inner peace

6:) painless body

7:) attractiveness

These are all things I need to hunt in myself. I must befriend myself after being self critical and self cruel forever. I must lavish myself with love, validation, and praise. I must do what I can to heal my body with food, rest, etc.

Promise: Prey

“ And your culture at this time there is a theory that those were harmed or hurt have somehow attracted that to themselves. oh how the hunters love this argument.”

Oh fuck this resonates so deeply.

“And this is what we have come to warn you of. we have come to tell you that there’s one who sees you as prey and they see themselves as a hunter and the more they can persuade you that you wish to play this role and that is your fault the more powerful they will become. This card comes forth when one has been groomed to be hurt.”

This is me. I’m the groomer. I’ve been so desperate for attention I’ve been trolling the hard kink side of nsfw Twitter. I’m trying to sink myself into subspace which is fine when it’s done healthily but I’m doing it self destructively. I’m putting myself in danger again. I’m literally acting like prey.

The cards say it’s time to stand up to a bully but the only one bullying me is me. I’m going to stand up to myself.

“Do not allow yourself to be prey for another’s hunger. Do not refuse to help yourself or fall into patterns of victimhood. Take good advice, demand what is yours by rights- including innocence and be strong in the face of the one who devour you. You cannot always win but the greatest battle you face at present is the one within you that says I give up nothing ever goes my way. It can and it will when you believe you’re worth fighting for. “

So I can interpret two meanings. 1) I need to stop putting myself in actual sexual/ emotional danger online. 2) I need to stop bullying and devouring myself. If I don’t steer off the path I’m on my future is me being victimized by myself and the world.

Thank you Les Vampires for the warning. I will heed your wisdom.

[davidfostercomedyblog]

How I Got Into Stand-Up Comedy - A Personal Memoir

I got into comedy because my Probation Officer made me stop smoking weed.

Alice Corrigan, a wicked witch of a corrections officer whose reputation was well known in my high school. “You got Corrigan?! Fuck, sorry dude.”

I loved weed, and continued to smoke through my first year after sentencing, carelessly trying to fool the tests via substances like Goldenseal, Test Pure, and/or gallons of water the night before each meeting. I’d strain to abstain from my beloved herb for 24 hours, then on the ride home from the Corrections office light up in joyous release, rapping along to some rap lyrics that denounced authority.

But Corrigan was no fool, probably why everyone hated her. After about 18 months of our cat-and-mouse game of urine testing, my mother woke me up one morning holding the (portable) phone in my face.

“It’s Alice Corrigan.”

Rude awakening.

“Hello?” I answered, trying to invoke sounds of maturity and sobriety all into two syllables.

“Hi, David. I need you to come in today by 2:00 for a random drug test.”

Long pause: Random drug test. Isn’t that an oxymoron?

It was my friend, Nick’s birthday the day before, and we spent the night on my porch listening to the new Cypress Hill album, attempting to match their lyrics in actual smoke. Alice filled my reflective gap.

“These are mandatory, so I’ll see you as soon as possible.” She was so cold, so adult, so stern and unforgiving. I hated her so much.

“Oh, okay, no problem,” I answered, trying not to reveal my devastation.

“I’ll see you later,” she hung up.

I proceeded to pound gallons of water, desperate for a miracle, only to be told at our next scheduled appointment that my hyper-hydration was for naught. I came up positive, much as I apparently had in many tests for several months prior. One more positive test would constitute a “violation,” which meant at least a brief period of jail time, which was a line for me.

I enjoyed the adrenaline rushes of graffiti writing and shoplifting but wasn’t cut out for prison. I was rambunctious and experimental, arguably damaged and angry - but with a 1240 SAT (imagine if I hadn’t smoked weed all night the night before) I knew I was better suited for zoot suits than jumpsuits. A prison sentence, no matter how brief, was out of the question. I quit smoking weed.

For a while I was bored and depressed, confused as to how to fill this void that copping, rolling, smoking and occasionally selling weed had done before. Fortunately it was around this time that I met E and moved into Manhattan.

The 90’s were arguably New York’s “sweet spot,” when it was becoming safe enough to always go about your business and enjoy yourself, but also pre-7-11 stores and gentrification, and the culturally rich neighborhoods that once made the city into the capital of the world still retained their integrity. The Lower East Side was still inhabited by broke artists, and E had grown up in Greenwich Village, which believe it or not still boasted some shady blocks where you had to be street smart.

E’s crew of friends could have shown up in a picture under “cool” in the dictionary. They were the best of both worlds, mostly private school educated, but equally street savvy: A racially diverse group of 18 year olds who’d grown up as much on downtown pool halls and hip hop as they did on independent film study and fine literature. They had nicknames for one another and secret handshakes and genuinely scoffed at ideas of style or dialectic parameters based on skin color. I thought they were perfect. I was as quickly accepted by them as I was influenced, and before I knew it my wardrobe was more urban, dialect more slang, and for the first time in my life I wasn’t embarrassed about sounding smart. 

E and I became inseparable besties, literally overnight (on a magic mushroom trip), and frankly, I wanted to be him. He was mixed, Hispanic and white, but when you grew up in New York, dressed in all Polo and North Face gear, and referred to all guys as “niggas,” you’re just “Spanish.” He was the most charismatic, which made him the unofficial leader of our crew. His energy dominated every cypher, and he was as popular with the film nerds as he was with black thugs and girls of all backgrounds. Handsome and stylish, E didn’t need to be hilarious to get laid, but he was – funny bordering on psychotic even. We had many drunken nights downtown with the local pool hall crew that would leave my head spinning the next morning, not only in literal hangover, but also psychological reflection of who I was, who I’d been to this point, and wanted to be going forward.

Without weed I felt mentally clearer, sharper and wittier, more creative. E’s words began coming out of my mouth and mannerisms through my body. I noticed people laughing more at my jokes, gravitating more to my energy and deferring to me in conversation, and what 18 year old wouldn’t enjoy this?  

Funny is a muscle like any other. We all have it, though some of us with a greater potential than others. Two guys can go to the gym together every day for two years and do the same exercises and will come out not looking the same. One’s biceps will be bigger than the other’s. Maybe the other’s legs will be stronger. One will have lost a lot of hair. The other did not. They look at each other constantly, almost as much as they do the mirror, coveting that which contemporary women deem more attractive. They go home and listen to bad music. They have simple jobs and terrible conversations, small penises and an embarrassing medicine chest. They’re unhealthy, too big, uninformed. I digress.

E introduced me to Manhattan Public Access, which up until the advent of Youtube and iphones, was a reputable vessel amongst our generation. Everyone who was anyone was up on the few dope shows that aired weekly on one of the free (uncensored) networks. Spic N’ Spanish, Sam Kellerman Live (RIP), and most close to home, Baby Show, which was produced by another crew of arrogant Greenwich Village kids that E knew from childhood. They would run around town with their video camera making comedy sketches, then air them as a half hour variety show, a pre-recorded, low-budget, uncensored SNL, if you will. Skits were hit-or-miss (also like SNL), but they were always interesting, vulgar but smart, and obviously having tons of fun. I decided for the upcoming Christmas to ask my parents for a video camera.

Over the next two years E and I made about 50 sketches (with the help of our crew). We wrote our first (awful) screenplay and laughed harder with one another than either of us had before in life. We worked hard and often, and my mind’s generation of ideas seemed infinite in the absence of weed. I understand many other artists have the opposite experience, which is just one example of how one size can never fit all, whether with diet, medicine, or otherwise. Marijuana became as distant a memory as an ex-girlfriend you know you’d made the right decision about.

We became instant stars (within our crew). Everyone looked forward to seeing the next joint. We’d hold screenings at crew headquarters, and a subtle “sibling rivalry” even developed, i.e. Who do you like better? Q-Tip or Phife? Havoc or Prodigy, etc.? E or Sauce?I knew I could never compete with E, though others would occasionally say otherwise.

Sadly, I don’t think our friendship was as emotionally rewarding for him, but served as more of a temporary band-aid for his own inner turmoil. When we turned 21 E got more into alcohol and girls, and who could blame him? Girls loved him and he loved liquor, and apparently handled them both very well. I was slightly less tolerant of booze and much less attractive to the opposite sex, subsequently less enamored with the bar and party scene that didn’t seem to reflect the urban identity I’d always aspired to anyway. For the first time a divide had formed between my best friend and I that I didn’t know how to respond to. E would regularly wake me up in the middle of the night with drunken messages on my answering machine, often times a girl’s equally intoxicated laughter in the background; a live audio reminder of my un-coolness and unattractiveness, and worst of all, the inception of my falling out with my brother.

“Saaaaauce! Where are you, Sauce?

Hot, drunk girl: “Where are you Sauce?!”

“Come out, nigga, we miss you!”

Long pause, as I lay in the dark room staring at the answering machine, feeling 40 years old at 20, probably angry that I didn’t believe he really did miss me.

“Aight… pussy-ass nigga,” and I feared that he meant it, or that I agreed, or it was objectively true. 

Was I was a pussy-ass nigga?  

E became an alcoholic. He would black out and have episodes where he’d insult or try to fight me, spewing whatever resentments he apparently harbored in sobriety. I never knew how to respond, whether to laugh it off as brotherly jabs and repress the upset I felt, or react more alpha, consistent with the hip hop culture we’d all immersed ourselves in. Usually I’d get stuck in the middle, leaving me more confused and insecure in my identity than I had since freshman year high school. E’s behavior grew more erratic and I would shut down, unable to compete or keep up with his intoxicated mania that would occasionally embarrass me in front of mutual friends. After one such incident that took place in my room I looked out the window at the sun coming up on another drunken night and saw him and Tre still downstairs on 13thStreet, leaned up against Tre’s car smoking cigarettes. I was unable to fall asleep, too angry and hurt and unable to make peace with how insulted I felt. Finally, I ran downstairs with the intention of attacking and fighting him, but by the time I got to the block they were gone. I was glad it apparently wasn’t meant to be. Eventually my anger transformed into sadness, and although our tight knit crew continued to chill, our brotherhood was over. E was the worst best friend I’ve ever had.

As I sought to fill the void left by the video camera collecting dust in my closet, my college Film Writing teacher suggested to me: “There are other routes to success in entertainment besides improv skits. Have you ever tried stand-up?”

It sounded preposterous, and I was naïve enough to think my teacher must not have been aware of the shy little boy that still existed within me – also young enough to believe that shyness or anxiety are mutually exclusive to courage.

One year later I started dating a girl whose mom had been a heroin addict for 17 years. Over the course of our time together I heard many stories from both sides, of the hell Mom put her daughter through growing up. They were probably the biggest fans of my jokes I’d ever had, hysterically laughing at nearly everything I said and did, thus encouraging me with their loud Nuyorican flamboyancy. We dated just long enough for me to realize how funny I was, also how lucky I’d been to have the parents and opportunities I did. I was given everything (tangible) a human being could ask for. Why should I not pursue the most difficult thing in the world?

One night shortly after we’d broken up I stayed home to watch a Richard Pryor special, in hopes of lifting my spirits. Not only did it obviously achieve said goal, I was mesmerized by his ability. While on stage Pryor seemed to me to personify “alive.” He looked so free and engaged, so courageous and perfect in his proverbial dance with the crowd and his material. I watched him take risks and rule his space, all the while exhibiting the joy of a child, and thought to myself: That’s it. That is the perfect vessel by which to taste life. I had no choice. The following week one night while E was out drinking I hit my first open mic.

If you’ve never waited three hours to do three minutes for three angry people in a dimly lit room devoid of any energy then you’ve never lived. Actually you’ve never metaphorically died the comedy death that is most open mikes. Truly it is awful, piercing deeper into our souls than just performance nightmares, but as existential crises, stomping on our egos, leaving us with the indigestible knowledge that we can never get back those few minutes of life. For the moment all worry and doubt of our talents are replaced with a bittersweet conviction that we are in fact definitely wasting our time.

A number of comics seated gaps apart from one another around the periphery of the room, faces buried in their notebooks, preoccupied with their own creative agendas while your material through the microphone resonates as nothing more than white noise. Every joke seems to receive the same one or two laughs from the same two or three sweethearts, their sympathetic contrivances bouncing around the room, ironically transforming its tone from awkward to dismal. Once in a while pops in a more veteran comic, unforced to wait his turn and the nerds perk up, temporarily uncovering their faces to actually pay attention. Consistent with their greenness, laughter is given as automatically as it is from laypeople to the Chappelle’s and Seinfeld’s of the world. They either assume his punch lines to be funny before they arrive, are just desperately attempting to connect with the comic in any way, or both. As soon as the popular guy leaves you can practically hear the plunder of energy, the re-separation of attention, sighs plunging back into future discarded material and half-attention (at best) to the poor schlep forced to go next.

The only thing harder than performing for fellow comedians is performing for fellow comedians who are waiting to go on stage; and the only thing harder than that is performing for comedians who are waiting to go on stage and don’t know you enough personally to give your new banter any shred of credence. These are not real people, for all intents and purposes, which can make it impossible to get an accurate read on how your new material or yourself will ever be received by real people. Maria Shehata once posted a joke (on Facebook) I’ll never forget. Some well-built, grown man challenged her to punch him in the stomach as hard as she could. She did so, and caught him off guard with her strength. “He didn’t realize how many open mikes I’ve done.”

Wednesdays’ “Train Wreck” at The Parkside Lounge on Houston and Attorney St. was appropriately named. Located so distally on the outskirts of the Lower East Side, by the time I arrived I barely felt like I was any longer in New York, especially because the inside of it always reminded me of some Midwestern bar. Fat, old, white men in beards and plaid shirts lined most of the bar in front of a thin, buxom blonde who looked good only at first glance, the TV’s above her head showing sports highlights or the News. The occasional Bud Light-guzzling, 50-year old black guy walks by, his afro not at all kept to uphold any of the standards of contemporary urbanites. The jukebox played a lot of Lynard Skynard, or maybe it was just stuff I thought was Lynard Skynard, and my post-adolescent mind could do nothing but define myself via harsh (silent) judgment of it.

As if some illegal black market we partake in, the comedy room was located through a dark narrow hallway of bathrooms, then behind a curtain in the back room. Sign-up was at 5:30 with “showtime” at 6, and I can recall some weeks walking purposely slow to the venue so as to convince myself that I’d tried my best, but arrived too late for sign-up. The handful of times I braved to punctuality ended up being awful bombs of silence that ate at my core for the remainder of that night.

“Sauce, have you ever been racially profiled as a wigger?” the host once asked after my set, and everyone laughed for the first time since I’d gotten on stage.

I wasn’t prepared to feel so small and didn’t know if I should risk retorting. Instead I remained mum, and it reminded me of the drunken, belligerent insults I’d had to absorb from my best friend during the past year. I felt like the new kid being pointed and laughed at by all the other cookie-cutter students who’d known each other for years. I felt I was being made fun of by the lames for being different, but I had no way to prove so, and was unable to laugh at myself.

In my 15 years in comedy to come, at the Parkside was the only time I was heckled by a comic. It was an Indian girl, a bit older than me, a regular, familiar face in the front row, who interrupted midway through my set: “Do you know that you’re white?”

Her remark got only a couple of laughs from the room, I assumed because even if the majority appreciated her sentiment, her timing was inappropriate. You don’t heckle fellow comics.

“I do,” I responded to her, able to muster only a hint of sarcasm through my lack of confidence. She’d hit a nerve. As my blood boiled I quietly finished my set, minutes later walking home, cursing out the Indian girl, as well as myself, rationalizing that I was “too real,” too authentic, and the act of stand-up was too contrived for me. It wasn’t for me. I figured I’d return to improve. A few months would heal this wound, and eventually I made my way back in time for sign-up.

At home life was worse, as I’d made the mistake of moving in with E. Our dynamic was fractured, probably by both of our hatreds for him, and I’d completely lost track of my voice. I felt like I was always bombing. I had no confidence, no sense of identity, and practically walked on eggshells when E was home, for fear of being derided in a way that emasculated my vulnerable ego. I’d gone from expressing the best version of myself to the worst version of myself and it was the inception of my anxiety disorder: An overwhelming head rush that would come on either at random and linger throughout the day, or during acute moments of social anxiety. I had no idea how we’d gotten to this place, and at 23 years old even less of an idea of how to climb out of it.

I consider February 13, 2002 to be when I actually started doing comedy. It was a different open mike, Gladys’, on W. 46thSt. in Times Square, known to be “one of the better mikes” in town – a spot I’d already bombed at once the week before.

For some reason beyond my awareness, for the first time in my life I killed from the first sentence out of my mouth. Something must have clicked, or maybe it was just dumb luck of the first joke hitting then riding the wave of confidence instilled by the unanimous laughter. From start to finish the entire five minutes was an out of body experience, watching myself delivering my words and the crowd responding as if I knew what I was doing; almost reminiscent of how it feels to lose our virginity. It isn’t that we’re unable to enjoy the moment, but the experience is clouded by the mental joy for its significance. It is literally unbelievable.

As I walked on air to the back of the room, overhearing my name repeated into the microphone by the host and the sincere applause that followed, I was stopped by a tall, friendly black dude, Max.

“That was great, man.”

“Thanks.” This must be what happens when you don’t suck.  

“Are you available tomorrow night?” he asked.

Huh? “Sure,” I responded with a contrived calmness, and he booked me for a $25 spot on a Valentine’s Day show at some local bar in Castle Hill in the Bronx.

He’s gonna give me $25 to do comedy?! Literally 10 minutes ago I had under my belt about 15 shitty spots over the course of two years and no clue as to whether I could ever have a good one. Ha… sucker!

“Thanks, man, I’ll see you tomorrow!”

I invited Tre to the show, and it wasn’t only because he’s black. He was also my other roommate, had nothing else to do and a car, which would save me a late night train ride home from the Bronx (something I had no idea would be in store on a weekly basis for years to come). I purposely did not invite E – not that he would have come if I had – but his presence would have made me that much more nervous. Instead, Tre was neutral.

The show was at a typical Castle Hill neighborhood bar, probably 60% Puerto Rican, 40% black, and one white person. Familiar hip hop blasted from the DJ booth as the majority of the patrons all fraternized and flirted, or freaked each other to the funky rhythms filling the fortress. How fun! A quaint little room, though not offensively so, the “stage” was set next to the bar and facing out to a handful of tables while the rest paralleled the bar traveling stage right.

The bouncer was friendly enough, and gratitude washed over me when I saw Max immediately after walking in the door. Like I’d just spotted my friends’ table in the school cafeteria, I gave him a pound and hug that I hoped everyone else in the room noticed. He greeted Tre and directed us to two empty seats at the bar, almost directly in front of the wooden box they’d be using as a stage. We ordered a couple of beers and I tried to act like I wasn’t terrified.

I was told I’d be going on second and instantly wished I could get up and walk around, go outside to pace, or just be anywhere besides the confined physical position I was in. I learned later in my career that I absolutely could have. Instead I sipped my beer and felt it mildly settle my nerves as I struggled to pay attention to one word anyone before me said. I remember a Puerto Rican comedian making a joke about my being the only white guy, though amiably padding it with a compliment and head nod of camaraderie. He had a decent set, and none of this had any impact whatsoever on my internal state. As he finished and Max came back up my panic set it, and I realized I wasn’t seated far enough way from the stage for this degree of nervous energy to be walked off.

As Max introduced me the DJ played the new hit single by Jadakiss and Bubba Sparxxx, a white rapper from down south (surely not a coincidence), and for some reason I felt like I’d look more nervous if I didn’t dance. My nerves produced some idiotic, upper body dance moves that had to be atrociously caught somewhere in between serious and mockery. I was a damned fool, surely looking as amateur as I did white, but I got lucky. The crowd bought my faux confidence, misinterpreting it as organic from this goofy white boy with whom they were too unfamiliar to detect the difference.

I did the same jokes as I had the night before, which was really the only jokes I had, which was five minutes about the perks of dating a girl who already had a boyfriend (the ex-heroin addict’s daughter). It was hacky and simple and delivered with a hokey animation, but for the setting it was perfect. Every joke hit even harder than the night before. I got laughs on set ups and punch lines, and in between bits even my defense mechanism persona of laissez faire facial expressions sent many of the women into hysterics. I “had them,” as we say, and it became fun. I was killing.

I’d never experienced anything like it before. Once killing, we reach a point where the crowd no longer cares how clever each joke is, but instead they’ve fallen in love with us. Who we are begins to shape our material instead of the material shaping who we are, and our listeners reward us with a benefit of doubt not dissimilar to what we get from close friends. I’m sorry to break the news, but this is also why it’s erroneous when laypeople take pride in having just “made the comedian laugh.” First, we’re not necessarily funnier than every non-comedian in the world. We’re just the ones who chose stand-up comedy as a pursuit. Second, and more to the point, in a social engagement there’s a good chance that welikeyou,your personality and energy. We might even love you and/or are warmly responsive. This doesn’t mean our laugh is sympathetic or your joke is not funny, but “making the comedian laugh” is not the equivalent of knocking out the boxer. In the exchange of humor the importance of connection cannot be overstated. I digress.

Tre and I stuck around until the end of the show, basking in my glory. Max paid me the $25 in cash, and it felt like $25,000 in my hand. I couldn’t believe someone had just given me money to do comedy, but even more appreciated were the pounds and hugs I received on my way out. I could feel Tre proudly walking behind me; also some of the women in the room eyeing me, and I didn’t want the night to end. I suggested to Tre that we go to Club Passion, downtown. “My treat!”

Club Passion was a ghetto strip club on 8thAvenue. For clarification purposes, “ghetto” strip club does not imply only the strippers’ ethnicity, but also the nature of the club. Instead of a traditional strip club setting, Passion functioned basically like a party filled with male customers and extremely forward, sexy women in thongs and lingerie whose job it was to “work the floor.” Whoever happened to be on the stage and pole at any given time was usually the least paid attention to, as fly girls were all over the room grinding on guys for dollars at a time; and most touching was permitted, if not encouraged.

It was one of the greatest nights of my life, instilling in me a pride and self-confidence that seemed to heal all of my wounds from my fractured friendship with E, and filled the void left by our defunct skit productions. His habits and lifestyle continued in the same direction but our friendship began to feel like a friendship again, mostly because I’d discovered in myself a strong sense of purpose and pride, and even my anxiety symptoms got a lot better and less frequent. I was a comic, better yet an “urban comic,” and (thought) I was good at it! I felt happy for the first time in two years, and we developed a new dynamic, where the student had sort of surpassed the teacher.

[btsxlami]

📢LISTEN 📢 UP📢 ARMYS📢 HERE ARE 23 UNDERRATED ¿!MORE!¿ RAP MONSTER TRACKS THAT YOU SHOULD ABSOLUTELY TOTALLY POSITIVELY SHOULD CHECK OUT by @btsxlami

Hey guys its your favourite Namjoon promoter here again a.k.a LAMI! My last post got a lot of notes so whoop whoop and included my personal favourite 23 Namjoon tracks which you can find here

Part 2 of my underrated Namjoon series.

Here are 23 more bc damn Namjoon has a lot of fcking songs!

Disclaimers: (HOLD UP IF THIS IS YOUR FIRST TIME SEEING THIS I SUGGEST YOU SEE PART ONE)

1. i will include tracks that Namjoon covered

2. I will include tracks that Namjoon featured in

3. I will include tracks that I personally feel the need to be well known *so no I won’t put expensive girl even tho thats my shit*

4. This list will be a bit more laid back since I covered a lot of the most important songs in the last list sooo

5. since i covered his best and most “important” tracks in the last list theres not many left but ill probably include his REALLY early like pre debut fetus tracks with his underground rapper friends, tbh I personally don’t think they are the best but you can definitely see how he grew and where he started from

6. enjoY! and reblog kekeke

7. THIS IS A LONG ASS LIST AND I FUCKING ANALYZED EACH SONG SO I EXPECT YALL TO READ AND APPRECIATE NAMJOON GODDAMIT

8. you can always go to BTS’s official soundcloud for unofficial official tracks yeet

9. titles with stars are ones i recommend ( i should of done this for part one yikes)

1. Voices by Rap Monster ⭐

from his first 2015 mixtape RM > Check out the full album here >>  X  *you can refer to more mixtape songs in my previous list

I feel as if this song is the closest a fan can get with Kim Namjoon. Just listening to it you feel a bit relaxed and almost a bit sad when you start listening to the first half of the song. This song reflects a person’s tender emotions and voices that run inside of someone’s head when they are confused. I remember listening to this 2 years ago and towards the end Namjoon starts screaming out all his pain and I started crying. C R Y I N G

Namjoon had a really smooth life up until he started pursuing hip hop. He was a beyond smart student and had a happy family so why the hell would he be depressed? He had his whole life ahead of him right?

But this lyrics totally breaks that facade down

 “ I didn’t have any dreams just like my lyrics, every day in that way the functions and equations that couldn’t give me an answer in the end those things became uncountable injuries “

Despite having such amazing grades Namjoon did not know what the hell he wanted to do with his life, he didnt want to go into something academic despite being good at it, he was lost in life and his academics could not make him happy but instead hurt him even more.

“ thought I could catch the mirage known as happiness but the me in front of my desk wasn’t happy even for a moment without my mom knowing, I put a sheet of white paper between the pages of my workbook “

This verse totally broke me apart. He wanted to be happy while being in school but school sure as hell did not make him happy. His parents looked up to him as some smartass freak but without them knowing he started writing his own lyrics to cope with his hardships.

“my identity that I wrote down matched to the drum and bass a different, relaxed feeling compared to when I got my report card even when I was #1 my heart couldn’t relax”

The music brought out his true inner feelings, music brought out his true personality rather than when he was almost robot like studying with no self-identity. Despite being number one in class he still felt an emptiness that only music could fill.

“even as 7 years passed... still making my mixtape by myself in one corner of my room some say I’m fake, okay, I admit it, my dark past I can justify it, but I won’t, so that kind of problem won’t happen again the pedal that I stepped on for 7 years has finally been oiled “

Namjoon has been writing music and tried to get recognition for 7 years, despite Bangtan getting fame he is still lonely writing his own mixtape in a dark corner, kind of pathetic ehh idk, in his mixtape interview his dark past was his problematic sayings and actions. He felt the need to appropriate culture in order to rap. He then figured out that music and culture had nothing to do with eachother, music is for everyone. *I’m fake*

And finally after all the hardships after 7 years he is finally started to receive praise and attention!

2. WE ARE BULLETPROOF PT.1 by: Rap Monster, Supreme Boi, and Iron ⭐

Composed 6-7 years ago when Namjoonie was about 15 or 16 THIS SONG IS FUCKING BOP. 

2 of Bangtans were also first members are featured here: Supreme boi (yall probably familiar with him) and Iron! (i hope iron never affiliates with Bangtan ever again tho we dont need a criminal around them yikes)

3. Hook by Supreme Boi, Iron, and Namjoon (also the track used in Yoongi’s all i do is win)

Extremely old and pre debut, but old is gold

Probably one of Namjoon’s only ‘diss’ song, he usually doesnt diss others while he raps tbvh

4. Seventeen by Rap monster

I FEEL LIKE I SHOULDNT MAKE FUN OF HIM BC 15 YEAR OLD NAMJOON AT THE TIME WAS PROBABLY REALLY PROUD BACK THEN BUT HE LOOKED SO FUCKING FUNNY BC DAMN THAT HAIR AND HIS VOICE SOUNDS LIKE A CHIPMUNK BUTHUSDHUFUFSUD

5. SKOOL OF TEARS By: Rap Monster, Suga, and Jin ⭐

Absoloute MASTERPIECE! FIRST OF ALL THE ORIGINAL TRACK IS FROM SWIMMING POOLS BY KENDRICK LAMAR AND I LOVE KENDRICK! SECOND, THE RAP FLOW SOUNDS AMAZING NAMJOON IS GOING SO HARD AND DAMN YOONGI BACK AT IT AGAIN! ALSO CREDS FOR BABY BOY JIN FOR SOUNDING SO BADASS HERE BUT HERE IS WHY I LOVE THIS SONG!

I think its absolutely amazing how Namjoon especially writes song towards youth suffering in school, it takes a lot of guts to write against a society that has been around for decades. 

“  This is a ring called a classroom This is a stadium with no referee only an audience You know there will never be a victor everyone will lose There will be no victor everyone will lose”

“ That’s right, in the end school is like another mini society A jungle made carelessly by adults They made the weaklings weak, they made the strong powerful Of course since they were strong they made the weak suffer A society built on the teachings that friends are only for pretend The morals of adults made us step on the weak to rise to the top “

Its clear to see that Namjoon has suffered in school but also isnt afraid to address the truth.

6. Expensive girl by Rap Monster 

( I FUCKING DISCOVERED THIS SONG WHEN I WAS LIKE 11-12 AND I NEVER WANTED TO PUT THIS HEAR BUT YALL LIKE FOUGHT ME TO ADD THIS TO THE LIST GODDAMIT I HATE YALL I GOT LIKE HATE MAN OKAY)

“Take it off now girl just take it off (I’m a master, baby with your bra)Take it off now girl just take it off (I can help you slide those panties off)(..I’m a beat that pussy like you never ever felt before)x2″

7. Converse High (original version SUNG by Rap Monster)⭐

Yall probably heard Bangtan’s Converse High but here was the original version written by Namjoon that was rejected bc of the swearing omg damn joonie, BUT HE SINGS SO BEAUTIFUL IN THIS YESS

(funny story in seventh grade when this came out it was the last day of school and i requested my teacher to stay after school late so i could finish listening to the whole thing)

8. Suicide by Rap Monster

Rapmon wrote this mixtape in the point of view of a baby in his mother’s tummy. The baby’s parents are high school kids who are forced to go through abortion.

*this song was deleted bc of copyright and also the source of it is unknown but hey ITS IN ENGLISH AND DAMN NAMJOON RIGHTS DEEP SHIT*

(tf is namjoon doing u good)

9. What am I to you by Rap Monster from the 2014 Dark & wILD ⭐

if you DONT KNOW THIS SONG I SUGGEST YOU RETHINK YOUR LIFE DECISIONS BC LOWKEY HANDS DOWN ONE OF THE BEST INTRO’S TO A OFFICIAL BTS ALBUM (gif is from the live ver of this song and he started crying ok)

So Namjoon used to have a girlfriend who “mistreated” him. Tbvh we really don’t know what happened but on problematic men he said it wasnt anything serious it was just she would neglect him and not spend enough time but also hang out with other men.

(gif aint mine so gif blogs dont come at me)

But clearly the lyrics of this song are very emotional but the real reason why this song is a masterpiece is because of the rise of  emotions.

It starts off slow and cute, Namjoon mentions how he loves the girl and how their love is pure and innocent, throwing cute love phrases and the song sounds so soft, hopeful, and romantic. But in the middle the music starts to get more serious and Namjoon starts to question the relationship. He feels as if the girl thinks of this relationship as more of a task and a job, and slowly as the song comes to an end NAMJOON STARTS FUCKING SCREAMING AND BELTING! ALL THE EMOTIONS BUILD UP AND HE STARTS SCREAMING “WHAT AM I TO YOU GIRL WHAT AM I TO YOU I DO LOVE YOU CRAZY UH DO YOU” LIKE IT WAS SCARY I WAS CRYING IM LIKE NAMJOON WHO TF HURT YOU

10. Always by Rap Monster ⭐

This song is more recent and farely well known but I still felt the need to put this masterpiece here. Namjoon said not to worry about him as the lyrics are really sad and almost ???SUICIDAL??? but he said he wrote this when he was stressed last year. Its kind of a self questioning song about life and your purpose. I cried when it came out. well i always cry when i listen to namjoon is it a surprise.

I'm honestly in tears because this song goes to show how hurt Namjoon still is even after all these years. Even after all these awards, fans, and accomplishments. Depression still hurts after a long time. I can tell that this song was talking about his past. This song literally made me realize Namjoon was questioning his existence and I wanna hold him so badly. Guys...we could of lost Kim Namjoon. My absolute favourite human being in the entire world who saved my life. He is a human being who does not deserve such pain but I am so proud he endured it so well and look how far he came. One of my favourite verses "I live for the sake of understanding this world, but why hasnt the world tried to understand me atleast once" Its a really vague phrase which is why I like it. WORLD could mean destiny, fate, life, even parents.  He tries so hard to accept his life, to understand his parents wishes, sacrificing his own happiness yet fate decides to only give him the worst. "Dad please listen to me" "dead dad, your dead to me," Talking about how his dad wouldn't let him rap. I remember him mentioning that his dad once told him all that education he worked hard for was for nothing and I can’t imagine how sad Namjoon felt in that moment. "I would tell god if I ever meet him, i would hold him by the collar and tell him this life is like a coffee I never ordered" A pretty sad and a bit confusing verse, maybe leading to why Namjoon eventually became an atheist. Namjoon was in so much pain he didnt want to be born. "I wished I was dead...... I wished “Someone would kill me" No Namjoon never utter such words. My joonie mini I hope you are better and hopeful now, look at how far you came, your so successful and loved, and you made your family proud. Dont ever doubt yourself and even think about death, just keep living happily and moving forward. He honestly felt lost in this point of his life and still continues to feel lost. Namjoon you have such in important role and your existence was destined. You were born for a reason. You were born to change lives. 

11.  J-Lim ft. Rap Monster & Iron - Ashes

12. TIPSY BY RAP MONSTER & SUPREME BOI

Namjoon wrote this in the beginning of his rap career when he was still trying to find where he stood as a rapper. He mentions how he isnt doing this for the fame or money and he isnt the next Nas or Tupac he just wants to rap for the love of it.

13.  Rap Monster of 방탄소년단 (BANGTAN),Supreme Boi,i11evn,Marvel.J - You can't do that

*i suggest you skip ahead to 1:30 for namjoon fire verse, shade intended*

14.  RAP MONSTER of 방탄소년단,Suprema,Marvel.J,Kyum2 - Rollin

I also recommend you to skip ahead to 2:40 BC DAMN BOY GOES HARD

But tbvh pre debut namjoon squad (supreme boi , young jeezy, iron are hella problematic and say the n word in this and still do so im like yikes im happy nam left you) “ They pissed, now rape me" bitch whet

yeah im just here for namjoons verse bye

imma mufukin balla on this mufuckin beat spit mufuckin rap on this mufuckin shit got mufuckin skill so im mufuckin phat its mufuckin trick and a mufuckin track i i bet you betta stop stopin da chatter im a rapper man, and i represent BPB im juss so greater than hoes

15. FUCK COCKROACHES BY RAP MONSTER AND ZICO *THIS IS SO FUNNY*

Zico was 15 and RapMon was 13 when they rapped this, Namjoon sounds like a chipmunk BUT ZICO SOUNDS LIKE JIMIN I STG!

16. Rap Monster- Thinking Bout you

Joonie Mini Representing Biggie smalls eyyy!

17. Glory By Rap Monster

"I'm a dick? Yeah, when you disturb me, I grow bigger" SO FUCKING DONE

*there was lowkey lowkey controversy bc he said he tore 4 hymens BUT DETECTIVE LAMI FIXED IT*

 In the beginning Namjoon says that people looked at him pitifully because he joined BTS,  the Underground rappers were disappointed with him which led the Underground rappers to leave him, which has ripped his hymen. Not 4 hymen of random girls. 4 and "I" sound the same in Korean

it's a bit weird but in this case he is talking about himself all the hate people showed has ripped his hymen symbolizing his innocence for music.

18. NAA BY RAP MONSTER

tHE ORIGINAL BEAT WAS DEUCES BY CHRIS BROWN I WAS DYING

19. REGULAR VOICE BY RAP MONSTER ⭐

A really sweet and open-minded song about Namjoon wanting a “regular girl” “Height? I don’t care. Age? I don’t mind it. When you say, “I’ll only look at you” then I’m okay. Whether your skin is light or dark it doesn’t really matter, our love is deeper than that. “

I feel as if idols are pressured to have certain ideal types and say them out in the open, Namjoon had bad influences around him *underground rappers* which also influenced his negative sayings towards certain things but he wrote this song all alone at a young age which shows that his intentions are pure, and ever since he apologized for his wrong doings you go joon.

his voice sounds like sex

20. DREAMING BY RAP MONSTER

FETUS CHUBBY WTF HAIR NAMJOON IS BACK

okay but seriously you can see that despite being young he put a lot of effort and thought into this song!

21.  RAP MONSTER of 방탄소년단 feat.김거덕 - RAP

22.  130305??  THIS TRACK IS UNTITLED BUT IT SOUNDS SO EPIC TF

23. Trouble by Rap Monster 🔞 🔞

OKAY IM BARELY AROUSED BUT THIS SHIT ACTUALLY HAD ME SOAKED IM SORRY GOD LIKE ITS SO SUGGESTIVE I STG 

HIS SEXUAL FANTASIES I STG

[fabulizemag]

28 days of supporting Black creatives and small businesses

New Post has been published on https://fabulizemag.com/2019/02/28-days-of-supporting-black-creatives-and-small-businesses/

28 days of supporting Black creatives and small businesses

As we conclude Black History Month and head into Black HERstory month aka Women’s History month, we wanted to compile a comprehensive list of black creates and businesses to support. Please support black creatives year round. Let them know they are visible; even if you don’t but their goods, share their work with others. Be the word of mouth, share their social media and leave good reviews on their business pages.

Crown of Curls

Crown of Curls “I officially started Crown of Curls about 3 years ago. Initially I was making hair creams, and I only gave them to family and friends. I now make a larger range of products, from body butters to conditioning leave-in sprays. Every item is handmade using natural ingredients. All products can be tailored to fit your needs. I also offer completely custom-made hair creams and hair oils. While anyone can use my products, all items are made with kinky-curly hair in mind. ”

You can find them on IG and Facebook.

Ben Reynolds is an animator working on a few projects. He has Kerlash and he’s working on an hip hop animation series.

“Subscribe to me on Youtube! I have an animated web series about a ninja girl in artschool. I only have 2 episodes so far but I’m currently working on the next one. There’s also tutorials and videos of me ranting about animation. I have another fairly new youtube channel where I make AMV’s based on hiphop and R&B. I only have one video up so far, but will start updating more regularly once I wrap up some other things I’m working on.”

Whole As Wednesdays

WholeAsWednesday

Whole as Wednesdays is a podcast where the black femme working-class perspective is centered.

Banks of Commune

Banks of Commune “Banks of commune’s serums, masks, oil cleansers, and polishes are enriched with omega balanced fatty acids, helping skin to maintain the healthy oil and water balance our skin needs. skin that has a balanced layer of protective oil has less inflammation, a stronger immune system, leading to smooth, clear, calm skin. the select ingredients counteract environmental pollution, and stress-related inflammation. facial muscles and skin need a workout as well. having a facial clears out debris and toxins, giving that glow a great platform to shine through. providing facials for 16 years, and consistently researching our skin’s processes has shown me that stress and imbalanced nourishment combine to wreak havoc on our bodies, which is reflected in our skin. regular facial treatments and your skin’s daily “food” encourages balanced skin. a banks of commune skin is radiant.”

Charlotte Banks is an esthetician and has been practicing for 16 years. She formulates skincare products with black skin and melanated skin centered.

You can find them on Instagram

Hello Boogie

Serving you the full urban art anime fantasy, Hello Boogie is a clothing brand that is about empowerment in all shapes and form. It’s a brand that screams ‘Fuck you!’ to the nay-sayers. It’s passive aggressive rebellion made fashionable. It’s that brand that hates getting up in the morning. It does not have time to deal with it’s co-workers bullshit. It’s going to wear what it wants even if it’s inappropriate, even if it’s “too much”.

It’s cool, it’s sexy, it’s dangerous.

Beauty Pop

Shan Walz owner of Beauty Pop Self-Care Shop

Beauty Pop is dedicated to the woman who wants to live her best life on her terms. With a focus on natural ingredients, remedies, and holistic life hacks, Beauty Pop is here to serve you! In addition to fostering a culture of sisterhood and support, we are here to ensure other small businesses win! Come on in to Beauty Pop and let us enhance your dopeness.

About Shan Walz: I own Beauty Pop, a self-care shop in Norfolk, VA. I sell all natural soaps, hair, bath, and yoni products in addition to loose leaf herbal teas (hand blended by yours truly) and dessert teas. I also carry books and handmade accessories by local Black owned businesses. I’m also hosting a Free Baby Food Drive to assist families who won’t receive nutrition benefits in February due to the government shutdown. I literally picked vegetables from a farm and HANDMADE baby food to distribute from my shop, free of charge to those needing the service.

You can find them on IG and Facebook.

Inner Wisdom Doula and Lactation Services

Inner Wisdom Doula and Lactation

About Kendra:

“I’m a birth & postpartum doula, Certified Lactation Counselor, & Placenta Encapsulation Specialist serving the MetroWest Boston area. If you’re looking for a doula, lactation support, placenta encapsulation and/or you just like things birth, breastfeeding, & babies, come check out my page.”

Visit their IG for more info.

Drinking With Blerds

Drinking With Blerds is where two Caribbean-ish black millennial professionals unpack all the mysteries of life over drinks. Tune in as we discuss things like bad high school memories, adulting, being black and young in the workplace, a bunch of things going on in popular culture, all the the problematic shit going on in the world, and pretty much anything we want to talk about. Also we’re petty so listeners beware. Cheers!

Small Scale Styles

About Nina: “Well hello there, my lovelies! My name is Nina and I love making things. Art, craft, music, trouble. Those are my jams! This shop came about because I started making things for my niece’s doll. I soon discovered, how much I love making doll fashions. I also found I really enjoy customizing dolls so most of the dolls you will see in my shop, I redesigned to my liking!

This shop may be new to Etsy but I’m not. I have a metalsmithing jewelry shop (Beads In The Belfry) that I started in 2007 but is currently on hiatus. I hope you like what you see! I have so many ideas that I’ll be adding new things to the shop just as fast as my fingers can fly!”

Follow Nina and her pretty dolls on Instagram.

Griot Enterprises

Horsemen Graphic Novel

Home of The Horsemen and 4 Pages 16 Bars: A Visual Mixtape! The gods of Ancient Africa have returned to save humanity from itself… Whether we like it or not.

Find more black comics on Facebook.

Yarn Goddess Cosplay

Yarn Goddess Cosplay

Geeky. Crocheted. Local. Yarn Goddess Cosplay shows there is more to crocheting than just granny squares. Shop crop tops, bathing suits, pillows or place a custom order!

Amasia

Shane Paul Neil launches Amasia

About Shane Paul Neil: “I’m the CEO of a new business development agency, www.Amasia.io. I’m slowly getting back to writing. Check spnwrites on IG. Check out. BlackPodcastHub.com for a directory of Black podcasts. Finally, Unreasonable Fridays is the podcast crew.”

Breast Milk University

Breast Milk University is the favorite source for all breastfeeding related spiritwear and keepsakes. We know the breastfeeding journey inside out and we want to share our pride with the world. We are here to #normalizebreastfeeding and we know breastfeeding comes in many different forms. Every breastfeeding journey is not easy and doesn’t last forever but let’s celebrate the accomplishments we have made! Our hope is to inspire women to learn more about breastfeeding and find support in this community of milk makers!

Follow them on Facebook and Instagram.

AforFi

Power through representation

Afro-Fi TV

Dreaming Elephants Tutoring

Dreaming Elephants Tutoring

Meet Thomas Sumter:

“I’m the Owner and Founder of Dreaming Elephants Tutoring in Philadelphia, PA. We offer in home Academic Tutoring and Test Prep(ACT/SAT, ISEE/SSAT, GRE/GMAT) for all students K-12 and *College and Grad Students(for select classes). Our primary focuses are English/Language Arts, Math, and the Natural Sciences(Biology, Chemistry, Physics,etc). Two things will make us different than your typical Tutoring company. First,we are led by people with a history or background in Education. I personally have been tutoring for 13 years and anybody I hire must have at least 3 years of tutoring/teaching experience. The second thing that makes us different(and better), we create individual tutoring plans/guides for each individual client and their academic needs.

Just as your teachers would create a lesson plan for an entire class, we do the same thing for each of our clients. This lesson plan is available for the client, their parents and educators to follow along as we tutor with them each session.”

Find them on Facebook.

Che’la McClain

About Che’la: “I’m a poet and I’ve been writing for what’ll be 15 years in a few months. I’m also a model and I’d like to think my website has variety in its subjects.”

Che’la McClain received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Poetry/Creative Writing with an Education Minor from Columbia College Chicago in 2017. A Gary, Indiana native she began her higher education pursuit at Vincennes University where she received her Associate of Science degree in General Studies as she shaped her long term goals. Che’la is an avid reader and through her literary excursions she receives inspiration for her true life passion which is poetry. She acknowledges her most free and authentic expression is through both writing and performing in this art. Since high school she has performed many of her original works throughout the Indiana and Illinois area in such events as both annual “Louder than a Bomb” Poetry Slam, and “One Night Only” Talent Showcase. As her schedule permits, she frequents the “open mic” circuit in Chicago. In her limited spare time she busies herself with her other interest which include photography, sewing, music of all genres, and playing the acoustic guitar. Her passion for all areas of the arts is the impetus for her ultimate goal; to teach underprivileged or special needs children self-expression through the arts. Che’la lives in Chicago, Illinois and is currently working in customer service to support herself.

Come Taste Africa

Come Taste Africa

Taste of Africa is a multi-pronged African Food Culture and Lifestyle initiative aimed at exposing, showcasing and providing access-to-market for African Food Products and those involved in its industry. We provide an experiential African food journey, online African food knowledge, information and lifestyle content depicting the modern and historical narrative of African food.

Learn more about their delicious food on Facebook.

The Art of Teshika Silver

View this post on Instagram

Grow. Inside. Outside. The spaces in between. The first in a series of three. Come by this weekend to one of the places I’ll be vending and pick up a print to remind you to grow. Check my bio and Instagram story for event details.

A post shared by Teshika Silver (@astratesh) on Feb 21, 2019 at 12:35pm PST

Teshika is a creative with over 12 years of wide-range professional art experience. Illustration is her passion, using both traditional media as well as digital programs to create pieces that are both captivating and magical. She is also an intuitive graphic designer, working with local organizations and small business owners alike: be it by logo design, promotional pieces or other marketing collateral. She is currently a teaching artist at Hyde Park Art Center where she works closely with youth. She strives to create work that uplifts, heals and promotes the resilience of marginalized people.

Follow her on IG.

Holistic Heights

“As the great grandchild of an Indigenous Healer from the Island of Grenada, I could not escape my roots. Working in Corporate America for many years, I began to see colleagues grow sick, many even passing at a young age. I had become overwhelmed by the need to liberate myself and my loved ones from a modernity that denies an age old tradition of healthy lifestyle. On September 11th, 2001, I was pregnant with my first child, working near The World Trade Center / “Twin Towers”. When Tower One collapsed, I ran for my life, and it feels like I’ve been running ever since; running from illness and the general decay that can get the better of us when we fail to equate happiness with healthiness. After 9/11 my son and I developed severe cases of asthma and eczema. The idea of becoming a guinea pig for allopathic treatment was out of the question. I was determined to heal the bodies of my son and I naturally. This was my mission as well as the birth of Holistic Heights!

I received my professional training as a Holistic Health Practitioner from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition’s cutting-edge Health Coach Training Program, as well as Teachers College, Columbia University.

During my training, I studied over 100 dietary theories, practical lifestyle management techniques, and innovative coaching methods with some of the world’s top health and wellness experts. My teachers included Dr. Andrew Weil, Director of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine; Dr. Deepak Chopra, leader in the field of mind-body medicine; Dr. David Katz, Director of Yale University’s Prevention Research Center; Dr. Walter Willett, Chair of Nutrition at Harvard University; Iyanla Vanzant, one of America’s most profound spiritual leaders and acclaimed empowerment legends; Geneen Roth, bestselling author and expert on emotional eating; and many other leading researchers and nutrition authorities.

My journey in wellness led me to further advance myself in various holistic methods of healing. Realizing healing manifests in many forms, I later became a Reiki Practitioner, Reflexologist, Aromatherapist, Iridologist and Yoni Steam Spa & Yoga Practitioner. I am grateful for the opportunity to have met and studied under some of the best healers of our day, including Dr. Laila Afrika, world renowned physician, researcher, author and healer; Dr. Akua, naturopath, spiritualist and master teacher, International Operations Director for A Life of Peace Wellness Institute, Inc., an international holistic health education and wellness non-profit organization, Queen Esther Hydrotherapist & Nutritionist of Queen Esther’s Holistic Haven LLC in Brooklyn, NY. Master Reflexologist & Healer, Dr. El Ha Gahn; Sister Maa and Dr Sebi, world renowned healers and founders of The Fig Tree, The USHA Healing Village in Honduras, and The Electric Cell Food; Elder Mr. Hooker, Intuitive Energy Healer and Wellness Instructor; Dr. Paul Goss, Master Iridologist and best selling author; Sat-Ra Sobukwe SoDaye, Kemetic Reiki Master and Founder of the Yoni Steam Institute, & LIFE the most important, influential instructor of all.

My education and intuitive abilities has equipped me with extensive knowledge in holistic nutrition, health coaching, energy healing and preventive health. Drawing on these skills and my knowledge of living a holistic lifestyle, I work with my clients to help them make lifestyle changes that produce real and lasting results. My passion lies in educating, empowering and connecting one to their body’s innate ability to heal itself. It is our birthright.

Come join me…

My Approach

​*A different approach

I practice a holistic approach to health and wellness, which means that I look at how all areas of your life are connected. Does stress at your job or in your relationship cause you to over eat? Does lack of sleep or low energy prevent you from exercising? As we work together, we will look at how all parts of your life affect your health as a whole.

A health coach (or health counselor) is a wellness guide and supportive mentor. Together, we will work to achieve your goals in areas such as achieving optimal weight, food cravings, sleep and energy. Through working with me, you’ll develop a deeper understanding of the foods and lifestyle choices that work best for you and implement lasting changes that will improve your energy, balance and health.

*Bio-individuality

The concept of bio-individuality is that each person has her or his own food and lifestyle needs. One person’s food is another person’s poison, and thats why fad diets tend to fail in the long run. Working on the principle of bio-individuality, I will support you in making positive changes that are based on your unique needs, lifestyle, personal preferences, and background. Instead of prescribing one fix for all people, I use a personalized, holistic approach that is based on your needs.

*Everything is food

We are not only fed by food, but by other factors in our lives. Healthy relationships, a fulfilling career, regular physical activity and a spiritual practice are essential forms of nourishment. When these primary foods are balanced, what you eat becomes secondary.”

Support these black-owned businesses and creatives!

[doublenegation]

Too Early

Being too early in a night club feels like dying young. You can see the whole thing stretching ahead of you, all the things yet undone sort of fading in a distance you will never reach.

Only young men seem to go early, stuck somewhere between the cloak room and the toilet, struggling for what was it again? The night is still young. Too young, like it will go on forever until suddenly it no longer does, and here you are -- stuck waiting for something, anything to happen.

There's a faux arcade machine in the corner, lonely and not exactly retro -- I might be the only person in the room who knows what it fails to properly reference, 90s rave aesthetic weirdly displaced by an 80s that never was, begging for change, any change, loose change, admonishing responsible drinking while sporting that accursed deer mascot, rendered unlovingly in a wireframe aesthetic that never was, unartfully ripping off that drag-and-release mechanic killed by ludic literacy and a terrible tendency towards complexity but lacking any understanding of what it's for.

Very videogame. Like a real videogame (made by love, with love), it doesn't know what it is except perfunctory and limited, potential delimited by a marketing budget and ... zero ambition? It feels unfair to judge, I'm sure the good kids at Chloroplast Games with their weak blob logo would have preferred to excel, to push a boundary or two.

But here it is, in a corner, across from the bar, most likely unseen by anyone but those who miss the bathroom queue, make a right too early, find themselves in an alcove populated only by that herbal alcohol mascot and their own misunderstanding.

I suppose part of my ennui stems from going to a rock'n'roll club an hour too early. I should have learned by now -- the party is at least half an hour away, maybe an hour even! And rock? Do I even listen to rock unironically? Am I in a position to judge this scene as anything but maybe something I missed out on ten years ago?

Hard to tell, I suppose I ended up here because the other place was shut and this seemed to have, well, open doors and some people. Maybe it was the girl who briefly held my gaze before her boyfriend arrived and pulled her back to reality?

She might have preemptively lied to me, suggested an impossible connection or at least given my half-drunk mind the illusion of one, her gaze a reminder of what I need but don't know how to get in this strange city with its strange people and strange ways.

I mean, this is just playacting anyway -- I'm not really out tonight, I'm just investing in a potential future, seeing what's up, how it's hanging, so I'll get to sleep okay tonight and not lie awake staring at the ceiling waiting for sweet nothing to embrace me so another day can promise me things it can't keep.

There's supposed to be a dance floor, but it's empty. I paid to access this emptiness -- a pittance to be sure, but it still obligates me to try, I guess, to pretend like I'm out and about; seeing town when I'm really just waiting for tomorrow, the real deal, a potentially chance date with a hairdresser who thinks it's funny she can't pronounce my name.

It's nearly as expensive too. A quarter hour of work to spend what, a couple of hours in this cellar with its post-rock and empty dance floor and cockroach I just stepped on because my peripheral vision is way acute and I can't help myself.

Tomorrow is the real deal, the real illusion, the current fantasy, the affirmation that I'm doing something other than typing out future blog posts on my phone in this cellar on this park bench as far as I can get from that Jägermeister fauxcade game only I can put in its proper cultural context.

We're 30 minutes into the cellar life and there is still hardly anyone here, meaning my initial assumption is wrong -- there's no life after midnight. It happens at some witching hour yet to pass, one I might not even get to see before I decide I've had enough and go home to find that sweet bedtime I've lied about wanting to avoid, like I've lied to myself about the severe blonde at the bar looking at me, like I've lied to myself about maybe being in the mood for rock'n'roll.

Turns out my gut feeling is true -- rock'n'roll is a state of mind divorced from the presence of that cultural touchstone rock'n'roll. If I like rock'n'roll, it's because I like that confidence and that swagger and that noise and not because I strictly enjoy real guitars and real drums.

The other people literally just left, which lends me courage to stay just a little longer to see what they will miss, if anything. I like the idea of exclusively witnessing potential lost to others. It's my inner hipster god justifying itself -- to boldly go where no man thinks there's any fun to be had, to hope that the DJ is not as lonely as me, on this early November night in a city I don't know.

Hey, worst case I have produced my most spontaneous piece of prose in whoa, a long time, wrapped in my language, a critical language, one that is knowing and distant in lieu of knowledge and distance, wrought under the very limited auspices of autocorrect. And it only cost me a fraction of the expensive alcohol I bought as soon as my invoice was reimbursed this very afternoon, the sweet Mammon I've waited for all week, months worth of rent and -- well, this.

I might be too advanced for this chance experience. I might need something less haphazard, something I know I want instead of something I maybe think I need. Healthy, though -- I have chosen to be disappointed in an effort to discover myself.

The DJ is doing good. Maybe because it's empty. He's wringing out some noise I haven't heard before, like he's loving it despite being unheard -- maybe because he's unheard by anyone but me here on my park bench that doesn't belong here in this place I don't know.

Once upon a time I would have paid for two people to nearly enjoy this emptiness but now I only spent what, one percent of my monthly fun-budget having this epiphany, this realisation that you can't win 'em all but you can reflect very, very eloquently on that belated epiphany, that sudden realisation that your princess is in another castle.

A couple just stumbled into the cellar. They are ... well, nearly gone again. They are not sitting down to write essays and reflect upon the empty dance floor. They went towards the toilets (or maybe the fauxcade machine, my view from here is limited) and then vanished.

No, this is just a trial run, a ... premature anti-climax, a preemptive disappointment before tomorrow's big whatever, the real club night where maybe I'll find my hairdresser in the crowd and we will kiss desperately because we're no longer young and want some beauty while we can still offer some of our own.

I will be on drugs and I will listen to music more suited to my state of mind, to my ironic distance, nothing as forceful as rock or whatever this undead amalgam should be called. I will lose myself even if it's not to her.

The couple found the benches too. I suppose that is the death-knell, the final proof that I am not an outsider here as I touchscreen-type this little screed. I am just ahead of my time, settling into the non-event I could see not unfolding before me even hours ago, even before I left my new home to find something new, something I'm not bored by or angry at yet.

They are smiling and laughing. They have, like me, paid to be here and like me they are making the most of their bad investment, listening to the really quite great music and trying to ignore the fact no-one else is.

Entrance came with a free drink. I should go to the bathroom then claim it and have a cigarette. Maybe I will emerge to find the dance floor filled. Or maybe I will sow the seeds of that throat cancer I so desperately hope won't eat my voice before I get famous.

Either way, the new me is yielding something, rock'n'roller or not. This is something. This would not have happened just a week ago, and the price is very, very low compared to the cost of all those empty moments I have wasted these last few years.

Love is a lonely thing, and the more time I spend alone the more I come to understand, accept and -- yes -- kind of relish in it. The couple are talking over the loud music and I am typing this on the world's worst typewriter as I bury my rock'n'roll persona and head past the advergame, past the empty dance floor, towards the toilets so I can emerge and provoke that cancer I hope will pass me by and grab someone else by the throat so I can live forever.

Hey, unlike the DJ, I am free to leave. And in the grand scheme of things, I am paid more for my time here than he is.

On my way out, I stop for that smoke. A cute Italian girl asks me whether there’s anyone dancing downstairs. I let her know it’s dead. She’s disappointed, since she wants something -- anything -- but reggaeton. I argue in favour of reggaeton, my contrarian streak flaring up like a shooting star, and she thinks I’m funny.

I leave, and I get all the way home (which is only a ten minute walk, granted) before I realize I am drunk and I am not sleepy, and I decide fuck it, I might as well stay out. I head back.

She’s not there anymore. I convince myself this was just a trial run. Tomorrow is hairdresser day, and I need to be awake, alert and in a party mood for that. I am only half-convinced, but really -- I don’t have much else to believe in. So I live and I learn. And I won’t go out too early again. Except maybe tomorrow because I wanna be there before the place fills up so I can spot her or she can spot me and I can say hi, I’m here, just like I said I would be, and she will smile and it will be like tonight never happened.