#tim barrus new york times

[timbarrus]

Take notes. People demand to know if Shawn is gay. These are the people who will make him pay for it. His fan base is mainly composed of fifteen-year-old girls. There's a lot of anecdotals attached to Shawn. I hear a lot of: No One Cares If He's Gay. That is not true. Those young girls care a lot. The problem is that Shawn is writing about intimacy. And so are they. It's a double-edged sword. Everybody wants to be a Normal. Let's be very clear here. There are rules and acuterment to being a heterosexual. The red truck would be one. Teenage boys see Shawn as a threat. They stand in the background grimly. They tolerate him but barely. They think he's gay and just isn't willing to pay the price for it. All of this translates to clicks and hits. The paparazzi are all over Shawn because those editors know clicks, hits, and give us the dirt. I know these guys. Identity is a witch. They are waiting for the pictures of Shawn with another guy. In fact, they're drooling for it. The media vampires will take him in and spit him out. They will take his career and drown it. It's lucrative. Shawn is not the problem. Being eye candy is always a problem. They are pouring him into the great big box of fun things to stereotype him because he's unavailable. Sexuality is just another whipping post. The term, Mental Health, is code for gay. This is all stuff Shawn has talked about. Here's the bottom line. People would like to make love to Shawn Mendes. To be a fantasy has never been a calling.

[lesmagnifiquessauvages]

tim barrus

[timbarrusart]

[timotheebarrus]

Tim Barrus and the New York Times

[timbarrus]

Take notes. I am a radical. Not a democrat. Not a republican. There are no independents. They employ the same political and cultural infrastructure -- how things work -- that the rest of us are compelled to use. Climate: Not a word. It's the Trump go to for climate change, a hoax. Americans are in denial. Why. Not a word about that. Save the American Dream. The American Dream is flat-out vanished. Is America is a corpse because it has a fetish for illusion. The American people still believe in the goodness of Gotham. Hollywood's Gotham is urban decay on steroids. Not one word about how Hollywood's cultural prostitution, carved from graves for advanced rot. Criminals rise to power. The word criminal is not to be found. There are metaphors for the word rapist. There are metaphors for the word crook. There are metaphors for the word deviant. You will not find the word deviant here because the republican (small d) party cannot bring itself to believe it's leader (ownership culture) is aberrational. Even the bad word sex is an economic negotiation. Or it's rape. You get to pick one. Not both. They take a deviant, and they normalize him as a leader who struggled. Another idea they avoid is based on the word individual. Individual is Americana. This is about the rise of Trump. And what did I learn. The word nothing has a metaphor, too. Vacuum. They are telling us America loves Trump. Genuflect. Now, the truth. Scratching heads. Suddenly, perplexed. More questions. No answers.

[timbarrus]

Take notes. "But voters still trust his positions more than his opponent’s."

Don't tell me. Show me.

I do not believe it. There's a different standard for showing, and clinging to a narrative that is dubious at best. How do we know that Americans trust Trump more. Where are the figures and whose data are we talking about. What did you know and when did you know it. Criminality is culture, too.

Americans will opt to grab at the simple solutions. They're busy. They live in terror of losing their jobs. They're hung over. Nervous. Their kids are failing. They're in debt. But they get to vote. Yet Americans want to be controlled.

They are already controlled. That is what advertising is. You being controlled. You being told there is a god and you must worship him the way we tell you to worship period. Let us away to art.

1969: They Shoot Horses, Don't They. Gig Young was Rocky Gravo, the evil ring master of ceremonies. Rocky can sell you anything. The Bob Barker of 1934. Just keep dancing. Just keep dancing. Just keep the people entertained with who dies first. Just keep the people on their toes with who dies last. Rocky Gravo has to prove that he is not ordinary. Rocky Gravo is ordinary. Look around the dance arena and you will see the people we never see at all. They blend into the walls. Rocky Gravo is dog eat dog. Complexity is not his problem.

Immigration is code for Let's Make Them Dance. Come on down.

[timbarrus]

Take notes. It was Armageddon. I am still clawing out of it. Even as my neighbors are just beginning to deal with the trauma of losing everything. The tourists are pouring in. A steady stream of tourism -- disaster porn -- didn't even flinch at another opportunity to see us struggle. I have not seen any evidence there even is a government. I have always known that the government doesn't really want to help us. So we become as self-reliant as we can. We cut our own trees. We dig the graves. When some power was restored last night, I am told they are still finding bodies in trees. I can't think of whatever else we might do to entertain the tourists. They do not arrive with chainsaws. No government. No food. No water. No hospital. Nothing. Do not show your tourist face to us. The humans hit hardest are babies. And they will be the ones who decide who gets to live where, and who will not live through storms like Helene. Because, it's all gone political. Remember what our fearless leader said: Global warming is a hoax. Homo sapiens are not going to care until some devil of a storm blows the doors off their hinges. I am now unhinged. Some door. Now guns. I am hundreds of miles from any ocean. You can only take care of yourselves. Where is FEMA. Even as the hurricane was furious, it had been decided by the business community to keep the T-shirt shops open. Someone might need a cocktail and a T-shirt. The videos are a pornography. In Appalachia, we are ruined. -- Tim Barrus

[timbarrus]

Charleen lives down the dirt road from me. I will not dwell on trailer stereotypes. Charleen is poor. We read a lot about the poor poor. Charleen and her babies lived in the car that now sits at the side of the trailer in the thick nettle weeds. Charleen gets rides. Charleen is my entire poll. I want her opinion. She's pretty free with it. "I think I should be Vice President." I take her to Denny's and we talk. Charleen would be horrible as Vice President. Charleen has goings on back in that woods. Charleen has only been twenty-five miles from where she was born. Right here. Her mother sneaks them food. Her mother will babysit. Charleen does not approve of local politicians. "More crooked than a barrel of fishhooks." Charleen reads all the wrong things. The poor have no face in the media. You do not know how we live. We are not a novel. We are not a film. No one sees us. We're just the poor. We don't vote. We don't matter. We do not care because every day, we are just the bottom feeders. Trying to survive by the skin of our teeth. Charleen has a few teeth left. No one takes Charleen to Denny's. I explained that she cannot be President. "Why." I gave her my best Because You Are Nineteen Look. Oh. I get a bad case of sensory overload from too much East Coast Political Handwringing. Charleen likes Kelly because he went to the moon. I refuse to discuss that one. Charleen hides pregnancy. I have delivered her to the clinic on my dirt bike. She does not own her own body. Men do.

[timbarrus]

Take notes. After I put my kids on the flight out of America, and all the crying had slightly ebbed, I had to sit in the airport for about an hour because I could not get up. I knew I had done the right thing. America is just not a place to raise kids. Life is giving them whip lash. This piece has little to do with keeping your papers organized. It's insulting that Americans would even think that. It's denial, folks. You do not know how to raise children, and you are leaving them with a toxic planet. Because you do not care. I am autistic and do not understand many of the rules I follow every day. I avoid the police because they will kill me as they are so easily threatened. I have never had so much as a parking ticket. America will not help in protecting my children. If we are going to slide into a civil war, and I think we are doing exactly that, I don't want my children anywhere near the Great American War Machine that focuses on identity. Our public policy is a pornography. Doing away with the Department of Education, or hobbling it, is a great plan to keep the marginalized in their place. Will there still be schools. Or indoctrination centers. The America you fear is coming at you like a trainwreck. I want my kids off the tracks, off the grids, I have already taught them how to fight. I want them educated. I want them to know how hatred runs the world of men. I want them to be able to recognize the power of authority, and to always sit where you can see the door.

[timbarrus]

Take notes. We all want to know, is it worth it. This question haunts us as the Internet becomes a utility. The tech oligarchs are not keen on the idea. One of the things FDR did, was bringing electricity to rural America. The people who got electricity last, knew they received electricity last. They could drive into town and see everyone had it but you. The Internet came last to rural America. Let's see what we can do with this and throw the bums out. It didn't work, so now they have focused on -- not kicking people out -- but in who can replace them with the proper messaging. One brick at a time. Journalists, gatekeepers, and opinion folks are flailing around with Let's Normalize Him when in their troubled guts they know he's laughing at you while he has his babycakes revenge of the entitled. They already own all the money. What more do they want. Do they really need the crumbs. Klein and Applebaum are playing a game where the intelligentsia cannot admit that they dropped the ball. They seem to think that the civil war will be a soft landing because it will have to be at least partially constructed by (who else) the intelligentsia. They articulate how surprisingly ordinary the opposition is. They go from We Will Never Ever -- to -- We Might in less than one tenth of a second for the pause. Pretty quickly. What choice do we have. We can't all move to Vancouver. I got my kids out while I could. You cannot talk the talk if you are unwilling to walk the walk.

[timbarrus]

Take notes. When you add up all the actuarial elements for a homo sapiens who is overweight, the numbers do not lie. The chances that a 78-year-old male will not be with us is ten percent. The story doesn't end there. The chances that a 78-year-old overweight male with a long history of mental health issues featuring a deep psychosis, grandiosity hallucinations, and has lost their ability to recognize what is real, and what is not real, and the generalized paranoia of dementia leaves us with a human being who has to be taken care of, not the other way around. The numbers have the homo sapiens of a 78-year-old in a timeline that indicates he has a 32.7 percentage chance of leaving us grieving when he goes. From ten percent to 32.7 percent. Adding in the actuarial numbers for political assassination, and the fact that two attempts (failed) indicates we are living in Vegas, and Vegas does not like the odds. Good times. At 32.7 percent, no insurance company will want to touch you, but you can be charged rates in 6 figures for the insurance. Government is run by the feeble and the elderly. The odds are good that Vance will be the new king. Musk has numbers far worse. His life is punctuated with exposure to toxic chemicals whose effects range from lead poisoning to cancer to impotence. You can't do actuarial charting without data. These guys control the data you can get on their health. The fetish for control is not an element that gets added but it drives the great machine.

[timbarrus]

I stumbled and there, Literary Heist Was. A focused dream of thoughts that are actually thoughts. I wrote a book called GENOCIDE. It picks up where reality (such as it is) left off. And everyone believed it was time to say HIV is not a problem. And now we move on. Not so fast. On that note, GENOCIDE begins. The camps, like the real ones, are there, but I do not consciously go there. I am there when the camps became carnivals with rights and lights and naked women. Then, the killing begins. All of that with machines rendered spotless, and when you look at the machine, you see your reflection just as the machine kills you. Not unlike a gift from the normals. My ass got raked in of all places, San Francisco. How dare I bring sex into it. Because it would be there, and it’s my imagination in a stuffy industry that won’t grow up. I do not care if there was sex. Heaven forbid. My purpose was to connect sex and death. Why. Because Readers drive me Miss Sugar Nut in refusing to see that that reflexion is not that far away, we are on our ephemeral way there now, it is not a secret that the public health camps project has enlarged their facilities some of which looks exactly like the Chinese prisons with the fences and the guards and the dogs, and a human tragedy.

I put the sex in because no one would publish it until I did. I am a whore. I set out to question stuff as to why certain stories got published and who was on the blacklist this week. When I trot around NYC with my manuscripts, and interacting with those homo sapiens sapiens called Gatekeepers, I hear a lot of rhetoric and hand wringing and the long chill of Amazon, but if I say the word — BLACKLIST — not an eyebrow is raised in the room. But they will never own it. They have hated us marginals from day one. They pay a lot of money to keep us out. If I say: I believe in talent, it is always misconstrued as opposition to publishing’s fetish with race. GENOCIDE is not about race. It’s about institutional murder, and systematic indifference. And that indifference is a violence to human race, and it’s a story everyone should write. I believe in talent. Period. They talk the talk. But they do not walk the walk because publishing is filled with people who are afraid of everything. Publishing is where imagination ends. — Tim Barrus

[timbarrus]

Take notes. Gay men have formed a survivor's group that is about older men who survived AIDS. And the AIDS era. Which has not ended. The group is angry with me for questioning the tenet of the tenets. The rule that life is always worth living because it's life. Living for what. A life of powerlessness. An apple is an apple because it's an apple. Life must be worth living at all costs is not the same as Life Costs. We do not live life. We are compelled to. I took a twelve gauge and blew my guts out. Life isn't worth it. Living is not heroic. But we have to make it seem that the wish to endure anything is strong. Brave. Dauntless. Courageous. Gallant. Intrepid. Lionhearted. I wanted to die because I am autistic, and I was being abused. While I was being abused, my abuser kept telling me over and over that they loved me. The neurodivergent brain can take what people say to you literally. You cannot even imagine it, but my second selves can. I believe what people tell me until I don't. How does that make me different from you. I am different from you because I cannot and will not trust you. You can look at me, and not see one gigabyte. Because I mask. I teach because I mask. I am because I mask. I discovered stage lights and acting how to pretend in masks. You never really see the audience. What audience. There are only gatekeepers keeping gates. I drive a dirt bike way too fast because I drive a dirt bike way too fast. It is my life. It does not belong to you. Old School my way.

[timbarrus]

Take Notes. I have to watch what I write. What are the risks of having a voice. As a writer, every time I turn around, there are new rules. There are the NYT rules of etiquette. There are the religious rules about specific words that are not allowed. All new ideas articulated will be subject to rigorous investigation. What Americans really want to know is where can they get tickets for the executions. Americans have taken sides. Neither side has the ability to recognize the humanity of the other. If we remove their humanity, we can... Do nothing. Which is what we always do anyway. We are powerless. Keep your head down. Do what they say. Look at the ground. Never look at them in the eye. Suits have always told us everything will be fine. Obey the rules. Rule #1. Do not speak. Ever.

All these people with voices. While your neighbors are being handcuffed, pull the shades. This is America. Has anyone noticed that the price of ammunition has skyrocketed. What do these people know that we do not know. What they know is that the price of the ticket must be paid. Retribution and revenge will guide the well-meaning authorities and their helpers to only execute the bad people. Managed quietly. The Night of the Long Knives in 1932 was a Brown Shirt German purge which was supposed to strike fear into the hearts of the compliant who were already about as compliant as you could get. There are many lessons in this. There will not be another civil war. The grass would get our shoes all wet.

[timbarrus]

Take notes. There are alternatives for renter folks who know how to look. Farms. I was living in a cabin that I built on a mountaintop in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was pastoral on steroids. Hurricane Helene changed everything. It wiped us out. I am renting a house in town. The basement is filled with snakes. There are no services. Like trash. Hurricane trash has piled up ten feet high, little mountains themselves. No one is coming to haul it away. FEMA never showed. Not one person in authority has stepped up. A telephone pole (why do they call it that) was blown over, the wires are still whipping around in the wind. No one will take responsibility. Not our problem. Not our problem. Not our problem. I am going to attack the wires and the pole with a chain saw. Maybe then, I can haul it away. Every day, we sit around, deeply depressed, and we all have skin diseases from the flooding torrents. My skin is now totally inflamed. The water was toxic. We watch life go by. I got on my bike and roared out of town. When I need money, it's Vegas. I gamble. I have never once lost. After a day, I drove home, and could make the rent. Vegas is its own rumble. Renting is about the cash. I count cards. I'm good at it. Autism must be worth something. Vegas is my bank. Fifteen dollars an hour is a pornography. I know a place next to the Carl Sandburg farm. I have lived on farms before. Life on a farm. Renting is a sweet revenge. The hurricane gods are the real landlords.