Random Ramblings CCCXV · 11:31pm Sep 11th, 2018
IN WHICH I BIRTHDAY'D
*ahem* Jesus was Black. Ronald Reagan was the Devil. And the government is lying about 9/11. </boondocks>
Okay, now that I've probably shocked you into unfollowing, allow me to explain myself past the jump.
But first, Weird Al !
By the time Straight Outta Lynwood came out, I was already all too familiar with the original Green Day song AND had visited Canada (well, Vancouver; it's technically Canada), so I busted a gut when I heard Al's parody.
Yesterday was my birthday. Normally I make a blogpost on my birthday saying that I'm "getting drunker", but I was too busy actually doing stuff. Went out to dinner at a nice Italian place. My parents both showed up -- they hadn't seen each other face to face in seven years, and my dad, as I've mentioned, looked worse for wear. He's eight months younger than my mother but now looks ten years older thanks to his various near-death episodes over the past 30 months.
Anyway, I ate so much at dinner and felt guilty enough about it that I decided to go to the gym again last night and put in two miles on the elliptical machine -- that's the most I've ever done. Normally I do strength training too, but it was late and I'd actually been awake all day so I was tired and wanted to eventually sleep.
I only got one gift, but it was a doozy. A new Canon Rebel SLR camera to replace my old Rebel 2000 -- I love that camera, but it uses 35mm film. Great when I bought it in 2001 (when digital cameras were pixellated crap), less so now that good cameras have nearly as fine a resolution as film and there aren't too many places left that will actually process film for you.
Naturally the first thing I did after setting the new camera up was to re-photograph the various imports I got from Japan over the course of the last month. So look forward to seeing those pix eventually.
My dad also got me a gift card to the bookstore on the north side of town with explicit instruction to buy Bob Woodward's newest book "FEAR" (it's about Donald Trump). Luckily the chapters are short. I like short chapters, both in reading and my own writing. Makes it easier to stop when/if you need to. So far I've made it through the first eleven chapters but nothing all that damning against Trump yet.
On the writing front, I'm about halfway through my experimental "Rarity Loves Sunset" story. Because I have no intention of naming either character in this one, I can show it to my mother (who has strongly requested to see some of my writings), although I may write additional material that won't make it to the published version, because she doesn't need to read the bit where Rarity waxes lyrical about Sunset's breasts and ass.
Meanwhile, the germ of an idea I had a few days back where a certain character speaks with Orangeglow, which will -- much to both their shocks -- lead to his death, is becoming more concrete. This is a fun setup for what I have planned for the future.
But before I can work on that, I gotta finish editing the biggest narrative weight on my shoulders. it's just… new ideas are more fun to deal with than giving triage to a story from three years ago, y'know?
Now I want to talk about September 11th 2001 and how I responded to it in the context of the environment I was in.
As most of y'all know, I was born and raised in a small town (then <10,000) in the Ozarks. I attended class with some of the same people from preschool all the way up through high school graduation. In addition to being a small town, my hometown is also quite remarkably conservative and almost over-the-top in its Christianity.
By 2001, I had already come out as a leftist (this was no shock to my parents, both staunch Democrats, as are/were most in my immediate family -- they wouldn't have cared if I was gay or trans [I'm neither], but being a Republican would not have sat well), and I was also quickly losing patience with organized religion, though I still attended church at the time, due to coming to understand and see firsthand the hypocrisy of the evangelicals and fundamentalists who make up the majority of my old home.
2001-2002 was my senior year of high school, so I certainly had formed independent opinions. I also had class at 7am because my school decided the smartest and most driven students needed to be punished for their diligence by putting the only two AP classes offered at the time at butt-fuck in the morning.
Thus, I was already in class when WTC was hit. They wheeled in a TV during my second class (1st period) so we could watch the live feed of the tragedy unfolding before us. By that time, the South Tower had collapsed a few minutes earlier and we watched the North Tower go down. We heard about the Pentagon receiving a direct hit -- kids were saying it had been destroyed; I scoffed at that because I've driven by the Pentagon many times, it's fucking massive (a fully-fuelled jet-bomb barely made a dent in the thing, it'd probably take a literal nuke to destroy it). One of my acquaintances was in tears because she had an uncle or grandpa who worked in the Pentagon. He was not among the dead.
As we went from class to class, we didn't DO any more learning that day; teachers and students alike were glued to the TV. But what I really remember is the bloodlust from my conservative classmates. That desire to lash out first and ask questions later. Immediate assignation of blame with little forethought.
Me? I had two thoughts. Fuck this, I'm going to Canada. And also, Well, now Bush is gonna get his war.
I hate it when I'm right.
Luckily, none of the people I knew who went into the military have yet died in our endless wars that we keep putting on the national credit card (and literally did not include in the federal budget until 2007).
Since that day, America has changed, mostly for the worse, and entirely because of the people who would become the Tea Party and later the Trumpists.
Nobody protested our going into Afghanistan, as those who masterminded the attacks really were based there and being given cover by the Taliban (who ran most of the country at the time). We fucked up the aftermath of that operation so bad for dumb political reasons that I don't want to get into because a MLP blog is not the place for a guy with a PoliSci degree to vent about government theory. ANYWAY, when millions of Americans rose up in protest of launching a war against Iraq, who did not attack us (nearly all 19 hijackers were Saudi, one was Egyptian, and I can't remember the rest), knee-jerk "Patriots" declared dissenters not only unpatriotic but anti-military and essentially traitorous. Thus began a common refrain that may sound familiar.
"If you're not for America, get out."
When George Dubya -- who by all accounts is a nice guy IRL -- gave the "with us or with our enemies" speech, he was speaking on a global level referencing governments. He was not extending that down to individual protesters. But that's how his supporters and the Mighty Wurlitzer known as the Rightwing Media took it and spun it.
It really hurts to have your citizenship called into question because of policy disagreements.
Today, over fifteen years later, we're still in Afghanistan. And the same armchair patriots are back, only this time with the backing of a false president who has never even read the Constitution he swore to uphold. They say those who support the (usually) peaceful protests of brown people, or oppose their White saviour in any way, don't support America and, as back then, need to just get out. Only now it goes further and the howls of the unoppressed grow louder. Strip non-patriots of their citizenship! You didn't serve in the military so you're not allowed to say anything!
No, I didn't serve. Even if I wouldn't have been declared 4-F for various health reasons, I consciously refused to serve because I didn't want to go die in a war (Iraq 2.0) that I didn't believe in. I also didn't want to cut my hair, as my hair itself -- what's left of it now at any rate -- is itself a form of protest against the conservative establishment I grew up amongst and declared men must forever keep their hair short. FUCK THAT. People complained. Their bitching made me happy and only hardened my resolve.
Yeah, I'm the type of guy who will do things just because I'm curious about how people will react, and I will also do something specifically because people I don't respect tell me not to do it.
Lately, I've been goading Trumpists on social media to come and get me. Forcibly strip me of my citizenship and deport me. Shoot me, ya coward. So far I've not had any knocks on my door from any angry fat old White men packing heat. It's fun calling these people's bluff's, though I'm sure at some point I'll pick a fight with the wrong guy and they'll doxx my ass.
Well, it's not like I have a job to be fired from or the ability to get hired to begin with. So no real worries there.
So that's my 9/11 story. As usual with me, it was marred by digressions and call-forwards to the present day. My dad has the genetic ability, showed off again last night, to tell a great story. I don't have that gift at all. So, I try to attempt to replicate it through the written word. I probably fail, but I try my best. And the best I can do is the best I can do.
Peace out!
I swear I did read until the end before unfollowing! Your stories are quite good, but they aren't worth this.
Glad to hear you had an enjoyable birthday.
And yeah, 9/11 was pretty fucked up. I still remember that day, clear as a bell.
4935927
I'm sorry to see you go. But it's your decision so I can't and won't stop you.
Would it make you feel better to know that I spent that entire afternoon with a couple of my friends in the Walmart parking lot waiting to give blood? Because that's exactly what I did. Hundreds were lined up outside the bloodmobile hoping to do something, anything they thought could help. And I, despite my beliefs, was no different. Of course it turned out that because of how WTC collapsed, there were very few survivors and most of that blood went to waste. Mine was also thrown out but for a different reason that required me to take additional tests.
Aside from the heartbreak of seeing someone I knew crouched in the fetal position crying her eyes out because she thought her relative was dead, I honestly felt numb. That's how I usually feel around tragedy. That of course is different than what I thought, though one obviously stemmed from the other.
That whole day was chaos even here in flyover country. Information and misinformation flying around willy-nilly to the point you couldn't tell what was true. People freaking out and going survivalist, buying gas until the pumps ran dry -- stories about stations in Oklahoma that temporarily hiked their gas prices up to four or five dollars a gallon (the price on the day, I remember clearly, was $1.55,9).
I had the occasional dream for months afterward that I was IN the World Trade Center as it collapsed. I felt the sudden darkness and suffocation as my life came to an end, except it was just in my mind. For over 2,900 innocent souls it was very real. Empathy may be a dirty word in America today, but sometimes I feel it despite myself.
Man, this is interesting. I kinda agree with you, I'd love to get into a discussion later, when I'm not on my kindle that's hard to type on.
4935927
I actually unfollowed him 2 months ago, his stories are good but his Trump is the devil, The US sucks, and Socialism is the way to go Crap just got to be to much.
4940795
Yeah, I was being too harsh before in my choler. His stories aren't "quite" good, they're pretty good. An important distinction! But when I know the author is a person whose first reaction to 9/11 was "I hate my fellow Americans for being angry about this", I can't really enjoy them any more. Even though his view - which he shares with President Trump - that the ensuing wars were wrong is one I also hold, with hindsight. I can tolerate a bit of socialist crap, but that's too rich for my blood.
4940795
I don't actually believe this, FYI. I'm a capitalist, just like almost every American.
However, I also think markets are dangerously under-regulated, and the current tax regime and hyper focus on quarterly profits incentivizes capital to trickle up to those of wealth where it is least useful for the macroeconomy. Also we spend WAY too much on the military, mostly via redundant bases and white elephant projects like the F-35… and nothing can be done about it because Congress does line-item budgeting and the Military-Industrial Complex has operations in literally every Congressional district so no one has the guts to cut programs the Pentagon itself wants to end, because "They Took Our Jobs!", even though defense spending is one of the least efficient uses of a tax dollar. (most efficient? Head Start).
I do despise Donald Trump, that much is true. I don't think he's the devil; that's just silly. His advisor Stephen Miller is the devil. Anyway, it's personal for me -- not just because I had close family members working on the Hillary campaign, but also I lost friends because of him; they went off the deep end after he "won", leaving town out of unfounded fear of brownshirts coming to kill them due to their sexual orientation (they'd already lost their apartment earlier in the year because of it; my state has almost zero protections for renters).
I'll gladly criticize my country -- though I'll be first to admit there are far worse places (hi Red China) -- and I won't shut up about it because I know we can do better. We once did.