Month: October 2021

my brother is applying to be a cop. he’s already a deputy with a semi-major city’s sheriff’s department, but he wants a transfer to somewhere more suburban. my dad was formerly an FBI agent. you can listen to him here, guesting on the relentless picnic. he sucks. full disclosure, I worked for the campus PD in college. it was the best paying student job. but no thank you, never again. I lucked out that an Oedipus complex trained me to be distrustful of the police state.

unfortunately, I also better understand cop psychology than most people who put ACAB in their Twitter bios. empathizing with viewpoints I disagree with comes so easily to me because my entire psychological development is a struggle to parse through the cryptofascist background noise of my upbringing. speaking of Oedipus, I would love to hear what Freud has to say about how I was affected when my dad left me, 7 months old, for Quantico, to return as an American Gestapo agent. I have suspicions.

anyway, I’m supposed to fill out a character reference questionnaire for my brother’s new department. he’s fine, much smarter than most cops. I just don’t understand how he could want to be a cop, and not in the abstract, from my political or moral objection to policing. like, he was never someone to enjoy wielding power over others. he often threw a fit when he felt like we were asking him to make a decision that affected everyone. but he doesn’t know anything else to do. he’s lazy, he didn’t enjoy school. most of his life was devoted to playing baseball, so when that didn’t work out career-wise, where was he supposed to go? I mean my answer would be “not be a cop,” but what does my opinion matter.

and that’s just it, my opinion does not matter. not to the police department asking me for a reference, not to my brother, not to my dad, not to this fucked world where everything seems awful and doomed and I can see it so clearly and it does not matter. I have tried to push back against their blinkered worldview. during the protests last summer I threatened to stop visiting if my dad didn’t take down his “thin blue line flag.” wrote a whole letter explaining my position and why it never feels like I can be heard. they did not take down their fascist memorabilia, and I have visited them since.

my thinking is I shouldn’t be so plain spoken about this, and instead use it all as the basis for fiction, which I fear will be weakened if I pull the veil back and let you see what goes into it. but I also think it’s valuable for me to be honest and forthright about this. then, when I get accused of being a plant, an op, a spook, or otherwise complicit, at least no one can ask why I hid this stuff. while we’re at it, what my dad does now, ie provide “security consultation” for very wealthy people, is even more evil, and by association probably sullies me worse, even though I refuse his offers for work. all these moral dilemmas are brought into focus by my mere existence, and I have no idea how to deal with any of them.

part of me wants to sandbag this reference questionnaire, somehow be a minor wrench in the oppressive machine recruiting my brother. but the questions just make me sad. “How often do you have contact with the candidate?” rarely. I miss my brother always, he was the only person I really had when my parents divorced. even though we have very little, next-to-nothing in common, he and I have no problem spending time together. enjoyable time. but I barely hear from him, in part because I harbor resentment over how I was always a satellite for my dad’s and brother’s interests, following around the baseball team my brother played on and my dad coached. but that childish indignation on my part seems to have created the space that made it possible for my brother to drift into law enforcement without any input from me.

when you’re a coward, everything’s always too little, too late.

somehow I lived til 2021 without having seen Jennifer’s Body (dir. Kusama, 2009). the movie deserves its cult status and does not deserve such a low score on rotten tomatoes. or maybe it does, but only if we lived in a world where real Movies got made, not advertisements for merchandise. I’d give anything for someone to make a zero-fucks campfest as bonkers as Jennifer’s Body in 2021.

I mean, ultimately it’s nowhere near a perfect movie. I can’t even say for sure if it’s a Good movie. not sure if it’s really my business saying if it’s Good or Bad anyway, but that’s an aesthetic discussion I’m not getting into now, not exactly. Jennifer’s Body is definitely a Fun movie, and it’s got grit and texture and takes silly risks and let’s itself be overrun with ideas. so few movies do that nowadays. and far be it from me to criticize a movie that burns Chris Pratt up in a fire explicitly symbolic of the World Trade Center attacks.

where it loses me is in the last 1/3, when Diablo Cody has to explain the mechanism of evil and tie it all up, and the film’s logic becomes too convenient. this hinges on easy “occult” cliches that offer very corny justification for Needy’s escape and revenge. when she goes into her school library searching for answers and finds an extensive “occult” section, me, being the pedantic librarian I am, I was like “yr school library would not have those books.” (later, Needy’s boyfriend “hangs the lampshade” on this when he asks her “our library has an occult section?”) but like, fine, like, the movie obviously relishes the absurdity of teen films and splatter flicks. the end just gets a little too Diablo Cody, and wobbles.

speaking of the occult (hoped for a more artful segue, but fuck you this is my blog), I started reading The Occult: A History, by Colin Wilson. truth be told, I’m ambivalent about the occult. And to maintain my ambivalence, or to prevent it from being too easy to determine what I “actually” think, I sometimes struggle with how much I should write publicly what I feel about my preoccupations. I don’t have simple explanations for my perverse fascinations, or for my idiosyncratic convictions. like, in The Occult, Wilson writes about faculties often termed paranormal or supernatural as being nothing of the sort, and that we all have some measure of perception that is subconscious, instinctual, not explainable by narrow conceptions of “logic.” this seems obviously true to me, based on my own experiences with premonition, intuition, and nonverbal communication. from this epistemological basis, though, one could easily follow lines of thought and feeling that would not only seem insane, they would feel insane. when one attempts to communicate felt truths from that alienated point of view, with all the conviction of someone asserting that 2 and 2 is 4, a mismatch of contexts gives the impression of psychosis. if you’ve ever read the writings of schizophrenics or any of those books that get labeled “conspiracy theory” on the back, you know what I mean. I have a stack of these books, plus books on shit like ESP, astral projection, Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, etc., that I intend to read once my school work is done. whether it’s all true, or if I’ll go crazy, or if those are two sides of the same coin, we’re going to find out.

were it to have not been so horror-lore exposition-y, Jennifer’s Body obviously would have been a different movie, so my criticism feels a little meaningless. I most value art that commits to its premise, which hell fuckin yeah that movie commits.

Alright let’s go clap, clap, clapclapclap Boris Yeltsin clap, clap, clapclapclap hippie burnout clap, clap, clapclapclap Stanley Kubrick clap, clap, clapclapclap Sour Diesel clap, clap, clapclapclap paranoia clap, clap, clapclapclap COINTELPRO clap, clap, clapclapclap Marxist discourse clap, clap, clapclapclap Leon Trotsky clap, clap, clapclapclap Frida Kahlo clap, clap, clapclapclap artist’s artist clap, clap, clapclapclap foamtop surfboard clap, clap, clapclapclap hot young singles clap, clap, clapclapclap hiked-up g-string clap, clap, clapclapclap “What’s that mouth do?” clap, clap, clapclapclap HR meeting clap, clap, clapclapclap antifascist clap, clap, clapclapclap Ku Klux Klansmen clap, clap, clapclapclap vaccine skeptic clap, clap, clapclapclap right-wing nutjob clap, clap, clapclapclap Donald Rumsfeld clap, clap, clapclapclap Don DeLillo clap, clap, clapclapclap “Go on Cum Town” clap, clap, clapclapclap unpaid intern clap, clap, clapclapclap bloody knuckles clap, clap, clapclapclap pin-up tattoo clap, clap, clapclapclap phat ass white girl clap, clap, clapclapclap West Coast shithead clap, clap, clapclap Samuel Beckett clap clap, clap, clapclapclap BDSM clap, clap, clapclapclap active shooter clap, clap, clapclapclap anti-Semite clap, clap, clapclapclap Thomas Pynchon clap, clap, clapclapclap schoolgirl fetish clap, clap, clapclapclap Jeffrey Epstein clap, clap, clapclapclap middle finger clap, clap, clapclapclap Alfred Hitchcock clap, clap, clapclapclap meth addiction clap, clap, clapclapclap new nonfiction clap, clap, clapclapclap algorithm clap, clap, clapclapclap 3D printing clap, clap, clapclapclap neural network clap, clap, clapclapclap mean Latinas clap, clap, clapclapclap marijuana clap, clap, clapclapclap tig ol’ bitties clap, clap, clapclapclap cumstain, sorry clap, clap, clapclapclap Hunter Biden clap, clap, clapclapclap Ella Emhoff clap, clap, clapclapclap Sirhan Sirhan clap, clap, clapclapclap kickflip faceplant clap, clap, clapclapclap lubricated clap, clap, clapclapclap hardcore porno clap, clap, clapclapclap anal prolapse clap, clap, clapclapclap unerotic clap, clap, clapclapclap bean burrito clap, clap, clapclapclap cocaine traffic clap, clap, clapclapclap Franklin Credit clap, clap, clapclapclap John Krasinski clap, clap, clapclapclap futures market clap, clap, clapclapclap kratom OD clap, clap, clapclapclap revelation clap, clap, clapclapclap DMT trip clap, clap, clapclapclap transcendental clap, clap, clapclapclap Bodhisattva clap, clap, clapclapclap Tender Buttons clap, clap, clapclapclap broken promise clap, clap, clapclapclap lover’s quarrel clap, clap, clapclapclap “What an asshole” clap, clap, clapclapclap LMAO