Noun, Not an Adjective.

I have never publicly commented on the state of affairs in the world. Mostly because I didn’t know what to say. That I was an ally of Black Lives Matters, that Black Lives do matter. It can’t go without saying anymore but it should. Nobody should have to say this it should be as understood as gravity as universal as oxygen. I have struggled because despite this being the fight of my generation, I cannot join the protests. I’m broke and my only ride can’t shift into second gear or higher and I’m not sure what’s wrong (Anybody on here a motorcycle mechanic?). I struggled because I have never wanted to be just another voice.

But then I remembered that it’s not what you do. It’s that you did it. Every single person in this world has their strengths. I am a student of history. As a counter culture punk asshole. I’m a student of all of history. Not just the shit they give you in highschool. I’ve taken courses, I’ve read books from hundreds of years ago, I’ve read research papers. I love this shit. And I’m here to give you what knowledge I can to help. To signal boost. To be another voice screaming in the crowd because right now the crowd needs to be as big as possible in every single way.

The Powerful ignore the rules and things are quietly rewritten so that they don’t apply.

But they’re not the only ones who can use this power.

People would have you believe the police came out of some noble breed of human whose sterling character compelled them to put themselves between danger and the vulnerable citizenry. And like, if you’re into fairy tales or we’re talking to a six year old. Sure. Police can be superheroes if you want. But realistically? Cops used to be security guards. They were bouncers. Back in the day we figured out that it was cheaper if we organized all of our good thugs into one group and had them just deal with the city as a whole. No more arguing with the judge about whether or not this thug or that thug had started it, now it was one thug’s job to go start it on behalf of “Law”.

And frankly? Yeah. Good enough. I’m not a historical apologist by any means but there’s no getting around the fact that “Things were different back then” is something you need to keep in mind when studying history. Being angry about how stupid shit was in the past is one of those things that non-historians do a lot because hindsight is twenty-twenty. Frankly, the world was a worse place back then. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t nice. But people needed to not have their shit stolen. There were enough good people in the system somewhere that little pearls of idealism ARE there. A totalitarian system was not successfully implemented because it left enough room that even at the glacial march time typically takes, it left room for idealism. It left hope that maybe our police officers COULD be superheroes.

Today, unfortunately, due to manipulating the system, our country is ruled by a minority of paranoid ultra conservative terrorists. And those in power perverted and distorted something that frankly wasn’t ever all that pure or grand in the first place. The history of the United States has always been one of the highest ambitions and ideals coupled simultaneously with some of the most heinous and unforgivable racism and hatred.

On the left you have "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

And on the right you have this shit. 

MOST OF OUR COUNTRY AGREES ON EVERYTHING. Less than 5% of voters VOTED FOR TRUMP.

So it’s fucking time to start educating each other. To take back the power.

They’re going to tell you that you can’t march.

We’re going to ignore them.

They’re going to tell you that you can’t speak.

We’re going to ignore them.

They’re going to tell you that your vote doesn’t matter.

We’re going to ignore them.

They’re going to tell you that you’re not doing things the right way.

We’re going to ignore them.

I’ve never been particularly religious, definitely not in the traditional sense. My relationship with god as I do not understand him her or it has been rocky at best. But I’ve always been really fascinated by religion. There’s something about places of worship and true believers that has always moved me. Not convinced me by any means but those experiences have swayed me from being embittered by even the idea of religion.

When I was younger I used to date a lot of girls who went to church. What can I say, it’s extremely true what they say about preacher’s daughters. I toured just about every Christian denomination you can imagine in that process and got to have a lot of interesting conversations with some very interesting people. One such conversation I had with a preacher himself. I’m not sure what you call a Southern Baptist preacher except loud or angry, so if he’s actually a minister or priest or something, you’ll have to excuse me. His title didn’t stick in my mind nearly as much as the conversation did.

Southern Baptism was always extremely fascinating to me. I may be fairly respectful of people’s faith but I cannot for the life of me understand why someone would wake up early to get screamed at for all the sins they’re committing. I have a mother already, I don’t need a story about a holy ghost to feel bad about all my sins. So after the third or fourth time I’d visited this church I approached the preacher and admitted that I wasn’t a follower but that I sought to understand.

Now, this guy really surprised me. After two hours of screaming up a stroke the gentleman was surprisingly patient. I guess it makes sense, all stick and no carrot gets you kicked by a donkey. Someone who relies on donations probably can’t just endlessly press the guilt button, they’ve got to be able to press other buttons to keep the money coming in. It was still a little bit... whiplashy to go from dust shaking screaming from the pulpit to a perfectly civil one on one conversation.

The preacher encouraged me to explain my doubts. I, figuring that I’d already started the fire by questioning god to a preacher, figured I might as well get some entertainment out of it so I hit him with the hardest questions I could find.

If there’s a god, why are babies born with aids and die before they’ve made it to their first year? How can children be raised by monsters? How can a loving god put people in such horrible situations and then judge them for the results? I had many other questions along the same vein but frankly, you can go to any atheist forum and search their FAQ and find the same questions. My questions are extremely unoriginal. The preacher’s answer, however, was something that has stayed with me to this day. Partially because it might be the only explanation I’ve ever gotten that could make AIDS babies and a loving god exist simultaneously.

The preacher earned my respect by starting his sermon with an admittance that he didn’t know for sure. That religion was there to explain the things we cannot know. That it made sense that if Moses came down with tablets written by the hand of god or transcribed from his speech, it’s likely there were a few translation errors along the way. Humans simply are not perfect and even explaining to us how things work wouldn’t help us because we lack the frame of reference to even start putting things in order. (Strangely I’d encounter this same description when trying to conceptualize what fourth dimensional beings might look like in the third dimension). Despite his lack of knowledge and lack of reliable sources, he thought that it was possible he had an answer.

He explained to me that there is probably only Heaven and Hell. He agreed that it didn’t make a whole lot of sense to spend 70 years on this earth and then eternity being rewarded or punished as a result. Instead, he explained to me that if something WASN’T Heaven, it must be hell. That we were put here on this earth as punishment. (I didn’t actually think at the time to ask him what we could have done in the first place as being punished in the first place asks the questions of why an infinitely powerful all knowing being would create a system where we could even make the wrong choices). The preacher had been a soldier before he’d gone into preaching, or maybe he was a chaplain in the military, I don’t really remember which. And he described to me that he had seen so much death and pain in his life that he had a hard time believing that there was a devil that could torment us as much as we torment ourselves. He explained that if God wasn’t a single being as we conceptualize human beings to be but rather a self defining force which represents “Good” then Satan probably wasn’t a red skinned goat footed asshole poking people with pitchforks. Rather he believed that where there was light, shadow was cast and as such God and Satan were the forces within us.

He told me that the reason all babies come into the world screaming and crying is because existence is suffering. That from the moment someone is born they march inevitably towards death. No matter who you are, how rich, how powerful, how good, evil, or completely unimportant you were, we all ended up worm food. (At this point I was definitely trying to figure out how this was an argument for god existing but he got their eventually). This preacher explained to me that being cast from God’s light was all the punishment that we ever needed. That being exposed to existence outside of God was like a bucket of icewater on a sleeping person. Horrible, jarring, nightmarish. That when we die and are returned to God’s light there is no eternal torment for us, rather that our prison sentence has ended.

Now, coming from a man who had just spent several hours vividly describing the burning pits of hell I found this a bit... odd. Like, when you tell someone they need to come up with a solution to a problem and then you let them go on for a bit and you introduce a new variable to the problem; most people don’t start from scratch to come up with a new solution that addresses all of the variable equally. Instead they attempt to adapt the original plan, usually with as few changes as possible, in order to accommodate the new variable. This strategy isn’t inherently deceitful, rather I think it’s a useful shortcut built into the human psyche. Back in the days of monkeys and saber tooth tigers, humans weren’t given the chance to come up with the absolute best solution to a problem. If you had a stick you had designed to kill a deer but suddenly you were facing down a lion, you didn’t a quick second to reinforce your spear or make it a bit sharper. You either made it work or you died. However, changing your story or shifting the goalposts is also the mark of a liar. And if anyone has an incentive to lie to people, it’s someone reliant on their donations. Trust me, I’d know. From one conman to another, I have a lot of respect for preachers.

So I asked him a few more questions. Namely, what about the obvious shitheels of the world. Hitler certainly deserves a pineapple shoved up his ass every day for all eternity. His response was kinda interesting, mostly because it deeply reminded me of Reincarnation and various Buddhist/Hindu beliefs. Which struck me as exceptionally odd coming from a Southern Baptist preacher but it was definitely interesting.

Instead of answering my question directly he pointed out that across the ages you have examples of truly unique men and women, people that only come once, leave a blazing mark on the world, and then are never followed. Joan of Arc, Julius Caesar, all the saints, etcetera. And then you have Bill. Bill is the most unremarkable man in the world because wherever you go in the world you’ll always find a Bill. He explained to me that the Bills of the world are often just Bill. Just one solitary soul going around and around until they were finally ready to accept God and Heaven. Those AIDS babies as I had put it were souls that took one look at Earth, realized their mistake, and noped straight back to heaven. 

Now, I immediately challenged that. Because to me, that sounds a helluva lot like waterboarding someone until they give you what you want. Sending someone back to Hell over and over and over again would be torture, and change brought around by fear and pain wasn’t true change at all, it was simply fear of punishment automatically curtailing natural behaviour. It wasn’t choice at all.

He had an answer to that too. He explained that “Accepting God into your Heart” wasn’t about accepting an authoritarian rule without question but rather a problem of compatibility. When a parent evicts their child from their home because they have done something like turn to drugs and have begun stealing or fighting with their parents, it’s not because the parents wish to punish their children or hope that any ill will befall them. It’s simply that you cannot keep someone in your house who does not want to be there. The rules aren’t evil because they’re rules. The rules are guidelines on how to live a good life. A rule against stealing and murder isn’t curtailing your personal freedom, after all a rule doesn’t actually stop anyone. The preacher told me that God doesn’t kick anyone out of heaven because he wants to. That as the “Parent” of the house, he had a responsibility to the others in the house. And that Hell wasn’t specifically designed to torment us. Rather that it was “The Street”. It was an opportunity for us to live outside of our Father’s rule. To be truly in charge of ourselves for the first time.

To sixteen year old me, that was some heavy shit. It’d be another three or four years until The Egg would be written and another couple after that before I’d come across it. But when I read that story I was immediately reminded of the preacher and his theory.

She's a special education teacher and she's preparing her lesson plans they had videos of sea lions. They're trying to teach the kids about different animals. They ask the kids questions and two of the questions she asked are, "Do you have feet or flippers" "Do you walk on two feet or four."

When she finished recording I asked her, "Hey moooom... what if your kids... do... have... ...flippers? Like... what about the kids born with fused hands. And uhh... lots of your kids are in wheelchairs. They don't walk at all."

Sure, I can’t feel the tooth slowly rotting in my jaw or the wisdom tooth that decided to cause the problem in the first place by erupting half under that molar. And that is a huuuuuge plus. Such a huge plus that despite the fact that I entered my laptop’s password incorrectly four times, I keep dropping shit, I keep forgetting stuff, and I keep whacking into stuff because I’ve basically lost depth perception... honestly I had to read back this sentence to remember where I was going.

Despite all that, it’s worth it not to feel my face. With any luck the problem teeth are coming out in a couple weeks. With just a little more luck, the anti-biotics will make it so I won’t even need the pain pills in a day or two. After they rip those fuckers out though? Jesus.

I’ve been in pain in my life. A lot of pain. A lot of different kinds of pain. Voluntary, involuntary. I’ve been in three car accidents, a couple motorcycle tiffs. I’ve broken bones, torn joints and ligaments, crushed fingers. You name it. For fun I put hooks in my chest and had a pretty doctor sew wings to my back one time. Not at the same time, those were separate times. Though I think it would have been a really awesome picture to be hooked and have the wings at the same time. Well... a long as they took the picture after I passed out. When they put the hooks in me I was okay long enough to stand up and take two steps. Then I looked down, kinda processed what I had just done, realized I had motherfucking meat hooks in my chest, turned pale as sheet with a slightly green tinge, and nearly fell on my friend. I was fine with the wings. I attribute this to not seeing them.

Anyways. I’m pretty familiar with pain is what I’m trying to say. And I’d take any of those pains over this shit. I really, really really hate the game everyone plays where they try to one up each other about who has been in the worst pain because I think at the end of the day any more pain than “Smashed my finger in the door” is just... pain. It just fucking hurts. Getting into an argument about who hurt worse is just silly. But fuck me nothing compares to this tooth bullshit.

When the dentist tried to ask me on a scale of 1-10 how much pain I was in, I didn’t really know how to answer the question. This is definitely the worst pain I can remember being in, but every time my tooth throbs, I can barely remember my own name. And if I say this is a 10, then where do I rate that time I tore my rotator cuff, how about that time I got the shit kicked out of me so hard I pissed blood for two days? So instead I described it like this. I’m the type of person where I’ve always got a million things on my mind. If I’m cooking a meal I’ll often be listening to music and puzzling over something I’m doing in a video game or a story I’ve read. Normally if I’m in pain, depending on how painful it is, it’ll start creeping up my attention span. Instead of cooking while I think about video games, I’ll cook and think about pain. This pain is so painful that I have to stop cooking and turn off the music because somehow even noise makes my mouth hurt more when shit starts spiking. The worst part is that it’ll spike like that, and then drop down to a dull hum. So I’ll be in the middle of something, already be in pain, and then suddenly I’ve dropped the potato and the knife on the ground and I’m holding my face.

I don’t have any critiques of BDSM that are really all that specific to the BDSM community. I don’t think it has any dangers that are truly unique to it that aren’t kinda obvious. For example, BDSM is clearly more dangerous than a knitting group but if you couldn’t figure that out in the first ten seconds I think you might need a personal handler of some kind or maybe you need to go find your parents or something. Additionally, the obvious dangers of BDSM have a ton of safety measures installed for anything approaching a reasonable event that it can be genuinely infuriating to some of us who have been here for a decade plus. Necessary annoyances though. I’ve fought to shut down events that didn’t have the exact safety measures that I sometimes chafe at. Just because “I don’t need them” doesn’t mean I don’t need them. So BDSM as a whole? I guess I wish we’d look at our past a bit more. Respect our history a little more. I wish the scene in general wasn’t in such a rush to fix all the non politically correct aspects of the scene to the point where it’s missing the original tenets of BDSM. Freedom of expression, no matter where that took you. I wish it was a little safer for edge players to play. As it is, the scene is no longer somewhere I feel safe publically practicing my craft. I’ve spent more than a decade honing my skills and really practicing my act and I no longer feel as if I could do a scene I’d really want to do in public at all. But also, I don’t necessarily feel as if that’s a point to the negative in the terms of the scene. As I grow older I begin to understand that the world of edge play really shouldn’t ever be glorified and that the current trend of everyone always trying to make edge play “Normal” is dangerous. I truly do not want to see any more eighteen year old “Doms” with knives. At all. And the normalization of edge play, which knives fall under, has made an eighteen year old with a knife all too common.

Okay, so maybe I have a couple specific critiques. But overall I think that the greater issues with the Scene are still worth mentioning even if they aren’t unique to the Scene. Specifically, it doesn’t matter what subculture you join, they almost all tend to share some level of elitism. I’ve been to martial arts dojos, gyms, churches, BDSM, Magic the Gathering tournaments. You name it, all of them have that sense of everyone who’s part of the group is better than anyone who isn’t part of the group. And there’s some level of “well duh, group dynamics” and there’s some level of inevitability to this. The truth of the matter is that being part of a group feels better than being left out of a group because human beings are social creatures and that makes sense. Getting specifically back to how this pertains to BDSM. Because BDSM tends to attract broken individuals, people who grew up too fast in some ways and as a result are less mature in others, people who have been hurt so much that any amount of comfort feels like the sun has risen for the first time, people who have been hurt so much that any amount of comfort feels like course salt being ground into fresh wounds. Because BDSM offers many of these people their first concept of formalized consent and the ability to negotiate every minute interaction they have between themselves and the rest o the world. Because BDSM is an extremely alternative look at the world and is extremely vilified in most of the known world. Because of all that and more, BDSM tends to create cults. So does literally every subculture. (Crossfit, Veganism, Conspiracy Theorists, Bird Deniers). But with BDSM, you’re already trying to apply what feels like a completely alien concept to the world and it usually has these incredibly positive results. So when someone else tells you to do this other thing that you maybe wouldn’t normally do... you do. That’s how you get these scenarios where people are suddenly complicit in violating their own consent and where it requires experiences, maturity, empathy, and training to keep people from doing that.