war machine.

go to a poetry open mic fully intending to just listen

sit down in the audience

check my last couple months of notes app journaling

realize i have one night of freewriting from a couple weeks ago that has a couple paragraphs in it that are Almost Poem-Shaped

blitz-write the poem during the 10min midpoint intermission

grab the signup sheet from the host right as he's heading back up to the mic like AIIGHT NVM PUT ME ON THAT SHIT AFTER ALL I DO IN FACT HAVE A THING

poem is rough af but might have some of my favorite lines i've written in the last decade

subject matter is the fight to keep faith in one's own ability to carve the void into something useful, no matter when or why or how you happen to have found yourself arrived, again, at the end of a beginning that had yet to begin. suspended at the apex of the fall. bottom dropping out. muted dirge of a funeral procession from just behind an unopened door. 

look.

i’m not gonna say this household contains one Smart Cat & one boy who is very much not going to make it to college.

but i mean.

"sorry for my sudden absence from here right around when i was most looking forward to coming back; i am currently staring down the barrel of a very possible (& if so, very imminent) Radio Silence Room 2 Electric Boogaloo"

@wings-of-ouroboros lmfao ok so

one of them was an orthodontist i saw during Peak Thyroid Brain Hell 1.0 (so i must have been 15 + in tenth grade) who accidentally stabbed me in the mouth with some sort of dental tool (iirc because he was trying to point something out to my mom & inexplicably chose to punctuate this statement by vaguely gesturing at something inside of my face with a pointy metal stick that was also at that same moment inside of that very same face) & so my brain-chemical-fuckery-addled instincts kicked in & i reacted to this by punching that orthodontist in the arm VERY MUCH WITHOUT INTENDING TO DO SO! & i was super embarrassed & apologized so much, & from what i remember he was really chill about it & apologized back to me as well.

& THEN THE OTHER TIME

was about a year later, when my dumbfuck global-warming-denying christian hippie doctor (who somefuckinghow immediately figured out the hashimotos thing for me & was then never correct about a single aspect of my health ever again) had decided, based on some botched blood test results, that i was in danger of immediate adrenal gland failure & needed to be put on oral steroids. a medication to which i apparently have an uncommon-but-documented sort of side-effect-reaction i have dubbed "reverse roid rage," where, idk, i always think the best way to describe it is "what fearmongering boomers in 2002 thought antidepressants were like"..? just. total inability to feel enough feelings to even react correctly to things happening around you. genuinely one of the most terrifying headspaces i've ever experienced in my life. BUT ANYWAY.

so at a followup appointment, i was expressing my displeasure with the experience of steroid-taking, plus how nothing else in my life had seemed to improve in any way

& HIS UTTERLY INCOMPREHENSIBLE RESPONSE TO THIS

was to go "yeah but you definitely need adrenal gland support, see?" & JAB ME IN THE STOMACH WITH THE FINGERS OF ONE STIFF FLAT HAND, LIKE HE WAS PLAYING A VERY AGGRESSIVE GAME OF ROCK PAPER SCISSORS VS. MY LOWER INTESTINES

to which i feel my VERY UNDERSTANDABLE & COMPLETELY JUSTIFIED RESPONSE

was to punch him back square in the chest PRETTY GOD DAMN HARD.

for which i did NOT APOLOGIZE

& IDK MAN

~19ISH YEARS LATER I STAND BY THAT DECISION.

whether or not this event contributed to his later suggestion that my mom send me to Mystery Jesus-Themed Therapy Summer Camp remains unknown.

all that is to say: hey guys look at these instagram pictures i took of my bomb-ass new haircut.

back before all of meta doubled tripled quadrupled down on the ultraprocessed human brain meat slop churn model?

& now the entire field of UI/UX design is about making sure everything behaves like the digital equivalent of hostile anti-loitering architecture..?

(because at this point everyone who wants a facebook account has a facebook account + new humans aren't being created fast enough to make the average-impressions-per-boosted-post line go up as much as they promised shareholders it would [& of course if you promise line go up big & then line only go up small that is A FATE WORSE THAN TEN THOUSAND DEATHS {aka oops you lose the capitalism, game over; now you gotta scrounge up a bunch more quarters before you get to play the machine again.}])

so all they can think to do now is to just keep feeding the rest of us through the slop churn over & over & over,

as the gutwork of the whole sprawling starving machine desperately extracts & digests whatever trace proteins of remaining humanity can be shat out in the form of Demonstrable Advertiser Value.