mad with the moon's cold taste

My orthodontist tells me I can make an appointment with the surgeon. I call the surgeon. They tell me I need a new referral. I call the orthodontist. They do a referral. I call the surgeon. Referral didn't come through. They tell me about their special unique system we have to use. I call the ortho again and walk them through the referral. I call the surgeon. They say the referral was missing some details so they have to do it again. I call the ortho.

The insurance company calls me about repair shops. I give them the name of the repair shop which I already gave them yesterday. They say they're not in their system but I can use them, but I have to call the repair shop to ask them to contact the insurance company. I call the repair shop and they say the insurance company is supposed to email them.

Like this. And it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful to hear a soliloquy I loved so much already, and have it come to life in a way it never, ever, did before. I feel like I grasp his motivations, his twists and turns, no longer on an academic level but on a visceral, instinctive one. Because he’s presenting his mental and emotional journey in a way that speaks honestly, like a real person.

Deserving/Not Deserving clearly has no power. Look at who has everything, who has nothing, who takes and who is taken from, who has the means to give and who actually wants to give, who makes the system that distributes life sustaining necessities, who can judge who is lazy and who isn't, etc etc etc etc. Deserving/Not Deserving is not at work in any of these instances because it doesn't fucking exist.

There is no divine force deciding who are the haves and the have-nots. There is no God of Deserving/Not Deserving that gives to the needy and punishes the greedy. There's only human people acting like their judgment reflects a higher moral power when in truth it's just for their own interests.

So I'm not bothering to ask if I deserve something I want anymore (and by whose standard was i going by anyway??). Instead I'll only ask "Do I dare?"

Do I dare to take an afternoon nap? Do I dare pause work and eat a meal? Do I dare to buy a $10 game?

Because probably, yeah, I will dare. And the consequences can find me rested, nourished, enriched, and happy fuck you

(and if I don't dare, it'll most likely be for concrete reasons like "I don't dare buy that game or else I won't have enough money for bills," or "i will not dare to eat that ice cream because i don't want to deal with a stomachache.")

tl;dr // It's not that you don't deserve rest/food/fun/housing/healthcare because of moral or divine reasons. It's that the people who dared to take those things for themselves don't want to share it with anyone they can't profit off of in some way (monetarily, socially, whatever). So i'm dropping the idea of deserving/not deserving and picking up the idea of daring.

Cellar Dweller (1988)

Dir. John Carl Buechler

Essentially, politically coherent works are works where the political message of the story is supported by all (or at least most) of the major story elements, and a politically incoherent work is a story where the political messages of different elements are seemingly all shooting off on different vectors.

The nice thing about this is it can bypass authorial intent (and the discussion of whether intent matters). This is about the text.

Like, politically incoherent works that had no authorial thought behind them are a dime a dozen of course, and politically coherent works that clearly had a lot of authorial thought are if not equally common than at least easy to spot. But there are also plenty of works that are politically coherent without the author intending them that way—like, whatever faults there are with Project Hail Mary, the overall opinion the book has about the nature of humanity & of science is consistent throughout. Likewise there are stories where the authors clearly meant a coherent political point and totally wiffed it. (The works @specialagentartemis has collectively termed “cozy colonialism” come to mind)