Everything is Fine

Wacky.

You Can Fight Ice by annoying them

Mess up their food/drink orders

Lose their tickets/reservations

Overtighten lug nuts, strip spark plugs

Give them incorrect but real-sounding information

Record them with your phones

Disrupt them with loud noises (car alarms, music, banging metal) and bright lights (flashlights, headlights)

Shame them

Fuck Yeah

The fascists want complacency.

Sdo not give it to them.

Fuck them white supremacists

They were free.

They were fucking free.

They were maybe ¢60 of acrylic yarn each at the most, and the whole ziploc bag of them took 2 hours max.

Three people gave me sad eyes until I took their money.

Someone who was clearly the mom friend of their group made me take a $5 and gave a 10 minute pep talk.

At least four more people insisted on getting change to pay for the, once again, free bracelets.

In spite of all these shenanigans, the absolute best was this one person who I can only describe as, “queer surfer dude who looks like a boyfriend who looks like a girlfriend.” I can remember nothing of the outfit, only the impeccable vibes. I did the same thing I did with everyone else, explaining the bracelets were free, and they nodded along as they took the last 6 strand rainbow bracelet. As soon as they had it on their wrist, they pointed at something over my shoulder and, like a fool, I looked.

Next thing I know, they’re running off cackling, yelling, “YOU’LL NEVER CATCH ME!” and I’m holding a fucking $20. I had to stop at least two people from chasing them, cause they thought the person stole something, and then they tried to give me money cause they thought it was funny seeing me flail over people being Too Nice.

stenographer: well her bio says she/her...

me: better play it safe anyway [writes "it"]

the ghost of marie curie: [appears out of thin air] ivy... you're the first person to ever correctly gender me in a hundred and eighty-two years. from the bottom of my cold dead heart, thank you.

me: [dies of radiation poisoning]

closed permanently

For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.

So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?

Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?

Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.

Idk y'all, I think that IS the solution: we gotta force diversity.

People don't Like That: *forced* diversity. But lol like "allowable progression of diversity" has ever happened, EVER.

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.