fluff & bloodshed

You've been struck by🔪

Something I didn't talk about in my last post is how New Age is often harmful to young children, so I'm going to talk about it here.

Here's a quick rundown on terminology for anyone who doesn't already know:

Starseed: An alien soul incarnated in a human body, typically for the purpose of "raising the Earth's vibrational frequency" (read: convert people to New Age beliefs).

Indigo/Crystal/Rainbow Child: A child born with a spiritually advanced soul, whose life purpose is to bring the New Age into being.

If you do a quick websearch on any of these terms, you'll find that the alleged signs of being one of these overlaps with traits associated with autism and ADHD. Many websites will just straight-out say that these children are commonly mistaken for having autism or ADHD. Sometimes you'll find people who claim autism and ADHD don't actually exist at all, but were created by the conspiracy to control and suppress these kids.

What often happens is that New Age parents see their autistic and ADHD children displaying these "signs," and decide that their kids are one of these special souls. So rather than giving their children the help and support they actually need, they project and burden them with incredibly high expectations. We're talking about parents expecting their kids to be able to work miracles or have access to all of this incredibly advanced wisdom that they simply just don't.

Various people I've seen on this website who were raised by New Age parents have spoken about how this kind of thing messed them up. They basically have religious trauma from it. Deciding that your kid has special powers and a special purpose because they meet a very spurious criteria is not okay.

When I was a kid, I absolutely would have fit most definitions of a starseed. I believed in magic, fairies, aliens, and psychic powers. Sci-fi and fantasy was my jam. I loved to draw and play elaborate games of pretend. The idea of helping and healing people appealed to me majorly. And, well, I had undiagnosed autism and ADHD.

But you know what I didn't have?

The kind of special spiritual gifts and innate wisdom people associate with starseeds and the rest.

In fact, as far as I could tell, everyone around me seemed to be more psychically and spiritually gifted than me, for no reason I could ever work out. It was actually kind of traumatizing, because I felt like something was wrong with me.

This is one of those non-poem things that are among my favorite poems.

As the OP stated, the use of alliterative consonants is aesthetically just great, especially the placement of the strongest use at the end: “fuck him on the floor.” The use of “chintz” is indeed great word choice.

Because I’m insane, decided to scan the poem:

Not only is the second sentence, indeed, perfect iambic pentameter, the entire poem is perfectly metered, though the first sentence has four iambs rather than five.

There are further things I love about this poem, though: I like the casual connotations of “keep it real” juxtaposed with “chintz.” It causes me to interpret the “chintz” more strongly as meaning something fake, a facade. There is also of course the coarseness of “fuck,” which is a contrast with “chintz” but a different kind of contrast, gutsy and carnal where “chintz” is flimsy and inanimate.

And then there is the storytelling: there is SO MUCH storytelling in just these two lines. To break it down: The speaker is having sex with a married man, in the house he shares with his wife, which is “filled with chintz”—something that here connotes fakeness, in contrast with “keep it real.”

The illicit encounter in the poem takes place within a house filled with facade, the flimsy construction of the wife’s marriage and domestic sphere, but the encounter itself is a taste of something “real.” That’s a story, and it’s just two lines.

This is EIGHTEEN SYLLABLES, y’all. The amount of meaning condensed into these eighteen syllables is stunning, and it is so elegantly done.

Two shared syllables / across the caesura

at front of words / forgoing aft,

this poetry makes. / Pops in English ears,

a memory long buried / of mighty lord Beowulf.

"His wife has filled / his house with chintz."

H W H F / H H W Ch

The alliterative pattern seems immediately broken by the parenthetical comment "To keep it real" but I think this is a necessary alert we are swinging to more ~earthy~ topics and breaking a pattern helps that

I never thought it was weird growing up for someone to never get married or have kids because one of my uncles did that. I never thought it was weird to be vegan because one of my cousins did that. I never thought it was weird to have a mixed race family because I had cousins and aunts and uncles with mixed race families. I never thought it was weird to be divorced because several of my family members got divorced. And their ex husbands and ex wives still showed up to family gatherings. I never thought it was weird for a woman to have short hair and dress masculine because one of my aunties did that.

some girls who took selfies in the woods with paper cutouts on hatpins: that seems reasonable

Doyle was SO CONVINCED that Houdini had legit magic powers and could turn into smoke or some shit to escape things and Houdini was like “no seriously it’s a trick let me show you how it works” and Doyle was all “it hurts me that you won’t trust me with this secret”

I feel like nowadays people project that back ONTO the middle ages, but even back then they were like "there used to be magic and now it's gone"

"kids these days just aren't working hard like they used to"

"young women sure are dressing skimpier than when I was growing up"