Let art live. Let it live in its mistakes, grotesque points, outdatedness. Let art be a mess. Let it be a disaster. Let it be wrong. Let it be ugly, wrong, and pointless. Let art be a sea of failures. You will live.

 

I hope you don't fuck up NYC in today's mayor primary but though I love you dearly, you hold my heart closer than any ever place, you likely will. All for rapid sex pest-Covid nursing home killer- blood thirsty for power Cuomo, who will sell you out to more billionaires to tear you up, be a right hand man to Trump for immigration and Palestinian protest crackdown, etc.

You will have done it to yourselves though. 

People throw away their futures all the time 🙈🙉🙊

*update June 25 12:37am, Eat shit Cuomo 👹

Well NYC you handed my pessimistic ass right back to me! Thank you 💕

Did a citizen surveillance culture over the last decade, that exploded in toxicity since TikTok and Instagram reels past five years, exacerbate conditions for a reactionary backlash? 

Zen Fascism @ 1:50, don't be the doomer the right believes you to be at your core, you're more human and layered than that

Mass protests against ICE before past Saturday, the No Kings one on Saturday, demands of the National Guard to take over, the most broadcasted dud of a military parade of a world super power ever recorded in high definition, political assassination attempts and assassination of (surprise) Democrats targeted by a Christian Nationalist who surprisingly not only didn't kill himself but thought he was going to get out of the country, Israel crying foul after bombing Iran and Iran responding to being attacked, Israeli Zionists crying out on social media 'We don't want to be Gaza.' Trump green lighting Iran war games....anything else? Oh yeah a mass database of everyone being scaled up!

*** forgot the Dem senator attacked and arrested and now one of the NYC mayor candidates the same

I was being a bit of a doomer talking with my mom the other day, if all those people out the streets protesting the ICE gestapo raids and wannabe Robocop armed military militias, if despite all this is it too late. She said that's what they want you to think, to give up. It's never too late she said. You can't think like that. It's hard, though I don't want to deflate people. (I don't want people to take my advice here.) I remember the Floyd protests very clearly though even if it seems most have tried to forget, that 'a better world is possible' as if it was never said before. I just wonder if people out there in the streets ever get a foreboding sense that maybe it will always be dark. Yet they still have to battle in a darkness maybe they cannot win, but if they gave in they would lose their souls standing and staying back. That would be a worse death for them. I read from an author I like where she was reflecting on mourning for a future more than a past, as she had pegged an authoritarian shift happening years before what is accumulating now. While I was reading and relating hard, and I loved the prose yet something else gnawed. I thought I don't want to be self pitying in a long term way like that. Maybe even considering what is going on with the Palestinians. While I was 'yes I do mourn the world that could have been, that we thought was promised,' this is not new or novel. What about a larger picture, what about those who were trapped in WWI or WW2 and they had their lives shattered and lost. Further back people whose villages were burned by invaders and conquerors, or plagues that wiped them away. Where these centuries past people didn't even live in a world where they could see and contemplate knowing the dreams lost in the way they are nowadays. More possibilities existed and taken. All over history people lost their futures. Very few fought in comparison to those who said 'no this is enough, I had enough.' They are the reason some of us try. Maybe they are the part of the reason we have survived.

There is a person from another art life many years ago I have been thinking about the past few months since I realized by looking something else up and stumbling upon their name that they have been deeply red pilled. I'm still in complete disbelief how this kind, empathetic, intellectual, creative and well educated person fell into it. I know they would have despised someone like Trump and all the personalities related to him back then. I know that much. Though maybe you only can know so much about a person because they have not fully formed into their final form. I would be horrified if they stay there but they appear happily entrenched, you wouldn't consume those kinds of people if you had any doubts in what you believed in. What felt and feels good what has brought you peace of mind. The fascist merchants who sell anger, fear, and conspiracy are some of these people's saviors. This is the answer they have been waiting forever for. What keeps me up at night helps them sleep. My suspect is the wellness to fascism pipeline had something to do with entangling this person in. Then life with much unknowns, disappointments, and calamities did its thing. 

The other people I've known who have gone down that route I wasn't fully surprised except a handful but this particular person's descent I will always find haunting. If it could happen to them, then who is safe? I was recently reading the Alice Walker essay for an assignment "Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self" and in awe of it's power and realizing this person who wrote this dragged themselves into these black holes of conspiracy to never pry their way out of. No one is safe. For many years as a kid I never understood the advice to be careful of the company you keep because of the influence it can have. I thought 'the worst would never happen to me!' How foolish youth is. My friend was not young though and neither was Walker when what occurred to them took form. Many in the population now are treading a lot of conspiracy pooled waters more the last 5 years and certainly more than the last 10 years. The desperation and appetite keeps growing. I observe a lot of spaces where climate denialists,  anti modern science, and anti Covid assholes lurk. LOL themselves to black pill under laughing emojis, and where do these people go in the years ahead, now some are bots but enough aren't. Are they being primed and dormant for now and the next crisis they can scream, threaten and attack those masked or god forbid a pandemic outbreak. The Republicans in our state put in a constitutional amendment to strip the Governor's powers if there was a state of emergency. Of course so few people know except the conservatives and they won.

One of the most important characteristics we can posses is to have some humbleness. To realize if you truly believe in critical thinking, intellect, love, empathy and commitment to these things that are paramount, you must let go of being so confident in 'No that's not me, that could never be me. I'm better than that. That's them over there.' smugness. I get it. I do but as bell hooks said we all have susceptibility to be co-opted. I think a lot about the terrors and grief I survived and wonder often how am I not the biggest conspiracy theorist. A therapist years ago said she would understand if I was the angriest person alive. For many years I was on fire. I was fortunate to walk out of it with my sense of wellness and sanity. I don't think you necessarily need to filled to the brim with trauma and rage to get sucked into what is basically darkness, a black hole but they have done a lot of studies that can make people much more susceptible. Something changed in their own universe that doesn't make sense anymore, the order of things are realigned and they have no control over it. I don't know what happened to this person. I didn't know them that deep or close enough. Ours was a short but meaningful timespan. I wish I had known. I don't believe they will return. I think this is a familiar story. The last ten years it's been a slow boil from numerous people who feel those they have known have drifted off and come back in a different skeleton. The last five it's been a larger amount, more vitriol, more out of control, more lost souls who were so hungry that fear and anger swallowed their world and all they have known. This is likely a shift that will be around for a generation. We like to believe art can save, artists know, but they are like anyone else. We must live with that humility.

- March 8, 2025. & March 26, * June 12-15, 2025

Everyone was waiting for the protest, the spark, the 'enough is enough,' the last few months. What would get people out there against this authoritarian take over. It wasn't 5051, the oligarchy tour, the electric car nazi and his bandits dismantling government agencies and hoarding all our personal data. It was images and videos of people being taken off the street in ICE raids and ripped apart from their loved ones for the "crime" of being undocumented, a green card holder, or suspicious looking. That was the breaking point of all the images and video circulating. I guess it was that simple and that horrifying. Everything else was abstract. I guess we will see how the summer holds.

If three or two years ago someone had said the issue that will unite large swathes of people around the world, that will have groups gathering and rallying weekly and daily in the name of freedom, liberation, and self-determination for the Palestinians for over a year and a half, and Israel would become a pariah, no one would have believed that person. They would have sent them to an emergency room to check for vitals if person had eaten something poisonous and hallucinogenic, hit their head, or having a stroke. It's been kind of amazing; average people have shown on such a large scale a moral compass that have exceeded their own nation states governing bodies, media, educational and art institutions, etc. The younger generation here, left-liberal-center-right are actually united in this, in the majority. So, this write off that American Generation Z are actually BAD, as they are authoritative nazi bois and submissive trad girls bringing social progress to a halt (and not blaming the actual old generations for their shitty voting patterns still) is kind of a misleading narrative, it's more complex. If you can find people on this issue no matter their political identity, there is something there inside connected to human and collective wellbeing. Can the dem consultants get on board with that? It's likely why the dems don't want to organize the youth and focus on the podcasts. It's a radicalizing issue away from the system and sowing more distrust, this is bigger than the post 9/11 response. But regardless of this issue that goes beyond any electoral politics that it's penetrated such a deeply divided political culture everywhere besides the origins of the ethnostate empire, is nothing to overlook at all. Masses yearn for wokeness (aka social consciousness) and connection to one another, now it's a mess the hows and why's and can it work?, but something real is there. The numbers and statistics for support as well as people in the street, donations, think pieces, bodies on campuses that let themselves be targeted over and over, protesters arrested, people fired, people fired at and attacked, people on a small boat that was droned at twice the month before, and people cheer and rally and demand a world away...I mean who would have foreseen all of this?

On my mind lately is I think back to 2022 and the midterms and special elections and how I got wrapped up in false hope. Even while I was scribbling down in my one line a day journal about the smell of theocratic fascism on the rise a year prior before leak of Roe to be overturned, I was hoping there was fight somewhere that it couldn't just be me. So those things/events led me to believe something bigger was happening that was more powerful and stronger than these forces, that as a collective who cared we could feel it in the air, and we were inching closer at any moment... Yet in the end I've come to think of those events as red herrings. Not distractions in that they didn't matter the elections and amendments, but that it was not a true and complete picture. The bills and dismantling of reproductive and LGBTQ rights that were in so many states, and the book bans, that so much of this occurred with that barely any true fight or civl disobedience push back was the real tell. I feel really bad I fooled myself. I feel really bad at what did not occur. I feel really angry at the young women who just ignored it all. 

I feel bad I wanted to believe some men cared enough about their loved ones not being sanctioned to state torture and mass government control. Men just don't care in large numbers about women nor themselves, their feelings are all that matter to many of them and a cobbled pod of people they can barely open up to, they claim to love yet have such a tiring slog in expressing this in healthy, steady, and reliable ways (*). I feel betrayed by middle age and older white women, and those are the white women who vote most out of all. I feel a big fuck you to the Gen X and Boomer women whose time has passed for that ability and they fucked other women. Some of you are no better than the men in the man vs. bear scenario at the moral center. Your daughters, granddaughters, nieces, cousins, girls as your neighbors, students, as your patients. etc., you fucked them over. I hope it haunts you but it won’t. A lot of older white women are captured into individualism they feel little larger care of others in the world, they mimic patriarchy in this way. They enjoy patriarchy in this way. Them against the world. 'Not my problem. (*)'

I also resent the reproductive rights movement for not preparing for this at all, even though they have openly written as if it was a good thing they had the foresight to see this years ahead of time back in 2022, and it’s like well what was your plan? To beat a drum, recite comedy, read a poem and honk at fake pregnancy clinics? Shame anyone demonstrating with more outrage? You abandoned the streets. You did. Shame on you.

 On another angle outside of the movement in moments misread and looking back in hindsight, I recall political commentators and critics that ‘oh now the Republicans have caught the car and it looks like there is a big price they won’t be able to afford.’ But too many couldn’t organize nor see the larger picture or feel or care about the danger top to bottom, seasoned to amateur citizens…So many gun to the face mistakes over the past ten years that makes me want to kick down a house.

* (*) recent

Yet I wrote almost all of that above a couple weeks ago before these protests against the gestapo been going on. It's hard to find a concentrated energy in this moment however for me, that doesn't feel it will eventually be a forgotten deflated ballon. I am moved and supportive but I rarely feel inspired. I went to a Palestine event which I enjoyed and I felt less alone, but once you leave it's difficult to keep that social energy up when you don't know anyone. We all are pulling at threads throughout our lives hoping we can find the right "way." But the fear of nothing there and the years of realizing nothing was actually there, no matter how hard I pulled or dreamed, puts in me in a position where the desire to tug a thread is not so enticing. And yet what is all this bitching and self pitying from myself when so much suffering is happening, people disappeared, family torn from one another, police beating the shit out of people as usual, people taking rubber bullets, a boat seized that was carrying humanitarian aid. Seized by the ethnostate guardians of the supposed best and most moral army in the world. I hope I find my people, I miss that tribe once upon a time. But I must remind myself the self pitying, no one is going to be drawn to that. I watched a Maya Angelou video recently and will badly paraphrase how it has struck and stuck with me,  she said you should carry yourself in the world the way people who carried and lifted you up throughout your life. Bring that with you.