What am I afraid of? Why is it so hard for me to sit down and write?
I’m afraid that I don’t really have any worthwhile or new ideas and I’m afraid that what ideas I do have will inevitable come out wrong and be interpreted in weird, distorted ways. Not that any of this is new. I think the biggest and clearest part of this slump I can point to was stepping outside my comfort zone yet sticking to my actual principles (which are apparently way more radical than anyone who occasionally follows me seems to think they are) and calling people out on their shit attitudes. I mean, I expected backlash, for sure. What I didn’t expect was the unilateral bullshit party it turned into, a bullshit party with lasting and far-reaching bullshit effects. Unequivocally, Fuck you all. There’s no goddamn excuse for not knowing better than this. There’s no goddamn excuse that a collection of grown-ass adults are incapable of reacting better than a group of children.
But the biggest and the worst thing is that it’s the starkest fucking reminder that I’m living in the south, that I’m living in the city that still has secret white clubs and still celebrates a heritage of explicit and overt racism. The tourist brochures gloss over the history and the politicians are good old civil rights champion blue, but the town runs on racism and if you poke that hornet’s nest you’re gonna find yourself mighty fucking unwelcome.
I’m so fucking tired of this shit, man. I’m tired of reading the same bunk arguments over and over, tired of hearing people’s experience ignored or doubted. I’m tired of the same fucking controversies hitting the news with the same fucking talking heads and the same fucking non-action afterward. It’s stupid, it’s stagnant, it’s stifling.
Still, the grindhouse presses on. There are still terfs to kill and tumblrs to reblog.
Life is full of all sorts of uncomfortable ideas. I, like you, dislike ignorance disguised as intelligence. I just read a great book entitled "The Ark Before Noah" by Irving Finkel, which will irritate a whole bunch of literalists because it shows that the idea of the Ark predates the Hebrews and was firmly established in cuneiform literature, as was the idea of floating a baby downstream in a covered basket, aka Moses. Both ideas were appropriated by the Jewish people when they were in exile in Babylon. Who would have known until Finkel discovered the information, which had been stored in the British Museum for a very long time.
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