'Cause you don't know my way

[sovay]

I know it is feeding the trolls, I know it is engaging with the rhetoric, but when the man in the White House claims that American Jews who vote Democratic are showing disloyalty—not to him, as one might suppose would bruise his nanometrically thin skin, but to the State of Israel, which in his mindset of eternal outsiders he imagines must command more of our allegiance than the country we actually, you know, live in—all I can think is and what would you know about being loyal to even one country? Nothing he has ever done has been in the interests of America as it is, only America in his image, the old, blood-hungry, land-hungry Moloch-ghost of prosperity gospel and racist fantasy. And I don't think he's loyal even to that; I just think he can exploit it and leave the rest of us with the ashes. Today is Lovecraft's birthday, speaking of American hauntings: I say to you againe, doe not call up Any that you cannot put downe. Well, the man in the White House certainly isn't going to do it; we have to lay this ghost and we're running out of time.

I am having an exhausting and rather difficult day, so here are some very different links.

1. Justin Philip Reed, "In My Defense, Monsters: Notes on Black Poetic Grotesqueries, Composite Humanity, and Freedoms of the Horrific, Part 3": "Horror—which I'd qualify as that mode that best abrades superstructural façades, degrades the social fabric and the sanctity of the flesh, and standardizes the repulsive—is a terrain of Black consciousness."

2. The bloodless icefish: "Their name describes exactly what is unique about them: they technically do not have blood."

3. David Schraub on Israel's exclusion of Representatives Omar and Tlaib. I keep thinking that forcing Tlaib to relinquish her likely last chance to see her grandmother is just another form of family separation.

thisbluespirit linked me this gif of Dwight Frye's Renfield and I am finding it extremely relatable.

Comments

[asakiyume]

I am having an exhausting and rather difficult day

I know you have some very concrete, very particular difficulties oppressing you, but our current nightmare is a wellspring of such unrelieved [and by unrelieved, I do mean unrelieved] anxiety and stress that it makes everything much, much worse (as well as being the proximate cause of a lot of difficultites--but even when it's not).

I remember back before I knew as much about structural racism as I do now, learning that people of color have higher rates of high blood pressure, heart attacks, and so on, due to the stress of just trying to exist in a society built against them. Living in the United States as it has been for the past three years has given me a little bit of a visceral inkling of what that must be like. To live each day with a baseline state of anxiety and fear.

[sovay]

Living in the United States as it has been for the past three years has given me a little bit of a visceral inkling of what that must be like. To live each day with a baseline state of anxiety and fear.

It's not fun and I would like to take the weight off a lot of people I know and a lot of people I don't know, but also me. There is no respite.

[coraline]

hooo boy. yes, this.