A large dilute gray tabby cat sits with his paws tucked underneath him on a tattered rug. In front of him is a well loved cat toy in the form of a little bat with fuzzy purple wings.
Today’s cat is feeling a little batty 🦇 #CatBreak #BlueSkyCats #CatSky
Also: You know you are GenX if you ever had to DIY a treatment for a burn, stitches, or a broken toe/finger because affording a doctor was not an option at the time
I belong to the generation of people who resist getting diagnosed for anything because any such diagnosis becomes a pre-existing condition for which you will absolutely be penalized if ever you succeed in getting health insurance
An absolute scion of corruption, that guy
It really is a day of psychological whiplash
Any woman or person or color in this administration is there as an eventual sacrifice.
Their incompetence is required because they are so obviously set up to be examples for why everyone like them is incompetent and should never be hired for a position of authority.
There are no words that adequately describe how much I miss being able to go out to gigs, to parties, to festivals, just having a basic normal social life.
Long Covid took all that from me, and it could take it from anyone.
Wild to keep hearing anti-AI sentiment described as an "echo chamber" by people who pretend there's never been a coercive dogshit marketing campaign actively pissing people off about it for two years or any no-opt-out half-baked shovelware making everyone's PCs and phones worse
Cowardice & complicity look the same, more & more
For myself, I suspect this is because I keep waiting for it to be “over“ - we’ll fix things, we can go back to normal, which means this period of time in which things are not normal is interstitial
Easier to view this as an extended (and temporary) liminal state than a new reality
The thing I’ve noticed most is my sense of the passage of time has been altered radically by the events of 2020
Everything that came before feels like a completely different life, but also, somehow more present and close in time than whatever wibbly wobbly stuff 2021-2026 has been
One of the other things about brains which is hard to believe if you haven’t seen it happen:
The ability to utterly memory hole trauma. Not willfully forgetting. Just blue-screening after the event & completely wiping all memory of The Bad™️
Insulates the psyche at the cost of rewriting reality
One of the Sandy Hook families lives in hiding 1500 mi away from their baby’s grave due to people stalking them.
The graves of multiple children have been defaced.
One of the fathers had to submit DNA evidence to prove his son was a REAL HUMAN BEING after Alex Jones’ book said he never existed.
That is awesome!
And let’s be real:
There is a paucity of transgender elders because a lot of people did not survive a society so openly hostile to their freedom of open expression and joy
My horror stories are of the 90s & 00s - and those who came before me had it So. Much. Worse.
And the folks I know who did transition back then & went through the proper channels to do so - there were underground zines describing the answers psychiatrists needed to hear in order to sign off on official transition
Folks made up whatever symptoms were needed to get that signature
And don’t get me started on being ace and/or agender in the middle of all of that
(Both also pathologized in the DSM-IV & V)
There’s a reason why so many back then found a haven in the counter-cultural spaces of Goth & Punk - exploding, resisting & redefining gender norms thru fashion, music & art
The number of people I knew in the 90s & early 2000s who wanted to transition - needed to - but could not afford the therapy required to begin making the process official in the eyes of society
AND ALSO how the trans community back then was so groomed to accept only full medical transition as valid
The gerrymandering and the fact that we were voting on illegal maps (are still voting on illegal maps 😡) and nobody really seems to want to do anything about that
I love this land. I hate the people striving to control and defile it.
It’s just so very shitty in an already shitty society to define an identity as a mental illness (check out the DSM-V) to control & marginalize its members, then cite mental illness as the reason to further control & marginalize those people
Something that continues to frustrate me about this widespread anti-trans narrative is how – in order to transition 20+ years ago – you were REQUIRED to be diagnosed as mentally ill. It was the only way to receive approval to medically transition
Mandated therapy for a year or more
It’s such a common redirect of outrage that we’re numb to it, bUt since Kelbold & Harris were known as the “Trenchcoat Mafia” there was a big push to ban TRENCHCOATS for young people
Not guns
OUTERWEAR
FFS
And no one with any substantial influence - then or now - seems willing to do the work of addressing the real issues:
Gun access
Home life
Bullying
Abysmal mental healthcare & crisis support
Although some folks spoke up for gun control, their voices were rapidly eclipsed by the now-familiar “violent video games” and “corrupting lifestyles” narratives (Goth then, trans now)
According to those views, wearing black & being a social outsider made you a killer, end of story
I cannot adequately explain what it was like to be a young adult alive during this event - especially in marginalized subcultures
The Satanic Panic folks had already been going hard against Goths, but with Columbine, my black-clad peers were targeted & harassed by cops for walking down the street
My favorite in recent years is YEET
Such a gratifying word to say!
April 20, 1999 🕯️
Columbine
The line in the song, “Good wolves have born bad sons” always hits me. A lot packed into those scant words
Closing on 30 years later and this kind of once-unthinkable violence in a US school is now the status quo. What have we become?
I was raised by folks who were born in the 1920s. As a consequence, I have archaic vestiges of slang - some portions of which only old Midwest mobsters would likely understand
Conversations can get hilarious with my academic-raised East Coast Millennial wife
Fortunately, we both love language
Infowars/Onion combo logo in rainbow saying “I support the onion’s hostile media takeover.”
It’s finally happened. After 18 months. Finally, a media merger you can root for.
