detox

Addiction is a hard thing to have and an even harder thing to break.

You can be addicted to a person. To the idea of that person. What they can be to you. How they can make you feel.

As good as any drug you can be addicted to a person.

Detox. A concept of taking that addiction, that person, out of the body and mind. That return to normalcy is terrifying to me, the addict. I do not want to detox. I want to swim in your smell, your ideas, your laugh and your tragedy.

I want to cry for you but more for me. For my addiction to you and how ruined it has made me.

Why can't we go back?

I will be me and you will be free.

Our tragedy doesn't have to be everything.

But moving forward is the hardest thing we'll do -- apart.

Stairs and Rain

I had a dream that I had somehow climbed up into the sky with many others. We wanted to go home so we looked down at a perilous fall and wondered where to step first. Someone said to just start walking down and so I reached out my foot as if searching for a step in the dark. It was there, a giant staircase down towards the earth. Each step was hidden in the sky as we walked down first slowly then faster and faster. Until there were no more steps and I had to quickly stop and hold on to the steps behind me that had scrunched up as if becoming a wall I could not walk back up. I got a hold of the step at my shoulders and hung on.

On the left, another set of stairs was coming to meet us. In minutes it was connected and we were fleeing the first stairs for these ones. It felt ominous. As if we were going to fall off of these stairs if we weren't careful but my companions were not afraid and they lead me down the steps which proceeded to feel like falling. "Don't you remember?" they said, "this is when we fall like rain" and suddenly I did remember. I'd done this before and I looked at myself and I was falling with them at an incredible speed but we were not bodies we were rain.
On the ground it was Christmas just as we had left it.

Tom Hardy obscure alien movie, dream

I had a dream last night that I was in a shop, like The Exchange, and came across a movie poster I recognized. I remembered it was an obscure movie, maybe more of a cult classic. The poster reminded me of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I recall Tom Hardy as the alien, unknown until the reveal in the climax, who is dating a scientist woman studying something science-y. I take the poster home and tell Eric about the movie. I really want to watch it but I have no idea what it was called. I have a strong feeling about the rest of the dream and even my memory of the movie but what would a movie like that be named?
In the end, he's really a tiny shape-changing alien who takes human form and dupes this woman. There's an awesome scene where we see his penis develop from alien nothingness. Maybe I was just jonesing for Tom Hardy, maybe I have the next great sci-fi thriller in my head, who knows.

Pitcairn

There are some places you can't escape. Places that keep coming back no matter how hard you try to leave them. We called it the slums, the projects, the poor neighborhood. It had a real name but if I told it to you it wouldn't matter anyway. Some of you know where I'm talking about and some of you don't. If you know, you understand, if not, who the hell cares?
We called it home because we lived there. Anyone who didn't live there called it by its name because they were being sensitive or called it what it was in an attempt to anger us, it didn't.
It was the kind of place no one even tried to better. Living in the shadow of a wealthy neighborhood, our parents paid for shit housing, no bus stops, two Quik-e-Marts and a strip of just bars. That was home.
Even after I moved out, it came back. It always came back.

The one pleasant memory of mine was still early after moving into the area, 20 years ago now, before things felt as gritty. Me, my sister and two of the other boys on my block all got hold of some fishing rods, nothing fancy. And we just went fishing in this pond. I couldn't tell you how natural that pond was, it was small compared to a lake but bigger than a backyard pool. Almost the size of a baseball field with a mound in the middle that stuck up far out of the water. We set up our sticks on the sides of that little island in the pond and waited. Then we got impatient and just swam and played in the water. If we'd caught a fish I hate to think what we'd have done with it.

Body

I was born into this body. I can feel it breathing, hormones skyrocketing and plunging. I'm only human. Born into a world of touch and sensation. You must feel like God, creating and molding me. Trying to make me perfect but I'm only human and somewhere along the way I became me.

My Family

Born and raised in the United States.  The truth about my family is this; I don't know enough about my father to know whether or not he loves me. My sister always hated me and treated me like an idiot, four years her younger. My cousin was a bully. My family is just my mother's generation and mine, a sister and a cousin. We didn't talk to the men in my family for a long time not including my dad who had every other weekend but I never got to know him. I felt like I spent a long time not even talking because no one seemed to like me.
Today as an adult I can finally put my foot down and refuse to be treated like a lesser being by a family I didn't choose. Constantly ridiculed and pushed aside and ignored. I don't have to have a family at all.
How selfish, you must think I am. Just desperate to regain some of the self respect I grew up without. If I want to live in this world I need to break away from the memories of hate I grew up inside of.

Comedy and Stereotypes and Is It Really Funny?

Today a great point was made in class. More than once now in my favorite class, "Family Guy" has been brought up as a point-maker in whether or not certain kinds of comedy are really getting across the point they were intending. When it comes to "Family Guy" I have always been torn on the subject of their intentions. Today though, Professor Glover gave me insight and understanding on something I had long since forgotten I cared about.
He said that; when a joke is made about a stereotype, on TV, it's intention (hopefully) is to point to the stereotype. To make you feel icky about it so you think about it, so you care about it and reexamine it. "Family Guy," however, perpetuates its own jokes in an awful two miles over the line kind of style. Heavily repetitive, taking something funny for five seconds and thinking it can be funny for five minutes. Later, in a few years, they take that joke and try to make it funny for thirty minutes. Over many years the other characters have been fleshed out while the main character stays exactly the same himself. It's very popular for shows to recall on their own jokes. Even Futurama did it before they went off the air.
What I always felt about Family Guy was that people weren't laughing at the ironic pointed jokes they were making but that they were laughing at the joke because it was real to them. Well I couldn't watch "Family Guy," thinking that people were stupid enough to laugh at it for real. No offense if you liked its fart jokes and general disgustingness. We have a different taste in humor. Please don't laugh at a pointed stereotype because you think it's ok if "Family Guy" says it.
I'm not someone who asks you to be 'politically correct.' I grew up under the harsh reign of my upright sister. I will never ask you to be anything but smart and humane. Too many children are being allowed to watch "Family Guy" while when I was a kid I wasn't allowed to watch "South Park" until I was about a teenager. There's going to be a different outcome for children being perpetuated these stereotypes that we're trying to get away from without the understanding that "Family Guy" is a horrible show about how you shouldn't think or act.
Stereotypes are a hard topic to cover altogether. I like to think that most everyone knows the phrase "don't judge a book by its cover" and how to relate that to not stereotyping people. We're a pretty smart peoples. But, stereotypes exist because they're perpetuated not just by TV but by the people being stereotyped. Some of them can be discredited like, I don't know a person anywhere that doesn't love fried chicken, others are harder to discredit.
Making jokes about a person's differences from you; race, gender, sexuality, slurrs. All of these things are a way to offend because if you still find it funny to be derogatory towards someone else then you're attempting to gain a power over them. I've found more than once over the years that woman jokes make me very angry. Logically I should laugh it off and ignore the person but why is it so unacceptable for me to be angry? Because you're attempting to put me into a hole because of who I was born. A joke about my gender is the same as a joke about someone's temperament or driving abilities.
Just stop making these jokes whether they're meant to educate or not. Come up with something fresh and tasteful and the world will thank you.
B-dog OUT