Puddleglum

I'm silently coasting semi tilted and askew like a muted minecraft boat across a moonlit ocean, floating incoherently around my house looking at the clock every half hour. Up is down and now is never and all the salt has been poured out long ago. This is what an eon feels like to a photon between galaxies.

Thank goodness for crock pots. That alone saved this whole day.

I have nothing wise left to say and my head hurts and nothing helps. I know I did this to myself. Pain be damned, right? They said double the med, so I doubled it and conquered all the hard things like I had the right to colorful spandex, and now look at me, wilting around brainless, useless, motivationless. Sleepless.

I was asked several questions yesterday during 6 month follow up assessment, I answered truthfully, and I remain free to continue sans head meds. I didn't volunteer that I triggered hard the other day and had to all-stop, and I didn't share the concerns and disappointments in my head, because I know all this is just adjusting to chemicals changing again and will soon pass (again) (they always do, this is so familiar). I also didn't mention the sad, which is partly very real and not just lopsided chemicals.

Just keep making words. Keep walking past the ennui. Keep looking forward so I don't see the bumping around in the dark. Keep looking at a teeny distant flicker I hope isn't something I'm just making up in my mind. I mean, of course it is, I invented all of this, it's the only reason I'm out here. I created *this* so I could keep bobbing on a dark ocean under a moon on a monitor.

I'm still really pissed about what happened last week, and I'm glad I turned it into a big deal. All the same, who do I talk to about it? Myself?

Some are called Lightworkers. Some are named Illuminati. Some are Alliance, some are Cabal. Some save children, some pass children through the flames.

One of us is very cynical.

If someone does wrong and calls it right, it is not right. If someone does right and calls it wrong, it is not wrong. If someone hurts another person for gain of any kind and justifies it, that is not right. If someone saves others from damage and victimization, that is not wrong. Yet we keep getting these things mixed up. You cannot hurt others and be doing right no matter how loyal or faithful you may be to your belief or your cause. You cannot save others and be doing wrong no matter what anyone else says about whose side you are on.

It is occurring to me that the ones saying wake up and the ones putting us to sleep might be the same thing.

What is your own heart saying? What is your mind and soul saying? When something beautiful and inspiring carries a sinister taint, or when something ugly and vile glows with warmth, maybe it's time to just step back a bit and ask ourselves what we just got pulled into. And maybe, just maybe, right and wrong are being so tangled up that we can't think any more and it's just easier to think what we're told by those we trust to be saying what we hoped we wanted to hear. Or, actually, those who yank our chains just right.

My own mantra is if all else fails, nourish my body with clean water and healthy foods, rest from the fray, and stop my mind so peace can seep in and refresh me. I walk away.

Lamenting the world and torturing ourselves with strong emotions over injustices is a form of self inflicting. Thinking that we are doing the world a service with our enraged or inspired overthinking is a disservice to our own health. We cannot be good for others if we are not good for ourselves.

There are some we praise who get high on the suffering of others, and I'm not talking about politics. There are some who skate above the noise because they think they earned a Place, and we give them money to live comfortably, and I'm not talking about religion. Every single day millions of us spend millions of dollars on entertainment, on an industry touting right against wrong while doing wrong against right.

There are some others thrust into places who could potentially change the entire world, and they are so afraid someone will kill, maim, or mute them and their children that they remain silent. It's difficult to stand up and say something like 'me too' when decades of evidence backs up cowardice over bravery. It's one thing to stand up for 'right', it's another thing to use it as an agenda. Stuff like that.

Then there is me. "Puddleglum, with Plato, recognizes the difference between the world of shadows, and the world with the sun."

Sometimes I find someone like me.

This is the truth behind all other truths, beyond all rights and wrongs. At 4:30, enter the clearest presentation I've ever heard for every argument anyone has ever made about any *thing* on this earth. This is a guy who is so done with right is wrong and wrong is right that he actually took on exposing a government program knowing it could cost him his life. Not just his job. His life. Sometimes being disgusted enough to step up is the rightest thing a person can do on this planet. Sometimes the only way forward is to accept that there is no 'good' around you before you can see what truth is.




Parens patriae. We are all owned.

Knowing how invasive and abused this 'protection' is, being on the side of 'right' and 'good', how can you possibly believe any institution is 'right' and 'good'? All humans are human. All people strive under duress to meet agendas. Never assume everyone around you is free from pressure to toe a status quo or keep a secret or protect their own asses. Never assume a friend (coworker, churchgoer, family) won't stab you in the back out of weakness if their world turns black.

YOU decide what is right and what is truth. Do your own thinking, research what you can, put together what makes sense, and take control of your own mind, your own emotions, your own lives. If you know you are hurting people, make a plan to change that and stop hurting people. Don't take that to your graves with you. Don't justify it and pass the blame. Don't give someone else the power to hurt people by using you as their tool.

If you want to fix the world, fix yourself first. If you want to heal someone, heal yourself first. If you want to find the truth, find your truth first. History changes for other people's futures every time we decide to make a change in ourselves and act on it.

Funny how a headache goes away when I let the words out.

fun with social organization and predictive programming

I like crossing lines. I've been treading taboo since I was a kid. I questioned God and faith so hard that my mom was terrified I'd be lost to hell. I still poke my dad so much that I get the feeling sometimes he is convinced I can't possibly be saved and that's obviously too bad, but it's his obligation to keep telling me all the stuff anyway even though he believes in predestination and that souls are born into this world already either belonging to God or rejected by him. I grew up with people who were so convinced that ideas in my head were going to cause my eternal damnation that they could barely find ways to accept me as a personal loved one. There were so many prejudices in the way that I never believed either one of my parents loved me for nearly my whole life. I never felt forgiven and loved anyway, which is a simple life truth I managed to sift out and apply to my own life and children because it's logical. It's not logical to throw your own offspring under the bus. That is fear, pure and simple.

I've brought up before that being naturally autistic enables me to enjoy thinking through conflicting ideas without being bothered by them. I can easily carry opposing belief systems around with me through my mundane days, because it amuses me to take them apart and reassemble them. I love asking more and more questions until every shred of institutionalization is torn apart, and then rebuilding so that I understand the purposes, the goals, the reasons it works.

I was born to think like this. It comes easily to me. I don't fuss much over who is right or wrong because all have some right, and all certainly have some wrong. One example might be Christians missing the forgiveness boat. I actually know people who have estranged themselves from offspring because of ideas, nothing else, to the point where their own children literally dying of emotional neglect or abandonment via drug and alcohol abuse doesn't seem to phase them. Bad seeds and all that. I find it shocking that a parent wouldn't go to any length to try to save a child at any age, but that exists all around me, and I find it contrary to nature. Or, I find it reprehensible, the same way a human might feel about a cat or dog gorging on their first litter, which is a real thing sometimes. If a sheep won't let a lamb suckle, that is so terrible, but if a human pushes a child away because saving a tree takes precedence, that is noble.

So I pull these things apart like puzzles, and up until the last few years thought I was completely alone doing this. Thanks to youtube, there's been an explosion of thought sharing, and I'm loving all the ways other people also take everything they know apart trying to figure out what is real, what is important, and what matters.

That's the thing right there. I don't believe any of that matters. Did Elon Musk fake the car in space? I love space. I love science. I love that there is a car floating around out there. I also love that there's a huge debacle boiling over on youtube about flat earth, science as a religion being institutionalized to brain train us into robots, and whether or not anything we think we know is real at all.

So let's step out for a second. Step out of this universe and look at it. We live IN it, or we think we do, or whatever, right? And we all have thoughts about our experiences. I have boiled it down to yes, we are in a situation where night and day exist, growing cycles have a regular rhythms, polluting is a bit of a nasty problem, and food is pretty scarce in some places. Other than that, there's not one shred of it that we can prove at all. People are born here, and then we die. Everything dies. Everything. We fuss about that part, and we use that part to make the rest meaningful or not in relation to that, but even that doesn't matter.

What are you doing right now? Did you make someone cry today? Did you make someone feel crummy or sad or miserable? Did YOU cause that? ~That's what matters.~

We can argue all we want about end time prophecy, faith vs works, who God really is, who and what is right and wrong, and none of that changes anything about your day except how you allow it to control your behavior. When you allow a belief system to control you so much that you'll throw emotional rocks at your loved ones, or let them agonize in emotional starvation ignoring them, then that belief system throws what really matters in the trash can.

Humans matter. People matter. YOU MATTER. Your family matters.

How do we know what really matters? I thought long and hard about this. At the end of our lives, and this has been studied and documented for decades, people extremely rarely care at all about whether their religion was right, or whether they were right. What they care about is being lonely, and they wonder why someone doesn't come to check on them, or they wish they'd said something to someone and now it's too late and that opportunity is gone forever. Some people die with broken hearts because their relationships are a mess, or they are alone, or they don't know how to fix what they broke.

One exception to this is mental illness. Some of you might have grown up with abusive adults that seemed to feel no remorse right up to the point of death. The hurt, pain, anger, and sadness you might feel about that is your reminder that THAT is what matters. You didn't feel loved correctly, you didn't feel forgiven for being in their lives, you didn't feel safe, and while you might use a belief system to console yourselves, that isn't what matters. What matters is that broken feeling, and that is a very good indicator for your belief system not fixing anything important. What is important? Forgiveness. Closure. Saying those last words. Not getting there in time. Missing that moment. Being there in that final moment.

I've been sharing a few youtubes off and on lately both on Pinky blog and on facebook that question the realities we think we are in. Some of you are familiar with truthers and survivalists and whatever. I have never cared. I'm being very serious saying that. I have never cared whether our government destroying our own people and places is real or not because governments have been doing that time out of mind. I have studied philosophies and governments and religions around the world, and the one thing they all have in common is how do we control the people. How do we manage our economies, change the structures, fix the problems, use solutions the people don't like? How do we normalize what we fear, reset what the norms are, swivel the point of view until compliance is met? It's very difficult to manage a large number of people when it comes to travel and economy and health care and supplies. People have a way of thinking for themselves, solving all their own little problems, and without central (mainstream) control mechanisms, that actually gets a little chaotic. So governments criminalize things and use laws as fences. They oversee economies (our milk prices have been fixed for a very long time) and move people around (military families) and subsidize stuff like school loans (think tank training). If you for one second think that a mass of people arguing nonstop among themselves can actually sway real change in government when the people behind the curtains with billions of dollars are the ones pulling the real strings, and then you go and make your own families miserable over something stupid because politics is so important, maybe you're the one getting played. Something to think about.

Sherlock fans might remember this quote. Guys, this is me. When Sherlock first said this, everyone blew it off as his eccentricity, but if you follow the entire series, you see exactly what really truly matters.


Anyway, the reason I started writing this out was because of the flat earth thing. I am a truly hardcore space fan, I always have been. I dig the escapism of space 'out there'. I love that space is used in stories as a way to deal with stuff we can't civilly discuss if it were on earth. Babylon 5, Farscape, Lexx. The entire Stargate franchise. But I couldn't help noticing for years that space stories are ultimately so handy for changing perspectives across large numbers of people. Entertainment breaks through where political diplomacy fails. And of course, I've brought up that Marvel has caught on, etc. Some of you know this fascinates me. So for awhile, science fiction was used in an either/or way. Either aliens were coming to kill us, or they were coming to save us. Either we die of mass plagues, or we solve all the problems and save the earth and possibly even the galaxy. The overarching ideas that kept being introduced for years were about problem solving very particular ideas that corresponded to our own lives. Sci-fi is notorious for dealing with race and gender issues, and for bringing governments and their militaries into the story telling. Refugees are common plot devices. Throw in a little time travel, a variety of off world species intermingling, and a noble calling, and bing, you have a fight for the right and we're all falling into step adopting it into our homes via collectibles, clothing, and decor. A really cool government is one that solves ALL the problems so that we can be one big happy world of people running off to find other exciting life across the universe.


Can you imagine how dull television would be without any of that? Space has lent so much to economic exchange and growth, not to mention new beliefs and belief systems springing up, that a world without all that would seem pretty empty. It's almost unbearable to contemplate. But now there is a new suspicion rising up, a terrible and bitter disappointment that all of this space stuff was made up just to hoodwink us all, and it has truly worked brilliantly. Until now. And now that the secrets are coming out and reality isn't what we thought it was and truthers are destroying our illusions, it's getting even harder to figure out who is really telling the truth. Like, for instance, Q-Anon. Is he alliance or cabal? Anyone really familiar with Illuminati would instantly recognize the method and the really subtle way truth is used to make other truth false, and people falling for it left and right. But is that person really sincere? Is he for real? Because if he is, then we must ask if he's just another one of their brainwashed puppets, right? The vid description in this recent reveal is noteworthy, click over to youtube to see it.


I'm all for investigating who in the world set up these belief systems in the first place. I grew up in a legalistic church that debated every jot and tittle down to the nuance on basically nothing more than the vaguest of actual historical studies, and from what I could see, Jesus questioning the priests in the temple as a boy was the picture of what was wrong with belief systems in the first place. I don't care for the debates over specifics, the point was that whoever Jesus was, he sure timed it well (Masons and Moors were already around, as were Buddhists), and his presence alone seems to have overturned the entire world in one way or another. But as was pointed out in that last vid, who exactly got hold of that religion in its infancy and grabbed world control is actually a really sinister story, and it really does continue to this day. Some of you have seen how I've struggled with my dad's POV, like he gets stuck in a loop counter after certain triggers.

Part of the problem is the argument coming out of nearly any mouth out there that we've been lied to. Well, duh, of course we've been lied to. Our entire lives are lies, can we please just move past that, thank you. Anyone can study history and see what the truth is, and that truth is that the idea of World Order goes so far back in human history that it's almost ludicrous. This is where people fall for it being an alien agenda, because what else could it be? Humans die so fast, why would they care? So there are elaborate stories woven around the richest bloodlines in the world being part alien DNA. Personally, I don't care whether that is true or not. If space aliens came to this earth to whatever their agenda is, then they've been among us time out of mind and nothing can change that. But if this was concocted to control the masses, like worship your gods and pay tribute, and oh by the way, we have sovereign ownership over you so you must be in our militaries, etc, then that was brilliant, right? Slow clap for that one. But then wake up and go Ohhhh, they're still doing it... We are still owned. I've been saying this for years. We have always been owned. You were born into citizenship. You aren't allowed to decide that. How many people around the world have defected and sought refuge from their governments? This next vid was oddly cute until around 5:30 in. Kinda got my stomach. (Predictive programming is kind of a sport with enthusiastic hobby spotters.)


So let's be smart about this. We may not ever know what truth really is on this earth. We can spit and argue all we want, but absolutely none of it is proven one way or another without your presence there verifying it. I personally favor logic and space. However, I also believe (my belief system) that people are more important than the ideas that come between us. I figured that one out in my childhood. My mom and my dad argued bible incessantly. Nevermind that they agreed on 95% of it, that other 5% was enough for my mom to suffer so much over my dad going to hell, according to everyone in her belief system, that it embittered her and sent her spiraling through a massive depression and finally to her lingering death. My dad was just as bad. Despite his once saved always saved rhetoric, he HAD to try to force her to agree with him decade after decade until the only way they could reconcile at all was through her strokes and memory loss, and even then it was very difficult being the children watching that ship go down. Their belief systems were more important than the way they treated each other. Their belief systems were more important than forgiveness and getting along. Their belief systems, so nearly alike, were so tortuous that I can't even imagine how I'd have survived my mother's death without dad going to the nursing home nearly every day for five years to sit with her at lunch. That devotion and her inability to call out much beyond his name when she was afraid of something became iconic to everyone around them. THAT was what their entire marriage should have been like.

How socially organized is your thought process? Do you feel compelled to defend a belief system? Like I said, I like the whole space thing, but I wouldn't be condescending to anyone over not believing it's real. Whether it's real or not is less important than how I treat someone. Hard lesson learned, thanks, Mom and Dad.

I need some more #bencongruity.

they still haven't realized I'm actually at home

I love this guy
click the pic for a good song

Day 5. Still hiding out from the Jehovah Witness. Curtains drawn, lights off, stealth chores going on. Outside is snow and nasty cold. Weather hasn't deterred them in the past.

I made the mistake of inviting them back when they showed up in my driveway right behind me last week. I was actually glad to see real people that day because my depression was so bad, but politely declined assistance getting my shopping in. We talked for awhile, and I was fine with it and even said we could talk again sometime. When they jumped on what day next week would be good, I auto deflected with we don't have a set schedule around here.

I don't invite people into my house. This is my sanctuary, my escape, my cave. This isn't a hang out for people outside my family. I grew up with my dad pulling people into the house to 'talk bible' and it would last for hours, and he even had me cooking meals so he could keep them there. He loves talking bible, and can out talk anyone, yes, including Jehovah Witness. I know for a fact that they eventually realize they are trapped and work on ways to escape.

I am like my dad. I am saving them from exhaustive entrapment. I am saving us all from a not so cute cat and mouse head game. I am like my dad. I like to win...

pic clicks to wiki page
make of it what you will
the USS Illuminati (NCC-60309) in ST Expanded Universe is a little over the top, I think
all the good stuff is in the interactive gaming
the rest flies under audience radar

So the stuff I brought up in the last post, right. It hit me later, I remembered having seen someone on facebook freaking out about finding out their kid's photo was being sold on the internet for a weirdly high price and they couldn't figure out why in the world, right. Well... maybe the cloning is a real thing. Maybe human trafficking isn't against the law when you use tissue samples from birthing and whatever (*cough*abortions*cough*) to clone cute little kiddies and people can pick them out of catalogs. Just saying. None of that is new. This is old stuff. You guys only know about it accidentally because of social media shares and internet surfs.

Those of us on the topside still have some semblance of human rights. I'm about to tell you exactly what I think since I've been so cryptic all through Pinky blog. Well, it still looks cryptic, but this is how it boils down.

Whatever comes, two things.

• Your mind in the moment is yours. Even if you are brainwashed, there are times you are a lucid self, and that person is who owns those moments. No one else owns your love and kindness. You create that, in any situation. No one is ever brain broken and retrained to be sweet and kind. If you want to own yourself, be sweet and kind in your lucid 'now' moments.
• We are all slaves. We always have been. We are continually used like noobs and taken advantage of with the whole freedom idea, and human dignity is a gift we give each other daily, not something someone owes us. We are the ones who give each other dignity.

Nothing else in this world holds any promises. Pinky blog assumes we are all already screwed. I am teaching you how to go forward and survive.

You don't have to believe in whatever god people hold over you or that extraterrestrials exist or that governments actually don't care about people as much as they do infrastructure, and you certainly don't have to believe me hinting at anything, but somewhere in your mind, heart, and soul there is a real person, and you easily forget to notice that we are all real people caught in a big mess. Where did the mess start? That's debatable. Did someone engineer this mess? That's food for thought. Is this mess necessary? From certain points of view, it might be. But underneath all that mess is you are real. Whether a genuine God is real is between you and God and no one else's place to manipulate you with. Some people do care, but don't realize they themselves come from a very brain trained institutionalized process that uses God to create and enhance emotional dysfunction and pressured compliance. That is not a loving God. Learn to tell the difference.

Never forget that you are real. Even if everything falls apart, or if your world is already broken, you are real. YOU are what is important. Your moments. The gifts you quietly give others. You own that.

dishing on my messy life

This is Thanksgiving Eve with a disability. It was originally the most beautiful swirled mocha cheesecake I'd ever made, a first time experiment with a gluten-free crust. I don't share that much, but this is the kind of nerve fail in my arms I'm fighting to hold at bay. I've been told that once I lose especially ulnar in my left arm, I won't be getting it back. I have destroyed my phone case dropping it so many times, despite taping it back together several times, but since my phone still brilliantly works, that is one helluva good phone case protecting my phone.

I remember sending you a story about a dream I had where I watched a life from beginning to end. Not knowing who it was, passing judgment on that life. Then finally being reconnected with my memories to find that I had judged myself. No matter how hard I tried to think up a reason of how this was unfair, I could not.

My cousin and I have very interesting convos, like no other person I've met. We've both had near death experiences, DTs from severe withdrawals, and close enough childhoods to be able to compare really deep personal meanings we've come away with.

This was the other half of that cheesecake. I've taken things out of the oven a million times, and I assumed this would go per usual, except this time my left hand couldn't make a grip at all in that position, and without warning (there was no pain), there she went, and my right hand was all that barely saved that 350 degree dish from burning me or careening across the kitchen.

I have always loved the debate over the existence of God, because it is unsolvable, even with logic. I was taught to debate from a very young age, and although it's taken me years to let go of using it as a cat and mouse toy on other people, I still love it inside my head. Sometimes I try every way I can to prove God cannot exist (for fun and games, I am not an atheist by birth, or even by nature, as I have found out), but physics keeps changing my footing. I used to be able to stop at If there is no life after death and this universe is all that there is and we are made of and from this universe and nothing else, then we should not be able to conceive or believe in anything or anyone else after life, yet so much of the world does.

I unfolded the saved bit and dug around taking a few bites, and it was pretty awesome cheesecake. I had marbled the lighter coffee swirls and darker chocolate swirls like art, and had used the only cream cheese I had to construct it. This was it. So yeah, I stood there at the stove and ate some after I walked off for 5 minutes on the pissy edge of tears. I'm not very good at self pity and why me, though, so it didn't take long to turn into a pig.

We are learning there is so much more to this universe that I have to keep tacking on provisional statements. For example, the Ancient Alien theories suggest that humans were part of a long galactic history of DNA experimentation, with growing evidence to support that. If aliens were posing as or mistaken as gods and could bring humans back to life via resuscitation, naturally this could be jumbled into a mistaken afterlife concoction. Like that. I allow for side jaunts into all kinds of logic that would still support my main supposition even though the side jaunts are questionably- questionable...

@bonenado was awesome and cleaned up the mess after it cooled. You can see I'm really hard on my oven, lots of broiling and spattering, but oh so yum. He got in there and spiffed it up while I stood off to the side sampling the other half of the mess. We were making crazy funny jokes and laughing our heads off. He always saves my days.

Anyway, over a long time I'm kinda sifting down to a couple of conclusions. There is no logic for the fail we feel over broken relationships at death after decades of not fixing them, and there is no logic for dreams like my cousin shared with me about the kind of life review judging we dread. Notice that both these things are very strictly subjective and usually unexpected. We question these things. We don't know why they happen, and we see nothing in this universe around us, even incorporating the latest physics, that allows or explains why we feel sad and guilty when everything else is stripped away and we are left standing alone before God, as it were. And it's not even that God is the vindictive one. We are the ones who recognize we f*d up. We are the ones who, at the very end of things when time has run out and despite all the other wishes and dreams and regrets we ever had, judge ourselves based on the deeds we did while we were here.

Nothing else.

This was Thanksgiving morning. Right hand this time, grip completely relaxed without warning after cracking the egg for scrambled eggs. I've worked very hard for years on learning to hold my hands differently, using both hands together, standing over areas so I'll stop dropping bottles full of tiny pills all over the floor, plus 4 years of physical therapy. This is life. I need assistance with so many things. When a handicap button to a heavy door doesn't work, I can't get into a building. It's that simple. I'm sharing this part of my life to help some of you understand the challenges holidays can be for people you know but don't really think about. Get up and help people do their dishes after they've cooked for you. If it's a drag for you to clean, imagine the drag it was for them creating the mess and then having to clean up after you. You know what love is, Charlie Brown?
14 Simple Ways Peanuts Taught Us What Love Is (click)

Here are the books.
Love is Walking Hand in Hand
   (1965 edition)
Happiness is a Warm Puppy
Peanuts Guide to Life

From The benevolent God of the funny papers

Throughout his life, Schulz constructed himself as the put-upon target of others' ridicule or indifference, from schoolyard bullying to the plaint, repeated well into old age, that no one loved him. Michaelis identifies the artist's "lifetime inclination to conceal hurt and the harsher emotions that follow on it, the better to brood upon them"; but as he also shows, that hurt was often illusory, the betrayal a figment: no one else recalls the bullying, and Schulz was indeed loved deeply and well by many. Yet, perhaps due to the premature loss of his mother, he nursed forever the symbolic wound of emotional and social rejection. "Arrested, bitter," Michaelis writes, "he spent a startling amount of time over nearly 60 years polishing a cameo of boyish helplessness and frustration." It's a puzzle worth puzzling over: the stunted boy's resentment of a cold, motherless world takes perfect creative form in the hopeful, searching Charlie Brown.

Getting ready for holidays in Mirkwood.

My biggest fail is an auto anger response that flares up over way too many triggers, clear back to childhood. The resulting fallout from that is sadness and depression. I'm trying very hard to change that response. Life is way too short and we have way too much to lose for me to hang onto being petty and hurt. Since so much of this response is both genetic and trained into me from birth (and I would argue might even be the survival tactic that helped me make it this far), it's hard retraining my brain to let go of it. Feeling sorry for myself or being angry about something I have no control over isn't useful. It's actually even wasteful of resources and drains me.

I wish these could stay up all year.

I think the important thing is, now that I recognize I can attempt to control some of this emotional chaos within me, that I apply it before it's too late and I regret later that I didn't try. At the end I want to be able to say I'm glad I was here, I loved my people, and I think I did ok, even if it's illogical and there really is no God or life after death. That doesn't change that I want there to be, and that I want to go on learning and doing and being in a variety of new ways. I definitely don't want to spend my deathbed moments feeling sad or disappointed in myself because I dismissed the important stuff while I had the chance.

I can't go out on sappy. Here you go.

fear-driven madness

From imdb quotes (1978).

Dr. Stephen Strange: What will I be called upon to do?
Thomas Lindmer: Become more than a man. And renounce such Earthly pleasures as are given to men who are only mortal: the pleasure of ignorance, or offspring, or an easy death.
Dr. Stephen Strange: Will I be asked to give up even love?
Thomas Lindmer: The universe is love. That you shall have.

In the meantime, autumn is kinda meh here. This is as far as we've gotten.

That's right, last time I showed you this street there was 6-8 foot tall wild grass lining it on both sides. Looks so tame now.

This is a fan made supercut extended trailer. Niiiice.


There are a handful of 'Muricans I try to ignore who never discuss life through story telling outside of something biblical. They are entrenched in a decades old mindset and really do believe the world still runs the way they've been clicheing it all their lives in their heads. Some of them actually think fiction story telling is evil and warps the mind to the point of paving the wide road to hell and being lost forever, or, having not seen all the stuff on TV, fail to realize their apocalypse theories are based on what others really believe they see coming out of script writing and acting. To be fair, these are smart people, even brilliant, just fantastically repressed into end world, end times, truther, anti-science, or science weirdly proving something politically horribly wrong with religion(s), and since I grew up like this around people like this and every day of my childhood and parts of my adulthood were like this- I'm tired.

What is or is not truth boils down to who we are and whether we are being real and honest. Until we can stop living double lives as individuals, hiding secrets and masking our own truths, none of the rest matters. Standing up for and defending bastardized politics and religions based on centuries long crafted belief systems essentially brainwashing people while we ourselves never share our own truths is what is at stake here. Pointing at someone else while covering up our own stuff is the shallowest part of humanity, and why most of humanity will always voluntarily be slaves.

I am so, so tired of people being stupid. We are so much more powerful than fear. Fear-driven belief systems have been happening since the dawn of civilization. The gods fight over us, divide us, punish us, and if not them, then we do this to each other in the name of the gods.

Ok, did you catch that? WE DO THIS TO EACH OTHER IN THE NAME OF THE GODS.

I've said in other places that humans have elevated monkeys flinging poop at each other to an art form. I've been saying since I was small that I never wanted to be a human, that I'd rather have been a dog or a horse.

But you know what? There are also some really brilliant people on this planet who use story-telling wisely. They accomplish far more on a world scale in real time than any religion on this planet. If anyone wants to believe I'm going to hell for appreciating this skill and the way it networks people all over the world into a family of fans that care about each other across national boundaries and beliefs, then fine, believe what you want.

I'm done with intellectual jousting from the dark ages, and I'm especially done sharing my thoughts on it because it gets people too excited and then the misunderstandings run rampant into even wilder prognosticating. Trying to explain this to the people who need to hear it is a waste of time, apparently. So, it goes here, where it won't be seen, because who I actually am on this planet isn't nearly so important as the lengthy deep secret discussions over what amounts to fear-driven madness, which does absolutely nothing to help anyone heal or feel loved. I have better things to do with my intellect than spend it in secret caves getting excited about things we can't do anything about.

my personal stance on the LGBT murders

I probably offended half my twitter followers this morning with what might have looked like a flippant buttinsky comment back to a very sincere discussion about how we draw lines around mental illness in regard to mass shootings, so I probably need to clear this up.

I got into a discussion yesterday with other people on a protected facebook post, a couple of friends have seen it so they know what I'm talking about. It was thankfully a very polite discussion, as opposed to some of the very hateful and heated ones I've seen about the very same thing in protected posts from other people I'm friended with.

I have no reason to hide what I think or believe. I'm not hurt if people unfollow or block me. I'm going to quote what I said in that protected discussion because it states exactly how I feel about this whole thing. The first was in response to someone saying that humans will find anything they can to divide, hate, and kill each other. The rest rolled on out as the discussion continued with several people.

Anthropologists call it "them vs us", a tribal identity thing that keeps social order within a group. You see this all the time in religion- we're not like -them-.

It's kind of an instinct if you look at the way animal groups behave, so we need to rethink 'group' to include all of 'us'. We need to become global citizens.

As long as people keep falling for the formulated hate, no. It takes time to retrain a whole world to see a bigger picture.

Like, don't hate the haters, right?

By the way, for your friends who don't know me, I come from 400 years of the most extremely conservative people in the world, and they think I'm wildly liberal thinking this way, lol. Give people time.

Also, it helps to be aware that govts & media work together to direct the energy flow between hate groups in order to pursue agendas. If we need a different policing system for world peace, they can't just force it on people, but if we feel desperate enough, we'll beg for it. Allow the possibility that some of what we see in media is manipulated to an ends.

lol, sorry, didn't mean to take over. I have a B.S. in sociology and minored in anthropology. I've met Richard Leakey, although it was brief. Transitioning an entire world into one peaceful govt is very difficult when whole nations employ belief systems against it, even if they actually want world peace, and most people do. People don't control their leaders, and even leaders aren't the controllers we think they are. Obama isn't a king and he doesn't have autonomous power. Even on Game of Thrones we see how politics and religions use each other. Realistically, the best we can do on our individual levels is keep helping other people get past hating the haters. It can't end until we just all stop.

Kinda laughing, 4 years back out on social media and I just wrote in a nutshell what I've been holding back all this time. I tend to go for distraction and hopefully not alienate anyone, but I really do want to see a 'star trek' type of society in our world future.

I realize I come very close here to advocating for World Order, which is an extremely touchy subject with many people I know. I'm in a unique position, coming from 400 years of Mennonite ancestry and arguing the pros of World Order. This is probably surprising, given how into Orwell and Lexx I am.

I'm also writing this under duress. I'm currently doing a monitored withdrawal off a blood pressure med that I've been on for 2 decades, and I seriously don't feel well just typing this stuff, on top of the other challenges I live with daily. I won't reiterate them because that's very boring for me and they're all over this blog anyway.

I understand all the sides- the mental illness debates, the religious debates, and how the twain can ever possibly meet without blowing up into political debates.

I'm just saying it's not going to stop until we personally decide to stop hating the haters on an individual level. There is no protocol in place for how we are supposed to think and feel. If we want the world to be a better place, it really does start within us. We don't need to be continually opinionizing ourselves into negative states of mind and health. Life happens, life sucks, and maybe it all boils down to someone just needs to instigate the kind of authoritative boundaries that say anyone who does this and this and this can no longer be allowed to live. Because, and follow me here, whether or not mental illness is involved in mass shootings, I personally don't think that kind of brokenness can be fixed. It's not kindness to anyone to allow debate to go on ad infinitum over whether someone can be rehabilitated against their own belief system whether it's entrenched with mental illness or not.

THAT is the conundrum.

in case some of you need more context on the transgender public restroom debate

I didn't date in high school, which I brought up in asexual pan and seriously lacking gaydar or any other kind of dar, which turned out to be a pretty popular post. I am asexual, and the first thing most people do when they hear that is ask why in the world do I care about a gender debate if I'm not interested in sex in the first place?

I'll skip the entangled layers for a few seconds to tell you what actually happened.

There were 3 brothers in my high school who didn't look at all rough and tough but were the toughest, meanest boys you ever met in your life. They 'picked' so mercilessly on gay boys that one of them actually dropped out of school and fled the state. By pick, I mean bloodied the hell up within an inch of his life.

I had absolutely no problem being friends with gays (trans wasn't used much as a descriptive word back then, so everyone got lumped into 'gays', or 'homos', even if it wasn't technically correct). I had no problem whatsoever sitting by them in class or at lunch, being seen talking to them, and generally being a friendly part of a subgroup of people I didn't really fit into, but I didn't fit anywhere anyway.

Those 3 boys had a big problem with it. I didn't say much during high school, despite my family thinking back then I was a bit of a whiner. I never told on people to faculty, never whined to friends, and never started fights. I was one of those true loners who mostly never talked.

I stood on the front lines in high school for alt gender, probably not so obviously to most people around me, but very obviously to the gays. Because I didn't take hints or react to remarks and comments and showed no fear of notes and being hissed at in the hallways, I took full body contact in P.E.

The day I was plowed to the ground so hard in flag football that I was nearly knocked unconscious by the brother that was in my grade was the day they ended coed flag football in my school. I couldn't breathe for awhile and had to have help standing, and was dizzy the rest of the period, and later discovered I had some pretty spectacular bruising and scraping. But I didn't cry. That boy was sharply reprimanded, but nothing else was done, even though he obviously tackled me on purpose with full intent to harm me. I mean, who doesn't get flag football?

The day I was smashed in the face with a 90 mph ball and my glasses shattered and my nose exploded into blood everywhere, that same boy (who'd just thrown that ball only a few feet from my face) stood there laughing. That was the last day we had coed P.E. in my school, period. Again, he was barely reprimanded, and nothing was done. I went without glasses for several weeks until my parents could scrape up the money to get me another pair.

I was very popular with the alt kids that year. The ones having free period would sit on the bleachers and loudly cheer my name every time I walked into the gym. My parents never knew. I never told my siblings. I never once talked to one person about how someone attacked me. I didn't whine or blame or cry.

Now, let's untangle the "why in the world do I care about a gender debate if I'm not interested in sex in the first place?"

My own first thought is, I wanna ask all you people who are worried about trans in the wrong bathrooms something- Is it wrong for a man to intentionally beat up and bloody a woman in public just for not behaving correctly after being threatened? Because that's what happened to me. I'm a girl, and not even gay. I was not just bullied, I was beaten bloody for being friends with gays, not in secret, but wide out in the open in front of a lot of people.

If it's not ok for a man to hit a woman, is it ok for a man to behave that violently to another man just for walking into a bathroom? Because it happens. A LOT. Men have been beating up other men in men's bathrooms so badly for so long that many men actually fear for not only their safety, but sometimes their lives. Why are these men being beaten up? Because even if they don't present as female, sometimes they just 'look gay', and that prompts mean men to pummel the living bloody daylights out of them, just like it did in high school.

So, men use women's restrooms. Why? Because women don't tend to beat them up just for needing to pee.

I use men's public restrooms. I very openly walk into men's restrooms when women's restrooms are closed for cleaning, and no one bats an eye. No one beats me up. I can be wearing men's clothing and no makeup and look as 'dyke' as they come, and no one bothers me.

So why is it ok to make laws that allow men to be attacked even more in public restrooms? They already fear men's restrooms, now they have to fear women's restrooms, as well.

So, first of all, just because I'm asexual doesn't mean I don't care about sex, but SEX has nothing to do with using a public restroom to pee, does it? Gender ID and sexual preference are two completely different things anyway, so that is just really poorly worded. Second of all, I CARE because people are being BEATEN UP. By 'nice' people. By people who spout all kinds of stuff about 'Murican freedom and Christianity. By people who get worked up about the kind of nonsense that gets people hurt and killed.

The reason I'm writing this out is because I'm getting some comments on a facebook status I wrote- "First hand experience considerations that I think laws against Trans in public restrooms would inadvertently cause great difficulty for many people is single parents with opposite gendered disabled children and older people relying on a spouse for help. I'm sure there are other situations as well. Sometimes gender has nothing to do with actual public restroom safety."

Scott was a single parent for 3 years before we got married, and he had custody of his baby daughter. He often had to take her into a public men's bathroom, and was always terrified someone would think he was a child molester. My mom became so deficit from strokes that my dad would escort her into the women's bathrooms in Walmarts to assist her, and although it felt weird to him, not one single woman complained about it. What woman wouldn't want a husband like that? I sometimes see family restrooms now in clinics and other places, and hear people mock them as they pass, making jokes about why whole families need to pee together, how wrong that is. Well, do you know nothing of handicaps and seniors and children and stuff like illnesses and injuries? I've been having to use handicap facilities for years because of spinal injuries, and for a couple years in my own home needed actual assistance. If I ever need my husband to come into a bathroom with me, people around us making a big deal had better hope I'm in too bad a shape to get in their faces about it.

I have no answers to the public restroom debates, but I will offer that it's nice to live in a country that believes in public restrooms in the first place. Some countries still don't. As for your reasons for why trans shouldn't use the 'wrong' public restroom, have a little consideration for 1- all the other people who will be affected by laws put into place out of fear, 2- the fear alt genders live with every single day everywhere they go, and 3- your inability to think outside a very small box. Many of you have been using restrooms with trans for years and probably never even knew.

My brain, like my body, doesn't 'work right'. The chemicals and hormones don't fit into an 'average' balance. I don't experience life the same way 'normal' people do. Am I to blame for being born into a gene pool heavily laced with autism spectrum, autoimmune illnesses, cancers, and hormone problems? I've been living with everything from joint pains throughout my childhood to diabetes into my aging adulthood. Does this body, something I have no natural conscious control over on a cellular level, make me a bad person? Does the t-shirt I wear instead of a blouse make me a bad person? Does who I am standing here being warrant me getting beaten up? Because I sure was bloodied up in high school by a 'nice' young man with a very strong moral principle that somehow failed to red flag 'men shouldn't beat up on women' in his mind.

What I'm saying is that you can't stand both against violence and for it. You can't stand up against domestic abuse and condone public restroom abuse. You can't say it's not ok to hit someone here but it's ok to hit them over there.

Human rights, human dignity, human public safety.

That is what the trans public restroom debate is all about, and that's what it stands for globally. It's not about genitals and being in the wrong bathroom. It's about people being bullied, beaten up, and even killed just for being different, even when they're doing their best to not start any trouble.

I'm not afraid of trans people in the same bathroom as me. I'm afraid of people who will hurt me in public and laugh about it just for being kind to other people, and the people who won't do anything about it because they're more afraid of the bully than they are of the trans person. THAT'S WHAT THIS WHOLE DEBATE IS ALL ABOUT.

I don't care what your religion is and what your beliefs are, if you are dismissive of others and cruel to people over silly ideas that you make big fusses over, I do not stand with you. If you believe it's ok to hurt (and kill) other people just for believing something different from you and looking different from you, and you base everything you think you know about life on glances without getting to know what it's really like in other people's shoes, then you've got a real problem when I walk into your room.

Back in high school I didn't say anything. I'm saying all the things now. I could be out here naming names, I could be naming and shaming, I could be pointing and accusing, but I'm not. I'm asking people to think it through. Untangle the layers and use your brains for a few minutes. Because from my point of view, not using your God-given brain is a sin. If you want to debate actual sin with me, I will win. I was trained to debate religion by one of the most obsessed people on the planet by the time I was ten years old, and I've spent all my years since soaking up everything I can about world religions, philosophies, political history, heck, the history of the whole human race since the dawn of time and the evolution of modern day thinking. If you're not yet familiar with me, I enjoy a little Orwell with my breakfast, and that's just the start of my day.

Here's the point blank of it all. People of faith are the only ones required to follow God's law. It's not your job to punish those outside the faith. It's not your job to condemn the world to the point where you drive even your own loved ones out of your lives. Your job is summed up in the golden rule, is it not? To wish death and harm on others without provocation means there is something wrong with YOU.

Something to think about.

woke up to hater porn, how is your Monday?

click for Angry Gamer Cat memes

First ban on my Lexxperience FB page this morning, idiot with a header full of pigs in bonnets and a feed full of really bad Muslim sex cartoons. Not tolerating crap, people. Added a 'review posts' setting so my page won't get spammed. In case some of you Lexx fans don't know, I've been deleting and banning determined haters for YEARS. One year in my Xanga past, someone created multiple accounts over and over and over just to keep pasting very lengthy diatribes about how I was going to hell (pick a religion and insert here, I've heard it ALL), and I just don't think it's cute when a brand new facebook account with a suspiciously familiar name (recent 'friend'?) starts following my cool stuff out of the blue to start religious and political wars. I did my best not to let stuff get ugly on twitter, but dayam if that crap starts on facebook. I have no problemo reporting haters.

Back to Pinky stuff. Been thinking for a couple of weeks about writing up a new syllabus. My old one is outdated. My pattern has changed. We're not having regular weekly Bunny visits like we used to now that she's getting older (I'm sure that'll pick back up a bit this summer), and I'm also running out the door lots more this month taking care of my own stuff.

It'll hafta start from the ground up with a whole new Plan again, plus resetting my short term and long term goals before I can put a work schedule back into place. Lately, all my writing work has been spontaneous and haphazard. I miss my daily discipline that I had in place like clockwork for several years. My output isn't as driven as it used to be. 4 a.m. minecraft is taking place over early morning writing, which might actually be a good thing on days I have to run out the door. Maybe I'll get back to less wordy on Pinky and more wordy on my writing projects. At any rate, braincation needs to be over now.

All this month I'll be running out the door 3 times a week, mostly mornings, so my morning workout time may need rescheduling. I'm usually doing my workout by 7 or 8 a.m.

In spite of all the extra activity suddenly starting back up, I still seem to be staying caught up with chores around the house, which means my energy level is up and my depression level is still down a bit, yay.

Still on top of bills and billing and scheduling more billing. Usually late winter is all about @bonenado helping me float through financially, but this winter I've juggled ALL THE THINGS and not dropped the ball once. This is probably the first winter that's ever happened, so huge high five and go me on that one. I went mildly glitchy, but I never hit my annual brain fail.

Time to get all over this day.

asexual pan and seriously lacking gaydar or any other kind of dar

click pic for
"37 Cats Inside Things That Are Much Too Small"

I've either broken my Pinky statcounter or you guys have successfully graduated to hardcore lurkers like I've taught you. Blogger says I'm getting steady traffic and shows legitimate referrals, statcounter says "What people? I didn't see any people." But as much as I've messed around with it, it's very possible I've corrupted the config. I could reset, but then all previous data is unrecoverable, so one of these days I might just add another one to pick up from now-ish and see if that works. Still feeling too lazy to do more than muse on it right now, though.

I'm crashing through a depressive cycle this week, which I was expecting because I was a bit euphoric for awhile again through December, so I'm doing all the usual routine stuff that keeps me functional while it passes, like house chores and research. I have a hard time watching TV when I'm like this, so I have ventured into a friend's RP forum for a good story to help distract me through this, and I'm loving it. In case you're new to me and would like more info about my head stuff, I'll put it at the bottom of this post, which you're welcome to skip down to if you don't want to read this next bit.

One of my distractions is writing through the aspie chaos in my head on weeks like this because focusing on a writing prompt helps my mood stay more balanced, so here we go, a whole buncha sex stuffs, lol. Close your eyes if you're easily miffed by discussions that challenge your belief system, whatever it is. I'll tell you when you can open them back up.

~~~~~~

One of the more amusing things I've run into in the last week was a trans friend wanting to know in a protected status update why asexuals were making a big deal planting their flag if they don't even want sex, because it can only be an attention-seeking thing, surely.

I've known since puberty that I'm pan (there was no word for it back then) and since high school that I prefer androgyny, although I do also really like strong male and female figures as well. I came out pangender asexual on a public blog in 2008, before it was fashionable for regular people in mainstream lives outside of entertainment to do that. That blog (one of so many I've had) is gone now, so I can't link to it, although several people in my life are aware and are fine with it. I don't bring it up much, although I have written about it here and there.

6-15-15 Khanlock One of the most popular posts I've ever created, and I never mention sexuality in any form.

6-14-15 5 ways people push my asexuality button

5-11-15 shipping asexuality isn't as boring as people think, certainly not Moffat, and I'll prove it

11-8-13 Brain Sex, Robot Style

11-20-12 Lexx and psychological health, perhaps

8-19-12 sex is wrong, or coming out of the pandimensional closet

7-1-08 self stim (this is an ongoing debate I have with my psychologist over aspie-autie kids having no self awareness during compulsive erogenous neuro stim, which I'm sure parents of autism spectrum children have a little difficulty understanding) (The book I'm working on, Existential Aspie, will have a LOT of autie kid POV in it that I don't usually see out in public, based on my personal experiences.)

I've also written about sex in relation to spinal injury at TMI time, but you'll thank me on my spaz (spoonie) blog.

Plus I've also had fun mocking the whole subject of sex in some of my silly surveys through the years at Surveypalooza.

For anyone in the world looking at that list and the length of this post thinking I must be one of those people who yaps about their sex stuff, rest assured this was very much me most of my life. For those of you who've not yet seen The Abominable Bride, I must put the word "spoilers" here, but seriously, not really much of a spoiler. But yeah, this is me at parties, on dates, through two marriages...

I'd love to source this for you at 5 a.m. because I grabbed it with my phone, but that was 2 days ago and the original tweet is already so buried in the twitter feeds that it would take at least an hour and I'm not feeling that patient.

My issues started early, about the time I hit puberty. I'd been sent to school in dresses for years and fought for my first pair of jeans around fifth grade, which my mom was strongly against until a friend of hers, who had five boys and wasn't that terribly feminine herself, shrugged it off, and they went through a stack of rejects in an outlet dump and brought home bargains, one with a twisted leg, one with a leg shorter than the other. I was ecstatic simply because I'd won. After that my mom got hold of someone's hand-me-down flare leg jeans and I spent a glorious year getting my jeans caught in my bike chain over and over like normal kids were supposed to until the jeans were too shredded to wear.

Being allowed to wear jeans didn't solve my problem, of course. I still had to be a girl. I really didn't care that I was actually a girl, I just hated being continually reminded I wasn't girl enough. I didn't sit right or move right or stand right or behave right, and then when I took things too far it was nice girls don't do that, like shave my legs above my knees. A kid at school actually made fun of my knees having bangs in P.E. Top that one, I dare ya. I wolfed out when I hit puberty, despite being a girl. (Irony has brought a patchy alopecia into my life, and I very rarely need to shave my legs any more.)

I liked being an action figure, along with being the secret genius behind the schemes my friend and I pulled off. I liked running cross country and jumping over fences and out of trees (and off the roof), and tried a few times to jump my bike over things, resulting in some impressive scrapings up and nearly ruining my bike. I liked that boys got to look cool and be cool running around and hated that I was expected to stand around looking demure. I studied how the fastest boys naturally ran differently from girls and taught myself how to move the same way. Same thing with throwing. I practiced throwing rocks and balls over our barn roof after school for days until I could mimic the way the boys at school threw stuff. There was no way I would ever be caught "throwing like a girl". It was bad enough that 'girl' was derogatory, it was worse to not overcome it and just accept it as my fate. All this before I was even twelve, and all my mom could go on about was her exasperation with me. We fought constantly (passive-aggressively, I wasn't allowed to yell at her without severe consequences), and the root of it all was my refusal to be gender typed.

So, yeah, it's a big deal to stand up for being asexual pangender, because I was treatly poorly over being my natural self. It has nothing to do with accepting who I have sex with and whether I sin, but about standing up to a demanding society shoving me down into a tiny little box and not allowing me to shine in my natural capacity with the instincts I was born with. While other girls were fighting to wear hip huggers to school, I was fighting to let my God-given hair grow out on my legs that no one ever saw except in P.E., and I was such a joke already that it wouldn't have made a difference. Believe me, I've investigated every which way hairy legs and nylons could possibly have anything to do with my status as a human being, and that is the tiniest tip of the asexuality iceberg that was my problems growing up in an ultra conservative household. You'd think asexuality would be a plus in a setting like that. It wasn't. I caught all my mother's repressed sexual issues head on and flung them back with vehemence. I look back now and feel quite sorry for her feeling so stuck and frustrated with her own stuff and never being able to verbalize it.

What no one knew at the time was that I come from genetic stock heavily leaning into polycystic ovarian syndrome, and along with extremely heavy periods, I grew an impressive amount of body hair for awhile and developed a fairly aggressive personality. A doctor confirmed in my 30s that I was making way too much testosterone and put me on hormone therapy to help control and regulate that and several other symptoms. (This is coming to light as a fairly common condition.) These are not things I chose. I've always been able to feel the duality in my brain chemicals. I feel very 'boy' sometimes along with the girl. If my brain chemicals are prompting things in my body I have no control over, and these things are in turn prompting behaviors like acting out and aggression, how in the world have I chosen this? As I have learned more about myself, I have come to realize that no one chooses their sexuality. We are caught in waves of hormones and chemicals, and we all do the best we can with what's going on in our brains and bodies. I see no shame in this, and no reason to 'choose' against who we are in order to appease a larger society of anxious and guilt-ridden believers who would rather turn their backs than forgive what they don't yet understand. People remind me of chickens sometimes, the really bossy ones pecking to death those who don't fall into step, out of sheer orneriness. How is continually picking on someone any different? You either love people or you don't. Actions speak louder than words. If there really is a God, and he really does promise a heaven, no wonder so many turn away when they're nearly picked to death for something they can't help and didn't choose.

My second best friend in high school was gay, and the treatment he went through got pretty ugly. A friend of his actually had to leave school out of fear for his life. Anyway, I had no problem being seen with him all over school, so he took me on my only date in high school to convince his mom everything was cool. She dropped us off at a movie, we never kissed, went back to his house, he showed me his bedroom, huge Marilyn Monroe poster on his wall, and he told me I had great lips and should be wearing lipstick. I still think that's a pretty awesome compliment.

Since many of my friends are gay, trans, alt, and whatever (I'm finding out there are a LOT of orientations out there), I barely even think about this stuff. I can swim in sex and never blink an eye, I am that asexual. Once in awhile my head turns, yes, but I miss unbelievable amounts of subtext and even blatant sex references in convos while at the same time I see it all around me much like a botanist would a forest. I grew up on a farm and know quite a lot about sexual anatomy and birthing and then wound up in nursing school for awhile, and I'm not squeamish at all, just terribly inexperienced with the social exchange that must accompany actual coupling up. I imagine I'd make a really good whorehouse madam or brothel priestess, sort of above it all and running things.

As for sex, I actually like it quite a lot, I just don't feel the need to share it with other people, and my asperger's makes it difficult for me to get past all the extra sensory overload anyway. Ever wonder why alcohol and sex go together? The entire human race would probably have died out long ago if it weren't for rape and alcohol. Yes, I actually believe that. I don't think most of the world has a clue what normal sex really is to begin with, especially belief systems that squelch women and children into third class citizenry, whether it's obvious or not. I grew up pretty third class right here in the United States. No one ever asked me growing up whether I had fallen in love with anyone. That just wasn't even a thing. The only reason I don't make a bigger deal of it is because I've met so many people who've actually been held hostage or have been owned either by default (family) or purchase (seriously, child trafficking) specifically for sex. Yes, right here in the United States. I've seen ultra conservative right wing Christians wink past the obvious under their noses to debate whether a divorced person can remarry without it being adultery, and I just walk away. Righteous people exasperate me.

Anyway, so I rarely find myself discussing the actual rights and wrongs of anything sex, but here we go. I grew up conservative, so naturally I start with the 'legalism' of faith. I'm not against faith, I'm just tired of it being used as a weapon or a shield.

The problem with debating about the natural order of nature being the correct way for things to work, especially if we are assuming a deity setting it all up, is running into little monkey wrenches like finding out male otters will steal harbor seal pups away and pleasure themselves on them to death, or that crabs will mate with so much gusto they kill off females that don't fight to get free. The instinct to mate is only that, a blind driven compulsion. The object of the mating, ideally, results in healthy offspring, but as we share more and more to the internet, we see a growing number of cats and squirrels doing sex trains, hunters having to get out of the way of elk or deer attempting to mate with their vehicles, the odd horse here or there rearing onto a police officer or rodeo clown for sex, dolphins happily pinning humans down, and I'll go so far as to say I actually saw a spider mate with a dead spider hanging limply in an old web, which is arachno-necrophilia. If natural sex has a directive for what is morally correct versus what is sinful, I'm not seeing it expressed so much as mowed over in the world around me, and I'm sorry, I can't blame all that on a fallen angel. And we must admit humans have been overseeing all kinds of breeding programs throughout human history, from cattle to fruit flies, and everything else on down to plant life. Anything that has DNA has been interfered with sexually by humans out of experimentation and the incentive for financial gain, which increases power, not to mention the food supply.

I saw this going around facebook yesterday (originally posted last summer), someone else doing research on why homosexuality is natural and important across the animal kingdom, and I agree it comes in pretty handy. (I'm not going to copy it here, sorry.) Case in point, my step daughter's mom has absolutely no natural mothering instinct just because she's a woman and gave birth. I grew up on a farm, we had farm animals like that, too, particularly noticeable among very young first time mothers, everything from cats to sheep and goats. If a first time birth is scary and too overwhelming, the mom rejects the babies and it's up to the kindness of strangers to make sure they stay alive and survive.

The Kindness of Strangers is a popular title when you run a search on it, but my first experience with the idea was a very thick textbook style research on orphanages being what saved quite a bit of old England during the dark ages, because so many people dropped babies and children off at churches that half the population could have died out if someone else hadn't raised the children. One of the concerns the priests had back then was that the children eventually wound up in brothels and it would be a sin for a father to be having sex with a prostitute daughter, even unawares. My mind was blown over this particular after so much else had been dismissed as not sinful, like an entire society making it impossible for parents to raise their own children in the first place between so many hard laws and taxing the people nearly to death (church and state were co-complicit in this). Humans have a long history of males raising children through rough patches. Whether the males were gay or not is kind of beside the point. Monks around the world have been taking in children as long as religions have existed. Those with nurturing instincts gravitate toward nurturing. Simple concept. We see this with pets, too, and with other animals both on the farm and in natural settings.

I once watched, in my own backyard, a bluejay swipe a baby bird out of nest, carry it to the ground, and viciously drill its beak through the baby's head. What got really interesting was not only the distraught parents darting around, but the anxious cowbird couple that hovered around the ground within inches trying to stop this from happening with their efforts to distract the bluejay. That baby bird had two sets of parents. Why does this happen in nature? Because there are killers out there. Because life is really hard and sometimes it takes a whole crowd of people to make sure babies survive. Perhaps human societies formed out of this very need. Perhaps the origin of society lies within the nurturing instincts of both male and female strangers feeling upset that babies get killed, and cooperating to keep babies alive.

I've mentioned I have a sociology degree, right? I was originally going for an anthropology degree but my college only supported a minor at the time, despite housing one of the most famous archaeologists in the world. I blame the bible belt. Sorry, got way off track. But my point is that sex hormones working properly enough to get babies born doesn't mean we're working properly as people. Pretending to fit into gender roles because a belief system requires it doesn't assure the proper survival of humanity. If anything, it encourages secret taboo behaviors that can't be talked about without severe repercussions. Trying to make people fit into standardized molds of any kind has a tendency to backfire into years of therapy at the very least, rampant public shootings at the very worst. A healthy sense of self within an accepting group creates an optimally functioning member of society, does it not? This is really basic stuff, not quite sure why it's still so hard for so many people to grasp. Oh, yeah, religion and politics. That.

What is often missed in gay debates are some of the secrets and problems that create conflict for a few caught in the middle of it. Gender reassignment isn't always a prerogative. Sometimes babies are born intersexed and a gender assignment must be made, creating conflict later as the brain matures into the 'wrong' hormones. Once in awhile an accident happens with circumcision and a boy is brought up as a girl. And sometimes a distressed parent with severe depression (and quite possibly other mental illness) just ignores the baby's gender and raises it oppositely. I met a guy that happened to. All his young child photos are in dresses, and he seems to be a girl. Somewhere in grade school his gender suddenly flipped because it became obvious, and he's dealt with that the rest of his life, plus being suddenly rejected by the parent who did that to him. He's not alone. Babies are like dollies for people in emotional pain. Likewise, how many girls are there who feel the fail when their parents really wanted a boy? Or passed themselves off as boys or men so they could do something females weren't allowed? I could go on and on. Gender issues aren't always about the individual being different, and they're not always rooted in the individual. Society creates gender problems before people are even born into their genders. Then entire lives are spent teaching children to hide things and perform for society.

In case you still haven't seen The Abominable Bride, the speech Sherlock gave near the end on women's suffrage was spot on, and in our own day and time, I would extend these thoughts to everyone on the planet. Here, go buy it right now.

The gay debate is not a simple one. There can be no black and white right or wrong or stamps of religious and political approval or disapproval if we don't have the whole story on each case. To deem any one person at fault for something beyond their control (so many maladies in this world are beyond our control, are they not?), and then to ostracize and lump individuals into a generic group and then make the entire group outcast from society in one fell swoop is as heartless as throwing unwanted pets out of moving vehicles onto highways. I say it this way because most people I've met would sooner have a tender heart for a derelict, abandoned, and abused animal than they would a mistreated and shunned fellow human being. We don't judge animals so harshly, and we are so much faster to stand up for their neglect and abuse, but that doesn't restore my faith in humanity as long as I'm still seeing humanity abuse, berate, and neglect whole chunks of its own over misconstrued opinions and ideologies. No wonder human trafficking thrives in all countries around the world, even under the very noses of the most adamantly religious and faithful- we so easily throw out our own.

There has always been a thriving underground of human trafficking and sex slavery beneath every civilization, and anyone studying human religious and political history and social psychology knows this. Perhaps the initial reason it wasn't ok for gays to come out was because once they did, they could no longer be secretly shuffled through an underground ring of perverted religion and politics, opening up many cans of worms, as it were. It's ok to see cabaret and S&M openly expressed in the entertainment industry going way back (war and sex seem to be market buddies), but it's not ok to admit it's real and all around us, and that accepting each other the way we are will save lives.

The answer between my trans friend and I wound up being how ridiculous all sexuality issues are in the first place, and we left it at that. It's not a competition for attention any more than any other sexual issue. It's people openly standing up for who they are, just like all the rest.

And yes, let's all facepalm and have a good laugh imagining Sheldon Cooper incorporating asexuality into his Fun With Flags series.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You can open your eyes now.

In case you skipped down for my head stuff-

On top of autism spectrum, I do have a 'mood disorder' diagnosis, although it's never been formally called bipolar, and this last fall I got 'adjustment reaction disorder' from my psychologist after I told him I finally processed through my friend's murder and my mom's death, since both of them happened years ago. Emotional shutdown can be pretty serious, but you guys know that because I'm always talking about it. I keep a standby team of touch base friends within reach, and about once a week someone is making sure I'm doing ok. As long as they see me out in public tweeting or facebook sharing or blogging, they know I'm not going down the rabbit hole. One of my constant goals is holding my weight steady and keeping a regular sleep schedule, both of which are high priority when I check in with my psychiatrist every 6 months. He literally counts pills. I'm allowed half a xanax 3X a day and that's it. I'm mostly otherwise managing to handle my anxiety disorder with diet, which I believe is directly related to diabetes and glucose spikes. As long as I can continue to self monitor and report in regularly, I'm allowed to stay off other head meds. It also helps that @bonenado oversees everything in my life and that I trust him to notice when I go off track and help me get back in routine. He's pretty cool about it, we laugh a lot.

~I'm kidding~

Off the subject, I have discovered Black Diamond Premium Reserve cheddar, aged 2 years. I'm the sort of person who will skimp on everything else in my life to spend $20 a pound on very hard to find cheeses, like aged gouda, so if you guys can find this one, it's totally worth it, even smoother and sharper than Cabot's Seriously Sharp. (Black Diamond is Canada based, Cabot is Vermont based.) I actually found it in the fancy cheese section in my local Walmart, so there you go. Good luck. It is absolutely wonderful with morning coffee.

Let's see, what can I find to get me out of here now and moving on into my day...