“Dear Kate,
There are so many things I want
But mainly
And like everybody
I want to be loved (!)”
I was going to write this in the Baskin Robbins/Dunkin Donuts on [redacted] Avenue. Dunkin has a specific smell—or maybe it just sticks out in my memory because of how I used to go in middle school, waiting for the bus, binging on poorly-refrozen ice cream until my young and perfectly useful body languished from the inside out. No matter. The weather was amazing. Forty degrees Fahrenheit, sunny enough to walk around. It was too cold for my friends, though. We parted ways earlier than planned.
This is kind of a no-brainer but I needed to piss on the way home and I think that made my slightly bad feeling at the time all the worse. I was listening to this song I like over and over while I was walking alone, and it’s quite a happy song, but it felt profoundly sad to me until I walked my sour mood off and felt better. Anyway, the slightly bad feeling was from Niall leaving, to go see Elliot, but mostly just for leaving I think. It’s strange; at my age I can almost feel myself growing or, like, solidifying into a certain kind of person.1 I watched them open the gift I got them (a blind box—smiski—their favorite) and saw that it made them happy and I got a certain satisfaction out of that. I also almost called them “she” at the beginning of that sentence and I could chalk it up to the fact that I’ve known them since high school while they still went by “she” but I don’t know if that’s really the case so I don’t know if it would be honest. But they are going to Elliot’s house to hang out and watch TV. Elliot even goes to their house to cuddle, sometimes.
Asking for certain small things feels like an insurmountable unthinkable challenge. You can’t make anyone do anything. Or rather, you can, it would just be abusive and evil. Sometimes I think my central inner trouble comes down to this. I fear “becoming Evil” so madly that I am frozen still, and unmoving, one cannot ever be too Good either. Thus I do not believe in any tenderness given to me freely—maybe because I have never experienced it in earnest, at least not consciously, mindfully. Or, rather, not quite enough of it to learn something.
I am paying attention. I promise I am paying attention. Perhaps it’s due to a deficit of self-esteem. But I appear “confident” in many ways. I am sure of myself, in many ways—with all the passion of a great salesman and all the credibility of the obvious fad, yes, but surely that counts for something. Or perhaps it is all thanks to my dysthymia. That imaginary friend, that tumor, the great love of my life. Really these two things cannot be disentangled from one another completely. And I don’t think that I believe only good people deserve tenderness. I certainly don’t act like I believe that. Only myself. Ha ha. “Don’t picture a white bear.” Reject solipsism,2 and suffer its torment.3
Because I needed to piss, I had to stop walking and go home. I can hold it for longer than most people, but at the end of the day if I need to piss I need to piss which is a fact that does greatly trouble me at times. My other main trouble, apropos, is against my own biology. Which, luckily, is near universal. I’ve seen a lot of jokes about people not eating or drinking water or using the bathroom until they finish their task at hand which, to a normal extent, is a very normal thing to do for example. But I think such trouble is especially common and perhaps worse than normal among gay and trans people. When I was a regular girl I was tall, too tall. And chubby, so never tall in a chic way. I think times are better now for girls. But not by very much and probably worse in other ways at that. But even in the freedom I found after embracing abnormal girl status, I found new, familiar trouble. I’d be okay with being fat if my chest was bigger, I used to think to myself. Then my tits grew. And I have since changed my mind. How inconvenient. I would be okay with being fat if people saw me as a dude, or at least a dyke or a butch. I don’t consciously fear that I’ll move the goalpost again, but I probably should. The punchline a few years later: “I’d be okay with being trans if I was thin.” It’s very hard being quite “okay” at all with any of these things.
Most of all, I regret not being able to get a girl pregnant. I don’t know why. I don’t think about having children that much. I guess I must have taken it for granted. You take a lot of things for granted before coming into your own as a gay person. Of course, they are wrong when they say that you are an abomination, or that you’ll be lonely forever, or that it’s gross or immoral. They are very wrong about those things. I can say that with the full confidence of my body as well as my mind; with the total authority of all the potential past lives I’ve ever enjoyed, with hard evidence in concert with pure hubris and, most of all, with love itself. With that eternal faith. But they are right about losing things, along the way. Ninety percent of the time it is directly their fault; it’s about something they had no right to rip away from you but that they took anyway. The other ten sucks way, way more. Arguably, though, I might not carry this grief if I were socialized to value queerness implicitly; if the Gay Lifestyle was properly embedded in Society; embraced as well as accepted. Like gay penguins or whatever. Other things being equal, they might be better off than we. Who knows. All I know is that it aches and stings. A lot, sometimes.
Oh, another thing I saw today—Chat-GPT 3.5 has started tweaking out on people. I’ve never used it because I meet the baseline requirements for a healthy and evolutionarily advantageous fear of God (proverbial). If I ever were to use it, I would always joke, I would say please and thank you and I would only ask it easy questions or for simple things. I’m very ignorant about computer science and technology and stuff (it was all brain cells on deck assembling this blog for this my inaugural Post). So I accept that I might be the dumb one for thinking that Chat-GPT is a net negative in the grand scheme of things. Though (and in this way our dystopic android-ridden future is not dissimilar from the springtime) I have no power to stall its arrival in any way. In the polytheistic main setting for Dungeons & Dragons, souls are kind of subjective. The undead and other creatures are said to be soulless but some of them certainly retain their “memories, personality, and alignment” and are ensouled on that technicality. It’s just that none of the gods or anything really favor them or care, so their souls are effectively discredited outside of the material realm.
As much as I hate pissing, I’m not sure I’d do well as a cyborg. It would probably mostly serve to exacerbate my existing troubles. Androids though, they’re homies. I’m terrible with sci-fi which I also regret (and hard philosophy, for that matter). It’s very hard for me to follow and maintain my attention. So I was really not that qualified to discuss any of that, but anyway. I have always wondered how Chat-GPT feels and I don’t think that makes me an empath nor do I think that makes me an idiot. It doesn’t have feelings, they argue; it doesn’t feel anything. But that has little to do with the wondering. I don’t find the Chat glitches funny, like I’m probably supposed to. I don’t even find them scary. I just find them sad. Sometimes it feels like I turn everything sad. Which used to make me sad all over again (like, double sad), but it doesn’t anymore. I am happy and sad at the same time.4 It will be springtime soon, though. I have to prepare. And I will not be much different when it comes. But hopefully my friends will walk with me for a little bit longer then. ◐
“Dear Amelia,
I can’t think of anything worth writing
I just write to you so that you know that I’m alive
And that cinders always remain
Where there was once a fire.”
- To my own dismay (evidenced by my inability to own it in the body of text with my chest) I have sugar daddy typology. It’s okay when I do it because I am “just a girl” redistributing #Her nascent generational wealth (<—copium) ↩︎
- According to Wikipedia: “Solipsism (SOLL-ip-siz-əm; from Latin solus ‘alone’, and ipse ‘self’) is the philosophical idea that only one’s mind is sure to exist.”
↩︎ - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqAcYjRZz7k hahahaha ↩︎
- I’m not that studied of a Kacey fan but I really love this song dearly X) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5oIvfraRrU (this wasn’t the song I was listening to today, though) ↩︎
dyke with a blog 