An open letter to offended people

Dear offended human,

Elliot Page being a trans man does not hurt you in any way. Why does it bother you? Stop being small minded and closed off from ideas outside your own experience. The world is a large place, and there is room for everyone to live within it, and pursue their own version of happiness. There is room for literally a limitless variety of perspectives.

Elliot Page isn’t asking you to stop being you. He is asking you to let him be him.

It’s that easy. Why are you trying to make it difficult? Why do you care about how another person wants to be identified? Why are you so opposed to letting someone else be comfortable in their own existence? …

Who will Trump drag down with him? And when can we celebrate?

Donald Trump most likely knows that his reign of flagrant Constitutional rape is over. By all accounts, from legal experts and Constitutional scholars, his attempts to challenge the results of the election that Joe Biden handily won are going to miserably fail. There are several recent indications that even his most ardent supporters know the end is nigh. And yet, Trump continues the public charade that he will somehow prevail.

Just today, Trump posted a link to a 46 minute speech to Twitter, a speech that he declared to be “perhaps the most important speech” he would ever give, in which he stated again he would not allow “the fraudulent election” to stand, and that he had an obligation to insure “every legal vote” was counted. For the next 43 minutes of the video he proceeded to rant and repeat lie after lie about “evidence” of voter fraud, but the only evidence he presented to back his claims were posters highlighting when the mail ballots were counted in Michigan and Wisconsin. He accused the media and even judges of being unwilling to accept that the fraud was real and he was actually the winner of the election. Judges. …

There’s no one method to this madness

Everyone else is doing it. I’m not generally one to hop on band wagons, but maybe in this case I will make an exception. It seems every other day I find another new Medium article written about “the way to make money” or “the one real method that works” for generating income on this website. Allow me to burst all the bubbles.

I’m still relatively new to the platform of course, so perhaps I am way off base. But I’ve been actively writing and producing what I hope is quality content for Medium for about a year now. …

Poetry

There is no hope, no promise of renewal, no great reset button like the moon in the sky, just days documenting the passage of time, numbers in antique alarm clocks clickety-clicking their way to 11:59 and flipping the entire horizon like a quarter flattened under a railroad car, pulling a tablecloth free of the table without disturbing a single dish, just a hint of champagne sloshing in a crystal goblet smeared with lipstick, as the great party dies down to the whisper of waves lapping at the shore of a beach strewn with beer cans and discarded paper sunglasses, a sequential number jutting from the top of their frames. You want to change, but you change every second, new cells dividing as old cells slough off to coat book shelves and lamp shades, brain cells starving and flickering out like light bulbs in filament fried sparks behind white glass shells, this thought of needing to change acts as a Sisyphusical Hell, when habit and routine sustain the solipsistic self. Change is a myth, an illusion behind the veil of itself, a stand-in for the idea of success, something unattainable like immortality that propels you forward through the monotony. Just look at the icons of the past, the gods held up high, fading into rotted celluloid reels and chiseled stone with wind-smoothed edges, smiles etched like caricatures of humanity on cuneiform walls of our histories. And what of happiness? What of love? What of the chemicals that rage like technicolor overtures in the brain and decode the floating soup of zeroes and ones we call a universe? These things are necessary for tomorrow much like my wife’s perfume left on her pillow, something I can bury my face in and inhale through the fabric long after she is gone, leaving me in the wake of her absence like a leaf at the edge of a river riding the crests and recesses of disturbances large as the moon, small as the breeze and tectonic plates shifting for miles like a god gritting its teeth. You want to know if it’s worth it, if in the end you’ll be remembered by even one, if someone someday will stumble across the nuanced journal of your existence and wonder at the person behind the words, the intricacies of hair falling across your face in a photograph, if in that instant you might bring joy in the form of a twitch at the corner of their lips. Maybe it is. Of course it is. Even if it never happens and you’re a fucking idiot. …

The critical panning of this movie is completely unfair

There is a lot to unpack regarding the controversial film Hillbilly Elegy, which recently released via Netflix. Directed by Ron Howard, this movie presents an unvarnished view of poverty and its effects on the people struggling to survive and rise above the systemic issues holding them back from success or happiness. I didn’t find much to be worthy of controversy in the film, in fact quite the opposite. This is a heart-rending story of personal growth, and it deserves to be heard.

The controversy that this movie has generated comes based not on the content of the film itself, but more from the material it is based upon, and its author J.D. Vance. There’s a bit of a cultural rift at play, wherein once Vance’s memoir novel of the same title released in 2016, it somehow was quickly latched onto as a possible thesis explaining why red state voters would vote for Trump. It’s strange to me that such an implausible connection was drawn, when it is just a personal memoir, and I think this extrapolation only highlights the levels of despair liberals were feeling at the time. …

I have released several poetry collections

This post will be nothing but a bit of shameless self-promotion. So, apologies in advance if that sort of thing annoys you. If you have been following me on here for very long, first of all thank you. I hope that you follow me on Medium because you have found something to enjoy in what I write. If part of what you enjoy is my poetry, perhaps you would like reading that poetry in a bit of longer form, and how it is intended, on the physical page.

I’ve been writing and publishing poetry for several years. A while back, I decided to start publishing my own collections, via Amazon. This was decided after I became frustrated with the process of trying to find independent or small presses to work with, and the whole concept of paying for reading fees or entering contests where you can never be certain exactly how much anonymity is really kept among the entrants and the readers. The straw that broke the camel’s back was when I had a contract ready to go with a small press for a collection, and then it all backfired because I listened to some bad advice from someone who I thought could be trusted, but who actually was more interested in promoting their own press, which ended up in some bad blood and a lost opportunity for me. …

Speculation persists on whether or not he can successfully be prosecuted

Donald Trump still maintains that he won an election that every credible source and all empirical evidence tells the world he lost. Most recently, he again made headlines by stating that Joe Biden would have to prove how he could receive 80 million legal votes before he would be allowed to step foot in the White House. No one knows right now if all these declarations from Trump are coming from an authentic belief, if he is just putting on a show for his supporters, or if he actually intends to try and somehow overturn the election result. I’ve speculated on this before, that his intent could be a tactic of delay, holding out hope that somehow the House of Representatives could elect him. …

Poetry

~after George Orwell

We live in a surveillance state.
Where eyes stare from photographs,
following.
This is what we wanted.
We carry the microphones.
Stare into the screens.
We share our waking thoughts
so that they can be policed.

Freedom is an inconvenience.
An illusion.
Freedom is the dream
we speak of while we sleep.
They’re rewriting history,
changing our memory,
revising the dictionary,
the very definition
of what freedom can be.

We agree to the terms of this torture,
the daily structure
of alarm clock and wage,
the exchange of time
for meaningless days,
a rationing of the will. …