#377

Number 377! Those digits add up to 17, friends, and 17 is one of the stars of this blog. 

There's more to 377, but I don't really feel up to the deep dive of why I think a number is cool today. Not because, near as I can tell, not one person has ever given one fuck about that. Just because it's difficult to even stand here and keep existing from one gaping second to the next, like a man leaping abyss after abyss and touching the razor-sharp spires of reality for but an instant before the next empty, killing vastness opens up beneath him.

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Better than yesterday, I guess. Yesterday I would probably add that the man was set aflame along with each piercing of his feet.

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Maybe I should be drinking more water. 

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It is interesting how persistent my own gender identity--as a man--is, despite how disqualifying my worldview and sense of existence in that gender contradicts the term as it is generally understood. Yet, by the prevailing definitions, I am a man; I use the masculine pronouns because they fit me, I had a penis and testes when I was born and still do, puberty gave me the apple of Adam, I am a lean and muscular, narrow-hipped, hirsute exemplar of the physical class of thinking ape generally understood as male. I even have a deep voice, deeper than you might think at a glance.

And because I am a man, I hate being told that feelings or expressions of my femininity are in some way disqualifying. As a man, I hate being told who I can and can't fuck based on some stupid idea about I don't give a fuck because I'm a man. As a man, I fucking dare you to tell me I can't wear a dress, or fuck another man, or think that almost everything about masculinity is incredibly stupid and not only not worth abiding by, but is to be actively resisted. My ideas about what makes a man are correct. What most people agree a man is, especially a "great" man, can only be a twisted joke, whose punchline is mediocrity and abhorrent, unnecessary violence, a huge, crude penis drawn in excrement and blood defacing the monument of history. 

Basically since I started reading history--so, since I can remember--I have been absolutely fascinated by the implications of gender roles in that history and how they led up to my own lived experiences, not a little because I also watched Jurassic Park two hundred times and its implications and the person of Ellen Sattler loom very large in my imagination. God bless you, Laura Dern. I was reading science books as soon as I could read, too, mostly about natural history and geology, and as a matter of course they dicussed mating habits and sexual dimorphism. Jurassic Park, again, tells you a lot of important stuff: I have always operated cognizant of the fact that most complex animals are inherently female until modified, I have always understood that yes, a difference in sex as a biological feature compassing reproduction as well as physical and behavioral adaptations particular to each is a salient feature of Terran life, and I have always understood that humans are animals, brand-new animals at that; descended from earlier iterations of bipedal apes, themselves descended from primates whose other descendants we have a close kinship to, and that human history is proportionally no time at all compared to the life that has played out through the eons of the history of nature.  

As such, how our prevailing adaptations--our grossly overdeveloped cognition and the ability to establish, maintain, and develop culture--has affected our performance and ideation around these biological differences that are inert and functionally meaningless unless understood culturally and cognitively.

We made gender up. Sex is just whatever, everything out there in the world fucks everything every way it can only because it works and even if it doesn't, and we made gender up to own each other.

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That idea, that you can own another person, that there can exist a person that is less-than based on how they were born, has poisoned this whole endeavor. 

It is. The number-one. Most bullshit, baseless, and unequivocally incorrect idea in the world, in all of history. It is the root of all the other ideas that are baseless fucking toxic ignorant bullshit.

Listen: fucking listen: that idea is Satan, the Devil. It is Ahriman. It is Morgoth. It is Cthulu. It is every writhing metaphysical virulence too terrible to name. It is the root of all evil.

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If you read history with that in mind, it's hard to respect people who try to tell you how to be. 

It is up to us to invent new ways to be. God damn near everything behind us radioactive. We have to hold on tightly to the precious things we're blessed to have despite it all, move forward, and step into the future with courage. 

We have to go up and in.

We have to do what we can to transform this narrative.

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Once more: as a man, I have the right to live however the fuck I want. Other men don't get to tell me fuck-all. I determine what a man is for myself, not you or anybody else. Some simping fucking slave doing and thinking what other men do just because they're too small-hearted to stand the fuck up thinks they can tell me how to live? It boggles the fucking mind. 

--JL

*look, I was basically Roald Dahl's Matilda except without the math, and as she was the single most relatable character I ever encountered in children's fiction, there you have that. Matilda of Matilda, Ellen Sattler of Jurassic Park, and Rachel and Cassie from The Animorphs: my mothers and sisters and preeminent feminine role models in the cultural absorptions of my prepubescence.

Of course I grew up respecting women. Can you imagine what Ellen would say if I didn't? Let alone Rachel? The way Cassie and Matilda would look at me? Please. Unbearable and not to be thought of. No one can be a perfect gentleman every time, but I have always known that women are as human as I am, which, given history, given the state of society, is a responsibility. I'm not great with a lot of responsibilities, but any time any form of outside pressures urged me to think or behave otherwise, I have bucked and kicked like a bull with his big old balls and done my best to gore a motherfucker where he lives, or bust out the paddock and charge away from the abbatoir.

Some challenges are just too crucial to ever let yourself fail. You have to stand up. You have to be a fucking man sometimes.