Once in some of the most helpless throes of my drunkenness--my profound, acute alcoholism--I took a sheet of paper and ran it through my typewriter three different ways, writing the word "rape" over and over, sometimes in all caps, sometimes all small, sometimes the word six or seven times with no breaks. Rape straight forwards, rape sideways, rape upside down. I was all alone, my girflriend at the time passed out upstairs. The recall is in flashes, suffused with the feeling of being set on fire over and over, reliving things I didn't let myself fully remember when I was sober until years later.
Years later, a couple of years into our relationship, my ex-fiancee saw this sheet of paper when I was going through old piles of work. She told me that I needed to get into therapy, that the artifact was a deeply disturbing glance into a psyche whose potential implications terrified her. I gave her the conditions and background of its production, and she simply repeated herself and walked away. Then I believe she made herself forget what had just happened, as it never came up again, not then and never in the year-plus of couples therapy I let her drag me into.
It was not uncommon, my lived experiences taking a backseat to something she reflexively intellectualized and would not budge on, as well as reactions and proscriptions her social training had instilled in her. Certainly less common is that we left something like that unaddressed, perhaps unique in the relationship, except of course for everything implied but unsaid and everything left buried, as yet unexhumed. I gave her the last word almost all the time. It was very difficult for me not to. She was rigid, and I wanted her to be comfortable and safe, even if I had to mute my own discomfort or pain.
Well, we must presume we loved each other as best we could, and try to move along.
*
The preceding section, yesterday's first post, and the increased feelings of insanity and pain (already at high levels) I have referenced very recently have me thinking about that sheet of paper, which is the first archival evidence of the extent to which I was raped, or sexually molested if you like, by an older girl on a school bus. I will allow for a worldview in which men cannot be raped by women, or small boys by girls about to graduate from high school, if you will meet me halfway at sexual molestation, ok? Whatever the fuck you want, I guess. I'll even leave the word "assault" out of it.
Why have these feelings increased? Because I am currently grappling with a situation in which I feel sexually targeted by a woman who has power over me and that could explode in my face fifty different ways.
So, that's fucking great and awesome, and not a living nightmare aimed at my worst trauma. It doesn't have me clawing at my own head at all.
*
This is why I personally need universal basic income, and to not have to spend it on essentials; this is part of why I've been hammering at this point. Because having enough to survive on and be sheltered guaranteed is more than enough for me to be able to truly contribute the best of myself to society, without having to expose myself to to these kinds of situations. It should be said somehwere if it hasn't been already: what we are talking about when we are talking about materially providing for universal human rights that include the bottom of Maslow's pyramid--safety (which in a world of capital must include financial safety), nutrition, and shelter--is not just ease or the reduction of unjust pressures on the masses that serve to enrich the already enriched. We are talking about freedom. We are talking about ordinary people not being subject to systems and processes that are set up to give one person power over another in a way that they cannot escape because nutrition and shelter supersede safety. Why do you think so fucking many reported and ureported assaults go down at work or school?
Let us be safe, let us have our basic needs regardless of what some employer thinks they should get out of us for the sake of the shareholder, and we will be able to protect ourselves and simply go somewhere where we are not treated like chattel, where our bodies and our minds are not considered property at the disposal of those who can buy and sell us. Make that power dynamic rare to the vanishing point.
Fucking just let us stand up. Just take the boot off our necks, and it will be ok. I say it will be ok because if we are pushed to the point where we have get it off ourselves, when we do, we will not put the boot on your necks. We will break your back like a snake in a yard, and we will kill you where you lie. It doesn't matter if some Napoleon comes along after the Terror. That's for us to deal with. You'll be guillotined. We'll see who's glib about living through history when you're the one one your fucking knees with the blade hanging over your neck.
*
Maybe it's not a good idea to post that? But I'm fucking gonna. I have to. I'm just a man in his special bathtub, scribbling, and if I get stabbed, I get stabbed.
Yeah, I'm not about the rehabilitation of the French nobility in modern historiography. Fuck a monarch. Fuck a landed class. It was a fucked up mess that went too far, but it doesn't change the fact that they got what was coming.
Too much historical writing is about sucking power's dick in the name of "stability". Well, that's only how you feel in your cushy little office. Most of us have never lived in anything like a stable world, and that wealthy people developed a cattle class as a buffer between themselves and the slave class is a trick that has run its course, especially because that vaunted "stability" was nothing but a public relations cloak draped over the imminent total collapse of all world systems. And the motherfuckers driving that collapse are types of organisms who think themselves safe and protected from all that, but there are only a very few of them, despite the size of their material and textual footprint, despite the loudness of their voices, despite the fact that there a hundreds of millions of meatpuppets willing to echo those voices out of fear or delusion.
So for fuck's sake, man. Get lost with this idea that enormous companies steered by sociopaths have made the world better by destroying nature. Get lost with this interpretation of the statistics that tells you that everyone is happier, safer, and better-fed than ever in history. That's the cloak. That's the PR. That, if you want to understand it with full viscerality, is the lubricated condom used to penetrate this world and fuck it to death. They told you they would free you because they wanted to use you, because they wanted you to be complicit, and that is how they frame their justifications: I was satisfying demand. I was providing. I was working harder than you.
A whore gets money and safety from a pimp, until they're thrown into the street used up, or simply murdered. Do you get this comparison. Do you understand.
*
Sure, we got some nice things out of it; the computer I'm typing on, the books that surround me as I type, the video games downstairs. But it was a loan, the interest was undisclosed, and now that it's come due fifty times higher than we were led to even imagine, it will be almost impossible to pay it off. So where do we get the money? Or, how do we make it go away?
If you're able to answer this question from a position of power, I suggest you do it now, at the cost of some of that power, which I know is scary. But necessary, because an answer will have to be forthcoming, and it will be much, much scarier if we have to come up with it ourselves.
It won't be organized. It won't be the revolution of the proletariat, which you're not scared of because you know it's bullshit. It will be instinctive ape action. It will be an animal at its most dangerous--wounded, panicked, desperate to survive.
--JL
