My phone just told me this photo is exactly ten years old yesterday.
Yes, I know. Having interesting colored hair wasn’t the political statement or social liability is is today.
I mourn being able to formerly fit into that jacket, too.
Anyway, let’s focus on the PRESENT, because that’s what grown-ups do, and everything is so much better today.
Speaking of not doing that, the reminder of old photos sitting on my cloud made me do some housecleaning. I found these in some old folders from adjunct teaching/tutoring. Just take a look at these and think about your present moment- presented without further comment.
My abuser says I’m an election denier. After watching a few videos of Hellfires navigating a chimney 9 inches across, I’m trying harder to be good these days.
LOL, no, fuck them. Not even for the sake of a joke. I’m thinking of doing a meme that updates the images with something spicier. Anyone who’d like to help, y’know… fucking help.
I’ve also been thinking about something:
I’ve missed the unique social dynamic of an interview- nearly every job I had before about 5 years ago had it as part of my job description in some form- and I’ve pondered the idea of doing a very chill, very personal style showcasing of Substack authors people are interested in (assuming they’re willing or at least don’t watch their drinks closely) called “This Fucking Guy” or something.
Anyway, it’s just an idea I’m formulating. Trying to gauge interest.
News from Mouth Farms:
Fall is in full swing and winter approaches. Everything not in a greenhouse is dead, dead, dead, or has been harvested. Our potato crop was a lot lighter than I expected, but what we got was very nice. I suspect it had a lot to do with planting depth. I’m trying again this year in another location and want to experiment with doing it in containers and hugelkultur mounds.
In addition to the three enormous New Zealand rabbits that joined our colony, we recently adopted hens from a neighbor who had to give up his backyard flock because of predators. They’re enormous and look like they have excellent genes. Our egg production is remaining pleasantly constant, there’s a growing queue of birds ready for slaughter, and honestly, if we were willing to accept an extremely limited diet, I’m almost comfortable saying we could completely feed ourselves right now.
This was our quietest Thanksgiving since 2020, which was the worst ever. Brothermouth was away so it was just Husbandmouth, Fathermouth and I, and I was physically incapable of not cooking a full-size dinner.
Husbandmouth still doesn’t have a job. We fight about it increasingly often. I am getting bad at being patient. I worry about money a lot of the time. I have nightmares about bankruptcy. (We are currently hanging in there.)
The ACL recovery since the last Thing has been incredible, and it was already progressing incredibly. I’m at 100% range of motion, already starting to regain some of my amazing flexibility, have been completely off oxy for a week, and they have to keep rewriting my rehab routine every time I go in because all the exercises have become trivial by the time I come back for the following session. For the last three days or so, I’d say I’ve spent over 85% of the day not in any pain I’m aware of- for me, an incredible development.
I still get major situational pain from fatigue and the muscles get sore incredibly quickly- I enjoy a good hour or so of really unpleasant “Charlie horse” after climbing a flight of stairs, but the point is I CAN climb a flight of stairs with completely normal movement.
I was cleared to use an exercise bike over the weekend, but a 30-minute workout gave me so much pain a few hours later that I had to dip into the oxy stash just to get to sleep that night.
My #1 fear in every case isn’t the pain itself but the worry that the pain is indicating that I’ve done damage to the graft by doing something I’m not supposed to, but the therapists have assured me every single time that this isn’t the case and that I’m extremely unlikely to do that unless I engage in any of the “completely forbidden activities” which is currently limited to carrying loads while moving, jumping, and running.
This has been an amazing experience thus far in terms of reflection. I’m extremely grateful for the incredible regenerative abilities of my body and grateful to feel each of its gifts slowly coming back- being agile, flexible, and strong. I’m also extremely grateful that this has been a TEMPORARY experience, as it gives me plenty to think about in terms of what it’s like to live with chronic pain or permanent disability- a completely different kind of existence than the one I usually get to enjoy.
But enough about me.
My unreserved admiration and hope goes out to every single Chinese citizen currently resisting their utterly evil and tyrannical masters. I’ve been moved to tears by some of the video I’ve seen in the past few days, as deeply as when I watched from a world away as the last few protests in HK burned out years ago, the people in those videos now likely dead or jailed or simply vanished.
“Give me freedom or give me death.” I wonder where they got that from? I feel like I heard it somewhere before. Some guy, I think.
Anyone who knows me personally knows I have very little love for China or much of anything that comes out of it. I find it a bastion of cruelty, sadism and the kind of joyless social Darwinism that comes from a society that has managed to achieve a zero-trust culture outside of millennia-old traditions of corruption and nepotism. I have long lamented, both sadly and angrily, that my own country’s elite have more or less sold out our prosperity, opportunity, and values to an empire that despises us and plans hungrily for our destruction.
The parallel between the hateful, jealous, vicious CCP at war with its own people and the road most Western nations are on now is a fucking straight line- we’re simply not as far down the road as the Glorious Middle Kingdom. EVERY SINGLE atrocity and element of dystopian brutality that can be seen in the day-to-day accounts of life in The Only Nation That Defeated COVID is not only possible wherever you are reading this, it’s likely planned and scheduled already. As such, there is much to be learned by watching, observing, and considering what happens in China.
Much will depend on whether the Chinese people are able to maintain their resolve when the CCP begins dealing with protests by publicly executing people with live ammunition. This will be the most important test of the coming weeks- if dissidents are able to continue their dissent in the face of explicit death. Otherwise, this will be something talking heads will debate on Twitter for a few weeks and everything will go back to being a despairing slog.
The importance of what happens next in China for the rest of the world that has become enmeshed by the strands of the hideous arachnid that is the CCP cannot be overstated. For the first time in my lifetime, I find myself entertaining the possibility that the Chinese people might actually revolt against this regime. If they do, and succeed, everything about the trajectories of Western failed liberal democracies (pretty much wherever you happen to be sitting right now as you read this) will be altered.
I’ll probably suffer a few unsubscribes and angry emails about Jews for this, but I highly recommend, again, Kissinger’s “World Order” and specifically read the section about China, a place he is obviously quite familiar with. Though it is 8 years old, the foundational concepts will add a lot of context to what you observe over the next weeks and months as you watch China. (Read it even- especially- if you don’t like Kissinger.) Here’s a link that might be a free digital edition- don’t yell at me if it’s Croatian ransomware embedded in dog porn.
No one- not the Chinese, not anyone else in this world- is going to get off the Dystopian Death Future ride without some blood.
Chinese resisters, freedom fighters, protestors, dissidents, free thinkers: may Tyr bring you strength for the work that must be done to fight for justice and may every embodiment of evil you destroy be graciously rewarded as a sacrifice to him. May Thor give you the courage to laugh in the face of death as you join a worthy battle. May the Hanged God curse your enemies for their cowardice and cruelty and let his ravens feast on the carcass of their miserable kingdom when it falls. Tonight I light a fire and pour mead for your victory.
So, Twitter. Let us know in the comments: what does everyone who’s active on Twitter right now think of Elon’s job so far? Observing purely from reports as an outsider, I’m pleasantly surprised by some of the moves he’s made, despite my very low expectations of any kind of Bluebird Spring. I’m most ESPECIALLY excited about his alleged intentions to publicly release several important collections of internal records about Twitter’s collaboration with intelligence agencies and private policies of politically-motivated censorship (as well as, relatedly, tolerance of pedophilia). If he actually follows through with these promises to delight the crowd, how the fuck is this guy still alive?
Skeptic’s critical thought: how IS this guy still alive, indeed? Surely he’s been visited by the men in nice suits who came to welcome the new owner and give him a tour of how this relationship actually works. Have they worked with Elon to do some limited hangouts or completely fabricated reveals to throw everyone a little red meat so they’ll believe things have changed? Or is Musk pulling a Trump and thumbing his nose at How It Works Around Here, believing he’s too big to be targeted by the deep state? Or is he too useful in other ways seen and unseen that they’re letting him have his Twitter fun as long as Starlink has back doors and Teslas have remote kill switches?
I still don’t have anything to say about Trump’s return to the stage yet. I’m glad he enjoyed the Rahul Ligma prank. I do, too. I need to see some more substantial public behavior to get a sense of where The Donald is going and what it means for the rest of us for the next two years and beyond.
One last thing that is probably going to piss a few people off. Maybe a lot of you? Who knows. I mused to another Substacker a few days ago that I realize I don’t really know how to define the audience of the Gutter- I like the fact that we’re not all the same, but ARE all the same in some really important ways that matter.
Anyway, here goes. Please read it slowly and read the whole thing before you have a full-tilt emotional reaction to it, if you can.
There’s a pedophile scare going on in our culture right now. We’ve had them before- ironically, in the past, scares about child safety were fueled by the media- the same people that seem to want to protect pedophiles today- using the same tactics of exaggerated or outright bullshit statistics, horror stories, and loudly amplifying completely false events to make every parent believe a pedo lurked behind every bush waiting to kidnap their kids and rape them before chopping them up. This led to explosive growth in the cultural phenomenon of safetyism- despite children being safer than they had been at any point in history when this hysteria first appeared- which, once it gained bipartisan traction in the minds of people across the political spectrum, fertilized the ground for the kind of previously-unimaginable tyranny we’ve all opened our eyes to, all in the name of “public safety.”
I bring this up because I’m noticing an alarming rush by people that I’m nominally aligned with in most things to join the easy and lazy chant that LGBT = pedophilia, and that any sort of rights or dignity granted to the LGBT community in the past half century was a horrible mistake that led us directly to Pedo Land.
I want to be very, very clear about something: I do not condone, empathize with, or accept on any philosophical level the sexualization of children and think that the recent insane actions of the woke left to expose children to grotesque sexual perversions and sexually groom them is incontrovertibly evil. There is no stable philosophical ground for this, even in abstract, at all. Period. Nothing that has arisen in recent years in schools or other public venues or children indoctrinating them into sexual ideologies is okay, at all, either. None of it. Okay? None of it.
That said, I’m old enough to remember when the train made the stop at Gays Are Pedos Town before. I’ve known, been friends with, worked with, stood up for, and cared about many, many LGBT people, and look, honestly, if you didn’t already know about this, before I was married I kissed (and more) plenty of other girls. Not one of the people I’ve ever known that could be identified as LGBT was a pedophile, none of them even philosophically accepted the idea of it, and none of them would have endorsed or tolerated or celebrated any of the absolutely sick shit that is going on with our children right now.
I see a back door (heh heh) opening here for a return to some really ugly hatred that I kind of hoped was more or less done or confined to a relative minority of people whose ideologies do not allow any accommodation for LGBT people as equal members of society. After all, me saying that “pedos are evil and can’t be tolerated and let’s maybe kill them” is hardly a spicy take; pair the idea with “and it’s coming from the LGBT community” enough times, and people- well. If they eat enough grass their wool will be lovely come next fall.
The promotion of pedophilia is coming from the woke, postmodern, socially-destructive left, most of them also followers of the agenda of globalist technocracy. Some of them may also be LGBT- many probably just think they are because their identities are so insubstantial and polluted that they’d identify as anything that might give them more meaning or attention or the simulation of love. Most of them aren’t. Epstein sure wasn’t LGBT, nor were the vast majority of his known affiliates.
People who are LGBT are not pedophiles because they are LGBT- and plenty of LGBT people that most Gutterballs would probably be perfectly happy to sit down and have a beer with and trade mean memes with are genuinely terrified that they will be painted with this brush and killed in the streets because, well, let’s maybe kill pedos.
Some of you will have religious or ideological foundations that make this a fruitless plea or are otherwise immovable because LGBT people were already unacceptable in a fundamental way to you, and that’s fine- if you’ve lost too much respect for me to stick around, I’m sad about that. But I think quite a few people are getting swept up in the completely legitimate hatred of New World Order tyranny and the righteous refusal to accept the sexualization and sexual abuse of our children and losing nuance. I think there’s a real misdirect and shell game going on here that is probably completely intentional, because the people that are truly interested in brainwashing and damaging our children are running global crypto exchanges and rigging elections, not my old boss at Applebee’s who threw a guy out just for raising his voice at a crying baby and whose husband would bring in cake for everyone on Fridays and cater a (strictly no kids) Christmas party at their super-gay retreat on Long Island.
And it sure is convenient for the Epsteins and the Bankman-Frieds of the world, who we would never be able to chase down the street and lynch on a normal day, to have a nice visible group of people for us to turn our rage on instead.
Just something to think about. Or not. Not is certainly easier.
Essay coming soon.
"I even made it look like a dong. Husbandmouth vetoed spilling milk at the end of the table to really nail the photo because it was his place at the table. Gay."
I love you guys :) Happy Thanksgiving!
I appreciated this whole post, particularly the last half. We all, but the left most of all, need to get a lot better about policing the bad behavior of our own "side." LGBTs really need to disavow and throw out the pedos, just as the right wingers need to throw out the antisemites and racial purity people. (The left should also throw out their antisemites...) The whole allies for the sake of having allies thing has made for some very strange bedfellows, and as you say, leads to a lot of otherwise good people being accomplices to some true monsters.
ICYMI, "Gays Against Groomers" got their PayPal & Venmo access shut down. https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/gays-against-groomers-says-venmo-paypal-google-shut-down-accounts-violating-user-agreements
Makes you think.