Tag Archives: pictures

Florida, where work is for chumps

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I’ve now been in Florida for over a month and a half, helping joreth get her new (to her) RV set up and situated…a project that involved gutting the entire inside, adding 600 watts of solar to the roof, and replacing the house batteries with a very large lithium battery bank.

As we’ve run bto and fro between Winter Haven and Orlando, mainly along I-4, a wretched hive of scum and poor civil engineering, I noticed a very peculiar thing:

Florida has given up on the idea of advancing your station through hard work.

Drive across Florida on Interstate 4. Drive around in downtown Winter Haven, Orlando, or Lakeland. Notice anything peculiar?

I’m talking, of course, about billboards. But not just any billboards. Florida is, to an extent I’ve not seen in any other state, littered with billboards…for accident lawyers. Billboards as far as the eye can see, all advertising how much money you can make if you are in an accident.

Billboard after billboard after billboard, all for accident attorneys. On the stretch of I-4 we’ve been driving regularly, most of the billboards—54%, by my count—are advertising accident attorneys.

They’re everywhere. It’s absolutely uncanny.

I took these photos from inside a moving car, so I know the quality isn’t the greatest, but they just go on and on. We would drive down stretches of road where every single billboard for miles advertised accident attorneys, one after another after another.

Florida has long been legendary for the staggering numbers of terrible drivers on the roads, the result of snowbirds coming down from all over the country without being accustomed to the rain, a olice force focused on making money over protecting public safety, and lax licensing laws.

But I think there’s another part of it as well:

In Florida, there’s a cultural attitude that says getting in a car accident that you can blame on someone else is like winning the lottery.

They even have lawyers who specialize in going after semi owner/operators and trucking companies.

And, of course, language is no barrier to your payday.

But the absolute freakiest thing?

Remember when I said that getting in a car wreck is like winning the lottery? I meant that literally, not figuratively.

Accident lawyers put up shiny happy billboards with shiny happy accident victims wearing shiny happy smiles under headlines trumpeting how much money they made.

(There’s something so very very Florida about this little scene: an “I won $500,000 in an injury lawsuit, isn’t that awesome?” billboard over a strip mall with a pawn and gun shop, an acupuncturist, a martial arts center, an MMA arena, and a weird Evangelical church, all sharing a roof.)

The way these billboards are designed, they’re exactly like state lottery billboards.

“Dude! You got hit by a car and smashed into rubble? Awesome! Cha-CHING!!!”

Every time you pull into traffic in Florida, you’re sharing the road with people who sincerely hope you hit them because that’s the way you get ahead in this world.

It’s really deeply creepy…and perversely, it incentivizes the exact opposite of driving defensively. Coming up to a light and it looks like someone might be about to run the red? Gun it! Get in that intersection and hope he slams into you. Then maybe you’ll be one of the shiny happy people with a big payday, baby!

Work is for chumps.

Borg Queen xenomorph parasite poi

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I like spinning poi.

I haven’t done it since I returned to the US from Canada waaaaay back in the distant Before Time of 2018, so a few weeks ago, something finally snapped. I woke up at 3AM, decided it’s been far too long since I spun, and ordered a set of LED poi from Amazon. You know, as one does.

When the poi arrived, Joreth’s first reaction was “hey, the local dungeon has a photo night coming up, we could do a Borg Queen xenomorph parasite poi-spinning photo shoot!” Of course, I immediately said yes, and so, that Friday, we did.

It’s a little-known fact that when a Borg Queen is parasitized by a xenomorph, a peculiar quirk of Borg physiology makes the Borg Queen spin LED poi. Later, as the xenomorph parasite takes hold, the Borg Queen is driven to do…unspeakable acts by the hiphugger on her hips.

My Talespinner’s boyfriend came into town days before the shoot to help us work on Joreth’s RV, because that’s how my polycule rolls. (Seriously, I have awesome metamours!) So naturally I pressed him into the shoot as well.

We had an absolute blast.

Behind the scenes, Joreth’s boyfriend (who, as it turns out, also spins!) helped with lighting and such.

The alien xenomorph hiphugger is definitely a head-turner wherever we go, or maybe that’s just Joreth.

Transcendent Joy

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Every second of every hour
Let your actions speak your will

Raise your head up high
Raise your head up high
So the heavens hear you cry
Light the brightest fire
From the highest mountain
So the whole world knows
That your spirit can’t be broken

—VNV Nation, Resolution

I love dancing. I’ve loved dancing for a very long time, though partner dancing is still relatively new to me. One of the few things I regret about living in Portland is being able to go out clubbing at the Castle, the world’s best goth nightclub…and I say that after being in goth clubs all over the world.

I’m back in Florida at the moment, helping prepare my wife’s RV for a cross-country trip (during which we plan to shoot photos of abandoned amusement parks all through the US, with an eye toward publishing a coffee table photo book in 2026 or 2027).

So it came to pass that my wife is out of town for the weekend working, but her boyfriend was of a mood to go out dancing, and so he said, “hey Franklin, interested in going to the Castle?”

I first went there in…um, I want to say 1997 or so? Somewhere thereabouts. It’s been a fixture of the Ybor City district for a donkey’s age. And oh my God, it remains just as marvelous as I remember.

There’s something utterly transcendant about dancing.

There is something so pure, so absolute about losing yourself to the music that now, two days later, I struggle to express it, or even recall it, except as a maddeningly vague series of impressions.

I remember the joy, of course. If you could bottle and sell the joy I felt spending the entire night dancing, there might never be war again. It’s a joy so flawless and unadulterated that everything else in existence falls away into nothing, replaced by exultation that fills every corner of my being. I had forgotten, I think, in the years since I’ve last been goth dancing, just whas a jubilant experience it is.

Round about my third hour on the dance floor, when I was starting to feel tired enough that I kinda wanted to sit down for a minute but the DJ just kept absolutely killing it. There comes a point where you push past the fatigue into something else, something numnous, on the other side.

Parts of the evening only exist in my memory in fragments. I remember dancing to the Aphex Twin remix of the Nine Inch Nails song Reptile sandwiched between a goth lesbian couple to my left and a da-glo bubble-gum lesbian couple to my right.

Mostly I remember an overwhelming sense of sonder, the realization that every single person you see is living a life as rich and complex as your own, with their own histories and dreams, goals and ambitions, heartbreaks and sorrows, as though I were surrounded by two hundred brilliant, dynamic, complex universes, fifteen thousand years of joy and desire and loss and tragedy all intersecting in this one brief moment.

The dance floor exists in its own space, a small pocket universe set apart from the world. It’s a bit like being transported for a single night to some Land of the Fae—not a fairyland like one might find in a Disney movie, but a wildland, a place of the old fae, the dangerous and unpredictable fae…but not to worry, they’re not hunting, they’re relaxing and having fun.

At one point, a person who was obviously of the Fair Folk and not even trying to hide it grabbed my hand to lead me deeper onto the dance floor. The music poured through me, vibrating like molten silver down my back, and such delirious ecstasy took me that now, sitting here in front of my computer, I can recall only the shape of it, the outline without its substance.

There is a vicious, ugly streak of Puritanism woven deep in the fabric of American social life, a cynical suspicion and distrust of pleasure, a sneering contempt for doing things simply for the joy of doing them. We are all poorer, I think, for it, for forgetting that joy exists.

I’ve heard people say, often with a derisive sneer, that nightclubbing is fr twentysomethings with no direction in life, as though Serious and Grown Adults™ should eschew mere pleasure. I find that idea both toxic and farcical. If we are, as some people say, spiritual beings having a physical existence, then what virtue is there in denying that physicality, the very reason we are in this world in the first place? What point is there to existing, if we don’t lean into that existence? What has it gained us to turn our back on joy, besides strife, division, and suffering?

I think we are poorer for this turning away from the joy of existence. We are here today, and gone tomorrow. We take nothing with us from this brief moment in the sun. Let us enjoy what time we have.

On Being an Experimental Subject

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A couple of years back, my co-author Eunice and I started work on a new erotic novel, told in two parallel narrative streams: odd-numbered chapters taking place in Buffalo, New York in the present day, and even-numbered chapters taking place in London in 1871. The even-numbered chapters follow a Victorian doctor struggling to find a cure for furor uterinus, the formal name for “nymphomania;” the even-numbered chapters, a group of college friends who find his diaries and decide to replicate his experiments for…more entertaining purposes.

This is an essay about being experimented upon in a bar, not about writing. I’m getting to that, I promise.

Anyway, the novel, which we abandoned for a while and have recently returned to (with the assistance of my wife and my Talespinner), includes this passage:

“Is this another sitting room?” Jason said.

“I think it’s a parlor,” Leigh said.

“What’s the difference between a sitting room and a parlor?” Jason said.

Olivia glanced around the posh, elaborately decorated room, its windows just as large as the ones in the master bedroom. Several couches, a large comfortable chair, and a tête-à-tête all lurked beneath white shrouds. “One’s more formal?” she guessed. “What’s that thing?” She opened what looked like a large cabinet built into the wall, to find a shaft with cables running down into darkness.

“Dumbwaiter!” Leigh said. “For bringing things up. Brandy, cognac, cigars…” She tugged on a chain dangling from a lever in the wall next to the dumbwaiter. A distant bell tinkled. Leigh giggled. “I say, old chap, do be a sport and bring up the cognac.”

“What’s cognac?” David said.

“Little fish eggs in a tin?” Natalie hazarded.

“That’s caviar,” Leigh said. “Cognac is whisky for snooty people.”

Now, those of you familiar with cognac will know that it is not, in fact, whiskey for snooty people, it’s brandy for snooty people.

I am not familiar with cognac, but that’s okay because the characters are also not familiar with cognac, so it’s cool that they get it wrong.

That’s the setup. The story I mean to relay here is utterly different.

So I’m currently in Orlando, helping my wife get her RV ready for a cross-country trip. She lives across the street from a small neighborhood bar which the three of us—me, my wife, and her boyfriend—visited a few days back.

Three things struck me immediately when we walked in:

  1. We were literally the only people in the place besides the bartender;
  2. The bartender looked exactly, and I mean exactly, the way I imagine the character Natalie from the novel, to the point I turned to Joreth and said “holy shit, it’s Natalie!”; and
  3. The house special that day was a cognac drink.

So naturally, I ordered the cognac drink (as did Joreth’s boyfriend); and naturally, that led to an entire conversation about cognac, which, as I pointed out already, is not whiskey for snooty people, it’s brandy for snooty people.

The special drink, which the bartender (whose name, as it turns out, was not actually Natalie, which is good because had it been, I’d’ve been quite convinced I’d fallen through a dimensional rift into a fictional world) had never made before, was a rather complex thing whose making involves, among other things, a blowtorch.

“It’s an experiment!” not-Natalie chirped as she got out the blowtorch.

I do not, Gentle Reader, understand the purpose of the blowtorch. I mean, I do, it exists to apply fire to things, but I’m not sure what role they play in making a drink. She stripped the peel off an orange, cut it into strips, sprinkled it with cinnamon and…um, sugar, I think?, slipped it into the glass, sprinkled more cinnamon on it, and…

I will confess that I am not generally an alcohol connisseur. I can’t tell a Scotch single-malt from a dry gin. But believe me when I say, Gentle Reader, that drink was delicious.

10/10, would recommend being experimented upon by a character from a novel again.

Let’s Dance! Some Thoughts on Being Embodied

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If you could move inside my head, you’d…well, honestly, you’d probably find the experience a little disconcerting, because who does that? Moving into someone else would likely be unsettling no matter who you did it to, unless they were, like, an identical twin or something.

But if you could move inside my head, you’d probably find it especially unsettling, because I don’t live in my body. People assume that a body is something you live in, but actually, from an entirely subjective viewpoint, my sense of self is more a big ball of wibbly-wobbly…stuff. I am, most of the time, a ball that floats behind my eyes and operates my body like one of those mecha things in a certain genre of Japanese science fiction. A meat mecha. A meat mecha made of flesh and bone and bizarre squishy biology.

But this isn’t an essay about that. It’s an essay about dancing.

I like dancing. I enjoy dancing. Some years ago, I started getting into partner dancing. My wife and my crush are both avid, skilled, talented dancers, so they were, as oyu might imagine, thrilled at the idea I might extend my repertoir beyond goth/industrial dancing at a certain flavor of loud, frenetic nightclub.

There is, however, as you might imagine, a difficulty that comes from not living in one’s body. Learning to dance is a bit like learning to make a marionette dance; when you’re operating a meat mecha made of biology and fluids, getting it to do exactly what you want it to do is a bit of a challenge.

I learned through a rather strange set of circumstances some time ago that psilocybin mushrooms can, for brief moments, make me inhabit my body. The first time that happened, it was…um, startling. When you’re accustomed to living life as an invisible ball floating somewhere behind your eyes, operating a meat mecha by remote control, the sensation that you reach alllll the way to the ground is jarring.

Then, when I burned my foot and learned that opiate painkillers do nothing but make me puke profusely and exuberantly, but cannabis edibles actually work for pain management, I discovered that edibles also put me into my body, which was wonderful because, you know, inhabiting one’s body without hallucinating is a marvelous thing.

So it came to pass that Joreth offered to take me swing dancing a few nights back, and I thought, hey, I wonder if it will be easier to learn a new dance if I’m inhabiting my body?

Morgan Freeman voice: “It was, in fact, easier to learn a new dance when he was inhabiting his body.

The entire experience was, for lack of a better word, extraordinary. It’s far easier, as it turns out, to learn how to move one’s feet when one’s sense of self extends all the way to the floor. I don’t think I’ve ever caught on to something new in…well, in ever.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, it helps that Joreth is the best teacher I’ve ever had. But still, never underestimate the power of living entirely within your body, rather than operating your body the way you might a particularly fiddly meat-robot.

Interestingly, when the edible started to wear off and I shrunk back into that ball behind my eyes, she could tell immediately. (Her, mid-dance: “You’re becoming a ball again, aren’t you?”)

Anyway, the whole experiment turned out to be a resounding success, one I definitely hope to continue exploring again in the future.

The Borg Queen awakens

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Okay, so sit back, and ima tell you a story. It’s a story of kink, and depravity, and surprise serendipity.

So. I’m in Florida, helping my wife Joreth get the RV ready for a cross-country trip, during which we plan to do a photo tour of the abandoned amusement parks that litter the American Midwest like so many broken dreams of a bygone era. (We’ll likely do a coffee table photo book sometime in the next couple of years.)

Anyway, the day after I arrived, the local dungeon hosted a party, so your humble scribe and his beautiful wife showed up, of course, for an evening of kink and Killer Klowns from Outer Space.

The dungeon had electronic consent forms to be filled out on an iPad. On the consent form there was a profile, and on the profile there was a place to pick one’s favorite kink from a dropdown list.

Me: “I guarantee my fvorite kink is not on this list.”

Cheerful Woman Behind the Desk: “It cannot possibly be any weirder than this kink I just learned about!”

Whereupon CWBTD pulled out her phone and showed us…

…The Picture.

You know the one. The Picture that broke the Internet. The Picture that, every now and then, undergoes a new wave of virality. The Picture that, I’m told, ended up briefly on the official Sigorney Weaver fan site until a moderator took it down.

There are two things to know about The Picture:

  1. That’s a photo of Joreth;
  2. Wearing a xenomorph hiphugger strapon designed and made by your humble scribe.

In other words, CWBTD was right. My kink isn’t weirder than the thing she’d just discovered, it’s exactly as weird as the thing she’d just discovered.

Anyway, she was thrilled, and asked us to come back in yesterday for a bit of show and tell.

Which we did. The Borg Queen xenomorph parasite has been in storage since Barcelona, but it required surprisingly little repair, and we were soon on our way.

It was marvelous. They let us use the dungeon for a photo shoot!

The bad: I didn’t have my real camera, and we couldn’t lay hands on the Borg mask, so we did the best we could.

The good: There’s a photo night coming up next week, for which we will be better prepared.

The better: We met a lovely couple who were all like “ooh, Borg Queen parasitized by an alien xenomorph? That’s exactly my kink![1] Victimize us, please?”

Innocent victim: Mittyrin (image by author, reproduced by permission)

Fantastic fun, if that’s the sort of thing you consider fun. (Tautalogical cat is tautalogical.)

We drove home beneath the symbol of God’s divine blessing, or, you know, non-traditional relationships, which is almost the same thing, so truly I feel like Divine Providence smailed upon a fantastic evening.

[1] When I first started working on the xenomorph hiphugger, I remember saying “I don’t know what the point is, there are only three people in the world with this taste and I’m dating two of them.”

Oh, how wrong I was.

Things that go Squick in the Night

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For years, my wife Joreth has teased me about getting me a RealDoll—you know, one of those horrifyingly realistic sex dolls that almost but not quite looks like a wax figure that almost but not quite looks like a real person.

It’s not out of any particular fetish, you understand. Oh, no, it’s far more sinister than that. You see, those sex dools creep me out. I mean really creep me out. The thought of putting my willie in one of them makes my skin crawl. And, since she loves pushing my buttons (this is, in fact, the reason the xenomorph hiphugger sex toy exists), well…

It is only the fact that those dolls cost more than the first three cars I owned combined that has saved me from the squick of mounting a thing that looks just enough like a person to be skin-crawling but not enough to be, you know, pleasurable.

But that’s not what I came here to discuss.

So it came to pass that my Talespinner’s other boyfriend found a full body suit on Ali Express for somethig like $2 including shipping, because globalization and low wages and all the economic hegemony that *flails arms* is part of, you know, all that.

And it came to pass that I thought, hmm, it might be interesting to cast a silicone tentacle on something like that, so the person wearing the bodysuit would seem to have tentacles crawling up their body.

I brought one with me to visit my Talespinner, where my hopes were quickly dashed: the degree of stretch and the fineness of the material precluded any reasonable means to cast silicone tentacles on the fabric and have them stay pot when it stretches.

We ended up doing an impromptu, last-minute photo shoot with the body suit and a prototype tentacle feeldoe strapless strap-on. The results were…

…horrifying.

Gentle Reader, the skin-crawling horror I felt taking photos of this would, if I could sufficiently communicate them to you, send you screaming from your computer in terror this very moment.

Since I am often the agent of my own undoing, I immediately had to run off to show them to Eunice and Joreth and say “hey, hey, check this out, these photos make my skin crawl!”

We are all drawn like moths to a flame to our own destruction.

Ronin Steppin’ Razor

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Some time ago, I found 45 meters of electroluminescent wire on Amazon. A few months after that, I found thin sheets of edible 24-carat gold foil on Amazon. When one finds EL wire and gold foil, one’s mind, of course, wanders to thoughts of old-school cyberpunk dystopias and the nude female form.

I’m writing this from Springfield, where I’m visiting my Talespinner, who is remarkable in many respects, not the least of which is the way she encourages my incorrigible nature. So naturally, when I expressed the inchoate thoughts brewing in my head re: EL wire and gold and lots of silicone lube, she not only agreed to become a work of art, but even helped make those inchoate thoughts choate.

So it came to pass that we three (me, my Talespinner, and her other boyfriend) gathered around her coffee table cutting thin (as in about 400 atoms thick) gold foil into geometric shapes and putting an entire case of AA batteries into EL wire battery packs, upon which we retired to her bedroom to cover her with silicone lube for that wet-n-shiny look.

Gold foil is, as it turns out, difficult to apply to skin without tearing, a process that requires patience and careful attention. That done, after a brief delay so that the model could have a spontaneous orgasm, we started wrapping her in wire.

At last, more than an hour after we started, all was ready. Ans the results were…well, I find them extraordinary.

That last one kinda makes me think cyberpunk yoga. “You do Downward Facing Dog. I do Ronin Steppin’ Razor. We are not the same.”

Cutting the thin gold foil turned out to be so problematic, I plan to try laser-cutting it to see if that works. (My 10-watt diode laser cutter isn’t generally up to metal, but hey, literally only 400 atoms thick, so who knows?) I’m picturing something like the Matrix waterfall cascading down her chest, but in gold.

We’re still finding teeny flecks of gold in unlikely places.

Some thoughts on Dolly Parton and kindness

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A new billboard appeared recently next to the grocery store where I do most of my shopping.

Image by author

I don’t mean the “now leasing” sign, but the one next to it. The one with the country singer on it.

Back when I was in middle school in Venango, Nebraska, I didn’t know a thing about Dolly Parton except that she apparently had large breasts. I might have vaguely known that she was in a band or something, maybe, but I couldn’t put a face to the name. I knew she had big boobs because all the other kids told me she had big boobs, and if all the other kids are saying something, like they put spider eggs in bubble gum or whatever, you know it’s probably true.

We would get together at recess and tell Dolly Parton jokes, all of them dirty (at least by the standards of a fifth-grader; ah, how little I knew!) and all of them about her breasts.

As I moved into adulthood, I learned that yes, she was a singer, she sung country and western songs, and she had that one hit because of that one movie everyone liked but I didn’t see. I don’t listen to country and western music, so that was about the sum total of my knowledge of all things Dolly Parton.

Nowadays, as I learn more about her, she strikes me as a genuinely marvelous person: kind, generous, giving, and genuinely invested in leaving the world a better place than she found it.

I still don’t listen to country music, but by all accounts she seems quite extraordinary. She is that rarest of things in creation: a genuinely compassionate person.

That’s something the world needs in greater quantities.

As I get older, I become more and more aware of the value of kindness. The truth is, callousness is easy. Indifference is easy. Cruelty is easy. The world is filled with people who see kindness as weakness, but in truth, kindness costs more than insensitivity. To be kind is to see the world from someone else’s point of view, and the ego rebels against that. It reminds us we are not the sun-center of all creation.

Empathy: Humanity’s Secret Weapon

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Pop quiz time. How did human beings—soft, weak, squishy bipeds with no claws, no massive canines, and thin skin—become the dominant mammals on the planet? Survival of the fittest says we should’ve been wiped out by fiercer, stronger, creatures, right?

No.

Our special sauce, beyond our big brains and abstract reasoning, is our cooperation. We work together. We help each other. We tend to our sick and injured. Where one of us goes, the rest follow.

We have each other’s backs.

That makes us unstoppable. There are many creatures larger, stronger, faster, and fiercer than we are, creatures that can take us one on one in a fight, but the thing about humans is it’s never one on one.

You kill one of us, the rest of us will come for you. We are an unstoppable force of nature.

Losers and idiots think that kindness is a weakness because they see the world in terms of the Rugged Individual™, the lone warrior standing strong against a world red in tooth and claw. They don’t see the army that stands behind that Rugged Individual, making his tools and his clothing and his weapons, nor the entire history behind him that brought him to this place. The Rugged Individual stands on the shoulders of others and says “look how I rose to this lofty height all by myself!”

Today, we live in a world increasingly dominated by loudmouth bullies, people for whom the world is always zero sum, people who believe that every interaction has a winner and a loser.

Image: Felix Mittermeier

This attitude appeals to the sort of person who thinks of himself as an Alpha Male™, taking charge through force and strength to leave his mark upon the world, but it’s comedically inept.

And the math is behind it. Entire branches of game theory show that cooperation always wins out in the long run, always…not that the sort of person who sees the world as force against force in a battle royale to the death actually understands the math.

In the end, it comes down to a simple but surprisingly subtle idea: Other people are real. In a world where we act with reciprocal kindness, everyone benefits. We are a social species; we do more acting together than acting alone.

I will admit this has not always been obvious even to me. The Internet makes it easy to forget that other people are real—that the letters we see on the screen come from a real person. I had an experience about ten or so years ago when I met in realspace some people I’d been needlessly abrasive to online, and it occurred to me, holy shit, these folks are actual human beings! Since then, I’ve tried—not always with perfect success—to be more mindful in my online communication.

Bullying is easy. Especially when it’s anonymous, and most especially when it curries favor in our social in-groups. We live in a world where kindness and compassion are increasingly seen as weakness. Let us not forget that it is cooperation that carried us here.

Be kind.

Lessons from my Mom: Malicious Compliance

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I grew up in a tiny town called Venango, Nebraska, a rural farming village of 242 people. A lot of my formative memories took hold there, even though we only lived there for my middle-school years.

I went to school in this building right here, Venango Elementary, which housed the entire kindergarten through twelfth-grade population of Venango.

One of my teachers, a guy named Mr. Shepherd (I don’t think I ever knew his first name—in fact, I don’t think it ever occurred to me he had a first name) had a reputation in my class for assigning “punishment writing” to any kid who acted out in class, by which I mean committed some transgression like speaking out of turn. He’d demand that the offender would write the same sentence 250 times or 500 times or whatever, as befitted the severity of the transgression, then took malicious glee in throwing the pages away right in front of the student who’d transgressed.

Because there’s nothing like making young children associate learning with mind-crushing tedium and then watching their work destroyed in front of them to instill a deep, lifelong passion for learning and a keen intellectual curiosity, amirite?

One day, a day I still remember quite clearly, Mr. Shepherd accused me of talking in class. The actual transgressor was the kid behind me, a kid named Mike, the school bully who loved seeing other people get in trouble.

I have never, ever liked being accused of something I didn’t do. I did something wrong? Cool, man, lemme know and I’ll cop to it. Accuse me of something I didn’t do? Fuck you, I’ll burn my own life down before I take responsibility that isn’t mine to take.

So it was that Mr. Shepherd, with the absolute conviction available only to autocrats, abusers, and teachers of middle school, decided I was the one responsible for the voices he heard, and demanded that I write “I will never talk in class” 250 times that night, to be handed in the next day.

I was livid when I got home. The wrath in Heaven at the rebellion of the angels was but a candle beside my incandescent rage at the injustice of a teacher believing I’d done something I hadn’t done.

Enter my mom, who taught me a valuable lesson.

My mom in 2016, wearing the same expression she did on that day in 1980.

We didn’t have that lovely, evocative expression “malicious compliance” back then, but that’s exactly what my mom suggested I do.

She explained that yes, teachers could be wrong and no, not all injustices could be rectified, but as long as I was going to be writing something 250 times, why not use it as a covert opportunity to express how I felt?

So I sat down and started writing.

I will never talk in class.
I will never talk in class.
I will always talk in class.
I will never talk in class.
I will never talk in class.
I will celery stalk in class.
I will beaver balk in class.

She encouraged me to adjust my letter and word spacing so that, on casual glance, the lines of text would all look about the same.

The next day, when Mr. Shepherd took my neat stack of handwritten papers and dropped it in the trash in front of me, I couldn’t help grinning. I’d stuck my thumb in his eye, my small act of defiance against injustice, and he never even knew.

My mom died in December 2023. I still haven’t adjusted to the reality of living in a world where she no longer exists.

There has never been a moment in my life I did not have the absolute, rock-solid certainty that she would always, always be there for me. My mom always had my back. She taught me, not just facts and skills and things about the world, but how to think. She encouraged the boundless, limitless curiosity I still have today.

She taught me how to think. How to ask questions and find answers. How to see the world, not as I want it to be, but as it is.

I still keep in my phone a list of the things she would say, the things I heard again and again growing up, that I continued to hear even as an adult:

  • Education is not the solution if ignorance is not the problem.
  • Information by itself almost never changes attitudes.
  • The curse of being middle class is you can afford anything you want but not everything you want.
  • People vote their identity and their feelings, not their interests.
  • People in groups will agree to something that each one individually knows is stupid.
  • We are predisposed to believe what we wish were true or what we’re afraid is true. Understanding what is true is hard work.
  • You can’t reason someone out of a position they did not reason themselves into.
  • Never ask a question whose answer you don’t want to know.

I still miss her, every single day.