Even feminists are guilty

Female value is measured by their use to men.

One night in Antwerpen, circa Feb 2016

Last night I was lost and found myself drawn toward a purple light, which gave an allure of nightclub. I approached the massive doors to read the sign above that said, "Club Silk, an American club." I went to open the door and realized I had to ring a bell. A beautiful woman cracked the door open to talk to me. I asked if she would speak English with me. She said of course. I told her I was American, and lost, and what not. Apparently I passed inspection, which presumably included identifying me as male, because the next thing she did was open the large door under the purple lights to reveal the plush interior of Club Silk. She turned to her colleague and said, "He is American," and walked away to let them deal with me. I knew the moment I realised I had to ring a doorbell that it was not a nightclub, but I was damn curious by then. The mystique lingered a moment longer as I peered in through the open door to the harem of barely dresed femmes slowly coming into view. When I asked where I was, they replied, "This is a strip club."

I was definitely not in the mood for a strip club last night (though under the circumstances it certainly felt like a warm port on a cold stretch of road), but it made for a vivid memory. I especially liked being recognized as a friendly face and welcomed in, even if they were a bit off the mark.

Private Prisons are the real beneficiary of the Trump Travel Ban

I received some literature in the mail today that impressed upon me that the real reason for the travel ban is to feed the insatiable hunger of the private prison industry in the U.S.

Think about it. Who is the criminal with this ban in place? Muslim immigrants, who are suddenly considered illegal. What do we do with illegal immigrants in the U.S.? We put them in prison camps!

The fact that they are Muslim and Trump once did business in those countries is just a distraction! If anything, his business ties in the affected countries give him greater access to legal knowledge on those governing bodies. Will they fight for their citizens lost in the cracks of our big red white and blue machine? I would put money on the answer to my rhetoric being no.

More on this later.

Immortality Through Glitter?

Why? Because glitter never goes away.

Cutting out the Trump Cancer

The #deleteUber campaign gave me an idea.

While many of us around the world sit in shock wondering what we can possibly do about the abhorrent first actions of the regrettably no longer mere "president elect," I found some inspiration. As it turns out Uber CEO has been advising Trump around the time Trump was writing his now legendary ban on travel to the U.S. from a set of 7 majority Islamic countries. When a group of NY cab drivers went on strike after news of the ban spread, Uber stopped their surge pricing in order to profit from the strike. News of this repugnant strategy went viral and in turn spurned a noteworthy hashtagivist backlash known as #deleteUber.

As much as I hate Uber's surge pricing, I did not really hate Uber itself until I heard the CEO was sitting at Trump's table. Now I am feeling like I would rather walk home in a Russian winter than use their service. (Sorry Logan!)

Then I realized an obvious way the outraged American majority (remember Clinton actually won the election) can start chipping away at his support: with good old fashioned consumer protest.

So, I Googled "Trump corporate support," and lo and behold, here is a helpful first step: 
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign_endorsements,_2016

This is my pledge to you, dear readers, I want to rake the muck and uncover the scum who put him in office, and I hope that you will react in kind, by directing your money to their competitors. These selfish and arrogant corporate moguls want to cash in on the Trump presidency. They literally want to profit from the horrific transformation of our beautiful constitution to a tool that will bludgeon minorities into feeble submission. We cannot allow them to profit from this. Do not let them. Spread the word. Let them feel the consequences of their pathology where it will hurt them most - in their profit margins.

I plan to drill down in this list and feature different offenders to the American tradition of diversity, haters of women, Islam, the impoverished, and basically anyone who is not a white Anglo-saxon one-percent-er, but don't take my word for it. I urge you to take this inspiration and follow suit by spreading the word that these companies and/or their stakeholders intend to profit from a Trump presidency. As an individual you DO have power. Raise your voice! Here are some suggestions about how you can join the fight:

Step 1: Delete uber.
Step 2: Peruse the list at the link above. (FYI: it is a long list, but below the politicians and military officials you will find a section that covers celebrities, CEOs, and the like)
Step 3: Share, publish, spread the word in your daily lives.
Step 4: Stay tuned. I will be back with more about the names on the list.

P.S. This is my screenshot from actually deleting Uber. I am not kidding about this!

Handel

I suppose I have been feeling existential for a few reasons lately, but none so much as the fact that I had to euthanize and then bury my 17 year old cat who I adopted when he and I were both kittens.

Handel AKA Bubby AKA My Fancy Footed Furry Feline Friend (among many other aliases over the years) was the most constant and wonderful source of love in my life outside of blood relations. He was perfect, fearless, loving, and the most beautiful white and black polydactyl with a little pink nose who ever lived. He lived 17 long and glorious years, and he still left this earth too soon.

The second most compelling reason for my current existential crisis is a corresponding bout of personal health challenges. Long story short, I have eczema plus a perfect storm of environmental triggers, leaving me with, in a phrase, monster hands.

Believe me when I tell you I do not take these words lightly, nor do I enjoy creating my own euphemistic nickname in mockery of myself. Allow me this poetic license for the sake of drama. What I have gone through in these last months felt like a personally tailored nightmare. My once capable hands juggled plates and glasses and demolished walls and moved friends and typed billions of bytes and managed replacing batteries and alternators and belts in my old jeep and helped hands and held friends and I could go on, but...important sidebar...Let it not be forgotten that one of my dominating literary and performance characters is butch mystique. She is born of nothing less than 100% me and my beliefs. Ever since I got over my youthful desire to have long delicate fingers, I have found pride in having strong capable hands. And in case it has not dawned on you yet, dear reader, for a queer woman, her hands are her sex, swinging in plain view for all to see. Capable of great strength and tenderness all in one. ...getting back around to what it means to this butch to have capable hands...I will let you infer the rest of your way through the ultimate challenge this period had on my very core identity. Case = rested.

So I withdrew into a cocoon. Skin conditions have the terrible side effect of rendering you paranoid of absolutely every possible trigger. You start with the obvious and work until the symptoms abate. Some people spend years suffering. I count myself lucky to have lost only a season. Regardless, I cut my bathing time in half. I worked from home, A LOT. I was bandaging sometimes as many as four or five fingers a couple of times per day. I could not cook or clean as much so I ate a lot of prepared foods. Ugh. It has been hell.

What is the silver lining to every wave of suffering in life? The period where you get sick of your own stink. That is the true test of character. What do you do when you are at the deepest place in the pit of your own despair? What life lessons will you extrapolate from your loss? In this case, I decided that I was going to have to take it on the chin. I must go to work. I must bandage my fingers meticulously. Type without activating the open cuts on my fingertips. Learn how to exercise without making it worse. Whew. I could go on for days, but alas, I have finally reached that silver lining which includes being sick of myself. I am sick of thinking, talking, contorting my life around these particular challenges. I just want to become highly skilled in living with it until it is naught but a memory...at least until the next round of hell if I should be so lucky. At least I will know better if it happens again.

The day these photos were taken, I bandaged up my monster hands and buried my cat. What better way to caption the ending of this experience, than to split open a finger tip wielding the shovel? Luckily, it is healed, and I went to work today bandage free. This is progress.

RIP Bubby. The day you returned to the earth was just as magical as you were, however tragic. I will miss you forever.

Modern Tech

The internet is listening as you type; scraping your yet unpublished thoughts with JavaScript. Terabytes and terabytes of data are dumped onto the internet every single day. For profit and not for profit ventures alike scramble to segment your virtual page views into interactive client side dashboards, widgets, and modals, oh my. Engineers,  scientists, mathemeticians, business administrators, and bankers all know one thing - they want your metadata, and all they have to do for it is give you an app. With a single set of files - because that is really all an app is, right - they are in your phone. IN YOUR PHONE. It is not  a conspiracy. This is our modern reality. Just like a human tracks DNA through a room, so does your device track packets of metadata à la IP hopscotch, pinging like pong, all the while leaving a trail of trackable characteristics for software to guzzle down into a third party analytics integration. Yeah, baby. And at the end of the day we pay a lot of money for telecom; for tiny phones and high speed connections. Yeah, you know it's true. We are paying them to do it to us.

This prose is brought to you by Why Am I Still Awake Productions.