triplets
no person is the worst thing they've ever done. yet we're conditioned from the jump to treat people punitively for their most egregious mistakes made in their weakest moments. Martin Walker, protagonist of the game Spec Ops: The Line, is one person many of us would struggle to apply that principle to. If you somehow haven't heard of Spec Ops: The Line, the part of the game that spawns the most conversation and controversy is when you, as Martin Walker, drop white phosphorous munitions on a camp of refugees and burn them all alive. Jacob Geller's essay, "What We Don't Talk About in Spec Ops: The Line", highlights the controversy within the controversy and how most works discussing the game explore it as a meta-narrative of the first person shooter genre, or the inherent jingoism and military propaganda the Department of Defense works very hard to maintain within the genre, and how all of these pieces completely fail to focus on how horrifying white phosphorous is as a munition. I won't do Geller's work the injustice of paraphrasing it here, so you should watch it on your own.
There's a pair of achievements in the game that I am certainly not the first to highlight, but when I played the game they were part of the moment that solidified it in my mind. They show up after you find that one of your two squadmates has been hanged by a vengeful mob, a mob that is now surrounding you and threatening to assault you. If you try to walk past them, they push you and inflict damage you cannot heal. You have to disperse the crowd. You fire into them, the militant rioters that they are, for threatening your life and murdering your squadmate in cold blood, condemning him to a slow and painful death of asphyxiation in the scouring sandstorms of Dubai. The crowds panic and scatter, bodies at your feet.
A Line, Crossed.
The crowd that surrounds you gathered to hang your squadmate because he dropped white phosphorous on their families in a refugee camp. At your orders. He died because he faced the consequences of the actions you ordered him to do, orders he initially refused to comply with because he disagreed. Is he absolved of the guilt of the warcrime because he felt sad about it? Absolutely not. Are you, as Martin Walker, too far gone into your mistakes to recognize the right thing to do? Do past mistakes serve as a rolling, continuous justification to make new ones in the future? Is the crowd really his murderer when you directly created the conditions that lead to his death in the first place? You fire a warning shot over the heads of the crowd, dispersing them without killing them.
A Line, Held.
no person is the worst thing they've ever done. what they are is someone who has to live with the worst thing they've ever done and learn to come to terms with it, learn what they have to learn from it, and try to go on. Martin Walker is not a person, he is a character in a video game, an avatar for the player. Whether or not you choose to fire into the crowd to disperse them, or fire over them, is a matter of self-love. It is horrifying to take an earnest look at the worst things you've ever done, make an honest account of their consequences, and then try to synthesize that with who you are. Do you love yourself enough to be honest and admit that you firebombed a refugee camp? Do you love yourself enough to admit that you hurt completely innocent people who did not deserve that pain? To acknowledge that the crowd that is assaulting you is completely justified and that you have no recourse against them? To just let them go? Or do you delude yourself, reinforce the lie that you were justified in your attack? To cover up your crime? It's up to you, love.
love.
I Saw the TV Glow is one of the most isolating and alienating group hugs in existence. It is firmly in "the girlies who get it, get it" territory, so much that it could practically codify the phrase. The loneliness that enshrouds Owen throughout the whole film, forming an almost tangible barrier between her and the world she inhabits, is reflected in an audience of two; a trans girl having a religious experience watching her life scroll in front of her on 35mm film while her cis partner the next seat over is wondering why the movie was so well reviewed. Haunting visuals weaving throughout the piece a surreal hallucination, an overwhelming sense of irreality, illogic, unbecoming, derealization. nothing is real. this life isn't real. i/owen/she is not real. what are we but two dimensional simulacra of what a person is supposed to be, hollow and intangible and all who reach out to touch us find nothing there and we're just an illusion and we can't keep going and we can't stop and we can't start yet there's another test there's another appointment there's another engagement i have to make a phone call i need to go to work there's bills to pay i can't stop i have to keep going with the unreality with the hologram with the image with the lie with the lie with the lie we tear through the silver screen and rip the boundary to shreds and look at owen in her eyes and as we start to scream we see the film screaming right back at us
there is still time.
in isabel's freshman year of highschool she went over to tara's house, her genderqueer friend that was 2 years older and one of the few places where she could feel comfortable exploring and breaching the boundaries of the reality that had been constructed around her. while there she tries on a dress for the first time, in tara's basement room, and a smile flashes across her face for a moment. an entire microcosm of a moment. a pinprick of light splicing through the dome of liar's stars. and then she represses it. she tapes over the hole. it's too early. irreality is too strong. it's not time yet. but there is still time.
in maya's freshman year of highschool she went over to rtpaern's house, her genderqueer friend that was 2 years older and one of the few places where she could feel comfortable exploring and breaching the boundaries of the reality that had been constructed around her. while there she tries on a dress for the first time, in rtpaern's basement room, and a smile flashes across her face for a moment. an entire microcosm of a moment. a pinprick of light splicing through the dome of liar's stars. and then she represses it. she tapes over the hole. it's too early. irreality is too strong. it's not time yet. but there is still time.
loneliness.
im thinking of ending things.
im thinking of ending things.
im thinking of ending things.
what value is there in a false past? a fever dream of a history? what can you learn from libating a vessel of a heritage which never existed? i've lately found myself, literally, dreaming of a past which never existed. i've started taking progesterone again and it slaps an upscaler on your dreams. they become incredibly, almost worryingly vivid. and in these dreams of late i've found myself yearning for a past stability that never existed, a safety that was not in place. it makes sense. i've had a very heavy soul these last few weeks, and it's taken a lot for me to even express that to myself, never mind to others.
a dear friend of mine is throwing their entire being into preserving their life. i'm trying to help; i am limited. they're engaged in a fight against the forces of fuckin' entropy and if they need my body they'll have it. if they lose, if we fail, then they'll @̶̻̏̃̈́#̴͕͊^̶̠̤̅S̴̺̬͇͌͐̈́^̵̜͗̊&̵̘̩͔͠%̶̲̣̠̈́͒d̷͇͈̽̓͘ạ̷̈́ġ̴̱̇͠j̵̬̈́́́h̶͕̗̄*̶͓̥̑́̐~̵͚̻͇̌̚
i was always taught to idolize life and death situations. to revere the chance to become a hero. to worship the people who would go into foreign countries, drop white phosphorous on civilians, and then come home and write a book about how it made them sad. it feels self-centered to say i'm in one. i'm not in anything, i'm bearing witness to one. trying to help. yet it would be deceitful and dishonest of me to pretend like it isn't weighing heavily on me. i cry about it every day. but even being this close to one, they don't feel like i was always taught how they would. there's clarity of purpose, sure, that part was true. but there's no heroism. there's just the work. to throw everything within your reach at a cosmological horror in hopes that it grants the smallest of a concession. what horror. moments lost searching for a dream that's real, from my heart i'd give it all away just to know.
why, then, would i not dream of a false past? yearn for a time, real or unreal, when this emotional burden could have been shared? I'm Thinking of Ending Things is a story about a janitor who, as he contemplates suicide, is spinning incredibly vibrant and vivid delusions of a dinner with his girlfriend and his parents. the dinner was never real. his girlfriend was never real. yet his mind spins these false memories, weaving them from metaphysical strands of yearning and longing and loneliness into a tapestry or a parachute or an IV. scrambling, throwing everything within its reach to get a concession. to stay alive. you hold what you can, even the unreal, when staring into uncaring antiexistence. but when i throw myself into helping my friend, when i throw myself into @̶̻̏̃̈́#̴͕͊^̶̠̤̅S̴̺̬͇͌͐̈́^̵̜͗̊&̵̘̩͔͠%̶̲̣̠̈́͒d̷͇͈̽̓͘ạ̷̈́ġ̴̱̇͠j̵̬̈́́́h̶̶͕̗͓̥̄̑́̐~̵͚̻͇̌̚ i feel such an intense clarity of purpose, a drive so unceasing and tangible that it wakes me up without my meds. the soul craves meaning and i know what water it requests for the trees.
im thinking of ending things, but not my life.
actualization.
Mrs. Downes will never forgive you. You killed her husband, and you're paying the price for it. She bluntly tells you that you can give her Arthur's money all you want, but it'll never make up for the original sin of collecting that debt from Thomas Downes in the first place. You blindly did what you were told and beat that poor debtor at the behest of the loan shark you allow in your camp, and there's nothing you can do to change that. The only thing you could have done was not collect the debt in the first place.
Martinaise does not have to forgive you. You tore that stuffed bird off the wall, you absolutely demolished your hotel room in an honest-to-goodness attempt at self-annihilation. You left the dead body hanging, rotting, in the backyard of the Whirling-in-Rags for three days! And you're no closer to solving the case. And you know what happens if you, through Raphael Ambrosious Cousteau, try to apologize?
Sorry Cop.
"You're one sorry piece of shit. A cop penitent, a flagellant cop-monk. This is not the right line of work for you. You should be grovelling at the feet of a feudal lord, providing lurid evidence against yourself at a Mazovian show trial, or ripping the flesh from your back with a cat-of-nine-tails. Whatever made you this way -- you can be damn sure it was your own fault. Do it. Really criticize yourself. Who knows? You might uncover something of importance from your guilt-ridden past!"
i never really understood the Sorry Cop when I first played Disco Elysium, when I was first bestowed with the crown of the Sorriest Cop Who Ever Lived. Aren't you supposed to apologize when you've done something wrong? Aren't you supposed to blame yourself for everything, highlight how it was your own moral failing and your failure alone, just like your parents always did? They weren't scapegoating their own problems onto you, a child, they were just teaching you how to take accountability, right?
Mrs. Downes will never forgive you. Yet, you have the option to do the right thing by her anyways. You can help her and her son out when he's being harassed at work. You can save her from getting murdered by a creep in the woods outside of town and give her a ride home. You can give them money to skip town before the heist, to go start over somewhere with enough to truly and earnestly try again. You, of course, can refuse to do all of this too. You can ignore her entirely. But if you try to make amends for what you've done, she plainly tells you there's no repenting or mending — the only option would have been to not have fucked up in the first place. You weren't the kind of person who could have done any different back then; if you love yourself, you'll be graceful and say that you made the best possible decisions that you could have at that time.
But you fucked up anyways. And you can't make up for it, she's clear about that. But apologizing and flagellating yourself over it won't solve the issue either, since that just makes you the Sorriest Outlaw Who Ever Lived. So what do you do? Your best.
"Life doesn’t have an accountant, no choice to do good when you could choose instead to do bad is meaningless. Each good act stands alone and does its own work in the world." - Noah Caldwell-Gervais, "Home, Home on the Console: From Red Dead Revolver to Red Dead Redemption 2"
love.
i joined a marching band this year. the Queer Big Apple Corps. it made surviving this year significantly easier that it otherwise would have been! i've marched in parades, i've performed at weddings, i've taken photos of myself with my quads above Times Square! I've also had birthday parties where nobody who was there would talk to me anymore in 2 months, where I felt so isolated and alone from the people who were supposed to love me the most. i've felt that same loneliness i always meet during the holidays, the sensation of it ripping away chunks at the edge of my vision as i hold my stuffed animals to my chest and watch The Muppet Christmas Carol with my new roommates, a tradition I started 2 years ago as I watched it with my then-new-roommates in Seattle. i remember feeling depressed around Christmas as early as 5th grade, and back then I hadn't gone through nearly as much as I have now.
yet i also find myself exploring christmas lights in my new neighborhood with a new, dear friend of mine who brought homemade cocoa for us. we met only in october and they've sent me furniture and have become someone very treasured to me. i have plans to go on a date with someone tomorrow, plainly i realize how fucking hot i am now and talk to so many people that if little egg maya knew about it she'd have transitioned years earlier. im spending far too much money to go visit my best friend because there's no point in existence if you don't take the time to live, and that was not something i ever did before. christmas is a holiday of life, ostensibly, and that was being placed in front of a girl who is still engaging daily with the process of sculpting herself into a creature that is alive for the first time in her history. and with each year that passes i will create more memories of the joy of revolution, of the beautiful destruction of the unself, the monument to be sculpted from its ashes, and i will persevere and i will continue and i will exist and i will create happy. happy. happy.
loneliness
i've been reading Red Valkyries and it opens with an essay about a woman who is quickly becoming a personal hero of mine. Lyudmila Pavlichenko was many things, namely a sniper in the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War and was attributed with 309 confirmed Nazi kills in her short 8 months of active combat. if you're reading this i would assume you know me well enough to not need an explanation why i would admire that.
im well aware of what 2025 is going to hold for transgender people. i'm not naive. i'm well aware of what a dying world is going to do to secure whatever holds it can, and i'm well aware of who they're going to do that to. the work remains to be done. the work has not changed. the old world is dying and the new one is struggling to be born. but in the work we will find purpose and carve out a life of our own meaning in spite of the systems that demand we become blood in the gears.
While fighting in Sevastopol in 1941 she met Alexei Kitsenko, who she would marry on the front. They formed a team together and would hunt Nazis as a couple, stalking the front. To quote Red Valkyries at length, "She embraced the hyperreal blur of war and, despite the death and destruction, enjoyed the utter conviction that her cause was just as the Germans had invaded the Soviet Union. Pavlichenko's training and aptitude allowed her to defend a country she loved and she shared this overarching purpose not only with a fellow sniper, but also with a comrade she adored. 'With him I felt for the first time the meaning of love, requited and all-consuming love, and I was completely happy in those days."
actualization.
the objectively correct first playthrough of Baldur's Gate 3 is a Dark Urge character who romances Shadowheart as you both fight to be good people in spite of your past. Shadowheart discovering her past with Shar as you discover yours with Bhaal has so much narrative coherence and builds upon each other so well that it's insane to me how much I would have missed had I not done that as my first character. I remember a scene where you wake up in the middle of the night in a murderous rage, and Shadowheart has to come and try to snap you out of it. the catharsis of someone who knows what you're fighting against, who knows what it feels like, and they still believe in you? they still know you can do what's right despite all the wrong that's happened because of you? incomparable to anything else. and it makes it that much more satisfying when you're there for her as she confronts what the Sharrans have done to her parents, as she faces the truth that her entire constructed memory is a lie and that she now has to decide, for the first time, what a life lived for her looks like. And you get to help her. what a treasure, to be so close to someone in that moment. and for Shadowheart to have someone she knows is on her side the whole time.
the objectively correct emotion to feel when i think of my dear friend, the one from above, is love. them looking at me and unwaveringly refusing to lose sight of the good when i was drowning in the void was the first weave of my chrysalis that birthed the maya of today. i get the honor of knowing that they were there for me when i had to decide, for the first time, what a life lived for me looks like. and i continue to decide it.
love.
you're doing a photoshoot for yourself at the Brooklyn Bridge, where the establishing shots for John Wick were filmed. You're by yourself doing the shoot, sure. A stranger compliments your shoes and you take the time to thank them. you take gorgeous videos of a gorgeous woman and a gorgeous view and you take them home. you create. you divine. one of your best friends helps you edit it and put it together into a video overlaid onto audio from Helen's funeral. you capture the important shots, the ones that only a few people will understand. you clip them together. your other best friend commends you, says it's beautiful, and that you have amazing artistic talent. you post it.
you're at a club. it's mid november. two people are dancing with you, courting you, buying you drinks, braiding your hair, trying to take you home. you're dancing at hen's and chappell roan is bumping and you're surrounded by lesbians and it's funny that people are trying to take you home because it feels like you're pretty much there already, right?
you're on governor's island. you're in providence. you're in dc. you're at st. john's cathedral. you're at a backyard pool party. you're at slate. you're in front of a storage unit on a cold day. you're playing quads with people who love you.
you're on the subway. you're listening to periphery because of course you are. the songs of periphery 1 are now fully entwined with your love for your friends, they're inextricable now.
you're in a new home. you have teddy and emily and cyrus and charlie and spotswood and pooh and piglet and tigger and eeyore and roo and that pineapple i never named and bullwinkle and the rats. and the love.
just because you might be by yourself doesn't mean you're ever alone.
loneliness.
you're a child who grew up with superhero movies. you were the perfect age to ride the MCU from the original Iron Man all the way to where it really should have ended with, aptly, Endgame. you remember playing Spider-Man 2 on the Playstation 2 at your mom's house, and the Pizza Time song is forever burned into your mind.
you're older. still a child, but older. you're watching The Dark Knight trilogy and you see Batman screaming through the streets on his motorcycle, breaking all laws in a race to do something incredibly important. you turn to your best friend and you say "I hope one day I'm doing something so important that this level of effort is justified." you know nothing in the life you've been instructed to have is that important to you. you know it's not real enough, not tangible enough, not actual enough to be worth the effort of going against the entire Gotham Police Department. you don't know why.
you're older still. a small crack shows up in the eggshell. you still like superhero movies, and you have posters of them all over your walls. you wonder how this will slot in with the new you that's slowly fighting to be born.
you're even older. you're a girl. you feel love for yourself, and you think it's enough. you don't know it, but it's still not worth that superhuman level of effort. you still haven't found something that important to you. there is still time.
you're the oldest you've ever been. your best friend is @̶̻̏̃̈́#̴͕͊^̶̠̤̅S̴̺̬͇͌͐̈́^̵̜͗̊&̵̘̩͔͠%̶̲̣̠̈́͒d̷͇͈̽̓͘ạ̷̈́ġ̴̱̇͠j̵̬̈́́́h̶̶͕̗͓̥̄̑́̐~̵͚̻͇̌̚ . there's genocide every day. you find community in those like you, and you love them more than you ever could have conceived. you didn't know this much love existed in the whole universe. you @̶̻̏̃̈́#̴͕͊^̶̠̤̅S̴̺̬͇͌͐̈́^̵̜͗̊&̵̘̩͔͠%̶̲̣̠̈́͒d̷͇͈̽̓͘ạ̷̈́ġ̴̱̇͠j̵̬̈́́́h̶̶͕̗͓̥̄̑́̐~̵͚̻͇̌̚ and @̶̻̏̃̈́#̴͕͊^̶̠̤̅S̴̺̬͇͌͐̈́^̵̜͗̊&̵̘̩͔͠%̶̲̣̠̈́͒d̷͇͈̽̓͘ạ̷̈́ġ̴̱̇͠j̵̬̈́́́h̶̶͕̗͓̥̄̑́̐~̵͚̻͇̌̚ @̶̻̏̃̈́#̴͕͊^̶̠̤̅S̴̺̬͇͌͐̈́^̵̜͗̊&̵̘̩͔͠%̶̲̣̠̈́͒d̷͇͈̽̓͘ạ̷̈́ġ̴̱̇͠j̵̬̈́́́h̶̶͕̗͓̥̄̑́̐~̵͚̻͇̌̚ @̶̻̏̃̈́#̴͕͊^̶̠̤̅S̴̺̬͇͌͐̈́^̵̜͗̊&̵̘̩͔͠%̶̲̣̠̈́͒d̷͇͈̽̓͘ạ̷̈́ġ̴̱̇͠j̵̬̈́́́h̶̶͕̗͓̥̄̑́̐~̵͚̻͇̌̚ @̶̻̏̃̈́#̴͕͊^̶̠̤̅S̴̺̬͇͌͐̈́^̵̜͗̊&̵̘̩͔͠%̶̲̣̠̈́͒d̷͇͈̽̓͘ạ̷̈́ġ̴̱̇͠j̵̬̈́́́h̶̶͕̗͓̥̄̑́̐~̵͚̻͇̌̚ @̶̻̏̃̈́#̴͕͊^̶̠̤̅S̴̺̬͇͌͐̈́^̵̜͗̊&̵̘̩͔͠%̶̲̣̠̈́͒d̷͇͈̽̓͘ạ̷̈́ġ̴̱̇͠j̵̬̈́́́h̶̶͕̗͓̥̄̑́̐~̵͚̻͇̌̚ @̶̻̏̃̈́#̴͕͊^̶̠̤̅S̴̺̬͇͌͐̈́^̵̜͗̊&̵̘̩͔͠%̶̲̣̠̈́͒d̷͇͈̽̓͘ạ̷̈́ġ̴̱̇͠j̵̬̈́́́h̶̶͕̗͓̥̄̑́̐~̵͚̻͇̌̚ @̶̻̏̃̈́#̴͕͊^̶̠̤̅S̴̺̬͇͌͐̈́^̵̜͗̊&̵̘̩͔͠%̶̲̣̠̈́͒d̷͇͈̽̓͘ạ̷̈́ġ̴̱̇͠j̵̬̈́́́h̶̶͕̗͓̥̄̑́̐~̵͚̻͇̌̚ @̶̻̏̃̈́#̴͕͊^̶̠̤̅S̴̺̬͇͌͐̈́^̵̜͗̊&̵̘̩͔͠%̶̲̣̠̈́͒d̷͇͈̽̓͘ạ̷̈́ġ̴̱̇͠j̵̬̈́́́h̶̶͕̗͓̥̄̑́̐~̵͚̻͇̌̚ @̶̻̏̃̈́#̴͕͊^̶̠̤̅S̴̺̬͇͌͐̈́^̵̜͗̊&̵̘̩͔͠%̶̲̣̠̈́͒d̷͇͈̽̓͘ạ̷̈́ġ̴̱̇͠j̵̬̈́́́h̶̶͕̗͓̥̄̑́̐~̵͚̻͇̌̚
you know what's worth the effort now.
actualization.