Reverse archaeology:
Most of y’all won’t even understand my accent, or dialect, let alone my culture.
I grew up influenced by so many things…
90s music and art of all genres, cultures, and peoples. The 80s too for that matter. British peace punk, riot grrrl, conscious hip-hop…gangsta rap too, 20th century anarchists, foreign art films (usually in various other languages), Japanese anime…in Japanese (again translated via subtitles), jussaying, Disney movies too, Fantasia and the classical music that inspired it? Yes please. Black Sabbath. Sœur Sourire, the singing nun. US death metal and grindcore, hardcore punk and metal interwoven from all over the world really. Nina Simone? John and Alice Coltrane?
Indigenous cultures—from all over the world, really. The good, the bad, the ugly, the holocaust and genocides so many of us are survivors of, runes, pan-theism and paganism, tarot, Thoreau, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, James Joyce, James Baldwin, Sylvia Plath, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Philip K. Dick and Ursula K. Le Guin, Madeleine L’engle, science fiction in general (to say nothing of science “factions”). ✨
Extreme sports and human excellence in all its sizes, shapes, and forms. From Patti McGee to today’s Olympians. From Muhammad Ali to Michael Jordan. Mohandas Gandhi to Maharaj Ji. Rastafari and Marcus Garvey. Post-wave intersectional feminism, and the idea that isms create schisms alike. Sex workers, and their survivor stories. Labor movements, and women in labor. Early blues, jazz, and folklore. Field recordings. Tribal wisdom. Musique concrete, industrial, and avant garde. Psychedelic rock and everything that led up to the 60s counter-culture. Astrology and the occult. The entire history of Art from beginning to never-ending. Freedom fighters and Civil Rights activists. Soul.
The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution.
The Haudenosaunee Confederacy, which once united the lands on which I leave my footprints…
A long-winded way of saying I seek the truth, while so many others focus on branding. This is not a manifesto. I am not in search of a perfect truth or an army of supersoldiers. I am in search of humanity.
In fact, I had a manifesto once. And it was precisely this:
#1) Truth
#2) Beauty
Needless to say, I’m out of words. Speechless. Exhausted. No, wait–a second wave flown in on a wind named Amnesia? Not unlike my own rebirth, shrouded in phoenix fire.
(“What?” What?)
POV: I did my best to get “good grades” in school too, and learn Their academic disciplines (not mine, thanks for asking). I also went to highschool in a region of California that was as much belonging to spanish-speaking “South” “America”—thankfully—as it was to the US of A-holes… I mean we do *all* have them, what? We’re united in that, at least. Just like the banner of stars up above US.
Not to mention I lived in probably about 20 places by the time I was 20 years old, during which time I went nomadic… and just to survive young “adulthood” I dragged my arse through ghettos, trainyards, coal piles, barbed wire, gutters, jail cells, and dumpsters most high-brow humans pretend don’t exist. The unsightly is out-of-sight, right? Out of mind… None of which circumstances were worse than the suicidal ideations the public school system gave me, but on par more or less. In fact, I dropped out of college because I knew I wouldn’t survive there *BEFORE* doing all that. I knew because… My mind and body barely survived my teenage years, but guess what?
We in here.
My mitochondria comes from a woman murdered by the Nazis.
I’m not bragging, but that’s an interesting misconception…don’t you think? I’m not even ranting. I’m just talking. Telling my story. Do y’all still believe in stories?
See… I’m not cut from your average Amazon-branded cloth, while the rainforest burns down. I don’t play by your distorted dystopian disturbia rules.
We “humans” are turning society into an A.I. internet, and turning the inter*net into an embarrassingly short-sighted parody of human culture. Artificial or no, we deserve better.
Please cease and desist this grotesque appropriation of literally everything that ever came before us. F#ck the ignorance and the set-tripping. These buddy-buddy cop politics don’t impress me much.
The light at the end of our tunnel vision suggests there’s a whole world outside this hole world.
If only “you” could see… how it looks from the other side of these fences… the other side of the walls we’re all building. Making mazes, motes, landmines, and deathtraps—where once there were migration routes, pathways and bridges. Playing tug-o-war over our boundaries and borders until nobody can agree. The Tower of Babel. Schisming our language until nobody can understand each other.
To be on the receiving end of a particular “brand” of prejudice, projection, homogenization, confirmation bias, lateral violence…? That’s the blessing and the curse of belonging to no one “identity”
You may be thinking that’s the point; I don’t belong, do I? But then again, who does?