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1. “Trout trudged onward, a stranger in a strange land. His pilgrimage was rewarded with new wisdom, which would never have been his had he remained in his basement in Cohoes. He learned the answer to a question many humans beings were asking themselves so frantically: ‘What’s blocking traffic on the westbound barrel of the Midland City stretch of the interstate?’”

2. There are two dozen or less of these cars that I am expected to drive, their differences only perceivable as subtle visual or mechanical quirks placed upon a singular entity’s character.

3. The derailed rolling stock do not exist as an omnibus as such, probably more accurately they’re a hemidemisemibus.

4. I haven’t named them all, but I call some of them ‘Jocelyn’.

5. They are named for the shudders and screams of their window panes on our uneven pathways.

6. The smaller ones exist without a name. They need less anthropomorphizing to have a neutral taste in my mind.

7. One has an Air conditioning unit that fills the air with staccato creaks that scrape the nape of the mind’s neck like the needles of a Geiger counter.

   

8. Adorning billboards and styrofoam insulation around town, I notice a growing and shrinking of one construction company’s brand and its legally dubious use of the Pink Panther™ as a mascot.

9. I see the County correctional facility advertising about their upcoming “open house.” I pray for the upcoming evacuation of due to the outbreak of irony poisoning or polemical poetical injustice.

10. I feel ashamed of my writing. I was tasked to write fifty observations in high school, using only the most concrete of details. Now, attempting to strip “judgement” away from “real” all I can think is: ‘it’s all cement Baybee’

    

11. The face of Tommy Le Homme is back in my mind. His name is on my driver’s manifest. My manifesto under that nom-de-plume doesn’t exist.

12. The visual snow has no effect on my observations.

    I think I made it, like all the rest of me, up inside my mind.

13. The Unionized wielders road sign left to rust while it’s buildings been repurposed.

14. The billboards of a local bakery and the statewide law firm winking at each other other across the highway.

15. The sign in west Duluth that attacks DOGE for making voyager national park deadly for tourists without staff.

16. My favorite trio of signs: a typical “this is your sign: don’t get an abortion!” Sign trailed by a derivative “if you’re looking for a sign to order pizza, this is it” (picturing Jesus proffering a slice). This was replaced with Sasquatch, but the display space is still shared with a “looking to move your most precious belongings? Call us!” Ad featuring an infant sitting in a cardboard box. By itself the ad seems to be encouraging child trafficking in that way that only the most naive people can, but with it existing directly beneath the anti-abortion board it can only be read as an outlet to deliver delivered children somewhere else.

    

17. The venture capital (actually it’s a co-op) dairy bar by mont du lac/spirit mountain. What I might call an anti-gastronomic gastropub.

18. The “milk house” that to my untrained eye functions as a completely ordinary gas station in piedmont.

19. Distinct from the hobbyist joggers that bristle with running equipment, a man bustles past shuttles with a milk crate in one hand. He holds it down at his side, refraining from swinging it.

20. Traditional bus drivers seek validation for their biases and methods of communication against specific passengers by providing other drivers with them. I do not engage in this time with my peers, and attempting understanding with my riders always ends up as uncomfortably personal, or stiff silence.

21. My mind, a porous thing, is still invaded with their prejudices when they are the only information I am given. I’ve gotten worse at talking to other people.

    

22. I hear a fly buzz —while I drive.

23. Kurt Vonnegut’s book “breakfast of champions” is a casting away of the mass assortment of garbage that other people had put into his head by the age of fifty (including slurs, prejudice, racism).

24. I worry sometimes that my reading of it, my listening to it, and my work with people three to five decades older than me will inculcate the shape of their garbage and trauma upon me.

25. Because of these influences, the n-word has audio in my thoughts. It didn’t used to. I used to pour over every hip hop release I could get my hands on for a decade and could always maintain a mental hold on ever hearing a voice in my head say a word that I wanted to hold in the past. My mind is weaker now, as it was when I was a child. Alone. Either drifting or spiraling, every wish to cease can only provoke a reinforcement of that which I feared or hurt from.

26. My ears ring.

27. I think on purpose, “Driving as an occupation entails thousands more instances awash in the conscious mind than you could ever hope to understand or compartmentalize. After seeing so much of the bizarre and a higher order of the mundane without a seconds lapse, anything will seem to lose its substance. Everything is artifice, and against the Dao.”

28. Half a dozen motorcyclists, all with very specific proclivities: using their arms to soar, to dance, and wiggle rather than steer. Promenading their custom big bird tri-wheel, a fursona helmet, or their boyfriend up and down the most busy streets.

29. I barely register 1% of all of the animals that have crossed my path as long as they maintain my driving record of not colliding with anything larger than a no-see-um. The words: “skunk, raccoon, turkey vulture that swooped right in front of me, unidentified raptors, deer” are in my green journal, underneath: “TURKEY! GOOSELINGS!”

30. I try to interrupt the concentric circles and yet I am contained within still. Erratic arm sweeps or delving into the songs held deep in my chest do not shake the paralytic in their soft tissue. The rhythmic dirge of driving instructions with song, and the slurry my favorite songs are poisoned.

31. Kendrick said “sometimes I’m afraid of my open mind.”

32. “[she] was pure machinery at the moment, a machine made of meat—a typing machine, a filing machine. [he], on the other hand, had nothing machine-like to do. He ached to be a useful machine.”

    

33. Brief ideas creep through but are lost in the noise without time to stop and transcribe them. Some get their time but have little potency.

34. “He established a sort of relationship to the traffic on the interstate, too, appreciating its moods.”

35. I dream up an image, “a guy proudly using his auto-express unlimited use (30 day limit) subscription to wash all of his vehicles, including donning full leather and a helmet to run his RTV and motorcycle through the futuristic sphincter of the car wash.”

36. With my eyes I see a trailer hauling a vertical slice of a climbing wall.

37. Sunday Service was cancelled, they’re doing Aerobics in the chapel.

38. I see a bike strapped atop an automobile stuck on the daily commute hoard of the highway, and picture someone maximizing good deeds by riding upon it, carpooling but still getting their morning ride.

39. In America, cars and people both have to shoulder the burdens of the myth of individualism, which explains why Kilgore Trout wrote a story about a planet of cars having an apocalypse like ours. I spin a low stakes conspiracy theory: Pleas to bring back a humane edge to everyday life range have evolved from the stationary (“Drive like YOUR kids live here”) posts in yards to more visible targets. The avenue is filled with stickers of well wishing on every bumper (“I hope you have a nice day”). The sneakier tactic is the proliferation of STUDENT DRIVER cars, asking for statistically undeserved but sorely needed patience from your fellows-in-cars. When I was in Driver’s Ed they warned me that student driver stickers encouraged aggressive maneuvers from all around who didn’t want to get stuck behind slow traffic, but now many people who aren’t good at driving have found a response to the many screaming “what the f*** is wrong with this person?!” that I suspect tries to shame that impulse of frustration.

40. Passengers share their stories and I try to think like an artist.

41. They’re sick of looking at “the people downtown” on drugs or homeless or asking for money or sleeping or whatever else.

42. And disgusted by people having sex in public spaces.

43. Two days pass and I am walking an alley and am startled by a man racing down the street, not slowing his truck to blare his car horn and flash his brights at two people talking and kissing while leaning against a wall. I almost laugh aloud at this display by someone who thinks themselves so correct in abrasive behavior.

44. My ears register out-loud-wondering if Duluth’s indirect communication style is the result of inter-generational drug abuse. So casually causal when hanging around correlations.

45. I shake my head. I hear other thinking too.

46. Venting in the aftermath of a blind date gone wrong. Flirting with each other or making friendships from the simple incident of scheduling a ride to or from the same place at a similar time. I’ve only seen this happen for theater performances, reinforcing my belief in art needing to warm away the social ice around here.

47. I treasure the few times I hear laughter.

48. I think about the Passengers complaining (or worse) just commenting matter-of-factly on how limited and poor the ‘separate but equal’ transit service for them is. Inquiring about each other’s setup for wheelchair replacements and housing, hearing about a good one but then finding it won’t work with their accessibility or income needs.

49. I find my mind thinking, “And then some number of them proudly support Donald Trump’s Administration. Finding an upsetting dissonance to live in more uncomfortable than their peers who simply rely on Medicaid and have a retirement.”

50. I try not to think of our dead.

51. The heat in my chest does not rise to my decalcified teeth and fades into nausea without action. The body clings to it’s brackish thirst.

52. I think, “serving them to empower their everyday needs has not made my life more harmonious, nor my ability to engage with them develop.”

53. I think on purpose, “I have a vague sense to keep doing my job despite this, until the few privileged enough to have this basic access to transportation have it defunded. We all keep each other ‘along for the ride,’ in a manner that is starved but sustaining. I find myself in a mirrored inversion to those I serve, which may contribute to my hardship in connecting. In addition, of course, to it being a fireable offense to build relationships of any kind with the people I serve.”

54. “This much I knew and know: I was making myself hideously uncomfortable by not narrowing my attention to details of life which were immediately important, and by refusing to believe what my neighbors believed.”

55. Hundreds of cars clog every available artery to fill the sandbar coast. Every enginepipe pouring a stream of exhaust into the ocean of smoke around all ways. A new kind of smokestack, I’m not quite enthused enough to make the pun better.

    

56. “But his mind wouldn’t leave it alone at that.” p37

    I cannot escape the cabin with my thoughts, but outside is no reprieve. It’s poison out there, and all I see is people acting like it isn’t.

57. I have to remind myself how this capsule changes my acquaintanceship with the only coworker I meet: the passage of time. We have little regard for each other, but what behavior I exhibit in their presence may garner severity. Lapses in driving are up to me to spend, and could be any length. Eating without hunger fills my longer breaks. “the grains and meat taste like grains and meat.” Without excess saliva each bite requires twice as many undulations of teeth, and the period between intercepts may stretch to equal the pulses in my head. Pooling hundreds and hundreds demand what goes for focus in this den. Blank stares are issued in response to any time I think should be used but can not hold a purpose in the focal length of my eyes. Leaving my pod of plastic and steel for a walk about is shocking, it takes up a quarter of the time I think it does.

58. Inside and outside of my vehicle, no one wants to identify themselves as “at-risk”. Every child and elder, every asthmatic and every other sensitive person seems content to exist only in the extremes. Those that are concerned have emptied from the public spheres, those who are apathetic people them. Someone puts a lit cigarette into the outdoor receptacle and its small circular opening continues breathing as they were: smoke in, smoke out. equivalent exchange. If I was a humorist I could make that funny too. I can understand some when they express that they bore our winter burden and so they will not be deterred from enjoying every summer day and clear sidewalk we have. I can’t understand when it translates to seeing young children chasing each other in the clouds, adults training for a marathon, families going to see the sailboats in the harbor and the block parties in the city. Taking no precaution, making no exception to try to do normal human activities in a world where space and time for that is forever disappearing. Ignoring the Air quality warnings to breathe warm air, ignoring the riptide warnings to swim in the lake, ignoring the wildfire warnings to have a bonfire, adding one more giant plume of smoke to gather with the rest.

59. Kurt Vonnegut’s brother was a chemist, so he also trained as a chemist. My brother trained as a chemist, and currently gets paid to inhale agents that cause cancer and destroy any biological material that meets it while in the business of constructing planes. McDonald’s pays $17 an hour in the poor end of town, $18 in lakeside. He earns 1 dollar more to make private jets for billionaires all over the world. Kurt worried aloud about how creators can poison the world with bad ideas, and in so doing I am more obliged to be cynical but hold my joy and wonder intact. His brother discovered silver iodide can sometimes make it snow or rain, and this encouraged my mother to think of the tendencies of men as unequal measures of toxic positivity and negativity.

60. I visit a rest stop and a pair of black Adidas slides come in to use the urinal. The sound a spray going in many directions is deafened by gas expelling loudly enough to create an echo with brass timbre. A pause, then proclamation: “you can’t have lightning without the thunder,” then the slides cut a straight path to the exit. I find it odd that he felt the need to clear the air in that singular way, a comment for the benefit of the legs in the stall. I wonder if he would have approached the sink if the legs called back: “pissy sandals.”

61. A kid came up and asked if he did a trick if I would give him a dollar. I paused to buck off the canned response to melt strangers away, but it did nothing for the physical reality I don’t carry cash on me. To bolster my cowardice and anxiety about failing an interaction so poorly I’d be attacked. I awkwardly told him I’d love to but I didn’t have a dollar and he said “really?” Not super disbelieving, or at least I told myself that any I found in his voice was my own invention. Potentially sensing that he needed to make his case, perhaps to prove he wasn’t just a panhandler that folks like me train to ignore, he explained that he was working to save up 15 dollars by biking up and down the street, because the gas station across the street had ripsticks. Upon checking my wallet I surprised upon 45 dollars, and thought about this while I misunderstood his casual question “what kind of bus this was” to be about the vehicle and not the service provided. I replied with the eyebrow raising line “yeah I don’t really know myself, one of the smaller ones.” After realizing my mistake but having drifted too far to correct it I opted to go back to our original conversation. Coming with an energy of fuck it but with a hopefulness tied in, I said “y’know what? if it’s a really cool trick, I’ll give you the five I have.” He wheeled up the street to get some room while I climbed out of the pit. He popped a wheelie and pedaled past, then turned around, perhaps feeling that five dollars deserved a bigger, cooler showing, and went back. His change in ambition eclipsed the balance of forces and he hopped down before the bike flipped turfside up. Smiling sheepishly he walked the bike towards me, and after a moments deliberating, I handed him the bill. I climbed into the cabin and as I recracked my lunch bag saw the boy madly pedaling to the gas station, and not even a minute after disappearing through the doors racing back passed me to bring the treasure home.

62. Theresa tells me: “thank you for being yourself” i laugh awkwardly and say “You’re welcome i guess, I mean, it’s literally the least i can do!” The response catches me: “but it’s also the most.” It’s a silly little paradox, this living thing.

Last week, I put together a small essay for the blog of the American Philosophical Association, as a example in everyday philosophy. This piece, To Salt or Not to Salt the Pasta Water: A Reflection on “Useless” Human Rituals, continues my practice of never settling on any singular tone, style, subject, or form, and you can find it here.

I am proud of it and I hope you give it a look, especially if you’ve already since the preview I released for paid subscribers and want that extra dose of behind-the-scenes goodness. Although it is the case that it is done and I will move on to other projects, I was tickled by the opportunity to capture and share additional aspects of the process, for your benefit and mine, for the cost of nothing except making our lives be just a little bit more pasta oriented.

Now that we have the content friendly intro out of the way, what is there to say? First and foremost, I had to remove all of the evidence for my extended diatribe about eating only gluten-free pasta! I’ve had a lifetime of experience gathering this research, but I also took the time to photograph a handful of the varieties available to me to communicate just how different each one can be in terms of cooking directions and ingredients:

I felt tempted to add even more personal flair to it. Cutting up the video I took of my friends and I making dinner? Should I be even more honest in articulating my lack of experience both in cooking and living vibrantly? Should I share the family anecdotes and humor about food that swim in my brain: My Dad’s mother trying to maintain the perfect ratio of sauce to pasta in the dish, adding more of each as she continues to eat eternally, the damnation of being alive. Not being able to finish your plate, hearing the dreaded words: “What, You don’t love me?” from your Mother-in-Law.

The silly, culturally insensitive parody song by Weird Al that was present in my childhood. How that song developed in me a feeling of imposter syndrome, that I can relate more strongly to a song making fun of the people that came before me than I ever could connect with them.

The discussion I have had with people close to me about the route and future for jokes about Italian/Italian-American culture, and whether future generations will see them as just as hurtful, cringy or weird as off-color jokes and impressions my parents and grandparents have made about Chinese, Polish, or Irish people.

The connection to gangster films and tv and the Super Mario franchise. Shutting down my urge to talk about the Mario movie as not an example of Italian-American erasure (given that Mario has always been a literal cartoon), but as an unhelpful ignorance of ethnic differences that can be identified with a not-at-all ridiculous comparison to the Sopranos. Then suppressing my urge to talk about the beautiful and scary minutia present in that show that hit me in waves as I watched it, more impressive even then its careful consideration of marginalized groups and peoples, making their experiences understandable and sympathetic to the kinds of people that would typically cause them harm. The realization that I am not an imposter, and I do have a heritage, and that it exists entirely in ways that are almost impossible to put into words. It’s in all of the toxic and beautiful ways the people around me know how to talk to each other, and exist within themselves. Asking myself what I do with that information.

Including the meta-commentary I had with another group of friends about the potential for a post-racial future, wherein systemic issues are addressed with systemic methods and we then need to look for other language that has less baggage, and how that most likely means forming groups with ethnicity as our identifier. I’ll need to make peace with my feelings of inauthenticity to exist in an equitable, livable world, and resist the compulsion to call myself the Gluten free pasta as an analogy.

…And then if I took this roadmap and wrote it all up to this point, I would honestly contemplate whether this <2500 word blog post that is now 6500 words long is the appropriate place to try to make my case for the comparison between race and gender as harmful social constructs that should ultimately be removed and replaced in an ideal world. Seriously.

What was this all about? Pasta? Right, of course. If I was to summarize, I would say this is a warning to myself that while it may seem impossible, I am at risk of being someone who simultaneously has nothing to say, feeling like I have nothing worth saying, feeling ‘at least I know what I want to write’ for my own sake, feeling like I’m worrying too much about what audience I am writing to and for, feeling like I’m definitely writing too much, etc… so I just need to 1: choose to be satisfied with my work and be done with it at a completely random time relative to my feelings about it, and 2: connect with others so I do not, in fact, only write for myself and a hypothetical audience that also exists in my head.

Hope this helps!

So I felt that making a full audio reading of a work I wanted to share with more people would be simple: I am familiar with the style of video essays, the script is already written, and I have a voice I can use. Clearly, this is a beta project, something I can whip out when I’m tired of other things.

Well, it’s been a few months, so the fact that I am uploading this now is both a triumph and a humiliation. It is kind of ridiculous I managed to get this out, especially considering everything else that’s happened this summer, but also it means that I had to give up on my hopes of attaching an updated slideshow to go with the reading, polishing the recording to avoid any awkward sounds or stuttering, etc. So I hope this is suitable for those who want to use it, but if it is not then I welcome some constructive criticism for future recording and potentially even an updated video/audio of this beast.

Anywhere, here is the audio for my honors thesis (you can find the text version here). Thank you for your interest!

You can also find this essay as a Google Doc here.

An Introduction To And Exploration Of The Work Of clipping.

A California rap group composed of frontman Daveed Diggs and producer-engineer duo Jonathan Snipes and William Hutson, Clipping rocked the world (or at least the experimental noise rap and underground hip-hop scenes) with their combination of harsh sound, obtuse sampling, and aggressive and lyrically dense rapping exclusively in the second- and third-person with their debut release midcity in 2013. Among the most interesting things about the group’s pitch that cemented initial public interest is their adherence to certain stylistic limitations as part of each new project, as well as some rules they follow for everything in their catalog: none of the words you hear are ever framed in the first person, and all the sounds used come from real world samples that fit contextually with the song’s themes (often captured with foley techniques and engineered like movie soundtracks). Signing to Sub Pop Records, they continued to release experimental and abstract records, often with compelling storytelling and an emphasis on subverting traditionally toxic tropes in the genre. The 2016 concept album Splendor & Misery told the story of a slave on an interplanetary slave (space)ship who violently gains his freedom and attempts to escape the society that suppresses and then hunts him; while also falling in love with the spaceship that carries him. The 2017 EP The Deep is a short story about an underwater society made up of all the unborn children of the pregnant woman killed and thrown off the decks of transatlantic slave ships waging war on the rest of humanity for digging for oil in their turf (or rather, surf). Finally, one of their most popular songs of all time comes from their sophomore album CLPPNG. The single “Body and Blood” takes the archetype of a maneater, an overdone sexist and often racist trope in many forms of media about a woman using sex to lure men to their deaths, and subverts it to be an empowering anthem for women while still finding a use for the accessibility and the draw of those traditionally misogynistic elements of both horror as a genre and Hip-Hop to some extent as well. Although Clipping often investigate and attack traditionally misogynistic or problematic themes that exist in Hip-Hop, they maintain that the art they create comes from a place of respect for the history of the genre and they consider it to be a continuation of the Hip-Hop tradition. With this context, this group may have the unique position to be able to take the traditional elements of the subgenre of horrorcore and the history and power of the subgenre of Black Horror in film and filter them together into an unholy unity. Clipping effectively highlights the true versatility of Black Horror and the true power of horrorcore by bloody marrying them into a Frankenstein’s couple. 

Focusing On the Horror Albums

At least, that’s what someone in their corner must have thought, because in October of 2019 they released There Existed an Addiction to Blood (TEAATB) and immediately followed it in October of 2020 with Visions of Bodies Being Burned (VOBBB); full length “Transmutation of horrorcore'' albums containing the themes and styles of the sub genre they come from, but using Diggs’ skill for writing in a deliberate, ingenious way. Both albums are full of songs that each tell an individually encapsulated story, making them similar to a Black Horror anthology like Tales from the Hood; crafting scenarios inspired by or ripped straight from horror films and telling them in second or third person with enough detail to fill a short film screenplay. This creates a hypnotic effect, a manipulation of your mind's eye. As your brain hears Diggs deliver rapidfire visual statements about what is happening to you, you can see them playing out, you can be tricked into thinking that you are thinking the thoughts you are being fed. The audio engineering creating the soundscape elevates this effect drastically, filling the white space with metal fences creaking (''She Bad''), alarms shrieking (“Attunement”), a pop song chorus that becomes warped and submerged in the mix (''Enlacing”), or an instrumental that only comes in when a car rolls by with its windows down (“Run for your life”). The unsettling nature of being placed into the middle of a Stephen King audiobook as the main character in addition to the fact that the audiobook is a bootleg download that’s been corrupted would make for a stressful couple of hours, so this method of storytelling is offset with the other way stories are conveyed on these albums. When Diggs retells a monstrous being's internal monologue or details its body chemistry, the stupidity of a victim’s naivete, or a series of brutal incidents with either an impersonal tone of narration or a biased storyteller who wants to see the killing agent enacted, the feelings that manifest allow for reprieve from the discomfort. The listener gains the arrogance of an audience member who has seen a film before and knows how it ends, or the misplaced confidence of someone who listens to gangsta rap and pretends they are the cold-blooded killer that they’re listening to. This catharsis eases some pressure and allows for the listener to still enjoy the experience of sitting through the album, but maintains a cognitive dissonance that is unsettling. That is one of the most notable achievements of Clipping’s work; the unlistenable becoming accessible. This phenomena is pervasive into the elements of noise music as well. There are several instances where a sheer wall of distorted noise or the clattering of pots, pans, and rhythm guitars being attacked with forks become the only discernible stimuli, but because these moments are slipped in between more traditionally enjoyable sounds, they become much more tolerable than you might initially expect.

A Short History Of Black Horror

Black Horror began to establish itself as a movement shortly after the release and surprise success of The Night of the Living Dead, when director George Romero made the decision to cast Duane Jones as the male lead. Subsequently, many Black directors and screenwriters like William Crane and Bill Gun were able to convince studio heads to fund their films (albeit meagerly) by pointing to films like it as well as the burgeoning niche of blaxploitation beginning to develop. Many producers were convinced to increase Black film representation during a time of harsh racial divide not by the promise of fair and equitable representation or high-minded notions of equanimity, but obviously because of the relatively safe return on investment of financing low-budget films for Black audiences, where they would steadily return a profit due to the exploitation of those communities’ desires to see themselves represented in media, as well as sexually exploiting Black women's bodies. Black Horror died as a genre as Black representation increased over the passing decades and its primary use seemed to be achieved. Then, Jordan Peele’s fantastically successful release of Get Out brought many eyes and minds back to the concept, and effectively revived the corpse of Black Horror by reframing what its purpose could be. Black Horror was ultimately fighting for space, representation, and the power to define what Black stories were to be told. Jordan Peele revived interest in it by first showing that that fight was nowhere near finished, that additions to the subgenre were still culturally desirable, and then with his following films started to interrogate further what other philosophical and sociological issues Black Horror was uniquely suited to portray. This lead to many incredibly exciting suggestions: The imagery and commentary about our collective obsession with spectacle and the importance of representation both in front of and behind the camera from NOPE, the articulation of Black existentialism, Black Marxism, and dissecting the heart of the American ethos in US, and even redefining the story of Candyman to revive the use of its story, similarly to how he renewed the subgenre of Black Horror with Get Out. When considering the trajectory of Black Horror as a movement or even Jordan Peele’s oeuvre by itself, the most notable change is a shift in emphasis from “getting the bag”, or doing the job no matter the negative impact on culture or representation, as long as it increases the sheer number of marginalized people in media, to a huge recentering of priorities about the kind and quality of stories being told by marginalized voices. 

Defining Horrorcore And The Nasty Surprise Of Clipping’s Releases

Primarily a space to piss off the more conservative and pearl-clutching sectors of the American experiment, horrorcore established itself as an even more extreme example of the kinds of lyrical content that could be found on an Ice-T, Ice Cube, or Dr. Dre affiliated project. Demeaning, deplorable, or downright homophobic and sexist language as far as the ear could hear, alongside very specific threats of violence and some devil worship and fascination with the macabre for good measure. The intent was always to deliver shock value, to say the things you are ordered not to say, and often the artists in this style risked both livelihood and personal safety to protest and uphold their right to free speech under the law. Being able to say things that were distasteful to the majority of the populace without being censored in their artistic expression was incredibly valuable when those voices could then use that space to speak truth to power. Hip-Hop and horrorcore specifically have never seen a significant dip in popularity since their inception, because they have steadily gained traction with a bigger and bigger portion of the population, first gaining huge support from suburban white children who found an entrancing false dichotomy between when they rejected parental expectations or rules and the art of marginalized people risking their safety to speak up against a government and societal structure that was deliberately hostile towards them. Regardless of the long debated ethical concerns about the fact that white people are the primary consumers of a genre of art predominantly made by and for Black communities, studies show this is the reality we live in. This also has had many raise the point that this means that although Black creators control the space they are in and the content they espouse, it means that the people that dictate what is and isn’t a profitable style are often outsiders looking in. This dynamic is somewhat comparable to the Blaxploitation era of film, except in many ways the pressure of the market is stronger than any controlling executive producer, because for many creatives it can feel like the extent of their free will is to choose whether to make what sells or to make a soundcloud album of a tree falling in a forest. Black people have consistently reported having a very strong sense of internal community, widely supported social programs as well as the importance of other minorities rights, but despite making up the majority of creators in Hip-Hop, the music’s messaging has stayed fairly stagnant. 

Biggie Smalls, Eminem, Three 6 mafia, the Geto Boys, and countless others have contributed to horrorcore over the years, but almost all of them relied on fairly accessible instrumentation for the time period and portrayed themselves as the machete wielding suburb killer, not as the victims or an instance of storytelling. This is primarily due to the fact that for so many, Hip-hop is a vehicle to maintain a community, to put food on the table, to escape from a bad situation. Over and over again, as efforts to take Hip-Hop’s ability to be that vehicle away, there had to be a showing of solidarity, that there were aspects to Hip-Hop that would not be changed, that would remain unwavering. This choice has had too many effects to enumerate, but one primary one is that the popular, accessible, commercial type of music to make it in Hip-Hop has a rich history of problematic or shocking lyrical content. Even among artists who vocally support socialist reforms, many make music that endorses an antisocial, hypercapital, individualistic view, because it sells and sales enable them to continue to live and support their families or communities. As it relates to my bigger point, this has resulted in a lot of Hip-Hop that stays inside one person's head. Even lyricists that push the human boundaries of creativity like Lupe Fiasco, who can conceptualize a project building as a giant robot or Nas rapping from the perspective of a gun remain locked behind a first person perspective, confining the world to a single agent of action. Clipping is a transmutation of these established roles. They showcase a way to deviate from the paths more traveled in the genre and find unique and inspiring hallows to unearth the music from. 

The Cold Case For A Crypt Connection

Similarly to Jordan Peele’s breakout hit Get Out, Clipping’s work feels like a breath of fresh, cold air. It feels shocking that a project like this had never been pulled off until 2019. Black Horror and Hip-Hop were both birthed in the early 1970’s, having both neared their semi-centennial by the time they were given an innovative redefinition. This means that Black Horror had existed for at least 15 years before horrorcore was established as an honest to goodness niche subgenre in the wheelhouse of Hip-Hop in the 1980’s. There was plenty of time for someone to connect the similar DNA between the two, but it just never was spliced until Clipping decided to give it the CRISPR. There are many direct parallels between Black Horror and horrorcore at large when considering this collection, but the main thread I wish to connect is the coronary artery that these two subgenres share, and how Clipping makes a powerful case for the argument that horrorcore can be revitalized similar to Black Horror to enhance its resonance as a style of art. 

The way in which Clipping employs film tropes from both Black Horror and the wider horror landscape shows just how well the mediums can work together when the proper care and respect are used. For example, in the single “Say the Name”, the lyrics both make a direct nod to Bernard Rose’s classic Candyman with a full retelling of a version of the cyclical story of violence and interracial love of the original. It also interpolates the Geto Boys song “Mind Playin’ tricks on me” with the lines “Candlesticks in the dark, visions of bodies being burned.” This is a direct tie to the founders of the horrorcore movement, as well as a film that is not always considered as an example of true Black Horror, but is unquestionably one of the most influential films to the genre. 

“96’ Neve Campbell” includes a beat entrenched in horror cliche, a serial killer pounding on the door to the victims house, the classic woman’s gasp, and even some accompanying hairraising violin horror screeches. Over this instrumentation, the lyrics convey the story of a typical slasher antagonist stumbling on the wrong house and getting tortured to death by Inglewood rap legends Cam & China. They effectively subvert the “final girl” horror trope by not only surviving and subjecting the killer to his own medicine, but by  tributing Jada Pinkett Smith’s performance in Tales from the Crypt - being Black women who don’t entertain the possibility of being victims. This messaging is also a subversion of the typical stories told in horrorcore. It’s easier to imagine the faceless slasher villain they deface is Eminem with his trademark chainsaws, fresh off of “Brainless.”

“Pain everyday" effectively answers the question “What would it sound like if I was an undead ghost stuck in a TV?” through its utterly depraved combination of glitching, skipping electronic synthesizers and what I assume to be a real demon stuck in a slaughterhouse rattling the metal freezer with its chains. The lyrics also convey a deeply unseated depiction of what the average day in the life of such a ghost would be like, with lines like “There ain’t nothing after life but the pain from the way you died and something reminiscent of hunger but if you had a stomach only satiated by making somebody run.”

“Eaten alive” fully embraces the experimental noise with a spine tingling combination of sparse, skeletal steel pans, a bass guitar being played by a man with cheese grater fingers, and Gordon Ramsay having a tantrum in the kitchen. The lyrics delve into the everyday life of the creatures of the swamp, and fall into a sheer abyss as the noises become more and more random and violent until they become the only discernible thing for the final two minutes. The sound design conveys the horrible and insidious things that these beings will do to you if they have the chance, and it's simply a part of nature. 

 One of the best, most clear examples of a subgenric transplant occurs in “Blood of the Fang''. Not only does this song sample the primary theme from the cult classic Black Horror film Ganja and Hess, but it is filled with lyrical allusions and direct commentary on its most evocative ideas. This is most evident when considering Bill Gun’s letter to the plight of the Black male existence: 

“To the Black male children. Philosophy is a prison. It disregards the uncustomary things about you. The result of individual thought is accruable only to itself. There is a dreadful need in man to teach. It destroys the pure instinct to learn. The navigator learns from the stars. The stars teach nothing. The sun opens the mind and sheds light on the flowers. The eyes shame the pages of any book. Gesture destroys concept. Involvement mortifies vanity. You are the despised of the Earth. That is as if you were water in the desert. To be adored on this planet is to be a symbol of success. And you must not succeed on any terms. Because life is endless. You are as nameless as a flower. You are the child of Venus. And her natural affection is lust. She will touch your belly with her tongue, but you must not suffer in it, because love is all there is. And you are a cannon fodder in its defense.”

The song connects the themes of bloodlust and the history of bloodshed in colonist countries, while portraying the many Black revolutionaries and civil rights activists who were killed over the years as undead vampires coming back to kill white supremacists, because peaceful protests are not sufficient to stop racial injustice. But the song delivers more than this. In the chorus, Diggs says “Look back, blood on the ground. Look straight, they’re still shooting. Jump back, still here. Now what that tell you ‘bout death? Death ain’t shit.” This is a rebuttal of the existential nihilism that Gunn’s character George Meda succumbs to when considering the Black condition. While interrogating the failures of liberals in the face of oppression and the constant threat of systemic violence that can loom over the Black community, Diggs reaffirms that “death ain’t shit.” It doesn’t matter what you try to do to us he says, we’re still here. 

Is It Alive Or Is This A Lie? Dearly Departing Thoughts

The concept and execution of these two albums seamlessly marry the ethos of Black Horror (using the trope and storytelling of horror to tell Black stories or enumerate Black experiences) with the sub-genre of horrorcore (A niche of Hip-Hop, a principally Black-led medium of art with a focus of horror themes). This makes so much sense you would think it would have been done before 2019, but this peanut butter and chocolate combination was apparently so obvious that no one thought to do it, or perhaps no one could convince a record label it would be worth putting money into. Thankfully, we live in a time where Jordan Peele’s recent successes can be leveraged by many Black creators outside of himself to pitch stories that would otherwise never be produced or financed. Additionally, it's worth making the point that film as a medium has a much higher monetary barrier to entry regardless of genre, and as a result has historically had to have representation and stake fought for and claimed by Black voices in a slow series of concessions. Hip Hop began existence in a world where music was already commercialized, and many of the genres of music that had originated in Black communities like Rock n’ Roll, Jazz, Blues, Rhythm and Blues, Soul, and Funk had already seen success and then been aggressively co-opted by white audiences who preferred white artists and entertainers and often stopped Black creators from having a voice. Much like these other genres, Hip-Hop was created principally because of and for the sake of Black spaces, but unlike its predecessors has avoided many, many attempts at separating the Black art from the Black people who make it. Through collective hard work and effort, it has maintained its position as one of the only American cultural touchstones that is still defined predominately by the Black community, and the white majority that has progressively made up more and more of both the primary consumer base and the primary stakeholders in the music industry have not been able to either stop it from becoming a cultural force or replacing the Black identity inherent to it without removing a great deal of its commercial versatility. We live in a time where Hip-Hop can and has begun to change. Women rappers, once a group constantly pushed to the margins of the rap sheet, now are consistently headliners. Queer artists like Lil Nas X, Tyler, the creator, and Frank Ocean are widely accepted in the space and have their stylistic influence copied constantly. In this context, Horrorcore as a music subgenre can be reinvented just like Black Horror was reinvented as a film subgenre to better serve the community that originally made it, especially in the wake of films like Get Out. This context transforms Clipping’s double Halloween album from a weirdly camp stylistic choice to an genuine attempt at a massively important cultural shift, so I think it's a pretty essential “reading” of the content.

Bibliography

Blackshear, Janise Marie. “Understanding the White, Mainstream Appeal of Hip-Hop

Music: Is It a Fad or Is It the Real Thing?” University of Georgia, 2007. http://getd.libs.uga.edu/pdfs/blackshear_janise_m_200705_ma.pdf.

Cox, Kiana. 2023. “Black Americans' Views on Women's Rights, Transgender Issues,

Gender Equality.” Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/race-ethnicity/2023/02/16/black-americans-firmly-support-gender-equality-but-are-split-on-transgender-and-nonbinary-issues/.

Eminem. 2013. "Brainless." Track 10 on The Marshall Mathers LP 2. Aftermath Records, Apple Music.

Geto Boys. 1991. "Mind Playing Tricks on Me." Track 6 on We Can’t be Stopped. Rap-A-Lot 2K Records, Apple Music.

Gunn, Bill, dir. 1973. Ganja and Hess.

Ingham, Tim. 2023. “38M tracks on music streaming service were played ZERO times in 2022.” Music Business Worldwide. https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/38-million-tracks-on-music-streamin-service-were-played-zero-times-in-2022-elon-musks-book/.

Lupe Fiasco. 2006. "Daydreamin’." Track 9 on Food & Liquor. Atlantic Records, Apple
Music.

Nas. 1996. "I Gave You Power." Track 4 on It Was Written. Columbia Records, Apple

Music.

I love the weird bends of our behavior that come about from taking our made up rules too seriously. This phenomenon seems to me like the opposite of desire paths. Rather than an unconscious breaking of our rules for convenience, it is the choice to do something the most inconvenient way.

This thought is an old friend in my mind, but only shows itself in the midst of specific, peculiar familiarities. Like when I have to look up a recipe online. I have to scroll through a lot of spam and AI garbage, and then find the directions I need scattered within what appears to be someone’s diary entry or a blog post about life with no central focus.

I’ve been told this is the result of written copyright not covering food preparations, so these lifestyle blogs or whatever have to go through this song-and-dance of hiding the information you need to keep it for themselves, even in the process of sharing it with you. This arguably makes finding what you want more difficult than it should ever need to …

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No, I do not plan to become a hist…

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Joe (my younger brother) recently complained (or rather, proclaimed) to me: “There is nothing that happens here! Nothing to do!” I found this funny, especially his blaming of the “majority old” population of Duluth, so that every venue aims at “old people” in their hours and their services. I don’t think he is right, I’ve seen too many things for that to be the case. But his frustration made some feelings bubble to the surface, and I can see why many people feel that it's so much harder than it needs to be to find their place here. 

… 

A few years ago, my mother walked me over to the house next door where I was taught to type on a keyboard by Marueen, the elderly lady who had no patience for my slow movements or complaints of pain in my wrists and fingers. Mom told me that she was nice and that I could trust her, but I couldn’t tell what she meant by that. I’m pretty sure just calling someone “nice” doesn’t make them that way. Maybe she meant nice to her. I quit before the home row ever felt at home. I still have a lot of fun quoting the voice clips from the BBC typing program with Joe though.

I floundered in public school for three years, unable to complete handwriting assignments, or sit still, or focus, or read analog clocks, or see the chalkboard, or exist without hurting people or putting them on edge. No one seems to believe me when I say that just because something isn’t an accident, it doesn’t mean that I want it to happen. I sat in the hall with dozens of worksheets while the class watched Paddle to the Sea. I enjoyed the fleeting glimpses I caught of that film before I was reprimanded again for shirking responsibility. The water and colors reminded me of the book Minn of the Mississippi. Everyone seemed to like the movie, but I think that the turtle story is better. Everyone looks at this creature and sees something scary, prone to violence, and thus violence is necessary. The child that shoots off its leg with a bb gun sees his violence as not necessary but gleeful, fun. Here is a scary thing worth hurting, I can revel in my own capacity for violence without doing real harm. It feels like a much better story than a block of wood that has its intent proudly etched into it, that never acts or reacts, and is never misinterpreted and easily understood by the people around it. Anyway. 

I dropped out of school, shortly after I fell down the embankment of the fourth street bridge spanning tischer creek. My parents didn’t want me to take the bus for some reason, but the walk home alone was too long, my backpack too heavy, the concrete too sharp on my legs and feet. An idea came to me: “I should ditch the bridge and go underneath it instead!” My dread melted away, my backpack felt lighter. It wasn’t a shortcut by any stretch of my imagination: slooshing down one bank, using the brush and saplings for balance, risking a quick hop over a half frozen river, and scrambling up the other side. It didn’t matter. I knew I could do it, a couple of the older neighborhood boys had showed me how last summer. It felt a thousand times more doable than walking down the same concrete slab that hurt my feet everyday, with the terrifying cars tearing apart the air right beside me, to then turn left and begin the slow steps uphill. 

I have spent almost all of my time walking on car roads, as the sidewalks on 33rd and 34th only appear in short bursts. If I wanted to stay “off the street,” I’d have to jaywalk in zigzags at least four times and that route only works when they're shoveled. Plenty of cars honk at me, swerving towards me in their attempt to avoid the worst of the potholes, (or for the teens with new licenses, intentionally running into puddles to splash kids). I don’t care, their annoyance or concern is fleeting, and the asphalt walk is eternal. 

Having gotten to the bottom and realized the river had swollen from the freezing and thawing snowfall, I turned around and proceeded to climb back up the ravine, until the slick snow and ice I slid down no longer gave any ground. I spent thirty minutes down there, desperately clawing at dead shoots to pull myself up on my belly. I would get one body length away from the curb and then start sliding back down again. A few kids older than me saw me once the clubs left school, but they were in a rush to get home, and their passing curiosity and confusion was not what I wanted. My embarrassment lasted just a moment after I told them “I’m fine”, expecting them to overstep my boundaries and pick me up. Instead, they looked at me like I was a weirdo and hurried away. I felt suddenly, with absolute certainty that I would die clinging to the side of a hill, probably from starvation. My body would slide down and be claimed by the water, and whatever care and attention I received would be the horror my family felt if my body was recovered before it drifted into the lake and was consumed by it. 

The embarrassment came back after I managed to stand and shuffle sideways to the stairs, but it felt muted in the face of the weight of my body and a newfound closeness to death. All three formed into a new feeling, a wakefulness to the fact that the way I was instructed to exist was crushing, but trying to do what felt right was going to put me in danger. Trying to be myself, a creature attacked and misunderstood by the people around it, took me out of the safety net built for the children around me. And there wasn’t anything underneath it.

Unlike the slow starvation I imagined under the bridge, the hurtling wagon's promise of death seemed quick, easily arranged, and not the fault of my own stupidity. If any one of these irritated mom’s or reckless 18 year old’s wanted to kill a kid that bad, so be it. Looking up the hill, I thought often that I didn’t hope for it to happen, but it’d be nice if it did. It’d be like the rare occasions that my mom or our neighbor’s up the street happened to pass in one of the cars, and offered to pick us up and deliver us home. Sweet, random, bliss, just without the deliverance. The closest thing to heaven on earth.  I’d heard about the difference between dying and going somewhere and just dying in Sunday School, but in these moments they seemed pretty much identical. At least, I’d prefer them to the pain my legs were expecting. Almost anything beats this dull danger.

My reward for my effort to inject a little more life into my day was a much longer, painful, and wet tromp up that hill. Trying to live without the pain in my existence became a dangerous thought I'd do my best to live without. 

Gritting my teeth, my arms and legs splayed after a bad tumble from my skis, I looked into the eyes of the ski patroller I'd fallen at the feet of. I had fallen into the line for the chair lift at Chester bowl. They asked me if I was okay. I said that I was fine, and hoped they’d go away or something would put me out of my embarrassed misery. They gave me that look I’d gotten used to seeing but never understood, and to my suprise went about their business, back onto the chair lift. I wondered to myself if I had hypnotism powers, and if they only worked on the people that were confused and uncomfortable with me. In front of all of them, I contorted my body until my leg fractured with the effort of trying to get up by myself. 

…

Later, I would be driven a mile uphill to learn piano from Carol. It was one of a series of activities that my parents could use to fill learning time away from home. I couldn’t grasp sheet music, so I would locate the starting hand position relative to middle C, and then memorize the hand movement patterns for whatever song I needed to learn that week. It was extremely stressful, and I pleaded with my parents many times to let me quit. They insisted I would be grateful to have had the opportunity when I was older, and they were the ones paying for it and bringing me to it, so my vote counted less. I was brought to piano for seven years until I could use the impending transition to a charter high school as an excuse to burn out. I still can’t read sheet music. I try to keep practicing sometimes, but my fingers can’t take it. 

… 

My mom signed me up for sewing with Sandy to ease the burden of bringing me and my siblings around all day. We would bike up and around hawthorne, skyline, and arrowhead. The other kids we worked with showed us a shortcut that took twenty minutes off the time, but it was still 300 feet uphill on a no-speed bike with a backpack full of cloth in the beating summer sun. Joe and I often got reprimanded for slacking off or getting distracted, singing along to the Frozen soundtrack playing in the background. It almost came as a relief when Sandy told Joe and I that she couldn’t teach boys past the basics because she only knew women's clothing patterns. I knew she was lying, but why would I argue to stay somewhere I wasn’t wanted? To keep making painful bike trips to waste everyone’s time and money? Pass. My mom still likes the rice packs I made, but I can’t remember anything about them. If it wasn’t for the uneven seams, I’d think we bought them somewhere. 

… 

There were other things. I was brought to dance at Madill’s in West Duluth, took Taekwondo at the YMCA, and went to Hartley nature center for wilderness experience. I did a summer camp at the children’s museum after they moved from the depot to West Duluth. Thinking back, it sounds like I did a lot. But it feels more accurate to say I was voluntold to do things, and only had these opportunities because of financial privilege. This was clear to me the entire time, as my mind remains a cluttered mess. The things I brought myself to were all blips, each too exhausting to ever sustain, but standing out like a flare amongst nothingness. The only things that were constant were the things I did not choose for myself and they all blend together, years of “activities” only separated by the feeling of my body being shuttled to and from my house. I can honestly say my impression of Duluth is a dozen or so little dots, each connected by gray lines. This has improved in recent years, as I have attempted to run or jog as my commute to schools or activities. I have seen some places in between dots, and even some beautiful scenery. I got too burned out to keep it up though.

Walking through many of the suburbs and sidestreets, I feel odd, detached. I feel like I'm floating, and I can’t help but blame the place for my feelings. Trying to move through this place feels wrong, feels odd. You’re meant to fast travel through it, jumping in a wormhole and popping out in the place where you need to be, and then going back to the place you belong. This is the way it has always been for me, but I can’t help but feel that something is wrong. 

When my nieces came to visit, they came up with the idea of walking to my partner’s house, because they prefer her company to my own. This by itself isn’t unusual, and so I accompanied them on their “ditching” of me: following 100 feet behind, jogging to catch up occasionally to set off shrieks and panicked footraces. I repeatedly asked if they needed help, but they reveled in the fact that they had crafted a plan, set out to see it through, and were doing just fine, thank you. I remembered how they both have complained that they have nothing to do, since covid they spend all their time out of school at home, in their rooms. Their parents don’t have time or energy to engage with them or drive them places. My mom still has the energy to take them places sometimes, and offered to pay for gymnastics lessons, and outside of that they live their lives online. Without a person to drive them to one of the places they can be checked into, they have nothing to do in the world around them.

 An hour later, I had to call my partner to pick us up, as we barely had time left in the night to say a quick hello and get a fifteen minute ride back home for bed. I was attacked for my betrayal of the mission, but there was no other option. 

Duluth has always been spread out, but I’ve noticed it has continued efforts to spread people as thinly as possible. How thinly can we be spread before we no longer count each other as neighbors? I only know the names of three of my neighbors, and no one greets me when I say hello beyond a nod if we walk past each other, or a frown if they’re driving. 

Here are the current problems as a result of our history:

As someone with lifetime experience as a child in Duluth, through every stage of development, I can attest to our failure. 

I’ve lived in the Congdon neighborhood and spent high school in the city center. I’ve tried to move through independent means and I’ve relied on cars, buses, and other community based means.

I’ve had to weave my way through side streets, the underground and skywalk entrances, and the back doors leading through the belly of the main library. There is the prevailing feeling that existing there is forbidden (an intoxicating feeling for most teenagers). As a child I laid on a picnic blanket on the hard concrete for the kaleidoscope events. Starting in a place of discomfort and the stone growing warm from the crowd of a soft one-hundred gathered to listen to the Okee-Dokee Brothers. I went to the same spot a decade later to hang out with friends: listening to bad fanfiction podcasts and stealing bad shows from Netflix. It felt a lot more miserable. It was just the four of us, and an unrelentingly cold stone. A guy came over to offer us a hit. This must be that Minnesota Nice I’ve heard so much about. The places for us to go are strung out little blips along the cityscape, and once we became adolescents I realized they had the hallmarks of a gated community. Most playgrounds, nurseries, or daycares are fenced in, and require an adult to sign in and out to access (and they're all for a very specific age of kid). Public parks are lovely and their “open hours” are the least strictly enforced, but almost never provide the need for privacy or shelter.

Anti-human seating and intentionally ineffective gazebos keep it as a nice weather only option, and they often require a vehicle to get to. Many have public bathrooms or other buildings that have roofs, but all of them are liable to be locked up with no notice. They could stay that way for a night, or a week, or a season. I wouldn’t know, I just know that every time I am capable of getting there they are locked. The teenspace of the library was in the same section as the child one. I avoided it until it was clear it was my only option if I wanted to be out of the street and not have to worry about security sweeps, angry strangers, or other people with nowhere to go that I was scared to talk to. I know that because we didn’t have safe homes to hang out in, didn’t have cars to drive to isolated forests or fields, didn’t have the money or means to do anything safe, we were forced to make unsafe choices in uncomfortable public spaces. I’m glad I got that experience, as ashamed as I am, because it helped me learn how to feel when I see someone and can’t imagine the circumstances that make their current actions make sense. The library staff made reasonable accommodations to this situation by moving the teen zone to the opposite side of the library, similarly to how the adult section is on the second floor  and the children friendly section is on the ground level. Anyone can go to any section, but they are intentionally designed to provide what is needed for different people, and unwanted activities are discouraged. The teenspace is within eyeshot of the front desk, the underbelly stage is now full of cameras. But now where do we go? Where do they go?

Unless I go to one of these zones, children cease to exist.  I was convinced that my generation was the last group of kids in my neighborhood, until teenagers seemed to appear among the rows of houses years later. Where do they go?

Our places for children are designed as impermeable bubbles where a parent with access to a car places a child temporarily, existing in contrast to the city around it. The city is designed for adults who can consume and engage economically, and to be uncomfortable for everyone else. 

People are often embarrassed when they rely on others in the world we have made. I have heard people complain many times that it is the peak of rudeness for a person to make their child “everyone else’s problem”, and it seems like many parents agree. I see kids reprimanded for talking to anyone in any public place, for making noise, for moving too much. This is saying nothing about if a child asks for assistance from a stranger, even less for the times I have seen a parent tied up by something urgent and have to ask someone nearby for assistance. Holding onto this ancient, outmoded tradition of a community where strangers – those super-predatorial beings –could be expected to occupy space in your world initiates apologetic behavior. I don’t know what emotion I carry alongside the memory of being in a starbucks at 7am, watching a mom cry a little at me because I told her I could play with her toddler while she ran back outside to take a call for a job interview. 

My parents always told us that if we were in a public space and needed help, and they were nowhere to be found, that we should look for a young woman with kids, who we could ask to call home.

Finally, there came a day when mom went to the laundromat, leaving us to wait in the car. Joe got bored (after what seemed to us like six hours), so he said he’d go inside to be with mom. She eventually finished, and you can believe that everyone with an attentional deficiency didn’t realize until she loaded up the car and drove all the way home that something was missing. Joe had been watching the Pacman/Galaga arcade game, but when he realized he was alone, he did his best not to panic. He approached the only woman with kids in the building and explained the situation, and asked if he could use her phone. And she said “No.” He said she gave him a suspicious look, like she was wary the six year old was going to steal her phone. We tried not to bother strangers with our existence after that.

We have been told that each person is an individual with many personal freedoms, and indeed, in a world like that, we are inconveniencing others when we ask something of them. We are asking for them to ‘opt in’ to participating in community with us. And they can say no.  They can say nothing, because not engaging is the default. 

I was walking down second street yesterday and multiple people approached me or offered words as I passed by. Due to my inexperience, my social insecurity, my discomfort with my existence in my own hometown, every interaction felt suspect. I could not register the words that were spoken. I could not see the faces of my neighbors. I did what my father had taught me, what my body does on its own without my control now: I just avoided eye contact, dissociated, and did not return words. Sometimes I come out of Fight, Flight, or Freeze soon enough to realize what they said to me, but never soon enough to respond. My face feels hot thinking about the number of times someone has wished me good morning, or said I looked nice, or asked how I was feeling, and they were met with a blank face, evasive eyes, and a quick walk right by. But for every dozen people like that, it feels like there is the one person who might have been trying to fight me, the one person who might have been trying to bait me, the person who called me a fag, the two people that harassed me, and the six people I still don’t understand and was too embarrassed and stressed to ask them to repeat themselves a third time. I butchered a joke so badly for one poor guy I don’t think he’ll ever tell a stranger they “dropped their pocket” again. 

When I told my brother about this he told me we should start going to the gym again. He was surprised when I told him that wasn’t my point. I don’t want to strive to be more capable of violence, to send the message to others I see that I’m not a person that should be messed with, in the hopes that this might increase my confidence and ability to engage. I want to get better and more confident at engaging in my community, and that’s typically easier when you aren’t brandishing a gun or treating everyone like a prospective threat. I am given dozens of chances to engage in my community, and I am so conditioned to expect the worst I can’t handle our best. My emotional reactions discourage others from trying to be friendly in the future. When I act like an NPC, a robot in my community, we all see less of humanity.

These behaviors didn’t come from nowhere. I live in a neighborhood that is enclosed on two sides. The people who own houses in my neighborhood wanted it to feel nicer, and stopped plans to develop the streets in favor of keeping the woods surrounding it. They wanted to preserve the value of their homes, and this goes hand in hand with making it less accessible. There used to be an easier way out on the main street connection: a bus route that took fourth street all the way to my house, but it disappeared before I was old enough to use it myself. 

A month ago, Alex and Quill met up with me to make collages and zines. On our way home to do so, they inquired whether we should stop by in support of the protests that were occurring that afternoon. I said I would like to, but as I had not dressed for going out I was afraid of being seen as a douchebag and doing more harm than good. They both looked at me and politely asked me what I was talking about.

I started stammering something about how I was wearing my black silk sleep bonnet and my gold chains because they brought me comfort, that feeling cloaked with the love of my partner and my family was something I liked for myself but it wasn’t a look I wanted to bother anyone else with before stopping lamely. I knew they wouldn’t get it, because they knew me and how sensitive I am, and it is hard for them to comprehend an action I make as portraying the opposite.

I’ve told them often I don’t wear my Far Side sweater outside without something else covering it so that I won’t present someone with an image that I can’t couch with all of the context for my owning it and choosing to wear it. As a person who has a degree in Psychology, who strives to be considerate and accurate about portrayals of mental health, I couldn’t stand the possibility of reaffirming the stereotypes that have done people like me serious harm.

I would love to wear it more so I could engage more people outside of my circle about the valid critical viewpoints of psychoanalytic theory, psychiatry, and psychology, but the concern of unintentional harm is too great. If only I could wear an essay about it to as an accessory to my statement piece.

But that would mean I would have to accept my role as a writer, and with it all the same concerns of my harm in that position.

After several months of trying to find the correct way to engage with our systems, I have realized my mistake. I was too focused on punching the right button sequence to achieve a modest income, connect with peers and mentors, and serve my community without falling into the many traps of ego, capital, or playing to the feeling of outside eyes. In my desire to produce the correct response to my work, I forgot that process is just an important of a piece to the puzzle as my beliefs or personal philosophy. We should always question whether or not our actions are in accordance with what we want to be or see in the world, but I can not let that concern stop me from doing the things I Must Do.

I can only hold on to the illusion of being a writer that only produces things that have good at there center, can only be understood by there goodness, and are not waylaid by distractions of image or capital if I never write at all, and I cannot shake off the feeling of being an imposter through a choice not to write. And the Earth knows that only making art as a guilty relapse into compulsion is not the intended function of the areas I make in. Making, talking and thinking about art and music is a communal activity, and that only compounds for subjects like discussing the impacts and changes that should be made to our social constructions and political projects so that we can live with each other better.

At a certain point, it’s better to be the genuine fool then give the appearance that everything is composed, planned.

I am an unmistakably human kind of person, and it would be foolish to ever pretend otherwise. This admittance does nothing to dampen my ability to do the things I must, and in fact only adds to my strength. If I know I am weak to the compulsion of polemic speech due to my experience growing up in the toxic collective consciousness of the internet through the decades of the 2000’s, I can question myself in my use of speech. I can ask that we find better words and feelings to evoke.

At some point, when I have grown past the midwestern inculcation of apologizing reflexively, I will find it silly that I considered so much of myself as an embarrassment that needs to be hidden away. My idiosyncrasies, my passions and hyperfixations, my desire to go to the doors of my neighbors and ask to borrow a tablespoon of their brainspace to share my deepest thoughts with them. I cannot help but to write, cannot bear but to share, but, for now, can never duck the embarrassment of imposing my communication style on anyone outside of my closest friends. But, if I am to continue to exist, I must do what I am meant to, and hope that by trying to align my selves into a gentler whole I will be met with kindness, curiosity, and a dialogue aimed at mutual understanding.

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