“What, do you imagine that I would take so much trouble and so much pleasure in writing, do you think that I would keep so persistently to my task, if I were not preparing - with a rather shaky hand - a labyrinth into which I can venture, in which I can move my discourse, opening up underground passages, forcing it to go far from itself, finding overhangs that reduce and deform its itinerary, in which I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again.
I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.” –Michel Foucault

Jun 19, 2014

Humiliated At SE:NYC – A Cosplayer’s Story


This is utter bullshit and offensive as hell. It's hard to feel good about yourself when you are constantly at-risk for being body-shamed in a society where treating the “fat chic” like garbage is still as socially acceptable as racism still was in Alabama on the day I was born there way back in 1954. Since then, I've ripened slowly into a guy whose face and body have that same lived-in look that made it possible for Henry Fonda to be taken seriously playing presidents. Jane Fonda now has that same look but, for some odd reason, doesn't get nearly as much mileage out of it as her dad did. I wander around all the time in shorts and flip-flops. I'm about as sexy as a rusty old jalopy as I roll along but no one has ever said the slightest discouraging word to me about being an eyesore. Imagine what would happen to my female twin if she tried the same adding only a tank-top to avoid being busted for indecent exposure. She would almost surely be hassled in spite of the tank-top not for showing too much skin but for showing that much skin without turning on the random male spectator as she rolled along.

Jun 5, 2014

Vanishing Island

Vanishing Island

New Orleans and Miami are gone. By 2030, all of current Southwest Florida will be a part of the ocean. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal recently signed a bill explicitly making it impossible for New Orleans officials to sue oil companies for the damage done to the wet-lands drilling and creating pipelines to get oil out. When New Orleans was first built by the French, these wetlands provided a buffer between the city and the gulf of Mexico that made life in New Orleans possible. Without spending billions to restore the wet-lands, New Orleans will be gone even a few years before Miami. Bobby Gindal runs for re-election this year. He will almost certainly be re-elected in spite of having signed the death warrant for New Orleans. Senator Marco Rubio, a Cuban raised in Miami, is also a climate change denier. Cubans, for reasons I do not understand, prefer holding tangible assets like land and houses to holding stocks and bonds. When Southwest Florida goes away, so will much of that community’s wealth.